I like to talk to all kinds of thinkers, but some schools of thought i dont like to read. What could eventually resolve Kierkegaard's anxiety if God is a fiction? He did not want to go to reason, it was a path too arduous with its anxiety for him. Hegel's dialectic comes to an end while continuing forever. I do not know what Kierkegaard's final conclusion was. He is too Augustinian for me — Gregory

But this begs the question. God? What does Kierkegaard say about God apart from the religious dogma? And what does he say about religious dogma? You really have to comes to grip with the profound differences between rationalism and existentialism.
Augustine is revered by the church for many reasons, and he does provide interesting philosophy here and there, as with sin: the absence of God, essentially. Not a complete argument, but Kierkegaard saw this as true. See his analysis of sin and the "positing of spirit" but do so as he does, with no scriptural references as all. Nor with any of the church's metaphysics, but rather with an explicit denial of this: the book's full title is, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. It is an existential analysis of experience, making Time, history, culture, finitude and infinitude, and most of all, the real palpable stuff of what human being are, their heartaches and joys as central to understanding what Christianity really is all about.
How is anxiety possible at all? How does the mundane affairs of our anxious and concerned spell out in a phenomenological ontology? This is where Kierkegaard puts his timeless stamp on things.

Incomplete how? Because it's a short paragraph from a glossary? Every term in that paragraph has numerous references in the suttas and in the commentaries, which have further references in suttas and commentaries.

The incompleteness is in your approach to the matter. — baker

But here we speak of philosophy. We make inquiries, describe, contextualize, and not to make the unspeakable speakable, but to explain what it is all about at the level of basic questions. Just that!

Why look outside of Buddhism for things to help one understand Buddhism? — baker

Because this is what language does. It is inherently interpretative. Calling something ultimate reality is seriously incomplete. Language is, as I see it, a yoga, and there is nothing new here. But consider, when ideas were first put forth, they were ideas, a way of disclosure as to what things are. Such ways are malleable, open. Life is suffering, e.g. What is suffering? You can dismiss this question, but there IS an answer to it, a metaphenomenological answer. And this stands to elucidate concepts like enlightenment.

paṭicca-samuppāda
Dependent co-arising; dependent origination. A map showing the way the aggregates (khandha) and sense media (āyatana) interact with ignorance (avijjā) and craving (taṇhā) to bring about stress and suffering (dukkha). As the interactions are complex, there are several versions of paṭicca-samuppāda given in the suttas. In the most common one, the map starts with ignorance. In another common one, the map starts with the interrelation between name (nāma) and form (rūpa) on the one hand, and sensory consciousness (viññāṇa) on the other. [MORE: SN 12.2, DN 15 ] — baker

It is not to say this wrong at all. But it is incomplete, and ANY philosophy that can help complete it is valid regarding what Buddhism is.

But the problem is, rather, and I don't know how to say this to you nicely, is that you lack respect for the Buddha. Yet you nevertheless keep referring to him. You are determined that you already know what enlightenment is and isn't, and anyone who doesn't match those ideas of yours, is, per you, wrong or insufficient.
I wonder why you look to the Buddha, if you clearly have no intention to take his words seriously. — baker

Don't worry about being nice, you do just fine.
But you know where I am going with this: When Buddha had is his significant enlightening moment (moments, period, whatever), was he following the four noble truths? Did he read this somewhere, follow the methods laid down after the fact? Of course not. The four noble truths is not an ontological dogma. It is an observation and a method. I am interested in how to describe the enlightenment experience in the context of Husserl's epoche. This is actually being done. If Buddha had read Husserl and others, he would have said, why yes! Of course!

Intimidated by what? And you are seeking out "abstract writers"??

He used Hegelian dialectics in his own reasoning to confound Hegel. His complaint with Hegel goes to the very foundation of existential philosophy. What is real is existence, and this is experienced as a single subject. Kierkegaard presented a phenomenology of alienation that saw rationalists like Kant and Hegel privileging an abstraction, as if the universal of a concept AS a concept could encompass palpable existence. You have to read Philosophical Crumbs and Repetition, among other things to see how this complaint plays out, especially in ethics.
But the real reason why K is so important is that he proclaimed the true reality we face lies in the interiority of experience, in the "passionate engagement" of actuality. This yearns for consummation and redemption beyond dogma of mere ideas. We are made of the dramatic stuff of a lived existence, and Kierkegaard thought this is a place where the finite meets the infinite at the level of ontology, the "meta" level of analysis of existence. Of course, he was, as Heidegger called him, a religious writer, and explicitly so, but his philosophy is not like this at all. In fact, in The Concept of Anxiety, he argues largely outside religious references.
Then there is Hegel who, like a good rationalist, put the onus of religious understanding on reason. I'm with Kierkegaard, in my own way: what is reason? It has no content as such, but is the mere form of judgment, and always takes its meaning from the content delivered by actuality. Saying that the real is rational is not entirely wrong, but only if we keep this in mind: reason is an abstraction ONLY because it is taken (abstracted) from existence to be observed analytically, and the same goes for all such inquiries. Originally they are part of an ineffible whole, ineffable because one cannot stand apart from it to say what it is; one is always , already In it the moment inquiry even begins. "Actuality" is the same. Originally it is an integral part, not separable at all. We do the separating when we think about it. Talk about reason and actuality as separate is like talking about heat and molecular activity separately (both scientifically conceived terms, here).
In the context of Kierkegaard's position, rationalists simply ignore actuality.

Many of the thinkers you have been referring to have presented themselves as resisting an error of one kind or another. Along with the version that is being put forth as the truth is an explanation where others have gone wrong. Discourse may require the continuing lack of of answers on some level. — Valentinus

What error? Don't be shy, what are you talking about?

It was mentioned above about how Kierkegaard felt about Hegel, and it common knowledge that he called on spiritual beings to save him from anxiety — Gregory

There is nothing of a textual reference in this. Why is it that Kierkegaard opposed Hegel?

What the "ego" may seen to be in these different psychologies that you refer to is not self explanatory from my point of view. Noting the limits in each theory makes me less inclined to state what is true for everybody than to see the works collectively pointing to one thing. — Valentinus

What limits?

That is fine, and not what my disagreement is about. My point is about the idea that he "attributes to the Germans a special task" via the German language. Which strikes me as nationalo-centric.

To illustrate my disagreement, IF language is an integral part of the construction of Being, in my interpretation of this sentence, it would imply that a human being speaking several languages is a more complete being than one who speaks only one language. But this is not the conclusion Heidegger draws. Rather for him, who to my knowledge spoke only German, perhaps with a smattering of greek, learning another language such as English or French would have been closer to a compromission with lower forms of thought than those possible in German. There is a striking parallel with the idea that racial diversity is a problem rather than an asset.

His philosophy, his world-view, was consistent with nazism, which he adhered to voluntarily. The Dasein is Hitler-compatible. THAT is the problem. — Olivier5

Yeah, that is annoying. But I don't know why he makes this claim about German and Greek so I just leave it alone. On the other hand, how is it that he can make claims about other languages' deficit in meaning possibilities if such a thing can only be understood by native speakers, and he is NOT a native speaker of French or English or Swahili anything else? After all, the difference he must have in mind must be nuanced, what only a native speaker could know.
Oh well.

One aspect of this all game -- and a reason why I think his Spiegel interview remark about French philosophers speaking German was a kind of joke but a telling one -- is that a great deal of 19th century German philosophy can be seen as a response to 18th century French philosophy, the time when Voltaire was advising Frederick the Great in Prussia. Followed by the revolution and napoleonic empire which swept over Prussia. By the 1950s though, the relation was reversed and many French philosophers spoke of Dasein, Umwelt and Gestalt... Here too I see a parallel between Hitler's revenge after the humiliation of WW1. — Olivier5

I suppose. But Being and Time carries none of this resentment itself. Was it in the background? You know, it is speculated that B&T does open this door, after all, dasein is an historical construct, so this invites a competition between cultures and their languages. But I still say, who cares. His phenomenology is an extraordinary reinterpretation the world. Powerful and compelling. F*** the rest of it.

One of the qualities Kierkegaard exhibited in The Concept of Anxiety is that the "self" who loves or not is always represented as a result of a process geared toward completing a certain end. The possibility of being an agent is presented in contrast to that.

The prospect of selecting between "competing" desires is interrupted by another dimension where the options are not easily laid side by side. — Valentinus

That really is the issue. I think of it in terms of Heraclitus and Parmenides: the ego that is conversing here with you is memory that seizes the present, and this is a constant process, this generative and generated self. But there is that mysterious present, isn't there? This is not an abstraction, not a Zenoistic contrived play with time and space. The Kierkegaardian analysis has two fronts that I see. One is the remembrance that we actually exist, and existence is not an idea, and Hegel thereby misrepresents what it is to be a person, for we are apart from the conceptual agreement that circulates and steals our identity. The other is the paradox of sin: We are only sinful when we posit spirit, for in this positing we see our alienation from the eternal. His Knight of Faith is one (beyond what K is capable of) who can make this qualitative movement into faith, and be here, in the world, a baker, a butcher, but reside with God as well. As I understand it, this is understood in a temporal analysis of our existence. A long story having to do with historical sin and culture and the turning away from our primordial relationship with God.

So how does one even conceive of the soul and God? As I see it, apophatically. the soul is this ineffable essence that is our eternal reality, and is revealed only as the sin of our obsessions (our historical/cultural fixations) yields to the eternal present, and this present (which Wittgenstein takes seriously) is the true eternity.

I look at what meditation is, and I find precisely this analysis. Turn off the imposition of culture and its temptations and engagements, i.e., turn off thought and affections, and time vanishes. The eternal present.

Hey thanks, I found that Der Spiegel interview you refer to. Obviously a very important cultural artifact. I’ve never read Being and Time, although many decades ago, I was friends with someone in whom it triggered an intense cathartic realisation, and I formed the view that it is probably an important book. On the other hand, like a lot of people, I have been put off by Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism and the suggestion that his philosophy leans towards fascism. I think about reading it, but I haven’t taken the time yet. — Wayfarer

Everybody is put off by that. But I think, if it were discovered that Louis Pasteur were, say, a child molester, would we simply stop taking vaccines? Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and to bypass him is to miss something essential to understanding the world.

I gloomily suspect that this is true, but I have no inkling if it is being done. If any of Heidegger’s successors are doing that, I’d like to know, but I suspect not. I am familiar with the anecdote of Heidegger being caught reading from D T Suzuki and saying ‘if I understand this man aright, this is what I’ve been trying to say all along’. But I take his point that we can’t assimilate Zen Buddhism tout courte. We - westerners - have created the cultural predicament which we suffer from, and we have to find a way out of it on those terms. I think that’s what he’s saying. — Wayfarer

The gloomy part is in the way culture has yielded to technological attitudes, and the world becomes more and more like "standing reserve", enframing, I think he called it, which amounts to, in my thinking, a complaint similar to Kierkegaard's regarding Christendom: what is meaningful and originary is lost, so we are alienated in the world, no longer "at home" because our lives are now made out of utility concerns and is not responsive to this primordial part of what we are (alienation from God, said Kierkegaard. And for him, it was this cultural fascination that was the essence of sin). See how the Marxist's frame this in terms of class exploitation and alienating capital. Nietzsche went after Christian resentment against the greatness of certain men, and this resentment became a metaphysical institution. Everyone has their terms of alienation, but all seek redemption somewhere in the body of thought they inherit. I tout the Buddhist approach because it is a method (as is Husserl's epoche, I should add) of liberation from all structures of thinking. Husserl and Heidegger laid a foundation for discussing what this is about.
As to Heidegger's successors, well, that would be what I am reading now. Right now, I am reading Being and Time again, critical works on this by Michel Henry, Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditaion, I go back to Kierkegaard often to remind me that Christianity doesn't have to be so nitwitted, and as well, I read Meister Eckhart, Buber, Levinas, Caputo (see his Radical Hermeneutics!), I review Kant sometimes, never read Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit but I've been meaning to, Marion (On Givenness which extends the thinking of Husserl, as does Fink. I am fascinated by the idea of presence. Reading Heidegger put the framework of being human as Time, but it was Kierkegaard who inspired this: his Concept of Anxiety is a bit hard to read, but if you stick with it, it reveals the basis of existentialist thinking, and you can see why Heidegger goes back to the Greek, where Being was a central issue, that is, being and becoming, Parmenides and Heraclitus. Derrida. Can't say I understand him well, and I don't have the patience to read Grammatology, but I have read Differance and others, and I think he puts the nail in the coffin of analytic philosophy.
Why do I find all of this so important? Because of hermeneutics, for one thing. This makes the system open. Open to what? Truth? What is truth? This lies in a description of the world as it is, and this is phenomenology: dismissing the natural attitude, making a qualitative move to enlightenment. to move forward from here, onw has to inquire and read.

SPIEGEL: You attribute to the Germans a special task?

Heidegger: Yes, in the sense explained in the dialogues with Hölderlin.

SPIEGEL: Do you believe that Germans have a special qualification for this conversion?

Heidegger: I am thinking of the special inner kinship between the German language and the language of the Greeks and their thought. This is something that the French confirm for me again and again today. When they begin to think, they speak German. They assure [me] that they do not succeed with their own language.

Gee, I bet the French just loved that. :blush:

Sorry for the digression. — Wayfarer

It does sound like a weird thing to say. I think it is as I commented above, Heidegger believed enlightenment is forged out of language, and there is some primordial way to disclose the world and erase its alienation that is the brass ring of philosophy. He had a lot of confidence in the Greeks, used their original terms a lot. I don't know, maybe he was right about something here.

I read in some edition to the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Tibetan monks, in their day, and now, as well, I think, for this is not a publishable affair, anyway, they would discuss their "subterranean" experiences in language that is very exclusive, esoteric. I wonder....

This guy was so naïve, so simplistic sometimes... It really makes one wonder about the lack of street wisdom of some overly theoretical philosophers, who don't have much patience for empirical facts, nor any awareness of their own cultural biases apparently. Also there is this "manifest destiny" of the German volk here, as the "thinking volk"... Ja ja. My grandfather really liked their metaphysics in the camps. — Olivier5

You have to see that Heidegger believed that language is an integral part of the construction of Being, and so, when you examine works of philosophy, literature, poetry, rhetoric, and then, even in the hard sciences (think Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions), you are FIRST looking at language possibilities, meanings as that which can be brought to bear on any novel affair. I don't speak German or ancient Greek, but who knows, Heidegger could have a point. I leave it up to the philosogists. As to Heidegger's bout with Nazism in the 30's , it is universally agreed that it was despicable.

But then, he know nothing at all about what they were doing in the camps. But then again, he never properly condemned all of this afterwards. So, do what Hubert Dreyfus did: take what is there and just put aside the rest as irrelevant to the philosophy, which was absolutely amazing.

Naive is the last term I can imagine that would apply to Heidegger. On the other hand, at the time there was this infatuation with volkism, wasn't there? Himmler and the rest took it seriously, that there were ancient divisions between the pure races that were corrupted by "foul practices". I don't think he bought into this at all, but he did buy into the spirit of a German rebirth which he thought the Nazis could pull off. But then, they went sideways.

The consequent moral realist has suspended all self-doubt and anything that could induce it. — baker

But the proof is in the pudding, a conversation about doubt, moral realism and the rest. Otherwise, it is just a generic complaint. Do you think the Buddha in his phenomenological prime, had doubts?

These are deep problems, I'm not proposing any solution. But I think what has to be worked out is, if enlightenment and liberation are the goals, what do they mean? Christianity doesn't often utilise that kind of terminology, especially Protestant Christianity, which casts everything in the light of sin and redemption, rather than ignorance and enlightenment. That's a shadow to the whole enterprise and whatever philosophical proposal is made to address these issues has to navigate these treachorous seas! — Wayfarer

But I do propose a solution. It lies with phenomenology. And Wittgenstein. And Husserl. and others. The point is not that any one has put their finger precisely where it needs to be, but that once the Husserlian epoche is is understood, one can finally see where philosophy is supposed to go. the reason there continues to be so much controversy is not that philosophical understanding has yet to achieve this monumental task, but that people are all put together so differently/ If you ask me, the Buddha had it right, and that was long ago, but he didn't have the theoretical tools to talk about it, to provide a phenomenological exposition on the actual descriptive features of enlightenment. As I said, such things are notoriously unsayable, but what is sayable are the contextual features, and phenomenology shows just this. But still, it does depend literally on how a person is put together to acknowledge this. Not all can, and this I affirm from discussions and reading. Not all are math wizards, nor artistic geniuses, or acrobatically inclined and so on. This is just the way it goes, and it is the fundamental reason why what I will call existential aptitude is not universal: it is not like the ability to understand the basics of logic or experiential intuitions, what every person simply knows. It takes a talent, if you like. Don't really care how this sounds, but I am convinced this is just the way it is.
Sin, redemption? See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety.
As far as I]'m concerned, philosophy is done, already reached its end, and in theory, this would be Derrida. But Derrida is just pointing to something that remains a complete mystery, and I think he was a remarkable thinking person, but likely too smart to see that it was the intellectualizing that finally had to be dropped. It's fun to be brilliant, but to put it in Buddha's language, it does encourage attachment.
I'm am done with navigating: Calm the breath, suspend thought and its moods, attitudes, affect, and just put it all down, and here is where one stands close to something really profound, which is the eternal present, a Kierkegaardian idea that found its full expression in Heidegger, who sought passionately for a new grounding in human existence, and thought perhaps the answer could lie with....Buddhism. (see his famous Spiegel interview). Of course, the Buddhists have been light years ahead of everyone for a very long time, but they were never good at telling people why. Not that I've read.

But there is a response to your rhetorical question: we care about what reality is, because, in Aristotle's phrase, 'we seek to know'. The desire to know, to understand, to make sense out of existence, is surely a deep drive. — Wayfarer

Case in point: why does one seek to know? Seeking is not a logical move, it is a passionate one. One cares, wants, desires, as you say, but these are not "reality" terms. Not ontological categorical terms. I am saying that every act ever committed by anyone is performative question begged when the purpose is made known, for the purpose is bound to motivation, desire and the rest. None of this? Then there is no substantive meaning to what is done. WE bring meaning into the world of facts, ways Wittgenstein. Every utterance, thought, moment of experience may have its own end and content, explicitly stated, but underpinning this the quest for meaning, the foundation of all things.

This is suggesting of the idea of 'higher self' or 'higher consciousness'. You find that in Fichte, who distinguished the finite or empirical ego from the pure or infinite ego. The activity of this "pure ego" can be discovered by a "higher intuition". It is also reminiscent of Schelling's 'intellectual intuition' or Jacques Maritain's 'intuition of being'. (Dermot Moran says that the German idealists retained some fragments of the 'doctrine of illumination' which had othewise died out in Western philosophy during the preceeding centuries; Maritain, of course, was a Catholic philosopher.) — Wayfarer

But you will have to deal with objections that come in later. If there is to be a true phenomenological description of what unfolds before us, the "no show" of this higher consciousness, and here just think apophatically, so that when the inventory of what is "there" is all there is to be accounted for, cognitive, eidetic, structural, and so on, never shows up. This is why meaningful talk about this is usually cast int he negative. As Kant reasoned, by extrapolating from what IS apparent in experience, to what has to be the case in order for this to be. Reason, is there, and it presents itself in the forms of judgments we make in a regular way. But where does this come from? Even if you are a Kantian about the "soul" and its rational functions, you realize that when we look upon these functions, you're perspective is circular for to affirm the rational form of judgment occurs IN judgment. There is no third perspective that is removed fromt he very condition you are trying to affirm. Can the eye "see" the eye, so to speak? This is what Wittgenstein was very clear on. Transcendental reality cannot be conceived, for the understanding can only understand itself, and to speak of a "beyond" of this is nonsense.
But on the other hand, ASSUME that our power of reason is an absolute, say, a "function" of the mind of God, and assume that when a function of the mind of God, through the agency of a person, a transcendental Unity of Apperception, if you like, conceives itself, this is an absolute conception, for what else can the mind of God produce? That is, God's judgment cannot beg questions.
But this is a very tough row to hoe. Here is where Wittgenstein comes in, for in order for a concept to make any sense at all, its opposite has to be conceivable, and the opposite of thought and its logic is not conceivable.
But then, how do account for these apodictic intuitions? they are at best, representations of something we cannot conceive. But it is my view that while we cannot conceive of the nature of logic (btw, Kant didn't call logic an intuition, but only a discursive function. But how do these discursive maneuvers work? Well, intuitively. What else?), we certainly can talk around it, look closely at how our conception of logic and other intuitions are engendered, get in proximity to the generative source. This is what Eugen Fink does in his Sixth Meditation. He follows Kant (or the Kantian Fichte) through to further reaches: the "enworlding" of the world.

I'm receptive to the idea; I think the term 'transcendental ego' is a plausible synonym for the 'higher self'. But it's hardly respectable in current philosophical circles; you will find it in Rudolf Steiner or theosophy but not in existentialism or phenomenology where it will usually be rejected as occult and or new age. — Wayfarer

No, theosophy is off the table in respectable philosophy, and I think there is good reason for this; but then, it is not WHAT is said, but the intuitions behind saying. The disagreement is in the justification for positing something, and this always goes badly extravagant metaphysics, systems of unseen ontologies.
What circles are you talking about? Phenomenology? No. The issue of a transcendentla ego in phenomenology goes back at least to Kant (Plotinus and Christian metaphysics, and lots more, of course) in serious contemporary philosophy, but this is sin continental philosophy, where Kant never died an untimely death. He was never refuted, only ignored. there is Kant, then the three H's, Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger, and everyone else in the system of this thinking. Check out, for example, The Transcendedntal Ego by Sartre, his refutation of Husserl on the nature of the ego.

If you read Vedanta, the ego is precisely what has to be 'slayed' by the aspirant (chela) so as to awaken to the Self (see The Teachings of Ramana Maharishi). There is a parallel in New Testament in that the disciple is urged to 'lose his life for My sake', where Adam is the personification of ego and Jesus the higher consciousness. Buddhism rejects the idea of 'higher self', or any self, altogether, although arguably the Buddha Nature teachings can be mapped against it (with strict caveats). — Wayfarer

I don't read much Eastern metaphysics, because it's metaphysics. That goes for explicit Christianity as well. But I am willing to read "around" these thoughts. Kierkegaard, Otto, Buber, then Husserl, and oward, these articulate the matter very well, better than their popular counterparts.

In my view, the problem of ethics is in the constitution of modernity itself. 'Being modern', apart from being born at a particular moment in history, is also a distinctive and novel form of consciousness, based on a new conception of what it means to be an individual. This article about Max Weber casts some light: — Wayfarer

I don't really agree with this kind of thinking, on either side. Reason is not cold and calculating; it's not anything at all! Just the form of judgment. And the humanistic dimension of our existence is better handled by Levinas. But most if not all really miss the boat on ethics. The business of philosophy is to get as far into basic assuptions as possible, and this means ethics has to be revealed for its "parts". It has parts, and is not irreducible. What is MEANING?? This is the question. Not Frege's "sense" but meaning, like this lance in my kidney, or my love of Ravel. Value is the center of philosophical concern. It is first philosophy. Ask, what is the Good? This is where an inquiry into human existence begins. NOT what is reality? This begs the question: why do you care what reality is? It is a performative QBing, this asking the question is motivated, concerned, there os a mood, an affect that makes it all important.

And also this one on Emile Durkheim — Wayfarer

I do get this. But I want to take the matter where philosophy goes, and not stop where issues are so entangled.

I noticed, when studying Buddhism, that one of the supreme virtues of the Buddha was yathābhūtaṃ, 'to see things as they truly are'. It was simply assumed that this was one of the attributes of the Buddha's omniscience. Whereas in techno-culture, 'how things truly are' is devoid of value, meaningless, as 'what truly is' are the elemental particles or forces of physics, within which the individual has emerged due to fortuitous circumstances.

Food for thought, that's all. — Wayfarer

A feast, really. Read the Abhidhamma and there is talk about confronting ultimate reality. The trouble is, there is no real explanatory concepts that reveals what this is. Like ethics, it cannot be spoken, but one CAN speak around it, of it, and phenomenology offers the vessel for just this. Heidegger's language of Being, dasein, hermeneutics, time, space, authenticity and so forth opens doors. Husserl, too. Kierkegaard, and Levinas, and there are so many who present the case, provide a contextual framework for serious discussions about what enlightenment and liberation really are.

That would be ego, and conditioned thought, and discursive reasoning, in my reading. — Wayfarer

But this ego is a slippery discussion. If it is taken to mean the assertive self, with confidence and even aggression behind it, as if in competition, then the ego is, by my lights, something objectionable, in need of a good critical censure. But if the ego is beyond this, an agency that is "other-worldly" then the best we can do is construct arguments and descriptions that are in the field of where this transcendence leaves the mundane. It's like ethics: we don't know what it IS, but we do know how we experience it and talk about it, and these can be objects of analysis. Ethics is an injunction to do or not to do something, and this is grounded in the "givenness" of experience, ande THIS is not reducible, or, if it is reducible, it is so in the language that constructs the idea that can be talked about, NOT in the injunction and its palpable counterpart: the OUCH! experience.
We can talk around it, about it, how it fits, is contextualized; we just can't interpretatively nail it down like I can nail down what a bank teller is or an igneous rock.

Are you still representing Kant here? I don’t see why this should necessarily follow from "[Intuition's] foundation is unknowable." Let’s take my Jesus example above (which I don’t believe in, but which I think is a coherent story – not empirically true, but not a story that violates logic). Jesus may not know where his intuitions came from, and may never know (in which case they are unknowable to him or perhaps to any human being); nevertheless, God put those intuitions in him; so they are not just a construct, and not contingent. — Acyutananda

Is knowledge an intuition? I know my cup has coffee without looking. Memory, of course. But memory simply "comes" to you. And how do you know you can rely on memory? Memory tells us about events in the past with a great deal of accuracy. So we have this system which is essentially pragmatic: memory works, it's consistent, and why is consistency preferable? Because it works.
It is a strange business to be like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and intentionally make great pains to spit in the face of reason and logic (using reason to do so, of course), but frankly, I lean toward your position when all is said and done, for it is not reason the underground man objected to; not really. Reason has no content. It is an empty vessel that neither denies God nor affirms foundational meaning. What the objection is really about is the presumptions of knowing that true conclusions follow from true premises, and here is what is true....Such confidence is ridiculous. A great book: Shestov's All Things Are Possible, in which he shows us how this confidence is groundless. We "know" nothing of the foundation of all things, yet meaning, not Frege's' "sense" of what ideas have, but affect, moods, joys and tragedies, these are the things at the center of the human condition, not clarity is what is true.
The significance of our intuitions lies not with reason, the empty vessel, but with the meaning it carries: the Good! And the Bad! What does it mean that I "enjoy" this danish with coffee? Or love Van Gogh and Ravel? What does it mean to be happy? Or to suffer terribly? These are the things humanity is about, and they simply are "there" and are complete mysteries. Intuitions.

Quite right.

I really should add that I am by no means a master of any of this. I simply read with understanding, and I usually do passably well. I read Heidegger for the first time about four years ago. Had to know, so I read Being and Time. Simple as that.
Astounding thing to wrap your mind around.

Philosophy isn't religion, nor is it art, or so I think. We shouldn't look to philosophy or philosophers for any deep insights into life or the world or ourselves, because philosophy can only be expressed through language, and there are limitations on the power of language to explain. Philosophy is supposed to explain, not evoke or inspire. When we look to philosophy as we look to religion or art, we read into it and the language used by philosophers far more than that language can reasonably be construed to mean. — Ciceronianus the White

But i do take issue with this. I think philosophy is THE religion. It's the people who are either inclined or disinclined to see it this way that makes the difference. I think ancient thought and its mysteries are important not because they are right, but because stand apart from systems of understanding which trivialize what it is to be human. Philosophy can reinstate something lost, only do so intelligently. And this is being done now, and has been for a long time, but few notice because, simply put, people are put together very differently.
Philosophy and deep and inspiring? How about Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety? Or Levinas's Totality and Infinity? There really are many, but they are embedded. Kierkegaard is very off putting in his idiomatic style and his endless references. Levinas is impossible, at first, but then you ease into his language.
I mean, it isn't a welcome thought, but the best stuff, and it does get really good, is hard as hell to get familiar with.
Like Kant.

This much of your post seems to be in almost complete agreement with me. The only difference between us seems to be your "as close . . . that I can imagine." Why not just say "This is a genuine/correct intuition," as I do?

Could not your "there is no answer. . . . apprehended" be paraphrased “The correctness of this geometric principle/proposition cannot ultimately be proved by any discursive argument. Its correctness ultimately rests on intuition, Such intuitions are intuitions that almost everyone has, and they are correct intuitions" – ?

"we are 'shown' things through intuition, but intuition is not that which is shown."

Can you refer me to where Kant says this? Anyway, I agree.

"[Intuition's] foundation is unknowable." — Acyutananda

As to Kant, his transcendental idealism is all about representation. When an idea is put in place, and its logic on tact, this structures our world, but then there is the problem of noumena. This impossible "otherness" of all of our thoughts and experience applies to sensible intuitions as well as the transcendental ego of apperception. I would have to go over this again, read the Deduction and, well, the whole thing, but Kant's analysis takes us to the point where explanations run and even sensible talk runs out, which is why he was so reluctant to talk about noumena. It is unspeakable.

Wittgenstein made it a point to disarm knowledge of its power to penetrate the world absolutely. His argument, among others, was this: for a concept to be sensible, its opposite has to be conceivable. So to talk about something beyond thought, beyond logic, is not even conceivable. When we are faced with the question, what is logic? we really don't have even a possible response, for to have this would require something that is not logical to describe it, lest the question is begged. So while we are irrevocably IN logic, we cannot say what it is.
The "what" of what is shown is impossible to understand. One can only use logic, and observe its structure "through logic itself". All explanations are, after all, propositional.
Take a look at Rorty. Is logic really foundational? Or is it something else? How about pragmatics? I was once an infant child, a world of "blooming and buzzing". How did I come to know the world? Language was modeled, its sounds filled the air and associated with objects, experiences. Thus, IF I say a word in context C, THEN I get lots of smiles and encouragement. This conditional is foundational to language and the experience of the world. The logic of the conditional issues from this pragmatic engagement that is a basic condition to survival and reproduction, an evolutionist would argue, and the conditional is really a pragmatic function of problem solving. The scientific method is this, not a formal condition of ultimate reality, and it is science that ruled the child's acquisition of language skills. The brain evolved to be an instrument of conditional resoning because interface with the environment was essentially conditional.
Time is foundational for logic is executed in time, so it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Dewey called this end consummatory. Logic is essentially a pragmatic, a useful instrument.

Do I buy this? Yes and no. Always has to be kept in mind to conceive of anything, it is done through logic, so a pragmatic theory of logic, presupposes logic in its theorizing, for this talk about pragmatics is logical talk. This makes logic antecedent to pragmatism, doesn't it? But then, the argument itself that places logic as antecedent is itself cast in logic. So where does this lead us?

It leaves us with best guess when it comes to anything.

for it certainly isn’t Kantian — Mww

You said this. I just want to know what you mean.

But there is no “problem of one’s whole being” as something outside of heedful circumspective relationality with one’s world for Heidegger , or a ‘whole being’ outside of noetic-noematic activity for Husserl. This only becomes a problem when you create an artificial “distance between the intending agent and the world qua world”. Only then does it appear that you “stand apart from all possibilities”, rather than always BEING IN particular possibilities. — Joshs

I take this issue the way Jean Luc Marion does: Husserl's reduction is incomplete, but it has a trajectory, which is toward givenness, and givenness issues forth in a negative correlation to reduction: the more one dismisses presuppositions that, to use Levinas' term, keep the moment pinned to the "same" that is, the totality of knowledge claims, the more what is given simply, or purely, is manifest.
Yes, I'm afraid I do believe there is something transcendental about our being here. Wittgenstein insisted such things are nonsense, but then, he wrote, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This, in 1929, the same year of his Lecture on Ethics, in which put ethics in the nonsense bin. What was he talking about? It was the "presence" of ethics as an absolute. He knew it all rested with ethics and aesthetics, and he was right, AND wrong: one could not speak what ethics is, what value is, but one can speak in its vicinity. this is what Marion does. And Eugen Fink and Michel Henry.

Ok. Just wondering from whom this philosophy originated, for it certainly isn’t Kantian, in which perception does not construct anything at all. And you mentioned the CPR, so.....just connecting possible dots here. — Mww

Tell me how in Kant the perceptual act does not construct anything at all.

What does perception construct? — Mww

What doesn't it construct? I mean, the moment you say what this could be, there is a trace to a perceptual event that has to be there, the absence of which would make for nonsense. Then, how does perception construct an owl, e.g.? Do you really think when a perceptual system vacates the presence of the owl, the owl is still there?

Again? Last time you claimed I couldn't understand you unless I had read Being and Time if I recall correctly. Now I must be admitted into the mysteries of Kant before I can grasp what you say. I admit I find the ancient pagan mystery cults and their influence on and interaction with early Christianity and Gnosticism fascinating, but am surprised to find a similar reliance on rites of initiation on the one hand, and claims of exclusivity on the other, in this context. — Ciceronianus the White

Sorry about that. If you find pagan mystery cults and gnosticism fascinating, then we should be agreeing a lot more. You see, I find that, for me, the only way to consummate this kind of, well, affirmation of threshold values, intimations from something that is not found in the totality of regular thinking, is to tear down the language and general assimilative processes that continue to insist the world is as is described by big consensus that is all pervasive in our culture. Gnostic intimations are fascinating, but only from afar are they usually realized. The question is, how does this make progress deeper into the understanding? Kant and the tradition of phenomenology (and not the positivism that also has its grounding in Kant) challenges common sense, and overwhelms it when it comes to ontology. Once the dramatic move (dramatic for me) is made toward transcendental idealism, marginalized thinking that can be given its due. Kant opened two doors. One was extablishing the delimitation of meaningful utterances to what is either tautology or empirical.. The other is that while we live and think within this delimitation, there is this nebulous matter of the "outside" of this which at once impossible to conceive, yet an imposing presence in ways that Kant doesn't really take up, but post Kantian thinking makes a huge deal our of: the transcendence that somehow is present in a way that is not merely an abstraction. Kant was close to this, but then, as Kierkegaard said, we cannot forget that we actually exist.
And this moves on into an extraordinary body of literature that ends up with deconstruction (which I need to read more about). Deconstruction seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the assumptions about knowledge and the world.

You're hammering and thinking about hammering as you hammer. We're quite capable of doing both if we want to, and without distinguishing ourselves from our thinking or our hammering. — Ciceronianus the White

But I think you have in mind some kind of simple multitasking event, and no significant distinction to be made doing two different things. I would invite you think of a thoughtful engagement in the world as a world making event. Hard to take this seriously if you haven't taken up Kant Critique of Pure Reason. He defended transcendental idealism. The hammering is not an empirical observer's hammering, as if it were an object in motion, there when all perceiving agencies were absent. Rather, the hammering is an event brought into being by our meaning making, it is an event in experience, not an event out there entirely beyond our perception. To perceive is not a passive process, but constructive one.
Once this is understood, then the structures of consciousness become an ontology. We make Being by our presence, and Being is conceived as thought itself, along with, of course, the full body of experience.

So when "I" stand apart from thought, it can be seen as a schism in ontology.

First, the term 'thought' is rather vague, isn't it? I'm not asking for a definition of 'thought', but a distinction can be made between the habitual flow of thought, the 'inner voice' which accompanies all our waking moments, and the kind of thought that characterises the attainment of insight or the pursuit of rigorous principles in mathematics, or engagement in a creative act, for example. 'Thought' exists on a lot of levels from the transitory to the foundational so using it as a general term is not sufficiently precise, in my view. — Wayfarer

I put thought in the front seat because thought is a reflection of the structure of experience, and generally it has been believed that while incidental matters come and go, thought sustains (going back to Parmenides). However, I don't think thought is the be all and end all. It is essential, for the present is structured by thought--no logic, then no human experience to talk about the weather or say hello (but I further believe that animals possess a proto-rationality. Our conditional proposition, say, is grounded in experience in a very primitive way, which is anticipation, and they clearly anticipate, and they negate, the grass being greener here than there, and so forth).

But of course, you're right about thought being far more tan the simple term suggests. It is a, if you will, thought experiment of mine in which I think, then observe my thoughts as I do so. This act of reflection has a qualitative distinction to it, apart from the usual kinds of reflection that come up when you're looking for your keys. Looking for keys is a disengagement from what you want to actually do, and is "removed" from this. It is an openness that was supposed to be a closed, routine affair. But to observe the looking, to stand apart from all possible modes of Being by retreating from Being altogether, and not encountering the world as a problem to be solved, but to simply stand apart from the totality of all possible engagement, this is an extraordinary event.

As for the structure 'dominating in describing the world' - I agree that the mind interprets experience according to the structured processes of apperception that are built up by the process of socialisation, education, and so on. That we can't step outside that structure and see 'the world as it is' in another way (although the significance of the term 'ecstacy' might be noted, as it means precisely ex- stasis, outside the normal state.) However, I think that realising that the 'structure of the mind' does this, is extremely important, in fact it's the very first step in philosophy proper (as for example in the opening paragraph of World as Will and Representation.) Few attain it. — Wayfarer

Well, I think you're quite right about that. The question that follows on this is, what IS it that one is doing and what is it that one encounters? In order to continue to be the agency called "myself" there must be something of that apperceiving event that is essential, surviving the apophatic process of elimination. The closer one gets to the "purity" of the present, the reductive finality (I am using Husserl's jargon. See his phenomenological reduction) the more revelatory. It is really because of the this that I take up the issue at all. If the reduction (again, Husserl's epoche) simply yielded more boring reality, a reduced form of the Same (this idea is played out in Levinas. See his Totality and Infinity), then it would dissolve into nihilism.
But this is not what happens. It is an uncanny event such that, as Levinas puts it, the idea is exceeded by the ideatum, the passion is not confined to the totality of that of which one can be passionate about. Transcendence is not an abstraction. It is embedded in existence, that is, us. We usually consider eternity to be simply beyond all things, and give it little attention, but it is actually deeply existential. Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety is an extraordinary read.

As for 'thought thinking about itself', in one way that is true - I'm doing it now, writing this post. But in another way, it cannot be true. There is a saying from the Upaniṣads, 'the eye can see another, but cannot see itself, the hand can grasp another, but cannot grasp itself.' That is an analogy for the impossibility of the mind making an object of itself, which it can't do, for just that reason. Knowledge, generally, presumes that separation of knower and known - but in the case of the question 'who or what is the knower', we're not outside of or separate from the object, or, put another way, object and subject are the same. The response to which ought to be something very like the Husserlian Epoché. — Wayfarer

Apophatic theology, it is called in the West. Post Husserlians, the post modern French philosophers, give very useful analyses of the only logical meaning of the epoche: it is a drive for givenness, the givenness of the world in thepresent (Jean Luc Marion, Janicaud, Michel Henry). And I thought Eugen Fink's Sixth Meditation a penetrating attempt to describe the foundations of phenomenological production. I find these philosophers, and others, helpful because in elaborating, in building systems of thought about the epoche, there is a tearing down of the totality that spontaneously rules our thinking. Heidegger is very helpful, not because I agree with everything he said, but because his Kierkegaardian influences give his Being and Time an openess to exploring that critical moment when a person stands before the world and the question of Being looms large. And here, one stands at a distance to all claims of knowing, to, I am claiming here, the thoughtful ego itself.

But even during the breakdown of the hammering, the being drawn to the broken hammer still belongs to and gets its sense from the totality of relevance of the pragmatic activity of hammering. So this openness is constrained by the larger purposes of which it is a part. And the successful and uncomplicated hammering activity itself is not devoid of freedom of decision. It is a more primordial engagement with things in the form of taking care of them. This engagement with the work rather than staring at the broken hammer represents a greater openness to the world via our pragmatic engagement with it. — Joshs

But it is not pragmatic engagement all the way down. Sure, when you turn the key and the car doesn't start, you don't have an existential crisis, but turn quickly to alternatives that hover near by. But the problem of one's whole Being has no ready to hand. When there is distance between the intending agent and the world qua world, one stands apart from all possibilities, and they are suspended.
In a letter to Rudolf Otto, Husserl said his epoche had a profound effect on many of his students' religious thinking. He himself was so moved.

I believe that correct intuitions exist and are monumentally important. But I don't see why for every correct intuition that exists (there is a maximum of one correct intuition per issue), I should consider all the many incorrect intuitions that might exist on the same issue to be monumentally important. — Acyutananda

But it is the very notion of intuition itself that is at issue. Does the concept make sense at all, apart from the casual talk about premonitions and feelings? If you try to give an example of an intuition, can it be defended as truly irreducible? How about my favorite intuition, causality? Try to imagine a spontaneous effect, ex nihilo. Can't be done; I mean knock down, drag out, impossible, a causeless event. Why? Just the way it is. Then there is logic, geometry, math and pretty much that's it. These amount to the same thing, it has been argued, but note, there is no answer to the question, why? Why does the leg opposite the largest angle of a triangle have to be the longest leg?
This is about as close to a genuine intuition that I can imagine. I don't deny that such things are intuitively apprehended. It gets difficult, here, frankly. 1) Is Kant right, and our intuitions are just representations? This would place it in Kant's world, where we are "shown" things through intuition, but intuition is not that which is shown. Its foundation is unknowable. Therefore, intuitions are constructs, and therefore contingent. 2) Enter Derrida's world. I don't know this that well, but as I see it, all thought is part of a web of contingency, no one idea stands alone. I say modus ponens, but these term get there meanings, their sense, from their play against what they are not. Up makes no sense unless down is there to be posited. There IS no stand alone proposition, for all ideas are like this. Thus an intuitively apprehended truth is really an embedded truth, for each part of the utterance is utterly senseless in and of itself. This makes all truth contingent.

But Heidegger would never say that the ‘I’ stands apart from the thought , and neither would Husserl, so your transcendental ego is not the ego of phenomenology but of Kant. — Joshs

But the question does bring the structural feature of dasein, freedom. The hammer is ready to hand, but when the head flies off the hammer, the nail is missed, something goes awry, the ready to hand yields to an openness as to what to do. This is freedom, the vacancy of rote behavior.
I use Heidegger to make my point, which is not Heidegger's, for I think the question really IS the outset ofreligious piety. The question is what makes the space that is the liberation from dasein possible. Not Kant. Kierkegaard.

There is mechanical associative thought and conscious thought. Dostoyevsky describes mechanical thought:

“Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

Plato refers to conscious thought which begins with forms. It is the process of immediate intuition, apprehension, or mental 'seeing' of principles. Can the philosopher become capable of more than babble and pouring from the empty into the void? Can the philosopher stand apart from mechanical thought so as to invite conscious thought to respond to the deeper questions or the aim of philosophy as the need for meaning? — Nikolas

As to Dostoyevsky, What I am defending is rather up his alley, for what it means to Put distance" between oneself and thought is to deny the priveleged place of reason in defined what it is to be human. It is an antirationalist position. Where the underground man says, am I a piano key? here, the answer is no, for the rationality that would lay claim to choice, to meaning (remember Kierkegaard who mused that Hegel had forgotten that we actually exist!), is denied, and what takes its place? Freedom. the freedom to deny the dictates of reason.

Plato: the mechanical thought, as you put it, has an inevitable place, certainly, but keep in mind that thought has no content. It is merely the form of meaningful utterance, so while a person is bound to rationality for the very thinking itself, rationality is bound to nothing save the power of the tautology and the contradiction. Outside of this, the thought that would claim me is always subject to second guessing regarding content. Reason does not tell us to be good, healthy; as Hume put it, reason would just as soon annihilate the human race.

When one thinks, one is doing something. Thinking is conduct resulting from interaction with the rest of the world. It's inapposite to say that we observe ourselves when we're doing something, as if we're watching ourselves when we, e.g., walk. When I walk, I don't observe myself walking, I merely walk.
I'm aware that I'm walking, but that isn't the same as observing myself walking. There is no me apart from the me that is walking, observing the walking me.

We can certainly think about what we do. We may also think about how we think. But in doing so we don't stand apart from ourselves, we're just thinking (something we do). Understanding this, we don't create entities out of metaphors, which is to say needlessly. — Ciceronianus the White

Saying thinking is conduct merely exchanges one problematic word for another. Conduct, how one comports oneself, it too confining. Thought is an event, in time. This works best. But then, there are other features that cannot be simply dismissed. I walk along, but how is it I know this? Not IN the walking, certainly, for walking is not a reflective affair. Only when I stand apart from it, if, say, I trip, or something stands in my way, then walking is suspended, pending a resolution. Of course, I may take up other "issues" about walking int his suspension a well. I may ask, what is the nature of "knowing" how to walk at all? I could take the idea of walking up in a variety of contests. But consider, I walk, and AS I walk, I place the event of walking in before my awareness. This is a different event altogether from merely carrying out a well practiced routine. When one is walking, it might be said, the walker IS the walking, and if one is hammering one IS the hammering. Just so, when one IS thinking, one IS the thinking, but here is the rub: When I place my thinking before my awareness, I am not the thing I am aware of. Just as when I stop hammering and consider what hammering is about, or, while hammering I allow my attention to pull apart from the rote, physical process and "observe" the unfolding of the hand grasping the handle, the muscles squeezing, and so on, I no longer AM simply the act of hammering. I am doing something altogether different.
This "difference" makes the distance I refer to above. I argue that this distance always has its object, but all that is can be made an object, and so there is no one thing that the subjective end's egoic center can identify with.

I have little formal background in Western philosophy, but I'm under the impression that in Western philosophy, propositions such as "'2 + 2 = 4' cannot be proved, but rather rests on intuition" and "'A square must be rectangular' cannot be proved, but rather rests on intuition" are rejected, or considered true but trivial. If my impression is correct, I would like to know why such propositions are rejected, or considered true but trivial. — Acyutananda

To see this, you have to try to conceive of something as being irreducible, which is what an intuition is supposed to be, a non discursive disclosure, a "knowing" that issues straight out of the belly of the world, unmediated by anything else. If something like this actually existed, it would be monumentally important, as if God had written it on tablets, but with out the God or other weird metaphysics. As if Being "spoke" its nature.

Of course, logic and math are intuitive, you might say, but is it true that these are simple, irreducible things? Just because thought cannot get "behind" logic, because doing so would require logic, doesn't mean logic is IT. It is not accessible, but only shown, but, as Wittgenstein tells us, even to talk like this is nonsense. A true expression of intuition cannot be made sense of at all, for the language one is using to express it cannot stand apart from itself. even if it could, a third perspective would then arise to validate this, a third medium that is NOT logic, and this is not conceivable.

Thanks. In my experience if people can't tell in their own words what they just read, then they either did not read it, or read it and did not understand it. There is proposition by Heimleitslaufen, "Anything that can be said can be said clearly." If it is beyond the reader's ability to say clearly what they read, then they can't say it at all, and if they can't say it at all, then they have no clue what it is about.

Please don't take my opinion to heart. It is, after all, only an opinion, and site unseen, too. — god must be atheist

Well, you have to see that some things are embedded. To explain them takes time, for the clarity is not really simple. It is contextually conceived, as are all things. For example. I am reading, slowly, through John Caputo's Weakness of God. He finds Derrida to be an apophatic philosopher who destroys all attempts to ground and center thinking, rendering the spoken word hanging, something of a lost cause to respond to philosophy's inquiries. Language is structured to make this impossible. Language is the "totality" that is "always, already" in place to construct meanings, and this totality has no, as Wittgenstein would put it, boundaries (for, to keep with W, a boundary makes sense on both sides, and there is no "other side" of logic and language; such a thing cannot be conceived)
Now, I am no professional philosopher (thank God! All the meetings and need to publish and argue constantly entirely offends philosophy's mission), but I read, and read about what I've read and understand as best I can. I say this as a disclaimer in case someone comes nosing around and notes an error. Certainly possible!; but clearly, it is Husserl we have to deal with first. To understanding Derrida, one has to see things through the eyes of the transcendental reduction. For this, you would have to read his Ideas I. But for here: sit in a nice comfy chair and observe the world. You are NOT having a purely perceptual experience. Rather, it is apperceptive: you bring into the event of simple observation structures of experience and its recollections. If you've read Kant, you know that reason pervades the simplest of encounters. Here, it is the same, only more so, much more. Husserl builds eidetic heirarchies of "regions" of thought that attend the simplest observations. I see my cat under the table. I know tables, and chairs, that cats sit under them, and there is the idea that things are under, over, on top, and that tables qualify as something that cats can be under, as opposed to tractors and super novas, and so on, and so on. If you look at the way observations are grounded in familiarity, how they just appear "as they are" with no questions asked, you find that what it is that grounds them is not some material "isness" that presents itself, but the past that constructs a future IN the fleeting present.
It is this "present" that I find very close to the holy grail of philosophy. Kierkegaard (Wittgenstein chiming in) in his Concept of Anxiety refers to the "eternal present". I argue that while one sits comfortably considering these ideas, one is, as the Buddhists say, already the Buddha. What does this mean? It means that beneath the language that streams through our minds when we discuss matters, and beneath the "instrumentality" of what Heidegger calls ready to hand, and beneath the unconscious engagements in t he world, there is the liberation and enlightenment.
Such thinking has one purpose, which is to lead one to liberation and enlightenment. It is an attempt to "talk one's way" into understanding the most simple of things. Derrida is just a part of this. He was no Buddhist, but he was "right" about language.

What is a "Derrida"? I actually don't know, and now it bugs me. — god must be atheist

Why ask me? Go read Derrida. But then, you would have to read more than Derrida for this. Why not do what I did: I just decided one day that I wasn't going to not understand Heidegger any more, so I got an pdf copy of Being and Time and read it. One thing led to another. Derrida is post Heidegger.
It "bugged" me enough that I had to read it. I can't tell you what it is, and if I tried you would think it nonsense.
That is just the way it is. I can say it is worth every page, torturous as they might be on occasion. I have many, many such pdf's. You are welcome to them.

Purifying the citta is not an easy task; or at least some think it's not an easy task.
The basic principles are easy enough, but putting them into action, every hour of every day, is quite another matter. — baker

But the point I want to emphasize is that it really has nothing at all to do with basic principles. These are just a means to an end, and the every hour every day putting to action is not to be understood as a principle based life, not at all. It is supposed to be about living beyond principles.

I like to think of it as if I were that man himself under the Bodhi tree 2500 years ago. What happened? It was not in the abstract, as a discursive argument running through the mind. Rather, it was a moment of complete freedom in which "ultimate reality" was understood to be what was there all along, but occluded by the everydayness of language and culture. Ultimate because language IS the finitude that interprets the world for us, and it is feeling-toned, as the psychologists would put it, a "sublimation" of our desires. Language, the phenomenologists tell us, is the hermeneutical binding of object to perceiver, out of which is constructed the personality and its affections. If you read existential thinking, you would understand that thought itself is the enemy of enlightenment. Thought is not some weak symbolic label; it is the individual's history, memory, familiarity and experience that construct the present moment's reality. We do not live in the "present". The present is "impossible", the absence of time and identity and knowledge. I think under the tree, he experienced complete freedom in the "eternal present" where eternal is understood (and this is Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, et al) as an absence of time, an absence of anticipating what comes next, a freedom from recollection's spontaneous hold on the here and now that entirely possesses science and what Husserl calls the "naturalistic attitude".
This is what is missing in the Abhidhammattha Sangaha: an account of the structure of enlightenment. Buddhism is essentially an apophatic practice that cancels language's pragmatic imposition of Time upon experience (as to pragmatic, see Heidegger, see the pragmatists).
I think this is what Buddhism is really about. Hinduism, too. And Christianity.

Such a thing exists: — baker

Should have led with this.

Reading: https://www.saraniya.com/books/meditation/Bhikkhu_Bodhi-Comprehensive_Manual_of_Abhidhamma.pdf
Also here: https://www.buddhistelibrary.org/en/displayimage.php?album=2&pid=1947#top_display_media

So I went to these texts and after I waded through the sheer bulk, I conclude that all is for one thing and only one thing, all of the nuanced emotional, tendentious descriptions of unwholesome and wholesome experiences, serve to encourage the purification of Citta. The rest, impressive in its bulk, is contingent, could have been accounted for, listed, enumerated, categorized, differently, or really, not at all. The irony strikes me: this that I read through is a reduced form of the Abhidhamma, the Abhidhammatha Sangaha, so, such massive bulk belies the simplicity of the Buddhist essence. I have to wonder what the need is for all this analysis if the point is NOT complexity but simplicity. Sure, some of this is useful, but passages like the one that says animals are reborn due to evil kamma. or the teaching that one should associate putrid thoughts with desires to be rid of the desire, these are the products of ancient thinking, and can produce terrible neuroses, I imagine.
I have also read that much of this not to be part of the original teaching. I suspect that extraordinary person 2500 years or so ago was certainly NOT the overwrought anal retentive type that would commit this to the "canon".
I tried to be objective, but in the final estimation, all that is essential to Buddhism is what happened when that man experienced the purity of Citta and the liberation from the "becoming" of psycho-physical existence. I think this nibbana was a deeply profound event, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the point of it all the fuss of being human.

We're part of an unimaginably huge universe and fall into despair because it's not what we think it should be. It fails to meet our expectations. Doesn't it seem we're a bit too full of ourselves? The ancients, like Horace, were wiser than we are.

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair. — Ciceronianus the White

Or perhaps not full of ourselves enough. I lean more towards Emerson. From his Nature, walking through a bare common:

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,.— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

One of the perspectives that one can derive from Early Buddhism is that an insight into rebirth follows from an insight into the workings of karma. As in: There is karma, therefore, there is rebirth. Which is why rebirth is not a metaphysical idea the way heaven, hell, etc. in Christianity or Hinduism are, or Platonic forms. — baker

If karma were to be conceived within a social and ethical framework of our affairs then it would be fairly clear" you reap what you sew. But reincarnation carries this idea into the great beyond, where an enduring core entity carries vices and virtues onward after physical death to another life. This cannot be confirmed empirically, but is meant to be required ethically, or, metaethically, into affairs unseen.
I actually think this has merit. I have often argued for moral realism. One does have to put side naïve religious metaphysics, though, in order to consider things clearly, and after one then reviews the ancient writing and discovers what is there that is important and enduring.

It's difficult to have a conversation on a very specific topic when not all involved are familiar enough with Buddhist doctrine. And it's too much to try to bring in all relevant references and clarify all points of contention at once. — baker

I am currently reading relevant references of the Pali canon. So far, everything is question begging. This is NOT a criticism, but a naturally occurring failing of ancient thinking. Reading on.

One could reflect this way and act accordingly, over and over again, day in day out. With nothing further, in terms of doctrinal points.
It's a kind of actionable religious/spiritual meta-minimalism that I haven't seen in any other religion/spirituality that I know of. — baker

Essentially this passage says one thing: Quiet is quiet, the absolute absence of attachment-affect and thought. A good passage, I thought, because it speaks to the struggle to earnestness which is self defeating. Of course, it does not speak about the structure of the quite interior, which is the philosophy of quietude, which is liberation into the present moment. The point I would make is this: The events in the middle of a consciousness in the karmic "struggle not to struggle" are not nonsense to description.

A case in point: karma is an ethical necessity, for the world is not stand alone, not ethicall complete unless the meaning of our affairs extends beyond our sight. This is the, well, REAL basis of karmic postulation, and the details of which regarding desert, responsibility, guilt and so on, are beyond our ken; we just know that it cannot stand, children being tortured at birth, etc. I take this as imposing and apodictic as causality itself. This quietude, then, what is the real basis of it? What happens when one goes quiet and attachments vanish? This is also, and foundationally, a question about language and value, for the subtlest attachments lie with "taking the world AS" language, thereby allowing language hold sway over experience, and this is existentially reductive--very slippery idea that the ordinariness of our perceptions of the world is made so by the language that conceives it, for to think it is to use language! And this is why I think Buddhism is so important, for it underscores this quietude of thought as well as affect, thereby shutting down the engaged self in the world. Death with a pulse, meant here not in derogation, but simply description. But conscious death? Fascinating, not just to theory, but to existence.
Issues such as these are not in the Pali canon as I have seen. You can say they are outside of Buddhism, but this is simply not true. They follow through on Buddhism's basic claims; they are the philosophy that gives analysis to these.

For this, you'd actually need to know what Early Buddhism is, which you don't seem to. — baker

Then, if would, disabuse me on this. I claim that any passage you can provide, I can show where the questions are begged and analysis wanting. Keep in mind, it is not the method I am interested in, for the many things put out in the many dialogues do present method, discipline, a way to conceptually penetrate through apparent aporias. What I want is a philosophical exposition of Buddhism at the level of basic assumptions. One cannot say this is not about Buddhism.

No, rather it's that you simply don't know the suttas. You're dismissing something without even knowing what it is. You're tailoring Early Buddhism after Christianity. I'm trying to show that it's not like it. — baker

The more I read, the more it is confirmed that there is a deficit of analysis. I don't think Christianity is helpful. There just happens to be an analogous error in sticking to Biblical scripture for a compelling understanding of, say, God's grace, redemption, sin, and so on.

Further evidence that you don't know the suttas, yet are dismissing them.
You're devising your own parallel Buddhism, and I don't quite see the point in doing that. — baker

I am guessing this is due to not be interested in a penetrating philosophical account of what your passage says:not to passion; to being unfettered, not to being fettered; to shedding, not to accumulating; to modesty, not to self-aggrandizement; to contentment, not to discontent; to seclusion, not to entanglement; to aroused persistence, not to laziness; to being unburdensome, not to being burdensome
These "nots" go where? Relative to what? What is there in the egoic center that does not vanish, and how is this related to meaning, value. What is a phenomenological description of the temporality in the "effort" toward noneffort? What is happening at the level of basic assumptions? the implications regarding a concept of self and the world?
Buddhism possesses many possible avenues of inquiry. Of course, you could take the Wittgensteinian approach and simply dismiss it all and do as directed. But I think liberation and enlightenment holds more than this. Likely much more.

In fact you do, with your implicit dogmatism, in the way you approach religious epistemology. — baker

Not dogmatism. I head in exactly the opposite direction of this, you should observe. Hinduism has an explicit metaphysics that agrees with meditation in some ways. to put it enigmatically, the only way to put it, I hold that eternity and finitude are coextensive, co existent, and the living moments, trivial as they may be, are eternal "as well"; and the reason I take a shine to Hinduism is that it talks about the (shankaracharya, et al) illusion, maya, the error in daily perception, in a way that has some sense to it: the "error" lies in the finitude, and the finitude is language, culture, familiarity, and all the hallmarks of Heidegger's "dasein". (Know that this curious bit of metaphysics does not take eternity as endless counting of time sequences or spatial extensions. It is here, in the eternal present)

Things are simply the way they are. They don't give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering? No. It's simply a thorn. It doesn't give suffering to anybody. If we step on it, we suffer immediately.

Why do we suffer? Because we stepped on it. So the suffering comes from us. — baker

Things are simply the way things are? But this statement is descriptively empty. I am not saying a person should not abide by this. I am saying there IS such a thing as a phenomenological analysis of the way things are. Massively descriptive in ways unimagined unless one reads the texts. The book Skill in Questions is, as I read through it, a demonstration of the Socratic method present in the Buddha's teaching. Note that these are verbal strategies to enlightenment, and I am not that curious about these. I want to know what enlightenment IS, and the only way to address this question is to look not at the how the Buddha cleverly responded to questions, but the a description of the phenomenal context. Do you really think the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist? The only way to bear this our is by meditating oneself, understanding the nature of meditation and how it serves to "suspend" the thought that would otherwise take possession of the moment. Then where are the writings to show this?