despite zero evidentiary support. — Agent Smith

You should look at that again. I mean, take a methodical approach to this. You find that most arguments against the existence of God are made of straw. The substantive defense of God requires something other that a naïve description of what God is. Assuming God is an old man in a cloud or an infantile fantasy makes it easy to dismiss. But a philosophical approach is much sturdier that this.

Why should that be? Why care what the non-ration nature of the world includes, if it must still be met with our particular, human, method of understanding it? Even if we can say we find the substance, or, that there is substance found, by its affectivity on us, it remains a condition of human nature to determine both what it is, and how it relates to other substances.

That non-rational nature is indispensable is given, but it isn’t all there is. — Mww

Reason is empty. Necessary for dividing the world up into things and their properties, but without intuitions, empty, as Kant said. Add sensory intuitions and it is still empty. Interesting to imagine a world without value. No gratifications, but a landscape of variegations. One could still make logical propositions, true and false, and conversations could be paragraphs and pages long. But no caring, no interest, no experience of something being "good" or "bad". I imagine AI could be like this. Beneath the skin, I think cognitive scientists are closet Kantians, looking for a way to produce rational "functions" and thereby duplicating human intelligence.

But human intelligence isn't like this at all. Dewey had it right: our experiences are all "consummatory", that is, inherently aesthetic as well as pragmatic/rational.

Anyway, if one is looking for the essence of being human, it is not reason that drives our affairs. It is meaning-in-affectivity (which you mention above). Reason makes us more than "blooming and buzzing' infants, true. But affectivity is what is at stake, and the real question is Wittgenstein's: is there any value in the value of the world? It is a metaethical problem. Is what is good, Good?

Thought so

Of course you don't because you're reading an aside out of context which I made in reply to another aside made in reply to earlier comments in the context of me addressing "Pascal's Wager" ↪Agent Smith. It helps to pay attention, Astro, in order to avoid making irrelevant bird-droppings. Btw, my reply to the OP and "philosophical analysis" linked therein is here ↪180 Proof — 180 Proof

It's a lovely rationalization, common amount those who don't know how to respond to an idea they never thought of. What better way to deflect than heap the shortcoming with all that is outside what is clearly placed before one. You are faced with a question, if I have to spell it out for you: on the matter of God and religion, have you not gone astray in reducing the argument to a stalled childhood fantasy?

Look and note that, and you there, calling foul. No mention was made at all to previous posting. All that was taken issue with was the idea you put into play. So play it, if you can.

which reduces to.....no science is ever done without first being thought. — Mww

That is the essence of it. Thought is presupposed in everything "natural". This plays out extensively in phenomenology. But the real issue with this is with its rationalism, for 'thought' itself is also a particle of language that has the synthetic function of gathering particulars under a general. It is by abstraction from what is given that we arrive at our conceptualized world and all that is in it. But the whole from which reason and its categories is derived is a generative mystery (see, if you have interest, Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation where Fink takes Kant to a deeper level of analysis; see his "enworlding"), however, we have to (as Kant does, of course) extrapolate from what is before us to what has to be the case in order for this "representation" to be what it is, and reason is just one part of this, a formal part, empty. Far, far more interesting and important is the non rational nature what is in the world. The extraordinary affectivity is where we find the substance of our existence.

Kant took the formal logical nature of our judgments and played them out all the way to their impossible "beginnings" (logical beginnings, that is, impossible because beyond our judcgments are not able to apprehend, nor even conceive the possibility of their own genesis)-- but what happens when we do this with the other dimension of meaning?: The aesthetic, affective, the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, the passions and their depths, and so on?

Sorry, I don't see the "psychoanalytic" relevance to my post of your (non-philosophical) "projection". — 180 Proof

I don't see the talk about unsublimated early childhood fairytales having anything to do with a philosophical analysis of religion and God. There may be some truth in it, but truth lies everywhere. If you think religion boils down to just as you put it, then you haven't really encountered the core meaning of religion.

Moreso, I think: religion seems to me more like early childhood (nursery, fairytales, kindergarden) and science like late adolescence (sex, cars, junior college) – the latter never completely outgrows the developmental vestiges (defects, biases) of the former. — 180 Proof

But this is all just psychoanalytic that doesn't even qualify as philosophy. Fails to look at what underlies all of this. Prior to being a fantasy of childhood, there is the analysis of what is there is out of which fantasies are fashioned.

It's just that God isn't a part of the known universe; neither is God something concrete in our cosmos, and nor do any abstractions thereof apply to him. Put simply, there's nothing in our universe, physical/mental, that we can use as a starting point in grasping what God is. Re: apophatic theology (via negativa). — Agent Smith

The rub in this lies in philosophy's need to, possess the world, so to speak. The essence of apophatic thinking lies here: "God" (if we have to think like this) is an actuality that cannot be "said"; but many things are actualities, like this sore ankle or this amazing work by Brahms. So if we want to understand the ineffability of God, we should first look (as we should have done in the beginning) at the ineffability of perfectly accessible actualities. Here, philosophy looks for the Real to step forward AS a concept (just as with God) and it does not do this. A pen is a pen, but the reality of the pen doesn't work like this.

this is the beginning of the philosophical "apophatic" work, for it is the apophatic approach to give analysis to something and abstract from what is there, dismiss all that is NOT what you are looking for, and discover what is remaining.

This is phenomenology.

There seems to be significant difference and disagreement amongst the positions held by phenomenologists - Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty. I understand Merleau-Ponty rejects Husserl's transcendental reduction and intentionality. I wonder how anyone can tell which reading is faithful and who has the preferred approach? If you say that as a mere reader you can discern each position as intended and from this determine which approach is more helpful, then I must assume your mind is as penetrating and original as the author's. — Tom Storm

Yes, there is disagreement. I am no pro, but I have read these and I will say this: Husserl can be very detailed, but also very direct. But when he is direct, it still takes some getting use to, and this is something of an understatement. What I mean is that in order to understand his epoche, you have to see it as a method, a very different way to actually "observe" the world, for it is not a matter of taking up things with their purposes and their familiar meanings "ready to hand" if you will; and it is certainly not the kind of thinking an empirical scientist does. Not at all, and this is hard for most people to understand. It is not a theory in the usual sense. It has an altogether different subject matter, and that is perception itself. Before a scientist sits down at her microscope, she has before here, prior to any application of all that science's paradigms provide, the perceptual field itself, which is complicated, because it is not just Kant's sensual intuitions. It is inherently eidetic as well (as Kant said long ago" intuitions without concepts are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty). Objects in the world are not objects at all until you understand that they are "predicatively structured". this means that the perceptual field that lays before you has an eidetic intuitive presence as well, and this is to be taken as an intuitive presence.

Husserl thought that when one achieves this phenomenological reduction, suspending all that is assumed and functional in normal affairs, and having before one only a "residuum" of the apperceptive foundation, one actually apprehends the transcendental ground of all experience. Let him tell it:

For the sake of further clarification, however, it should be added that we must distinguish "straightforwardly" executed grasping perceiving, remembering, predicating, valuing,
purposing, etc., from the reflections by means of which alone, as grasping acts belonging to a new level, the straightforward acts become accessible to us. Perceiving straightforwardly, we grasp,
for example, the house and not the perceiving. Only in reflection do we " direct" ourselves to the
perceiving itself and to its perceptual directedness to the house.

Heidegger would call what Husserl is talking about "presence at hand": When you pull away from the familiar use of things and just look at them and describe them. I read John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics and he says Heidegger thought Husserl believed in "walking on water" and this is a very big point: Husserl thought one could withdraw from the world's familiarity and behold the actual structures of the presence of the world (what Derrida will later call the metaphysics of presence). A very strong position to take. One might say close to a God's eye view, no? But there is something, frankly, truly spooky about this. I read in a letter from Husserl to I think it was Rudolf Otto, he wrote how his students were becoming Christian converts in their studies of phenomenology.

Anthony Steinbach wrote "Phenomenology and Mysticism" where he tries to defend radical spiritual interpretation of the epoche. These days, there is in the French post Husserlians like Michel Henry (The Four Principles of Phenomenology), Jean Luc Nancy Marion and others; prior to these there was ewmanuel Levinas, Husserl's student, I believe.

Anyway, you can tell where my tendencies lie--with Husserl. Heidegger was for me a profound reading. Nothing to equal, really, reading Being and Time. Changed the way I think about everything at the basic level. But Husserl made him possible and I do lean toward his radical what I call "revelatory" view on this. this pulling away from everydayness into a no man's land creates an unbridgeable chasm between the world and something Other.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Mysticism I am familiar with but I have no idea what the rest of what you say means but will read it again later and see if I can unravel it. I am not a philosopher and the idea of infinity has never captured my attention. — Tom Storm

An addendum: There is today a strain of philosophy that think's Husserl opened up an extraordinary kind of thinking that is not simply theoretical, but revelatory (speaking of noumenal presence within imminence). From Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, where he gives some light to his "phenomenological reduction" (epoche) :

But perhaps, with the Cartesian discovery of the transcendental ego, a new idea of the grounding of knowledge also becomes disclosed: The idea of it as a transcendental grounding. And indeed, instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying a transcendent subjectivity, we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenornenological epoch lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.

What a tantalising response. Can you say more about experience itself being noumenal? — Tom Storm

That would be mysticism, no? Meister Eckhart wrote, help me God to be rid of God. Something in the former obstructed by the latter. What would that be?

But in the "contradiction" between finitude and infinity, one looks for the ground where the finite simply ends, and off everything goes to infinity. Given the finite, the limited, the well structured and familiar, I see no "place" where this can stand apart from infinity. Infinity does not have its termination anywhere, but rather "runs through" all that is. If infinity is taken as a mere extension of the familiar, as in a sequence of negative time moments that has no end or a spatial extension of "further ons" with no end (both Kant denies in any way describes noumena, of course) then all we have is a concept of infinity that is, if you will, finitized, made finite. Pointless to even bother taking seriously if this is the best one can do, and Kant thought this the case. Clearly not what Eckhart had in mind with God. With him there is something entirely Other. And this Other is not the vacuous noumena of Kant.

I think the thinking on this leads to a focus on the nature of finitude. What is it that makes a thing separate from its eternity?

I understand the majority of what you state here from the individual meanings of the words you use and the context within which you use them but I am not so interested in this type of analysis. It is a very valid analysis I'm sure and certainly belongs on this forum, more than my approach does but I would refer you to members like Garrett Travers or fooloso4 to name but a few, for better feedback on the points you raise, than any that I can offer you. — universeness

Impressive. An honest answer. At any rate, if some time in the future you want to look analytically at nihilism, check out Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. Perhaps Husserl's Ideas I. they don't talk about ethical nihilism, but they do give al discussion about foundations.

There is nothing in the empty void except that which we bring with us.
We have nothing to fear but fear itself. etc, etc.
All the horrible experiences the human race has memorialised since our civilisations began have surely screamed at us their main message:
THERE ARE NO GODS TO HELP YOU! HELP YOURSELVES OR PERISH!
We must accept this and build a fair, global civilisation with economic equality for all or perish as bad stewards of Earth.
Another species will emerge in time on Earth, if we cannot correct the historical
errors, which have led to our currently dangerous predicament. — universeness

But this is putting it all in a dismissive narrative about how all is lost and it is just up to us, and so forth. \

The matter gets interesting only when we examine what is there, in the ethical nihilism as a rejection of something. What is rejected, exactly? It is that there is an ethical foundation that lies in the deepest analysis of ethicality itself. What does this come to? One has to look at a given ethical problem, the anatomy of an ethical problem qua problem. This goes to the concrete circumstances of our prohibitions against causing others suffering through the many ways this can be achieved. At root, it is the pain itself, and the joy and pleasure: these rise to the surface of the discussion, for these are these existential foundations of ethics.
The question then is, what is pain? What is pleasure? What is falling in love? Being tortured?

A serious analysis of religion BEGINS here.

Man is an end in himself. Consciousness is self-producing and self-informing. This is what Hume didn't understand in his "Problem of Induction," or so called. The concept of 'circular argumentatin' can be applied to the human mind, no more than what it can be applied to the earth. Nor are humans an argument. We are conscious. The human brain developed and emerged out of the crucible of 3.5 bill years of evolution to provide us with the capacities you are using to read this now. If that is a reduction to you, as opposed to some mind-body mysticism you may be working with, then I don't know what can help you understand. There is NOTHING more complex or advanced in all the known universe than the human brain, and the consciousness it produces. — Garrett Travers

Massively, and I suspect willfully, misses the point. You have to think better about this: explain how it is that your material reduction of a person to brain activity escapes as a reduction itself, the same reduction? Observe the computer that sits before you: What are you experiencing, neuronal activity? How is neuronal activity experience as a computer? How does, a "computer" get inside this matrix of activity and make you aware of it? What is there in this relation you have with something that is out there beyond "you" that makes for the necessary EPISTEMIC connection? How does causal account in this relation translate into an epistemic account?
My guess is that you don't even know these issues exist. Rather typical.

My brain - yours as well - is designed to retrieve data corresponding to reality, with it to build coherent neworks of data that inform rudimentary behaviors and thoughts, then when enough data has been gathered, use those networks of data to formulate concepts that inform future actions and behaviors as a metter of executive function, and using that data we formulate values which inform all data networks gatherd in a feedback loop of information exchange. The human is the definition of explanatory matrix, and the only one we know to ever exist. Ontology, as far as my interests go on the subject, and maybe I'll do some writings tonight, is self-explanatory in all things, one merely needs to know what its functions are. Properties of actions, properties of function, in the case of humans, thoughts, and the relation between them contained therein. — Garrett Travers

By all means do some writings, but you will have to write about how this "the only one we ever know to exist" sits with phenomenological thinking. You likely think science is foundational, but this is because you have never read any continental philosophy.

I'm going to forgive this kind of statement, as a starter. If it happens anymore I'm going to inundate you with the content of my extensive philosophical training, that is still on-going in professional academia, as well as private, everyday pursuit. As far as suffering qua suffering, you're going to have to be specific about the point of exploration you'd have me analyze, as you could be meaning several things. Because, as it currently stands, we know suffering to be a function of the brain used to reinforce certain types of thoughts, granted it's not entirely clear why certain suffering functions are distributed as they are, but neuroscience is still young. As far as it not being a fact, such a thing is going to have to be qualified. I would take a look at this and get back to me on that fact business: — Garrett Travers

A function of the brain? True. But to call it this is to give interpretation that is outside of the interpretative context of pain as such, as it stands before waking experience. We live in a world of possibilities, and among these events as brain functions is just one.

Look no further for a neuroscientific account for this. Not that this has no value for, say the treatment of schizophrenia or other disorders, but it has limited philosophical use. this is why Rorty, e.g., straddled the fence, putting Heidegger among the three greatest philosophers of the past century. Rorty was something of a pariah in analytic philosophy, but this was because he knew the problems that were being ignored. He once succinctly put it: " No one can explain how anything "out there" gets "in here." He knew Heidegger was right. Scienctific account need to be seen AS account in unison or contradiction with others, but in essence a "regionalized" thinking that has its own ontic place and relevance.

Look, don't inundate me with anything. I don't have the time. But make your point. And spare me the threat of your awesomeness. But thank you for that all the same. It did give me occasion to smile.

Well not being a philosopher and lacking in any qualifications in the field, I am quite limited in the philosophical terminology that I can call upon.
I would say, from the evidence of observing human behavior in my own lifetime and from human behavior recorded in the books I have read etc. My interpretation of such evidence suggests to me that the 'existential foundation' I refer to is human fear of that which they do not understand and therefore conceive as a potential threat. A natural reaction to such fear in the long term is to try to learn more about the phenomenon but meantime seek protection from potential harm by engaging in tribal or/and biological support and psychologically attempting to establish further support from imagined benevolent supernatural forces. I think that's what humans do and I think there is a great deal of evidence for it, both current and historical. — universeness

Yes, and this is why there are so many of those ancient narratives: fear and hope. But take any narrative at all and you find it follows the rules of emplotment and development. There has to be dramatic content, jst as in life. A muthos is the memesis of a praxis (Aristotle). All eyes are on the actual human condition, therefore, the source of narrative content. One then asks, what is there in this one has to be afraid of, and hope for? Now we are talking philosophy.
What do you think it is?

Great Omniscient Diety. I just made that up btw, so please no one respond with "that's not what God stands for!" :naughty: — universeness

But this has no analysis. Ask yourself, what is the existential foundation for these stories, that in the world that gives rise to them at all.

A person is most certainly a brain. You do realize that all functions you exhibit, including those which are subconscious, are produced by the brain? — Garrett Travers

Keep in mind that it is a brain that manufactures this idea. When I look around the world and I see brains and nervous systems, these are massive clusters of axonally connected nerve cells, which are, my that perceptive event, also just this. So if you want to reduce the affairs of being a person to what a brain is and does, then this reduction applies equally your own reduction. There is no finer definition of circular thinking.
ALL that you have before you is what is. You are not in an explanatory matrix like a laboratory looking for causal bases of things. Causal explanations say nothing about the ontology of a something in the world. E.g., you cannot explain pain by describing neuronal complexities.

This kind of reductive thinking is what happens when people think that since science can make a cell phone it can therefore do philosophy. Science needs to know its place

I don't regard "suffer and die" as what I am meant to do, or that human life and consciousness is to be relegated to such as the decree of anyone or anything other than myself. We suffer as a function produced by the brain, we die because bodies are made of organic materials and elements that expire over time. Like all things do — Garrett Travers

No, no. You don't understand the question, which is forgivable since you haven't been properly educated in such things (not meant to be a unkind here. But it is simply a fact that philosophy is entirely neglected our culture's curriculum).
The question is about suffering qua suffering. Look at it. Put a lighted match to your finger and observe, to be a good scientist. You will find something qualitatively different her from the facts science generally deals with. Suffering is not a "fact" in the Humean sense.

Religion and Jesus? You have to step out of your comfort to se this. There you are, fingers blackened with gangrene, your children the same, each waking a moment nightmarish suffering as you yield to the black death....and so on. This is, of course, no fiction. Perhaps you'll be burned at the stake tomorrow. You raise your fist to heaven to no avail. Then you plead and beg, to no avail. You conditions screams for deliverance.
This is what Jesus is about, on the negative end of what we are.

So, what you'll notice about Jesus, just from a cognitive level in the sense that the brain desires conceptual frameworks with which to use as informational guides to action and behavior - which, is what concepts are actually for, mind you, and why they generate from consciousness - is that he checks all boxes normally reserved for individual exercise of executive function and exploration. What do I mean? We have in Jesus 1. a conceptual framework provided for us, no effort. 2. absolution of any failure to uphold the tenets of the frame work. 3. an ideal embodiment of the framework that we can constantly use to induce more action and thought both on the part of ourselves and others. 4. the open invitation of universal acceptance within the framework. 5. threats of punishment for those who reject the framework. 6. rewards for accepting the framework. 7. justifications for all bad phenomena (humans) and good phenomena (God). and 8. a definitive low-resolution explanation of all things in the universe. Or, stated another way: — Garrett Travers

I think you take over thinking to a new level. I can give you a dozen more explanatory contexts to fit Jesus into. No, a hundred more. It is easy to do. And it misses the point, in a ,well, most superfluous way (there are, heh, heh, easier ways to miss the point).

It is not a question of what the brain needs or does. A person is not a brain. Just compare the two and you will find 3 and half to 4 pounds of gray squishy matter on the one hand, and a thinking, caring experiencing person on the other. Two mistake the one for the other is impossible.

The point you miss? Tell me, why are we born to suffer and die? It is meant as a reference, not to historical philosophy or theology, but to the foundational conditions of being human.

The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα [phainomena] and νοούμενα [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearance — Schopenhauer

The reason why Kant fails to understand noumena is because he is bound to the rigidity of categorical thinking. He is quite "manichean" on this: the world we can know is boundaried and closed to possibilities beyond the definitions allowed by the simple understanding that sensual intuitions are blind without concepts and concepts are empty without sensual intuitions. This is what you get when logic rules theory absolutely. All that matters is clarity. Kant would have made a good banker (or better, a good anglo-american analytic philosopher. Kant started both traditions, the analytic and the continental philosophies).

But this noumena, what are its boundaries? He imposes limitations on human knowing reasoning that since there are no sensual intuitions, there is nothing for a concept to be about, but why is this true? For surely the only reason he had to posit noumena is because he had no choice: representations had to be OF something. Look a little closer and you see that noumena must be posited only because there is something in the phenomenal presentation that insists. Now look at noumena and what it "is". There is nothing it is not, for how is there to be a line drawn? His my apperception of my hand in this occurrent event of typing to be excluded from the encompassment of noumena?

Kant doesn't see that noumena is just a term for what is in the phenomenological "presence". Experience itself is thoroughly noumenal. There is an insight here that is elusive, slippery. One way to say it is this: we live an breathe metaphysics. We think of metaphysics as being impossibly remote (like Kant does in the transcendental dialectic) but this is all wrong, simply put.

What stands in the way of realizing this in the perceptual encounter itself is, in philosophy, this Kantian intractability.

What is called wisdom is far remote from what professional philosophers do.

Because most of them are of them are undereducated and watch too many movies that valorize violence. Ever talk to these people? Well don't! No analytic skills at all. Cannot tell the difference between being angry about something and explaining it.

Guns laws? I want to say as the lunatic gun advocates do that people kill people, not guns. True enough. Put a gun in my hand and I tremble at the possibility. But then, gun prevalence and living in a culture of violence glorified in the media, this is a self fulfilling prophesy of sorts: Makes people into "gun believers", familiarizes the culture with guns and violence, and if one is brought up in this visceral assault on our humanity, then...well, "then" is the trouble.
Maybe there is an old Testament God and maybe the time nears to build that ark.

Yes, this is at the core of Derrida’s thinking, and Heidegger’s as well.
In 'Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language' Heidegger tells us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up, but that he can only provisionally point to his notion of the primordial ground of language as the basis of this new grounding of logic. Traditionally, language is thought as a tool of thinking, as secondary to thinking, as grounded on grammar, which in turn is grounded on logic. Heidegger says “the first thing we need is a real revolution in our relation to language.” — Joshs

Thanks for that! I have it here.
I don't know what this is about. I have always thought it was hermeneutics that sealed the fate of adventuring "beyond" for Heidegger. Taking up being in the world would never step beyond the boundaries of historical possibilities, just as science could never step radically out of the paradigms that make its thinking possible, just as a person's freedom is bound to personal and cultural history, still. Anything beyond must be familiar in its parts, and any revolutionary shake up can only shake what is contained therein, that is, "shake" language as such. If it is within language that the shaking occurs, then this cannot be beyond language.

Husserl: "the intuition of the past itself....is an originary consciousness" (Section 12)
Time therefore does not exist at all, it would seem to follow. After all, what has the past ever been other than a mode of a timeless actuality?

Language viewed as a logical grammar is self-referential. Language viewed through the phenomenology of someone like Merleau-Ponty is embodied, and therefore self-transformating. For Derrida language points beyond itself. Deconstruction , as a post- structuralism, began as a response to the structuralist models of language that think of it as a self-referential totality. — Joshs

The beyond of language?

Second thing? I'm working on it.

Interesting. On close reading it appears that what you giveth, you taketh away. But I'm a buyer, believing that ethics is a something, even if not-so-easy to say what. I can even resort to boot-strapping: "it is because it is." — tim wood

two things: it is "worse" than I have let on. Once we allow affect and intuited value or phenomenologically pure "data" pf pain, pleasure and the rest, then there are implications. If it is not just some historically constructed ideas, but issues right from t he heart of the "world constitution". Very weird to say this, but ethics is thereby part of this constitution, and the authority possessed in ethical injunctions comes not from mere convention, but the world itself.

No. It is a rhetorical comment on your series of questions that are unreasonably proposed, thereby drawing attention away from the project at hand. I find myself spending more time figuring out how the questions relate to a philosophy, then I do critiquing it. — Mww

Well, you were responding to my "can go on forever in a childish game of what and why" which was a reference to the way deconstructionists sometimes play a childish game of "what's that?" I have read one or two. the point many don't want engage is that whatever meaning one wants to bring to the table, if the intention is to go to the most basic assumptions and questions, philosophy, then one has to deal with language and logic, and language is self referential, roughly put.
I do completely agree that this puts everything under suspicion, for everything issue that is taken up is done so in language. Empirical science is a construct that is "made of" language. Ethics is the same, so the basic meanings that language makes are the foundation for talk about ethics, and this means ethics is deconstructable, which, as one could put it, means one is really hard pressed to get "out" of language" to "say" the unconditioned thing that ethics IS.
This is where I come in: Ethics has this. It is affectivity and value. All ethics has this not only as a presupposition, but as the very core of ethics itself.

Henry calls attention to the way in which we are aware of our feelings and moods. When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.

“Self-affection understood as the process of affecting and being affected is not the rigid self-identity of an object, but a subjective movement. A movement which Henry has even described as the self-temporalisation of subjectivity. But as he then adds, we are dealing with a quite unique form of temporalisation, which is absolute immanent, non-horizontal and non-ecstatic. We are dealing with an affective temporality, and even though it seems to involve a perpetual movement and change, nothing is changed. In fact, it would be wrong to characterize absolute subjectivity as a stream of consciousness. There is no streaming and no change, but always one and the same Living Present without distance or difference. It is always the same self affecting itself.” — Joshs

Still reading Husserl's Internal time consciousness. Trying to construct a response. As to Henry above, it doesn't touch on the original phenomenological datum which I want to bring forward as the intuitive foundation for ethics, what is "concealed in apperception". I am convinced the regression toward the originary intuitive apprehension of things leads to something revelatory, not merely an underpinning of structure presupposed by our affairs that "proceed constructively" upon it. Husserl, and I think this onw way to put the subsequent complaints against him, assumes this intuitive given to be free and present apart from apperception, but this cannot be sustained: there is no freedom from tis, for the "ap" apperception is intrinsic to any and all thought, so any thought of a pure phenomenon is undone, as in his attempt to give a phenomenological exposition ot time, from the position of writing and thinking in time. It's not that his analyses are wrong, it's just that they cannot be what he says they are: "time and duration appearing as such." As such? He means this as a radical departure from "Objective time", and not just a, say, hermeneutical departure. I think this is what you meant by his being much more radical.

But then, at that threshold, when the suspension becomes radically exclusionary, and one's affectivity's attachments are , as well as what Fink The Sixth Meditation) calls the "transcendental aesthetic," that is, the explication of the "phenomenon of the world the explication of the cogitata as cogitata and of their universal structures, the description of acceptances" (the term "aesthetic" here confuses, but he is talking about the primordial belief that attends cognition); then it is not ust the understanding reach to a sublime height of apprehension alone. It is affectivity. And this makes a turn toward religion (in the non trivial sense).

For Nietzsche, morality isn't essentially a set of true or false statements. It's an activity. A society is doing something with its ethical approach. Look to a society's narratives to see the unfolding drama. — frank

we are in a limited way, in agreement. What is left after the historical notions of grounding ethics in some kind of logocentric idea are pushed aside is contingency. As Sartre put is, the world that we confront is "radically contingent", it does not "speak", but exceeds in its superfluity the confines language would contain it. Of course, he has beneath his thinking Kierkegaard and Hegel and Nietzsche as well, who all contest the any "rational reduction" as if logic could possess actuality. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'.

I think this is a profound insight, but with one slip: ethics and value. There may not be some overarching independent grounding for meaning and to understand is to have context for that understanding to be possible, but does this apply to value simpliciter? This is not an historical argument; it is a phenomenological one, so forget about Nietzsche's complaints against Christianity and Platonism. Phenomenology puts the burden of meaning at the level of basic questions to the "things themselves" which is, in my thinking, reduction away from argument and analysis and toward intuitional givens. The pain in the kidney is, I argue, foundational, unassailable, absolute.

Well, yeah. I said "Nietzsche." You said "perspective." — frank

Continue.

Just don't want you to be typing stupid stuff on the internet when you should be in the hospital. — frank

Stupid stuff, Frank?

Digging a hole to discover what’s in the dirt is one thing. Digging a hole just to put the dirt in a different place, is quite something else. — Mww

A reference to deconstruction? The point that they are making is that all singular assertions defer to something else. I call myself accountant, but what is this, as it is assumed I know since I am one. I can answer this question easliy, but each answer I give "begs" other questions, and this without end.Even when matters turn sagacious, talk about, say, how accounting is intrinsically misaligned with meaningful values, the questions never find the foundational "referent" they seek. Deconstruction (and I am no expert) is not a childish game, for it is something like the period on the end of a very long sentence beginning with the pre socratics: to speak at all is to have a perspective and meaningful thought can never be free of this. All meaning is contingent. Not too far afield from affirming Heraclitus over Parmenides.

to see how this all plays out, you could do what I did: read Saussure's Semiotics, then Derrida, chapter two Of Grammatology.

For ethics, one has to see how extraordinary this is. At this terminal threshold where language is seen not as an avenue into the world of truths waiting to be discovered, but as a stand in for this world that is constructed out of the "difference" of meaningful play among other meanings. This looks a lot like ethical nihilism finding its rationalization, for if God is out of the picture, then all that is left for metaphysical affirmation of right and wrong is left in the hands of what can be said, and if what can be said (and I think very much of Wittgenstein here. He is, in the Tractatus, emphatically against making meaningful statements that step beyond the boundaries of the limits of language) cannot make sense of what is true outside of language, then language's limitations apply to ethics.

I try to argue that ethics has an absolute grounding that is evident in the anatomy of avgiven ethical case: value simpliciter is not deconstructable. What we say is, but the intuition of pain, say, is not, and this pain is the kind of thing that drives all ethical possibilities.

You have a raging pain in your kidney? Are you peeing blood? — frank

A non sequitur, Frank. Perhaps you could restate.

Values vary by culture and class, as Nietzsche pointed out.

If there's a foundation, it's the complex of human emotion that gets sorted post hoc in ethical terms. — frank

A matter of perspective, eh? Then, what is it that is a matter of perspective? Is this raging pain in my kidney a matter of perspective?

is the category of thought responsible for generating behaviors conducive to both individual and collective well-being, flourishing, health, happiness, creativity, productivity, and peace. How's that for a definition? — Garrett Travers

Not sure what happiness is, really. The question is, how does such a thing bear up under scrutiny? I can say I am happy, but what is there in the world that makes this meaningful? Is happiness "good"? What is this? Is it like a good couch? But good couches are good for good reasons. What is the reason happiness is good?
I am not interested in a definition of ethics that moves forward without being clear about what it is at all to value something, to love, cherish, hate, detest, and so on., valuing something is the essence of all ethical issues. This takes the matter to agency: what makes for an ethical agency, one that is capable of being in relationships where something of value can be put at risk? This gets to the heart of the "existence" of ethics. You see how this goes: all the shoulds and shouldn'ts of an ethical nature presuppose this valuing nature which is IN the world. We made culture and its value institutions, but we did not make value as such. This issues from existence.
Valuing is the existential foundation of ethics, I say. The question that remains is, what does this tell us about our ethical affairs in terms of their nature, their essence?

I've got Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness here. Let me read it and and see what I can say.

Pity.

I, on the other hand, think the default sense that things ARE, is inherently logical. — Mww

And right this is. But re. logic: I think of Hume. It is empty, formal. Meaning has no message here. When we say something is rational, we are talking about how content is structured, not how structure is structured.
And, we can say that logic is transcendental if one tries to inquire as to its nature, since such an inquiry is itself inherently rational. The same goes for affect. But as I see it, affect has manifest meaning which something that stands outside the categories that would attempt to possess it. That is, we can think of affect and contain it in our thoughts, but its "beyond" (logic has this "beyond, too. See what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus) has real presence, evidenced in the very foundation of our affairs. To observe dispassionately is to observe with, if you will, passion, for human existence has its way of being in caring--- and caring, which is part of my point, begs a question: caring about what? the reduced answer to this is affect. or value.

That's as misguided as saying "appetite, urinating, flatulence, defecating ..." is what metabolism is "all about". :roll: — 180 Proof

If you think of these as bodily functions, you might think like this. But there are many ways to contextualize this. Physics can give, in a limited way, a particle-physics description, evolution can discuss the historical structures of the brain, we could talk about how these fit in some social etiquette and how these differ in cultural systems. But more we step out of the familiar talk and head out into philosophy, we discover that what is familiar doesn't rest on something else that is so solidly there. Here is an interesting scienc-grounded question: What does it mean that existence exploded in being (putting aside any terminological distinctions one might think of) in some Big Bang and fourteen or so billion years later started torturing itself through the agency of humans, goats and chickens and so forth?

Of course, this is not a question about biological evolution. It is a question that is put to the qualitative nature of suffering.

As an illustrative example, you find in Mahāyāna literature the frequent expression that 'everything that exists is subject to birth and death'. Nirvāṇa does not exist, but is the reality beyond the vicissitudes of birth and death. So, beyond (the vicissitudes of) existence.

I make this distinction because when you encounter the puzzling phrase 'beyond being', I think what you're really reading is 'beyond existence', where 'existence' means 'phenomenal existence'. — Wayfarer

It does present the question, what is being? So, when you walk into a room, there is this implicit "sense" of things being there. It is a kind of familiarity, isn't it? So I say (and of course, I am working with what others have said), and this account is not going to set well with everyone, along with Heidegger, that this general sense of things being there is utility they have. I see a desk and its "being" is the way I can approach it, sit, get up, straighten posture in it, and so on. the room is filled with this way of realting to things. Then there is the affect, that I care, have an interest, maybe I admire the form, appreciate the function. I follow Dewey on this: all pragmatic relations are inherently aesthetic. I think language itself is just this, after all, how did I come to know language if not through a process of associating sounds with things modeled by others, then, gettin it right and everyone is very pleased: Problem solved! Dewey called this consummatory, both knowing and feeling at once. This is being, call it that substratum of encountering things that you acknowledge "are".

But then, is this an exhaustive account? It is a simplified account, granted (pages and pages of philosophy reduced to a paragraph) But, I say, and I am not arguing for this, for an argument has to have presentable evidential premises, that there is something in the intuitive encounter that exceeds this. The affect (consummatory affect, as Dewey put it) is the ontological foundation of the affair: affect is not an abstraction. To love, hate, have pain or pleasure, I think not only are these real, but are what makes a relationship with objects in the world one that intimates the being real.

And it is the subject that issues this affect. so when I say this tree exists, it is not the tree's existence I am encountering. It is my own. Not that the tree is out there, beyond me, but that the existence I experience when I see the tree is my own.

Nirvana does not exist? well, it is beyond birth and death because it is NOT birth and death. Birth and death refer to conditions in the world, the circumstances in which we find nirvana. But nirvana has nothing to do with this as I can see. Nor does it have anything to do with sitting lotus style or having a good teacher. These are contexts.

Beyond the vicissitudes of existence, meaning beyond what exactly? How about the above (the Dewey, the Heidegger above)? Isn't existence about that intuited "sense" of things around us being there? It can't be about some unseen substrate qua existence, because this is not to be witnessed at at all. As in, one never sees substance; one only sees individual objects, not what "all things are" underneath.
I think of nirvana as the Hindus do: It is absolute affect. Defined as joy, happiness, bliss, or whatever terms we have that are, as terms, merely "stands ins". Is there such a thing? I think there is such a thing as a powerful experience of bliss that occurs when one reduces the world to its bare presence. Being in love intimates this. Being a child (n the Wordsworthian "Intimations of Immortality" sense) was like this (how do I know? I remember this) Talk fails us here for no other reason than we do not have shared experiences so that we can match vocabularies. Not that it is transcendence in some impossible concept. The fact that, as Levinas would put it, we look beyond the totalities of familiar categories, does not to me mean these "beyonds" are in some other realm of being. The atman is the brahman: we are already "there".

Are you saying the value of a thing is its purpose? That which has purpose has value, and that value is its affectivity? So an act, the purpose of which is to solve some ethical problem, obtains its value from that solution, and that’s what ethics is?

That works fo me, iff value is not taken to be a quality. If the value of the solution reduces to a relative quality, which is where I was coming from, we’re no better off than before. — Mww

The value of a solution begs the question: what good is even a maximal value FOR a solution? Or, what is it about a solution that makes it at all desirable? This goes to the manifestness of the quality.

I'm not saying at all value and purpose do not align, but then if someone has a purpose for something, then we can inquire about it, and inquiry can go on forever in a childish game of what and why. The point I would make is that such repetition of inquiry works annoyingly well because the purpose is set in a background of further questionable accounts. I want ot be an accountant? Why? What is an accountant? What is money? And this never ends (something Derrida points draws attention to. I have read some deconstructions that sound ridiculously childish as they do just this kind of thing).
But regarding the purpose, once the answer turns to value--- It makes someone feel good! then questions run out, for the "good" of the good feeling is unassailable.
Of course, questions can turn to other goods and bads that stand in competition, but the good of the feeling as such, cannot be defeated. One could ask, "are you sure it is a good feeling"; but this does not question goodness, but only the ambiguity in certain cases. Unambiguous cases of "the good" are indefeasibly good. Absolutes.