I am still not really getting a clear idea of what is being pointed at by the phrase 'essence of religion'. Are you just saying that Ethics is the essence of religion? Are you saying the unconscious is the essence of religion? What do you really mean by using the term 'essence' and what reason do you have to do so? — I like sushi

Yes, I am saying in order to understand the essence of religion, one has to look to the essence of ethics. Religion is an "ethical" matter one has between one and the world, though one is free to quibble about applying the terms.

The term essence just refers to what a thing is free of the entanglements of its instantiations. Think about what Kant did with reason (whether you are a Kantian or not is besides the question): you look a judgment in the world or about something in the world, and ask about the structure of the judgment itself, a judgment qua judgment kind of inquiry. He discovers apriority in judgments about the world and asks how is this possible? Apriority is supposed to be a property of logic, not things in the world.

Here, I ask, what is ethics? and also discover apriority. But ethics is NOT vacuous logical form. It's essence is value, that is, entanglements in the world that deal with pain and pleasure and this is really a dimension of everything: the very event of this trivial occasion to write is saturated with value. Pull me away and I care that I am being pulled away. A glance at the time is implicit interest and meanings subtlety in play.

This is where the proverbial question of the meaning of life has its answer at the basic level of inquiry. It lies in the apriority or apodicticity or indubitability of the nature of value, and hence ethics/aesthetics, itself.

But really. Signifier only of the inherent meaninglessness of all signifiers until meaning has been assigned. — ENOAH

Well, not assigned, but appearing historically and producing signification.

Being too shares that origin. Inherently meaningless. That I know is ultimately what you are saying. It is implied that in uttering being, I have already accepted that my utterance is only as good as how far I can throw it; and, I can't ever throw it outside of Mind's reaches.

And yet, I use the tool to point at the moon, knowing it's not the moon, but the finger. — ENOAH

But take one step further: the event in which you know it is a finger and not the moon, then pull away from this to ask about the language that produces this very insight and one is taken to the moment itself. But whatever transpires in that moment can be spoken: it was received in language and by language. Language's references DO NOT POINT. Rather, language is part and parcel of the event itself, which we CALL pointing.

Your objection about an "outside" of mind's reach is itself a "performative contradiction": there is no "outside" in this manner. And by this, there is no inside either. All that occurs is simply there (phenomenology). I would argue that it is the assumption of inside/outside talk that makes the very barrier in question a problem.

I am not keen on religious doctrines posing as a philosophy of consciousness, nor am I inclined to side with mysticism as anything other than a pacifier of sorts (albeit somewhat essential in its role on mental stability).

The path to woo woo is the way. The destination of woo woo is delusion/madness. — I like sushi

Heidegger looks to history and language: There is no truly foundational truth, neither in science nor in traditional religion nor in philosophy. Truth emerges out of historical settings. Not even remotely mystical.

But it does present a serious question: Take an ethical problem, a serious one to make it clear: I am prime facie ethically bound not throw my neighbor into a vat of molten rock. It is not a question of what to do in the face of conflicting circumstances; it is a question of the primordial injunction not to do it. Why not? It hurts; it hurts and I know it. Now we face a different question: what is it about hurting that makes for an ethical prohibition?

Simple as that. Now you face the world not constructed out of language at all. Heidegger still maintains that the understanding of this is still historically and linguistically bound, and he is right, right up until you realize that while language constructs meaning, the essential "givenness" of the world "gives" meaning as well, and this is supposed to be impossible. One is not supposed to be able to observe in-the-world something that produces a meaning independently of the language that is deployed to understanding it. There world is "there" but it dos not "speak".

But being tossed into boiling lava "speaks" in the most certain terms, terms that exceed the authority of language, which is contingent and contextual. It is a certainty that is apodictic, and by this I simply mean it is beyond contradiction, as with the formal logicality of modus ponens. Ethics, at the level of the most basic questions (philosophy's purview) is apodictic. This is the basis for the OP's essence of religion.

This should be clear, at least in the basic claim. Hard to bring Husserl, Heidegger and the competing ideas into this without getting technical. The above does have the beginnings of this technical discussion.

I have my doubts here. Heidegger and Husserl parted ways because Heidegger hyper-focused in on hermeneutical form of phenomenology. Husserl was still reaching for the unreachable (and stated as much). The task is endless. — I like sushi

I am saying no to this. The task was ended long ago with the Buddhists and the Hindus, but this jumps to the chase. Heidegger seems to defend the Hegelian "theology" when he says "Metaphysics is the truth of the totality of beings" and the totality of beings is what the historical period says it is. Being is the answer to the question What are beings AS beings? and this refers us to the historical framework.
And right, Husserl was reaching for the unreachable, but then, take the Cartesian/Husserlian position and and put aside the historical analysis: Here I am, not a Cartesian cogitom because a disembodied cogito makes no sense at all, but standing in a world that is "know" in the standing there. A cogito must be ABOUT something. Thought is never "just thought" and this is the Husserlian insight, intentionality.

But THE most important part of this is very simple, Buddhist, even: As I stand and face this tree, it cannot be doubted that I face a being! I can doubt everything about the being because the historical basis of language is contingent, but facing a being possesses in its "thereness" something only a fool would deny. HERE is where hermeneutics reaches its own termination.

What I mean to say is just that. To know Being is what philosophy ultimately desires. But being cannot be known. It can only be. — ENOAH

Being is elusive to the understanding because it is not an object that can receive predication. The copula 'is' is for saying things like The moon is in orbit around the earth, or What is an iguana? Being is ubiquitous in language and every proposition has it, implicitly or explicitly. Say Give me that book! and the 'is' is all over this. Me is the I that IS; the book IS; "give" implies things that 'are' in one way or another.

So Being is given to us in language first. Try to step outside of language to affirm being and you head for nonsense. On the other hand, it is, I hold, wrong to say being cannot be known, just as it is wrong to say metaphysics cannot be known. Note that when you say being cannot be known, you and positing being, so this is either nonsense or it's not. Nonsense because the "nothing" of non predication ( no "X is Y" in the analytic of the proposition) being posited cannot be made sense of, just like "gbischitz": nothing meaningful being said and entirely out of meaningful contexts other than references to letters and sounds.

Essentially what Heidegger and Wittgenstein and many others think. So one is already in hot water with "being cannot be known." What is it that cannot be known?

But if one is like me, Being is quite predicable, for this simply means one can say things about it and there are contexts of meaningful talk. Being is an intuition, I'll call it. And leave it at that. Not just a mathematical abstract terminus, or a set of all things, abstractly conceived. And it can stand much analysis, but if Being is an intuition, this analysis would have to be done. This is Jean Luc Marion and others. Being is a concept and an intuition, and all intuitions are conceptually constructed, that is, one can say, " by this I mean..." and words follow, even if those words become enigmatic and interesting. To me, this is where philosophy does its most interesting work: it "leads" us to hidden possibilities that are disclosed in language AND its non language counterparts, like being in love or spraining your ankle. I could not speak of the essence of religion and talk about how a sprained ankle is front and center of religious meaning without the symbolic connections language makes possible. I could not speak at all of anything with out "that which conceives" and in the case of being, Being is not pulled down to mundanity in this. In fact, it is "pulled up" through the language that makes it what it IS.

Note that language itself is the very Being in question.

It could mean a blend of technology and our body in such a way where we're no longer human in it's true meaning, we might become entirely new species, changed not only in look but also mentally. — SpaceDweller

I suspect it will not be a technology of synthetic materials, but organic. AI will master the human genome, and we will live in a brave new world. Only without Aldous Huxley's unfortunate Delta class. All Alphas! But this will lead to a new world of leisure time, and leisure time is freedom, and freedom opens basic questions, and the question of the self will loom large. We will all probably becomes Buddhists.

Yes, I'm totally with you on everything preceding. It is a "dream world," which happens to be a label constructed by tgat very dream world, and so on. That too, all the way down. No access that way, to ultimate truth. So what to do with it? Abandon? No. No need. It's not in all respects a dysfunctional thing, quite the contrary. What to do? Tend to it. Tend to the business knowing that knowing is incessant "asking". — ENOAH

And incessant answering. Pull as far away from this as possible, and questions become one question, that of being qua being. But to get here, this is the issue. For interpretation haunts inquiry, and interpretation is built into the temporality of our existence: I see a tree and tree memories rush in to make "seeing a tree" seeing a tree. But, and I refer to a prior post, this temporal structure shows memory to be holistically bound to presence and anticipation. To say "I saw" is itself a saying that will one day be recalled, and the recollection will not be of a "genuine past event" but of a holistic unity and this remains analytically clear ONLY in the positing of transcendence: One simply cannot talk of a condition or state of affairs "out" of the basic structure of subjective time. When you refer to a dream world, I think the best possible analysis ends here, with time. This is fundamental to Kant's Transcendental Deduction in his Critique. This deduction needs to be read over and over just to get the essential idea. I continue to go back to it. You might find an excerpt from the Deduction interesting, just to see how Kant's mind works and how his analytic of time moves along. He says some extraordinary things, full of penetrating insight. Consider that time is one moment occurring after the next and in order for the mind to grasp a whole thought, these moments must be linked together or "synthesized" into a unity. I see a cup, and the seeing it "as" a cup, there must be a unity of these temporal "moments" sequenced one after the other. Consciousness is this unity. In the Synthesis of the Recognition of a Concept, "If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of
representations would be useless." For it would simply be a jumble of unrelated "representations". Something must bind moments together to make them the unity that they are. "Cup" is a temporal unity of a sequence of moments. What is a self? It is the grand sythesizer of all experience: Without consciousness, the manifold of the representation would never, therefore, form a whole, since it would lack that unity which only consciousness can impart to it." This is Kant's rationalism.

Of course, Kant, as he explains all of this, is IN a perspective of finitude. His rigorous apriori arguments are themselves behind a veil of the medium of explanatory language. And this IS the most fascinating idea to me: Go the Kantian route, and "final determinate knowledge," call it, is hidden as a permanent and structural impossibility, for in the unity of the manifold of a consciousness of a cup on the table, there is no "getting behind" the unity itself, because one's own thinking issues from this unity. Hence the "transcendental" dimension of transcendental idealism. On the other hand, and this is the place where you and I step in, while this thinking may be well reasoned, once we understand that the entire analytic itself is transcendental as well, in its foundation, we then pull away sharply, for the epiphany puts the states of affairs of the world completely OTHER than what knowledge claims can produce, and this "otherness" is right before your eyes. We are thrown back to the original phenomenon that gave rise to all this philosophy in the first place. The transcendence that puts "truth" as you referred to it earlier, at an absolute distance from understanding (Kant), now is IN the intuitive grasp of the cup. Now one is the Buddha, that is, if one sees this with complete clarity, and the body of implicit knowledge claims that possess the world in ordinary perception are suspended, and no longer hold sway. This is liberation, and this is where phenomenology takes one, one who is, of course, inclined to be "taken" (thinking of the expression gelassenheit, again. This yielding to the world, away from the "totality" of egoic insistence), and if Buddhism's and Hinduism's very strong spiritual claims are right (as in the Abhidhamma, the Prajnaparamita, the Vedas, and so on), and I think they are qualifiedly right, then the world becomes Nietzsche's worst nightmare: This world itself becomes a reality of the radically Other, other than, that is, the world in "plain" sight.

Yes, a dream world. You sound like a Hindu, but it makes perfect sense in phenomenology. You might find Henry's statement of the basic working ideas useful. The Four Principles of Phenomenology (following Husserl):

Phenomenology rests on four principles which it explicitly claims as its foundations. The first—“so much appearance, so much being”—is borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term “appearance,” we prefer this strict wording: “so much appearing, so much being.”1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: “zu den Sachen selbst!”[ (To the Thing itself!). The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”3

I must have confused you. "Business" is what we can't leave. Assuming the hypothetical staring at the abyss of being is even possible (if anything, it's a micro-glimpse, not a stare; an aware-ing, not a vision), it's not so much a returning, as a being smothered (once again). — ENOAH

But one does leave it the more one brings questions to bear upon the world at the most basic level. It is an inevitability, for belief is not sustainable without justification and it is justification that the question assails. Someone tells me she is a doctor and a mother, and I have no issues with this. But then I read Derrida's Structure, Signs and Play and others and I begin to see that when one speaks, the assumptions in place about the knowledge claims implicit inn being a doctor cannot be verified. This is nothing at first, for such an insight really has no redeeming features; but in time, one realizes that one is living in a kind of dream world. Ask, does General Motors really exist? I can talk about it in many, many ways, but all this amounts to is reified talk and pragmatics. GM is a pragmatic "function" and ontologically vacuous, save its pragmatic ontology. But to understand being a doctor like this, to take the idea apart and look for its basic meanings, once done effectively, it makes, and it SHOULD make, the mundane world itself into a question. It is not turtles all the way down; it is questions all the way "around".

Not just originally, continously. We "pursue" being because we are being.

It's just that we "pursue" being; thereby, ignore that we are. — ENOAH

It does depend on what you mean by "that we are." This is a point of disagreement I have been laboring. You think like an Eleatic Parmenidean. But this is not conceivable. This is simply to say that to "pursue" refers to a basic structure of consciousness itself. Being cannot be extracted from becoming. All one calls being is in subjective time, and when something that IS appears before us, the stillness and the profundity does "appear" and there is an event and the agency of this event is a self, capable of implicitly grounding an experience such that there is someone "there" to experience.

And this is notwithstanding spiritual identity, whatever that is. Consider one of those near death experiencers who often say time stands still when there is no profusion to the brain and they leave their body. They no longer have the sense of their own identity, many relate, in this other world. Perhaps, I say; maybe more than just perhaps. But note, their experiences have a beginning and an end, and events come and go and are recorded in memory, and so forth. Their IS, let's allow, an encounter with Being-as-divinity. The point I would make is that THIS is time. It is senseless to talk about otherwise. Time actually standing still would be an absurdity, like two colors occupying the same space or two velocities at once. Logically, it makes no sense.

Though the latter may suffer from the misfortune of thinking they are two things. Both are "pathological," if by existential enlightenment, you are referring to the "pursuit" of being, thinking you will access being by such pursuit. It's the same for you and I, if either one of us denied the inherent contradiction/futility in a dialogue which intermittently (to wit: now) pointed out it's own futility.

While schizoid, as you say, or any other pathology recognized as such yields no functional benefits, not so for philosophy, though the latter seems futile. Philosophy, just as it is wilfully blind to the futility of its pursuits, is wilfully blind to its own actual role: to make sense/navigate the meaning making system. To order the Narratives in functional ways.

Philosophy gets us even to the essence of religion, that pursuit of and glimpse into the real truth outside of our Fictions. — ENOAH

You think of Being as a kind of finality. Perhaps. I argue that to think like this makes being vacuous, literally vacuous. Being requires agency. "No one" there implies no experience at all. The "no self" of the Prajnaparamita is an explicit no self, and has nothing to do with the constituting agency.

The schizoid condition I refer to puts aside the notion of pathology, at least in the familiar sense. It could be called a spiritual pathology, the Kierkegaardian pathology of spirit dialectically subsuming soul and body. This is the introduction of the question that interposes itself between the self and the affirmation. The "no self" intrudes into the, as Fink put it, "construct of acceptedness" we live and breathe in. We are always already existentially schizoid, for the division between acceptedness and the question is implicit in the paradigm of normalcy, just as, as they say, one does not become the Buddha, but rather realizes that one IS this, and has always been this. But without the reflective self, I am arguing, the Buddha vanishes into nothing. Again, to BE requires agency, metaphysical or mundane.

Ontology of the real self would exclude the ego/subject and therefore necessarily all signifiers, including but not limited to all words/thoughts/ideas. So called ontology of the so called Subject self, I, would yield much intriguing discussion, but I would recognize that we are analyzing the laws and mechanics of Mind. — ENOAH

Yet "mechanics and "Mind" are themselves signifiers. As my prof once told me, you're never going to get that tart to your dessert plate. You cannot work within a field of meaning making and posit something outside this without having access to this "other field"; just as one cannot speak the nature of logic unless one can step outside and into a third pov from which one can observe; and this third pov itself, to be affirmed, requires yet another pov; ad infinitum. To posit something entirely outside of what is possible inside (ignoring the problems of sense making these two notions present) is what bad metaphysics is made of. One has left the phenomenon, the presence-in-the-world, to seek remedy in lands unseen!
Derrida, and this is Caputo's reading, exposes "real" metaphysics by showing how language's analysis puts radical distance between the word and the referent. An impossible distance, for the very reason anticipated by Kierkegaard: reason and "actuality" (in double inverted commas, of course) never cross streams, if you will, of their respective existences, and when this is understood, one finally sees that finitude has always been an imposition of language that really never "touched" the "life of the world" (Henry), and this is, or should be, a massive assault on common sense. BUT: you already know this. What you resist is what I will call the metaphysics of language: language is the structure of finitude itself, among language beings like us (dasein), but it is ALSO the medium of discovery, and agency, and thought, and revelation. Imagine a revelation without language: no backdrop against which the novelty of what is revealed to play against. No interest set against a predelineated set of conceptual values. No one there to receive the experience.

With all due humility and modesty, we are applying western analysis to the concept of no-self; not to the level of technical precision you might prefer, but still; despite phenomenology, mahayana is permeat. — ENOAH

This is something I rather emphatically argue against: My world is Thic Quan Duc's (sp?). The technical precision you refer to is in no way exclusive of the analytic I willingly apply, any more than it would be exclusive of physics or geology. Why? Because what we have here is not merely a system of logically connected terms. It is an openness unto the "truth" that is, as you are fond of reminding me, not conceptual. I have been disagreeing and agreeing with you the whole time. Yes, the world stands apart from the language identity assigned; no this "standing apart" is not free of language and signifiers, or rather it is and it is not. The whole affair is transcendental when issues like this come up. Everything is under erasure, so we try as best we can with the hermeneutically grounding of meanings. Note how Derrida's thesis itself is under erasure! The very term hermeneutics is under erasure. For me, things are made clear in the truly objective sense, this is the point. Eastern thinking is not so far from phenomenology. It is parsecs from anglo american philosophy, yes, but not phenomenology. These are very close disciplines. Meditation and Husserl's epoche are, I argue, simply the same thing, only meditation is the reduction radically executed. And argue this.

This is why post modern thinking is so notoriously obscure: They theorize in a world that dances around metaphysics, daring not to make a move too far, yet trying to make meaning there, at the threshold of sense making.

Hah, like an uncarved block, actionless action. That Heidegger! I have to imagine he knew more than he let on to, delivered it to his world in the most progressed language of the day. But that sounds like wisdom beyond logic. — ENOAH

Plainly put, one should read Being and Time. Just read it, then you will see. You will never think the same way again. You will, of course, disagree often, but you will realize that these disagreements are THE disagreements. He articulates the terms of disagreement soooo well.

Sorry, have to go. Ill finish later.

Thanks to the scriptures we still know what we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to behave. It is a fantastic tool against the manipulative narrative of the ruling mafia. They handsomely benefit from growing depravity. We don't. — Tarskian

I missed this. I beg to differ: Scriptures are ancient thoughts about a time of very different social entanglements. It simply is not helpful today, and what is found that is helpful is helpful because it works, not because scriptures say it is right.

The ruling mafia? I like that. Scriptures, speaking generally, stand as a remedy that issues form a higher moral authority, one that will not be gainsaid. AND, this is exactly what the OP is all about: Scriptures are historical documents that lay claim to a higher moral authority and bring ALL of our "mafia" tendencies to heel, but it does this dogmatically, and this is no way to believe, meaning belief works according to justification: The case for a higher authority, an absolute authority, has to be argued philosophically. Not religiously, that is, not according anything so instantly assailable.

The trouble is, even philosophy has a hard time seeing what is there in the midst of our existence. All of our in-the-world experiences are inherently ethical because our being-in-the-world is value-saturated. There is caring in every glance and every thought, private, social, technical, rhetorical; and caring is the engine, if you will, that drives ethics. But caring itself is not the analytic bottom line, for it is dyadic: one cares ABOUT something' or monadic: caring and that which the caring is about are one and the same.

This is not meant to be confusing, just analytical. I care about whether is rains today because an outing is planned. But why is an outing important? It's a good time? What is the meaning of "good" in this locution? Fun, enjoyable, pleasurable; but these are just synonyms for good, I mean fun is inherently good.

The point? The argument is not complete in these few lines, but an essential idea is exposed. This has been a brief metaethical discussion that reveals something this "higher moral authority": it is about the Good. The Bad as well, of course. The argument moves forward to show how this analysis moves inevitably toward metaphysics, only, it is not going to be about ignoring justification just to keep us in line and rid us of our mafioso ways. It will be about a clear, justification for metaethical grounding of our ethics.

If we one day reach trans-humanism — SpaceDweller

A curious notion. What could it mean?

What are sound ethics? — Tarskian

But this is not about what to do. It is about a descriptive account: when an ethical issue arises, what is there that makes it ethical? Religion is about the answer to this question. And the answer is value, and i use this term in the way Wittgenstein did when he said about this world, "In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value." He doesn't really go into it as I would like, but Moore talked about ethics having to do with a non natural property; so what is this all about?

When we talk about ethics and justified actions, we carry with this an assumption that things matter, and this mattering is the foundation of our ethical and religious lives.The argument here is that analysis shows that value is as apodictic as logic. Value is what ethics is, if you will, made of, and value has an epistemic (and therefore ontological; this can be argued) standing that is unassailable. Situations are endlessly assailable, and this can make value assessment ambiguous, obviously (as with torturing someone to save the lives of thousands, and so on); but value AS SUCH is unassailable. Just like modus ponens, say, or DeMorgan's theorem.

And just to finish the thought, imagine walking into a familiar environment, and coming across something that does not at all belong there. Notice how the language steps in for analysis. Sure, the cow can move to the greener grass and discover it is not grass at all, but something else green. But systematic symbolic constructions of language move inquiry deeper into causes and quantifications and comparisons and speculations, and so forth. This OPENS inquiry and makes religion's an analytic possibility, that is, something that exceeds the mindless story telling and ritual fetishes. Language allows thought to cancel what is irrelevant. Cancel naïve religious metaphysics.

It is trivially easy to deprave and degenerate humans away from their innate biological firmware. There is a lot of power to be had in doing so.

Therefore, the need eventually arose for religious scripture to appear which contains a copy in human language of the biologically preprogrammed rules that humans should not break and that government should never overrule. That is why during his investiture ceremony the new king was always forced to kneel to religion in order to be crowned. He had to acknowledge the supremacy of God's law.

If there are no tensions or even conflict between the political overlord and religion, then it is not a true religion. The more the political overlord complains about a particular religion, the more it is doing its main job, which is to constrain the political overlord, and therefore the more truthful it is. If religion is never an impediment to the expansion of state power, then it is a false religion. — Tarskian

At its foundation, religion has nothing to do with biology or politics and government, or kings. These sit on top, if you will, of a more primordial analysis. One has to see that biology, for example, can have no insight into what is not apparent in the microscope and manifest physical features of an organism. But religion is certainly not about this. It is about ethics. What is ethics? This is the question. Talk about anything else will beg this question. It is singularly an ethical/aesthetic question about an unobservable feature of our existence: The Good. This is where the discussion begins.

Do you believe we need language to think? As in this here written language? — I like sushi

Clearly we need a language to think about language, but to ride a bike or sow a seed, no. Reading Robert Hanna's paper on this very subject, I was reminded of the difficulty of addressing such a question: The cow looks up and sees greener pasture elsewhere, picks hersolf up and moves. Did the cow perform the conditional structure of thought? Obviously not, but there is was, in the pragmatic response, that is, the desire for greener grass, once observed, was satisfied by putting one leg in front of another and so forth. Call it proto-logical or primordial logic. But the difficulty: my assessment of the this protologicality issues from a language and logic that can only interpretatively understand the world, and this is done within logical and sematic delimitations. The cow's cognitive abilities are going to be assessed IN an interpretative bias.

This also applies to language thinking about language: how objective can this be given that the answer is going to be structured in language? This is question begging.

But on the other hand, Hanna gives a pretty good "philosophical" analysis on this matter. He says,

the correct answer to the question inherently depends on what you
mean by “thinking.” If by “thinking” you mean discursive thinking, then the answer is yes,
but if by “thinking” you mean essentially non-conceptual, non-discursive thinking, then the
answer is no

Of course, this is right. It ALWAYS depends on the flexibility of the words we are using. When you start the car in the morning, are you "thinking" about starting the car, or is it just rote action? But you certainly CAN think about it. I think when a person enters an environment of familiarity, like a classroom or someone's kitchen, there is, implicit in all one sees, the discursive possibility that lies "at the ready," as when one asks me suddenly, doesn't that chef's knife look like what you have at home? I see it, and language is there, "ready to hand". For us, not cows and goats, but for us, there is language everywhere and in everything.

I thoughts on the whole matter of religion is varied and widespread. Could you perhaps give me a summation what has happened over the 9 pages as I am late to the party.

I think it could be best to start by looking at differing cosmological perspectives both now and historically, then extrapolating further back into prehistory.

I think Mircea Eliade did some stellar scholarship on religions and religiosity in general. — I like sushi

Well, you're preaching to the choir. But the OP is about something prior to the qualified nature of the experience. One may experience something so alien to common sense and deeply profound that it requires metaphysics to give an account of it, but to make the claim that the world as it is in all its mundanity itself possesses the basis for religious possibility, this is the idea here; that in the common lies the uncommon metaethical foundation for ethics and religion.

Most who are religious do not give any thought to what Eliade had say and the mystical things they believe in are entirely textual, traditional, cultural, but certainly not personally mystical. This is reserved for "faith" in others who were like this, hence the rise of personality cults and so much bad metaphysics. Faith mostly encourages the divide between this world and another. Here, I want to show that this other world really is this one.
So here is a question that lies at the center of the idea of the OP: what if ethics were apodictic, like logic? This is what you could call an apriori question, looking into the essence of what is there in the world and determining what must be the case given what is the case. Logic reveals apodicticity, or an emphatic or unyielding nature. Entirely intellectually coercive. I claim that ethics has this at its core.

Or admits to having no access via [that uniquely human form of] existence, and so, gets on with the business of existence, knowing (unlike postivists) that it's just business. — ENOAH

Easier to say; but I don't think it possible to go back to business, and just as likely that one was never wholly really there IN the "just business" to begin with. After all, if one is there staring at the abyss of being, what is it that drove one to be there in the first place? It wasn't the curious lines of thought produced by philosophers. It was something there originally that made their thinking compelling.

A thin line between existential enlightenment and schizoid personality, the latter literally meaning divided. The kind of thing I have been emphasizing would be no more than an encouragement of a psychosis by normal standards.

So well said! — ENOAH

But did I say it? Yes, and this was a derivative occasion, for was I not just repeating words I have said many, many times before? Derivative in the mundane sense, sure, for nothing in my head is not derived from those I read. But more broadly conceived, derivative in terms of the possibilities already in the language I was educated into. One direction the OP takes us is toward the self, the ontology of the self. This is value-in-being.

Do you think he maintained focus on knowing, right through to the end; or, did he silence the knowing, the pride that would follow, and the fear which the former arises to overcome. Did he make the ultimate sactifice; one stripped of all construction, loosened from the (safety) net of becoming; a sacrifice of being?

If the former, "one" remains "I" even in its noblest sacrifice.

If the latter, one truly is the body being and ceasing to be. — ENOAH

It is a curious question. He was at once there and not there, and certainly he had been "not there" many times. He likely lived in this threshold most of the time. Already dead, you might say, by any non physical standard of living. But read the Abhidhamma: it is a world of extraordinary and unrealized dimensions of experience. I have argued that the notion of "no self" is not taken up very analytically in the East. I will in the future look more deeply into this extraordinary account, very alien to our culture.

WTF? I'm intrigued. Thanks! — ENOAH

That's Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation. The first five are found in Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. Quite accessible! Unlike the more technical works.

You know, that might be a "crack" a glitch in the mechanics where aware-ing might find "it's [organic] self." I've never tried.
But you must agree. Instantly "thoughts" flood the aware-ing, even in its "effort" (which habitually employs thought). — ENOAH

Yes, I do agree. But explicitly one can yield to the world, what Heidegger called gelassenheit, his meditative thinking that does not dogmatically seize hold of the world but yields to its possibilities of disclosure. This is, for me and I suspect for you as well, the uncanny sense one has of the world as being, or being-in-the-world as one approaches its margins. Absolutely essential, I argue, for understanding the nature of religion. It is our own finitude that is somehow lost, but lost IN that very finitude: Inquiry beings with the life we face every day, then moves to what is unsaid and ignored. You like Fink. Here is an actual quote:

If, then, the point of breakthrough to transcendental life, the transcendental ego, is described and fully unfolded in the first stage of regressive phenomenology, we have essentially two possibilities for proceeding further. Either we actually get into the concrete disciplines of constitutive investigation, and carry out static and genetic analyses of constitution, or we first of
all develop the full content of being as it is given us by the reduction, we disclose the hidden implications of the ego: co-existent [koexistierend] transcendental intersubjectivity. These two possible ways of proceeding are not at all, however, of equal standing. The methodologically correct procedure is
rather to keep to the first stage of regressive phenom enology and to cover it
in its whole breadth, to complete the initial form of the phenomenological reduction, egological reduction, in the final form, intersubjective reduction. It is only by disclosing transcendental intersubjectivity (even if only in its protomodal form) that constitutive regressive questions, which in every instance
proceed from the construct of acceptedness which is "the phenomenon of the world," achieve the rank that makes possible adequate understanding of the intersubjective world as the correlate of a transcendentally communicating constitution. That is, if we immediately go into constitution within the egological restriction, then on the basis of egological performances we shall never
be able adequately to explain the intersubjective sense of being that constituted objectivity has. There are elements left over in the problematic of egological constitution that do not come clear and which compel us to return to the methodologically first stage of regressive phenom enology and broaden
the contracted field within which regressive inquiry into constitution began
its work.[/i]

You see, Fink is no mystic. He is a very rigorous intellectual, but his thoughts attempt to find where in the already given world transcendental impositions have their ground. In this passage he prepares the way for a discussion about metaethics by introducing the condition of intersubjectivity. Emanuel Levinas moves deeply into this.

I, as I have said, am a quasi mystic, meaning I do not sit in a cave trying to annihilate the world; but I do take this kind of thing seriously. For the understanding, the reduction is the key to this (see the underlined text above). It subsumes all meditative practices intellectually, which means that while the meditative practice may be the ultimate rigor of discovery, to understand this is to move into phenomenology. All of the "metaphysics" in the ancient Eastern texts are reducible to phenomenology, whether it is in Pali or Sanskrit. How can I say this so emphatically? Because it is so clear. Phenomenology takes one INTO the world and shows us the problematic of this relation.

Of course, these texts are often disdainful of language's attempts to disclose the unspoken, but this is exactly why one has to read Derrida: language is self critical; if there is something profound about our existence, language will discover this. It is IN language it is revealed that the world is metaphysics.

This comes up consistently. Does this answer, if any necessary premises are accepted, address it? Use rock because cup has the added complexity of being a cultural construct.

In nature without language eyes see rock and brain process it bt sending signals to trigger an appropriate feeling, drive, action, if any. The "conversion" of the rock into the object, "the rock" doesn't take place. So that your question, "how rock there brain here" does not even come up.

In world of human mind, eyes see rock, a conversion into language autonomously takes place, drives feelings actions, are displaced/determined by those constructions. Now eyes "see" "rock — ENOAH

Yeah, I do time and time again come back to this. I don't want to complicate it. Not one thought. Consider that I am the scientist that is asking the simple question about a relation between two objects, a brain and a fence post. One has to isolate the condition and study it as it appears, and nothing else. Later one can assimilate and object all she likes, but for now, just intelligent observation: how is it possible?
It isn't. There is no epistemic theory that makes the connection. Knowledge according to the physicalist model is impossible. So, this makes one review the working thesis of what a person is, an epistemic agency, that is, me, this self that stands before the world. What do we do when idea flat out fail? We reexamine assumptions, or examine them for the first time, as is mostly the case here.
But first, are you convinced that "physical reality and the causal laws that apodictically determine it" is a failed attempt? One has to first get to this place.

The purpose: to undo the grasp that physicalism has on one's basic thinking. It is a very strong, intuitive hold, encouraged constantly, assumed throughout one's education and a permanent fixture in belief. THIS has to be undone. ANd then, one can look at alternative theories in a different light. (What is a theory: and idea with a predication. "Snow is white" is a theory.)

And all that you say about the world of language and the world of the human mind: put this on hold, if you would. For one cannot speak of the world and drives and feelings, etc., until one can say what the world and the rest are. This takes the matter to the perceptual act itself. The perceptual act is PRIOR to what things in the natural DO.

Husserl's transcendental contradictorily involves the Ego. It is, by definition, not elevated. — ENOAH

The transcendental ego. True, one does have to read his works mto understand the nuances of phenomenology. Keep in mind that he opened a door. Later, philosophers will walk through in greater strides.

For me it is simpler. The elevated reality where humans are concerned, belongs to being [that organic being]. All else is talk. — ENOAH

Not sure what you mean by "organic," but I do understand what you are talking about. But I would say this: For me, the world is this grand "ineffable" disclosure of being, and when I am in the intimacy or deep proximity of this experience, the world seems to stand still, and I become aware of the "substratum," if you will, of the horizon of being in the world, the absolute "thereness" that remains undisclosed in day to day affairs. Such an odd way to talk, but there it is. This state is often called ecstatic, meaning one stands "outside" of oneself and the usual assumptions that are always in play.
The "talk" is an attempt to give this experience analysis. Just that. And the literature IS productive here. This "being as such" occurs to the understanding in language. That is, when you ask yourself, what IS this? you are already the mode of disclosure. This simplicity you speak of is a simplicity; this is not being challenged. This is where we leave Heidegger in the dust. But if one wants to clarify the "what is this?" question, and make more clear the vocabulary that one is using every time one tries to think about what it is, then Heidegger is VERY useful. As is Husserl, and especially all the post post modern phenomenologists I read. I don't know that they experience the world quite as I do, in fact, I am sure they both do and they do not, but they help a lot to guide thought through to greater realization.

Look at it like this: I am quite sure the ancient people of the Christian bible were often deeply attuned to the "divinity" within, profound and wondrous. By this I "simply" mean that they experienced the world a bit as I do, free of the burden of presumption and open to the world's original being and free of the endless distractions of science and technology and the claim these make on our identity. But interpretatively they were just awful! Dreadful ideas of primitive thinking that brought about the world's worst horrors. One has to ask, how they could their thinking be so radically missing the mark of what this original divinity (I am calling it) "said"? The answer to this question is that everything we experience is interpretatively received. The "good" as Wittgenstein called it does not wear its interpretation on its sleeve in the entanglements of familiar affairs.

Such is the problem of the "simplicity" of analysis-free living.

Hmm. But is it in the constructions? Or is it in the Organism providing both the infrastructure and feedback? — ENOAH

To speak the word "construction' or "organism" is a construction. This is why post modern philosophy really is the final philosophy: inquiry reaches into its own structure and finds itself looking back, as with questions about the nature of logic, say. Every time inquiry goes as deep as it can go it encounters the language that produces the thought that is inquiry itself. Kant is a called a transcendental idealist for this reason, and positivists got tired of a hundred years of Kant and declared nonsense to metaphysics. Structures of thought itself are not analyzable once thought is reduced to logicality simpliciter and so the existentialist finds herself just staring unproductively at nothing in search for being. I think of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức who set himself afire. Yet his mind was not absent of the thoughts of protest and judgment up to final moment, that is, he knew what he was doing and why. Most interesting test for the nature of agency, the "who" one is.

There is a fundamental agreement with your thoughts that emerges from this, which is an inescapable transcendentalism. The quasi mystic, like myself, stands in a twilight world, like something out of pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite's Cloud of Unknowing, and I think this is exactly where one should be or Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation in which Fink tries to pin the activity. To observe the generative actuality in the generative moment, seen AS generative in real time: the live consciousness prduced, brought into existence as a flow of experiential-reality which is received in the actual occurrent "acceptedness" of the present, but IN the theoretical mentality that beholds the being-there at all. Hear the way he puts it, referring to the phenomenologist:

......by producing the transcendental onlooker, who as such does not go along with the belief in the world, with the theses on being [Seinsthesen] held by the world-experiencing human I. Rather,
he takes a look at that belief in the world in such a way as to inquire back behind the "world-character" of world-believing life, behind humanness, and thereupon to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human. 9Thus
through the reduction the proper theme of philosophy is revealed: the transcendental constitution of the world

Really, he is expressing simply what happens when inquiry takes one to this threshold of discovering our foundational indeterminacy which is discovered in the concrete moment of experience production, as when I put forth thoughts to conceive this sentence. I stop, and bring the whole of productive thought to a halt, and turn thought into an indeterminacy by removing the certainty of the affirmation that goes unchallenged in the thinking. But then, this indeterminacy, conceived as indeterminacy is a new thought construction itself, and we achieve what for me is a rather dramtatic impasse as the regression never stops, for thoughts about thoughts are always subject to the same review, the same gainsaying. One will never "leave" this place by, if you will, dropping out of language, for it is in the language structure that is was brought to light. But again, this does nothing to render less significant the interface itself! You see, agency-in-language or language-in-agency in the enlightened awareness does not witdraw from language; it withdraws from a hermeneutical perspective, from, as Fink puts it, the "world-experiencing human I." Houses and trees and General Motors recede into the background, for one now takes up the "impossible" givenness of the world. Impossible? See Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Long story, a bit long, and windy. There is a long extension by Caputo in his Prayers and Tears of Derrida that is complicated, but worth the read.

The case I am trying to make here is, and I know I repeat this, that "language" never leaves perception for us, interpretations come and go, and I put the term "language" now in double inverted commas because, and this is a major point I try to push, language itself is under examination, and it has been revealed that this leads to an infinite regression, but this cannot make language external to enlightenment for enlightenment in this quasi mystical sense is part of the structure of understanding. One cannot be, to recall Mill's old maxim, be both the pig and the philosopher. Enlightenment produced in the experiences of an infantile mind have a very limited sense of agency. For me, there is only one way to find remedy, an obvious way: language itself is transcendental, but not in the historical Hegelian or even Heideggerian sense. This is hard explain, but simply put, language as an interpretative medium is not a "medium" at all, but structed enlightenment itself. Nothing stands outside "noumena" and double inverted commas are everywhere in this context as language reaches into the impossible presence of its own generative possibility.

Except ontology qua what ontology purports to pursue, Being. That, if pursued to its end, is not knowing, but being. How does this require any logical assessment? Ontology pursues the nature, ultimately, of being [itself]. How better to pursue being than by turning away from making and believing (including but not limited to all philosophy) and just being? — ENOAH

Kant opens this door. But plain analysis does, too. That one epistemic failure: How does anything out there get into knowledge claims? This has to be pondered, you know, cup there, brain here....errrr, explain. Once physicalism is undone, THEN the world steps forward. An account of my knowledge of the world needs to close the distance between known and knower. This is a brain-physicality problem, so what does physicality say about this relation? It says there are two separate localities, just as when we talk about physical things, like fence posts and cactuses, one here, one there. But this "thereness" of the fence post is physically distinct from the cactus such that there can be no epistemic crossing, no intimation through the "medium" of physical space of its being-a-cactus, and this is not, at first, a language problem at all. It is purely a problem of the mechanics of physicality, if you will, the causality of relations (what the naturalist Quine calls the bottom line of justification of knowledge claims).

All I can say is that once this becomes a vivid problem, the kind that shows itself as truly important (for we are accustomed to ignoring or never even imagining such questions prior to their being taken up. That is, we are in such a "mode of acceptance" prior to basic questions, that basic questions seem outrageous and absurd) one sees that physicalism and its "localism" has no place at all in foundational thinking. And now, the world is upside down: physical distance is a mode of what is given rather than the givenness being a mode of what is physical. That is, when I say things like The cup is on the table, and make the move to basic questions, the distance between me and the cup is now interpreted as a foundational transcendence, meaning, the cup remains what it is in plain nonanalytical talk, and its being on the table, its being "over there," fits nicely into many contexts of discussion and reference, but move discussion to this other order of thought, philosophy/phenomenology, and the plain spoken "thereness" vanishes, and the intimacy of knowing is primordial. I am not a brain, most clearly. I am thought, feeling, anticipation, memory, and on and on, or rather, to be clear, I witness these as the most intimate and unassailable "objects" of my knowing, and a brain is an object like a tree or a cactus, before me, acknowledged. Does the brain produce consciousness? Of course not. Consciousness encounters a brain in the phenomenological horizon of events. Thinking that the brain does exclusively generate consciousness makes knowledge impossible (per the above). But does this mean that a brain is not causally related to thought, feelings, and the rest? Of course not. It is evidently the case that there is this causal relation, but epistemically causal relations do not define the relation between me and the the known object. Casual influence makes sense, but certainly not causal generativity. If this were the case, to repeat, knowledge would be impossible.

Metaphysical physicalism, or "scientism" as it is pejoratively called, simply fails at the basic level so completely (there is no working paradigm in science that can even approach epistemology) that in order to responsibly draw up a theory, one MUST step into the pure phenomenology of the perceptual event in order even begin.

And so, in response to your "turning away from making and believing" in discussing being, this would entail the physicalist position, the treating of subjective states as independent of the observed. But a phenomenon is inclusive of this because this is the way the world presents itself" the taking up of a lamp AS a lamp, is there IN the lamp event, as are the attitudes, emotions, interest, and concepts. They all "attend" the lamp in the constitution of the lamp in its "thereness". Physicalism and a physicalist being, by comparison, is just an abstraction, a reification of a single feature of the perceptual event, its locality in space. Even if one is not being physicalist about this, the presence of the world's being in the perception of an object is complex. Being is a simple term, another world for presence, if you like, but, and this is what I call the jumping to the chase, the simplicity acknowledged in, well, the quasi mystical apprehension of being-as-such, is OUR being as such. Meaning, we really do exist, and when I say a stone exists, too, I am projecting my being on to the stone at the basic level of apprehending. Simplicity here never does overcome and annihilate complexity, for the complexity, too, is part of our transcendental nature.
Now, I have put the whole matter in deeply troubled waters, no? You and I REALLY ARE in a world and our problems and their entanglements are real. What is NOT real is that which belongs to the interpretative error made as a matter of the habits of the race, as Kierkegaard put it. What is happening before our eyes everyday is happening, no question, but what it IS is a question.

That was a bit excessive.

I think, psychoanalysis has gotten pretty close. I think science could Crack a lot of the code. And phenomenology, as did Plato, laid a strong foundation. But I think what none of those can do is know what reality is, or truth. They can only construct it, just as I too, am only constructing. Phenomenology, from Kant to Husserl does, I agree, ironically (?) also express this essence of religion; it points to the fact that there is Truth "hidden behind" the knowledge. — ENOAH

On noumena: noumena is not an ontological division but a division in ontology: when we think of noumena we have in mind that indeterminacy found IN phenomena, not some distant and impossible transcendence that cannot be known at all (Kant, and the cause of a great deal of trouble among those who want to keep metaphysics out of serious thinking). All that one may affirm is grounded in the world before us, and the phenomenal IS the noumenal. They are only interpretatively distinct, meaning when one thinks noumenally or transcendentally, one turns toward what one encounters in the world that gives rise to this in the first place.

Psychoanalysis is another construction on the foundational givenness which this discussion seeks. I don't know which you have in mind. Savaj Zizek takes Lacan seriously, and I am reminded of R D Laing's Divided Self that tries to reconceive psychological problems free of the traditional pathological assumptions. But this begs the ethical and religious questions that lie deeper in the phenomenological givenness. Religion is logically prior to psychology, meaning its issues are presupposed by psychology just as they are by physics or biology. The perceptual act itself generates metaphysical questions. The cup on the table possesses the entire range of possible inquiry for the world at the basic level, for all that is the world is derivative epistemically. Epistemology and ontology are the same thing in two words.

This last sentence needs to be taken very seriously. To be is to be perceived. This says nothing about other things beyond the scope of perception not existing. But it does say that what the term 'existing' can possibly mean to us is bound to the conditions that make existence possible.

Plato's metaphysics I have never had use for. And I think rationalism of any kind is going to stand outside of your principle critique of "presence". For Plato, presence in the world as becoming refers us to the talk about being as such as a formal concept. Take a look at what Kierkegaard has to say about this in his Repetition as he champions the "becomingness" of the world as the very source of presence now reconceived as a spontaneous renewal of givenness where freedom Platonic "recollection" is discovered. John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics is very good on examining this idea.

Truth hidden behind knowledge? I once wrote about conceiving the ancient mind beholding the sun without the knowledge assumptions of modern science which lay instant claim on the epistemic/ontological event. Of course, putting the danger of getting things miserably wrong aside (violent rituals to appease anthropomorphic gods, e.g.), for this is not the point; the point is the existential profundity that is lost on us. Original sin for Kierkegaard is the "habits of the race" which is Christendom and the pageantry and devotion and institution of culture. So bound to the "tranquilization" of the "they" of inauthentic existence, as Heidegger will later put it, one never rises up to even ask basic questions.

I think this would be true if there were two selves. There is only the organic aware-ing being. There is no knowing, no meaning, nothing but aware-ing the present is-ings. View that aware-ing as unfettered reality; being unencumbered by the projections of becoming. We were so obviously once an animal like that. Our [what I've been calling] brain was fed images to trigger conditioned responses. Now our brain us flood with stories. And tge organism aware-ings the "I" in tge stories as itself. Neither the "I" nor the stories are anything. They're empty nothing. So no one is in the fettered state needing to get out. The body just needs to aware-ing its organic being so that tge stories follow a--ironically just as fictional--path which is more functional to the Body and the species. — ENOAH

The brain certainly IS the physical center to where thought, emotion and the rest IF one is studying neurobiology. Phenomenology is prior to this. There is no brain. Of course, there is a brain, but look at it like this, if I am studying particle physics, I don't talk about brains, neurons, synaptic density, and the rest. Or if I am talking about a gymnast's skill I don't talk about how the nervous system works. I CAN, but this is not the contextual "region" for it. But, we generally agree that talk about physics is more basic than that about skilled activity, and so closer to ontology, that is, foundational inquiry into being, what IS. Phenomenology observes that there is something more basic than physics, which is the "thing itself" (not Kant's thing in itself): presence or givenness itself. To know a brain is there is to see a brain, and "seeing" is not a brain function. Seeing is the act of consciousness awareness. Consciouness does not produce a brain. It witnesses a brain in a conscious event. The question is, how is this possible?

I agree that a brain floods us with stories, but these are not "empty nothings." The story's aboutness is an empty nothing just as so many finctions are. But phenomenologically, there are meanings in play, an event in experience, thinking and imagining, and these are real. THOUGH, even the concepts that can be in play at all possess this same unreality. Big question.

That's right, I agree. Inevitably Mind's autonomous process is still flooding the brain and triggering the body with its constructions. — ENOAH

But the giveness or presence of these constructions still IS presence. This is a pretty big point, I think. Apprehending the extraordinary nature of this world lies not in the denial of these constructions that flood the mind. Such constructions constitute the world in its everydayness. The error is in the interpretation of these constructions, not in there being there at all.

But they aren't one with the organism, they are images stored in memory and moving by an evolved law which flesh only provides the perfect hardware for. Once the data is input, it has evolved to function. But the data, though existent and functional, is not Real like the flesh is real. And the flesh is the real consciousness; it's organic aware-ing. Even a plant has it when it grows toward the light, or it's roots search for water. But Mind is just data making us feel by projecting stories. The stories are not real. An apple is what it is; not what we perceive when Mind constructs and projects "A is for Apple". — ENOAH

Tricky and a very good point. The matter goes to the basic description of what lies before you. When you stand and behold the world, it is a structured event. It is not chaos. Without structure it would be the "blooming and buzzing" of an infantile mind. This is what makes truth possible, not what makes truth, truth, but is essential for truth.

But the experience and its content and the gravitas of this world, for this I look to Michel Henry, and beyond, though the Christian bent I can do without. OTOH, Christian metaphysics doesn't have to be tied to churchy narratives.

It's a physical exercise, but it's easy to stay stuck in Mind with advice like watch your breath, or worse, count them. I believe one must hone in on that breathing is. Not I am or my breaths: just breathing [organism breathing]. There are no fireworks; nor eureka I'm sure. It's more like Kierkegaard's knight of faith. To the world you are still just a clerk, if you have masterfully glimpsed being, by momentarily being. To yourself you remain a clerk, but you now "realize" something "true" outside of the constructed truths. — ENOAH

I think there is a eureka. This really does go to the OP: Value-in-being designates all that makes something important and it is at the core of religion and ethics. Dreadful things happen, as do wonderful things. But once it is seen that ALL of these common affairs are transcendental, if terribly entangled, then the contingencies fall away, that is, the states of affairs so common and trivializing are suspended in the openness of one's gaze. What happens then is hard to say, for we don't live in a culture that talks about it.

And I am not trying to be argumentative, but something "outside" of constructed truths is hard to imagine. Certainly outside a culture's collective beliefs and practices, and so on, but once one grasps the truth you refer to, it becomes structured, for a person is a structured perceptual agency. Again, this in no way diminishes what it is. God could comes to me, impart his divine wisdom, and I woule be free to talk about it in a very structured way IF my interlocutor also was made aware as I was.

If you're saying the organ brain only exists as a construct projected, and that the thing brain in itself may be vastly different, I accept that possibility, but think it's far more likely our organic senses are not tricking us. There are objects and bodies in the world around us. We could sense them as they are so called in themselves. But Mind floods sensation with images and churns out perception. So now we can't help but see the seasoned version. We aren't outright seeing an alien world, but compared to apes, it's alien enough. — ENOAH

Actually, no, I am not saying an organ brain only exists as a construct project. The assumption of the question How does anything out there get into knowledge claims? is that we do in fact see what is there, not some representation or mental image. I am sure the brain is actually there as seen. It is not about the impossibility of perception of the world; rather, it is about the possibility. I observe it and it is there, but I cannot say how this is made possible given the standard physicalist model of the world. There is only one rule to this "method" of phenomenology, which is to report about and analyze as faithfully as one can about what stands there, clear as a bell, and this coffee cup is clear as a bell, there in space and time just as science says it is. No one questions this while IN the interpretative mode of scientific and everyday acceptedness. BUT: leave this interpretative pov, and move to phenomenology, then one is in a different world: a completely different interpretative context (ever wonder how a chair can be a chair, an aggregate of wood and synthetic fibers, a vast system of atomic energic stability, a prop in a play, and so on, all in the one chair? How about a weapon as I throw the chair at an intruder? Or a symbol of third world oppression suggested by the Made in Cambodia label? Meaning is contextual, and the more one moves away from narrower contexts, one eventually ends up in philosophy and religion, the final foundational questions.

The question is, what phenomenological interpretative pov all about? One thing it is about it is the complete dismissal of normal science and everydayness. One looks at different things. What is THERE is the phenomenon and its "thereness" is reduced to what you call presence.

With respect. That expresses a lingering in the very thing that "metaphysical" aware-ing you're implying. That thing--yes, call it language (Human Mind)--from which the sublime presence is, we agree, a "reprieve", but actually, simply, a turning inward, into silence, asks the question, and you, with respect, "let it" (its all autonomous anyway), but "here" in presence, where reality is being (what it is-ing which we call being), there are no questions, no discovery.

The instant "you" discover the "experience" of sublime presence, it has ceased being aware-ing-ed. And organic attention is once again flooded by made up images from memory and reprocessed for "the world" by the imagination; all in lightning speed and incessantly. — ENOAH

A reprieve from explicit thinking. But to encounter at all, the agency of a self is constituted by knowledge assumptions, as when I glance at a cloud and thoughtlessly, passively, know it is a cloud and anticipate what it can do having had many cloud experiences and read cloud texts, technical, poetic, and so forth. But while there are no explicit assumptions, one is not a feral being nor an infant child: the presence is registered in a language context and the significance of this is contextual as well.

Discovery: just as there is no discovery when get in my car and start the engine, or enter a familiar classroom of desks, lectern, white board, and so forth, and familiarity fails to deliver? See below.

The question, the piety of language. Consider what a question is phenomenologically. Hammering away, the head flies off and the hammering ceases. A question emerges as stoppage produces inquiry. It is an "openness". What was there yields now to a brief nothingness before attempts to reestablish hammering. A question as it opens discovery of possible remedy is mundane. Consider that metaphysics begins with a question: something in the continuity of our existence that reaches for a solution and finds nothing, yet the openness remains. It is not a fabrication, as a fantasy might invent. It is existential, not "ontic" but "ontological" (in case you are interested in Heidegger's language). Call this openness eternity (not Heidegger).

This nothing: Eternity in time and space is familiar, and this is not simply quantitative: when one reaches out to these eternities, one is confronted with an existential impossibility that is not reducible to an abstraction, though we are mostly familiar with this kind of reduction and so familiarity, once again, trivializes something pretty amazing. Now think of eternity, not in space or time, but in the existing things around you and see how this familiar intuitive anomaly of perception trailing off into eternity, now throws the world into question, rendering indeterminate not merely space and time, but everything, every breath taken.

I am not disagreeing with you, essentially. My purpose is to close the gap made by language that separates the ordinary world from the esoteric: one does not find the esoteric in the world; rather, one realizes that this world is always already metaphysical and our ordinary language has its final self analytical revelation in the discovery of its own radical indeterminacy, and hence, the world's, as with the brief inquiry in the the nature of what a question is above. Language erected boundaries of discovery, but in doing so made it possible to think at all, made it possible to be an agency that can be aware at all. And all thinking is categorical, and thus what is apprehended is implicitly categorical and when the thought comes to you that there is more, something radically Other, that mysteriously has "presence," THIS is categorical thought at work. To be an agency at all is categorical (and just to be clear, the cow that looks up and sees greener grass elsewhere is non-symbolically, proto-categorically "thinking". How? It is the essential logical conditional structure, if...then.... as she lifts her legs to move to greener grass).

Also, to say there is no past (history), present or future, but rather that these belong to an impossible singularity, does not cancel the way this "singularity" (which is, of course, itself a boundaried word) "works". Everything is now enclosed in a question, and the past is now "the past", under erasure, if you are Derrida. In other wods, the language one deploys in the dismantling of the assumptions that are at work (deconstruction, i.e., language's self analysis) can never be transcended for it constitutes agency, but this in NO way undermines the nature or significance of what is disclosed. Rather, it brings language into the fold of metaphysics.

Language itself is its own indeterminacy as well as the openness itself--the question, the openness TO the wonder of the world.

Ok. Yes. And yet, that's what I think I mean to say. So, I need to understand the problem. First, this so called unencumbered reality is like everything, the wording is a stab at a target, and I am not a well trained fencer. In itself is implied, its failure. But that can be said of everything, all wording, to obviously varying degrees. But none is immune. But I know you mean beyond that. So does this help. When speaking of reality; not only do I have no business qualifying it with conditions like unencumbered, but I have no business period. What I reiterate is I do not and cannot know reality; I can only know the seasoned version. I can only be reality; which is that (not that "I" already am) that already is. — ENOAH

Well, I just read and think like you do, but I read different things. But consider that all one has every encountered as the world is phenomena. One knows the world in experience, and it is impossible to imagine what something would be outside of phenomena. Such a construction "outside of phenomena" is literally nonsense, something Wittgenstein famously announced, but just ask the question I asked above for the down and dirty: how does anything out there get in here? How does a tree get into a knowledge claim about the tree? Complete nonsense. Of course you can trace the causal sequences of any sensory connection, but what you cannot do is explain how causal connectivity can be epistemic. This very, very weird inquiry leads only one place: consciousness is LOGICALLY prior to any acknowledgement of the world. Logically because the being of something is logically bound to the perception of that thing, that is, what it IS is an event. And the being that is intimated as an impossible "presence" is an event, too. But I say this only because analysis demands it, for to understand what Being one is already IN Becoming (to use this kind of Platonic talk). What we say is "Being as an absolute" itself cannot escape the world in which it is discovered for this would be ony "bad metaphysics," the kind of metaphysics that exceeds what is there in the world to posit. Being is, after all, a word, conceived in the time matrix of phenomenal being, and to call something Being "outside" of this makes no sense.
But again, this in no way diminishes the nature and importance of what one experiences. It rather wants the explanatory approach to what this is to make sense, and I can see where this leads to trouble: for to take that extraordinary step into the "cloud of unknowing" is to silence the world and its affairs and stand before all things as one stands before an original primordiality. This is not alien to me. But it does not necessitate the reduction of the self to nothing. Quite the contrary: The self is elevated, profoundly reified, and acknowledged as the very source of the divinity objectified by popular religion. None of this is undone. But one's finitude is understood as infinite. This is a way to understand Kierkegaard's knight of faith.

Yes, I totally get that. There might even be a melancholy to it. But that's because Mind moves egotistically. The system "desires" manifestation of its constructions (because the organic infrastructure upon which it drives is structured to fire images to the aware-ing part of the organism for conditioned responses. So "it" that is, experience and the Subject to which it attaches, "want" to extend into the being itself. It's not an illusion it's a process of evolution wherein a thing thrives by growing. So "you" which constructs meaning, knowledge, want to extend that fiction into being itself. But being is being, not knowing. And not just into being, "you" want knowledge to extend beyond being but into an imagined eternity; and so Mind evolves to construct itself in History as spirit. And being a functional construction, it sticks — ENOAH

You see, I agree and disagree throughout this. See what I wrote above. How does one move beyond the fiction that attempts to make a claim into being itself? How does one get out of this "karma" if you will? The answer: a faithful analysis of the phenomenal world one faces. A structural analysis called the phenomenological reduction (epoche).

And if you are the kind of person who at the outset of philosophical inquiry is already, well, say, very spiritual, then perhaps phenomenology is a viable method. I think phenomenology is the only way, frankly, for all of the spiritual practices that lead to deeper understanding are inherently phenomenological. The formal writing is the Western jnana yoga. And it is VERY rigorous as it dismantles the world.

That is sublime. I'd adjust my own take to it by saying "the world" is just the images constructed by mind and flooding organic consciousness. Plato, afterall, laid that foundation regardless of the given locus in the history of evolving interpretations. No skin off his back. — ENOAH

Plato? Rationalism really does not carry the matter very far. But this is a big issue, for per the above, thought and the world are one! Kant (a rationalist, too) put it like this: sensory intuitions without concepts are blind; concepts without intuition are empty.

Ok, but the "event" only in the context of the essence of religion, i.e., to save us from our "selves" remind us we are all one, all of us, not even, just humans.

In the rest of "thought", it is in my opinion, though thought of as Philosophy of Mind,
the heart of metaphysics, explains, therefore "negates" epistemology, and, since Ethics is the offspring of the two...etc.

However, the Heideggerian process you described, and, maybe, on a strictly intellectual level, Husserl's bracketing (though I am a novice at both Hs, not for lack of sweat squinting, and tears), is close enough to what I'm proposing. Zazen just happens to be almost bang on, if properly practiced. Soto. Rinzai is probably a close second. I say just happened because I made the connection after witnessing tge hypothesis that Western philosophy built.

I note that, in my opinion, for both Hs as for Zazen, and Koans; the "reward" that sublime experience of presence you called it (it is utterly uncallable, so that feels right, why not) is extremely momentary. It's "hope" or "promise" from a "religious", but I submit, Hs perspective, is to "jolt" you so that you're on to the truth. And, as you instantly and inevitably return to the Narratives, maybe yours will be restructured autonomously to follow a path more functional for the Host organism, and its species and planet. — ENOAH

The bracketing is a method, nothing more. It aligns with what Buddhist thinking only if one can see how the pure description of phenomena is exactly what where rigorous meditation takes one. Only when one actually sees this, one steps beyond the intellectual level. It is an apiori argument, moving from the "presence" of apprehending the world and its objects, to what has to be the case given that this is the case. This is something Buddhists really don't do very well. For example, take this from the Prajnaparamita, on the extinction of self:

Sariputra: So, how does a Bodhisattva course as one coursing in perfect wisdom?

Subhuti: One does not course in skandhas, nor in any sign of such skandas, nor in ideas such as 'skandhas are signs', nor in production of skandhas, nor in any stopping or destruction of such, nor in any idea such as 'skandhas are empty', or 'I course', or 'I am a Bodhisattva'. And, this also doesn't occur to this one, 'one coursing thus courses in perfect wisdom and develops it'. One courses but one does not entertain such ideas as 'I course', 'I do not course', 'I course and I do not course', 'I neither course nor do I not course', and the same [four] with 'I will course'. One does not go near any dharma at all as all dharma are unapproachable and unappropriatable. So, a Bodhisattva purely cognizes and is as undifferientiated concentrated insight 'Not grasping at any dharma' by name or appearance, and regardless whether vast, noble, unlimited and steady, not shared by any of the Disciples or Pratyekabuddhas. As one dwells as this concentrated insight, a Bodhisattva quickly realizes full enlightenment which Tathagatas of this time predict for one such as this. But as one dwells in such concentration, one neither reviews nor thinks 'I am collected', 'I will enter concentration', 'I am entering into concentration', 'I have entered into concentration'. All these thoughts or notions in any and all ways do not exist for one such as this.

One way to express this idea in a very mundane way is to talk about qualia, the way analytic philosophers talk about pure phenomena. Note that when you observe the color red, you certainly CAN acknowledge this color as itself, its simple presence, and when you do this, all conceptualizing is suspended (bracketed), and contexts are ignored, and there is no question at all that you stand before the color red as it is apart from the language that informs you about it being red. Granted, the best you can do is stare, for the moment an idea comes to mind, the purity is violated, but again, the "red" (now in brackets, for the language is suspended) stands as "its own presupposition" so to speak: it needs no justification or explanation. It "explains" itself. Acknowledging this is done in language, of course; I mean, to speak as I do now, I am bringing this qualia INTO context or "skandha" but note: language does not undermine the integrity of the non categorical "red" before me. Skandhas engaged now as I explained do not misrepresent. Misrepresentation only occurs when one makes the mistake of identifying the otherness of the Real with categorical thinking, as we do when we talk about our dogs and cats and subway rides. Talk about these things is rich with skandhas or predication and description and so on.

I'll have to finish later.

By remaining present. By being. By not being-knowing-and-becoming. — ENOAH

Two ways to look at this, and they both belong to something I believe you accept. One deals with the "present". Now, it is not that I entirely deny this as an existential possibility, but it has to be given a broader context. When I am in the present and I witness the world around me (and I think those who are able to do this the best are the, well, call them practitioners of the religio-philosophical methods of the East. It is said that Gautama Siddhartha was the quintessential phenomenologist for a good reason: serious meditation reduces the world to its essential or "pure" phenomena, and brings one into the most direct intimacy with the world. This little description does not reveal the affective dimension of what occurs in this rigorous practice, something missing from Husserl and the rest, but is, I am arguing, the principle part) the agency of the "I" of my encounter with the world, even when matters turn profoundly insightful and deeply felt, is going to be constituted by the interpretative language education that gave me my "presence" out of infancy. The important part of this lies in the question, does this language and the "totality" of my educational grounding which prior to the "sublime experience of presence" determined my thinking, discover "something else" revealed as one approaches the ground zero, if you will, of the famous nunc stans. This something else is metaphysics
Of course, there is this terrible burden of philosophy that interferes with what I believe is the very simple (if difficult to achieve) revelation. But then, it is philosophy that requires us to speak what it is that this is about. Being and becoming have a long history of discussion and analysis, from the Eleatics and Heraclitus through Heidegger. The trouble is, Western philosophy is decidedly not mystical (in fact anglo american philosophy has done everything it could to distance itself from this), on the one hand; yet the world IS decidedly mystical as a world, on the other.
The other deals with time construction of the self. To observe, think, imagine, experience AT ALL, is to be in the becoming of things, for we ARE becoming in our nature. The absolute stillness of "being" is conceived by Plato as the changeless form that this world is an inferior manifestation of. I don't think at all that you have this in mind; I think what you have in mind is an actual event such that one discovers in the flux of one's existence a presence relative to the busy, what Heidegger calls "the they" self, so immersed in the daily goings-on if things, never pulling out and throwing the question of existence into the world, never lifting one's head out of the sand, so to speak. When one does this, one, in a very important way, stills the world. One no longer is concerned about catching buses and planning vacations. THIS kind of becoming is terminated, and the question (the piety of language) asserts itself.

But this does not change the "becoming structure" of experience. We are time, and each moment this "not yet" the stilling of which cannot be imagined. So, there is stilling and there is "stilling". I can still conscious activity, but I cannot still the construction of the moment itself. This would not be the "no self" of the Buddhists; it would be are duction to literal nothingness.

But, yes, we are flooded, our brains, with images of becoming and it is hard, arguably impossible, to escape. — ENOAH

Brains? The phenomenological view I am suggesting puts the brain among the many things found in experience. It is an inversion of the physicalism that implicitly dominates our thinking. A brain does not generate consciousness and all its thoughts and images; rather, consciousness is primary. Brains and everything else are discovered IN consciousness.

A bring up the question about how things out there get in here inorder to show that the default physicalist view is simply impossible for it makes knowledge impossible, because causality has no epistemic part of its nature. We are not "connected" to the world causally. We are connected in consciousness, in an occult intimacy that only phenomenology can discover. Science will never understand this.

But in the spirit of this particular discussion, though we may be trapped by our condition, if anything provides a window, an opportunity for a glimpse, it is the essence of religion, which I (presumably not alone) am positing as attending, not to the self, and the weaved narratives it appears in; but, rather to being; first, by being its unfettered, unencumbered reality; second, upon returning, as one ineluctably does (instantly), to the self; then, by attending to the welfare of the body, the species, and the nature we share with all others. Not to desire more; not to settle complacently for less. And, not to entertain the inevitable desires of the self, flooding the brain with reasons to go way beyond the welfare of reality (I.e. the body, species, nature). — ENOAH

And I share this enthusiasm for a world cleared of the muddle of entangled living. But terms like unfettered and unencumbered reality are philosophically problematic. Experientially, perhaps not, though this will have its limits, and will be vaguely understood at best, not unlike the term religion, all mountains, so they say, arrive at the same peak, meaning what one believes doesn't matter, for faith itself liberates one from the constraints of everydayness. I am sure there is something to this (even Kierkgaard has been accused of defending silliness), but I stand on the side of clarity AND metaphysics, not just clarity (the positivists who, by denying the term 'metaphysics' has any meaning beyond nonsense, completely trivialize our existence and have now ended up in what has been described as the trash heap of philosophy) nor just metaphysics (e.g., Christian faith; or the vague sense of something more). As I see it, one has to be clear about this mysterious threshold, and this requires a careful dissection of the structure of experience-in-the-world, the average everydayness.

I mean, before we can talk about what is unfettered, we have to know what it is that is doing the fettering. If we are "trapped" then this implies some untrapped condition, and this is not available to one who is IN the "fettered" state. One has to commit what is called an apophatic search: define what is in the world and the way that it obstructs insight. It is not as if what is there on the proverbial other side announces itself in the many contexts of our affairs. It is it absence that is notable, hence the apophatic method.

Very possibly I am not understanding something technical in your question. But it gets into judgement, 1. Because that is what Mind is, a knowing system; meaning is its "aim/product," 2. It happens autonomously. Like vision does to begin with (I.e. pre'consciousness') etc. For a hypothetical human never born into an age of humans with Mind, I.e. History, an apple comes into its line of vision (randomly, or because it is foraging) and it truly sees this aspect of its nature as, whatever, food; and it, whatever, eats it. For Mind, "judgement"--apple, ruit, healthy, red, green, large, ripe, crunch, squirt, sweet, etc etc etc--floods our brain autonomously, just as pre historically, the drive to eat might alone, have flooded the brain of the human organism, and yet, no less autonomously. — ENOAH

I did not make it complicated on purpose. Sorry for the confusion, but I meant it to be taken at face value: there I stand before the apple and I know it is there, and it is not me, and it is over there, and all this falls into place in the plainness of observation, but now the hard part: how is it that my knowing extends to something at all? Not through complex system of relatedness, all of which are essentially causal, because such systems cannot penetrate, if you will, the media of sensory, neural nor external conditions. Consider that the perfect model for epistemic connectivity is a mirror, and so seeing th images delivered by sights are like mirror images of the world. The question asks, How is it even remotely possible for such an image to be "of" the world, given that the intervening condition are the most opaque imaginable. Nothing can be more opaque than a brain. But then even if the brain operated like a mirror, upon inspection of its properties, what is a mirror image is something is most emphatically NOT that thing. Further, in the case of a true mirrored image, the object being mirrored is already known. I see a mirrored image of the Taj Mahal, and look up from the image, and there IS the Taj! In perception, there is no looking up to confirm. The image is itself its own being. One cannot look away from it to discover the Other. All there is or has ever been available to experience is experience.

Even when one observes a brain, one is only observing a phenomenon. My point is to make very clear that the indeterminacy I talk about with respect to the essence of religion is ontologically and epistemically absolute. Therefore, ethically absolute.....save the one thing that survives, which is value. It survives Descartes misconceived cogito, it survives physicalism (just reviewed here with this confusing question), is survives hermeneutics (one is not interpreting that one is in pain or pleasure), it survives comparisons of utility (better to torture one than a thousand; but then, this does not diminish the one in the least) It survives all second guessing.

A kick in the teeth possesses a dimension of wrongness that issues from the world.

Have to go so no time to respond to your last comment. Sorry.

What if it only appears to us as a linear process x-->y, because whatever "happened" to x and to y was immediately post constructed as x-->y and re-presented that way by Mind to "the" aware-ing ans assimilated in that form as "knowledge". But in "actuality" it was always just xy? — ENOAH

I followed you all the way up to "But in "actuality" it was always just xy." If your reasoning here is right, and I don't think it is wrong (meaning I do think causality in thought in an interpretative imposition on the world), then how does one get around the "post construction" of anything which is acknowledged at all, even and especially "just xy"? It is a Kantian problem, and the reason why we are forced into a transcendental telos of thought thinking about thought. Thought cannot think about the essence of thought, and talk about "in actuality" because this would take a perspective outside of thought. It COULD be that x and y are in some metaphysical, non relational simultaneity, but to speak like this takes one into the iffy world of speculative metaphysics.

But I am sure you are right about the way our ideas about the world are indeterminate. They are hermeneutical, and open to possibilities. When I see my cat I "see" the structures of my own thought in play, but I am so absorbed by the taking this world "as" (a Heideggerian term) the totality of my thoughts that I never am able to see freely that all of my apprehensions are open and viable for decision making.
But to step back: "xy" also belongs to this totality, I mean, to think of two things not being separated by the usual sequential thinking about causality, still affirms each of the two things PRIOR to this problem. There being something "there" at all is prior to anything one could say about its relations with other things, but then, to talk about its thereness begs the epistemic question, how does "it" get into judgment at all?

I am one for removing my eyes from text and thinking, and allowing an existential issue to "speak" on its own. So here I am, and I look up, and there is the cat, and I know the cat is there. And there is this very intuitive knowing. This is the ground, this direct intimation that escapes Descartes' doubting. Foolish to doubt the "thereness" of the sight and feel of the cat. But now look to the simple mechanics. The cat is there, not me, and I am here, and there MUST be a non magical way to explain how the, if you will, brain thing, "receives" the cat thing.

Causality is taken here to be simply the apodicticity of objects having to be caused to move. What is "really" going on here is precisely the point of the thought experiment of asking how anything "out there" gets "in here".

Keep in mind one thing: there is nothing at all epistemic about causality.

The essence of religion Is to pursue, or at least know, the Truth that there is a being, and a species of being, for which you are an agent, a tool, and more so, a fiduciary who must apply the highest good faith in carrying out such a duty. You are not a thing in itself which can exploit that being, though you think you can and in the process construct suffering. — ENOAH

Consider:

On truth: I think there are some questions that have a kind of zazen nature to them, a "sudden enlightenment," and this question is among these: How does anything "out there" in the great externality of the world, get "in here" referring to internal knowledge claims about the out there?

To understand religion in its essence, one has to understand existential indeterminacy. This is an foundational epistemological, and therefore, ontological, problem.

What are the grounds for doubt? What are the grounds for knowing? Maybe part of the confusion lies in the fact that we can imagine situations were we can doubt such propositions. However, can we doubt the propositions Moore is using, and can we doubt them in Moore's contexts? — Sam26

Language games end where pure phenomena begin. But this can be doubted as well: for how is it "pure phenomenon," escapes being a contextual "game" constituent itself? It doesn't, and Derrida was right about the "trace" which puts all that lies outside of the trace under erasure, under metaphysical erasure. So close to the Tractatus here, no? The world is mystical and ethics transcendental and Wittgenstein is sounding like the mystic Russell said he was.
But as I see it, there is no way to reconcile "the world" and language beyond this: it is a pervasive "doubt" that yields an ontology of, if you can stand it, the cloud of unknowing, the mystical underpinning of hermeneutics. The cogito and its object stand in a mystical relation.
Rorty was said that it has never been shown how anything "out there" (this under erasure) can get in here (the head's brain thing). A fascinating insight, so simply put, even as one is deeply pondering Descartes, missing this obvious fact, that there is nothing epistemic about causality. It is not doubt that rules this thinking, but hermeneutics and contextuality.

Presupposes as used in this context means there is a justification for believing X, or rather a justification for making the claim that one knows that X is the case. — Sam26

One has to wonder, is it possible for something to stand as its own presupposition, Kierkegaard's way of putting it. I think this question cuts deep into the issue, for it takes one to examine how presuppositional perceptual events (ordinary experiencing the world) can possibly hold within themselves that which both "there" undeniably, yet stands as its own presupposition in its "thereness".

Who needs goalposts anyway?

Ethics is not equivalent to spinoffs and extrapolations from/of Heiddy's thought. — creativesoul

The matter here is not about goalposts, though. This is the trouble with not reading closely. This is a descriptive argument. It is not about making things fair or just.
:cool: Have a nice, day creativesoul. I find your conversation....too vacant.

They don't get to choose so it makes no sense whatsoever to say otherwise... — creativesoul

No, no, my good friend. You are being invited to think a bit. When you raise your awareness to philosophical thought, you find you are always already (a Heidy term) IN a culture, a language, a "potentiality of possiblities" (Heidy yet again). In this, you have been making decisions all your life. But I cannot, for example, decide how to dress for a formal dinner in Indonesia.

That's not true. — creativesoul

Hmmm. Cryptically succinct.

Bullshit.

The narrative in question was all narrative. — creativesoul

No, you are mistaken.

And a nervy thing to say entirely without warrant. When I say religion has to be delivered from traditional narratives, it is simply to say that popular religions are constructed out of a lot of assumptions that are unsustainable on face value. Religion generally calls upon faith rather than justified belief. The idea here is that faith has driven religion into absurd reasoning. This can be overcome by phenomenological analysis.

As if all religion is existentially dependent upon a fairly recent philosophical practice we've named metaphysics? — creativesoul

No. Metaethics is discovered IN the analysis of mundane ethics. Ethics has its grounding in the value dimension of our existence. This is an apriori argument about the structure of experience. It has nothing to do with how recently the argument and the language came into being.

Assertion, not argument. — creativesoul

True. I am referring the argument at hand, though. Here is what I wrote in response to Janus just now:

Janus wrote:

For me 'God' signifies nothing beyond the highest feelings and principles that humans aspire to. Unconditional love, unwavering steadfastness, indomitable bravery and so on.

I responded:

Perhaps there is something to this, in fact, I would say there is, but this still remains distant from the affirmation of divinity. It is the same kind of thinking that gave rise to those pesky "omni this and that" that engendered so much empty metaphysical theology. In order for the "highest feelings" to be liberated from finitude, so to speak, feelings have to examined for "properties" that can do this. I recall Moore's analysis of ethics and "the Good" in which he called this a non natural property. Curious the way this goes, for it requires an examination of the finite and accessible occasion of the good. That is, an ethical or aesthetic example. What makes this apple's taste "good" to me? But first, because it is good to me, it becomes a possible object of some ethical problematic. If it were not in any way good to me, and this may include my concern for others for whom the apple is good, then there can be no basis for an ethical complaint regarding it. The point is, it is this mysterious goodness that is among the various other properties, the sweetness, the texture, the complex taste features, etc., that makes the apple ethically viable.
But back to the good. Why mysterious? And why did Wittgenstein call value transcendental? To me, this is a fascinating question, for note as one enjoys the apple, and all of the empirical predications are analytically exhausted, there is this residual good. What IS it? One cannot observe it, and this raises eyebrows as to whether is "exists" at all. It is invisible, as odd as this may sound. But take a stronger example, much stronger, like falling in love and being ecstatic or your "unconditional love." Here the residual good (as I will call it) still cannot be empirically identified (it is not, after all, an empirical property) yet "it" dominates entirely the analysis of this love (or happiness. Love is happiness with an attachment).
Think of the other dimension of ethics and aesthetics, the Bad. Not observable, yet apply the thumb screws and the bad is now this overwhelming presence.
There is a reason Wittgenstein in his great book of facts has nothing of ethics in it (see his Lecture on Ethics). The good and the bad are transcendental, but one more thing has to be made clear: The good and the bad are apodictic, or apriori, if you like: universal and necessary in what they are; non contingent.

How do you know without knowing what "the basic level" includes? — creativesoul

One discovers the basic level through inquiry. Heidy found there to be no single primordiality (as with the Christian God), but rather, a complex ontology of equiprimordiality, and if the matter were about language, then I would agree. But religion is not grounded in this.

Nah. It did not begin by thinking about thinking practices as subject matters in their own right. — creativesoul

But metaphysics is not about thinking practices. These are hermeneutic. No, religion is about the dimension of our existence called value. Religion is about metavalue, metaethics, metaaesthetics. This is what Heidegger did not understand.

Jump over the burden much? — creativesoul

No, jumping To the burden, and bypassing the endless parade of descriptions of God that are entirely fabricated. God the creator? But where did this come from and why is a theistic view committed to this? To be the creator now puts the burden on this concept of God to be accountable for everything, and you end up with impossible contradictions and, say, theodicies to explain them All along, the entire issue was that God as a concept had never been thoroughly purged of invention. God is omnipotent, omniscient, the greatest possible being?
You perhaps see how the posts that try to talk about God are all bound up in fiction. God has to be reduced to its essential meaning before one can talk about why one should believe in God. Prior to this is the worst kind of naivete. I mean, a metaphysical entity? And one has not examined at all what metaphysics is.

What "behind" means to you, good sir, determines what you mean to say, what you mean by what you say, as well as what I take you to mean after such usage had begun. — creativesoul

Heh, heh, no, creativesoul. I don't mean behind the refrigerator. I referred to metaphysics. This is about the lack of fixity our ideas have at the basic level. Ideas' meanings are derived from the contexts in which they are found. But contexts are determinative or finite. "The world" possesses in its meaning "that which is not contextual" I am arguing. It certainly possesses interpretative values of language, but it is the "fleshy feels" and the palpable engagements that stand outside of the way context confers meaning. This is the metaphysical ground of ethics, where ethics, and therefore religion, acquires its foundation.

The assertion "Philosophy wants to know what things are at the most basic level of inquiry" is attributing wants to things that are incapable of forming/having them. I'd charge anthropomorphism; however, humans are not the only creatures capable of wanting things. — creativesoul

It is rather a simple statement referring to the telos of philosophy: if there is a question begged, then inquiry will follow. Philosophy begins where specific inquiries in specific fields end. Physics does not ask what a force is. Philosophy does. Science does not ask about the nature of knowledge relations. Philosophy does.
"Attributing wants to things"? A bit left fieldish.

Philosophy is something that is practiced. Practices are not the sort of things that 'want to know' anything. Practitioners are.

The quote above is self-defeating. It cannot be put into practice. What would 'the most basic level of inquiry' even look like in complete absence of narrative account. I mean, honoring the suggestion neglects the fact that it quite simply cannot be done. There goes the only means/method available to us for seeking such knowledge. — creativesoul

The narrative account in question refers to the religious narrative that is the stuff that sermons are made out of, and all the bad metaphysics. Not about narrative as such.

The most basic level of inquiry deals with epistemology and ontology.

can think of a few different sensible uses of that term. It may indicate situations when/where one's spatiotemporal location is drastically changed as a result of being hurtled through the air, against their will/choosing/wishes. It may refer to all the different subjective particular circumstances during the adoption of one's initial/first worldview. It may refer to the fact that no one chooses the socioeconomic circumstances they are born into. — creativesoul

Thrownness (geworfenheit) a term that refers, plainly put, to the condition of our being in a world always already endowed with the terms of meaningful possibilities. One sees this in moments of reflective thought in which it becomes clear that one has been "thrown" into a world of entanglements where one is a teacher, a lawyer, a wife or husband,has a language,or any of what Heidegger called "factical" identities. We move through life never questioning these engagements in a culture, and as a result, we never realize our "true" nature.
You are close when you say "It may refer to the fact that no one chooses the socioeconomic circumstances they are born into." Right. But when one does choose, she is already IN a lifestyle, a language, a body of meaningful institutions. This is one's throwness.

Yup. Thousands upon thousands of pages. The introduction story in On The Way To Language is some of Heiddy's best work. Too bad he wasn't around enough individual's to grasp the full meaning underlying "that which goes unspoken". He was thrown into a different world. — creativesoul

The full meaning of that which is unspoken? Pray, continue.

Keep in mind that when it comes to metaphysics, I do not share Heidegger's commitment to finitude in his Ontotheology Constitution of Metaphysics (and in Being and Time's Care as the Being of Dasein, and elsewhere). In fact, I reject this way to ground metaphysics. Which brings me to what I call "value-in Being, the Being of Value.

As to "that which is unspoken" Heidegger is notorious for dismissing ethics and value (value, in the way Wittgenstein refuses to talk about it). Here, both Kierkegaard and Heidegger fail to discover (at least analytically) the most salient feature of what we are. It is our existence's value dimension. Discussable.

If you're attempting to equate ethics with "being thrown into disease, and countless miseries, as well as the joys, blisses, and the countless delights" then I'll have to walk. That makes no sense whatsoever. — creativesoul

Just ask, what IS ethics? This is not to ask Kant's question, or MIll's, but it is a question of ontology; not what should one do, but what is the very nature of the ethical and therefore religious imposition. So if you take no interest in such a thing, then you probably should, as you say, walk.

But keep in mind that this is not a study in Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger provides the language tools for presenting ideas. Throwness is a VERY useful term for ethics regardless of whether he talked like this. He didn't because he didn't care about ethics and value, which is appalling. Husserl didn't talk like this either, yet you will find a great deal of neo Husserlian thinking in the French Theological turn, so called; there is Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, Levinas, and others, all who take the Husserlian reduction down to the wire. Henry is magnificent. His complaint against Heidegger rests with his (derived from Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety) notion of the angst one experiences when the "nothing" of encountering being as such appears. Henry's point is that if one is going to give this angst an ontological status (not merely ontic) then he has to allow for the entire range of affectivity, for anxiety is a mode of affectivity. And HERE is where the issue of the logicality of atheism begins. Theism has to be delivered from religious narrative (recall how Lyotard famously referred to the post modern move past "grand narratives" of religion, and reason, as in the "age of Reason") in order find what is there that was not constructed by creative medieval minds.

One cannot understand the "logic" of atheism if one doesn't understand what theism is. Theism has to be purged of incidentals.

And I say, Language that constructs it. This is exactly where we diverge. I am not convinced logic is a "whatever" (attribute, principle, truth?) in Nature; only in Mind. But I remain radically open to any convincing out there. In here, I'm admittedly settled. — ENOAH

Now you are talking like Heidegger. And Rorty who, in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, says it outright: The world is not discovered; it is made. I said earlier that I agree, and I have agreed all along, and I think if you find yourself at this crossroad, you have made an important step toward really understanding our "being here". It is foundationally hermeneutic, or dialectically evolving. I brought up Zizek. He holds in his Hegelian views that our current perspective-in-zeitgeist is like a software program in which one cannot see the mountains in a setting because it is simply not there in the one's and zeros, in the possibilities of the program, so from our pov, there are no mountains and it is absurd to speak as if there are. A wonderful way to talk about the absence of what we cannot even imagine, but is in the currently transcendental possibilities.

But discovery, this must occur within the possibilities of this zeitgeist. Kierkegaard spent a lot of ink on Hegel. Hegel, he says, simply forgot one thing: that we exist! THIS is where Henry comes in and the essence of religion becomes clear, for while I can see how powerful this idea of the hermeneutic delimitations of thought and understanding is, I am IN a world that is in NO way interpretatively distant. But one instantly leaps on this assumption: interpretative distance pervades everything. There is nothing that "survives," as "in itself" for when the mind turns to say what a thing is, there is no thing itself in the saying. The thing itself itself belongs to this finitude of language and culture. But this is well understood, already, and yet there is in the reduction (and one has to look at Husserl's Ideas, or Cartesian Meditations, or The Idea of Phenomenology to see how important this "epoche" is to the neo Husserlians that challenge scope of hermeneutical prohibition) the presence or givenness of the world.

Now one can see why this reduction is used to give religion its meaning that was lost in the modernist critique. Once one sees that the presence of the world CANNOT be "presence" for the moment it is spoken in this context, it is "under erasure" (Derrida) it vanishes in its authority as meaningful language. And this is where we stand in the world as enlightened beings, very aware that our language cannot possess the "givenness" of the world, yet there it stands before one, the world of beingS, the chairs and tables and interests and things and moods and anything that is "said" being now "under erasure".

If this makes sense to you, then you are parsecs ahead of this zeitgeist we live in, as was and is Gautama Siddhartha. It is a matter of understanding in the rarest sense, in the occurrent seeing and being here, that we are not "here" at all.

Then you'd say the same of the Self, it is coercive as he'll. Yet I doubt it's occurrence in the universe anywhere outside of the evolution/emergence of mind, as History, structured by Language. — ENOAH

No, the "self" is, in the context of talking about selves, entirely grounded in language's contextualities. But in the revelation that follows the "under erasure" above, things becomes manifest that were not before. The self, too, is revealed by language, but it is IN language that the delimitations (above) are "discovered" for one has to admit that anything that steps before one to be understood, is "revealed" to language. BUT, and this is the hard part, there is a counterpart to this revelation that has no name. You see the point here: one cannot be rid of language, for to even try is an attempt in language. And so, it is in language that we "discover" what is not language. Language has already evolved to this radical manifestation of confronting the tout autre of language. Here, history is no longer an interpretative obstruction, nor does it inform understanding.

I agree. And I clarify, logic, its function in human existence (history/mind) is undeniable. I say so what if it is part of the constructed? We must adhere to it to function. Then why deny its universality, pre-language, etc? Because it helps when navigating through the ocean of how things really are, to know you are on a ship. Abandon it? No way. Know what it is. Which again is how religion saves us even from logic. It shows us the ocean from the ship, though we are compelled, or at least best to remain aboard. — ENOAH

The whole point of bringing logic into the discussion is simply provide an unproblematic model for what certainty is. No more than this. The reason I do this is due to the way people, philosophers, treat ethics as something that is as variable as belief systems, as customs and "taste". Nietzsche tore away from this, but his ethics was a purely naturalistic one, a "blood and guts" ethics of the gladiatorial (which he praised). N did not understand ethics due to his abhorrence of metaphysics and he thought Christian world hating other worldly divine judgment and condemnation simply had to go. And he was partially right, but he just didn't understand what ethics was. Ethics is the metaphysics, the metaethics, of this world. This is the claim here.

I agree with every word, and yet here's how I think we still differ. For me our real self, is not a self, reacts to feelings, sensations, drives. Among those drives is bonding, a drive so powerful which at any level of analysis reveals how not individual our organic so called self is. That real self is caring. But as for pragmatic, Historically/Temporally structured, perpetually becoming, you describe; like logic, that "Self" me/I, is just another mechanism constructed by History as a fit way to move that temporal narrative becoming along. It works to have a mechanism within the system of signifiers, to signify the body it is occupying and affecting. — ENOAH

And I say you are wise to talk like this. For me (I don't like the condescension of preaching or even advising) the next step is a very strange one. There is no history. There never has been. Give the self a brief analysis: I am now, in the reduced moment, that is, in the nunc stans, the here and now. something of analytic possiblities AS an occurrent phenomenon. I perceive the world around me, and I recall, as I see all that informs me about the world, my education, and this education defines the possibilities of meaning making. I cannot tell you about the the grammatical nuances of Swahili, but I do know about English.

But looking more closely, we see that In the actual event, the past is never discovered (in this analysis); rather, the past is part of an anticipatory dynamic of what could be. Even when one explcitly recalls, the recollection itself is a "not yet" of becoming the next moment. My recollection, in the process itself of recalling, anticipates what will come to be in the next moment of the thought, the utterance, the experience. And the past is analytically absorbed into this singular dynamic of recalling and anticipating. This is what we ARE, constantly on the precipice of an unmade future. It is never settled into some primordial ontology, but never stops being a projection of possibilities into a future. So the past entirely loses it identity AS the past. The most fundamental analysis annihilates common sense time. The present? This is our freedom to choose, but then ALL meanings get lost in this analysis of time.

Consider: a curious question ask, what is the past? One has never witnessed the past; it is always the past IN the present in which it is acknowledged. It is literally impossible to witness the past.

Unless I am misunderstanding the use "Ethics" in some specific way, with Ethics, it is the binary feeling pleasant/not pleasant; there is the coercivity in the intuition regardless of the aporia of the language.

But, let me put it in my terms. At the organic root of ethics, as in all things, is thd binary feeling, or the on not on of bliss. But the construction of ethics is, also like everything else, a dialectical process of competing constructions. The most functional is projected into our world/history. — ENOAH

Why not allow the world to be what it is? There is nothing in the pain of a sprained ankle that is dialectical. One is not comparing nor is the event historical in any way. It has a "thereness" that transcends analysis. This is an important idea. Ethics may be a construct, the the "raw material" if you will of ethics is anything but.

I'd say the pain of the sprained ankle is one "event", immediate, present and organic. The ethics is constructed seemingly
immediately, but nevertheless constructed. — ENOAH

But then, drop that tag, "but nevertheless constructed." Why is this there? The construction issues from the entanglements of value in play. These are incidental. That I owe the bank money, and in order to maintain the confidence in its institutions a society requires debts to be paid, yet I live in poverty and there has been such an absence of justice in my background, I feel well justified in avoiding this obligation, and so on; all this is dismissed in the reduced analysis, for we want to know what the essence of ethics is, not the many "states of affairs" we find ourselves in.

The pain screams out from the living present. What is IS is worn on its sleeve, so to speak. It is the world "speaking" the ethics of not bringing this into existence.

I would view logic as apodictic in accordance with its own terms. Perhaps a priori, insofar as I would define a priori: a "truth" settled upon and input foundationally and universally, more or less. But not pre-existent nor always present; like a posteriori and phenomena, mediated (constructed and projected). I would not view logic as universally and necessarily true outside of its own construction. I would not impose our logic upon Nature, for e.g. If/when we [superficially] observe logic in nature, we are superimposing it. — ENOAH

I have to lean Kantian on this one, but only lean: The apodicticity shouldn't be denied what it is: one cannot, say, even imagine an object being its own cause, to move all by itself, that is. Nor can one imagine logic's tautological principles being any less authoritative than they are. This apriority of the logic of causality is, notwithstanding the contingency of the language that discovers it, itself an absolute. This is saying: no, I really do not know what logic is because, per Wittgenstein, logic is only shown but its nature cannot be known, and: language itself is not apriori. It is as you say historical. But even though I cannot clear the interpretative language dimension of knowing of all doubt (to speak like Descartes), the intuition (whatever that is) is emphatic and and clear as a bell, and it is this coercivity, of logic, not the hermeneutic aporia, that is the absolute. I think to question this collapses into an empty skepticism.

But to call it an absolute is itself bound to interpretative indeterminacy. One simply cannot help this. One CAN doubt anything, true, but to doubt logic as it appears is disingenuous. I would without hazard say, the "intuition" of causality is absolutely inviolable.

Not clear about a posteriori and phenomena. As to nature and logic, I think it important to note that a person is not nature. Nor is it right to argue that that one fits into the natural scheme of things. A person is a self, and a self is a very different kind of being from a tree or a coconut. Our self is a living and breathing, caring, pragmatic, historical temporally structured existence that anticipates a future in a perpetual "not yet".

I know this sounds weird, and I have to say I don't understand it perfectly well, but the more I read the papers on phenomenology, the closer I get. It is best to simply allow oneself to observe and think: there is logic. What IS this? See how it is played out in symbolic logic. The insight the OP and all that follows is trying to show is that this "intuition" of logic is simply inviolable. But because logic is only about the form of thought and not the content, it is only trivially inviolable. Logic QUA logic is vacuous. But now let's look at ethics and we see it is not the form, nor the random opinion, the cultural orientation, the relativity of values, and the like. Here, we move to the essence of ethics/religion, into what all these have to make them what they are. And this requires an analysis of an ethical matter. We find the essence of ethics is value, and so it is with religion. What is value? This has been discussed.

As for ethics, same exact paragraph as above, mutatis mutandis. — ENOAH

Which means you would count value as not something as universally and necessarily true outside of its own construction. But what is its construction? With logic, there is the coercivity in the intuition regardless of the aporia of the language, and this has to acknowledged for what it is. But in ethics, it is the pain of this sprained ankle. Now, what IS "its own construction"? Are you saying that the sprain is entirely a localized affair, there in the ankle, and no where else? I suspect this to be the case.

The trouble is, again, that the view here is phenomenological: There are NO physical locality boundaries, and each being IS Being qua Being. You may find this odd, but this really is the implicit physicalism that pervades science and naturlistic thinking. All is metaphysics, I argue. This sprained ankle is as profound as it gets. Why? Because the pain that is physically localized, is phenomenologically without locality, for it is subsumed under Being as such.

From Upanisads to Analects to Sutras, Gospels, Torah and Prophets, Koran, and I would speculate much more, beyond the mythological, legalistic, and ritualistic, there is the consistent thread: surrender your ego (Mind's constructions/projections) to the Universal (God/Nature). That consistent thread, I say, is the essence.. — ENOAH

I believe you are saying that that consistent thread is value-in-the-world. Note that all you mention is essentially constituted by ethicality, for there is in all this the essential normativity that aligns with ethics. All of these metaphysical systems "insist" on compliance, like logic insists. The argument lies in the observation that value experiences, the ones celebrated in those religions, like logic, cannot be imagined to be other than what they are. Value in ethics and religion is noncontigent, in other words, and apodictic

Look at it like this, say, as is generally assumed, that the Hindu Brahman, the Buddhist Nirvana, the Christian heaven and so on, are not realizable for the confirmation of religious belief. And all there is in the world that would make for our existence's foundational meaning for one in good intellectual conscience lies in the everydayness of things (which is science. We are all scientists in our everydayness). Pretty much the assumption of modern thinking, and philosophy certainly assumes this to be the case, for the most part. This argument takes this assumption and says the religious, metaphysical affirmation one seeks, is IN the very everydayness itself. It is demonstrable world for atheists, agnostics, logicians like Russell and Frege, in the analytic of living and breathing.

What the hell! Yes. I thought Hegel had built that idea, yes. Mind is History. It moves through, not just language qua language, but a multiferous system of signifiers, operating in accordance with its own evolved laws mechanics dynamics. Logic for instance, a "grammar". As is ethics — ENOAH

Slavoj Zizek would agree. And I think this right. By this thinking, when one observes an object, the object and the observation are one! One spiritually evolving divinity. BUT: one has to put history down explicitly, suspend all of those "historically" derived knowledge claims that implicitly and immediately take hold of the object (the emotion, the attitude, the idea) and allow oneself to to understand that the language and its interpretational possibilities is clearly NOT this sprained ankle's misery. To speak about the misery, within all a particular historical framework's "potentiality of possibilities" is radically OTHER than the misery itself. This is Kierkegaard (Concept of Anxiety) and his complaint against Hegel. This is a long issue.

Yeah well, the logical precedent happens to be manifest historically since the topic concerns a concrete, social institution and not a mere abstraction. — 180 Proof

But the point is that it being a concrete social institution is exactly what one has to put aside to understand the essence of religion.

What "argument"? There is no "argument", just speculative observations which are either informed by anthropology, history, psychology, etc or they are not. — 180 Proof

No. Read the OP. There are actual claims there. You should read it, understand what it says and say something like, look, here you say this, but this is assailable on grounds X and Y.

No we don't because Witty isn't the topic of this thread as per the OP. Folks shift the goal posts when they are confused by the obscurity of what they think they are talking about. As far as I'm concerned, Witty is a non sequitur you've introduced that further obscures the issue. — 180 Proof

Don't be naïve. Witty is at the very center of the OP. I can't help you if you don't do this, read the OP with a mind to understanding and without the default dismissal, that is. Just read it.

Constance, religion long preceeds (by scores of millennia) philosophical reflections such as ethics and that's where its "essence" (foundation) lies – in facticity (e.g. exigency), not ideality (i.e. effable ineffability). — 180 Proof

It precedes reflections about ethics logically; historically. who cares. This is an apriori argument.