The Midnight Philosopher | Matthew Nini on Wonder, AI, Learning & Night Thinking | UEF Podcast

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:02]Hello everybody and welcome to the UEF podcast which today is going to be examining a very interesting intersection of ideas primarily the relationship between the thinking we do at night and loving learning and playing which is the key to flourishing. Now today as a host I am Kristoff Perau I am a PhD researcher in philosophy. I have been a scholar and residence at the Cambridge uh center for the study of platonism as well as a deans fellow at Harvard University and I am delighted to be hosting the great Dr. Matthew Nini who is a research associate at the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb Croatia.

[00:00:47]Previously he was a post-doctoral fellow fellow at Albert Ludvig University in Fryberg Germany. He is the author of three books. Ficta in Berlin, the book of nocturns and shelling's ages of the world which is to be published in 2026.

[00:01:05]Now the book that we are examining predominantly today is the book of nocturns. So before we begin, would you like to kind of introduce what the book is about? Dr. Ni.

[00:01:17]>> Yes. Well, thank you Kristoff Bau for having me. It's a pleasure to talk to you and uh the audience ought to know that we're uh old friends and acquaintances from the the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism among other places, trips to to France and and your your part.

[00:01:34]>> We have had our adventures >> indeed. Um, the book I've written is perhaps a strange book for uh, an academic to write, but it is very much an expression of freedom and of thinking in a way that is unconventional in so far as it is a thinking that seeks to connect with human experience that academic writing and thinking can sometimes miss. And I've tried to phrase this through the metaphor of day and night. Day is the place of logic. It's the place where things are linear and proceed from the first step to the last step. Going from beginning to end, things are identifiable, have limits, are logical. Whereas the night symbolizes something more human, something less linear, something darker where things are not as easily visible as they are in the daytime. And so night thinking is a way of tapping into part of the human experience that is lost in the peer-reviewed journal article or the scholarly monograph. The kind of thinking that is maybe better represented by religion, myths, stories, poetry, music.

[00:02:53]That >> in summary is what the book is about.

[00:02:57]But that's very interesting because typically people would say, you know, you want to walk into the light, right?

[00:03:04]You want to see clearly, you want to get out of the dark. And you seem to be suggesting that there is an element of wonder in the darkness. There is something spectacular in the darkness worthy of our exploration that might even connect us to a deeper sense of reality than we can find in the supposedly clear and lucid elements of the day. Is that correct?

[00:03:28]>> Indeed. Well, our rational self, I think, is only part of the story of who we are as human beings. And of course the old light metaphor that is very common in world religions of coming out of the darkness walking into the light.

[00:03:42]This is very often a question of morality of turning away from what is evil into the good. One thinks of Plato's analogy of the cave. You know where one lives in ignorance deep in a dark cave and then as one rises up towards the sun the sun is the symbol of the form of the good the wellspring of all that is good. But on a human level, on the level of what we might philosophically call phenomenology, that is a sort of examination of our own human experience, we might say that light comes out of the darkness that in a certain way it's the opposite.

[00:04:21]That we as finite, limited, very small creatures cannot simply begin with absolute rationality and logic. We come out of a place where we know nothing.

[00:04:34]We're born and we have no experience of life. Something has to begin. But what do we possess from the beginning? We possess something that is there in the dark as it were in the night. And that I think especially the Abrahamic religions but perhaps the other great world religions, the sort of axial age religions, Buddhism, Hinduism bring out this idea of wonder.

[00:05:04]Philosophy begins and we see this in Plato, we see this with Socrates.

[00:05:08]Philosophy begins with something called tomatine in Greek.

[00:05:12]That is wonder.

[00:05:14]The fact that I am here, that everything is, that it presents itself to me, is full of mysteries, full of questions.

[00:05:23]And one ought to dwell in this feeling before jumping immediately to answers so as not to forget the more human relation that we have with these things.

[00:05:35]>> So that's amazing. And William James comes to mind because he was a philosopher who kind of found it amazing to think about the mere fact that we exist. He thought that was astounding.

[00:05:46]Like that's weird, right? We exist. How curious, how bizarre, right? And you seem to be reinvigorating through the Greek tradition that sense of the astonishment at our existence which you base in wonder. Right.

[00:06:04]Does that sound fair?

[00:06:06]>> Yes. I'm perhaps doing it in a in a minor key compared to uh the way that you've expressed it with such uh infectious enthusiasm.

[00:06:16]Uh since the book uh the metaphor of darkness can be extended to the whole part of the human experience that we don't always want to look at to melancholy to mysticism to the conversations that we have with ourselves when no one is looking to the dark corners of human existence of our own souls of the ecstasies that we live as human beings. And so the book is is not written in a linear way meant to make a linear argument. That would be a way of writing that is bound by the rules of the day. The book consists of 170 fragments. Now what is a fragment? A fragment is a thought or a story, a narrative that is fundamentally unfinished.

[00:07:04]It begins somewhere and then never goes anywhere afterwards. it >> it trails off as it were. So the thought is begun, something is constituted, something is formed, whether it's an anecdote about a person, an observation about something, a historical remark, the interpretation of a text, and then it's it's left off in a sort of poetic way. It wanders off into the night and the reader is left to meditate on this. And of course, these don't proceed in linear fashion. You don't have to read the first fragment and then the second and then the third. You could in theory open the book up to any page and begin reading and find something to engage with, to dialogue with. Since a huge element of the book is connecting with one's inner dialogue partner, what Socrates called his don inner inter >> and this silent conversation is I think the essence of philosophy and this is what happens when one dwells in wonder.

[00:08:12]sort of dialectic of dialogue begins and and we see this in the Platonic tradition very very clearly.

[00:08:20]>> Wow. Okay. So there's a lot there to unpack but let me start with one thing just to kind of you know at UEF we talk about shining a light on things right and in a way it's kind of a metaphor for illuminating bringing to central focus something that we're ignoring in that way. Do you feel like paradoxically you're kind of shining a light on the darkness on what's considered the darkness because we we ignore its value.

[00:08:53]We ignore the night thinking has a meaningful contribution. So there's that element that I want to ask about and the other element that I want to ask about is when you talk about these fragments that lead you to meditate.

[00:09:09]This does seem to touch upon a theory of how we learn, which is in a way to remember things, to recall things more than to merely be have things transmitted over to us.

[00:09:27]And so when you talk about fragments that leave you thinking, it seems like there's a trust between you and the reader that ultimately if you send them down the path, they can go where they have to go for that point in moment in their life. They can go where they need to go. They can think through the implications and relevance of the fragment. And that level of trust seems wholesale ignored in modern educational systems. So I'm curious for the second point, what role you think trusting a kind of innate knowledge has in transforming educational experience for people.

[00:10:14]>> There are a few elements in what you bring up. I think there are three and I'll I'll take them one by one. The third being the most significant one that we can dwell on a little longer in our conversation. The first is this paradoxical relationship of light and darkness, night and day. Uh the old metaphor is of course to shine light on things.

[00:10:37]>> But to shine light presumes that there is some darkness on which shine and that there is some background. Light is always sort of a concentration of light in order to read really be bright. It has to be concentrated. A diffuse light doesn't really make anything very distinct at all. So, one might say an art metaphor that thinking for me in a really human fashion is about inhabiting a sort of kiarosuro. You know, if you look at a great Renaissance painting, a Rembrandt is the master. You always see in Rembrandt these very profound shadows and then these beautiful moments of light shining and a lighting on a particular figure's face or an event, some shining object, a piece of jewelry or the latch on an old book. And it is precisely this idea of bringing out what is most important in relief that >> Knight is trying to address.

[00:11:42]Um, that almost sounds a bit like Epicurus with Atraxia, right? That the ultimate pleasure is a relief from suffering. Like that there's something in the contrast that brings meaning and increases the value of the activity at stake. And you mentioned Rembrandt. I would add maybe Kadavajio who always has the light coming from outside the painting but into a relatively dark scene. And because the light is going into a relatively dark scene, it's actually more prominent.

[00:12:15]>> Is that kind of what you're getting at?

[00:12:17]>> Yes. There's something carvajesque about this way of thinking that that highlights certain elements. I think that that that's an excellent excellent uh metaphor. Uh onto the question of education, you know, the third and second and third points. Perhaps the second point that I would like to make in uh response is that education thinking should be a question of trusting the student and trusting the reader since uh while of course I believe in learning there are fragments that make a sort of ironic criticism of teaching to make a socratic point. That is to say, if one really trusts the student, one cannot teach the student in the way that the modern technological scientific pedagogue would imagine the student should be taught. Perhaps not so much the pedagogue as the administrator at whose bid whose beck and call the the the pedagogue is doing his contemporary work or perhaps mischief. Uh one could liken this to an idea from from Martin Haidiger technology in H Highiger. Now there's an idea you know if you read H Highiger's essay concerning the question of technology technique is not simply a bunch of things it's an attitude a way of approaching the world we see this with artificial intelligence today people think that AI will replace them I think that's often because they approach the world as a series of tasks to be accomplished of little boxes to be ticked of course if you see your life as a bunch of little boxes to be ticked uh AI will do it better than you can. But that's not fundamentally not what life is.

[00:14:11]>> And if you see education in this very very transactional way, sort of opening up the head and pouring in information and then sealing it up again well um that won't get you very far. That is treating the human as if it were merely a piece of technology whereas the human is something alive and breathing. And this means that the fundamental attitude of the teacher should be this faith in the student to be able to think the problem through. Again, a quotation from H Highiger. I don't want to lean too heavily on him, but he's coming to mind today. The best respect, the greatest respect that one can pay to a thinker is to think his thoughts through to conclusions that he himself had not reached. And I'm hoping that the night book will be uh as I call it the book of noctturns a means for people to think through questions for themselves having only begun with me and having been put on the scent as it were of a particular question or particular matter.

[00:15:21]>> Thirdly, how are we to conceive of education if we think of it in that way? Of course, uh we know you know from past associations that uh I have a background in the history of Platonism and I'm committed to keeping the Platonic tradition of thinking alive. Now, uh, the first thing that should be said about that is that Plato is a teacher, but he's not a teacher in the technical technological sense of teaching where he just wants money from students so that he can try to pour facts into their heads and then send them off. Plato wants to awaken a sense of wonder in the student so that they can perform philosophy for themselves.

[00:16:12]This is very important.

[00:16:14]The way of expressing this this is tied to a metaphysical so a theoretical point in Plato's philosophy which is the idea of in ancient Greek anomnesis remembering there's a famous part in the mo one of Plato's dialogues where Socrates brings a young boy who is a slave boy who has had no education to the sand and says to his uh dialogue companion this boy does not need to be taught geometry He knows it. And Socrates sort of does what a good teacher would do. He walks the boy through how to do a math problem.

[00:16:54]What are the the the characteristics of the sides of a triangle?

[00:16:58]And from this, Socrates argues that it was something that the boy remembered.

[00:17:03]Of course, there's a Platonic mythology behind this of the soul having lived before, having been clothed in forms, having come down to earth, having remembered the most essential things, not the contingent finite, fleeting things, but that which is most essential about the soul.

[00:17:24]I think that what we can retain from this story is that learning has the structure of remembering because we learn as our own teachers in dialogue with ourselves. And uh you know better than I do some of the contemporary theories about uh innate knowledge and uh >> cognitive nivism >> cognitive nivism and things like this.

[00:17:48]There's there's a parallel to be made. I I'm not interested in the philosophy of mind and so that is not something in which I am terribly conversant but as a metaphor for the the curious way in which we learn it is something to be retained. I'm remembered of a lovely passage in a novel before you jump in and comment that I think your your listeners should read because it's a beautiful novel. I think it has been translated into English by the Austrian novelist Himto Doda and it is called demon the demons and in it you have a character who's a workingclass boy which is very bright and uh manages to begin a relation with a bourgeoa girl and from this girlfriend what they do together might sound in congress to the contemporary mind but when they are alone together in the back of a shop they uh study Latin and she's going to school and she's going to a very good classical gymnasium, a classical high school, has classical languages and teaches him Latin. And there is a beautiful moment in the book when he is reading some Latin text and one sees the inner thought process of his at work at the exact moment when he discovers that he is no longer translating in his mind the text from Cicero or or or whoever he's reading but really reading it having made it his own engaging with it. That's a moment of wonder. This great miracle of learning, of really understanding something is a moment of wonder. And it brings us back to that which is oldest in us, the most simple aspect of our humanity, >> that openness, >> right? And there's so much to say. I'll just highlight that that Platonic theory of remembrance seems to have an echo in some of the great religious and metaphysical traditions of the day, notably Islam, where you don't convert, you revert, you remember uh who you are.

[00:20:02]>> Yes.

[00:20:02]>> And of course at UEF we like to talk about our deepest longings are love, learn, and play. And typically what happens is that we forget about those deep longings, about who we are, about what we are, about what we care about. And we forget through false narratives. We forget by prioritizing the means to our goal as though it's the end in itself and not the means to the end. There's multiple ways we forget who we are. But there's a great parallel between your work and that basic intuition that life is ultimately not about constructing in a volunteeristic or willoriented manner something new but recalling something real. Does that sound like a fair analogy to draw that we're recalling something real about ourselves?

[00:20:59]>> Wonderful. Wonderful. I'm reminded of St. Augustine saying, "Late have I loved thee, oh wisdom so ancient and so new."

[00:21:11]>> The great moment of realizing that in knowledge, my knowledge is my love. uh and I come back to my great love, the thing that was there at the beginning, this edification of of the soul, >> the recollection of what has been lost.

[00:21:33]Uh in the book, there is a passage uh where I discuss a moment in Dante's Divine Comedy that I think illustrates this well. It's a sort of uh misim or a moment when when Dante the character the the protagonist is called to consciousness as it were.

[00:21:54]And what happens is passing through purgatory on his way to heaven. He has to be purified. That's what purgatory means. And he passes by the the river uh Lee, the river le which is the river of in classical mythology, Greek mythology, the river of forgetfulness.

[00:22:13]One drinks of its water and forgets everything.

[00:22:17]And this is meant to be part of a mental purification, purification of memory on the part of the pilgrim. And so he drinks this water and Beatatrice his companion his beloved this angelic figure says to him well now we can proceed. And Dante sort of says well who are you? You know and uh >> Beatatrice answers oh poet you have forgotten everything. You have forgotten your sins but at least remember that you have forgotten and you will be able to make your way.

[00:22:51]M the force that propels Dante forward in purgatory after this moment of forgetfulness is this return to the center as it were.

[00:23:04]I remember that I have forgotten. What have I forgotten? What is most essential? What is not merely data in me that can be erased and written over?

[00:23:14]What remains? Well, the heart remains.

[00:23:18]M would you mind elaborating on that a little bit? When you talk about the heart, what do you mean by the heart? Because obviously I imagine you don't uniquely mean the organ in the body.

[00:23:34]>> Of course not. Traditionally, I mean, we all know this that in literature and in philosophy, the heart in the west is the classic metaphor for for love and for the impulses that drive humanity forward. In the Hebraic tradition, this is the or in the Middle East at least generally, this is the guts. I think it's more the the tripes that have this role and there's something to that as well. But we at least in our European tradition think of the heart as being the place of the seat of emotion, the seat of affect and also that which is most intimate. It is in the heart that one has conversations with oneself, in the soul that one has conversations with oneself.

[00:24:24]With whom? With some inner guest. What does one find in the heart? not mere intellectual content but something really human, something deeply felt, some energy that can move one forward.

[00:24:38]And this in in the Abrahamic religions is very clear that this is love. This driving factor, this is the the again to return to Dante when he looks up and he sees God in the heavens having achieved the end of his journey.

[00:24:57]The last lines of the divine comedy refer to the love that move the heavens and all the other stars. And he's talking about the prime force, the first mover of the universe, which is the infinite God.

[00:25:14]>> So he places love as not only as the force that is moving the universe, but as that which is most intimate to him.

[00:25:25]>> So it's not merely that love produces effects that are worthy of experiencing. and it's the mover of the universe. It is also that love is most thoroughly authentic to our inner being in a certain way in this case that you've spelled out. Does that sound fair?

[00:25:46]>> Absolutely. And I've often said that if one really wants to learn something, there should be some great love driving it. I think this is especially true in the case of learning a language which as you know as a multicultural person half American half French with a foothold in both languages and both cultures this can be devilishly hard because a language is an entire universe. Mhm.

[00:26:10]>> One simply decides that one will learn Tersian or Arabic or Mandarin Chinese and sits down and starts studying. Sheer willpower will get you quite far, but you will need an awful lot of it in order to reach your goal. Some love of the culture, of a family, of a place, of a person, of a cherished experience will have to drive forward your linguistic journey. Otherwise, you probably won't make it very far. The cost, the cognitive cost of the willpower is just too much to be done in a state of indifference.

[00:26:50]>> I agree.

[00:26:51]>> The the love has to be the weight, to use another Augustinian phrase, >> which is probably why They so often say the best way to learn a language is to go live in the country.

[00:27:05]It's probably not merely the hyperexposure you get to the language which could be induced in other forms through extraordinary rigorous study and so forth, but also the fact that you start to love the people who speak that language. and an internal drive emerges to push you forward through the love to acquire a better and better capacity to express yourself and to understand them.

[00:27:31]So love is that great ingredient in this process. I agree with that very strongly. Now, one thing I want to ask you about as well is we've talked about wonder, we've talked about the way we learn or remember, and we've talked about love a little bit, but it all coaleses into the role of play in education. And I think there's something not only very playful about your work in the sense that you're just kind of throwing these fragments out there for people to kind of play with, be inspired by, meditate on, but also, if I'm not mistaken, there's something playful in your approach to education on the whole.

[00:28:22]>> And I'll let you maybe articulate that if you're willing. Perhaps you'd like to read a passage from the book with your magnificent reading voice, Kristoff Burrow.

[00:28:30]>> With pleasure that could then use as an illustration. This is uh the passage about the first or rather the the unmarked tarot card.

[00:28:51]You can >> This is 37 I think.

[00:28:56]37 37 in the book there. I should give the the experts since one never knows who will be listening on the internet.

[00:29:03]Uh caveat that uh I had made a slight mistake that the the tarot card in question does not have the number zero the magician I believe that it is unmarked. So the read to us about the batler and I'll explain this will be the catalyst to talk about building and education and playfulness.

[00:29:23]Great. So I will read it right now.

[00:29:29]This is fragment 37 from the book of nocturns and it goes like this.

[00:29:38]Let our patron as night thinkers be the figure found on the first tarot card or the card before the first the card given the number zero the magician. The French say it better and isn't the tarot from Marseilles. He is the juggler, the batalur. His depiction on the card describes who he is. The young man wears a hat shaped like a figure eight. He stands in front of a small table. On the table are a yellow vase, seven discs, three red and three yellow, two dice, a knife, a bag. He holds a rod in his right hand, a ball in his left. There are play things, but to succeed at these games requires the utmost concentration.

[00:30:28]Yet it is not the severe concentration of work, but the easy concentration of play. To keep the discs in the air, the juggler must be entirely focused on the task, but not overthink it. For ruminating brings one away from the rhythm of juggling, from the easy playfulness of act.

[00:30:52]Do you wish to think night thoughts?

[00:30:54]Then learn to concentrate without effort.

[00:31:01]Thank you. Thank you. Uh the first thing that ought to be said is why use tarot cards when this doesn't sound terribly serious. uh it is part of the western imaginary these images that come from the renaissance of east and it highlights the esoteric side of this.

[00:31:21]There's something very mysterious about what I've called here concentration without effort.

[00:31:29]I think in modern terms we would want to call this being in a flow state.

[00:31:33]Mhm.

[00:31:35]>> This is something that has become I mean it's a theory that that that comes up in the in the 1990s. I think it starts to make make headway in the late 20th century and it's connected to other things. It's been taken up by cognitive science since then. And the idea is that if one thinks directly about the object of what one is doing rather than simply being totally immersed in it, then one will lose this easy capacity to do it.

[00:32:06]One of the best examples would probably be playing an instrument. If you're playing piano on a very high level or even just at home, anyone who has played an instrument knows that once you know the notes and you're not thinking about them, not reading the music, but playing the music, you can get very easily into a state where the music is simply sort of playing and you are in it. You were swept up.

[00:32:32]>> People playing certain sports might have this sentiment as well where they're sort of in a zone as it were. classic uh cases, the tightroppe walker. You need to be sort of concentrated but not overthinking every step because when you start to ruminate >> that's fall that's when you're going to make a false note, play a bad note, the wrong note or or or what have you. Drop the ball.

[00:32:58]>> This is something fundamental about the way that we behave and it is playfulness.

[00:33:05]This is what it means to play. Playing piano, playing a sport, being at the circus and seeing the tightroppe walker who is fundamentally engaged in something by definition difficult requiring skill preparation but playful.

[00:33:22]You sort of have to get out of the head and into the body into the respiratory system and simply let the rational part kind of function automatically and it will work. It it does produce the results and to overthink would be too laborious rather like analogously with what we were saying about love. If one thinks that willpower will achieve everything, the mental load will be excruciating and it will eventually fail. But if does this with lightness, then it's much faster. Learning as a game, something playful is much more agreeable and and much more natural to the way that we do things because we do have this capacity to to be lost.

[00:34:13]in in music and even in learning, >> right? And this is very interesting because there's a lot that fades away when you talk about going into this concentration without effort or the flow state, however we want to phrase it. The one of the things that fades away is time.

[00:34:39]M >> you don't ruminate on time itself anymore because you're simply there.

[00:34:45]You're in a kind of timeless moment.

[00:34:47]It's very hard to track when you're concentrating without effort exactly how many minutes or hours you've spent. You could have a basic sense, but you really are just in the zone, in the moment, experiencing a timeless reality for that very precious experience. So time kind of disappears with the ruminating on time but also in a way a suffering disappears because you're intrinsically motivated to keep going to keep pursuing the very task at hand because you like the task. You are loving the task. So playing involves this loving element to it where you are loving what you're doing. So you don't worry about how much longer you have.

[00:35:37]You're not checking the clock. You don't worry about how well it's being performed. You're just happy to do it.

[00:35:44]And usually that improves the performance. But that's almost a side note benefit you know that to the actual interior experience of merely playfully lovingly participating in the very thing that is enabling you to let so many burdensome ruminating elements of life vanish.

[00:36:08]Does that make sense so far?

[00:36:10]>> This is a different way of living one's life that you're describing. If one thinks about what is called in the media hustle culture and this desire to >> to achieve to perform to do more and more.

[00:36:28]This is this is willpower. this sheer force of will trying to dominate or trying to ascend to conquer and it is too much daytime as it were and eventually this will to use my sustained metaphor sink into the night. Anyone who engages in that kind of lifestyle will eventually burn out. something will eventually go wrong that won't be able to be sustained properly over the course of years and decades.

[00:37:03]That kind of concentration fizzles out and then where does one find oneself?

[00:37:08]One finds oneself in what the psychoanalyst would call the depressive position. Mhm.

[00:37:14]>> In the place where one's forces retreat, contract, concentrate onto themselves.

[00:37:21]And one must pass then through one's melancholy in order to see what is really good, what is really easy, and what can really be accomplished without so much effort.

[00:37:39]See uh this would be the time to bring up uh a favorite topic of mine that we have spoken about before which is a wonderful novel by Helman Hessa that I can warmly recommend called the glass bead game glass.

[00:37:54]This is the illustration of education as play and the love element of course comes in towards the very end. Maybe we should add a spoiler alert to what I'm about to say. Spoiler alert, everybody be ready.

[00:38:09]Indeed. Uh Helman Hessa's last novel, The Glaspeed Game, is published in 1943 and it imagines a sort of distant future or rather not so distant future after the Second World War when Europe has achieved a state of peace and this hard one state of peace in the Germanspeaking part of the world leads to the establishment of a pedagogical province. This is an expression borrowed from GU. And the pedagogical province is a place that will train the teachers for all of society, for all of the German speaking world called Castalia.

[00:38:49]Castalian in German. And the people who live in Castalian, who all seem to be men, are all celibate and live in a sort of monastic community.

[00:39:02]This is sort of a monastery. Now given that Hessa's imaginary future is one that has been renewed by the discovery of Eastern spirituality, meditation is the backbone of what is done in Castalian to maintain rule and order and commitment in their lives. Now uh some are sent out to teach in the world but the majority of them would seem to simply stay and engage in what we would call research or perhaps the intellectual life. The Germans have a wonderful word de muz not m as in the muses but the mus as in leisure >> to be a a moose shamech to be a uh a poetic person a person of leisure a person who reads and thinks engages in discussion and who lives the life of the mind for its own sake for its beauty this is what castalian is so when one reads the book as a as a writer As a philosopher, one is entirely enchanted by this universe.

[00:40:12]Fascinating about it though, most fascinating is that it's highest form of life, the most important thing that happens in this place is a game, the glass bead game, the titular game of the novel. Now, Hessa never tells us exactly what the glass bead game is or how it's played, but it is described as being the synthesis of all forms of human knowledge. It's called the glass bead game because it would initially have been uh played with with small marbles, small glass beads to sort of occupy places almost like notes on a musical staff since music is of course the the earliest foundation in Hessa's mind of of all human sciences. The first sort of what we would call matheis universalis in the renaissance the bringing together of all the forms of knowledge. Music is seen as as doing this. But out of this combination of music and eastern spirituality in this peaceful world, this pedagogical province uh comes this game where the abstraction of something found in a Beethoven symphony can then find its response in a proposition from uh integral calculus and then move gone to Chinese literature of the classical period or or or what have you. And uh this uh this summary of all human knowledge is a game. It's playful.

[00:41:54]>> Now, however, there is a caveat because there there is a sort of decadence that is gnawing away at Castalian. One sees the figure of Fritz Tegularius who is the one of the the main characters who's based on Friedri Nichze. One sees an ill niche. Teulararius is the virtuoso glass uh beat game player, but he is of a a sickly uh temperament, a sickly uh uhh constitution and doesn't meditate and simply sort of frivolously engages in this this game like thing. So play can be frivolous if one is not careful. And so the main character who is sort of parachuted into the role of the master of the glass game, the magistto ludi, he who is a great friend of Teulius has to confront the contradiction at the heart of the place where he lives, which is on the one hand the necessity of play as the primary element of bringing together all forms of human knowledge and on the other the decadence of those who simply do this as if it were a meaningless game.

[00:43:19]>> Hence the importance of serious play, >> right?

[00:43:23]>> Plays seriously in a certain uh certain way. And so the the question that comes up very early in the novel is whether or not the magista ludi uh y it's a very revealing name because k in German means slave or servant.

[00:43:44]>> Yseph is and of course Joseph and his brothers from the Bible someone who sold into slavery and comes out of slavery. Ysef Kh must decide, do I stay here as the custodian of the rules of this game? Or is this playfulness to be lived in another way? And he eventually, and here's the spoiler alert, here's where you can skip ahead 30 seconds if you really want to read the novel. He decides that he will leave Castalian.

[00:44:10]And the job that he takes on in the world, this is sort of like leaving a monastery. He's then left to his own devices to go into the world with with nothing but the clothes on his back and becomes the receptor, the tutor of one young boy to share the wisdom he has acquired with this one person is an act that is greater and more meaningful than being the best glass bead game player. It is through this gravitational pull of love that we were talking about with Dante, with Augustine, with other figures that he sees what this playfulness is about.

[00:44:52]This sort of divine playfulness of the love that moves the stars that that is playfully moving the universe forward, but is not playing games with us.

[00:45:04]>> I would add Iris Murdoch to that list.

[00:45:06]The kind of the gravity of the good >> over us.

[00:45:10]>> Yes. Yes, you >> know that the good has its own pull which we feel we feel pulled towards the good and it's very often the case that we suffer tremendously when we reconcile with the fact that we don't feel like we're good. That's one of the greatest sources of human suffering to feel like you are not good. Not good in the instrumental sense like good at a game but good in a more ontological sense like a good being a good person. And it's a very uh difficult experience to endure of course and that would be you know if you're not loving if you're not learning if you're not playing in a certain sense you feel like you've gone away from who you are and that is a great source of tremendous pain and I wonder you know the other thing that you kind of bring up with the glass bead game that I think is a meta point of great significance meta meaning a point about the point, right?

[00:46:17]>> Is that if we're looking to break the silos of human knowledge that are self-contained and indifferent to each other, the pathway forward could be through play.

[00:46:33]>> Uh through play, but as I said, not through the frivolous kind of play, you know, >> not frivolous play. No, >> but this play that serious serious play a serious play that >> is a commitment to the to the other that is open to this encounter with with the other. Uh look, as an extension of this, I'm writing a book on travel right now.

[00:46:55]Sort of sort of philosophical meditation on what it means to travel. And I think one of the most interesting typologies, one of the most interesting kind of travelers that you see in literature again and again and again is the figure of the journeyman, you know, >> who is who is on on a journey to learn something. And the prototype here is actually Helman Hessa's inspiration. A figure that was that comes from G uh two novels about someone named Vilheim Meister Vilhelm's Leara and Wilhelm's Vandara. So his wandering years Vander Yara you know the journeyman what does it mean to be on one's journeyman years which is how that book is translated into English vir's journeyman years the journeyman of course initiates in sort of the medieval Germanic world where one learns a trade and goes around after an apprenticeship one has to go out and work and goes from town to town working with other masters learning from them on the job and eventually has to create a great work to present to the guild as proof of one's skill. Now, what moves that forward is not necessarily a plan. This is not what we would call an apprenticeship in the modern university sense. This is not a a stage as the French would say or or just a practicum that one makes in order to acquire experience. Frankly, the vaguest term that one could apply to to to one's inner life. You know what what exactly does it mean? It has to be qualified as a term.

[00:48:41]>> What the journeyman is looking for, he does not really know.

[00:48:47]And it is only through the journey, through the encounters that are had that it becomes clear. He goes knocking on doors. He arrives in a village. He needs a place to stay. He needs a bed to sleep in. He needs food. and he needs his his day's wage. Journeyman comes from the French. So we're being paid by the day.

[00:49:07]>> And it is this moment of fragility of encounter with someone else, of another door being opened, of entering into contact with someone, this playfulness of running around and finding some random place. But then the love in terms of friendships, it's friendship is one of the classical definitions of of love that permits real learning to happen.

[00:49:35]>> And the I think another great example, the illustration of what I'm saying is in Gerta's own account of his own travel, his Italian journey, which is a beautiful book. It's really a beautiful book. And Gouta is 37 years old. He has been a writer, a statesman, a scientist for many years already, but felt that he needed to learn more. He needed to take what we would call a sbatical and go to the source of all of the books that he found inspiring, which was Rome. Now, in the 18th century, traveling from northern Germany to the center of Italy was a long and difficult journey. And after being in Rome, he goes down into Sicily, passing through Naples, spends a lot of time in Naples, has a very active social life there. comes back up and on his way back to Germany decides he'll go to Rome for a little while more, maybe a few weeks, maybe a season. He winds up staying in Rome for almost another year, a huge amount of time. and he writes three of his most incredible works while he's there including one of the first versions of his famous fa the man who tries through his fist through his fa his willpower to gain knowledge doesn't gain it through willpower it's through this easy concentration of going places and being led by his encounters by the people that are there he has guides He has the, for example, the German painter Tishbine who painted the uh the famous picture of him lounging in the Kana with a sort of a poncho and a hat on and uh Tishbine had been living in in in Rome for for a while and and knew people there. And of course uh if Gu were living in our century he would be given six months or some sort of sbatical would go down would have goals would check off the boxes sort of hiding in technological idea and then he'd go back home and where would be where would FA be where would the and the the diary novel that is the Italian journey where would that be? Uh uh who >> it almost it almost sounds like and you can correct me if this is not accurate but it almost sounds like the journeymen and the general process of love learning and playing to their fullest requires and night thinking which invokes those elements requires one to have an openness to an infinite horizon where you simply don't it's a neverending experience and you don't know exactly where it's going to go, but you follow the experience knowing that it can take you somewhere. Whereas the whole point of check marks and tasks and the technological uh version of the human being is precisely to make everything finite. You will finish this within six months. It will be two papers. It will be one article. It will be one speech. It will be this and that. And it will be done on this finite timeline. And you have to let go of the finite and kind of have an openness to the infinite horizon to really be a good journey man because you say I don't know where this is going. I don't know if this is going. You're in the night thinking. You're with the mystery. And the mystery can be an endless mystery that you have to acquaint yourself with. I think now I'm adding infinity into the equation. But does it seem reasonable to you? Feel free to correct me if it doesn't.

[00:53:18]>> No, I think you're right. Uh at least in the sense infinity uh in the sense of >> never ending like maybe everlasting would be another way of putting it more than infinity.

[00:53:30]>> I would say simply not being put under absolute constraints of time. no >> conraints about uh of of the determinate uh the absolute constraint of of outcomes which is a word that that some university people like to talk about today. Outcomes or outputs >> because when you're really learning you are sort of wandering around in circles and the circle is the symbol of infinity and the circle is the symbol of perfection. you're spiraling around. And of course, when you're on that kind of journey, if you knew where it was going to go and what you were going to achieve, why go on it? You already know what you're supposed to get out of it.

[00:54:14]>> If you decide what the goals are, you decide what the outcomes will be. This is sort of like the silliness of contemporary academics who have to write a research proposal. Many students or young people listening will uh recall having been inculturated into this insanity of being made to write a thesis and then being told well you'll have to write a proposal first where you tell us exactly what you're going to say.

[00:54:37]>> Well why thesis if you've already given the outcome what's the >> completely incompatible with the journey.

[00:54:44]>> Exactly. Exactly. Of course uh every age has constraints and we must work with the constraints in which we live and there is space for playfulness even if one has very very small space to move.

[00:54:59]>> So I think that this movement is something that one has to consider interiorly. Where am I going? We were talking about Gert about uh Vilhelmeister.

[00:55:16]Gerta is on a building rise an educational journey. Vilhelmeister is the first build Roman build Roman has become an English word.

[00:55:27]It's been it's a story a novel of education or a novel of sentimental education as it were. But what is this word building that is lurking behind all of these expressions that I think is is somewhere here? And my book, this is perhaps only approximate to the book, uh is a sort of expression of my own building and also a facicious very playful attempt through an unreliable narrator to to show how fun building can be. Um, Boom does not have an exact English cognate. There is no one English word that corresponds exactly to what this means. One could say culture, one could say education.

[00:56:10]The French might say culture personnel, but even that doesn't doesn't capture it. Bong is having been educated on the level of one's heart as a human being.

[00:56:22]It is how all of the books one has read and all the experiences that allow one to interpret them move together. Bilong is what makes you a good glass game player. You're not simply able to memorize things and regurgitate facts. You don't just know a lot of things. You live them. You have them in you like the way you speak a language. Not just something dead like you would learn some ancient language, Sanskrit or something, but to really live and move and breathe in it to have it on your lips. When the modern university, the modern research university was founded, it was not meant to be what it has become. It was founded in Berlin in 1809 by someone named Vilheim Fonbul who transformed who gave Berlin its first university and transformed the university precisely from the cathedral school of the Holy Roman Empire that was a vocational school for the three learned professions of medicine, theology and law into the means of expanding one's horizons. as a human being and I think that if you only have technical knowledge you have a lot of learning but you don't have a lot of education >> build there's a wonderful book that I think anyone interested in philosophy or literature or western culture should read uh by someone named Vanna Jger Jr.

[00:57:55]Jerger was a German classicist and he wrote a book called Pidea about education in ancient Greece in three volumes.

[00:58:04]Bilderong is the modern German sort of romantic concept of what pidea was amongst the Greeks which is precisely education as a form of self-ultivation. Education as exercise, education as providing a way of life, a moral education, a personal education, a spiritual education, not simply the compilation of random facts.

[00:58:41]>> Well, I find that to be a highly inspiring potentially an end note because we've come up on the hour. And what I want to propose is you can have the floor for a final statement as you wish. I will do a little outro afterwards and say goodbye to everybody with a few key points of what we discussed. Um but or I can go to the outro now. What would you prefer Dr. Nini? I think that I've given you plenty of material and I've just given gone on a sort of very nice summary of of of my thought on the the questions of of of love live play. So uh love learn play rather. So I you can sort of go to your your outro now and uh and I'll turn off the microphone.

[00:59:30]>> Well everybody thank you so much for joining this podcast episode with Dr. Matthew Nini the incredible philosopher who in a way is having a little revolution against the way philosophy is being done. He is bringing us back into what he calls night thinking which is the opportunity to explore the mysterious to explore those elements within which we feel like we don't know the answer yet to explore the infinite by extension. He's bringing us back into the possibility of organizing our lives around a deep sense that it's meaningful to become, to cultivate, to seek for a true sense, not to merely instrumentalize who you are for the sake of completing tasks, but to be who you are because it's important. So, thank you very much, Dr. Matthew Nini, and thank you everybody who listened. Ciao.

[01:00:26]>> It is my pleasure.