Thus Spake Vervaekustra

“If you don’t know about Kant, then shut up about Jung!” Noted.

this series has been one of the most enlightening and educating things i have ever encountered. thank you!

I would trade my knowledge of the Earth revolving around the sun IN A HEARTBEAT for the relief of my existential anxiety and fear. The beginning lectures on Plato, Aristotle, Buddhism etc. made sense to me and the world views described were beautiful and rational. Everything from Luther on just doesn't make sense to me and feels tragic.

The best thing about Friday is the next episode of Awakening from the meaning crisis. Your work is much appreciated John :)

"Its difficult to be fair to this". And he stops to re-center. I so love the commitment to doing so. This is intellectual integrity. Straw men are easy to make. Loving one's enemy is most crucial in philosophy.

14:45 mind making sense 17:00 contient model: like matrix multiplication 18:00 bottom up (from inputs), top down (from cognition) 21:00 Kant+Gnostic=Jung. Also, Freud 30:00 "sorry, but romance has to go" 39:50 enter Shopenhauer, with Nihilism. 55:00 Nietzsche: we are self-deceptive, but I have no self-transcendent mechanism to solve this. What an episode! Do not get lost in your mind ♾️❤️

J.V. Squad rolling in to watch the weekly video

Saturday mornings in Australia are "New Vervaeke Episode" day, perfect with Coffee and sunshine

That shot at Peterson. 😆😆 "I don't understand people who like nietzsche but dislike postmodernism "

It‘s so interesting… when you were talking about all the ideas and concepts predating the enlightenment I was listening with both a sense of wonder and deep understanding, as if someone was speaking to the core of my being, to some long forgotten intuitive knowledge in me. Yet, at the same time, my rational mind often felt so foreign to the propositions that were made. Now I’m listening to this and I’m catching myself in my head going „oh, I‘ve had that thought as well“ and „yeah right, sounds logical“, while simultaneously feeling somewhat sick about it all because it just feels so wrong and uninspiring and somehow less real, less true to me. So, it‘s like throughout this lecture series I am actually able to experience the conditioning of my own mind and how it tends to judge and frame things and how it‘s often in diametrical opposition to my intuition, my deeper sense of what this life is all about.

"Rom-coms are the quintecential form of porn we endulge in the decadence of romantisism" im making a shirt with that phrase. So cool.

Does anyone else have the sense that the episode before this one were fairly straightforward and easily digested, and that here it’s as though we are starting to get into the thick bog of the meaning crisis? It’s as though this aspect of it is still too recent for us to have a firm grasp on it, which is perhaps precisely why the crisis persists.

I have the temerity to say “I don’t believe in Jesus Christ. I know Jesus Christ.” I am NOT a Christian. I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. Not a follower, rather I am yoked to him, and the load is light.✨😺💫

I can't believe I get to listen to this for free. Seems too good to be true. Thanks so much John for making Fridays so much better. Dreading when this series ends. Will probably do all 50 again.

They don't just give us words--they gave us Tchaikovsky!

John shines the starlight of wisdom on a darkened culture, awash in despair and bullshit. Highest praise to the efforts of john vervaeke!

Nietzche took away my drive to stop living, I'm very thankful for that, and his axial revolution inspiration came with his profession "ancient philologist". Yes, he is an obnoxious critic on almost everything, but man, his writing and expression prowess are superb and delightful. As John's remark on his "one-sideness" of transcendence, I think the critical point of his failure is lack of a broader view, if he had the abundant information that we have access now, he would have done a different and more complete legacy. Such a brilliant man, such a sad and broken gift to the next generation. Thank you again John, tremendous respect for your effort and work.

This was a fun one, lots to think about here. Your comments regarding the Kantian influence on Jung and Nietzsche’s influence on post-modernism were spot on. It’s good to have someone talking about these subjects that is knowledgeable of the web of connections that is the Western philosophical/theological tradition. Thanks Professor-looking forward to next week’s video!

John Vervaeke, I just want to thank you for doing this. This is the best lecture series I've ever seen. Thanks!

Re-watching this episode after reading Shopenhauer, it answers a lot of questions now but doesn't help to overcome Shopenhauer's hangover. Finally although it's hard to admit but romanticism affection is over. Thanx for this

I always thought wisdom was only in ancient text then John verveake comes and connects all the dots of the towering intellects before him in such an eloquent way. In the future he will be mentioned along side all of these great minds he mentions in this series.

John is really killing it. This is the 3rd lecture I'm watching today (yesterday I watched 2) and I'm gaining a ton of valuable insight. This is a tour de force! A pattern emerges in my mind. The world-man was progressively deadened until man blew up and expressed himself onto a blank canvas. Really eye-opening to see how the canvas came to be.

wow, these episode is so important to understand the meaning crisis and the colapse of meaning in the actual world

These lectures get better and better

These lecture episodes just get better and better! I'm truly astounding at the way you are able to encapsulate history, philosophy, religion, myth, science,psychology etc... in the way you do to make it so relevant and fascinating for me. This is no easy feat because, for me, anyone who can encapsulate as well as you do is a sure sign of someone who is well read across a broad spectrum, someone who is deeply and passionately engaged with the material and can see its inter-relatedness. As much as I like JBP and I have followed his lectures from the days when he was addressing his class students. You sir are on a different level in terms of intellectual understanding and knowledge. And finally, this episode is the best one so far :)

John's stuff is so deep that you have to watch several times to grasp.

Brilliant lecture yet again! I love Romanticism, though one can love a deep pool even though it may drown you.

Thank you John

This is the best explanation of Kant I've heard, by a long way. Thanks.

"Nietzsche is the god father of postmodernism" Jordan Peterson fanboys are seething. This series rules

24:00 The icon for this series should be a hand gripping a red cup. 😂 35:00 Whoa.... JV without glasses! 😮

I am beginning to see history in a different light ..... thank you!

The saying “we are products of history” has a profound, profound meaning for me now.

Thank You!

I changed my whole view on Nietzche. Very enlightening 😮

I'd absolutely love to have this in a book on my bookshelf.

This is excellent!

I wish these were podcasts

At this point of carefully going through and thoroughly enjoying this series I just go ahead and click the thumbs up immediately as the intro music plays.

Such an important lecture. Thank you, John

John dropping the mic so many times in this one 🤟

Welcome back indeed...

Loving this series. Thanks.

Integrates and beautifully interrelates the four pillars of culture: art, science, philosophy and religion. A juggernaut of a lecture. Fucking brilliant. This is what atheists will never understand about how the life of the spirit touches all dimensions of the human condition. Thank you sir.

This was my favourite episode of the series so far, thank you for all your work :)

Thanks I think it's important to remind this . Respect for Megyn.

Dark as fuck. Thank you

Thanks John.

another banger, thanks

This series is fantastic. Thanks for creating it.

Excellent lecture

Thank you for your time and dedication.

Another 'best so far' lecture.

Wonderful again. You have given me a lot to think about every week and now I'm doing videos to express my thoughts. My crop of wisdom that I have been cultivating is starting to bud.

Profound criticism. Thank you.

I have been listening to all the previous episodes in this series and it is the most revealing thing I've ever found, but this episode in particular is absolutely blowing my mind!

Best episode so

3:15. Vervaeke talks about the “I” as in “I am typing”, is this almost infinitely discrete moment. I think Edmund husserl would push back on this and say that the smallest unit of consciousness is temporally extended. See husserl’s “Form of the living present”… i Believe that’s what he called it.

Good ole Friday

I deeply appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 this one was really great i got some poets to look up and thank you for such vast extensive work. Like actually awe inspiring work you’ve done.

Pseudo-religions gave us "spiritual junk food": tasty but not nutritious! ....... I think I need a Gnostic thickshake to wash that down lol

Unbelievably brilliant. Superlatives abound... on Romanticism I almost fell over at your take as "spiritual junkfood"... this pulled the rug from under me... indeed i paused and slept on it... must meditate before episode 24. brilliant brilliant brilliant...

First of these lectures I don’t totally agree with. Romanticism “only gave me words,” and it led to a night of fire life-changing mystical experience that I’ve thought about every day since 2007. Yeah, I can’t “give it” to anyone else, but it changed my life and gave me meaning.

This makes me glad that I studied photography it really takes this lecture and upcycles it in a way I feel I can actually understand and perceive and interpret what you are saying. And ironically it's helping me to focus as the information links up with my brain In a way that I can keep up with your dynamic here. I also drew a new model so thanks

"And so the Romantic return to reality through irrationality gets connected with love, and that's how we get romantic love. And we get the idea of it as a fundamentally irrational force, and you get romanticism." My Dad has said things like that in support of his faith, using "Love" as an analogy to things tjat are real but not rational. And despite being a very rational person, also believing that some things get a pass on being rational, because there are basically two worlds: logic & love. Thank you for giving me a taste of where all this came from.

I've always thought Romanticism is to the Enlightenment as post-modernism is to modernism. We seem to have a never-ending propensity to over-correct. I really wish we'd stop doing that. I'm hopeful but doubtful.

woah, didn't expect to see lachman pop up here lol. great lecture as always.

Dr. Vervaeke, thank you very much for this excellent work. at 42:11 you mentioned that Kant inverts Protestantism. Despite watching the previous and videos several times and the following ones and despite the knowledge I have about Kant's philosophy, I failed to understand how Kant does this inversion. I would appreciate your explanation of this particular point or anyone who would volunteer to doing so on this page. Thank you all!

With the world slowly shrinking and foundations continually crumbling throughout this series so far, I'm having a little disturbing daydream while listening, of John gradually sinking further and further into insanity as the series progresses

Great lecture. I enjoy grappling with the concepts and disagreeing with their titanic progenitors!

If you don't understand people advocating for Nietzsche while criticizing post-modernism then you don't understand Nietzsche. It's true that a lot of ideas of the post modern movement come from Nietzsche but he was incredibly more complex and nuanced, and would have absolutely abhorred present day post-modernists.

51:28 "I don't understand people who advocate for Nietzsche and criticise post-modernism" Jab at Peterson, John? ;)

The equation for Jung - I love this expression, I've studied psychotherapy and Kant + Gnostic would have been profoundly helpful at the time. Thanks as always John

what do you mean, "i don't want to infringe on your time"!!!!! we, or at least i, am hungry for all this, so keep going, please...

Moving away from the „Chaos of Reality“ into Rationality makes us sane human beings, I think

Will to live. Will to power. Can we have a will to agency? That would include the other two, but in a non-selfish and non-cruel way - e.g. me with my friends have more agency than me alone, being a part of society increases my agency, volunatary cooperation does so etc

Thank you...🤣🤣🤣🤣😎

Something to note is that, while you *feel* small/isolated when you do that Cartesian/Eastern drawing inwards, notice that you still *felt* connected before you did that

My interpretation of the neuroscience suggests that rationality (in the form of the prefrotal cortex) is about constraining all aspects of the unconscious. It isn't merely about limiting self deception. One illustration of this is "rationalization". This is clearly the rational part of the brain assisting with self deception. While rationality can be a tool for limiting self deception it is not necessarily so. Furthermore, as illustrated above, rationality is prone to it's own pitfalls of self deception. These are the pitfalls common to all abstraction. Namely, after constructing a useful map it confuses that map for the territory itself. Rationality can then fall under the tyranny of it's own constructions, failing to notice deviations from the scant bits of reality it can access, until the self deception leads to catastrophic failure. In this mode it is the unconscious that brings forth the truth and breaks the self deceiving tyranny of the current conscious rational model. The flood brings both chaos and fertility.

I'm intrigued by the fact that the Luther quote is on-screen but not verbally quoted. I wonder whether this was done because of Google's AI, the infamous KZfaq Algorithm, and the dumbing down of discourse that results from it when things are automatically demonetised or deleted because of "naughty words" or "bad thoughts" with no reference to context.

KZfaq has stopped the ability to download your lectures. Now we seem to be obligated to KZfaq to get your wisdom and knowledge.

I find it ironic that you chose a Romantic painting for your series intro (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Freidrich) when you are so critical of the movement (rightly so).

After watching this video for the second time this is how I see it according to my naive protestant background... Romanticism is an imitation of the Beautiful participatory aspect of true religion, but all she possesses are vain imaginations. She disguises herself as love, but her ultimate ends are the opposite of love: compulsively imposing ones own will on reality as opposed entering into an agapic co-creating relationships with the cosmos. So she is the whore of the earth and her bastard children are the peusdo-relgious ideologies that bathed Europe in blood. Her fruits in the individual lives of those who worship, or act out her tenants, are nihilism and a solipsistic separation from reality. This series, your discussion with Peterson and Pageau, as well as the After Socrates series which I am currently working and practicing through have deeply enriched my spiritual life. I'm just a college drop out in my twenties living in the backwoods on my little homestead. Came across your work last year. Listened to this entire series over the summer while driving my tractor. Now I wake up early each morning and engage in an ecology of practices. Once a week I sit down as if I were attending an online class and slowy go through your After Socrates Series, taking many notes to really digest your material. I do lectico divina with much of what I read. It has opened up Christ's Sermon on the mount to me in many profound ways. My consciousness is expanding, my appreciation for life deepening. I'm still learning and contemplating so much, but thank you for your spiritual midwifery Vervaeke. You may not get immediate feedback from your work because it takes slow busy hicks like me a lot of time to digest and comprehend. Your videos are too deep to market quick sound bites and so it takes a while for your work to gain traction among the masses. It's a meditative wrestle to learn from you which doesn't't make for popular consumption. But for the few who are seeking, your work is making a deep impact. Keep doing what you are doing!

Wow.

I am struggling to decide, what's more remarkable, the contents of these lectures or John's ability to distil dense subject matter?

I had completely forgotten the link between Kant, Romanticism, and Pietism until I watched this.

Dear Dr Vervaeke, Luther's anti-Semitism only comes into play late in his life, after he thought that Jews had tried to poison him multiple times. He might have been a bit paranoid in his later years. Early on, he argued for being nice to Jews! Of course, his hope was that they would convert to Christianity because of that. This failed and also kindled his hatred for them. A third factor is the fact that there was a wave of Jewish proselytizers who actively were taking followers away from Luther. All of this, of course, doesn't exculpate Luther, but it's not just his gnostic undertones.

I don't know if I should pray, impose my pattern of belief on the world or get drunk. Seriously this series has really captured my interest. The last series that did that was Game of Thrones. I truly hope this ends better than that did.

John - these lectures are amazing but are starting to make my anxiety grow. The earlier ones made me beyond happy and they seemed right to me. Then these more modern men ruined it all. I’m hopeful the series has some positivity going forward. If not - I’ll have to go back to Jesus, Buddha and the earlier sages for the way i operate in the world.

Hey John! I'd really like to dig in the Napoleon/Hitler theme you mentioned. Could you please let me know if you remember which is the podcast you mentioned? Thanks a lot!

I have a feeling this will all reduce to "chop wood, carry water" in some manner for me. Still worth thinking about.

Schopenhauer's "will to live" sounds very similar to many contemporary interpretations of "suffering" in Buddhism.

Best 56 minutes in all of Time! But....BOOKS being suggested...See The World According To Amazon, CBC doc. Evil in our midst??? Where, how to buy books???

Books in the Video: 22:26 Gary Lachman - Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

These are not third-world problems. This might be the base for the whole thing we call life. I hope you find your magical part of the world in the midst of the materialistic culture. Like Weeknd sang, You don't need to be afraid, we can take it step by step ♾️❤️

Amazing points on Romanticism's over use of imagination and lack of esoteric practice. However, this just makes it like every other exoteric religion that ends up stalling out on dogma. Romanticism seems to have a lot going for it if you introduce those practices.

Need slides. :) A glossary would be nice. How about a map of these connections you draw between people and events? What is this podcast you mention? Need a link please...

🙏