Matt Segall: Hi Marc, pleasure to meet you.
Marc Gafni: Good to meet you, Matt.
Matt Segall: Really, as I said in my email, it’s an honor and it’s humbling to get to talk to you and Zak. I’ve had a chance to spend a little time with Zak. But yeah, great to connect with you. Where are you right now?
Marc Gafni: I’m in Vermont. The think tank is in a big old Vermont house up in the northeast kingdom. Zak also has lived here – he’s between here and Florida. There are like 15 bedrooms, different scholars and people come in and spend time. It’s a sweet northeast kingdom space. Do you know Vermont at all?
Matt Segall: I’ve been to Burlington once in the summertime and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’d love to come back to visit you guys.
Marc Gafni: You’re in California, right?
Matt Segall: Northern California. I’m in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco.
Marc Gafni: We cross deeply on participation – the participatory universe. I think Brendan mentioned you guys are doing a journal. We’re finishing – I actually just had a long talk with Jeffrey Kripal.
Matt Segall: I was just with Jeff a few days ago actually, because he’s down at Esalen but was coming through San Francisco.
Marc Gafni: Right, that makes sense. I’d never spoken with him before – we were aware of each other for years. I was sharing with him this stuff I’ve been working on for a couple of decades now on the nature of story, the ontology of story, and the participatory nature of story – how story is part of the story of cosmos. That’s a primary way of understanding participation. Zak told me you guys had emailed back and forth about writing something up, so maybe that would be a good topic.
Zak Stein: [Joins the conversation] Hey Matt!
Matt Segall: Hey Zak!
Marc Gafni: Well, before Matt dives in, I said to Matt he’s got to find his way up here to Vermont and we’ll drink some cider with him and hang out at some point. So that’s a real invitation.
Matt Segall: Thank you. There’s a conference that Harvard Divinity School is hosting on Rudolf Steiner in December. I don’t know if you guys will be around – maybe it’s not the most ideal weather in Vermont then, but I’ll be in Boston or Cambridge at the end of the year.
Marc Gafni: Good, that’s actually a good time. Let’s focus on entering into that space.
Matt Segall: So obviously the meta-crisis has been ongoing for quite a time. Things are always seeming to be coming to an ever increasingly sharp, pointed head. We’re probably closest to a Third World War than we’ve been. In this type of situation, when zero-sum rivalrous dynamics and eye-for-an-eye ideologues seem to be in charge of all the weapons and militaries of the world, what role can philosophy play? As philosophers, we like to engage in dialogue, and we seem so far from that being what guides the decisions shaping the immediate future. What’s the role of philosophy right now? How can we feel like what we’re doing here is meaningful when we’re facing this type of rivalrous, revenge-based antagonism? What are we doing here right now, and how is what we’re doing relevant?
Marc Gafni: I’ll dive in and then turn to Zak. It’s a great way to start because in some sense, there’s always the question of: Can we move history? Can we participate in the historical process? Can we be partners with the Infinite in history in some real way?
The conclusion that Zak and I came to when we started the think tank was that – if I could borrow Jurgen Habermas’s terminology – social structure (new forms of regulation, law, etc.) won’t be able to address the meta-crisis. And infrastructure (like finding bioweapons in wastewater more efficiently) won’t be able to either, although they’re both necessary. Only some version of superstructure will work.
We’re focusing in superstructure on this notion of not just story, but story of value. Our premise – not a faith-based premise but a radically empirical premise emerging from both interior and exterior sciences – is that the single most effective thing we can do to respond to impending suffering is to enact a story of value which is a context for diversity and which allows for conversation.
Zak and I have traced a thread from this moment of what we called many years ago “the second shock of existence” – the death not of the human being but of humanity. You can trace a very direct thread from the need for coordination. Coordination can’t happen without resonance. Resonance can’t happen without coherence. Coherence can’t happen without intimacy. You can’t cohere without a sense of intimacy, and intimacy is always based – whenever I’m working with a couple, the first thing we talk about is their shared values.
If there’s not a shared story of value, we can’t create intimacy, which means we can’t create coherence or resonance, and then we can’t create coordination. Since every existential risk is a global problem – which will become a galactic problem, but let’s stay global for now – without this thread that goes from global coordination to resonance, coherence, intimacy based on a shared story of value, we actually don’t have a chance.
From our perspective, when we talk to each other every day, we remind each other that we’re not an intellectual think tank. We’re a kind of religious activist, world philosopher, time-between-worlds, time-between-stories group, madly intent on enacting and downloading this new story of value into culture.
Matt Segall: Yeah, love it. Lots to say, but let me let Zak chime in.
Zak Stein: It’s a great place to start because – what the fuck? I mean, what are we doing? We’re just talking. My first response actually was that we need to qualify – we need to say something like “philosophers like us,” because it’s also the case that philosophers make war. Philosophers justify war. There are bellicose philosophers. There are philosophies of just war, meaning philosophies about the wars that must be fought because of the existence and reality of value.
We are philosophers of peace fundamentally, and love – although that’s cheesy to say. But it’s just the case. The nature of our ontology makes us philosophers of peace and love. But even our definition of Eros includes the breaking – Eros is the bringing together, but Eros is also the distancing and the breaking.
I’m not saying bring on the war, but I am saying we have to be able to transcend and include the philosophies that see war as a primary driver of the universe – like Heraclitus, you could argue Hegel, and even some traditions of the lineage would say you have to sometimes go to war to protect. That’s what I would say – it’s not so simple as being philosophers of peace and love if you don’t transcend and include the bellicose philosophers, so that it’s a fierce love that can actually protect.
One of the things that drives war is very profound disagreements about value. What else could be at stake that’s deep enough to drive you to kill at a large scale? There’s something about what we work on – we call it the “eye of value.” There’s something about the ability to clarify the eye of value that is key to this.
Matt Segall: Well, just to be very concrete and specific in this instance, it seems to me that the tragedy here – in the epicenter of the war that’s threatening to spiral out of control right now – is that the Persian tradition and the Iranian people, and the Israeli people have these deep, rich traditions and insights, coming out of profound ancestral sources of wisdom. On some level, the values that these two societies are trying to protect are not all that different. And yet there’s a war breaking out. The tragedy seems to be that there is a deep source of value on both sides of this conflict that should be able to resonate. What’s blocking us? Is it the intimacy crisis that’s blocking the resonance?
Marc Gafni: Let’s play for a second. In the study hall of the Talmud and the Aramaic traditions, we can be fierce combatants and filled with love. That’s our premise. Just like in the Bhagavad Gita with Krishna and Arjuna.
All three of us are deeply familiar and resonant with the grandeur of, let’s say, the Sufi traditions. We all know that Rumi was one of thousands of Rumis, and that there are these incredible schools of unimaginable depth. I think we take that as a given. Maimonides’s son was very close to the Sufi schools and redefined a certain moment in the medieval school. All of that we take as a given.
Having said that, that’s not what we’re dealing with today. What we’re dealing with today is a regime that funds death cults. Hamas is a death cult. Hezbollah is a death cult. They are challenging a pluralistic democracy rooted in a particular field of value. I’d be hesitant to make a moral equivalence between those two governments.
I picked up what you wrote on Brendan’s site. At the end you wrote, “Whether or not one agrees with every proposition, the overall invitation may still be worth considering” – and then you wrote “to live as if value is real, as if story changes the world, as if love is not merely human sentiment but the source energy of cosmogenesis.” I was struck by the “as if” position.
When I was closer to your age than I am now, I locked myself in a room and tried to look at theodicy in some serious way. I spent six months locked in a room in Jerusalem, reading every theodicy I could. I came to the conclusion that none of them stand. Theodicies don’t stand in the face of burning children. Attempts to theologically explain suffering are obscene in some fundamental way.
So we have to hold uncertainty in a radical way – the ontology of the void, we take the void seriously as a big yes. And we also get to hold the radical certainty that value is real, that it’s not an “as if” position. We can step out of that postmodern fear. Are we willing to take a stand on some inherency of value, even though we understand that value is completely evolving with radical diversity?
Matt Segall: Yes, and let me clarify – I didn’t mean to create a moral equivalence between governments. Actually, I was talking about the peoples, the societies, and not necessarily the state apparatus in charge. I think the Iranian people deserve better than the government they have, and I would say the Israeli people deserve better than the government they have.
In terms of the “as if” – I get the connection you’re making. I’m not a pacifist. I’m not one who thinks we have the luxury of not choosing sides in every conflict because we’re above it. There are some conflicts that are unavoidable, and therefore we need just war theory as philosophers to know when and how to engage.
When I say “what happens if we consider value and love and story as if they were real expressions of cosmogenesis,” the “as if” there is an invitation to my readers more so than it is the position that I myself am taking. We have to begin from where the culture is. The culture is in a place where, interestingly, I think we do take fiction very seriously. We’re constantly seeking escape into fantasy. So it’s a bridge to the dominant culture to offer a participatory invitation – what if this were true?
Pragmatically speaking, I’m a pragmatist about these sorts of things. Maybe living as if value were real makes value real. What the human being has is this power to become detached from that, to live as if it were not real or just something we make up, and we see the destructive consequences of that. The “as if” is an invitation to try to meet people where they’re at and offer this pragmatic invitation to see how their lives might change if they took these ideas seriously.
Zak Stein: There’s a lot of subtlety here in what’s being raised. There’s how to rhetorically engage with postmodern readers, and then how to even apply philosophical clarity about value to real existing political issues in a context where there’s a sensemaking crisis and decades of intergenerational propaganda warfare that makes it impossible to know what’s actually going on.
When I read that “as if,” I thought of William James and his theory of God – like Pascal’s wager meets post-empiricism. If believing in God makes people happier and they have these experiences, why even get into the ontological debate when the proof is in the pudding that believing in God is good for you? It’s an interesting argument, but Josiah Royce and Charles Sanders Peirce would have none of that.
We’re in a culture that isn’t able to speak about the most profound things. The real question here is: what would you die for? Because the question about war is why are people going to die? There’s this sense that there is no such thing worth dying for, in which case anyone dying for anything is being coerced.
What are the different sides dying for? What is their ultimate motivation and the means by which they would execute that? James talked about a moral equivalent of war. James Hillman talked about an aesthetic equivalent of war in his book “The Terrible Love of War” – not the moral motivation but the overwhelming aesthetic experience of war as something humans are drawn to.
We’re in a situation where everybody loses the war, period, full stop. No survivors, no bunkers. If you’re believing in bunkers, you’re not understanding the nature of advanced weaponry. The end of everything is the result of the current war, which requires a different type of philosophical approach. A much wider consensus of humanity would prefer not to have everything die. That didn’t used to be the argument against war. Now we’re basically saying war is bad because it kills everything. This doesn’t mean everyone’s equally moral. There’s this question: how do we enforce moral standards in a context where we know we have to end war?
Marc Gafni: You spoke in the beginning of Peirce and Schelling. I don’t read Peirce. I don’t read Schelling. Those are not my worlds. Zak reads them in the David J. Temple world. I live in three other worlds.
One is an anthro-ontological world, a visionary anthro-ontological interior world, which is probably my most important source. Then I live very strongly – Zak and I have spent maybe 15 years studying in this context – in what we call the Holy of Holies and the Solomon lineage. The first matrix of CosmoErotic Humanism would be the mystical interior science lineage of the Song of Solomon. There’s an entire mystical hermeneutics of the Song of Solomon where its insides are lined with love.
Akiva, living at the time of Jesus, said all the books are holy but only Song of Songs is sanctum sanctorum. The Holy of Holies of Eros replaces the Holy of Holies of the Temple. When I wrote the academic thing, it was on Lainer, the master in Hasidism who understood himself as inheritor of the lineage of Solomon. There’s an explosive religious dimension to CosmoErotic Humanism which is very explicit – it’s world philosophy and religion.
The third source is science. I’m a crazy, insane reader of the sciences – not so much physics, but molecular biology, molecular chemistry, the hard sciences as texts of revelation.
Coming back to war – I’ve been in conversation with you deeply the last three or four days, just reading you and enjoying it very much. On one hand, I feel your participatory imagination – homo imaginalis – with stunning reach. I read gorgeous passages where you talked about number mysticism, how we experience numbers and time. Then you’d make this other rhetorical move with the “as if.”
I wonder if there’s a way – not just for you but for all of us – because what we’re trying to do at David J. Temple is make a different rhetorical move. The metamodern movement at the outskirts of Integral is very different than what Ken Wilber intended when he started his integral move. They’re refusing the religious dimension, the homo religiosus in it.
I think we need to reclaim religion in a new form. We need to be able to speak potently, powerfully, and proudly, and hold the divinity of our atheism even as we hold the radical divinity of our trust in a CosmoErotic universe. That paradox – we know there’s heresy which is faith and faith which is heresy. We’re heretics for all the small faiths, but your voice is really important here. The possibility of this move seems to matter.
Matt Segall: Yeah, I have been accused before when entering into fierce dialogue of being in the subjunctive mood too much. I certainly agree with you about the need for reengagement with religion and even religious modes of expression and faith, and to not just be in this metamodern sincere irony thing, but to just be sincere sometimes.
I don’t necessarily identify as being in the metamodern camp or the integral camp. If anything, I’m a process philosopher is what people call me. I’m in John Cobb Jr.’s lineage in terms of my religious outlook. He died in December.
You say you haven’t read Peirce. I’ve had – I’m not a Peirce expert, but I’ve read some of his major essays multiple times. His “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” in particular relates to this “as if” thing. James was a nominalist and his pluralism was a bit of a free-for-all. He’s opening doors to important ideas but not really providing us with a solid basis for a new religious outlook.
Peirce, on the other hand, provides us with a more rigorous logical proof for the existence of God. But it’s still pragmatic. He says, “This argument should present its conclusion not as a proposition of metaphysical theology, but in a form directly applicable to the conduct of life and full of nutrition for man’s highest growth.”
He says, “Let religious meditation be allowed to grow up spontaneously out of pure play without any breach of continuity, and the muser will retain the perfect candor proper to musement. Enter your skiff of musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself, for such is all meditation.”
This is his account of religious meditation, and it’s deeply imaginal, playful – musement. When I use terms like “as if,” it’s really just my way of signaling there’s a participatory element to this truth, the reality of value. It’s not just waiting out there for you to find it. You have to become worthy of it. “As if” is just a way of trying to invoke the role that imagination plays in religious meditation and contemplation – not because it’s not real, not because the divine or cosmic value aren’t real, but because we need to imaginally body them forth to maintain that reality. That’s our role as human beings.
Marc Gafni: Zak, did you want to say anything about what I just shared, or should I move on?
Zak Stein: I’ll resist the very enticing urge to talk for 20 minutes about Charles Sanders Peirce. He is one of the many lost children of modernity seeking for lineage. At the end of his life, he had this experience of mystical reunion with some of the faiths of his childhood, which were the faiths of Kant and Hegel. He eventually found his way back in a second simplicity to a form of faith, which is hugely embarrassing to the early Peirce scholars who want to see him as this reductive nominalist who justifies science and boots a theory of semiotics useful in AI. That’s all true, but ultimately his semiotics was a kind of Logos mysticism, a participatory evolutionary cosmology which climaxed in the dimension of thirdness in religion.
The move to the post-secular and the clarification of emergent post-secular discourse is the solution to this problem of planetary scale war and inevitable extinction. World religion has to emerge. Philosophy assists that, science assists that. But it was a blip on the radar in the context of modernity and industrial socialization that we started to believe as sociologists that religion would disappear because it was stupid. The vast majority of the world never thought religion would disappear or that it was stupid. The small group of people who ended up creating the technologies that have driven us to the point of near self-extinction were the ones who basically tried to run religion out of the center of power.
We’re in a religious war, and the dominant religion in power that doesn’t even call itself a religion is something like anti-humanism or transhumanism. That brand of scientific reductive materialism is attempting to use AI to build Dyson spheres to collect all the energy from the sun, to build enormous data centers we can upload our consciousness into and explore the stars. That’s their geopolitical strategy in the near term.
Nothing beats that – no secular ideology, no “we hold these truths to be self-evident” stuff beats that. What beats it is something post-secular, which is what they’ve done in other societies like China, which has returned to Confucianism and Taoism, and India, which never went secular. The West flirted with the idea that you could run a civilization on nihilism. This is the end of that experiment. The only answer is religion.
Marc Gafni: Even with Hamas – when I was in Israel living next to Qalqilya, I would walk around and say “You guys want to kill me? You can kill me, but I’m not going to carry my machine gun.” I found a couple people related to Hamas and said “Let’s study text together.” If we don’t take the various forms of Sunni and Shia thought seriously, if we don’t read the texts and just dismiss Islam, and we can’t engage the Mu’tazila and the Ash’ariyya and actually understand the profound religious experience even at the center of the degraded forms and find our way in that conversation, we have no chance.
If we counter them with science and commodity fetishism and pop culture, then we’ve just schismogenically made them more likely to occur. They need to see that we’re taking this as seriously as they are. We’re not dismissible.
We renamed the center the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. We wanted religion to be front and center. We argued about the name – we called it Center for World Spirituality in 2010 because we were being appropriate. Then Center for Integral Wisdom. Then we said “Fuck this, let’s call it what it is” – Center for World Philosophy and Religion. A world religion as a context for our diversity based on the best readings of the best philosophies and a serious reading of the primary texts of the great traditions in their best esoteric forms – not through Huston Smith but actually reading the texts and having a conversation in the texts.
Some of those texts are degraded in horrific ways. Voltaire wasn’t wrong when he said “Remember the cruelties.” There’s a reason we left premodernity. We don’t want to go back, but we can only move forward. We don’t see another way through. Does it matter that three guys sit and talk? The answer is it matters unimaginably. We have to be the new Florentine Platonic Academy with our eye to the world. We have to create this new world together, and we can’t do it without entering and killing ourselves on the altar of the texts and the experiences and the phenomenologies.
Zak Stein: The assumption of the religious fundamentalist is that a conversation about value is not an arbitrary conversation. They’re as serious about value as we are about engineering. They just happen to have certain views that haven’t evolved because no one else is willing to engage them in a serious conversation where value is not arbitrary.
Modernity says it’s all emotion like Max Weber, just sentiment. There’s this reduction of religion to not something where there are non-arbitrary conversations about value, which means which ways of life are preferable to which other ways of life. Can we compare ways of life, open the eye of value, and see that this set of doctrines results in suffering?
Interreligious dialogue was basically not that. Interreligious dialogue was accommodationist pluralism that actually isn’t taking the non-arbitrary nature of value seriously.
Marc Gafni: Jews who didn’t believe in Judaism got together with Christians who didn’t believe in Christianity, and they discovered they had a lot in common.
Matt Segall: John Cobb wrote a book, “Christ in a Pluralistic Age,” and I think he was proposing, as many before him have across traditions, that Logos, the Word, could be the basis for a true interreligious dialogue that takes value seriously, and that this isn’t just relativism.
What I hear you both saying in answer to my initial question – what is the relevance of philosophy in the midst of geopolitical conflict and war – is that we need to change history by enacting a new story, a new story of value. Study of sacred texts is a way of shifting from zero-sum rivalrous conflict to mutually enhancing, intensifying, deepening of value through the study of this shared history of revelation through the Word.
I read the Torah, the New Testament, the Gospels, all the apocryphal texts, the Quran – which I admittedly haven’t spent enough time with – all of Buddhist scripture. This is an ongoing revelation, and we all have a voice to add to that symphony. That doesn’t mean we all agree with each other. There’s discordance in music, and that’s an invitation to find a higher harmony. Maybe that’s the moral equivalent of war – this deep study of sacred texts.
Marc Gafni: Here’s the wild thing, Matt. If you actually look at the evolution of sacred texts, it’s very clear that they evolve, that they’re not static. Even the fundamentalist texts which claim there’s this unchanging quality – if you actually sit in serious study of text and trace things over time, you realize this prophet said this in this context, and now we’re 200 years later in this hadith saying something entirely different. You create this context of shared intimacy in the actual gnosis and eros of study.
We take each other seriously instead of basically dismissing the phenomenological experience of most of the world as being fictitious and contrived, and yet think that we have a chance of averting world catastrophe without even having a shared phenomenological experience.
Matt Segall: One of the things I tried to do in that essay on your book was to introduce Whitehead’s account of propositions. He points out, referencing scripture, that the point in reading a proposition in scripture or in Hamlet isn’t “is it true or false?” He thinks the reduction of propositions to just this logical binary is a tremendously short-sighted error. It’s more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true – that it provoke interest, enjoyment, Eros, and that regardless of whether it’s true or false in some simplistic correspondence theory sense, does it ingress novelty into the world in a way that enhances the expression of value?
Zak Stein: That’s another idea I would say he took from Charles Sanders Peirce, who specifically first talked about different kinds of hypotheses and propositions and differentiated between those that were just accurate and true but didn’t foster the imagination or make the world have more connotation and meaning, and those hypotheses which actually did that.
Marc Gafni: We need new language. When we say “interesting,” we’re still playing with the “as if” thing. Is it more radiant? Is it more alluring? The word “cheshek” in Hebrew means allurement or desire. The 72-letter name of God means reality as configurations of desire, configurations of allurement.
In Luria, 16th century, the clarification of allurement is the fundamental moral act. If we say something that’s alluring to us – not to our surface structures but to our depth structures, not just my desire but what Lainer calls “my deepest heart’s desire,” my clarified desire – this arouses my desire. That’s what you mean by interest. You don’t mean interesting in a vapid way, you mean this is interesting.
Matt Segall: To sort of close up this initial exploration – Hegel threw in the towel and said philosophy just describes history. Marx inverts that and says no, we’re supposed to be changing history through changing the means of production, the base not the superstructure. You guys are pointing to the superstructure – we need a new story.
The enactment of a new story of value at the level of the Word, of Logos, and participation in that is not just interesting. It’s transformative, enlivening, erotic, creative. Human beings have been hoodwinked by what you call pseudo-eros, this capitalist consumerist myth of technological progress. Carl Schmitt talked about technology neutralizing politics – the idea that technology is value-neutral and we can all agree on technological improvements regardless of our religious orientations, as if there aren’t ethical consequences to every technology. Techno-capitalism has become a pseudo-religion and source of pseudo-eros distracting us from this other deeply motivating and inspiring engagement that could unite the human community across differences, not eliminating those differences but allowing us to understand ourselves better by entering into this deeper level of communion in a field of value.
One of the propositions you lay out at the beginning of this book is that value and consciousness need to be added to the list of what counts as fundamental to the cosmos. You mention Ian McGilchrist’s work, German idealism, Kabbalah and Whitehead as supporting this idea.
The question I have – if consciousness is fundamental, does this imply that the human being is not just the product of an evolutionary process but something more like the very medium of evolution’s expression? If consciousness is fundamental, then the human being seems to be the locus of the most intense consciousness on earth. Does that make us the end product of a process that didn’t include us at the beginning, or is in some sense the human being present at the beginning, evolving all the way through? Is this truly an anthropocosmic situation and not a cosmos that happened to produce a human being as one of its products?
Zak Stein: Modernity disqualified the universe – it removed value and consciousness and left space, time, causality. Philosophers got really interested in trying to add consciousness back in first, especially Western philosophers late in modernity who were obsessed with philosophy of mind and the hard problem of consciousness. Kant was actually a little bit more worried about value and how to argue for value.
The move we made some years ago was to get out of the consciousness arguments and into value, where value is more fundamental even than consciousness. Consciousness emerges in service of value. But the equally primordial thing becomes this interesting paradox at the very beginning of everything. Our argument will be that at least they’re equal primordial, but probably something like value/desire/eros would be the thing that would make consciousness want to be there, make consciousness make sense. What is consciousness aware of? It is aware of that which it values, that which is there for it.
I think it’s more useful even in conversations in philosophy of mind – Robert Brandom makes this point echoing Wilfrid Sellars – that the problem isn’t sentience. It’s not about the emergence of awareness, which is basically ubiquitous. It’s about the emergence of value and specifically normativity, and the radically counterfactual normativity that drives moral and scientific progress. This is supplanting the hard problem with a harder problem – the problem of sapience.
First principles, first value stuff suggests yeah, personhood goes all the way back. But there’s also a deeply emergent evolution of all the first principles and first values. So it’s a little weird to say that personhood goes all the way back. We argue with Ken Wilber about this – is it really personhood or is it consciousness, value, eros? What is it really back at the core? But it’s certainly not just matter and time and space.
Marc Gafni: When we think about it, it’s not that time and space are co-primordial with value. Value is underneath time and space. When we stopped talking about consciousness, it’s because the conversation around consciousness had become so confused on so many different levels. Around 2014, we literally said we’re not going to talk about consciousness anymore, we’re going to talk about value.
We used to say Eros is a value of cosmos, Eros is value and value is filled with Eros. But at some point we realized no, it’s not Eros, it’s ErosValue – it’s terminologically inappropriate to split those words in any way. ErosValue is the substrate of cosmos and everything emerges from it.
We know that human science works because it’s in some sense a human cosmos. If we take the intimacy equation – intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness times mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose – that intimacy equation applies to the three of us in this context right now. It can apply to divisions within General Motors trying to get a car out. But it also applies 3 seconds after the Big Bang when the proton and neutron in the nucleus come together with an electron to create an atom that has shared identity in the context of otherness, with recognition, shared pathos, shared value field, and shared sense of purpose.
We’ve given about 450 applications of the intimacy equation across every dimension of life. All of a sudden you can be welcome in cosmos – the human being is not an accident but fundamentally and essentially welcome. We have an actual experience of being intended. There’s a fundamental human need and desire to be intended, to be recognized, to be chosen, to be desired, not just loved but love-adored, and to be needed. We call those the six core needs of Eros.
Anthropologically, need and desire disclose ontology. The split between phenomenology and ontology is overplayed. Phenomenology at its deepest core discloses ontology. There’s a movement of need/desire which at the foundational levels of cosmos are not distinct. These needs that we have – the need to be intended – anthro-ontologically is telling me something about the nature of reality.
If you read the Sunni mystics or Luria with their elegant cosmologies, where does this all come from? They’ll always say the most elemental human experience and the most esoteric are the same. The mysteries are within us, and our most clarified experience of our own need and desire discloses ontology because reality is desire, because the name of God is desire.
If I have a need to be intended, to experience myself as welcome in the universe, that’s actually disclosing my being welcome in the universe. My imagination is desperate to be intended. God is a figment of our imagination, but our imagination is a figment of God. There’s this beautiful inherent dialectic of radical evolution as a value of cosmos, and yet it’s a human cosmos in this fundamental way.
Matt Segall: I would not ever say God is a figment of our imagination. I would say God is the ferment of imagination, the aim of our imagination.
Marc Gafni: Our imagination is a figment of God – I gave you the whole sentence.
Matt Segall: This need and desire dialectic is very important. While you were speaking I was thinking of what Heraclitus says about the way up and the way down being the same. Thinking of Whitehead’s affirmation: “We have no right to deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe. Existence in its own nature is the upholding of value intensity.” He talks about the need any experiencing being has for a value relationship to others and to the whole, and that as a self, we are the achievement of value.
You guys argue that value is the origin of life, not that life is the origin of value. Similarly, consciousness as we usually think of it is a very high intensity expression of value. I hear you trying to hold this tension between levels of emergence of ever deepening capacity for the realization of value and intimacy, while also saying there’s a through line and value is the basis of it.
Maybe indulge me for a minute. I have a couple of friends here with me – Whitehead and Schelling’s Ages of the World. For Whitehead, consciousness is a high grade form of feeling. It’s feelings all the way down for him – panexperientialism. But consciousness for him specifically refers to what he calls the feeling of negation or affirmation-negation contrast. Only some occasions of experience are conscious in Whitehead’s specific sense, where we’re not just perceiving what’s present or feeling the givenness of the past. A conscious experience is also aware of or prehending everything that could be.
He says at the beginning of Process and Reality: “Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual of such higher grade has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality, but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”
On Whitehead’s definition, consciousness is having to perform this double role – recognizing its own limitation, its own status as a limitation of the totality, but in recognizing that, becoming capable of self-correcting that limitation so as to become more sensitive to and rationally adequate to that totality. Is his use of consciousness more helpful here, or do you think it’s better just to speak in terms of value?
Zak Stein: When I hear that, I’m hearing James and Peirce and their definitions of consciousness which had to do with early psychological work on the reflex arc. Consciousness emerges in the presence of error – when your hypothesis about what the world is going to do doesn’t match reality. In attachment theory, when you bite the blanket and bite your finger and realize there’s a difference, when mom’s coming and going and you’re not always right about when she’ll show up – all this brings you into self-awareness as a result of your error.
Peirce says if we could see all semiosis, that’s not consciousness – that’s like the god mind. For him, it’s about this uniqueness specified through the characterization of what I’m lacking, which I become aware of more and more. This relates to value because to think in terms of error, you failed at doing something. The reflex arc is hypothesis, action, meet the world, hypothesis confirmed or disconfirmed, retool, try again.
This moves across the Atlantic to Piaget, who turns it into something resonant with this worldview. The interiorization and growth of consciousness – you need the unification of consciousness, then it goes so deep it becomes universal consciousness through the uniqueness. This is basically unique self theory. What they’re seeing is the reality we’re all trying to triangulate. Is Whitehead’s definition useful? Yeah, insofar as it shows us that consciousness actually means value – it’s coded text for value.
Marc Gafni: The language of consciousness has gotten so confused. Whitehead – a writing course might have helped, but then it would be so much less gorgeous.
When we talk about a classical position of separate self versus true self, the assumption is that true self is awareness. Let’s do an anthro-ontological move – the word “awareness,” what does it do in our body? Not much. It’s not that arousing, not that awakening, not that interesting.
If you look carefully at the lineages – Kashmir Shaivism, Rumi’s contemporaries, the Solomonic lineage within Hebrew wisdom – it’s not actually awareness. It’s awareness and allurement, or awareness and desire. We’re talking about Sat-Chit-Ananda – being, consciousness, and the inside of consciousness is ananda. The inside of the inside, which the Solomonic lineages call literally the inside of the inside, is the Holy of Holies with the two cherubs above the ark. The voice of divinity comes from the empty space between the sensuously intertwined cherubs. The cherubs are desire – clarified desire.
True self is not awareness. True self is the field of awareness and allurement which then discloses itself as unique self – the irreducible uniqueness. I’ve now met Matt. Matt is God’s unique intimacy. I’m never going to be confused in the rest of my life and think someone else is Matt. It’s not because of his t-shirt – it’s because there’s this configuration, this quality of Matt-ness which is his unique set of allurements, interests, yearnings that have this unique configuration which is the source of his dignity.
Matt becomes an irreducible unique expression of God as the infinite intimate. It’s an unmistakable quality in which Matt actually adds to the divine. There’s literally more God to come. I can be excited about being Marc because I’m not supposed to be Matt. Jealousy disappears, rivalrous conflict disappears. I get to be excited about meeting this new quality that’s not Zak-ness and not Marc-ness. We get to love each other again. We can be welcome in that world.
Zak Stein: There’s a saying from my teacher Theo Dawson: “The insight of psychology is that you’re every age you’ve ever been.” One of the things we’re saying with the universe story is that you are also every age the universe has ever been. The entire embedded compound individuality of your unique occasion contains the memory of the entire universe.
That reconfigures the phenomenology of your most essential values and feelings. The traits characteristic of you – some are arbitrary and cultural, but some are actually the traits of the universe itself. Your love, your purest heart’s desire, is not just your opinion or cultural indoctrination. Your desiring as an infant to be attached to your mother and receive her care – that’s not just your opinion or culture. That’s a deep embodied proof that the universe runs on ontologically real love.
There was nothing arbitrary that led to the emergence of the human. There was chance or play, but nothing arbitrary. In Peircean semiotic cosmology, habit formation is valued. What is selected for and stays in the universe is what is valued by the universe. Selection theory is about what the universe values, what’s the appetite of the universe. We’re here, this human form, our brain, the language I’m speaking – it’s here because it was valued by the universe. It’s almost that simple. Therefore I completely belong. My clarified desire would clarify my personality and make my personality a unique self expression of universe rather than some arbitrary outcome of human socialization.
Matt Segall: Personalities are made of more than memories. We have anticipations, expectations, and desires. In this anthropocosmic sense, in our own inner experience and longing is some sense of where the universe itself could go. The future is open, but there’s a reality in our longing for what could be that also has a cosmic basis. It’s not just arbitrary.
Marc Gafni: That literally makes me happy. Gabriel Marcel once wrote “Hope is a memory of the future.” Nachman of Breslov’s first religious act in the morning is not prayer or meditation – he calls it in Aramaic “to remember the future world.”
Even in terms of attachment theory, we think we can heal people by helping them recover the memory of the past and reorganize them – the psychological self, which was a momentous evolutionary leap. We realized those women in Vienna that Breuer was seeing were not crazy, they were abused. We can recover the past and reorganize, which is gorgeous and sacred.
At the same time, it’s ultimately ineffective. The recidivism rate is unimaginable today in clinical institutions across the world. We’ve been developing something called unique self recovery, which is about recovering the memory of the future. If I just recover the memory of the past and don’t recover the memory of the future, I actually can’t heal in a fundamental way.
One of the great epistemic confusions is this confusion between separateness and uniqueness. Separateness and uniqueness are two utterly distinct experiences. The Western enlightenment idea says the source of our dignity is in our separate self. Eastern or mystical enlightenment locates the source of dignity in moving beyond separate self to true self. But both are based on an epistemological error between separateness and uniqueness.
The source of dignity for the West shouldn’t be separate self – it’s unique self. In the East, I want to move beyond my separate self but not beyond my uniqueness. To realize there’s a seamless code of the universe that’s seamless but not featureless is essential. That confusion between separateness and uniqueness confuses both the Western enlightened tradition and the Eastern one.
Unique self theory at its core is this notion of the infinite intimate incarnate in the irreducible unique individual who is a higher individuation beyond ego. Separateness is the coin of alienation while uniqueness is the currency of connection.
There’s a text in the Book of Job: “Through my body I vision God.” This is the beautiful passage you just read from Schelling. The interpreters of that text within Hasidism over a couple thousand years – what that text comes to mean is this realization that I’m both an irreducible unique expression of the whole thing, that I’m not just unique self but evolutionary unique self. I add something to the whole that it didn’t have before. I have the capacity to not just fix that which is broken but to actually add an irreducible quality of perfection to that which is already perfect. Even though it’s already perfect, it must still be perfecting, because ever-perfecting is a quality of perfection. I then become the incarnation of that new perfection – Marc-ness or Zak-ness or Matt-ness. That can only happen because it all lives inside of me. I’m both an irreducibly emergent expression of it, it all lives inside of me, and then I become literally the amorous cosmos in person writing its next chapter through my story.
Matt Segall: Time check – we’ve gone for 90 minutes. How are you guys doing? Do you have a few more minutes?
Zak Stein: Yeah, I got a few more.
Matt Segall: I want to stay on personhood for a second. Person from Latin “personare” – a mask through which sound passes. Mask makes it seem ephemeral or make-believe, but I think the distinction between uniqueness and separateness is that the uniqueness of a person is established in relationship to other persons. The face of a person, the mask through which the sound of the word passes – I think of it almost like the iconostasis in an Orthodox church where the priest is moving in and out, opening and closing the door and curtains. This polarity or oscillation between revelation and concealment, the mystery of personhood is very much about that.
We speak to each other in a shared language and connect across our uniqueness through the Word. Yet behind the word, when we’re silent, is this mystery, this vast empty space where creativity happens. Whitehead says our moment-to-moment experience is flitting about in the interstices of the brain, “empty space.” He doesn’t really believe in empty space – it’s the matrix of possibility. Personhood as this way in which the divine can come into relationship with itself by wearing masks that aren’t just make-believe but the context within which value can be experienced and intensified.
Zak Stein: Of course I think of the face as a portal to Levinas. The core of the practice of clarification of desires – getting on the inside of God’s face, meaning what does it mean to be looking out at the world from the inside of God’s face but from your unique face? There’s this paradox in seeing God in the face of another. You don’t see some generic person – you see their uniqueness.
You’re walking through a crowd trying not to see people’s uniqueness because you’re trying to get your thing done, and flashing in front of you is the uniqueness of a face. That is that portal into the divine through the uniqueness of the face. Personhood is showing of the face. There’s so much in terms of losing face, recovering face. In attachment theory, the first conversation is face to face – not language, not even sound. It’s the incredible responsiveness of the mothering face to the infant face, similar to the conversation of faces during lovemaking.
We fear the replacement of politics by a science of behavior control – being made anonymous, being made to have no face. The non-player character meme is a faceless member of a crowd automated into complacency, anonymized without face. The preservation of personhood is the preservation of the ability to have your face seen and to show your face.
Matt Segall: Marc, you were saying now that you’ve met me, you’ll always recognize me. I might need to recruit you once Google uses the thousands of videos of me to build the AI of me. I might need you as an authenticity checker.
Marc Gafni: We have to bear witness for each other after all the witnesses are gone. The temple – one of the names for the temple is “Panim,” the face. The word to be before the divine “lifnei,” the word “penima” (interiority/inside), and the word “panim” (face) are the same word. To be before God is quite literally to be on the inside of God’s face. This split between beforeness/second person and inness/first and second person playing each other in this insanely beautiful way.
Let’s be direct mystics of allurement, erotic mystics, evolutionary lovers. I wrote an essay called “Evolutionary Love” and Zak told me Peirce had written used that word before me, which was annoying. But I like the word better – “Outrageous Love.” The word outrageous connotes something slightly different. It’s a term used in the Sabbatean strain of thought. There’s this usage of outrageous love – this love that is the heart of existence itself, not in the “as if” way but in the ontological way.
If I fall in love with someone, what happens? There’s an emotion, a feeling tone, because I’m participating in the universe. Love’s not hard to find – love’s impossible to avoid. The universe feels and the universe feels love. What’s happening is a perception. Love at its core is a perceptive act, an imaginative act. But there’s not just a perception of the beloved – the beloved arouses a self-perception.
I can notice there’s a particular quality of intimacy that shows up when I’m talking to Zak that doesn’t show up with any other person. There’s a dimension of Marc-ness that shows up in that exchange. When Matt shows up on the inside of God’s face or before God, there’s a new dimension of the divine that shows up in that relationship.
Anthro-ontologically, you have a direct and clear sense of this ontological emergent of something unimaginably new. Who am I? I’m unique self – an irreducible unique expression of this love intelligence and love beauty that’s the animating Eros and energy of all that is, living in me as me and through me. There never was, is, or will be ever again. As such I’ve got this unique quality of intimacy, this unique gift, this unique way of being and becoming, this unique poem to write and song to sing and unique gift to give that has never and can never be given by anyone other than me. That allows you to get rid of a decent amount of Prozac. To live without that is to live without dignity.
Matt Segall: I can’t help thinking about the importance of personhood for cosmology that fosters intimacy. Even non-theistic traditions like Buddhism still talk about the Tathagatagarbha, the embryo of enlightenment in every person. Whether or not a term like God finds resonance in traditions like that, there are still resources for emphasizing the importance of personhood and intimacy.
What I hear in so much of what you’ve written and discussed today is almost a new argument for the reality of God. Peirce says what we need is a poem as an argument rather than a logical proof for the existence of God – something that evokes the experience of that reality. Saint Anselm tried to define God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. But what you’re suggesting is that God is that than which nothing more intimate can be felt, which is a different way of getting at this – almost a phenomenological proof of the existence of the divine ground.
Marc Gafni: God is the Infinite Intimate. We were talking yesterday with Ian McGilchrist about intimacy. Ian asked the right question – what about the horrors of the world?
In 2011, I met Deepak Chopra in an elevator and we stayed in touch. He sent me his book “War of the Worldviews” which he wrote with a professor from Caltech. There’s always a key text in a book around which everything else revolves. On page 121-122, Mlodinow tells the story of his mother in a death camp where the Nazi commandant walks behind his mother and 20 people kneeling in the snow and randomly shoots one and not the other. Mlodinow basically says “Fuck your God.”
Without engaging that, the intimacy question doesn’t begin. That’s what’s so intensely painful but also intensely beautiful. Russell wrote in one of his letters something like even after feeling unable to address the subjectivity of ethical values, “I can’t bring myself to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is I don’t like it.”
You can only be Abraham protesting the divine, you can only argue with the divine, you can only be putting God on trial for suffering in the world if you live in an intimate universe and God’s the infinite intimate. If it’s an “as if” world of sincere irony, then there’s no reason why at the border of India and Pakistan 15 to 18 million people aren’t bashing their babies’ heads against walls for 50 years.
It’s only the infinity of intimacy – God not just as the infinity of power but as the infinity of intimacy – that allows us to challenge the divine and be God’s voice challenging the divine and scream that it can’t be this way, because I have a direct experience of the infinite intimate universe.
Luria says the only time you actually merge with crown and wisdom and feminine understanding at the top three levels is when you scream to God in protest, when you scream to God demanding justice, furious with the divine. That’s the highest level of gnosis. Evil is a failure of intimacy.
Matt Segall: Right, and it provokes love in response, fierce love even.
Marc Gafni: The question itself is actually the answer – not the answer, but the phenomenological door into that which we can’t articulate.
Zak Stein: I would say something about loneliness here. The loneliness epidemic and all the attachment disorders show us that what we need is real. The solution from a radically ascending consciousness-only metaphysics is that there’s no loneliness because there’s nobody else – it’s just one self, so why are you lonely? But that’s actually terrible and incorrect.
The solution to loneliness is the reality of the second person, both in others and in God, and therefore the reality of shared value and story. The argument for God has a lot to do with the ontology of story which we’ve been flirting with but never actually addressed. We’re not saying there isn’t some reality of absolute no-story, but we are saying the reality of story is primary.
How do you feel welcome in the universe, not lonely and welcome in the universe? It requires solving that problem, not dismissing the universe. How do you have a story that is good, a story of a life that is not misspent, a story that is truly meaningful? Not to dismiss the category of story as itself illusory.
There’s a definition of God, an argument for God, which boots from something very different than the assumptions of materialists, radical idealists, and spiritual escapists – a whole host of well-meaning attempts to solve this problem of loneliness and meaninglessness and moral obligation in a postmodern culture that hasn’t given us the cultural resources to do that.
Matt Segall: Right, so relationality goes all the way down would be another way of talking about ErosValue going all the way down.
Marc Gafni: You can’t even talk of – the word consciousness doesn’t exist without relationality. There’s no value without relationality, and there’s no consciousness. Reality is at its very core relationship at its very essence.
Matt Segall: The human being is conscientious with creation, not identical with but in this relationship of co-knowing, co-valuing.
Marc Gafni: As your friend used the word conscientious in that Schelling quote – beautiful.
Matt Segall: Gentlemen, thank you so much. This was not just fun, it was edifying and hopefully valuable for anyone listening. Keep up the good work, and I hope to talk to both of you again. Let’s circle back about December.
Marc Gafni: For real? Okay.
Matt Segall: Take care!
Footnotes2Plato 
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