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?

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. — Ciceronianus the White

I'll let Wallace Stevens have the final world on this. Only to add that the final two lines is the consummation of all that went before, for how can nothing behold anything, and poeticize it? You may find this odd, but this "nothing" is at the very heart of existential thought. It is the essence of our freedom.

If you don't even understand the relevance of virtuous behavior for epistemic purposes, then I'm not sure what to tell you. — baker

Hmmm, I think language is essentially a pragmatic epistemology, true, and by this I mean pragmatics in the literal sense: a term is an inherent proposition, and all such things are in time, performative events. The question is, what practical good is there in virtuous behavior regarding liberation and enlightenment? And here it is the eight fold path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. Well, there are a hundred ways I can think of to direct a person to a disciplined life, but the bottom line is not the virtuous behavior, is it? This would be simply dogmatic governing of living. The point is not this. It is liberation. How this is achieved is not a singular path, though all paths are of the same nature, which is a turning away from the many engagements towards a rather mystical unity. That term mystical is mine, and is one reason I don't care to ask the Buddha if it is authorized: when one turns away from everydayness, one takes normal standards of interpreting the world away as well. One is no longer anywhere, and this is the marvel of it all, beholding the world no longer as the world, not as anything. My claim is that this is a profound experience, rapturous and outside the currents of thought that hold powerful sway over our collective understanding of what the world is.
One can rightly say, there is only one virtue, and that is achieving the extraordinary state of mind, not to put too fine a point on it, achieved by the Buddha.

Anyway, I've been engaging in some discussions of Buddhism in an effort to find closure to my involvement with Buddhism. But it's only in these discussions lately that I've come to realize that even though early Buddhism seemed so natural to me (and still does), I'm beginning to see just how foreign early Buddhism is to many other people ... I've gravely underestimated that for some 20 years. — baker

If the Buddha was an extraordinary phenomenologist (your linked essay) then why not just do what phenomenologists do with Buddhism in the world and forget what is natural or foreign? Think philosophically about meditation, liberation and enlightenment. The world he lived in long ago was the same sun rising and setting of today, and those extraordinary people aggrandized by time were just like you and me, and for Buddha, he had none of his own teachings to guide him, but synthesized for himself what he deemed right out of the existing culture, one at that time when becoming a sadhu was the be all and end all.

So, let's do just that. Wittgenstein was wise to recommend silence. Silence saves us from trying to say in words what can't be described in words, but can only be asserted or named as something. Or Nothing? Is Nothing something which can be shown, at least, even to such as me? Perhaps I'll know the Nothing only when and if I'm suspended in dread. But then, how will I know when I'm suspended in dread, or what dread is for that matter? Will I know it when I'm suspended in it? — Ciceronianus the White

Pass over in silence. OR, just read Heidegger, and put aside his flirtation with monsters. Husserl, too. Then Kierkegaard is behind them, and Kant behind him, with Hegel, who is a whole new dimension of weird, that gets less weird the more you read in the field. What can I say, one say I picked up Heidegger determined to understand him, and the world of phenomenology opened up in time. Now I can't stay away. Reading Caputo on Derrida and radical hermeneutics, and the French post Heideggerians, very religious, since Husserl opened religion to Kierkegaard, and in all this there is actual insight I never remotely thought possible.
I often say to other in such a conversation, you are what you read. Never well received, because it is tantamount to telling others to read what I want them to read. But one has, once they get into a lived life, already "read" his or her way into things. If you have the patience for Jerry Fodor (didn't you say you read him?), Dewey and others, why not pick up a copy of Husserl's IDEAS I? For dread, Kierkegaard's "Concept of Anxiety" which you will certainly find off putting for its religious leaning, but then, it is really not religious at all if you continue reading.
As to knowing it once you are suspended in it....perhaps.

The secular Buddhist movement tries to separate what they see as retreivable from Buddhism from what they see as the 'metaphysical trappings'. They might say that re-birth was not really part of Early Buddhism, it was imported into the tradition from external sources. That is what the article that baker linked to was written in response to. — Wayfarer

To me, rebirth is a metaphysical idea, only to be approached by first observing the world. I mean, this is how metaphysics has any reasonable standing at all. Otherwise, one might as well be talking about cherubs and demons and Platonic forms. Wittgenstein (and Kant, et al) claimed that even when one gets down to extrapolating from the observed to "that which must be the case given the observed" there is no room for sensible thought. I think this is wrong, but it largely issues from the kind of thinking that sees no possibility in non discursive intuitive experiences that have something other than logical "content". Intuition is a four letter word in philosophy. But meditation, I claim, brings one to some extraordinary intimation that actually realizes what Kierkegaard, as well as Wittgenstein, called the eternal present, what I consider to be the most profound philosophical encounter possible. But this: I am not interested in early Buddhism any more than Kierkegaard is interested in Christendom. I look to its essential features, and by essential I mean what is conducive to liberation and enlightenment, the brass ring of all Eastern philosophy.
I am trying to accommodate baker, but he wants Buddhism to stay in the comfort of the 650 BCE's. This is an extraordinary time, granted, and but there was a deficit in interpretative language to explain it. IT being meditation and the place of realization deep in the interior of the self. Everything else is incidental, historically important, of course, but Hinayana, Mahayana, Hinduism and its Vedanta and the intellectual/cultural practices, the metaphysics that is part of this, the synthesis of Taoism and Buddhism, Korean Won Buddhism, Japanese Zen, and on and on are mostly about contexts of contingency, grounding things so we can talk about them, get university degrees in this talk. But meditation has nothing to do with history, and the Buddha would agree with me. The eight fold path has one purpose, that it can contribute liberation and enlightenment. It is a method. Consider if I were to discover a means to God's grace, and it were actuallytrue, literally-- Christ himself would yield. I think were the Buddha equipped with phenomenological philosophy, he would yield to this, because it is an extension in language of what occurs in meditation. He would then tell us quite emphatically that the moment one even begins the conversation, with which he just agreed, one has fallen away form the whole point. Sounds a LOT like Wittgenstein who speaks about what he insists will cannot be spoken.

It's not a question of interpretation, but of the background of Buddha's teaching, which assumes the reality of saṃsāra, the eternal round of re-birth. So it's a soteriological doctrine, in academic language. Kant, and the others, did not assume that background, although Kant did have something to say about God, freedom and immortality, and those soteriological concerns are present in a greater or lesser degree in the others you mention (not all of whom I have read, but I believe Levinas was a religious philosopher.) — Wayfarer

When I say interpretation was not the Buddha's forte, I simply mean he, the "extraordinary phenomenologist" as the paper called him, was the embodiment of exactly where philosophy needs to go. Derrida put the nail in the coffin of Western philosophy, but the nail was really always already there. An attack on language is an attack on what can be said vis a vis the world, telling us clearly that it is time philosophy went silent, as language was cluttering thought, interfering, misleading, confusing. Language is the "final attachment" to use a Buddhist's terms, for once one can control appetites and affectivity, then there remains familiarity, memory and what Husserl called predelineation: the eidetic hold language has on the present (though he didn't think it an issue). Here is where phenomenology is useful, for so many get to the point where taming attachments does not make for the final movement, for the attachment is implicit, unseen, IN the simple apprehension of the world AS world. How to make the move to the "eternal present" is a fascinating matter. I somewhat challenge the idea that the Buddha understood this, and that all that could be said and realized about meditation and liberation and enlightenment. Blasphemy, of course. I lean more toward Hinduism.

Belief in re-birth in any form is tacitly forbidden in Western discourse (save for in some of the underground movements like gnosticism, hermeticism and so on.) But it seems to me, remove that background from Buddhism, and it loses its overall rationale. — Wayfarer

Yes, analytic philosophy is not able to take metaphysics at all seriously, not as some sort of philosophical foundation. Wittgenstein is in part responsible for exactly the thinking posted in the OP here: a ban on what is not clear. Thus you have a hundred years or so of analytic thinking trying its best to make philosophical concepts conform to existing standards of clarity, which is largely what science says. Has gone nowhere.

As I see it, there is only one basis for belief in reincarnation, and that is the metaethical argument that I have tried make clear several times here and there. Put briefly, the world is ethically impossible without something like reincarnation and samsara. It is a complex argument, but it is a metaphysical one that moves from the world to what must be the case given the way the world is, adn the world demands an explanatory extension where observation cannot go. Pretty simple, really: Why, are we born to suffer and die? is a question that haunts us. The question then goes to suffering and I have put this forth earlier elsewhere more than once. If you like, because it IS after all THE issue of the world and the self, we can discuss this.

Again, I beg to differ. All scientific propositions are falsifiable, but mathematical and logical ones are not falsifiable — god must be atheist

Now there is an issue. Not falsifiable, but then are logical propositions really propositions at all? they have the form of a proposition, but exhibit only form. All logical propositions are simply tautologically true, says Wittgenstein. But on the other hand, and I will review this if you want to take issue, Quine's Two Dogmas attempts to show that analyticity never holds up, for terms are never really the same. All bachelors are male is supposed to be analytically true, but what does one do about the "sense" the terms? Also consider, and this one is especially compelling: a proposition is a temporal event, thus although, say, modus ponens, is logically valid, in the space of time it is uttered, the P, of "if P then Q" will not be identical to the P of the next premise, for their actuality is found in two different temporal events. this applies even to "P is P" for there is really no true sameness in identity. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'.
Finally, when what is the foundation for logic? Intuition. What is this, that is, what is "behind" logic that gives logic its justification? In order to see this, we would need another standard of assessment, which would in turn need another such standard. Logic, says Wittgenstein, is transcendental. It "shows" but does not explain itself for the generative source is outside logic, which is nonsense, of course. The point I would make is this: where is the warrant for excepting logic as self justifying? Granted, we are not in a postiion to choose, but nor are we in a position to justify.

When you say "All things that can be said can be said with clarity" then you make a proposition which is falsifiable. I falsified the current one in question in my argument (won't bore you by repeating it). If you don't want to make it falsifiable, you have to make it into a squeaky-clean, logically unassailable statement, whereby you state your necessary assumptions to be present to make the proposition true. If you don't say the assumptions, the reader is not obliged to assume the same things as the author. — god must be atheist

You sound like Derrida. Keep in mind this: that even while Derrida insisted that there the "trace" always seized upon meaning rendering all communication indeterminate (interlocutors all different in the interpretative grounds for receiving others' utterances), he still had pragmatic success in his works and in everyday speaking and listening.

Alas, I really don't understand what you mean. The world is a world in which we commit acts, necessarily, because we're part of the world. It isn't a world in which we don't commit them, as we commit an act whenever we interact with the rest of the world; we do so every moment we're alive. The judgments we make are necessarily human, like all else we do resulting from our interaction with other parts of the world. We can't take ourselves out of the world to consider as if we were outside it, nor do I know of any reason why we should want to do so, but that seems to be what you imagine can be done. How do you imagine a human would "simply report" what the world is if not as would any human embedded in and formed by the rest of the world? — Ciceronianus the White

I would stop you at "the world is the world". The question is, I surmise, about "fun and gloom and gangrene and Haagen das" and the claim I made: "the value dimension of experience can be identified context free AS a direct intimation of the world."

Just as a reminder, I am responding to your claim about a "hyperbolically negative attitude toward life." My response is not about taking "ourselves out of the world to consider as if we were outside it" at all. Rather, I want to look directly at the world. Talk about what may or may not be or should or shouldn't be "other" than this cannot proceed until the world is observed in earnest, like an empirical scientist who wants to classify something and has to first observe its properties.
But here, we are doing empirical science, but phenomenological "science" (Husserl) which deals with the structures of experience. There is logic, e.g., a term for the very structure of thought itself, and is there, antecedent to doing any empirical work. There is pragmatics, which attempts ground logic in end-looking problem solving (I think this right). And there is value, and this is where my attention is. Analysis proceeds from experience itself, and there is the convicted 15 year old dancer in the moonlight to be burned alive (horrific examples are the most poignant). I am very simply asking, what IS this horror, pain and the rest. I find G E Moore's answer (Principia Ethica) the only one viable: the experience of pain is a non natural property, sui generis, irreducible, as Kierkegaard would put it, its own presupposition.
Everything else follows on this.
To give this some perspective, consider the term "good". There are two kinds, contingent and absolute (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, very short and to the point, online: http://sackett.net/WittgensteinEthics.pdf). Contingencies are very common: that is a good couch. Why? It is wide enough, comfortable ,and so on. W says absolutes are nonsense, and it is important to know that he is talking about the philosophical examination of ethics that looks for a foundation. Impossible, God's world. He writes, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This matter goes to the girl's actual suffering, the "badness" of it. On the stake as the flames scorch the flesh, this is not a simple fact of the world, like my shoe being untied or alluvial weathering. We are "out" of the factual, for there is in the simple analysis this sui generis, non natural "presence".

See here for the answer: The Truth of Rebirth And Why it Matters for Buddhist Practice. — baker

I read it, or significant parts of it. first, I did like, and frankly, already understood, that, "The Buddha was a radical phenomenologist in that he dealt with experience on its own terms." Meditation is the ultimate phenomenological reduction, more radical than Husserl imagined, and in fact, the consummation of his epoche. Radical because, while Kierkegaard talks about the eternal present and Derrida performs the ultimate in apophatic thinking, that is, he annihilates any and all foundational possibilities in knowledge claims, meditation takes these claims to actuality. all phenomenologists have as the centerpiece of philosophy, Time. Our existence is an event, and all that we encounter is an event. My couch is an event. So, when I come across ideas like those in "The Truth of Rebirth...." I first look for something that has the explanatory depth of Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Nancy, Marion, Derrida, et all, and find it absent. This is not to say at all that the Buddha didn't have it right, but it is to say that interpretation was not his forte.
Yes, of course, blasphemy, but interpretation is thought, not prereflecitve experience. As a child I can tell you in all candor that the world was perfect at times. intimations of immortality, as Wordsworth put it-- "trailing clouds of glory," that was childhood, without exaggeration. But as I grew up, this was forgotten, and at the time, I had no ability to articulate it. I think the Buddha was clear as a bell as to the experience of liberation, but the interpretative language available failed him.

I don't know what happens in that event, because what you describe is some new-agey meditation mishamash that has nothing to do with Buddhism. — baker

Sounds like you are saying meditation is not sitting quietly and doing nothing. This is Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki speaking. If you take issue with it, then pray tell.

Well, as long as those self-declared "Buddhists" are also New Agers or practitioners of corporate mindfulness (that's a term, look it up). — baker

You have an ax to grind with new age people. But really, it should be with ideas, not resentment over offences to the purity of the Buddha's words. This latter is more like a cult, like being hung up on Jesus' words, as the Bible tells us. This is not the point. The point is to understand and have the explanatory resources, not to recall, but to reason out.

Buddhism has a virtue epistemology. It supposes that in order to know the truth, one needs to practice a sufficient measure of virtue. The trio sila, samādhi, and pañña is central: moral conduct, concentration (meditation), and wisdom. These are the three fundamental categories of training. One has to train in all three, simultaneously and progressively. One cannot have one without the other. — baker

Moral conduct? Is this a discipline or is this a moral thesis? Wisdom? Again, pray tell. Meditation? You need to see that when you talk about meditation, you take your meditative states and put them unders review. So what meditation IS, is an interpretative matter. The meditative act itself I take as clear and nonesoteric. The esoterica comes in the interpretation.

In contrast, the popular mindfulness movement is trying to force the issue by focusing primarily or solely on the concentration/meditation, but generally avoiding the Buddhist prescription of the necessity of moral behavior, which is captured for lay people in the first five precepts.
Some philosophers are trying to force the issue by focusing on the wisdom component, and, again, neglecting morality and the actual practice of meditation. — baker

The moral element: how is it that this is in any way conducive to freeing the mind? I mean, it can help because it is discipline, and the point is to discipline oneself out of attachments. The whole effort is toward liberation, I could say with confidence. You can say, and perhaps rightly, that it is not Buddhism even if liberation is achieved, but not through the specified techniques. But then, it would be a technical distinction.

Assumptions are never knowledge. At best they carry a possibility of getting it wrong. You can't tell me that an instance of a falsification of a theory, which falsification does not contravene any of the hypotheses of theory, is an invalid falsification. — god must be atheist

Assumptions are assumed knowledge. No one is saying some proposition is not falsifiable. All are. One has to consider that nature of a verification, for in the justification, there is nothing that can ever serve as an absolute, and Wittgenstein says as much. The concept of an absolute is nonsense. But we nevertheless get on with things, like discussions about what can be said within the delimitations of logic.

Dewey wrote of something he called "the philosophical fallacy" because he thought it so pervasive in philosophical thinking. Very simply put, he thought this was neglect of context. I think the use of concepts such as dread, anxiety, suffering and so on as appearing in the existentialist's lexicon, applied to describe (and perforce condemn) the entire world, is an impressive example of neglect of context. Neglect of context in using and applying concepts and making judgments and claims based on them is unreasonable and potentially dangerous. — Ciceronianus the White

On the other hand, dread is pointedly not concept, which is the point. Nor is fun and gloom and gangrene and Haagen das; I mean of course everything is a concept when it is spoken, but it is the actuality itself that is context free. But this is the point being made here: Contexts are conceptual. So when I say I want to look plainly at the world and simply report what it is, I am suspending, or "neglecting" contexts intentionally. this would be of no avail if I were thinking of the color yellow or the timbre of a certain tone, but the value dimension of experience can be identified context free AS a direct intimation of the world. The language, of course, is always in the middle, joined at the hip, as it were, with actuality, but this does not mean we cannot apprehend the, say, screaming pain as it is. Wittgenstein admits this, and calls it transcendence, mystical, impossible and nonsense, because he knows one cannot "speak" the pain. Logic contains delimitations on what can be said, and what cannot be said is where the value, the importance, the aesthetic/ethical meaning is. He will call this divinity.

The "room" you refer to is unimaginably vast. To claim that room is indefensible because of the act of a particular person (instead of making the altogether obvious and unobjectionable claim that the act is indefensible as is the person committing the act) is similar to claiming that the world is evil because of a sin committed by a single person, the claim we find in the doctrine of Original Sin--perhaps the most glaring example of neglect of context we've managed in our history. The concepts of "evil" and "sin" applied so broadly and thoughtlessly have been used for various purposes since St. Augustine came up with the notion, none of them laudable, or so I think. — Ciceronianus the White

But it goes to a more fundamental level than this: before a person commits an act, the world is there as the place to commits acts. What kind of world is this? Look around, but do so phenomenologically look around, apart from the many contexts that would make a knowledge claim, but directly at the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon of pain has "presence".

I'm not sure of what is going on hereabouts... I am certain of the itch on my left foot; confirmation does not come into it. Talk of an interior divides the self from the world; a false dichotomy. In your reply to Ciceronianus the White you spoke of values having no foundation; the itch in my foot, together with the other certainties with which we are each surrounded, are that foundation. — Banno

This is not as easy as it seems. The itch is there, as an unquestioned immediacy. But then it is one thing acknowledge the itch spontaneously, and another to recognize, identify, report about, understand what it IS. Dogs and cats have itches, but they don't "understand" what an itch is. We do, but this understanding is what is at issue, because, while the intimacy with the tactile feeling is unmistakable, more so than talk about plate tectonics or evolution, say, since it is not it itself discursive at all, to observe and understand, this is conceptual.

All the more reason not to read Heidegger. I'm not a fan of his as a philosopher, and especially not a fan of him as a person, as I've gently hinted in this forum now and then. But let's pass over that in silence. The path you describe is a path I can't follow, nor do I want to follow it, though I read all the Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky I could find in my distant youth.

From time to time I wonder when and why this hyperbolically negative attitude toward life and the world arose among and came to be expressed by intellectuals. We can't know all that was thought and believed by people in the past, but as far as I'm aware it doesn't appear until the 19th and 20th centuries, and seems to be peculiarly European. This view that living is a terrible thing and therefore requires explanation doesn't seem to have been held by ancient thinkers of the pagan West. The view that living, and the world, are terrible things became prominent with the rise of Christianity. No matter how nasty the world is, though, Christianity promised salvation and a vaguely defined happy and holy life beyond the world provided one is appropriately Christian. I speculate that as European thinkers lost their faith, they could think of nothing similar to replace it, and so succumbed to despair or sought refuge in alternatives that appear to foster melancholy, or a manic kind of romantic mysticism (leading some to be fascists or Nazis). — Ciceronianus the White

Dostoyevsky was not happy about the world, or about anything as far as I can tell. Probably permanently emotionally damaged when then put him in front of a firing squad, pulled the triggers on blanks just to teach him a lesson.
Hyperbolic? The question doesn't rest with "ancient thinkers" or the Christian promise of salvation. It is simply a descriptive statement. Think of the world as a "place" like a room. In this place things occur. Some die horribly, some not. The number is not really to the point, for the argument is not quantitative, but qualitative; really, all it takes is one actual case. What does one think of such a room where people are tortured? The rack, thumb screws? I am simply saying this is the "place" where we actually are. Of course, one can just dismiss this and get on with things. But complacency does provide what we are looking for, which is an honest assessment of the world when we ask, what IS it?
Heidegger, it is generally understood, was despicable in his nazi cooperation. Didn't last long, but he never denounced the nazis properly, and went along with them while Jews were being persecuted. Nobody lets him off the hook. Too bad his philosophy was so extraordinary. I see you do not agree, but one can't argue against his thinking based on what kind of person he was, and this is an infamous fallacy.
You're right about the European romanticism: Himmler and others were inspired by Madam Blavatsky and a movement called Volkism that held beliefs about aryan ancestry, interracial perversions that led to lower races and so on. Ghastly thing! It could be that Heidegger held some of this in his belief that culture needed to be reborn. But he was disappointed to find the same perverse modernism in the Third Reich.
But really, none of this is what I am on about. For me, I want to honestly describe the world. Then, further thoughts may be warranted. I think the presence of suffering makes the world indefensible, and in need of a metaphysical counterpart to "redeem'" it. I find this need as coercive as even the principle of sufficient cause.

Because he did not point this assumption out. He can't assume we will assume the same thing he is assuming. That is not kosher in philosophy. — god must be atheist

Well, there is the subject matter one discusses and the structure of discussion itself. You have to separate the two. If I am, for example, going to explain the electronics of cell phone, and I am explaining this on a cell phone, then it is assumed that the cell phone functions sufficiently well to satisfy the explanatory requirement. W is explaining and deploying logic all at once, but this assumption is implicitly in place. He is not arguing that this assumption is in jeopardy, only describing the logical limitations that prevent certain other kinds of explanations, those that include irrational concepts.

Whoo, boy. This is the most watered-down description of all the utterances of any philosopher ever in existence.

This I say with the ASSUMPTION that philosophers don't say illogical things. If it is illogical to a listener, it is because the listener does not base his logic on superstitious beliefs while the speaker does, or the listener does not suffer from the same mental illness as the speaker or else vice versa for both conditions. — god must be atheist

These would be kinds of assumptions implicitly in place, yes. I don't see why this is an issue. It DOES sound close to what Willard Quine talked about in his indeterminacy of translation. In fact, if you haven't read this, and this kind of thing is your concern, it is right up your alley.

Eh ...?
No, one most certainly doesn't need to read Heidegger for that. Oh dear. — baker

Being and Time is the pinnacle work on existential thinking. Maybe Sartre is to one's liking (can't imagine), or just Husserl, but Heidegger really drew it out. One really should read Kierkegaard so as to see the depth. Not that he held the one true view, for such a thing is always receding in the horizon of thought, but his ontology opens the way to greater understanding.

A meditating person may discover unity beneath it all, a calm in which particulars vanish into pervasive
overarching nowhere, at no time, and I know such a thing is right and true, not to put too fine a point on it, but I claim that behind this state, or this "stateless state" is yet a foundational barrier thick with beliefs and most of all, simple familiarity that is still in place implicitly. I have read stories of Zen masters running amok, shouting at trees, and I thought, they must be close.
Existential thought can clarify this, and undo familiarity, for it is this very undoing, perhaps you've noticed, that is its very essence. I think that infamous "existential dread" is a precursor to liberation.

I would think that everyone thinks so, at least intuitively. It's not like people actually confuse words for reality.
Confusion emerges when people say things they don't mean, or when the parties involved have irreconcilably different understandings of the matter at hand -- and this in plain terms, not in some fancy, abstract sense.
"Yes, I told you that loved you, but that doesn't mean I want to be with you, so bugger off." — baker

Not that they confuse them, the there is a movement toward unity, and you are probably familiar the attempts to pull away from dualism toward some kind of unity, whether it is material substance or, as with Heidegger, the unity of the phenomenon of idea and actuality. So the discontinuities understood are really unities at the most basic level, then the former can be reduced to the latter.

Yes. That's why a line "drawn" in the air isn't a meaningful demarcation. — baker

Well, for me it does get more complicated, as I have said elsewhere. Remember, W DOES draw that line, thoughunder erasure (very Derrida). We do not live in a world where the term "transcendence" is existential nonsense, rather, we see as we "see' eternity. Now, is eternity unspeakable? One has to ignore the infinite timeline or spatial extension. Wittgenstein read Kierkegaard and they are the same on this: eternity is the present released from time, and this is where I rest my case regarding meditation. For what is meditation if not the annihilation of the standards of measurement? Call it transcendental meditation, but wait, Paramahansa Yogananda already did this. Not that I believe all the wild tales of his autobiography, though. Or, the metaphysics of meditation.

Wittgenstein never went here, nor did he ever entertain any thoughts about intimations outside the boundaries language and logic. But it has to be said that I am really not AT ALL entertaining such ideas: everything that can be thought is rigorously bound to the rules of logic. Meditation is more an existential discovery in what is disclosed when one turns off explicit experience making.

I'm not sure I understand what he meant here ... He may be saying something that is strongly influenced by Christian and anti-Christian thought. Metaphysics have such a bad reputation ... and I'm not sure I can redeem it in one forum post. — baker

As I read him (and certainly I am no Wittgenstein scholar; this should go without saying throughout. I've read the Tractatus, several papers on it, and sat and thought) he is simply looking at the way meaningful utterances are made. In order for a term to be meaningful one has to be able to conceive its opposite, or of its nonexistence. Existence makes no sense as a philosophical concept because one cannot even imagine non-existence. 'In' makes no sense without "out". 'Outside" makes no sense without "inside". This makes "meta" anything nonsense. Now, W did encourage religion, its rituals and faith, and divinity. I think he understood that the ethical/aesthetic dimension of human existence required this, but we could never talk about these things philosophically.

Still, language is good enough. It serves a purpose. — baker

Yes, it "works". But we are faced with reality, too. The loathing I have for the taste of ammonia, e.g., is not language. Yellow is not language. The question I am posing here is how is it that we understand the actuality AS actuality. This is Sartre's radical contingency notion: the world "overflows" the boundaries of language. It confronts us as an alien presence, for what is familiar, comfortable, identifiable, and the rest is made so by language: words are not labels; they are deep in the construct of the world we live in, when we say, pass the salt, and my, what a fine day! we are participating in a narrative that sits like a superstructure on top of this very alien reality. See his Nausea.

Existential thinking is supposed to be an unsettling experience.

"You're an intruder, you don't belong here" is an assumption that seems to be tacitly held in so much of our culturally specific discourse.
This assumption could be inherited from Christianity, or from European classism, or from reductive materialism, or a combination thereof. Be that as it may, it's a culturally specific discourse that is making us alien to our own lived experience. — baker

If this were about Christian dogma and metaphysics, I would agree, as if original sin set the stage for our alienation from God. I find it off putting to think like this, and so did Kierkegaard; in fact, K spent his entire life trying to liberate Christianity from this kind of thing.
Phenomenology is a "descriptive" science, as Husserl would say, of what is there when we take the apple on the table and analyze it for its essential features as a phenomenon present before us. And prior to its being deployed in empirical science. Kierkegaard started this, revolting against the rationalism popular in his time. It is not "culturally specific discourse" any more than physics is. We are only "not at home" because analysis shows us this divide. W of course, understood this, but again insisted we could not speak of it.

There is an important difference here, though: the early Buddhist samvega narrative and the existential anxiety narrative are different.

The narrative of existential anxiety is conceived within a framework of one lifetime.
The early Buddhist one is conceived of in the framework of rebirth.

The person who conceives of life in the framework of one lifetime experiences the threat of loss of everything that is meaningful and dear to him as unique, ultimate, and fatal.

The person who conceives of life in the framework of many lifetimes experiences the threat of loss of everything that is meaningful and dear to him as serial, cyclical: they get it and then they lose it, and then they get it again, and lose it again, and so on.

That's how such a person sees those things as inherently unsatisfactory, whereas the person who thinks in terms of one lifetime, doesn't.

This is how the existential anxiety of a Western secular existentialist is qualitatively different from the existential anxiety as experienced by a rebirthist. — baker

Remember, I am explicitly trying to think outside of the historical belief systems of Buddhism. I only want to know what meditation is at the level of basic assumptions. I mean, what really happens in this event in which one sits, ceases thinking, wanting, anticipating, and does this rigorously over time? Buddhists famously want the purity of the event to be untainted by presuppositions, and I see the value of this. But what is it that you see as opposition to the philosophy of what this is about?

It's as if one sort warrant to conclude that since the cat is projected onto "out there", there is no cat.

Yet there is a cat. We should be at pains to avoid the illusion of idealism as much as of realism. — Banno

I have never read anyone that think there is nothing there, outside of our experiences. But what it is, if one withdraws all that the perceiver contributes in the perceptual act, and tries then to "say" what it is, there is nothing to say. It is no longer a cat, nor is it not a cat. It is nonsense. Cannot be conceived.
But this nonsense is transcendental. We cannot conceive it, yet we are not at liberty to dismiss it, for IT is an imposing part of the "presence" of the world. My thought on this are rather out there.

One is debarred from talking about what is beyond language, yet "out there" talks about it. The argument divides the world into what is out there and what is in here. Ciceronianus the White has a similar discomfort. — Banno

Take the matter one step further: granted, out there beyond the horizon, I mean, straight idealism is not tenable. One has to keep in mind, however, how radical Wittgenstein's point is: IT is utterly unthinkable. Even the designation "it" is not possible, and when W calls logic transcendental, he tells us he is speaking nonsense just to inform us as to what we cannot say! But, the term 'transcendence' applies, and I think most critically applies, to our own interior. I cannot confirm the Being of objects that are not me, but my own interior: nothing could be more intimate or unmediated. Yet, when we conceive of this interior, it is done through language and logic, so it is just as remote is the out there thing (a nonsense term) I call a cat. Language "stands in" (as Derrida put it) for the world. But within, I AM this, and the implication is that if I shut down the interpreting apparatus of thought, and stop the process of presumed knowing, then I can encounter my own transcendence. this is why I think meditation is a very big deal; not the Buddhists, but the Hindus have it right!
Of course, to confirm something like this, one would have to spend a lot of time "deep diving" into one's interior.

There is always a cat; there is nothing to speak of that one might "project' onto. That this is learned - "conditioned a body of conditioning memories" - does not render it somehow false. — Banno

Right, and this is Heidegger's view. The idea and the actuality are "of a piece". Phenomenology takes eidetic structures are an integral part of the phenomenon. I find myself in agreement, save for two things: one is the above regarding the transcendental ego and the meditative method of its "discovery". The other is about ethics. Long story, but what I know about ethics, is hermeneutical, and I cannot conceive of the actual pain and pleasures (and eveything else) simpliciter, however, when the presence of a pain or pleasure is in me, it is not a neutral fact, but has a nature that is noninterpretative, and this is its metaethical dimension. Extreme examples are clearest: we shouldn't torture others. Why? Because it hurts. What is "wrong" with that? The justification turns to the pain itself, and is not deferred to something else. This, I say, knowing full well it is nonsense, an absolute, but one that is, while nonsense in the "saying" not nonsense in the injunction not to do it.

Value, in my view, presents an absolute injunction to do or not to do X. Of course, such injunctions are mixed with entanglements in the world. Oh well.

The difficulty I have with much of this is its de facto assumption of the world as something apart from us. I think that conception is embedded in any claim of being thrown into the world without choice, as if we're from one place and have come unwilling into another. I think it's also assumed whenever we speak of the world being suspended for our viewing and understanding, and perhaps most clearly when we complain of alienation. — Ciceronianus the White

It is not the from one world to another idea that we are being invited to consider. There are no metaphysical claims about here and there. Heidegger sees it like this: you are born and you receive an education, and you become this education, and once you have been duly assimilated into a culture with its language and history, and then, there is your private history that ends up becoming a repository for future possibilities, the plot and character development, if you will, of the narrative you will write into existence. But the rub: this is the way of everyday living, and everyone lives this life of unfolding affairs with implicit trust and unquestioned confidence, and one is entirely absorbed in the grand narrative. Then one opens a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time, and begins to question, and if s/he is lucky, or unlucky, there is an epiphanic moment of startling awareness that there is a discontinuity in our questioning self and the world that is there to meet questions at the basic level. All, and I mean ALL questions that issue from any object of inquiry leads inevitably to nothingness, or eternity, as Kierkegaard would put it. This is not an abstract idea, but a part of the reality we live in: a very big deal for existentialists! The world is not a concept to be tested, as Dennett or Quine would see it. It is a living experience, so this failure to find foundational understanding of anything at all goes to values: having a family, a job, a life of worries and delights, and so on, all of this has no "value" foundationally. Most are not disturbed by this, that is, until they start reading Heidegger. The question, he writes, is the piety of thought. Questions, poignant philosophical ones reveal our authentic nature.

Part of what attracts me to both Pragmatism and Stoicism is their acknowledgement that we're parts of the world. Once we come to that realization (which some may think too humbling) much of what's been called philosophy, i.e. the propagation of dualism, dissolves. In Stoicism, the acknowledgement we're part of Nature has a spiritual aspect, divinity being immanent. — Ciceronianus the White

For me, it is the question, "why are we born to suffer and die?" I don't get it. Out of the blue, there you are, and the world of which we are "part" begins a campaign of torture against you. So they throw a girl into a cell to be burned alive for illicit midnight lanterns and dancing. I take a close look at this, not as a historical event, nor as an evolutionary success story (pain and pleasure serve survival), but as the existential crisis of first magnitude. Such a thing cannot dismissed simply because we got lucky. This "place" this reality is a torture chamber. Put a match to your finger and ask the Real question: what IS that?
I don't recommend being morbidly transfixed by evil in the world. But one thing is clear to me: Language, whether pragmatic or otherwise, neutralizes the world, makes the specific actualities into general concepts that are passed around AS IF thought were reality so we can pass over the horrors of the world in mild distain, rather than being shocked and driven to crisis, which is the only genuine response. this is not invoking some other reality, not dualism posited or groundless metaphysics. It is simply observation.

In his later work, Wittgenstein abandoned the idea of logical form and with it the notion of ineffable truths. The difference between science and philosophy, he now believed, is between two distinct forms of understanding: the theoretical and the non-theoretical. Scientific understanding is given through the construction and testing of hypotheses and theories; philosophical understanding, on the other hand, is resolutely non-theoretical. What we are after in philosophy is “the understanding that consists in seeing connections.” — Ray Monk

This is a very good statement, and is the core of my complaint. "seeing connections" has been the bane of analytic philosophy. The conditions of verifiability are strictly enforced, so what is taken as true and verifiable, like, "I am holding up my right hand" is, becomes the standard for philosophical work, and this has gone nowhere. They reduce philosophy to scientific speculation. Phenomenology has no issue with science at all, only the presumption that it should be the foundation of philosophy. But, on the other hand, there is nothing that is not theoretical, because by "theory" I mean hermeneutics. Long Story there.

I agree that Wittgenstein never crossed paths with Buddhism but there are clear parallels. I would characterise the similiarity in terms of reaching the same point by different means. Actually there's another paper I mentioned previously, that I think you might have also missed, Epoche and Śūnyatā: Scepticism East and West, by Jay Garfield. It opens with a quote from the Tractatus and discusses Wittgenstein in places. It casts a lot of light on what philosophical scepticism really means (and what it doesn't mean, i.e. that nobody knows anything.) — Wayfarer

Reading Epoche and Śūnyatā: Scepticism East and West now. I'll get back to you. I did notice one his references to Dick Garner. I actually knew this person. Small world.

If I understand this aright, it seems contradictory. It's agreeing that the world is always, already interpreted and yet saying that it does not relate to what is seen... — Banno

There is a contradiction, hence the counterintuitive nature of the claim: if everything that can be brought to mind and made sense of is conditioned a body of conditioning memories, then the present, my cat on the sofa right here before me, is not just a conditioned event, but, in the understanding of it, nothing but conditioning, for it's not as if the cat thing "out there" projects its "catness" which is directly intimated (Plato is near by with his "having a share" of the forms as the nature of the object) to me. I am projecting catness on to that "Other, out there" in my conceptual schemes, my language and logic and education.

"To the understanding" is a crucial part of this. Wittgenstein knew, as we all do, that there is something there that is not what I project, and this is simply unspeakable. Here is the essence of the point: how is it that what I "know" is "more" than the conceptual and the conditioned? Analytic philosophy calls this qualia, but terms should be put aside, especially that one, because it connotatively trivializes the issue (discussion on this if you like). How do we know such things if knowledge is exhaustively eidetic? The answer is that it is not exhaustively eidetic. Knowledge possess a residuum after all that is idea is suspended, and this is, I claim, Absolute Being. The difference in the claim here from the Kant, the Heidegger and others is that I hold that in meditation, we can reacquire this that has been lost to us through the modern tendencies that turn people into utilities, into "its" rather than "thous" as Buber put it. Meditation has this restorative metaphysics.

The "transcendental ego" merely names, without explaining...

SO again phenomenology seems to me to be claiming to say what cannot be said... what ought be passed over in silence, to avoid talking nonsense. — Banno

Just to say, phenomenology is a wide field of different positions. It has been speculated that Wittgenstein was a phenomenologist.
You cannot speak of it, and yet you can, sort of. My thought is that Wittgenstein leaves no room for this very weird acknowledgement of Being, weird because it is intimated by the presence of things. this is best illustrated by ethics. The essence of ethics lies with, I say, the palpable existence of pain and suffering (and everything that fits therein) but, W say this impossible essence cannot be spoken, the "good" of being in love., e.g. Right, but, and this is a very big point with me, the good does present the injunction to do that is received as an absolute.
It is a sticky wicket, but if not sticky, than philosophically unworthy. All such wickets are sticky.

..but of course, this is nonsense. Recognition requires the "all of this" that was suspended; SO phenomenology must fail. Phenomenology is not meditation. In so far as phenomenology tries to say how things are, it cannot succeed. — Banno

It is an interesting issue, and not without its counterintuitiveness. One does have to, well, follow along and put aside certain normal assumptions. Start with Husserl's reduction, and not to go into its detail, for in Ideas there is a lot of this. The matter here is simple: Attending to the phenomena themselves, as he puts it, is a method that fist requires one to understand that the present moment is composite as it is a "predelineated" aggregate of one has gone before. This is not the counterintuitive part, but just obvious (and Kant derivative; just take a look at the latter's transcendental deduction to see where this comes from) because when we think, conceive, understand, it is not the "pure present" that informs us, but a personal history of language acquisition, enculturation, and so on. This, I take it, is the basis of your objection, as it is well thought out in Heidegger, who thinks Husserl is trying to "walk on water" as well as, from my recent reading of John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. The complaint is rather well known. The pure present is, and this is very much the centerpiece of postmodern thought, impossible, senseless, nonsense. To speak it is a performative contradiction to the "purity" of the apprehension! As I understand it, this is very close to Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
Husserl, it should be remembered, held this: suspending "naturalistic attitude" and this is all the knowledge claims that rush to define, all the presuppositions that fill the sciences, leaves the residual "predicatively formed eidetic affair/actuality", so it is NOT intended to be an complete eidetic suspension at all; quite the contrary, Husserl took the present to be imbued with ideas. His reduction was meant to acknowledge the singularity of the eidetic and the actual, a perceptual moment being "of a piece" in concept and "hyle" (again, Kant hovering close by). I trust this is acceptable without much fuss. Makes perfect sense to me. What is this phenomenon before me? It is a composite of idea and hyle, of-a-piece.
Now the counterintuitive part: There is a lot written about this, and I think it holds great importance to understanding meditation. In meditation, you night say the whole lot of it, Heidegger's desein and then some, is "suspended". The production of hyle and eidetic content lose their generative source, altogether. This is the goal, a kind of suicide with a pulse. So, first consider that in the apprehension of objects we are not having an eidetic experience. There is the Other, Husserl's hyle, the actuality that is before me in the cat on the rug and the sun in my eyes, and we take these in and understand them not exclusively in the conceptua' mode. We take them in palpably. My claim is that this needs accdounting for. We may not be able to "say" palpable pure presence, but its "presence" is undeniable. From whence comes this? It is the transcendental ego. Meditation reveals this in the sustained presence, in the fact that the self never vanishes, never is truly reduced to nothingness.

Quite the opposite: Nirvana is evidence for this ego's ontology.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world. If I widen my linguistic abilities, I will be able to talk about things that previously seemed ineffable. — baker

I completely agree with this. But there is a certain inevitability. There is the nature of language itself which is inherently mediatory, standing "between" actualities like the feeling of happiness or dread, or deliciousness or disgust; I am referring to the actuality of these events that are qualitatively distinct from the thoughts we have of them. We call a thing by its name and its concept subsumes all particulars, but this is NOT the feeling of being abandoned by a a loved one, e.g. We don't "know" what this is, but in the calling it something, we reduce it to a manageable form that can be discussed and fit into pragmatic contexts. The point is, and this is straight out of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, reason and actuality, understanding and the "real" events of the world are ontologically different. (Heidegger and Heideggerians will take issue on this, I should note).

What is fascinating to me, off the charts fascinating,is that we can "understand" this, making, as Wittgenstein put it, for ( I know this is rather esoteric; apologies) the "other side" of the requirement for posting something. Consider when he says, "in order to draw a limit of thought, we should have the limits of both sides thinkable." THIS is his line: Metaphysical "talk" is talk about something the "other side" of which is completely unknown; no, not unknown, but just nonsense, because such an "other side", is not conceivable, for in the conceiving, one deploys "this side's" language, logic, ideas, and so forth.
So, one cannot "say" the color yellow. And this makes references to the color AS color impossible. Why I say this is so fascinating is this: It is my palpable, intuitive grasp that there is someting "other" there that is not language that affirms my own metaphysical Being, for the intuitive grasp of the thing, or the color, or the pain or bliss, does not issue from the thing out there, but from me. The nonconceptual Being of the world is my own Being affirmed in the relationship.
I am aware this likely sounds far flung, but this is the way it is, and I am quite willing to defend it.

/.../ Samvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It's a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range — at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings we've all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I don't know of a single English term that adequately covers all three.

The term sought for here is Existential Anxiety. Again, and especially the reference to childhood, see Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, this above plays into existential thought in a central way, not merely a sideline issue. It is THE issue, for this deathbed realization is a withdrawal from from the grand "narrative" we all live in, going work, raising a family, outings with friends, all "blindly" priveleged and hermeneutically sealed. Phenomenology is about the method of suspending all of this so that the world "itself" can be recognized. Of course, a very big issue for continental philosophers,

I'd like you to be more careful/specific when using the word "Buddhism". I'm not sure you appreciate the vast and unbridgeable differences between some Buddhist schools. — baker

I know you would like thinking more controlled in this way. Tell you what, I'll call what I do with Buddhist thinking, "philosophical Buddhism". Just thought of it, and it seems there should be no objections. I mean, you can certainly disagree with claims I make and argue about, but not that I have coopted Buddhism.

Okay, then let me look more closely.

He did not say this. He said, "what we can say can be said clearly". Big difference.

But he is wrong. You can say things that can't be said clearly. A clear example of it is talking to a blind man about colours. The speaker can say it; to the listener it will never be clear.

It is clear to the speaker though. Is that sufficient to say that W was wright? No, because he did not identify the respect in which the said thing was clear: to the speaker, or to the listener.

Bad, bad, mistake by Wittgenstein. Apparently he was not very clear when he said what he wanted to say. — god must be atheist

Why do you object to my saying that the issue you raise lies with the assumptions Wittgenstein is accepting about communicative conditions required for making a point? When you say the blind man is part of the communication, this is true. But, for examples, we have to assume our audience speaks the language, has the intellect, is within hearing distance, and so forth, as so when I talk to a blind man about color it is my assumption about the term 'color' being received properly that is off. But W is not talking about making things of everydayness, of empirical discourse. He is arguing against claims in philosophy that are logically not possible, therefore nonsense.

And I think Wittgenstein's intent here is very similar to the Buddhist intent; that the 'silence of the Buddha' in response to the question was exactly comparable to Wittgenstein's 'that of which we cannot speak'. (And there's another, delightfully-named 'Honeyball Sutta', which I think would also be close in meaning to Wittgenstein, but I'll leave it there for now.) — Wayfarer

Don't know how I missed this. To me, this is right where I think it all goes.
I've read it and many others like it. The Prajnaparamita makes extraordinary negative claims that can be baffling. For Wittgenstein, we know that he thought he could put an end to overextended philosophical thinking, making empirical science the best we could hope for in making sense of the world. He never did, as far as I have read, cozy up to Eastern religio-philosophy. Heidegger, Schopenhauer (haven't read all of his The World as Will and Representation. Likely never will) did go there, though.

But the ladder: It seems to me there is a fascinating line of thought in this: if there is a speed limit to what can be said in philosophy, where metaphysics brings things to a screeching halt, AND, if the human condition is apodictically (a good word. Means necessary, but not referring to logic only) bound to its metaphysics (I mean our world is not exhaustively finite, for once all finitude is accounted for, the "Otherness" of the world, its actuality, remains), then the implication is that we live IN metaphysics, and this is a special point to make: finitude is coextensive with eternity, co existent; physics with coextensive with metaphysics. They are one and the same! What can one do? for the implication is clear: meditation takes off where language and logic end, and Wittgenstein tells us that this end, this limit, is structurally built into experience.
I am convinced that meditation's purpose is to realize this not as a proposition, but as a liberation from the finitude imposed by existential/interpretative engagement, attachment, as the Buddhists put it. Attachment is not only our explicit indulgences, it is conceptual, the looking up in the morning and seeing the time and having this knowing of time and things everywhere "as we are taught they are" step into perception, as Heidegger would say, always, already there, immediate.

I don't take the above to be simply speculative.

In truth, I've read some Kant and some Heidegger and some Sartre; my old copy of Being and Nothingness is probably somewhere in my house with other old books. Some of this rings a bell, but is not of great concern to me. — Ciceronianus the White

Heidegger's Being and Time is the seminal work. If I had kept reading analytic philosophy I would not have left it. It was accidental that I came across Rorty, who referred me to Heidegger and Derrida. The bell is for me a kind of revelation.

I'm almost hesitant to admit it given the popularity and vulgarization of Stoicism these days, but I accept as wise the Stoic view (roughly stated) that we shouldn't allow matters outside our control to disturb us, and our concern should be mastering what's in our control, and we should strive to act accordingly. Accepting that, what rings a bell as you say doesn't have visceral significance to me--it isn't something which drives me to despair or distraction, nor do I feel a need to explain or understand philosophically why we're here if that means discovering the hidden meaning and purpose of our existence. It isn't clear to me we can do so by thinking, no matter how hard we try. — Ciceronianus the White

Well, if one day you decide to look into it: Heidegger had high hopes for Buddhism, thought that it could discover a new language of deep intimacy with something primordial within that has been lost through ages of bad thinking. In fact, if someone were genuinely interested in what the "existence" part of existentialism is, I would say, read Husserl's Ideas and meditate. It is not about explaining things as one would explain a combustion engine. It is a "method" which Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction (epoche), not unlike meditation, if you think about it. His Cartesian Meditations is accessible and interesting, but his Ideas is more rigorous. In his private letters he writes that many who follow his method come to understand religion better.

According to Dewey, we only think when we encounter problems; we're reflective when we encounter circumstances which we seek to control or change. Otherwise, we conduct ourselves largely by impulse and habit. James said, as I recall, that for the most part the world, to us, is a kind of blooming, buzzing confusion which takes focus only when we feel the need to pay attention to it. We feel pain and though pain itself isn't a problem solving event, reducing or eliminating it is. What is it about pain that we must otherwise understand or think about? Why, as a general matter, we should feel it? Theology has a ready answer via Original Sin--but why is this a philosophical concern? — Ciceronianus the White

This is the shortcoming of pragmatism, and Wittgenstein knows this when he lauds action, for ethics will not be explained, but it does make its appearance, "shows" itself, and I think this is exactly where he was on this, in all of its absoluteness, which we cannot discuss, in the injunction not to do , or to do something. It is what John Caputo calls the "weakness of God" (my interpretation of Caputo, at any rate). We can clearly see that, say, being burned alive is far more than a factual affair, something that fits neatly and exhaustively in a theory like evolution or some other set of contingencies. Something irreducible in the givenness of the pain. This is what W had in mind when he prohibited talk on ethics: the metaethical "badness". Something central to all my philosophical thinking. Can't explain it, but the injunction is clear, the clearest thing I can imagine. Straight from God (W did affirm divinity, not to put too fine a point on it).
Metaethics is foundational for an exposition on what it means to be a person and it was Wittgenstein who showed me this.

You claimed in several places that you don't understand my arguments and you disagree with my references. So that's that, we can' t argue if you are incapable of comprehending what I say.

The word nincompoop you understood. — god must be atheist

I don't know what you're talking about. Put a proposition on the table, give it some support, and I will respond.

I am not sure if this is W's assumption or your addition to the set of assumptions you imbue W's points in order to deflect criticism. I admit I never read W. But you have. So have you seen this assumption written anywhere, by him, or do you think it is left to the reader to assume that this assumption exists? This is an important point. Has the meaning in the quote ever been expressed by W, or is it the reader who assumes this assumption exists? — god must be atheist

Okay, but first, what do you think? It seems like you want to bring inquiry into the assumptions of communication possibilities, as if before W can speak to us about what is or is not "speakable" he must first confirm the conditions for speaking at all are met. Is this where you are?

Answer: in my example, he places the clarity of speech and understanding on the speaker, not on the listener. Once he places the onus of clarity of understanding on the listener, W's claim is falsified. Or can be falsified under certain circumstances. Therefore he arbitrarily places the onus of understanding the clear communication on the speaker, not on the listener. This is an arbitrary placement. — god must be atheist

An interesting answer. Should have read it before the above. Of course, the same onus is on you as you write to me in this post. Since I don't know where you are going with this I will just lay out what I think is an answer: First, I have not read all of Wittgenstein and never will. I just don't aspire to this. But I do know he has a position on private languages and intersubjective verification. But putting aside what he might say, it sound lie you're asking, what IS that standard of verifiability that makes speech and communication possible? Quine and Derrida tell me absolute verification is a myth. I think we live in private interpretative worlds, and to me, at the most basic level, you are a "theory" to me, a very, very effective theory, but the language that is deployed when address you is both public (in theory) and private (yet another theory). The point is, this world of mine subsumes others and there "otherness" with a baseline for all being hermeneutics. Even my references to myself are hermeneutical. The thought that thinks the thought, observes it, questions it, is a great, great mystery to me. Frankly, it is THE mystery. But even as I entertain this AS a mystery, I am still bound to hermeneutical delimitations.

For me, when inquiry bottoms out, I am left with what is NOT interpretation, and the study of the "space" where actuality meets language, where the generative beginning of meaning and phenomena meets itself is where philosophy needs to be. Wittgenstein seems to be unaware of this, but then, he never read Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation or Jean luc Marion's On Being Given.

(And aside from your bringing up another issue, which I can only think you do because you want to obscrue the issue I had brought up. this interpretation of yours can not at all be inferred from W's quote. There is a common domain between your interpretation and W's claim, but one does not flow from the other, and one does not encompass the other. You are freely winging it, making wild claims that are not valid. I, however, do not wish to continue this new vein of discussion, because I first wish to close the discussion between you and me by coming to a common understanding, before opening up another discussion.) — god must be atheist

Opening such a discussion is entirely welcome. Not winging anything, as I know. And not at all aware of wild claims.

I have to admit one more thing: I think Wittgenstein's models are false, his insights are wrong, and his claims are not true. It is a hype that got him into reverence by many thinkers, but any thought I've heard others attribute to him has holes, large, huge, gaping holes in logic or in reasoning. It is only blind faith in his intellect that makes people bow to him and try to explain everything he has said in terms that makes sense; while in reality he is a nincompoop, a come-hither idiot of philosophy. — god must be atheist

An odd thing to say given that, as you say, you haven't read W. Calling him a nincompoop is will get you nowhere. The proof is in the arguing. The only question I have is, what have you read that makes you think so and why?