can't you can't base, you can't found an ethics and also a political worldview on these individualistic teachings, in my opinion,

but the interesting thing is, I was talking with a friend about this and many and, you have Kant and the, how is it in English, the stepping out of the self-imposed immaturity, right? That highlighted enlightenment. And Nietzsche's Superman is in many ways a continuation of that thinking. So you have to step out of your own slave morality, basically, and to become a fully grown, fully mature individual to wrestle with the forces of nature and the world. But again, let's not talk so much about Nietzsche, I wanted to ask you. So in light of what we talked about, and this is like a double-sided question. So when you look, and I think in the beginning of the talk, you kind of alluded to this. So there's, at least from my experiences, there's always something that we go back to, you know, something that's often primordial interest, growing up, right? Something that we're drawn to. And it's like, it's very hard to describe why it is a specific topic. You know, you know me a little bit, you know, I'm, I'm very much interested in phone, for example, in will and and all these kinds of things. Yes, yes,

yes. I know your books. Right.

Okay, so, and I don't know where that comes from. I don't know. It's just it just is right. Is it a revolt against it

is it a revolt against the is this a revoltit-Bourgeois environment where you grew up in, in Northern Germany?

No, it's like, I think, I would say, I would be more, I would be more metaphysical about it and say everybody has a diamond, everybody has something that draws him from the future. Right. And so it's like a theme that is infinitely interesting. There's always something to explore. We're drawn towards it, right? And I would presume if you read biographies, if you read a little bit about philosophy, you know, everybody, every philosopher has their shtick, basically, basically their thing. So the question, you know, in terms of, you know, our, our your project, I wanted to say, our your project, I want to say our because I published the German. So but you know, in terms of your book, like what, what is the driving impetus for you? Like what in your in your life? So what are you always coming back to philosophy wise? You know, what are you always, what do you like to explore? What is it that, you know, makes you wake up in the morning and want to explore that topic more? And in terms of the book, what was the, in this context, what was the biggest kind of insight that you had working on the book? Because also I know it's like a book is always, if you start out with a book, it's never ready. Right. So you start with it and you unfold it. And then you find something for yourself. So, you

know, as I told you before in the basic idea was already there in 2000, back in 2004. And it hasn't changed. You know, for me, for me, I when I grew up in the, and become aware of politics, for example, in the early 70s, mid 70s, I came to know, you know, the Club of Rome report, Global 2000 report, the writings of a Bavarian eco-philosopher called Karl Ameri. You may know him. And this opened my eyes. You know, I was aware at the age of 14 or 15, I was aware that this kind of civilization and economy will destroy itself if it continues like that. This was one key experience for me. And the second one was when I studied philosophy, I studied analytic philosophy, that is the modern, you know, logical analysis of language, and so on, very strict and very, very careful and very intellectually demanding and ambitious. And they, most of the analytic philosophers spend an enormous amount of energy to, to, how should I say, to, to deny any, any existence anything divine, to even to the existence of a mind, of a human mind, which does something that is not determined by the brain, and the neurons and so on. So this is so brute materialism, and that was also a key, key experience of mine. I want this intellectual ambition and and standards, but I don't want this, this, this foolish materialism, you know, we are we won't we won't be satisfied until we have showed that the human mind is a program inside a brain. You know, cognitive science, a program played out inside a brain. So this was, you know, the ecological predicament, and this materialist foolishness. These were things where I thought as a philosopher, I have to try and put something against this, you know, to make sense of the world, more sense of the world, you know, and of our time, and of epoch. And, you know, the problem, I also had a problem with postmodernist, you know, ecological, esoterical scenes and milieus, where I grew up, I grew up in this milieus with my brothers And this was very, you know, intellectually, intellectually, this was very, very weak, very weak, even, you know, they were relativists, but they didn't know shit about Foucault or Derrida or Deleuze, and they didn't care. didn't even care. They gave a shit about any about any justification of their beliefs. And I can't stand that, you know, you can you can you can believe in everything in anything you want, but you have to try at least to try and put it in a context in my view. And that's also something which which bothered me and which inspired me to do something different, because I wanted a worldview that united ecological concern and intellectual rigor. of family, you know, of family and of home. I'm a Bavarian, you know, I'm very attached to my, to my, to my Heimat, you know, to my homeland, without nationalism in the, in the Nazi sense. But this for me is our roots, and we need these roots. So I saw all these pieces, and each of them was, pushed to an extreme. And I wanted to put them in the right place. I tried to put them in the right place and find some formula where any of them finds its place, you know, like the... also Ken Wilder, you know, he tries to put everything in its right place and give it place, but also show its limits. You know, and that's the ambition. And in my first book, a German book, even before we did this book together, I called this, you know, the overcoming Tism, you know, the, the, terms of God view, of the view of God, of the divine, overcoming the transcendent Lord, but also overcoming this esoterical feeling religion, which is absolutely, you know, formless and arbitrary. And I can't stand that. If you believe in the account, you can say, yes, you know, the Virgin Mary is a goddess and there's also Krishna. But these are two completely different, you know, this eclectic system. I can't stand that. I'm feeling like living in Krishna and Mary and everything else. And the shamans of the, you know but this you have also to pay the cost, you know. I accept the cost that this will have. And you know the ecological and this post-modernist people are not ready to pay this price. They don't bother. They give a shit, you know, it's like a supermarket of multi-colored spiritualities and they choose whatever they feel like. Another day they feel like plucking something different. I don't like that. I'm a philosophical thinker. I like to have consistency and a coherence. Right, but like- In the milieu I came from, there was nothing like that in the early, and that was a key experience. Right,

okay, but that doesn't really, I mean, you're alluding to your first book in German, it's called, The Gansärteigagod. I think in English it would be something like the holistic God, maybe, I don't know. And, I mean, it seems to kind of wrestle with similar issues, you know, in a, it's not an entirely different theme. And what I mean is you could, you know, tentatively call it like an integral kind of intention to bring things together, but it doesn't really answer the question. So what is it exactly that fascinates you with the unity of both and many? What is that? Yes

it's what's what you know the normally we think we think in terms of either or and I went for this too for many years because I think either ultimate reality is oneness, formless, structureless oneness and even not one, because one is a category two, or it is plurality. And some, someday I have this intuition. Why is it? Why is this a alternative? Why isn't this maybe a complementarity, you know, a mutual dependency. Right. That's the idea. And this basic idea hasn't changed even during making this book. Because with both one and many and we had it in German under the name of your field in design and build. Even in this book, I have not changed this basic intuition. What I had was in 2013, I think, a Facebook friend of mine, Timo Sisondas, the British podcaster in the, I think it came from the Spiral Dynamics website, if you have a Facebook site, if you remember, you know, Dov Lapani's site. And one day I wrote something about this complementarity of the one and the many, and of the encompassing and the multitude, as I called it. he said, wait a minute, there's someone like called John Herron, a transpersonal thinker who has this idea too. And I was struck because I had never heard from my knowledge, this approach didn't exist before. And that is really something because in the history philosophy almost anything exists. Is it very difficult to find something that is novel and really deep? That's difficult because there's Spinoza and the neo-clatornism and you know there's always this stoicism. And there is, example, Cusanos, Nicolas of Cusa, and on Sleitnitz, many of giants, and it will be difficult to find something really novel. But from my knowledge, the idea of a complementarity of the whole and its parts was new,, you know, this polarity is so heterogenic, you know, it's not normally you suppose that a polarity is balance of something opposed but similar, you know, North Pole and South Pole. But here we have the polarity between the most different things, you know, the wholeness of the whole cosmos, and then any tiny ant and you know, cell and grain of grain of sand. So, this was the idea and John Herron seemed to have had it too and I bought his book. He's a psychological, you know, psychologist.

You have to hold it higher, so yes, okay. Feeling and

personhood. Yes. And really, he was there, he was, you know, he was exposing a theory of personhood, and on parissons, you know, just in passing, he was developing a theory of what he called the one-many. That is this complementarity of the wholeness and its parts. Exactly the same thing I had come up with in the early 2000s, but he had written this book in 1992, I think. So it was earlier. And for a moment, I was, I was troubled that I might have done the exact same thing that when he, and this would have been bad for me, but it turned out that that there was there were differences to in the approach. this was really a key experience when I came to think, well, maybe this idea of mine is not so foolish after all. Right.

I mean, the interesting thing is always, you know, I was just reading up on Lacan and so the idea of, you know, the topology of ideas and that you can't have an idea or a term like as an island independent of everything else. And that if you have, let's say a discussion about the freedom of will and you say, or there's no freedom of will and say everything is determinism. Determinism makes only sense in context of indeterminism. Right? It's like it does. It just derives, derives.

And vice versa. Yeah,

yeah, exactly. Because it's a landscape. You know, you can't have hills without valleys. It's like, so, and so these kind of things, there's an indeterminate independence between the things and and so you know I very much like this. And you know the book I wanted to express this because that is a very beautiful book, I think, while they published it, no, like the American publisher. No, your book. My book. Yeah. Whippenstock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It looks gorgeous. It's great. You know, hold it up again. You have to hold it up. Hold it a little bit higher. So yeah, there you go. It's great one. It's a hard cover. But what again, let me ask you. So even if the core idea didn't change, what was there, you know, let me what was the biggest additional insight you had while working on the board.

from some of the contributors, I learned something. For example, I learned something from Lehman Pascal. Because Lehman Pascal has a theory called the metaphysics of adjacency. And one could call it also a metaphysics of approximation, you know, it's always just nearly, you know, just nearby and nearly but not never ever completely bit identical. Everything is different, but everything is related also, right? Same difference. And, you know, he has a different word you've got view God view, view of God than I, in that he, for him, the divine also has, can only be approximative. It can never be complete, completed. in some sense, the divine has to be completed because it can be different at the beginning of times than billions of years later, because then you have several divines. One that is more less evolved and the other is more evolved, so you don't have the unity. In some sense, I think that the divine or God has always to be the same, you know, at the very beginning of the universe and at the end, whatever that may be. So here I diverge from Lehman, but I also acknowledge that, you know, there has to be some, there has to be, how should I say, some form of necessary, you know, never completedness of anything finite in the in the cosmos. And yes, he gave something to me and also Bruce Alderman. Bruce Alderman, I have incorporated a paper of Bruce Alderman. And he's writing is writing much about the about the is not his idea, I think it's a idea of thinkers work of critical realism or no. I don't I don't know exactly, but there's the idea that there is a unity encompassing encompassing everything, but also any individual also withdraws withdraws to this unity to a certain extent, you know, so to speak, even God, you have even some an extent of liberty, even against God, you know, even against because it's like, say, the the meshes inside a fabric, you know, these are the meshes as a whole, you know? It gives the fabric its elasticity, but the whole is not the fabric completely assessed. Some degrees of freedom, individuality, and in this sense, you could say that an individual, is a person is independent a certain extent even from God and that's what I what I wanted to have because I I don't want to exclude any kind of reductionism even ultimate you know like for example Maester Eckhart also says that if I don't exist, Jesus Christ doesn't exist either, you know? And that's what was heretic in the Middle Ages, in the Dark Ages, but this is a very deep thought. Now back in 1200 BC, or AD, and that's the, here I learned something from every each of the of the contributors. But I think, you know, in in in metaphysics, it's not enough to have a basic idea you have also to implement it to apply it to physics, natural philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, sociology, psychology, philosophy of mind.