Dr. John Vervaeke | The Primacy of Beauty | Lecture 1 (Official)

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Beauty used to be considered sacred, an occurrence of truth. [music] What if we replaced this ancient notion of beauty with appearances? Disclose what's real, reveal, help [music] us to realize, and we reduce the beautiful in some pretty reductive ways.

[00:00:22]The aesthetics of the smooth. Everything is smooth. Your cell phones are smooth.

[00:00:28]But the smooth is not challenging. It's all flat. It's empty. Something deeply meaningful is missing.

[00:00:38]This notion about when [music] appearance discloses reality is the ancient notion of beauty. That's what beauty primarily is. We realize a deeper reality.

[00:00:52]I happen to think that if we do not address the meaning [music] crisis, we will not be able to address all the other crises that are facing us.

[00:01:03]Is reality a blank slate? Is it an empty canvas? If the doors of perception were cleansed, then man [music] would see things as they truly are, infinite.

[00:01:18]You have to understand what it would really mean to say that beauty could save the world.

[00:01:30]So, welcome. This is a course entitled the primacy of beauty. It's going to be all about beauty.

[00:01:38]It's deeply influenced and you won't see that for quite a while but it's deeply influenced by an important essay by a friend of mine DC Schindler called the primacy of beauty the centrality of goodness and the ultimacy of truth. I hope someday to do a course on all three. Uh but to today we're working on beauty.

[00:01:58]Now that's a very odd thing to say the primacy of beauty. How is beauty primary?

[00:02:06]And I want to talk about the status of beauty for us. Now today I want to talk about what I call the fall of beauty.

[00:02:15]And I want to make use of some ideas from Buang Chuhan philosopher in a recent book from 2018 called Saving Beauty. Listen to the title. Saving beauty. We're at a risk of losing beauty. That's that's a that's an odd thing to say. Now what Han points out is that beauty used to be considered sacred.

[00:02:40]It used to be considered an occurrence of truth. These are odd things.

[00:02:46]Occurrence of truth. How does the truth occur? How can beauty be sacred?

[00:02:52]Augustine who wrote maybe the first autobiography in the history of the west very famous important thinker philosopher theologian called God beauty ever ancient and ever new God isn't just beautiful God is beauty.

[00:03:12]Now, before you get worried, this isn't going to be like a religious thing I'm doing, but I'm not going to avoid the fact that beauty used to be associated with sacredness. And what does that mean? You take a look, both Dionis, a founding figure for Eastern uh theology and philosophy, and Thomas Aquinas, an important figure for Catholicism and Protestantism, the West in general, argue that beauty is an important name of God. It's one of the primary ways in which God is manifests himself or herself in the world.

[00:03:47]In fact, there's a living tradition from Plato all the way through to Aquinas of treating beauty in this really exalted fashion.

[00:04:01]Now, we've got this ancient association therefore with sacredness and the occurrence of truth. Now, I'm trying to say these things to you, but I hope and it looks like it. These are kind of strange things. We don't think of beauty that way. What is meant by sacredness?

[00:04:18]For many of us, that's not a clear idea anymore.

[00:04:22]The occurrence of truth. What does that mean? Is how does is truth an event?

[00:04:26]That doesn't sound like the way we think of truth. And how could God be beauty?

[00:04:31]What the heck does that mean?

[00:04:33]See, all of these questions sound very strange to modern ears.

[00:04:40]And yet, they used to be the most prominent ways people spoke of and experienced beauty.

[00:04:47]Now, what happened? Well, I think one of the things that happened is modernity is dominated by what Paul Rur famous philosopher called a hermeneutics of suspicion. So, first of all, what's hermeneutics?

[00:05:01]>> [clears throat] >> hermeneutics is a framework, a set of practices for how you interpret, how you make sense of and interpret something.

[00:05:09]And the hermeneutics is suspicion. What does he mean by that? Well, he points to the the really influential work of people like Nichze, Freud, Marx, and others who have taught us to be very suspicious of appearances.

[00:05:26]Appearances are deceptive. They're distractive. They hide or mask a secret agenda. And so we're very suspicious of everything these days. We're very sus.

[00:05:38]Well, what about that? Oh, I don't know.

[00:05:40]And everybody is in that sense very cynical. We're very cynical. This hermeneutics of suspicion.

[00:05:50]It's very pervasive.

[00:05:53]Let's pause here and let's think.

[00:05:57]If I'm going to say that something is an illusion or a delusion, what's actually going on there? What's actually going on? This is a point that's been made repeatedly by philosophers. And the fact that they repeatedly made it means we need to constantly remember it. Plato has made it. Mar Ponti has made it. This is the idea [snorts] that you can only point to something as an illusion by comparing it to something else you treat as a real.

[00:06:29]Real and illusion are comparative terms.

[00:06:32]When I say something is illusurary, I say in comparison to this, it's not real. So the shadow is only the illusion or appearance of a stick. The stick is actually the real thing. The reflection in the water of my face is not really a face. My face is the real thing. Is that making sense?

[00:06:51]Okay.

[00:06:53]So, real is a comparative. It's like tall.

[00:06:58]You can say that's tall. And you should all you should ask, well, in comparison to what?

[00:07:04]Okay. Now, what does that mean then?

[00:07:06]Just if we slow down and we zero in on this, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the accusing of appearances as being deceptive and distractive is actually dependent on another relationship to appearances.

[00:07:26]Not where appearances are distractive or deceptive. That's the hermeneutics of suspicion. But where appearances and re and right appearances disclose what's real. Remember the hermeneutics of suspicion depends on the judgment the interpretation of something else is real. So although appearances can be distractive and be misleading that eliminates a suspicion they can't all be that. That'd be like saying everything is tall. It doesn't make any s everything is tall doesn't make any sense. There has to be what is it in comparison to? There has to be a hermeneutics whereby appearances disclose what is real.

[00:08:11]Okay. Now, what would that mean? Well, notice that this is a different sense of truth.

[00:08:21]See, in a modern way, we think of truth as here's a concept or a claim and it corresponds to reality. And that's just the relationship.

[00:08:33]Uh what's going on here is a perceptual experience of realness being disclosed through how things are appearing to us.

[00:08:44]>> You starting your own college?

[00:08:46]>> Yeah. Well, it's well started. The progressives hope for universal education at something approximating zero cost. That's what we've got. We can [music] bring you the best lectures that you'll be able to get anywhere in terms of their quality of content and also the production values. All the people we're bringing on board are existential philosophers in some real sense. We think that a humanities education should enrich your experience in every [music] direction and be nothing but positive.

[00:09:12]Well, except also difficult and challenging, but that's also positive.

[00:09:16]Yeah, >> we certainly didn't have that when I was a kid.

[00:09:20]Another way of saying this is we realize I want you to remember that word realize because it's a great word means you make sense of but it also to become real. We realize through and I'm using both senses of the word through by means of beyond like the way I'm looking through my glasses.

[00:09:42]We realize through appearances, perceptual experience, something that is real.

[00:09:53]Okay. Now, notice we're already starting to get a little bit about what the moment of truth would be. That's that moment of realization. That's truth as an occurrence.

[00:10:04]And we have that phrase, the moment of truth when it, oh, right. And, oh, now I know what all this means. and what's really going on.

[00:10:15]Now this notion about when perceptual experience appearance discloses reality that is the ancient notion of beauty.

[00:10:28]That's what beauty primarily is. Beauty is when we have a perceptual experience through which we realize how something is real. We realize a deeper reality.

[00:10:41]That's very far from our notion today of what beauty is.

[00:10:47]Okay. So the hermenics of suspicion depends on a hermeneutics of beauty which is bound up with the occurrence of truth bound up with realization bound up with that moment of insight when you go aha right I get it now.

[00:11:06]One reason why beauty has fallen is because we have sort of eviscerated it with the knives of our suspicion. But the problem is and this is kind of an irony because behind the humorics of suspicion is actually a hidden hermeneutics of beauty that we have forgotten to some significant degree.

[00:11:31]So Hans says well what have we replaced it with? What have we replaced it with?

[00:11:35]What have we replaced this ancient notion of beauty with from the framework of harmonic suspicion? What is the surrogate of beauty? How do we see beauty? He talks about what he calls the aesthetic.

[00:11:53]Aesthetics is the study of art which is sometimes the study of beauty.

[00:11:59]He talks about the aesthetics of the smooth.

[00:12:02]We like things that look at this. Look at this lectern. It's so smooth.

[00:12:08]Everything is Look at the floor.

[00:12:09][snorts] It's so smooth. [gasps] Everything is smooth. Your cell phones are smooth. Your watch surfaces are smooth. Everything is smooth and clean.

[00:12:24]You look around, it's all this smooth.

[00:12:26]We want things to go smoothly.

[00:12:30]What a weird thing to say, actually.

[00:12:34]Okay. And what is it about the smooth?

[00:12:38]Well, let's point to some features of it. Well, the smooth is not challenging.

[00:12:43]It's like, yep, I get it, right?

[00:12:48]It's readily available.

[00:12:51]It's easily consumable by me. It's easily usable.

[00:12:58]It's in no way shocking. It doesn't require any insight.

[00:13:01]No, it's just like ah yes, the smooth.

[00:13:05]All right.

[00:13:08]There's no obstacle to our consumption or use now. He immediately connects that to some of the work that he did in an earlier book called The Agony of Aeros 2017 to his discussion of pornography.

[00:13:24]I'm not going to say anything graphic here. I'm just going to talk about pornography.

[00:13:29]And he argues that pornography is the epitome of the ethics of the smooth that is masking and preventing us from having an experience of beauty.

[00:13:42]Because when you're looking at the pornographic object, right, that other this is why we talk we even use the language of objectification.

[00:13:56]that other is completely consumable by us.

[00:14:03]We don't care to know anything more about them. We don't want to have any insight into them.

[00:14:11]We don't care how fake it is.

[00:14:19]The other poses no obstacle.

[00:14:22]There's no resistance whatsoever to our pleasure.

[00:14:27]It's easily consumable pleasure in which we do not care whether or not it is real.

[00:14:36]There's no challenge, no mystery.

[00:14:40]Now, I have to stop here because I've introduced another word we use all the time and we don't use it correctly. I'm going to do that a lot in this course because how we use language really shapes how we think. So, when people hear the word mystery, they think of a mystery novel. Now, here's the thing.

[00:14:56]Mystery novels don't actually have mystery in them.

[00:15:00][snorts] Mystery novels are problems that are difficult to solve. And when you solve the problem, you're done.

[00:15:06]Like, if you were reading a mystery novel and you never found out who did it, it would turn from a pleasure into some kind of hell. But who did it? But who did it? But who did it? Okay, I want to I want you to compare this to another phenomena.

[00:15:25]When I was living with one of my stepsons, he had he had a smaller whiteboard in his bedroom. And you know, because I'm a cognitive scientist and a psychologist and a philosopher, and he was an adolescent, I would write things on his whiteboard to try and be provocative. I thought that was a good way of being a father figure. I don't know. He says it was. We'll see. But I would go in and write things. And here's one of the things I once wrote and it really twisted him. It's like, does time take time to happen?

[00:15:51]What? And when you try and think about what time is, well, time is things moving. But doesn't motion require time?

[00:15:58]Oh, yeah. Notice what happens. And this is an idea of what a what a mystery is?

[00:16:02]Mystery actually means to close your mouth and close your eyes. It means to fall into silence. It doesn't mean to get an answer.

[00:16:10]So Gabriel Marcel in one of his important essays on existential mystery says what happens in a mystery is we have something we think is a problem and we put a frame around it. Now we'll get a lot more into what that framing is but just think about like the way we sort of box things in focus on them what we're what we're concentrating on how we understand it remember when I talked about hermeneutics as a framework of interpretation. So we have a problem and we think we put this oh does time take time to happen and then we realize that the framework is itself problematic we go oh I need a bigger frame and then we go out to there and we go oh wait that's not working and we get this trajectory and it and then we get a sense of oh this isn't going to end this isn't going to end now you want some things in and we'll come back to this and All right. You want some things? So, I'm going to use the word entity because the word thing sounds like an object. Okay. The word entity is very neutral. It's sort of any thing I can think about. Is that is that okay?

[00:17:14]It's a phil philosophical term. It helps us from misunderstanding.

[00:17:18]Okay.

[00:17:20]I'm going to say this and then I'll come back to it. Develop it.

[00:17:24]You want your partner to be a mystery.

[00:17:28]You don't want them to be a problem you solved.

[00:17:31]Think about that. Think about if you said that to them. You know, I got you and I completely understand you and I know what you are through and through.

[00:17:42]How's your relationship going?

[00:17:45]Now, why do you want them to be a mystery? Because you have a sense that reality actually exceeds your grasp of things.

[00:17:57]If you're mature and not a narcissist, and I'm hoping none of you are because if you are, this lecture won't matter to you because it's not making you the center of attention.

[00:18:09]But notice what you get. You get, well, there's something I and I'm going to use that word again. I want to realize this person.

[00:18:16]I want to come to know them more and more. And I want to help them more become more and more real, more help them actualize who and what they are, their identity. I want to participate.

[00:18:24]When you love somebody, you want to participate in help realizing their identity with them and allowing them to do that with you. And you get that bond.

[00:18:33]Yeah.

[00:18:35]And what you get is I'm never going to get I'm straight so I'm just going to use that language or way of talking. I don't mean anything by it. It's just ease easy for me. I'm never going to fully get her because she's real. I want you to remember that there's something We're going to come back to this again and again. There's something inexhaustible about realness, right? Let's go back to the shadow and the stick. You examine the shadow and you get a few things about it and there's not much more you can learn about it there. But the stick, oh my gosh, there's all kinds of facts and more and more things you can understand.

[00:19:12]That's how you know the difference between a dream and reality. I hope you think this is reality. This is if it is a dream, it's a really bizarre and boring dream and you should see your therapist.

[00:19:23]Right.

[00:19:26]The dream world doesn't have that inexhaustibleness to it. The illusion doesn't. Well, the bent stick in the water. Yeah. But if I do some more exploration, I find that the stick, the bent stick disappears. Illusions can disappear. They can cease to be. Reality is inexhaustible. And do you see how mystery points us towards that?

[00:19:49]Okay. So let's develop this in conjunction with another idea.

[00:19:59]So this is an idea from Eric from and I've already laid out it intuitively but I want to make it a little bit more clear because I want to be able to use it throughout. So from made a distinction between two kinds of modes.

[00:20:11]So what's a what's a mode? What's an existential mode? Okay.

[00:20:18]So an existential mode is made up of a relationship between an agent and an arena. This is work that Chris Master Petro and I did making use of Clifford Gear's idea. So right now I'm I'm adopting a particular shape of agency.

[00:20:36]I'm taking on a particular role. Yes, I'm a teacher and there I'm assigning identities to this space. It's a space in which being a teacher makes sense.

[00:20:48]This is an arena and you are students, right? And here's a board and yes, and see how the two identities are bound together. If I try to take up my teaching role with my partner, things are going badly.

[00:21:03]And she will sometimes say that to me.

[00:21:04]She'll say, I'm not one of your students. You you probably made mistakes like that. You realize, oh, right. I'm I'm not I don't I'm not getting this right. So an existential mode is when you are enacting an agent arena relationship.

[00:21:21]Okay. And you have lots of existential modes because they are prime they are ways in which your identity takes place.

[00:21:32]So I'm a teacher.

[00:21:35]I'm a lover in the sense that there's I have a loving partner that I love. I'm a father. I'm a friend. Right. I'm a citizen. I assume you have multiple roles. And part of what yourself is, and we'll talk about this later, is you you're trying to thread through all of those and keep them together and related somehow.

[00:21:55]Okay. Now, Eric from talked about two really crucial existential modes.

[00:22:03]He talked and they're organized around two kinds of needs.

[00:22:10]the having mode which is organized around having and what he called the being mode. I think it would have been better to call it the becoming mode or the developmental mode but I understand what he means. So you need to have things you need to have oxygen. You need to have water. You need to have food. You need to actually be able to really control these things and consume them. There's nothing evil in that because if you don't do it, you're dead. Okay. Now, how do I relate to things in that mode? I relate to them as problems to be solved. They're either things that will give me satisfy my having needs or are obstacles I have to overcome. So, I relate to things in what my Martin Blubber called and notice this is an I an agent arena relationship an I it things are it.

[00:22:59]This is a marker. I categorize it. I know how to solve problems with it and it bel I understand it only in so far as it belongs to a category of other markers and I want to be able to manipulate it and control it.

[00:23:14]But as we've already talked about, you know, this isn't your only mode. Imagine again if I said that to my beloved partner.

[00:23:22]You know why I'm with you? Because you remind me of all the other women I've been with. I can easily put you into that category and allows me to predict and control you and consume you as I need.

[00:23:33]Not good.

[00:23:35]Not good. So there there's another mode we have.

[00:23:40]The being mode is the mode in which you are trying to not have something. You satisfy these needs by becoming something.

[00:23:50]So for example, you have a need to become mature and mature is to face reality.

[00:23:59]Now notice that remember our little diagram and reality is when I'm trying to face reality, I'm ultimately having to confront a mystery.

[00:24:12]It's not a it's not a problem I can fully ever solve or get complete control of. If you think you have complete control of reality such that it's consumable to you, you're very, very immature.

[00:24:27]I'm not in an IT relationship with my partner. I'm in an I thou relationship.

[00:24:32]And I'm in that relationship precisely because it is a way of maturing.

[00:24:39]It is a way of growing up. It is a way of facing a deep mysterious reality in another person.

[00:24:46]Being in love. Compare having sex to being in love. And now we've circled back. Do you see that? What the pornographer is all about? We're having sex. And we are not confronting the mystery of another person.

[00:25:05]When you treat something from the wrong mode, when you're trying to satisfy your being needs, from the having mode, that's modal confusion.

[00:25:20]So, I need to mature. Well, I know what I'll do. I'll buy a car. [snorts] I'll have a car.

[00:25:28]I need to be in love. I know what I'll do. I'll have lots of sex.

[00:25:35]That's modal confusion.

[00:25:38]And you see the pornographer is actually with the aesthetics of the smooth luring us into modal confusion just like advertisers are luring you into modal confusion. If you just buy this shampoo, everybody will love you.

[00:26:01]Okay, now this tells us something right away.

[00:26:04]Just like we have to be in the right mode to properly to be in right relationship to a person or to reality, we will need to be in the right mode, the right relationship in order to appreciate beauty.

[00:26:22]And the aesthetics of the smooth hides that fact from you.

[00:26:28]It's no challenge, no require. There's nothing you need to do. Just open up the mouth of your consumption and eat whatever it is.

[00:26:42]So notice there's there's different orientations.

[00:26:47]There's consumption and now I'm going to use an ancient word contemplation where contemplation means coming into right relationship with things from the being mode.

[00:27:00]Many of you do contemplative practices and you'll know what I'm talking about.

[00:27:06]Okay. Now, let's pick up something else about the smooth.

[00:27:14]The smooth has a really important property that goes with the hermeneutics of suspicion. Another important one.

[00:27:24]When I want to project onto a screen, I need the screen to be smooth. I need it to be empty. I need it to be blank. I need it to be completely hidden behind whatever I'm projecting. It's a bad screen if it doesn't do that.

[00:27:44]Now, in the ancient view, beauty showed that there was something in reality beyond our grasp of it.

[00:27:54]We've mentioned this in fact the Greek word one of the important Greek words again if if you didn't well my hope is my suspicion is I hope that's not a pun my suspicion is right that if you weren't doing this lecture this wouldn't make any sense to you the Greek one of the important Greek words for beauty ancient Greek words was kalos which means to call beauty Beauty is a calling to us as Scari would talk about. It's like beauty greets us almost like a like a person.

[00:28:38]It's an encounter with another, a mysterious other.

[00:28:44]Now compare that to a notion from these important figures within the hermonic suspicion. Nichi, Freud, Markx, they're all deeply influenced by Foyerbach, who you probably haven't heard of. But the idea I'm talking about is the idea of projection.

[00:29:01]You're just projecting. You're just projecting. You're just projecting. Now, notice that only works if you're projecting onto something that is smooth, that is an empty screen, right?

[00:29:17]What's behind and this is ironic because I'm saying there's something behind the hermeneutics of suspicion right what's behind the hermeneutics of suspicion is a model of reality as indeterminate empty shallow like a screen and we project on or it's like a canvas that we paint our experience So why do we like that according to Han?

[00:29:49]Because the thing is if we can project onto it, that means it has no depth.

[00:29:58]And if it has no depth, there aren't any hidden secrets lurking beneath it. It we're completely safe. See, the herminics of suspicion wants to make you see the world is actually something that you can smooth that you can project upon and you don't have to worry about those depths, those hidden things getting you.

[00:30:28]But notice this language. Smooth, empty, shallow.

[00:30:34]Would you like your life to be like that?

[00:30:40]Okay, these are features and we'll talk about this later that people use when they describe their lives as meaningless.

[00:30:49]They use something very similar to smooth. It's all flat. It's all flat.

[00:30:55]It's empty. It's shallow.

[00:30:59]It's like, oh no, something deeply meaningful is missing.

[00:31:05]When we really live from the harmonics of suspicion, we're going to see that there's an alternative model.

[00:31:14]It's all one that we've had some hints about that reality is actually a planitude.

[00:31:21]reality is actually an inexhaustible source of new meaning.

[00:31:27]That could give us some idea about what beauty could be. Beauty could be the shining forth into our experience of that inexhaustibleness.

[00:31:40]Now, let's return back to Han. What's another way in which beauty has fallen?

[00:31:44]We've done a lot on the hermeneutics of suspicion and the aesthetics of the smooth. And what I'm trying to do is make all of this very problematic because I'm trying to open up a space so we can reconsider the ancient model of beauty because that's what DC Schindler is arguing for.

[00:32:02]I want to say David's a friend of mine and his work has been just profoundly and in an ongoing fashion influencing me. I want to try and show you why this is the case. Okay, back to Han though.

[00:32:17]What does pornography also point to? It points to another way in which we have caused beauty to fall.

[00:32:24]This is sort of a Darwinian reductionism.

[00:32:29]Now, I'm a scientist, so I'm a big believer in Darwin. So, I'm not here to make people who want to say the earth is only 6,000 years old, something. I'm not I'm not trying to do that. That's not what I'm talking about. Okay? But Darwin is a scientist and therefore as a scientist, we should be able to criticize his thought as well.

[00:32:44]So this is the an idea and there's lots of books that are around this and a lot of people say this, right? Beauty is just a byproduct of sexual attraction.

[00:32:54]That's all it is. We're talking about beauty. All we mean is we want to have sex with it. That's all we mean by it.

[00:33:00]Now, right away, you know, that can't quite be right cuz a lot of music is beautiful. Um, and you know, a mountain can be beautiful and it's like your child is beautiful and all of this is like, uh, but let's just go ahead. Okay.

[00:33:14]So this is the idea we have genes that determine our behavior or Dawkins talks about memes ideas that sort of are parasites in our mind and right they are deceiving us they are making us attracted to people and Dawkins talks about that as the selfish gene the gene doesn't care about you it's selfish or one of my colleagues from the University of Toronto Keith Stanovich talks about the robots rebellion. Uh the idea that the memes and the genes are making us do stuff that isn't to our our benefit. And we all know I mean I I shouldn't presume. I'm much older than many of you. So I've come to realize I can't trust my sort of automatic sexual attraction radar because all it cares about is genetic matching. It doesn't care about my happiness at all. Right?

[00:34:07]You have to be really careful about that. Right?

[00:34:11]Now, all of that has some interesting things to say to us about sexual attraction, etc., but we're that's not our topic here. Our topic is beauty and the fall of beauty. Right? Now, I want to say, and I've already hinted at this, that there's important cognitive science, and Stanovich is a psychologist and cognitive scientist. There's important cognitive science that actually challenges this reduction of beauty to to mere sexual attraction.

[00:34:37]That's deceptive. You see, the hermeneutics is suspicion still, right?

[00:34:40]It's deceptive. It doesn't care about you. You're just a machine for reproducing your genes or reproducing your memes. Okay. So, this is the psychological phenomena called fluency.

[00:35:02]This has got a lot of research ongoing.

[00:35:05]You just go into Google Scholar and type in the psychology of fluency, you'll get a ton of articles. I'm not going to cite any one person around this. There's just so much work being done. Okay.

[00:35:16]So, what is fluency?

[00:35:18]Fluency is something like the ease of processing. So, if I give you the same text and I give it to you in two different formats, one is black on white and the other is blue on green, you can still read it. Do you understand? But it's a little bit more difficult to read. the exact same text and you read it black and white or you read it blue and green. Do you understand the sort of a basic experiment? And then I ask you to judge the text. You're much more likely to say the text is true and beautiful. Notice those are associated together in people's judgments contrary to the hermeneutics of suspicion. People will say that writing was beautiful and it's probably true. And what about the same text word for word the same blue grain? It was kind of ugly. I don't think it's true.

[00:36:11]What's going on there? Okay, so an important point is this is processbased.

[00:36:19]It's it's called what's called domain general. It's not dependent on the content of what you're doing. It's dependent on how you're doing it. You can get it with reading a text. You can get it with doing, you know, trying to manipulate a spatial puzzle. many all all kinds of tasks you get fluency effects. Do you understand? It's not bound to any particular kind of object, any particular domain. It's reflecting something really fundamental about your cognition. We'll come back to that.

[00:36:51]Okay.

[00:36:53]So, [snorts] it's process-based. It's domain general.

[00:36:57]So judgments of beauty and truth that are being driven by fluency and they are being driven by fluency are not based on any particular object or kind of object.

[00:37:09]Nor are they based on any particular domain of experience.

[00:37:14]Did you get that? It's not based on any particular kind of object.

[00:37:19]It's process based and it's not based on any particular domain of experience.

[00:37:24]It's really general.

[00:37:29]And what does that mean? Beauty can't be a of belonging to a particular kind of object in a particular kind of domain.

[00:37:40]It can't be reducible to properties of sexual objects because then you can't explain the massively replicated finding of fluency effects on judgments of beauty and truth. And I keep reminding you those are woven together for people. Okay, does that make sense as an argument?

[00:38:01]It's like whoa. Okay. Wow. Something else is going on here. Okay, we'll come back to fluency and ask what's going on in fluency in a bit, but we haven't finished what we're doing right now, which is the fall of beauty.

[00:38:20]Okay, the final dimension of the fall is the replacement of beauty which which is called the aesthetic sense. This sort of starts in Kant and it picks up and if you take a course right on aesthetics you you very probably will not talk about beauty in that course. You will talk about the properties of art. What makes something a work of art? We've shifted from talking about beauty to talking about art. Now don't misunderstand me. I think we should talk about art like we should talk about anything that's important to human beings. But notice that shift has also shifted our attention away from beauty.

[00:38:58]Now this notion of art also reverberates back in the in the way it not only makes us ignore beauty it makes us dismissive of it. Let me try and explain that. So a really important book on aesthetics maybe I think Ridley from 1998 was correct to say this is one of the most important influential ideas in aesthetics in the 20th century was calling woods principles of art from 1958.

[00:39:29]And what Collingwood does is he like uh let's take a look at a partic and I want to I'm choosing this very carefully. So I don't know many how many of you have ever seen Gernika by Picasso? It's that famous picture with with the sort of horse and the the light bulb above it, right? And it's above and I think they have it hanging in the UN or something.

[00:39:51]U because it's about the bombing of Gernika in 1937 by the Nazis in in in the Spanish Civil War. Now, what is Picasso trying to get with this? If you look at it, it's not it doesn't have ver similitude. It doesn't look like a photograph of the battle of Gernika, right? That's not what he's trying to get. He's not trying to help you do an I it.

[00:40:13]He wants you to realize this has some there was something absolutely horrifically unique about this event. He wants you to really contemplate it, not just consume it. The work of art is trying to get you to to see how things are in their uniqueness. Collingwood talks about not seeing things categorically, but seeing them expressively. Listen to that language.

[00:40:39]And we talk about how things are expressed in art, right? And notice, oh, by the way, express. What does that word mean?

[00:40:49]To push out. To push out onto the empty screen, onto the blank canvas.

[00:40:59]Express yourself. Okay.

[00:41:02]So the idea is art is trying to shift you into the being mode so you can contemplate something as you would a a a thou an individual. You're trying to get see what's unique about this. This is unlike other moments of war. And that's why Gernika is an astonishing work of art. I would think many people would not call Gika beautiful. It is shocking and horrific and it's but it's a great work of art because it does exactly what Cullingwood is talking about. Do you see that?

[00:41:37]So the unique is shocking.

[00:41:42]It wants us to realize how something is different from all the other members of a category and that this difference matters and we should come into a proper appreciation of it.

[00:41:54]Now when we take a look at the work of Ela Scari which we'll get to we'll see beauty also has something to tell us about you shocking the ancient world talked about beauty is shocking by the way and talks about uniqueness so there's some overlap here but there are other important properties to beauty other than the shocking uniqueness there was a very famous TV series miniseries called the shock of the new about part because what's going on here?

[00:42:30]When you get to the aesthetics of the smooth, we're not we we don't have beauty available to us. So art is going to rely on the shock of the new, the shock of the unique.

[00:42:45]And it can be ugly. It can be horrific.

[00:42:48]Like Garner, the emphasis on shock and uniqueness prioritizes originality. It prioritizes a a a triad of things. The work should be as original as possible because if it's like anything else, oh, it's derivative. It's formulaic, right? It just belongs to the category.

[00:43:09]It can't possibly be a work of art. See, I'm falling into that horrible snobby accent. I don't mean to be. Right.

[00:43:14]Right.

[00:43:16]And connected to that individuality, the artist must be expressing their uniqueness, their individuality. It has to be an act of self expression, something that only they are experiencing in this way.

[00:43:32]And so that means we get an emphasis on confrontational self-expression. A lot of art is designed to shock you and make you right realize that you're confronting the originality and the individuality of the self-expression of the artist and so art becomes obsessed with the history of art.

[00:43:58]How how is this related to art and how is it new and how am I different from Picasso and and etc and etc etc. Now again this isn't a lecture on art but what we have is that all of this move the replacement of beauty by the aesthetic of art emphasizes subjectivity.

[00:44:28]subjectivity my this is my unique personal experience and I it's all I'm all I'm doing right now is an act of self-expression about it right and we get the idea art for art's sake and beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course when reality is smooth empty shallow canvas subjectivity is free to paint on as it wants.

[00:45:01]It's not bound by anything at all. The freedom of self-expression and the world being a blank canvas go hand in hand. So in this beauty either disappears or it's completely disconnected from truth, objectivity in any way and it's also disconnected from the good. Although there's something been going on in art in the last 1015 years that is trying to reorient because they this has been understood because the good is about how we ought to behave.

[00:45:34]What does that have to do with subjective self-expression?

[00:45:40]Okay. Now again I'm not here to get into art.

[00:45:44]I'm here just to point to a phenomena to help explain the fall of beauty. I want to challenge this picture presupposed by this final reduction to beauty. But in order to do that challenge, I'm going to go back to the cognitive science of fluency as I promised.

[00:46:03]Okay.

[00:46:05]So, thankfully I left the term on the board. Fluency, ease of processing.

[00:46:12]Processing what? Well, sort of everything. But that can't be right because you're always processing potentially anything or everything. So, and this is one of this is a problem in psychology. We sometimes confuse naming an effect with explaining how it comes about.

[00:46:28]So, ease of processing.

[00:46:33]Okay. But it has to be domain general.

[00:46:35]There has to be something we're doing that's very domain general that we're finding it we can do very readily. Is that is that making sense? Because remember fluency is domain general and somehow something that we has a domain general application we're processing it in an easy manner right [snorts] it can't just be simple ease for example I can make something really easy for you by merely repeating it to you cat notice you're not going how beautiful.

[00:47:15]Oh, I think that's true. In fact, you're going this is becoming meaningless. The word cat is losing its meaning. Okay, so you see we we got to get a better answer than just ease. Ease of what? Yes, it has to be domain general, but it can't that doesn't mean just anything.

[00:47:30]Okay.

[00:47:32]So, we want to take a look at something that's domain general a general process relevant to our judgments about truth and ultimately beauty because fluency is affecting both of those.

[00:47:45]So, we're not talking about any particular problem, any particular goal we're trying to achieve. We're talking about something really important about you.

[00:47:56]You are a domain general problem solver.

[00:48:02]Now I'm going to I talked a lot about this in a previous course I've done on intelligence, rationality, wisdom and spirituality. And I going to talk about this whole art line of argument a lot more when I do the nature of intelligence. So if you want deeper versions, go there. And I guess that was a shameless plug for more Peterson courses, at least [snorts] mine. So it's a shameless plug for me too, right? So, so what do I mean by that?

[00:48:27]Unlike let's take a calculator.

[00:48:30]Calculator solves certain problems. Yes.

[00:48:32]And in that very limited way, it has a kind of intelligence. It can do it can do arithmetic probably better than you.

[00:48:38]Yeah. That's why you trust it in a way you don't trust yourself. Like when you're doing your bank accounting for your taxes, you don't go calculator if you do it.

[00:48:50]Okay? But you don't ask your calculator to make you lunch.

[00:48:54]Or, hey, do you want to go to the beach and go swimming?

[00:48:58]Hey, do you want to learn about the Spanish Civil War?

[00:49:02]Hey, do you want to participate in a good conversation?

[00:49:05]That's ridiculous. But you can do all of those and more. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains in a wide variety of ways. This is why the quest is on right now within the LLMs, the large language models like chat GPT for what they're calling artificial general intelligence because that's the kind of intelligence you have. You have general intelligence.

[00:49:30]Okay.

[00:49:32]Now, this was actually discovered way back in the 1920s by Spearman.

[00:49:37]He found that how kids did in any one subject was strongly correlated with how they would do in any other subjects in school. Contrary to a lot of popular mythology we have about you know people who are good at sports can't be smart and vice versa.

[00:49:52]Okay.

[00:49:54]And this has been a massively replicated finding, more and more sophistication, more and more revision of the test to weed out culturally specific knowledge to weed out b the effects of bias. So all of these criticisms have been made of measurements of intelligence. So they're good criticisms, but the thing you need to remember is that they have been responded to much better than any other social science predictor.

[00:50:21]This is why measures of G are so predictive, reliably predictive of your health, your relationships, your longevity, etc. Okay.

[00:50:34]First of all, I want to pause and make a note here. When we are talking about intelligence, we're actually now on the doorstep of an important term that's used in the ancient model of beauty.

[00:50:45]This is the word intelligibility.

[00:50:48]How many of you ever heard that word intelligibility? Some of you. So what does intelligibility mean? It means that something how something makes sense to us.

[00:50:58]So if something has intelligibility, I can make sense of it. I can come to understand it. I can gain knowledge of it. If it's unintelligible to me, I can't do that. Does that is that okay?

[00:51:10]And the ancient world draws a lot of deep connections between beauty and intelligibility. So I need you to put a pin in that. We're going to come back to that. Let's go back to general intelligence.

[00:51:21]Okay.

[00:51:23]So, what's going on in general intelligence? Well, it's what general intelligence is what allows you to be a domain general problem solver.

[00:51:34]Now, here's a proposal that I have been arguing for since my thesis in 97 and I published on it in 2012, 2013, 201 blah blah blah. published on it just last year. Keep publishing on it. Got just had a paper come out. Johannes Joerger uh main author of it's just coming out now. So lots of publications on this.

[00:51:54]Other people publish uh publishing on this.

[00:52:00]If I'm going to find something that is domain general to my problem solving, it has to be something a feature that all problems in some important way share.

[00:52:12]Right? Doesn't that make sense? Because if it applies to all problems, it has to pick up on something that all problems share. So, general intelligence has to apply to meta problems.

[00:52:27]Meta means above.

[00:52:30]So, a meta problem is a kind of problem that all problems share.

[00:52:36]So, here's the idea. General intelligence solves the meta problems that you have to solve whenever you're trying to solve any specific problem.

[00:52:46]So what are some candidates for those meta problems? Well, I've argued and many people convergently argue that there are two meta problems.

[00:52:59]one and this is if you want some recent work on this take a look at the work of Michael Leaven he's a biologist cognitive scientist at TUS and he uh has a lot of stuff online I have some recorded dialogues with him if you're interested um and he talks about a cognitive like cone and the idea is this you can we can find a universal scale for talking about how intelligent an organism is by how deeply it can anticipate into the future. This is why, I'm sorry, I'm going to be treading on deeply religious ground here. We regard dogs as more intelligence as cats. And we should, by the way, because we have evidence. I know. I know there's the big debate. But cats are so aloof. Big deal.

[00:53:44]It's easy to be aloof, right? I love cats, by the way. Okay. But you can do this. I also have a dog, Satie. And you know, I can say, "Satie, go get your ball." and she'll go to another room, look around, find under some furniture, and bring the ball back. And what do I say about her? I go, "Oh, you're so smart. Do that with your cat."

[00:54:06]Cat looks at you like, "Are you giving me food? Okay, get lost." Right?

[00:54:13]Okay. So, this is your ability to predict and prepare for the future. This is your ability of anticipation.

[00:54:24]Now we have a huge and powerful framework within cognitive science bridging between psychology and neuroscience and computer science that talks about how intelligence is due to your brain's capacity to anticipate the world. It's called the predictive processing model. Now I'm not going to get technical about that. I get technical in the other courses. The basic idea here is what your brain is constantly trying to do is anticipate the world.

[00:55:00]And what one question you should be asking right away is well anticipate what? So hold that question. We'll come back to it. Okay, hold that question.

[00:55:06]But let's get a what's the proposal about how your brain is doing this?

[00:55:11]Because the proposal even at an intuitive level has very important implications for our discussion of beauty.

[00:55:23]So the idea is actually all the time your brain is trying to anticipate the world.

[00:55:32]So for example, if I'm moving and I start moving at a certain speed, the sensory motor loop, the speed at which I get information in from my perception and I can send signals to my legs and my body is too slow to walk to get at that certain speed. So what actually works?

[00:55:49]where you have your cerebellum which is linked to your cortex and what the cerebellum is doing is doing exactly that which is why you sometimes trip.

[00:55:59]Okay, let's do another example of it. This one's a little bit more creepy for people. Okay, so what color is this?

[00:56:08]White.

[00:56:10]Okay, now your eye can't actually take this all in.

[00:56:16]Your eye is what's called subtending.

[00:56:18]It's taking little tiny samples from this and then it's anticipating what the rest of it is.

[00:56:27]This is kind of strange.

[00:56:29]You're actually, and I'm going to qualify this in an important way, but I'm going to say it now just to be provocative. You're actually imagining it much more than you're seeing it. That doesn't mean it's false because you can have true predictions.

[00:56:44]Does that make sense? That's a kind of a soon as you do that. Whoa, that's interesting. And I'm not going to get into heric suspicion. I'm going to be doing something else. Okay, because some people you oh all of reality is an illusion. I don't know that what that means. That's like saying everything is tall.

[00:57:02]Compared to what? Compared to what?

[00:57:05]Okay. Now, in psychology and cognitive science, we talk about top down versus bottom up processing. Top down means it starts in the mind and works down to affecting perception.

[00:57:21]Was that okay?

[00:57:24]So you can you can see this at work in all kinds of phenomena. Uh a very famous one that predictive processing people like to do is they'll play some some noises to you and you'll hear them will go, I don't know what that is. And then they'll say the sentence, "The shark is in the water." And then you listen to the same thing you hear, the shark is in the water. And it's really creepy. And I've had that done to me multiple times.

[00:57:46]And you eventually you want to say to the people, stop doing that because it really it's it's like whoa. Okay. So this is called top down.

[00:57:55]Does that make sense? Is that okay? Now if you were just top down, you'd be dreaming.

[00:58:01]So there has to be bottom up. There has to be informations coming up that tells you when you've made a mistake.

[00:58:12]Like when I trip, oh, oh, the floor isn't flat. I tripped coming into the room. Oh, there's that little tiny thing there. I didn't see it. Does that make sense? So, you're you've got top down prediction and preparation, top down anticipation, bottom up detection and correction. Is that okay? that's happening moment by moment in everything you're doing. What does this what does this help your brain do? Anticipate the world well and deal with how complex and big the world is even though you are very small.

[00:58:47]Allows you to have a very significant cognitive light comb.

[00:58:55]Now, when you have just the top down, this is pure imagination.

[00:59:03]If you could have just the bottom up, this would be pure perception. But you can't have either one of these pure.

[00:59:10]They're always mixed.

[00:59:12]Even when you're asleep and dreaming, you're getting a little bit of of perception. That's why you can be woken up by a sudden noise. Okay.

[00:59:22]Now, I need to work with you on this word. Remember, I said I'm going to be constantly going back and opening things up because everything is like crammed, reduced, fallen, smoothed, and easily consumable by us so that we will buy more stuff until we die.

[00:59:42]Okay.

[00:59:44]So, I'm going to make use of a distinction by another philosopher, Henry Corbat.

[00:59:52]If you're if you get interested in uh his work, there's a whole bunch of books by Thomas Chief on Corban. Big big colleague of Jung by the way for those of you who are interested in Yung.

[01:00:04]Corban has a huge influence on Young which Young really doesn't admit. Jung has a huge influence on Corban which Corban admits. I think Corban is a sort of a better guy.

[01:00:14]Okay.

[01:00:17]Corban made a distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. The imaginary and the imaginal. So what's the imaginary?

[01:00:27]I want you to im picture in your mind a sailboat. Are you doing it? Does it have its sails up or down?

[01:00:35]And you and it doesn't matter. Now notice what you're doing. You're forming a picture and you're looking at it. Does that make sense? You're forming a picture and you're looking at it. And it's actually taking you away from reality.

[01:00:47]that. Okay. It's it was almost pure this.

[01:00:52]Now, I want you to compare that to a child playing. And now I'm going to ask you to make another note. Play. Play is going to turn out to be important.

[01:01:03]And notice we talk about play with respect to things that we consider beautiful like playing music.

[01:01:10]Going to a play in Taichi, which I practice and teach. You don't do Taichi, you play it. same verb for playing music. Okay, so here's a child about to play and they're going to pretend that they're Superman and they tie a blanket around their neck and they sort of raise their arms and they run around like this. Now, are they looking at an image of Superman?

[01:01:35]No. What they're doing is they're looking through an image of Superman.

[01:01:41]They're adopting the agent arena relationship of Superman. And how would what would Superman notice? And how would Superman respond?

[01:01:51]That's the imaginal. You're not looking at an image. You're looking through it so that you can see things within and without that you weren't seeing before. So you can develop and grow. That's why kids play so they can mature. The imaginal is linked to development and maturation. It is linked to the being mode. Is that all tracking?

[01:02:16]Now I want to show you the imaginal.

[01:02:19]I've already shown you it without.

[01:02:22]That wall is imagininal.

[01:02:25]You're not picturing a wall in your mind, but you're looking through an image.

[01:02:33]Yes. Okay. Now, I want you to do another thing. I want you to multiply in your head uh 22 * 33. Can you do that? And she looked up to her left or to her right and you do okay. So you went to that space, right?

[01:02:48]Okay. Is that space real?

[01:02:52]Is it a physical space? Can I crack open your skull and go? Yeah, there it is.

[01:02:56]Look good. There's the 22 and that's the 33. Is it physical space in any way?

[01:03:01]Okay. Now, is it just a fiction? No.

[01:03:05]Because that space allows you to become aware of your cognition and your thinking. Do you understand? That space inside your head which is the core of your subjectivity and for many people is actually imagininal in nature.

[01:03:23]So the imaginal is within and without.

[01:03:34]So notice that the imaginal is between the top and the bottom and it's between the in and the out.

[01:03:48]It's doing this thing of helping you to imagine so that you can anticipate the world top down, bottom up. But it's also helping you realize within and without. This is the imaginal.

[01:04:06]And notice this isn't and notice what I keep doing. I give you a philosophical idea, but I show how it's grounded in cognitive science.

[01:04:20]Okay, that's the first meta problem.

[01:04:23]So what are we doing? We're addressing this issue of beauty being subjective.

[01:04:28]And in order to do that, I went back to fluency. And in order to get into fluency, I went into it being domain general. We got into general intelligence. And then we're looking at general intelligence in terms of the two meta pro two meta problems. One is anticipation. And we get that. And that gives us this notion of the imaginal.

[01:04:45]And now we're going to take a look at the other meta problem, the one that I've been obsessed with for my whole of my academic career. and I've mentioned at least alluded to.

[01:05:00]So when I as I anticipate more and more into the future, what happens? What happens to my cone?

[01:05:09]Gets bigger and bigger. So I have to pay attention to more and more things. Yes.

[01:05:16]Now let's just start intuitively. How many things could you pay attention to in this room? And you can even be really boring. I'm gonna pay attention to that little patch of white. Now this one. Now that one. I'm gonna make a pattern. This one. That one. This one. No, that one.

[01:05:29]This one. This one. How many things and how many patterns of things could you pay attention to in this room? How many huge?

[01:05:44]And yet you don't.

[01:05:47]And that's just right now. Now you got to do that with the world going into the future.

[01:05:52]How many things can you remember?

[01:05:56]Is your memory full? Don't tell me.

[01:05:58]Don't teach me anything. I'm done. How many things do you think you have in there? How many combinations of things?

[01:06:05]Arvar, Australia, Captain Marvel, and you know what your brain's doing right now? How are they connected?

[01:06:13][snorts] So, all the things in there and all the possible ways you can connect them.

[01:06:24]How many possibilities are there?

[01:06:27]Logical possibilities.

[01:06:30]How many sequences of actions can you perform? Well, I could bend this finger and then this finger or I could bend these two fingers or I could bend all three or I can bend this one. Oh my.

[01:06:41]Are you getting a sense about this?

[01:06:44]This is a problem. This is a problem.

[01:06:52]>> [music]