Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 48 — Corbin and the Divine Double (Summary & Notes)

“A symbol is trying to challenge you to transcendence. If you are not transcending in response to a symbol you really haven’t understood a symbol. If you just treat it as an allegory that you can replace with other literal terms, then you haven’t really remembered through the symbol. There has been no alathea.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 47: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-47-a3cafbd5f431)

Ep. 48 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Corbin and the Divine Double [59:55] https://youtu.be/mrnpZhWqdcA?feature=shared

• Heidegger wrote commentary on some of the work of Angelus Silesius, a poet who was trying to put into poetry the work of Meister Eckhart. Eckhart is someone we spoke about before: he was one of the great neo-Platonic mystics within the larger group of Rhineland mystics. Eckhart experienced gnosis as a form of sacredness — something appropriate to a religious context.
• Heidegger’s commentary was on a Silesius poem, here in translation: The rose is without why/It blooms because it blooms/It cares not for itself/Asks not if it is seen. This conveys an element of one of Eckhart’s maxims: “Live without why.”
• Heidegger’s commentary picks up on the word physis, a Greek word that is the core of the word physics. He’s trying to get back to a re-experience of the physical as an important way of remembering the being mode. “Physis” means blossoming forth from itself, springing forth from itself. Heidegger says, “The blossoming of the rose is grounded in itself, has its ground in itself. The blossoming is a pure emerging out of itself. A pure shining.” We get a sense of the depth of the rose in its physis. As it shines it shines in a way that’s showing that it is shining out of itself, its own depths. Shining out of that into which it withdraws as it presents itself to a phenomenological experience.
• Meister Eckhart’s maxim “Live without why” might seem at first glance as describing a life without meaning. But isn’t a quest for some grand, culminating purpose to life maybe coming from the having mode and not from the being mode? Eckhart isn’t proposing meaninglessness, he’s proposing a non-teleological way of being. There’s no narrative to the rose. It’s not that it’s lacking a narrative, it’s beyond the narrative. Maybe the universe itself is like the rose. Maybe it’s blooming from itself, shining from itself, while always withdrawing. (Note how this comports with the latest physics which describes an ever-expanding universe)
• Narrative gives you deep cognitive existential practice in non-logical identity. There is a non-logical identity between who you are inside the frame and who you are outside the frame (after trans-framing). This will be important to remember when we talk about aspiration.
• Narrative is a way of representing through time how you have a non-logical identity to yourself. e.g. your location and physical traits as a baby were different than they are today. As a baby you couldn’t speak a language, or walk… you were in so many ways different from who you are today. Yet, in another sense, it is you. “Narrative is a way of tracing out and training us in being able to work with this kind of fundamental transformation — this non-logical identity.”
• Meister Eckhart is perhaps suggesting that we can exapt this narrative ability, and instead of thinking of it as unfolding horizontally across time we can think of it as a vertical ontology in which we are connecting the depths of ourselves to the depths of being in a non-teleological being mode.

• We can also talk about that idea of pure shining as relevance realization (RR). “The salience landscaping into intelligibility.” We can talk about the idea of pure withdrawal as “the independent inexhaustibleness of a combinatorially explosive reality.” And Vervaeke thinks we can draw these two things together. We can experience these things in the being mode in the following way: “A trajectory of transframing that is always closing upon the relevant while always opening to the moreness.” Vervaeke has argued that this recognition and remembering (alathea) so that we can accentuate and celebrate it… this is what sacredness is. (Which lines up nicely with what Eckhart puts forth) Heidegger is reticent to talk about this, while Tillich is not.
• We can think of realness as a tonos, a creative tension between coherence and moreness. After all, if realness is just assimilation and no accommodation (remember that accommodation is experience as awe and wonder) then it’s not experienced as real. Taoism is a powerful symbolism because of its emphasis on yin (a confirming) and yang (an opening up) as each interpenetrating one another, and all of that is the disclosure of the inexhaustibleness of the Tao. “Taoism is all about the serious play with the serious play of being.” This is how Corbin describes gnosis, as does Avens when talking about Corbin.

• Heidegger is important to Heidegger as is the Neo-Platonic tradition, but most especially Neo-Platonism within Persian Sufism. (Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam) Corbin helps us remember how central Persian philosophy is to the history of philosophy in the world. Persia plays and important role between the Arab world, the European world, and the Asiatic world. (the world of India and China)
• “Remember that Persia was made Muslim via an Arab invasion that was nothing less than a genocide. And I know Persians. They remember this deeply to this day.” For huge periods, the Persians (e.g. Rumi, and others) were especially attracted to a mystical interpretation of Islam (Sufism) precisely because they are trying to find a form of liberation from an oppressive Arab empire.
• Persian Sufism has a much more flexible relationship to Islam than you might think of when you think of Iran today in the world. Corbin read Persian Sufist works deeply and repeatedly. There are ways in which, as a Frenchman, he misunderstands some of this literature and is therefore not a perfect interpreter, but he is an insightful and important interpreter.
• Remember that Corbin talked about gnosis as “transformative, salvic, participatory knowing.” A deep attunement. An at-one-ment. What Corbin brings that we don’t have in Heidegger is the claim that the recovery of gnosis is bound up with imagination in an important way. (Vervaeke recommends reading Avens and Cheetha before reading Corbin, see List of Books below)
• He’s not using the word “imagination” in the way we typically use it. He makes a distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. And it’s the imaginal that is bound up with gnosis. Imaginary is what we typically mean: the purely subjective experience of generating inner mental imagery which we know is not real. It’s completely within our control and we can play with it, etc. That is not what Corbin is talking about, nor is it what Jung is talking about when he talks about “active imagination.”
• The imaginal can be described as mediating between the abstract intelligible world and the concrete sensible world. It bridges between them and allows them to come together in meaningful experience. One of Corbin’s arguments is that the Cartesian cultural grammar of mind vs. matter (“this Cartesian division”) causes us to lose the imaginal that bridges between those two worlds.

• The imaginal also mediates between the purely subjective and the purely objective. i.e. it’s deeply transjective in nature.

• You have to imagine this whole relationship as being in motion, because the imaginal is not a static relation. It’s a constant transformative transframing. It is vibrant and vital in that way.
• Corbin was deeply opposed to fundamentalism and literalism because they make this relational framework static and they categorize things into either abstract or concrete, subjective or objective. “They freeze this and then they fracture it.” For Corbin, if you lose the imaginal you lose the capacity for gnosis. And if you lose the capacity for gnosis, you lose the capacity for waking up within the being mode through alathea to being — the grounded being in sacredness.
• You’ll hear the invocation of the symbolic as a dismissive term. “Yes, you can read this symbolically but it’s just symbolic meaning, it has no real relevance or importance to you…” Corbin argues the opposite: if you have an attitude towards the symbolic that is dismissive then you have lost the capacity for gnosis, which means you have lost the capacity to overcome (in alathea) the forgetfulness of being. To come out of the deepest kind of modal confusion. Jonathan Pageau is someone who is trying to get us back to this gnosis of the symbol and how we should not be dismissive of it.
• We can bring out the imaginal in a way that connects to Dasein (your being-in-the-world) via the symbol. Specifically, the translucency of the symbol. You look at it but you also look through it, in both meanings of the word. By means of it, and beyond it. (Like looking through glasses) A symbol is translucent, transjective. And it’s important to have a dialogue between the looking-at and the looking-through because that is how the symbol can help you to capture the non-logical identity between your agent-arena now in one frame and your agent-arena in a more comprehensive, encompassing frame.
• “A symbol is trying to challenge you to transcendence. If you are not transcending in response to a symbol you really haven’t understood a symbol. If you just treat it as an allegory that you can replace with other literal terms, then you haven’t really remembered through the symbol. There has been no alathea.”
• The symbol is not only transjective, it is trajective. It’s putting you on a trajectory of transformation. A symbol is also trans-temporal and trans-spatial, because it has to do with this movement between worlds. An ontological movement between a smaller frame and a larger frame.
• The troubling example that is central to Corbin involves a symbol that he calls “the Angel.” (Resist the temptation to roll your eyes…) What many people think when the idea of an angel gets introduced is an imaginary understanding. Corbin rejects this.
• An alternative understanding of this involves analytic philosophy and cognitive science, specifically the work of Stang in his book Our Divine Double. He points to a particular motif of “the divine double” that was prevalent in the Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic domicide that saw the rise of gnosticism and early Christianity. The idea was that I may have a self right now but it is bound to a double of me that is archetypically more important than me. That double is my “true” self, and my spiritual path is to reunite my present self with that divine double. This realization of their interdependence culminates in a kind of mystical union between them.
• Notice that this idea is trying to break the grammar of thinking of your true self as something you have and what you have to do is express it. That grammar is being subverted and transgressed by the idea that you true self is beyond you and you aspire to it. It’s realized through the being mode of transcendence and not the having mode of possession.
• Corbin’s use of “the Angel” is a symbolic way of talking about the divine double, i.e. the aspiration towards a better self. This goes back to the Socratic project but also runs through Maslow, Jung… it is central to a lot of the mythos that we have about talking about how we are going to normatively improve not our situation but ourselves.
• Instead of asking the question “Should I believe that?” first ask yourself the question “Why did so many different groups of people in that world believe it?” What was going on there? What was it doing? Here we can invoke the important work of L.A. Paul re: Transformative Experience, which has been brought up before and is bound up with ideas of gnosis. It’s also bound up in the work of Agnes Callard in her book Aspiration (see notes for Episode 45). She argues for a neglected form of rationality that is best understood through aspiration. (Remember that rationality means “any systematically reliable internalized psychotechnology that reliably and systematically affords you overcoming self-deception and affords you cultivating enhanced connectedness — enhanced meaning in life.”)
• Let’s talk about the self before launching into the self-transformational process and the self afterwards. (i.e. the you as a baby vs. you now difference, the non-logical identity) Callard says the nature of this relationship involves aspiration, and points out that if you don’t include aspiration in what you mean by “rationality” you’re going to get yourself into a deeply self-refuting position “because my relationship to rationality and my relationship to wisdom are aspirational.” And notice how we are finally getting back towards the Platonic idea of the deep interpenetration between “love” and reason.
• A liberal education in the classical sense (liberal as in “liberates” you, to save you from existential entrapment , to make you into a better self) is gnosis. It’s aspirational. “The divine double is a symbol, in Corbin’s sense, that allows you to move from your self now to yourself then. To your better self.”

Next up: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 49 — Corbin and the Jung (Summary & Notes) https://medium.com/@markmulvey/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-49-5577775df252

List of Books in the Video:

• Roberts Avens— The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels
• John D. Caputo — The Mystical Element of Heidegger’s Thought
• Edited by Graham Parkes — Heidegger and Asian Thought
• Reinhard May — Heidegger’s Secret Sources
• Gary Lachman — Lost Knowledge of the Imagination
• Tom Cheetham — The World Turned Inside Out
• Tom Cheetham — Imaginal Love
• Tom Cheetham —All The World An Icon
• Charles M. Stang — Our Divine Double
• Charles M. Stang — Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionyssus the Areopagite