Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred
So last time we were continuing our examination of the experience of sacredness (the Schirrmacher side of things) and I was trying to develop an account of what symbols are; at least, symbols insofar as they are distinct from signs. This is a way of trying to understand the role that symbols have in our understanding of sacredness.
So I was presenting to you the view that symbols are a participatory act, and that participation has a connection to the activation of a profound kind of metaphor. By activating that metaphor, we are reaching backwards through our exaptation and reactivating that material so that we can re-exapt our cognitive processes and re-experience, re-appreciate, re-see, re-understand some aspect of reality, and that re-exaptation makes the use of a symbol, a deeply participatory transformative thing that we do and that with a symbol we’re activating all that reexaptive machinery in order to hold something in mind so that we can see more deeply into it, be more in contact with it.
Then I argued the point of that is ultimately to set up an anagogic expressway by which I am transformed so I can see through the symbol into reality, and so that reality can speak through the symbol to me, and that we get an angogic flow happening and I’m becoming deeply integrated, the world is become disclosed, and that mutual reciprocal realizing (feels deeply sort of like love), coupling to reality in a profound way. So symbols are in that sense designed to get me into a trajectory of transframing; they’re designed to open up the world (in wonder) and also grow me so that I can be in that larger world.
That points to how symbols are ecstatic; they’re participatory, they’re integrative, they’re complex, because they help to complexify me and disclose the complexity of the world in a coordinated fashion. Then I suggested to you that we understand symbols as mythos, that it’s always a symbol and a story together and that the story points to the ritual and the ritual is also there because the mythos is always enacted if it’s going to bring about the transformations that it wants to bring about (or that we want to use it to bring about).
I think both of those are right—we can use mythos to activate, accelerate, articulate, and appreciate religio. Religio is inherently valuable to us so even that alone is going to be very valuable to us. In addition to the act of seriously playing, not only is it development of what we are, what we find intrinsically valuable (because it’s constitutive of our ability to value anything else or anything we consider valuable because it’s primordial), but relevance realization (which is at the heart of religio and I’m giving you an argument for that) is constituted to it, it is structured to function by being interested in itself, correcting itself, transcending itself, developing itself. So that’s why we love the flow state; not only is it optimal in that it’s getting us to be our best, we also find it to be an optimal experience because we’re seriously playing with this intrinsically valuable machinery in a way that is constitutively intrinsically significant to us.
I propose that when we are using the symbol to get us to play with the machinery, the meta-assimilation the meta-accommodation of sacredness or at least the meta-assimilation, the meta-accommodation of the higher order relevance realization within sacredness, and that’s what we deeply mean by the experience of sacredness.
It seems to me that he might be getting at some different concept with “symbol” that I would get out of it. I kind of get that if you have a religion you might pave out a “learning curve” of insights and that the same objects would get resused at multiple levels. But what distinguishes a symbol from a non-symbol, can some symbols be better than others? (I think that “symbolic value” migth make sense in the sense of affording participatory transformation, but then symbolic value can vary)
The inextinguishablesness also seems a bit wonky. I get that if somebody reliably gets new and new insights it might make sense to treat it as ever-producing but I doubt whether they truly have this property. Like Plato is only finitely insightful, it seems plausible that one day when returing to the text it ceases to speak, that there would be diminishing returns or that the growth one gets from the reading is all of the readers insight and none of the writers. I am thinking how a river might be inexhaustible, it is hard to drink a river dry and because of the hydrocycle one can rely being able to drink daily. But weather patterns change and using the river to irrigate a too big of a field can actually dry up a river. If you have a water bottle with you then withholding from drinking means you get to drink more later. With a river spending more time drinking means more water total gotten.
Having a business that generates a profit can make for exponential growth. But that is a different thing than having infinite money. So in a similar sense “that one is above the line in transcendence” might be an important thing, but it is not a “I win” button.
Your point about inexhaustibility rings true to me, and reminds me of a broader question about anagoge (for personal development), engineering (for technological development), and science (for understanding the physical world); is it actually an infinite staircase going up (or deeper, in the case of scientific theories), or is there ‘completion’ (in the sense that pretty quickly we’ll be able to make the best possible spaceships, have the best possible wisdom, have the complete theory of everything, etc.)?
It feels really dangerous to have an orientation that presupposes growth, or puts all of the value on growth, in a universe that might actually be finite. But also it feels really dangerous to assume that you’ve grown all you can, and there’s nothing more to do, when in fact you just don’t see the next door!
Verveake was losing me in these parts of the series (though I did finish it). His overuse of complex language makes it extremely hard to understand what he’s talking about. And that also makes it hard to evaluate, use or further explain.
So some quick refreshers on earlier concepts: Vervaeke thinks that humans are evolved, and that means lots and lots of ‘exaptation’, where something originally created for purpose A turns out to also be useful for purpose B, and develops to satisfy both purposes. The tongue is an example, of originally being useful for moving stuff around in the mouth (lots of animals have tongues that can do that) but then also being useful for speech, rather than creating a new speech organ from scratch (few animals that have tongues capable of speech, and this actually seems like the limiting factor in getting dogs to talk with us, for example).
But exaptation doesn’t just happen with body parts, it also happens cognitively. The thing that Vervaeke thinks the symbol is doing is giving us access to the ‘history’ of the thing, in a way that reminds me of UtEB and memory reconsolidation; rather than just going off the ‘current sense of justice’ or w/e the symbol of justice gives you a way to handle the parts of it and its justification all at once, making it easier to reflect on justice and change your mind about it / develop it in contact with more of your experience.
Anagoge is a sort of philosophical self-development / ascent towards the true/good.
Religio, is, uh, the parts of religion that relevance realization is related to? I’ll figure out a better explanation at some point.
Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred
It seems to me that he might be getting at some different concept with “symbol” that I would get out of it. I kind of get that if you have a religion you might pave out a “learning curve” of insights and that the same objects would get resused at multiple levels. But what distinguishes a symbol from a non-symbol, can some symbols be better than others? (I think that “symbolic value” migth make sense in the sense of affording participatory transformation, but then symbolic value can vary)
The inextinguishablesness also seems a bit wonky. I get that if somebody reliably gets new and new insights it might make sense to treat it as ever-producing but I doubt whether they truly have this property. Like Plato is only finitely insightful, it seems plausible that one day when returing to the text it ceases to speak, that there would be diminishing returns or that the growth one gets from the reading is all of the readers insight and none of the writers. I am thinking how a river might be inexhaustible, it is hard to drink a river dry and because of the hydrocycle one can rely being able to drink daily. But weather patterns change and using the river to irrigate a too big of a field can actually dry up a river. If you have a water bottle with you then withholding from drinking means you get to drink more later. With a river spending more time drinking means more water total gotten.
Having a business that generates a profit can make for exponential growth. But that is a different thing than having infinite money. So in a similar sense “that one is above the line in transcendence” might be an important thing, but it is not a “I win” button.
Your point about inexhaustibility rings true to me, and reminds me of a broader question about anagoge (for personal development), engineering (for technological development), and science (for understanding the physical world); is it actually an infinite staircase going up (or deeper, in the case of scientific theories), or is there ‘completion’ (in the sense that pretty quickly we’ll be able to make the best possible spaceships, have the best possible wisdom, have the complete theory of everything, etc.)?
It feels really dangerous to have an orientation that presupposes growth, or puts all of the value on growth, in a universe that might actually be finite. But also it feels really dangerous to assume that you’ve grown all you can, and there’s nothing more to do, when in fact you just don’t see the next door!
Verveake was losing me in these parts of the series (though I did finish it). His overuse of complex language makes it extremely hard to understand what he’s talking about. And that also makes it hard to evaluate, use or further explain.
So some quick refreshers on earlier concepts: Vervaeke thinks that humans are evolved, and that means lots and lots of ‘exaptation’, where something originally created for purpose A turns out to also be useful for purpose B, and develops to satisfy both purposes. The tongue is an example, of originally being useful for moving stuff around in the mouth (lots of animals have tongues that can do that) but then also being useful for speech, rather than creating a new speech organ from scratch (few animals that have tongues capable of speech, and this actually seems like the limiting factor in getting dogs to talk with us, for example).
But exaptation doesn’t just happen with body parts, it also happens cognitively. The thing that Vervaeke thinks the symbol is doing is giving us access to the ‘history’ of the thing, in a way that reminds me of UtEB and memory reconsolidation; rather than just going off the ‘current sense of justice’ or w/e the symbol of justice gives you a way to handle the parts of it and its justification all at once, making it easier to reflect on justice and change your mind about it / develop it in contact with more of your experience.
Anagoge is a sort of philosophical self-development / ascent towards the true/good.
Religio, is, uh, the parts of religion that relevance realization is related to? I’ll figure out a better explanation at some point.