After all, speaking from a religious point of view, the ticket to heaven has to bought with good deeds and the passage to hell has a similar arrangement although the currency in this case is immoral conduct. — TheMadFool

Not good deeds, good intentions. But then, this goes further: good intentions affirm the good, but what is this? Metaethical questions always haunt in the presuppositions that underlie talk about utility. this makes the whole affair sound preposterous in terms of sound think, for there one is arguing, and at the center of it all is a term that one cannot even begin to fathom. A bit like talking about economics but having no working definition of wealth.

So, what do you think? Does the fact that acts of human procreation can reasonably be expected to create lots of undeserved suffering and non-deserved pleasure imply that they are overall morally bad? — Bartricks

A utilitarian measure, and not sure about the premise that a person's life realizes more pain over suffering is sound. But then, the entire argument ignores the qualitative distinctions between pleasures and pains, as well as in the grounding these have in ways unseen. The dismissal of undeservedness or deservedness antecedent to being thrown into an existence is an assumption that needs to be argued.

"The map is not the territory". There is the common model, the "in-hereness" of shared human understanding of the world, as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the cosmos. And then there is the indivdual model, the "in-hereness" of the individual understanding of the shared human understanding of the world as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the shared human understanding of the world. "Tanscenedence" is a relative term; the transcendence of the territory in relation to the common model, and the transcendence of the common model in relation to the individual model.

But these are just relative ways of talking; there is no absolute transcendence to be discovered. — Janus

Look closely at the argument. It states explicitly as a major premise that regarding value, the map IS the territory, so to speak, hence the impossibility. It is not even about the inhereness of an event. Rather, it looks directly at the "presence" of pain, pleasure, suffering, joy and the rest bypassing the language (the map) that would claim it. When you miss the nail and smash your finger with a hammer, you are not, qua in pain, IN an interpretative event, though language hovers close by for deployment. the argument here looks only at plain, denuded (of words, references, ideas, contexts).

You say transcendence is a relative term, and this is no doubt right, and the same will go to ALL terms in play, and since language rules the understanding and language is a contingent body of meanings, one can never "say" anything that is not contingent. this is essentially the argument of Wittgenstein's (but please, in the tonnage of material written on this, there is room for a library of objections. To argue about this, fine. Just let me know, not that I'm so perfect at Wittgenstein, but I do have my thoughts).

Here is the ONE exception to language ruling over the understanding: value. and it is not as if one can produce a treatise on this and think one has escaped the delimitations of language. Rather, and this is a BIG point: the transcendence of value presents itself in the injunction not to do or to do X. X is, of course, entangled, messy, and we have agreed on this, which is cause for the reduction to the "material essence" if you want to use that kind of language, of ethics.

Are you familiar with Plato's Euthyphro dilemma? We could ask a very similar question here, concerning the relationship between value and ethics. Is value based in ethics, or is ethics based in value. The answer would determine which of the two is more likely to be absolute. We have to consider the conditions carefully before we answer this question. We cannot just refer to examples like pain and pleasure, and conclude that value is primary, because Plato has already demonstrated that there is no necessary relationship between pleasure or pain, and value. So for example, an athlete will subject oneself to pain in training, for the sake of a goal which is valued. So pleasure and pain might be things which are given a positive or negative value, but this doesn't say much about value itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

The argument here places the need for training in a matrix of concerns that are contingent, all such concerns ultimately beg the value question. It runs not unlike those irritating deconstruction questions run: Training? Why train? to be great at football? Why this? and on, and on. The non question begging answer appears only when contingencies are abandoned and inquiry finds it mark: I do it because it is fun, enjoyable, pleasureable, blissful. ALL are bound to contingencies in the living experience, but here, I am doing with value what Kant did with reason: reason is always, already entangled in the very language used to talk about "pure" reason. But one abstracts from the complexity to identify the form just to give analysis. Here, I identify the very mysterious metavalue In the pain, and it is not the form ofethical affairs, but the actuality, the substantive presence.

So you are proposing a "metavalue" which you call "presence". I assume that this would be the end to all ends, like Aristotle suggested happiness as. Is "presence" like existence? The problem with this type of proposal is that we already have presence, and we might already have happiness. So this type of end cannot incline us to act morally, because actions as means, are carried out for the purpose of bringing about the desired end. If we already have what is needed, presence, or happiness, then there is no need to act morally. So as much as you might insist that there ought to be a metavalue, or ultimate end, the absolute within which value is based, I think that this is just a pie in the sky ideal, imaginary, and without any bearing on real people living their real lives. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it is not argument, not yet, about what to do. It is a descriptive claim. An exhaustive description of an ethical case possesses what GE Moore called a non natural property. The badness or goodness of what is in play is IN the fabric of the world. We do not find in the structure of language the actuality of pain.

And I don't see how your example of torturing children is relevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

It just to illustrate a point, and extreme cases make for a clearer illustration. The emphasis is on the way the value dimension of an ethical case is unassailable to competition and objections: no matter what alternative one can imagine to bring against the choice of choosing the one child's welfare, the "badness" of the torture is undiminished. This is NOT how contingency works.

As I said above, it's been a well known fact, since the time of Plato, that value is not grounded in pleasure or pain. It is something distinct from these, as we will forego pleasure for something of value, and we will also subject ourselves to pain, for something of value. Therefore your example, which says something about the "presence" of pain, would only be misconstrued if it were taken to be demonstrating something about the nature of value. — Metaphysician Undercover

Forgoing pleasure in a competition is about the relativity of value. I am identifying something that is not relative, but "absolute" acknowledging that this term is rather self contradictory because language itself does not possess the possibility of absolutes, all propositions being contingently bound to others. The claim rests on the premise that there is something transcendental about ethics that lies at its essence that is nondiscursive and intuitive. One is being invited to simply observe the pain simplciter, observe--- not weigh, compare, contextualize.

Sure, we’re all imbued with a sense of value to be assigned. But value assigned is itself contingent on the object to which it is assigned. — Mww

Don't think of it as value assigned. Simpliciter means not contextualized for judgment. Granted, it is difficult often to disentangle affairs, but then, the entanglements themselves are value intense. There you are with your friend's ax which you borrowed, and he asks for it back, but you know he is in a state of rage, but then the person he might kill you know for a fact to be a serial killer too slippery to be caught, but then again...and all this is maddening to you!

I mean, I'm not at all concerned with how this works out. Simplciter means the pain (pleasure, and all the rest) as such, as an irreducible phenomenon. The spear in your kidney is an intense event, and it bears the stamp of a non discursive and intuited "bad". Not a contingent bad, where one can talk about a bad couch, and discuss its pros and cons.

This tells us a lot about the self (and animal "selves," of course). Is it is as Wittgenstein said, that value never makes an appearance, and the "bad" of the pain is utterly transcendental (he would not even speak of it, would turn his chair to the wall at the very mention) and unavailable to language? I think not. I think we can talk about this just as we can talk meaningfully about qualia and "presence" qua presence. There is just very little to say, and what we can say is bound to the contingency language construction (there are no singular propositions, for affirmations are inherently deferential to their opposites, their defining associative "regions" as Husserl and Heidegger put it), but we DO affirm qualia intuitively, a nd all qualia is valuative, metavaluative, good or bad but entangled.

Language puts all this in question, of course, infamously so. Heidegger though such talk, like Husserl's, was like walking on water, for he know knowledge intuitions were impossible, senseless. My claim is that the impossible is exactly what we face: the metavalue to which all presence is bound. And this makes for the reality of the real. Metavalue Real, the essence of the self.

One does have to put aside presuppositions to allow the the metavalue/metaethical and the meta injunction to be clear. that is, to assault another with a spear to the kidney in wrong grounded in the metainjunction not to do it.

The above requires a close reading.

You're right that this is an impossible thesis. Value is by definition relative, as the worthiness of something is always dependent on a purpose, or something other than itself which it is judged in comparison to. How do you conceive value as something absolute? — Metaphysician Undercover

Here is the beginning from Metaethics and Moral Realism posted 14 days ago:

Consider: the ethical anti objectivist John Mackie's thesis (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) that there are no objective ethics, and he runs through R M Hare's objections, the notion that "value statements cannot be true or false" and Kant, Plato, Sedgwick, Aristotle, but I am not going through all this. His Argument from Queerness I find central, which is quite simple: ethics is just too weird to consider as objective, and here he cites G E Moore's non natural property. Mackie denies this both on epistemological grounds and well as ontological, the former focused on intuitionism, etc., the latter essentially: what in blazes would objective ethics even BE? Inconceivable.

Mackie is wrong: To deny moral objectivism on the grounds that it is too weird implies a non weird standard already in place, and this would be, of course, empirical science. But how is it that empirical science is allowed to be the foundational basis for determining the nature of ethics? Ethics is about value, in its essence: If you want to really get the center of ethics, you have to give it its due analysis, after all, an ethical case is a thing of parts. On the one hand, there is its entanglement with the "facts" of the world. On the other, there is the metaethical, the "bad" and "good" of moral affairs. It is here, in the metaethical, that the essence of ethics has its objectivity and its reality.

The question is, what makes the ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts what they are? Ethical goodness and badness, and we will simply call this ethical value and, are not like contingent value and judgment. A good knife is good, say, because it is sharp and cuts well, but this virtue entirely rests with the cutting, the goodness, if you will, defers to the cutting context. But change the conditions of the context and the good can easily become the opposite of good, if, e.g., the knife is to be used for a Macbeth production. Here, sharpness is the very opposite of good, for someone could get hurt. This is how contingency works, this deferring to other contextual features for goodness or badness to be determined.

Ethical value, on the other hand, is very different, for once the context is taken away, and no contextual deference possible, there is the metavalue "presence" remaining. How so? Now we are in Moore's territory. Consider: You have a choice between the torture of one child for a hour, or the torture of a million children for, let's say an eternity (forget the foolishness of the idea). Utility clearly states the former over the latter, and even the most die hard Kantian deontologist would have to yield to the straight forward utility of this (Did Kant ever make any sense at all in ethics??). But here is the rub in this: the child torture for the one hour is in no way mitigated due to the "contextual" justification. You may have done the right thing, but the value in play is not at all effected by the conditions vis a vis the other children. In fact, there is no set of contingent conditions imaginable that undo or even mitigate the ethical value, the "badness" of the one child's torture. It is impossible to conceive of such a mitigation.

What IS ethical badness as such? Try this thought on an empirical object, looking for the "empirical as such" and you get what I call mundane qualia, and, just ask Dennett, qualia is without meaning, or, very close to nonsense, and I think he's right on this. But, if you want to use this language, value-qualia is certainly not nonsense, for apply a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds, review the experience, and remove all contingencies, all talk that could contextualize it entirely out of the analysis, and there is the remaining "presence" of the non natural quality of value/ethical badness and goodness. It cannot be observed, but that burning finger is more than Wittgensteinian "fact" (and Wittgenstein knew this) like the fact that my shoe is untired of that the sun is a ball of fusion. Such facts are all contingent. The metaethical dimension of ethics is not. It is absolute, though, not absolute in the way it is taken up in a conceptual analysis (where analytical philosophy often goes so wrong), but in the injunction not to do something. This is critical to my position: I cannot tell you what an absolute is, for this would be beyond what language can do, not to put too fine a point on it. It only "shows" itself, in the same manner logic shows itself, but cannot reveal itself in the showing. It only reveals itself in the inherent injunction not to do (my example is negative. Doesn't have to be) something.

Oh dear, that's ambitious for philosophy! — baker

Philosophy has been all along a search not for truth, but for value. I think it is close to its end in postmodern deconstruction. Heidegger thought Buddhism was on to something, a new language, primordial, lost through the ages of bad metaphysics. He didn't elaborate, but he was right, and he set stage for a phenomenological philosophy that puts meaning first.

That's just it: You want to understand and engage with Buddhism on your terms. You're ignoring or downplaying the importance of the living tradition, the living community of Buddhism, ie. the people who are actually working to preserve the teachings and make them accessible (from librarians to translators to those who pay for the upkeep of Buddhist websites to the monks who teach meditation and everyone needed for the system to function). — baker

You're part right. Look, if you're going to talk about the history of Buddhism, or, the various schools with their differences in place, then fine, and if you have a cultural/historical respect in place, then also fine. But an inquiry into the meaning of Buddhism at the basic level is a very different matter.

And you think you can do that apart from committing yourself to an actual Buddhist community?

This is a vital point. Really think about it. — baker

Well, see the above.

Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[30] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning (discussing facts about the speaker or author relative to the value of his statements) is essential to understanding certain moral issues due to the connection between individual persons and morality (or moral claims), and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning (involving facts beyond dispute or clearly established) of philosophical naturalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy

Kierkegaard applied this to himself when he broke off his engagement because he thought he wasn't good enough to marry.
And I think that his lifestyle and his not integrating himself with an actual religious community disqualifies his opinion in religious matters. He was an armchair Christian. — baker

You've never read anything by Kierkegaard, have you? I mean, quite seriously, you haven't read a thing of the man who affirmed God over reason. Armchair? And you have the story about Regina all wrong. And you spend so many words on justifying ad hominem arguments?

Off the deep end, I'd say.

I will make an observation: in order to be in any sense of being free in any way, one needs security. I find knowledge and understanding of the Good to be a nexus of energy that supports and self-supports being in a secure way that facilitates that being. So I agree that while the temporal movement is from doing to being, as we grow in understanding of what doing both needs and entails, the logical movement is from security and being secure first, and then to doing. And what it is, exactly, about what we call "the Good" that makes it so in terms of itself and its efficacy, is no small question. — tim wood

What then is security? And I don't mean this in the everyday sense of the term. I defend a rather impossible thesis: within the self there is the oddest thing imaginable, which is value. I claim that value, like the pain a spear in my kidney causes, is absolute, and the self is therefore absolute. Pain as such, pain simplciter, not pain contextualized in an all things considered sense, but simply the phenomenon of pain itself, is not a contingent "bad" but an absolute.

Not a popular thesis. No matter, I am right, my detractors wrong. I can argue this very well, and it is the genuine foundation for moral realism and the reality of the self.

If it wasn’t intelligible, he couldn’t have brought it up. He did, so it is. And he said so. He actually said, under certain conditions, the conception of noumena are necessary. That which is unintelligible cannot at the same time be necessary. In Kant, an idea is a concept of reason formed of notions by the understanding itself (A320/B377), and noumena are concepts thought by the understanding (B306). It follows that the question is necessarily predicated on a misunderstanding. — Mww

the question is, why isn't noumena dismissible as dialectic overreach, as delusion, with "the mere
dream of an extension of the pure understanding"? It really is not intended to bring attention to Kant or Wittgenstein, but rather, both of their denials that any sense can be made of the very thing, by calling attention to it, that carries an implicit affirmation there is something in the presence of the world that cannot be dismissed, but does not belong to sensory intuition or the understanding, or, to the "facts" of the world. The Tractatus and the Critique are explicit in the line they draw on this.

The ground for bringing it up is not in the world; if it were it would be incomprehensible anyway, which is the same as nonsense. — Mww

Therein lies the rub: It is the elephant in the room, the "it" so readily referred to, yet denied so immediately. The term 'transcendence', should we not file this away, along with "the present kind of France is bald"? No. The issue goes to, why not?

It is clear, that if understanding is that which thinks, then understanding can think whatever it wants for it is I to whom understanding belongs. Therefore, it is at least non-contradictory and at most entirely admissible, for understanding to think noumena if it wants. And it does want to, in metaphysical parlance, in assuming the possibility of non-sensuous determinable schema subsumed under the categories, which Kant terms objects-in-themselves.

Now it can be surmised why he had to bring it up: he’d already proven the categories only apply upon being presented with sensuous objects as phenomena, that is to say, under entirely empirical conditions and by that the means to cognize them, so it would have been catastrophic to allow a category to present objects to itself that can never be phenomena, after having allowed such objects to be legitimately thought, albeit under entirely pure a priori conditions yet maintaining validity in the cognition of them nonetheless. — Mww

It is clear why Kant thought like this. The matter here outs a question to the line drawn. It IS catastrophic to allow such a thing, and yet, there he is, committing this very catastrophe. One way to say this is to yield to delimitation of the understanding, but in doing so admit there is an incompleteness, in metaethics, and in a full disclosure of world ontology: If it were true that nothing at all imposed itself from "outside" (Levinas' Other) on a reasoned construction describing the world exhaustively, then discussions about noumena would entirely without meaning beyond the empty spinning of dialectical wheels.

At bottom, with no further reduction necessary, this is exactly how I do not contradict myself.

Easy-peasy. — Mww

Would that it were.

The answer "no" would point in another direction. If emotions are not irrational, it means that we're by and large completely in the dark as to their nature for the simple reason that we treat them as encumbrances to logical thinking. Emotions could actually be rational, we just haven't figured it out yet. This, in turn, entails that a certain aspect of rationality - emotions - lies out of existing AI's reach which takes us back to the issue of whether or not we should equate humans with only one-half of our mental faculties viz. the half that's associated with classical logic with its collection of rules and principles. — TheMadFool

Emotions could be rational? Well, not as odd as one might think. Consider Dewey: experience is, in my take on Dewey, that is, the foundation, and analyses of experience abstract from the whole to identify a "part" of the otherwise undivided body. Kant looked exclusively as reason, Kierkegaard looked exclusively at the opposition to reason, the "actuality" and argued this makes for collision course for reason's theories. But for Heidegger it was all "of a piece", not to put too fine a point on it, and I think this right: When one reasons, it is intrinsically affective, has interest, care, concern, anxiety, and so on, in the event. Dewey puts the focus on the pragmatic interface where resistance rises before one, and the event is a confrontation of the "whole" and the result, if successful, is a consummation that is rational and aesthetic that is wrought out of the affair.

But regarding mods censoring emotional content, this is not quite right. It is offensive content that is censored, not emotional.

If you follow that logic it leads to the conclusion that only you exist: solipsism. — Janus

Yes, that is true, though it does overstate the case, doesn't it? Wittgenstein and Kant famously refused to give sense at all to such things as the "out thereness" beyond logic, intuition and language, using forms of the term "transcendental" to refer to them, if such referring were to be allowed at all (there is the transcendental deduction, but this is open ended merely, not something metaphysical. And Wittgenstein says explicitly he only brings up the matter to say we should pass over it in silence).

But I always have had a different take on this, after all, if Kant was so sure noumena was not an intelligible idea, then why bring it up at all? That is, what is the ground in the world that makes bringing it up not pure nonsense? An excellent question, I think. My thought is that there is another dimension to being a self altogether, and this is discovered, no, intimated, in meditation, philosophies on apophatic theology, post Heideggerian thinking like Marion, Henry, and then there is Fink and Husserl earlier on, and then Levinas' Totality and Infinity, and others. I'm reading Caputo's Weakness of God. He takes Derrida as a threshold philosopher who takes thought to its "end" and here, we face, and I think this is his point, the wimpiness of metaphysical love, and are told, THIS is where our philosophical journey ends, keeping in mind that the totality of language has never possessed this.

To be clear: By doing what you suggest, one asserts one's supremacy over the text and the ideas it presents.
If this is what one is going to do, then why bother with the text at all? You might as well buy a blank notebook and write down your own ideas. — baker

I see ancient, original texts as openings for new disclosure, and therein lies their greatness. There are no definitive texts, only movement toward greater intimacy with truth at the level of basic questions. What is so important about Hinduism and Buddhism is that they presented an extraordinary efficient method for disclosing revelatory, intuitive understanding at this level. They presented a new intuitive horizon! And I believe it to be philosophy's sole remaining mission to talk about this, learn what it is.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the origins and the systemicity of (a) religion are forcefully superimposing themselves and their own ideas onto (the) religion, thus making (the) religion their subordinate. — baker

If i were putting forward something to replace Buddhism, this would be right. I just want to understand what it has to say. At the center is not a doctrine for me. It is an existential engagement.

He was a Protestant living off a trust fund, flriting with Catholic ideas from a safe distance. Of course he could afford to fiddle and flirt this way, never actually committing to the religious community which produced him and to which he was indebted. Ungrateful brat.

In other words, I judge, I condemn the areligious, "spiritual" approach to religion. Religious texts were not written for just anyone to read them any way they like and to do with them whatever they like.
It's a matter of common decency to akcnowledge that and the religious tradition of which they are part — baker

That about Kierkegaard and his inherited wealth seems like just an intentional ad hominem.

But remember what K stood for: a deeply understood religion that can take absurd notions like original sin and reveal that they are not absurd at all. What tradition to you have in mind, the one that sanctions the subordination of religion to social trivialities? The "churchy" way of affirming God in the margins of regular living? He was not aspiritual at all, quite the opposite. I can't begin to imagine why you would think like this. He thought the medievals had it right with religion square in the middle living and breathing. Read his Purity of the Heart; no more aspiritual than than de Chardin or Meister Eckhart. The opposite is true.

But then, this here is certainly NOT about the errors of the Pali canon at all! I mean, it is an interpretative expansion, but exploring meaning not unlike what it is to explore Jesus' words, only here, we have the "event" that is center stage, much more available for objective study. To me, meditation is a practical metaphysics!

Sure. But I don't see how you can do any of this in some relation to Buddhism. Neither the Buddha nor Buddhists would tolerate you doing that in their presence. What you describe is something they criticize severely. — baker

Begs the question" Buddhism?? This is my point. Read about what is said at all, and you will find not a closed system of thought, but an openness of possibilities. Those who try to contain religion and philosophy to a doctrine put up barriers to understanding. What is Christianity? Kierkegaard claimed that what Jesus, "Christ," was actually talking about lay with an existential analysis of the self, not in Christendom, not in orthodoxy.

This external reality is the world that interacts with our senses: the light that hits our eyes, the sounds that hit our ears, the feelings on our skin, etc... One of the capabilities of our brains is to reproduce/mirror that external reality so that he can then make models and simulations of the "future". Example: it creates a model of the room you're in and this is useful for you to move around, it creates a model of your friend's personality what helps your talk to him and understand each other... — Raul

Tell me what you think of what I call the opacity test: In your physical model of the world, there is a brain and this is the seat all we experience. Assume this true. Given a simple notion of transparency found in a window or a mirror, with, if "clear," an opacity of zero when it comes to delivering or transmitting the object as it is, how clear would be what is delivered by a brain, a thick, bulk of organic material? In fact, how is it that any at all of what is the original, independent object brought forth?

Rorty convinced me that such an idea is senseless. What we call reality is a matrix of pragmatic interface; in plain physicalist term, all you ever encounter is the collective neuronal epiphenomenal presentation. But here is the real rub: The idea of anything that stands outside of this physical "thing" we call a brain can only be conceived within this mass, thereby making talk of exteriors like this nothing less than metaphysics.

I think one has to take a good long look at this idea and ask, how is it that anything out there gets in here? Out thereness itself MUST be in here, point to my head. I know you want to affirm an scientist's world of the assumed understanding of an exteriority in the standard sense, but what good is this if it depends entirely on an assumption that cannot be explained at all, that in fact, on analysis, reveals exactly the opposite, for one can never conceive how a brain can "know" what is not a brain and phenomenology is the only recourse.

Those are categories and concepts we develop as we grow, as our brain grows. We learn how to categorize physical objects as well as conceptual objects that are communicated by the social context we grow in. The relationships of those objects and our brain assigns value to them, cognitive value, emotional value to achieve its main goal: keep the homeostatic equilibrium.
The episteme, the knowing, happens when the internal objects and categories, ideas have a external correlate. There is a "symbiosis","correlation" between the cognitive objects and the external world. When the cognitive predictions (manipulations of the internal objects that represent the external world) correlate with reality. Example: if I tell my wife I love her she will react in certain way, if I eat an apple I'll like the taste, etc... Pure biological activity. — Raul

Yes, if you are going to work with the common assumptions of empirical science, all this is quite salutary. But all of this begs philosophical questions. It is one thing to talk about objects and brains. cognitive and and worldly relations, but what of the analysis of knowledge itself? Going on about one's business is well and good, practical, productive, but here, we want to ask basic questions, for this is philosophy, not physics. When you say you know there is a cup on the table (or bioactivity in a petri dish), how does this get affirmed on analysis of the relation qua relation, not the relation qua all the basic assumptions that are in place while one does the shopping and pays bills. What IS such an affirmation about? we follow here the rules of procedure any scientist would, only here, the themes are altogether different in that we look to what is presupposed by familiar, unquestioned knowledge relationships.

It is not at all that there is "nothing out there" but rather what that IS cannot be said, realized, at all. This makes objects of the world very mysterious, transcendental, impossible! at the level of basic questions.

Yes, there re experiments that show a person saying he doesn't see anything (consciously not seeing) but he behaves and moves avoiding obstacles. Search for "blindsight" in wikipedia. — Raul

Yes, there re experiments that show a person saying he doesn't see anything (consciously not seeing) but he behaves and moves avoiding obstacles. Search for "blindsight" in wikipedia. — Raul

Okay, the brain delivers mixed events. Consciousness is what is reported, conceptually identified. If my hands are doing what I am not aware of, it is not a conscious event, but is autonomic.

Not all of them but many of them. Could you put some examples? — Raul

If knowledge is inherently problem solving, and to know is simply to know successful outcomes, then this places everything we consider to be true accounts of nature entirely outside the possibility of some intimations of what things "really are". I think this is likely true" Thinking and its language and its interpretative function is foundationally determinative of what the "isness" of the world is.

Of course, this is not exhaustive of our experiencing the world as world. But it IS exhaustive of our understanding's ability to establish belief and knowledge.

Our Self shares many qualities with the self of primates for example. We have more capabilities mainly related to language that enable deeper reasoning and manipulation/simulation of realty for our evolutionary advantage. Evolution is about patterns that survive longer and adapt better. Our brain have created this capability of the "Self" that enables evolutionary advantages. At least for now. Why do you see it is entirely OTHER? There are no "new qualities" in our brain, just more powerful. I don't think our Self has a singularity. — Raul

Our Self shares many qualities with the self of primates for example. We have more capabilities mainly related to language that enable deeper reasoning and manipulation/simulation of realty for our evolutionary advantage. Evolution is about patterns that survive longer and adapt better. Our brain have created this capability of the "Self" that enables evolutionary advantages. At least for now. Why do you see it is entirely OTHER? There are no "new qualities" in our brain, just more powerful. I don't think our Self has a singularity. — Raul

This is a wrong understanding of evolution. The self is not an "evolution" self, for reasons cited earlier. Not sure what you mean by "entirely Other," not that I disagree, but I miss your point. AS to the singularity of the self, this is a different matter, difficult to show because the center of an act of awareness escapes awareness. I find it very reasonable to argue that the self that is engaged on multiple fronts existing as a teacher, spouse, sibling, political activist, believer of this and that, and so on, is an aggregate self, but in the examination of the self's, errr, properties, we are looking at an interiority of affairs, not at the furniture of the world, and it is here we can "observe" the self in our stream of consciousness: this stream is our aggregate self. Look further and find this stream "runs," it constitutes time, not in time, but constitutes it, is the foundation of thought itself out of which meanings are produced, scientific meanings, as all meaning is essentially scientific. What, after all IS science if not the method of science, and what is this method if not the structure of thought itself: the simply conditional form of logic: If I impact nitro with sufficient force, THEN is will explode, hence, the meaning, in part, of nitro. This sructure is at the very heart of crossing the street, selecting a book, talking about the weather, everything at the level of basic assumptions about the world issues from here.

But in this interiority of multiple events, endlessly changing, there is always the abiding self that is on the subjective end of a given encounter. It's easy yield to the temptation to absorb this into the matrix of everything else, but then you would not be giving sufficient due to the actuality of this center. Alas, this is too difficult to talk about here. One has to read Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, back to Kant, and so on. Open for discussion, though.

Agree, and a good example si this "Seven Seconds memory" man you can find in youtube. — Raul

Agree, and a good example si this "Seven Seconds memory" man you can find in youtube. — Raul

Seven seconds: the time it takes to define a constructed self in the given complex moment of awareness, made out of the past. But the question is about this middle vis a vis the actual experience, not to be found in the theoretical paradigms; for just as science must yield to the facts, so phenomenology has to observe faithfully the structures of the self as they appear "themselves". Awareness as an aggregate is a common view among phenomenologists. I think they are wrong for several reasons. One lies with the Kantian transcendental turn, which is best expressed by Eugene Fink in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, a more than daunting read if you haven't read Kant. Here, it is accepted that all the appears before one as it is, prior to and presupposed by empirical science, has its grounding in experience, and the focus is here, on the "primal philosophical act..to reductive giveness."
An empirical idea is constructed out of the givenness of the world, and so prior to an analysis of what the self is, we have to look into what givenness IS, which really is just a matter of looking at the interiority where the self is and finding that all roads lead to this generative source, which is the self, which is NOT contained in the categories generated that give rise to the possibility of empirical science.

Most do not even know such inquiry exists. Alas.

This is incorrect. Heterophenomenology deals with actualities in the human consciousness and the self (I'm thinking on Dennett and Dehaene works, you should not ignore them).The success of science studying the self is that it brings "the new" and "actual new" not based on speculation but on scientific dialogue with our brain and our subjective manifestations. Thanks to this we can today not only better understand our limits and how the brain creates the "illusions of the self" (distorted reality in order to make it useful for our survival, pleasure, ...). Thanks to this we have reached levels of manipulation never reached in the past (for the better and the worst). — Raul

I have little doubt about the above. don't get me wrong, I do not at all think that scientists like Dennett are wrong, but they do coincide with, say, Husserl's Ideas or Heidegger's Being and Time. It's just that these latter are at a more fundamental level. Of course, the metaethical argument for the self is completely beyond his interests as well. Indeed, the most powerful argument for the self lies not in ontology, but in metaethics. I find some analytic philosophers interesting, like Quine, who arrives at the same conclusions, essentially, as Derrida, and Rorty, who straddles the fence, though naming Heidegger and Dewey among the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Others, like John Mackie, are outside of insights at the basic level.

I think you're looking at the Buddha in a very romantic, idealistic way. A modern re-imagining: egalitarian, politically correct, democratic. Non-sexist.
The Buddha of the Pali Canon is not like that. He's an aristocrat, authoritarian, dogmatic. Even when he goes for alms or sleeps in the forest covered with leaves.
The Buddha of the Pali Canon doesn't care how you're doing or what your "hopes and dreams" are. You think he would agree that all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing? No, he's not a New Ager.


There are many metadiscussions of Buddhism. Starting with the ones in traditionally Buddhist Asian cultures. Then the metadiscussions in the many Western imports/exports of Buddhism that try so hard to make Buddhism seem palatable to modern Western sensitivities, that try so hard to present it as the one religion that isn't really a religion, but a philosophy.

But as one reimagines the Buddha and Buddhism this way, selectively regarding old sources, keeping things one likes, discarding those one doesn't, making changes here and there, as one prefers: What is the result of that? Is that something that can be relied on as a path to liberation?

The old tradition (that can be traced back to the historical Buddha and his disciples) came with a declaration of a guarantee: Do things the way you're told, the way preserved by the tradition, and this is your best bet to become liberated.
One might accept that guarantee, or not; but at least it's there and has some historical validity.

But the new reimaginings can offer no such guarantee. This is free-style, anything-goes, reinventing-the-W/wheel kind of "Buddhism". An ivory tower populated mostly by youngish able-bodied males who told society to go suck on a lemon and escaped into their own minds. Are they enlightened? Are they liberated? Maybe they even are, but they sure can't teach others how to become liberated as well. — baker

Well, I don't think sucking on lemons is helpful. But the philosophy is just the a matter of making ideas clear, even if the matter itself is revelatory, intuitive and defiant of interpretation. This is why I think apophatic philosophy, in the East, neti, neti, is helpful. I mean, once you are in an earnest engagement to find out what is so mysteriously called enlightenment, it is in your inquiring mind where everydayness needs to be pushed aside. It is not a matter of saying what is essentially revelatory and intuitive, but rather talking around it, about it, indirectly through the familiar to point to what cannot be spoken.

After all, the actuality of the world, the "presence" of being here, cannot be spoken, and if a person can realize this at the perceptual level, that is, in the plain apprehension of objects in the world, in the midst of implicit knowledge events there is the palpable mystery in all things, and one experiences an extraordinary intimation of depth and profundity, then one knows without a doubt s/he is in the proximity of enlightenment, though its consummation may be light years away. It is what inspires one to move forward, do the hard work endlessly looking. I don't think the Pali canon is the exclusive vehicle for this at all.

The mental raise of the self: The mental “model-of-the-world” is a representational mirror of the external reality, a second mental mirror comes from the mental representation of “the others” that makes the self to happen/emerge when the mental process realizes the “invariants” between the other and I (confronting both mirrors). Two confronted mental mirrors that create the self’s singularity. — Raul

Not sure what this external reality is meant to be. Not that externality is not meaningful, but what you mean is unclear. Of course, this is a big issue. Seems to me that the mirror of external reality would hold within it that of the others, but then, what do you mean by "other"?

The Self bio-basis: The self process is confined to synchronous integrated information exchange activity between the cortex pre-frontal ventro-median area and the temporal and parietal (praecuneus) lobes. — Raul

I am willing to think like this, in this naturalistic framework, but only AS naturalistic. But where do your, if you will, "reductions" lie? Are you committing yourself to a physical reductionist thesis? Then you will have to face the music: your utterances pronouncing an objective physical world would have to be physical, yet if that were true, how does epistemic affirmation occur? That is, how does a physical object like a brain, ever "know" an external object to affirm the out "thereness" of external reality?

Self and experience: The self is not required for experience to happen or to be communicated. A conscious and an unconscious brain can be able to communicate its emotions without being self-conscious, i.e. reflex actions. — Raul

I don't understanding this. Unconscious experience? This needs explaining.

Self and time: The Self process "emerges" gradually as our brain matures and as we grow as individuals in a proper stimulating cultural context.
The Self is not something permanent, it dissolves gradually when we address our attention to specific tasks and/or non-referential thoughts. It dissolves and disappear as well when we sleep or die, — Raul

I see, you wake up, there you are, fall asleep and you are not there; you die, you're gone. It rises and falls, like the tides and other physical things. Proving that there is an enduring self is not possible empirically. But then, empirical observation precisely called into serious question with a physicalist model. If the pragmatists are right about knowledge, and what is known is pragmatically known, then ALL claims to knowing are relegated to the bin of unknowables. Then there is the metaethical argument which I won't go into here unless you are so inclined.

The self and evolution: The self makes us more adaptive and effective in our survival and homeostatic goals as a species.
As consciousness, the Self enables even more complex (larger, longer, more realistic and more integrated) models-of-the-world as it enables, i.e., evaluating our judgments against the other’s. — Raul

The self and evolution: The self makes us more adaptive and effective in our survival and homeostatic goals as a species.
As consciousness, the Self enables even more complex (larger, longer, more realistic and more integrated) models-of-the-world as it enables, i.e., evaluating our judgments against the other’s. — Raul

trouble with evolution, which I of course think is a right view as far as it goes, is that evolution has nothing to say about the evolved self qualitatively. More realistic? No, better at solving problems regarding survival and reproduction, but wht actually brings about evolutionary change is entirely outside this: Genetic accidents have no intrinsic relation to evolutionary needs. They just occur and happen to work better than otherwise, but this, "better" refers to a quality that is entirely arbitrary to evolution, that is, accidents are not inherently evolutionary accidents. And the consciousness that has arisen over the millennia is not an evolutionary consciousness. E.g., granted, the reproduction is encouraged by the gratification of sex, but such gratification is not therefore so defined as the success of gratification. What it is, and all the evolved self is, isentirely OTHER than these processes and have to be understood only in their manifest qualities.

Self and memory: Access to memories is necessary for the self to happen. More accurate and longer memories that contain external descriptions of the world (i.e. science) the more empowered the self is. — Raul

True, and it goes further: the self is constructed out of memory, as memory precomprehends the given moment. Ask, what is my "self" and you are already relying on memory even in the asking, for recollection of language and the learning, of structured logical thought is all part of the anticipated moment of asking, of walking down the street, and so on. One's identity is a complex memory.

But in this predelineated self, one finds much more than memory, doesn't one? Examine the self and its immediate interface with the world, which, not being so immediate after all, given that all encounters are precomprehended and that it is IN the recollection that the understanding can grasp the world in thought, BUT there is this strange insistence on "presence" which defies temporal delimitations: not only is my experience constructed out of memory, but there is the actuality that I face that is NOT memory at all. Put a spear into my kidney and I am not registering the event as a dynamic recollection, and the same goes for all experiences: the actuality of the event entirely escapes the understanding. Since the self is, as with all matters, predelineated by memory and the understanding and its recognition and familiarity with things rests with this, there remains that elusive "middle" world of actuality where the self has its center.

Self and the existential delusion: The Self is necessary for the emergence of the concepts of "infinite" and "finite" that foster the generation of fear, anxiety and depression as the "model-of-the-world" it generates is much larger than himself. This idea of confinement gets in conflict with its primordial instinct of survival. Systems of believes that sustain a teleological illusion mitigate these negative feelings (religions, intelligent design, spiritualism, mysticism,...). — Raul

And yet, when we speak of survival have we brought theory to its final resting place at the foundation where inquiry goes no further? Ot don't we need to made foundations where they present themselves: at the level of presuppositions at work in the affairs is science? Science does not even pretend to be about the self; rather, it yields to the interpretative standards that have no regard for the actualities in the human self's world. Physicality? A meaningless term, ontologically. Propositional empiricism? What is the structure of the proposition vis a vis the world of objects? What of ethics and aesthetics, the most salient feature of being a self? That is, the meanings we are IN, in the world is what comes first in discussing the self. And also, the reductionist paradox looms large: You think all things reducible to the physical, yet, the concept itself is without predicative possibilities, i.e., there is nothing to say about it; furhter, you, the thinking agency conceiving of the physical would be yourself a duly reducible agency, and therefore you would need to show how that which is reducible can even conceive of what is not.

What have you heard about the Buddha, and which can reasonably be ascribed to the Buddha, that makes you think the above? — baker

Your link provides:
"And what is right view? Knowledge with regard to stress, knowledge with regard to the origination of stress, knowledge with regard to the cessation of stress, knowledge with regard to the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress: This is called right view."

I don't see Buddhism as subsuming the meditative event; I see meditation subsuming Buddhism. Meditation is the practical foundation to achieving liberation and enlightenment, and so the question that lords over all, if we are going to risk being assaulted by the Zen master's fan by thinking about what demands quietude, what is meditation as a method of liberation.? And this begs questions like, what is liberation, liberation from what? and to what? If one is going to talk about the meaning of Buddhism, one must looks to its concepts, but most seem to think there is nothing to say. This is because they don't read phenomenology.

If you want to say the true teachings of Buddhism lies with the study of the Pali canon, I would say, true? What does this mean? Do you mean historically, categorially? Then perhaps you can talk like this. By I quickly add the Pali canon bows low to the unfolding event in the deep meditative state, and a determination of this state looks to the phenomenological structures of experience.

Take "The Right View" from your link:

"And what is right view? Knowledge with regard to stress, knowledge with regard to the origination of stress, knowledge with regard to the cessation of stress, knowledge with regard to the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress: This is called right view."


What kind of stress is this referring to? There is the mundane stress of daily affairs, the common things that rise up in relationships, expectations others have of one, stress at home with family and siblings, from the need to establish security professionally, and so on. Is this what The Noble Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of dukkha dukkha nirodha gamini patipada ariya sacca is about? Of course, these are not excluded from the problematic, but this is certainly not where the concept as it is dealt with here hits its mark. For this, we have to examine what meditation and liberation are really about at the level of basic questions, putting aside the mundanity of relaxing and feeling better about oneself. One can take a valium for this latter.

What if I said meditation is an event that is understood only in an analysis of the structures of consciousness? Here I think of Husserl and his phenomenological reduction has been implicit in phenomenology since Kant, and here particularly, in Kierkegaard. What is the self? he asks in his Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard, responding to Hegel, sees that reason cannot be the ground for the actuality that is qualitatively set apart from it. Existence is not essentially rational but is utterly transcendent (not his language). Wittgenstein was a fan years later and the idea plays out in philosophy, analytic as well, but especially in Continental philosophy. The self, for Kierkegaard, is acknowledged as a kind of nothingness that sits in the middle of the temporal dynamic of the future that is constructed out of the past in a process of becoming (to borrow from Heraclitus). He says this, and of course, Sartre's Being and Nothingness is derivative of this, as is Heidegger's Being and Time.

This ontology of time and the self, the self being constructed out of a past to future dynamic, leaves the question of the self open, for the actuality of the self cannot be possessed by the past (see the long standing tradition of apophatic theology/philosophy--Meister Eckhart, Dionysus the Areopogite, e.g.s; deconstruction steps in announcing the "end" of philosophy), as it is an actual presence that is not discovered in an analysis of the precomprehended projection that is grist for the future making mill. The present is an "eternal present" which is the foundation for existential freedom: freedom the emerges as the "authentic" self that is no longer claimed by the language and culture and beliefs and attachments that issue form the past.

Forget how the crudely made paragraph above can be questioned, criticized, the point is merely to set up an answer to your question: In the event of meditation, the above is a rough sketch of a phenomenological description of its essential features. Ever since I read Kierkegaard's discussion of the eternal present, I realized what meditation is really about at the level of basic questions (keeping in mind that we are asking questions, probing into concepts and their underpinning meanings, not stating chapter and verse. A text is only as meaningful as its concetps, and these are only meaningful if their meanings are exhaustively examined. Postmodern thinking is the crown jewel of the centuries of meandering metaphysics seeking endlessly to say the unsayable, pronouncing, by MY thinking, that we are faced with, not a conceptual problem at all and all this busy work possessed this one flawed premise that it was a propositional answer that was sought; but no: our existence is a VALUE problem, and meaning follows upon value). "Actual" eternity is not defined as a succession of moments that never ends, but as a kind of ontology of nothingness that is always already there, and is the valuative "seat" of our being. Another philosophical theme I take seriously is metaethics/ metavalue. I think in the examination of value simpliciter, the phenomenon of suffering and joy, reveals an extraordinary insight, which is that the core of value is, as Wittgenstein relates in his Lecture on ethics, well, invisible. The "good" of joy cannot be empirically observed and is a transcendental actuality. This actuality is the self, the realization of which is the goal of meditation.

Buddhism realized this in its own way centuries ago, but phenomenology gave Buddhism its meta-discussion.

Why disputatious?? — baker

The point is that such things are by their very nature not determinate. The language in play is open.

This is the thinking of someone who is not a Buddhist. — baker

Where do you think Buddha got it? Lived in a culture that laid out possibilities, and he practiced, observed, thought. His final words have no definitive claim on the very thing he brought forth. Buddhism is NOT a doctrine.

That's a bizarre claim to make in relation to a religious text.
Religion is dogma to which one is supposed to align oneself. It's not something to discover, or verify. — baker

Sorry, this is most emphatically wrong.

That's your claim. I neither agree nor disagree with it.
What proof do you have that there is more than one way to achieve liberation? As in, liberation as it is defined in the early Buddhist texts? — baker

My claim? All religion is about liberation, and the question of how this can be reasonably discussed depends entirely on what is disclosed for the individual in the events of deep meditation. The less one can do this, the more s/he depends on others for understanding. the better one can do this, the less one relies on others, and once this latter is realized, methodological texts fall away. They were just heuristics all along.

I'm saying that in early Buddhist texts, he is called the Rightfully Self-Awakened One, and Buddhists texts say there can be only one such being per one cosmic entity of time. That's all I'm saying. — baker

But what does this even mean if the notion of being awakened is not clear in one's own experience. It becomes a mere fiction, something alien and distant. How can the concept have any meaning at all like this?

There are all kinds of ideas of what "liberation" is.
Theravadans have their own idea of what liberation is.
Mahayanis have their own idea of what liberation is.
Hindus have about a dozen ideas of what liberation is.
California Buddhists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Western psychologists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Every meth head has their own idea of what liberation is.

But these ideas of liberation are not all the same. Not all paths lead to the same goal. All things that are called "liberation" aren't the same. You're arguing for an equivocation. — baker

But these all vanish when one sits quietly and breaks free from the conceptual hold of the world. To see objects not as objects, but to bring no distinctions into play at the level spontaneous perception, and what was once a divided world becomes a profound unity. In this condition, and approaching it, one realizes that the only talk that can matter is that which acknowledges that beneath experience there is a foundation that is entirely Other than the everydayness of things. It intimates its own consummation and in this one realizes that the there is only one thing that is sought beneath the multitude of spiritual and otherwise ambitions. Not a multitude. Gautama Siddhartha knew this, I believe. He knew that there was this singular, consummatory event for all, and that is was not far and away, but right there, in our midst, unassailable and perfect, and we know what this is, for we see it in part played out in our lives, in loving relationships, in romantic visions, in childhood innocence, in a yearning for what we call God, an intimation of what was realized fully, perhaps, 2500 years ago.

I think if the Buddha were here with us now, he would agree: all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing. I say, the "end" in both senses of the term, of philosophy is to narrow theory in order to bring this into the fullest expression. Post Heideggarian French theology, Jean luc Marion, Michell Henry, Emanuel Levinas, then there is Husserl and Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, And John Caputo Apophatic thinking and Derrida, and so many others who see that theory has come to a dramatic point where the ineffability of the world enters the world! Odd thing to say, but I believe it is the mind reaching out to affirm the essential Buddhist thesis, which is that language will not consummate the self, Truth is not propositional, but what you might call meta-affective.

If someone wants to make up their own idea of enlightenment and the path toward it, that's their thing, and they have the freedom to do so. But it is misleading, to say the least, to then call this "Buddhism" or "what the Buddha really taught". — baker

What did Kant "really" teach? If he were here to tell you, would his thought be any less disputatious? The "real" Kant is, of course, a matter of scholarly work, but to the extent the object is to stay true to Kant exclusively, then the matter is not philosophical at all, for it is not interpretative, but historical. But then, Kant, in everything he said being philosophical, taken as it is, is inherently indeterminate, so the real Kant is really no more than a multitude of open questions.

This is what Buddhism is. Everything the Buddha said begs many questions, which is why it continues on as an open concept. Taken as a path of liberation, even, a practical method, it still is open. I would say as with Kant, even if the Buddha stood before us and told us exactly what he meant, it would still remain just as conceptually open as it is now.

The point is that the teachings in the Pali Canon are regarded as being taught by an enlightened being, and a unique one at that, someone who is categorically different than an ordinary person. As such, it is assumed that the teachings in those texts contain insights that an ordinary person simply cannot have. — baker

Insights! Of course, what else? Insights into what to do and how to regard the world. A foundation that provided, as I see it, the most important contribution to human thinking ever. But I would say in the event of meditation, all "schools" are in abeyance, especially when the significant changes occur in the way one's everydayness is apprehended. There comes a point, I do not argue but simply relate, at which attachments are genuinely loosened, and the world becomes, not to put too fine a point on it, a different place altogether. Schooled thinking has nothing to do with this, but it has been merely tool all along, a tool of second guessing interpretations and undoing familiarity held in place by pervasive conceptual strongholds acquired since childhood. It is at the conceptual level in the structures of the world itself that detachments have to be finally undone.

Later texts are taught by someone other than the Buddha, by people who may not even be enlightened. As such, they aren't assumed to have such insight and such value as those by the Rightfully Self-Enlightened One. — baker

Where is the proof? In the pudding. One has to read and confirm for oneself.

You're missing the point. The Buddhist teachings in the Pali Canon aren't just "some more philosophy; yet another philosophical text"; that is, the texts themselves claim to be more than that.

Whether you accept them to be such is up to you. But when a text itself makes such claims about itself, it's not clear how come people so often ignore that bit and just go on reading it as if it was yet another text. — baker

I agree, it is not just some more philosophy, rather, it is THE philosophy! But look at it like this: Buddhism's great contribution is that is provides a practical guide to liberation, but such a concept is absolutely open, it presents a landscape of fascinating theo-philosophical thought, and there is so much in this that takes the matter of liberation into extraordinary fields of inquiry.

What amazes me the most in relation to Buddhism is how ready people are to bastardize it. Orignally, in the Pali Canon, a path of practice toward enlightenment is layed out, in considerable detail. But despite that, so many people make up their own ideas of enlightenment, but nevertheless believe they are legitimized by the Buddha, and even call those ideas "Buddhist." — baker

I disagree. Buddhism laid out clearly as a method in achieve liberation is not the only way to achieve liberation. And you seem to think he was the only one ever to be "enlightened". I mean, what is enlightenment such that he was the only one and only his utterances make the right way? I've read the four noble truths and find them simply superfluous, not wrong, but certainly not exclusively right. They are extraneous to the essential idea: liberation.

If we're using terms in the same way, I don't think it's surprising that "presence qua presence cannot be spoken", words aren't identical to the things they stand in for after all. When we make an assertion, a whole process of interaction has lead to the uttered statement. "This rose is red", what are the boundaries of the rose? How many thorns does it have? How many petals? What is its hue? How reflective is it? How tall? A condensation of the rose's constitutive patterns occurs when using words to stand in for them; what counts as a rose, what counts as red, and what is irrelevant for both instances of counting as. — fdrake

I will do my best to use terms in a way that is familiar to your discussion.

The question I have for the above is, to say words aren't identical to the things they stand for, what "things" do you have in mind? Where are the boundaries of thing as a thing? What thingly qualities are implicitly brought to bear in the calling of X a thing? In short, nothing language can say can demonstrate a release from the richness of associated meaning so as to isolate any one thing such that the one thing is one. All terms are multiplicities, so when making assertions at all, any thing is absorbed into the congregation meanings. There are no things such that "words are not identical" to them. Presence qua presence cannot be made sense of UNLESS there is something in the actuality that "speaks" that is not explained in terms of other terms. This would be an absolute, not that such a term can be made sense of, it is the only wheel that rolls to express the peculiar nature of ethics: the injunction.

To say that "x" and x pick out the same thing is quite different than saying "x" is true iff x, the equivalence between the x on the left and the x on the right occurs only after the rose has been counted as red and counted as a rose; that is to say after it has been picked out. A whole regime of phenomena; of representation, of perceptual exploration of the environment, of how word is tailored to world; is hidden if the x on the right is treated as an uninterpreted event in the world. The perspective, norms, use of language, go into x, that is why it can be matched redundantly with "x" being true. In other words, that x on the right is theory ladened, and the theory it is ladened with is set up by how the statement counts as the state of affairs. — fdrake

Interesting. I tend to abide by what Heidegger says, and I find pragmatism coincides, though I think this needs work on my part to be clearer. I live an everyday life with already intact engagements, like walking down the street, waving at a friend, and so on. It is when something goes wrong that I take notice, and I think Dewey (Rorty following Dewey on this) makes a very good case from here: Meaning is the consummatory event whereby the problem that arises is solved, wherein lies the foundation for all understanding, language structured or otherwise. X, as I take your thinking, is prereflective, that is, the bare recognition that the snow is white, unreflected on, passed over propositionally, a ready-to-hand familiarity. Is this autonomic recognition inherently propositional? For one endowed with language, it is, for what gathers in the familiar event is the language learned. But it also is more, and that more is the rich meanings that are not pragmatic at all, but are simply the givens of the world, and these are value laden, and this brings the matter to the thesis at hand, metaethics. I don't agree with Dewey that such meanings are "wrought out" of pragmatic events, or, if this characterization works, it is not exhaustive of what occurs as one is still left with the presence as such that defies the pragmatics of speech altogether. We should, as Wittgenstein famously says, pass over such things in silence, but what of value? Value qualia, the appearing, not redly, tactilely, but in pain or joy: these cannot be spoken; one does not speak the world of ineffable actualities, these "qualia". But then, there is, I claim again (responding to the quote of mine you responded to), the injunction against causing pain that is "spoken". The proof lies in the pudding: put a flame to your finger and observe. A truly exhaustive analysis of the event cannot overlook its most salient feature, which is its noncontingent "badness".

Which provides a problem, if how "x" counts as x is internal to norms of discourse - it is indeed part of their execution -, those discursive norms must be taken as a given in order for disquotation to spell out the sense of a declarative sentences. ""x" and x pick out the same thing" works as an account of the sense of "x" only insofar as the means by which they do pick out the same thing is taken for granted. For declarative sentences, this is all buried in truth; truth as direct but interpreted contact between what the sentence is and what it picks out. That burial is also an inversion; what counts as an event becomes the substrate of the declarative sentence, rather than the speech act of its assertion containing within it a generation of what counts as what in interaction with an event. Displacing the generative component of the speech act's content with the norms by which the speech is judged by that generative content. This is an intellectual magic trick; a conjuring of the given by which the relationship between "x" and x is judged as a redundancy. In reality, that relationship is a generative process of interaction, and the conformability between "x" and x can be seen, retrospectively, as its output. — fdrake

If I understand you rightly, the magic trick has to do with attempting to "retrospectively" (after the case) take the question of whether "x" and x is a mere redundancy (tautology?) up IN a truth bearing proposition, which is circular, for such a proposition cannot penetrate into the nature is what is arguably non propositional, the full generative "sense". In other words, it is through the truth of the proposition that all things intelligible must pass. My thoughts go like this: in the execution of x, the passive observation, and "there is a rabbit" is uttered, truth only comes into play after the fact because it is in this afterward that truth, the functional concept's context comes into play. Until one utters the term explicitly, truth is merely a standby notion, along with a cluster of other rabbit and non rabbit notions that implicitly attend, ready to hand.

Yes, exactly. Much as belief differs from perception in the same way. You see something in the distance on a hot day that looks like a pool of water. But from other knowledge, such as of the local geography and climate and of the refraction of light in air of different temperatures, you do not believe there is a pool of water there, even though you perceive one. You believe there is a mirage, the false appearance of what looks like water, but isn't.

On my account, willing is thereby also equivalent to what might otherwise be called "moral belief". It's not just having a want, but judging a want as the correct thing to want, the thing you ought to want; just as belief is not just perception but the judgement of perception.

(Both perception and desire, on my account, factor into judgements of either kind: you must perceive your mental states and desire them either to remain as they are or to change. The difference between a willing, or an intention as I prefer to term it, and a belief, is which kinds of mental states you are judging: the first-order perceptions, or the first-order desires). — Pfhorrest

You know, there is a lot in this a take to instantly. First order beliefs and thoughts of any kind puts one in the mode of existing whereby past predispositions naturally and fluidly become present realities and the future openness is closed, predictable, fixed. If you read enough existential theory, you take this idea as central to grasping what a self is: it is a temporal "event" structured by historical familiarity determining one's reality. existentialists typically look upon the everyday living affairs of people as inauthentic, sleep walking through lives.

I think you're right calling it a moral belief, for when one realizes one's "freedom" one is placed in the midst of choices, and choices are value laden, not merely factual, and value is the very heart of ethics. What is right or wrong is always built into choice, even if one is not aware; indeed, it is awareness that makes freedom possible. A good Nazi perhaps never gave an order a second thought, for, if you will, he knew not what he was doing, and to use the concept of "will," this was simply not there, and technically, no "decision" was really made, for without the will, that is, without the second guessing, the standing apart from one's beliefs and autonomic behavior, one remains innocent!

Kierkegaard is an interesting read on this in his Concept of Anxiety, which is a study on the nature of sin, entirely removed, in most of the analysis, from Christian exegesis.

First order perceptions and first order desires? I think these talk about the same kind of thing, the stepping apart what would claim one otherwise immediately, in an unquestioned way, and this is the way we live our day to day lives.

Still not fond of the concept of will. It can be a useful term, but it is misleading for the will would be reducible to things that have a clearly meaning, like existential freedom.

This is Mahayana doctrine. Why choose Mahayana over the Pali Canon? Can you explain? — baker

As with any doctrine, one can either dogmatically receive it, then take this as an authoritative representation , disseminate what it says, learn by rote the utterances, divide into schools of thought, and call oneself a scholar. Or, one can talk the matter itself seriously, which means, while having respect for ancient ideas and those who founded them, realizing that these are interpretations of their own experiences and have no fixed, timeless say in the matters of determining what meditation is about, its nature and meaning, its revealed actualities.

What Buddhism is really about should never, ever be taken dogmatically, as a mere historical set of "facts". I don't choose Mahayana over Hinayana. These are mere classificatory distinctions that can be useful for referencing purposes, but to talk about what is essentially Buddhism, well, this takes one into the interesting interpretative inquiries: what is it that is disclosed in the interiority of the self when one meditates? How do we fit this into religious and philosophical paradigms? In the suspension of normal, spontaneous interpretative ideas, does Husserl's phenomenological reduction inform us in any interesting ways in understanding the meditative experience? And so on.

Case in point is your link to the right view. I do like this:

[The Buddha:] "By & large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by (takes as its object) a polarity, that of existence & non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'non-existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one.

There is a striking resemblance here to post modern thinking that denies a center to any proposition. Husserl's epoche, whereby all schools of thought are in abeyance, as is all naturalistic knowledge claims (so called). Many consider the religious dimension of this, reminiscent of Kierkegaard's "eternal present" which has a fundamental place in existential thinking across the board.

"Nonexistence" is simply an intruding conceptualization that has its meaning bound to a network of meanings, and to invoke such a term transforms a, call it "pure" perceptual event (very disputatious idea), into an apperceptive event, binding the understanding to logic and language, and here is where the most challenging part of meditation lies: in the undoing of the interpretative grip one's earliest training in the world has on one. Not to see a house AS a house, or to take up the world AS anything.

Why do you quote or cite anything, instead of just making stuff up and ascribe it to another person? — baker

Because I am not arguing about who said what, when or where. I care little for this. I only care about ideas and how they come into play in understanding the world and the rest is incidental. Now if I had the job of teaching this, it would be the same as it would be for Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth, or anyone: incidental facts become part of the lecture.

Don't be silly. No one is making things up.

To will is not just to want, but to want to want. Weakness of will is when you want to want X (you will X), but nevertheless you do Y. Strength of will, also freedom of will, is when wanting to want something causes you to actually want (and so try to do) something. — Pfhorrest

So will is not in play until you want to want. Does it have to be explicit wanting to want, or if I want it and I pursue it I am implicitly willing it? I want a new computer and I go to the store, pick one out and purchase it. No will in this? Not until I put the wanting before me as a want, review its contents, and determine to satisfy it is it a will. this puts will as a reflective positioned perspective as the wanting is no longer simply the spontaneous drive to acquire, but it reviewed at a higher order: I reflect on the wanting. But how does this differ from regular wanting, for all it adds is a second guessing of the wanting, then a reaffirmation that the wanted thing is truly wanted. If I am choosing veggies in the produce department, turn to the broccoli, reach for it, then remember I want squash instead, is this a matter of simple want turning to willing? Or is it a matter of just wanting intelligently?

The illustration above aside, what you're saying here seems to be in line with Adler's will to power, related to Nietzsche's Wille zur Macht.

If we start from the premise that what drives a person is a will to power, then this also lends support to moral realism. — baker

I always take issue with "will". I simply have never detected such a thing. I will something. What does this come to outside wanting it, and doing what is required to get it, the driveness of the whole affair no more than this? Will seems superfluous, reified out of bad metaphysics: a will? Is this a noun? To will is just to want, desire.

But here, it is simply descriptive. I ask, what is pain? and you are invited to be the dutiful scientist and observe, then see how it conforms to "normal science" (Kuhn's term) paradigms. It simply does not. Pain, joy, and all that belongs to these are sui generis, all because of that non natural property, the ethical badness and goodness (as opposed to contingent badness and good ness; see above).

Nirvana is a related topic that deals with the extinguishment of the personality. Complete nirvana, more officially called "Fifth Nirvana," is the final extinguishment. — eduardo

You know, there may be truth in all of this, but I cannot affirm beyond what I have been able to understand myself. Eastern philosophy is revelatory and it is not about faith, but actual encounter. As for me, I am what you could call a threshold person, meaning when I meditate, the conceptual grip the world generally has on me slips readily away, and there is in the interiority of my self a kind of rising presence of something entirely other than normal reality. The world loses its definition, its familiarity, its knowledge assumptions, and the whole yields to something extraordinary, unnamable, but unmistakable.
You find this in the Western apophatic literature as well. See Meister Eckhart, who prays to God to be rid of God, or pseudo Dionysus the Areopagite's Cloud of Knowing. The final extinguishment? I imagine
the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức had achieved this when he set himself on fire. I do wonder what it must have been like to live inside that world where pain could be such a distant event.

So, if I'm understanding you correctly --

I'll illustrate on an example:
There are three major Viennese schools of psychology, classified by what a person's will is considered to be centered on:
the Freudian will to pleasure,
the Adlerian will to power,
the Franklean will to meaning.
The idea behind this classification is that a person is driven by will; there is difference as to what exactly that will is about, but the agreement is that the will is the essential driving force of a person and that this is the optimal way to approach psychological issues both theoretically and practically.

It seems to me that you are after a similar principle of classification as above (not specifically in terms of psychology, the example with the Viennese schools of psychology occured to me because it seems to be structually the same as what you're looking for). — baker

Not this. It is prior to this. If Freud thinks the pleasure principle rules egoic motivations, I ask, what is pleasure? A reasonable question for philosophy, not for psychology, though. I ask this as a phenomenologist who wants to take the honest confrontation with with the world at its foundation: the first encounter that is presupposed by empirical science. So, before psychology even makes an appearance, we can examine what things are at a more basic level, not unlike what Kant (the father of phenomenology, before Husserl) did with reason.

What is pleasure, joy, happiness, misery, and so on? This is a metaethical question, which is generally dismissible, for one cannot "speak the world' so to speak. But in the argument I laid out above, I claim pleasure, pain and the rest of our value words designate something metaphysical that has a presence which can be talked about, and this is the injunction, in the case of pain, misery, and all the other "bad" experiences possible, not to do X. Torture possesses absolutely the defeasible directive not to do X: sounds contradictory, but it's not. In and of itself the injunction against doing X stands absolutely, but entangled in accidental affairs. It stands as a prima facie obligation, only.

The idea that the self = nirvana, or that once the defilements are done away with, what is left is pure goodness and joy, is an idea that can be found in some Buddhist circles (esp. in Mahayana, and modern developments of Buddhism), but to the best of my knowledge, it has no support in the Pali Canon (ie. the text that is generally considered the authoritative text of what the Buddha taught). — baker

Right. But let's take the matter further, and in this, I am only interested in how we interpret something like this, and have limited regard for what the Buddha actually said. (BUt then, as I read through the Pali canon I find some very odd references that quite absurd. Why, I wonder, should this original doctrine hold sway?) Go ahead and empty the self of its contents I like this on "annihilation":

There is no this world, no next world, no mother, no father, no spontaneously reborn beings; no priests or contemplatives who, faring rightly and practicing rightly, proclaim this world and the next after having directly known and realized it for themselves. A person is a composite of four primary elements. At death, the earth (in the body) returns to and merges with the (external) earth-substance. The fire returns to and merges with the external fire-substance. The liquid returns to and merges with the external liquid-substance. The wind returns to and merges with the external wind-substance. The sense-faculties scatter into space. Four men, with the bier as the fifth, carry the corpse. Its eulogies are sounded only as far as the charnel ground. The bones turn pigeon-colored. The offerings end in ashes. Generosity is taught by idiots. The words of those who speak of existence after death are false, empty chatter. With the break-up of the body, the wise and the foolish alike are annihilated, destroyed. They do not exist after death.'

It doesn't go far enough, does it? If you follow through on this annihilation, you must deny existence to anything language can make into an object, or reify by mental acts like gathering particulars under a heading, for a thoroughgoing annihilation denies all knowledge claims, for all such claims attempt to categorize the world. To think at all is to entertain a kind of illusion. Thus, all this talk about the four elements, wind, bones and ashes, these are not primordial things that stand above father and mother. There is no "person".

I prefer the prajnaparamita:

Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness.
No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch,
no object of mind;
no realm of eyes
and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness.

This is annihilation, and the method is one of apophatic philosophy. My thoughts are that once the constructed self is eliminated, what remains is not nothing, but a depth of existence and well being that goes entirely beyond the pragmatic existence of everyday living. Nirvana, throughout the literature, confirms this.

At first I was kind of surprised that you would come to conclude that moral realism follows from what I said about values, because I would conclude from values being socially constructing that something like a constructivist metaethics would follow. But yes, from the point of view of an individual in a certain society, morality would look largely the same no matter if constructivism or moral realism were true. Where I think those metaethical theories would make a difference in practice is that in a constructivist metaethics you can have different societies construct different values, whereas in moral realism values would be the same over different societ — ChatteringMonkey

I think it works like this: If you admit that there is within the analysis of the essence of ethics something that is NOT constructed, then one has crossed the boundaries of meaningful discussion and it must be "passed over in silence" just as one must pass any qualia over in silence. Ethics remains an entangled affair, in relations, politics, jurisprudence, and so on. E.g., it is rarely an issue that murder, rape, theft, torture are bad for obvious reasons. The issue rests with how be bad cashes out in complex, irreducible actual cases which deal with responsibility, accountability, constructed collective sentiment, legal precedents, and all of the things that make the world a morally messy place. Free will, for example, is always compromised in descriptions of accountability, yet it is has a essential place at the foundation of legal justification. This does not get resolved if there is something apriori right or wrong at the basic level of analysis.

R M Hare argued that if there were something in the fabric of things in ethics, it would make no difference. He writes;

‘Think of one world into whose fabric values are objectively built; and think of another in which those values have been annihilated. And remember that in both worlds the people in them go on being concerned about the same things – there is no difference in the “subjective” concern which people have for things, only in their “objective” value. Now I ask, “What is the difference between the states of affairs in these two worlds?” Can any answer be given except “None whatever”?’

I would argue against this: While affirming an absolulte foundation to ethics does not yield an inviolable body of practical rules, it does issue some that apply to all. Mill's harm principle comes to mind. But much more than this is, if ethics is, call it eternally grounded, then what does this say about US? For such a grounding transforms the conception of the self as a valuative creature. Saying value as such is eternal means that WE and our world are so grounded.

I am asking about the level on which art can play in addressing social and political issues. I am speaking about the role of expression of feelings in art, fiction, music and other art forms. How far should it be seen as an aesthetic quest or one which is part of a cultural statement? How influential can art be in raising consciousness?

Also, I am asking about the responsibilities of the artist. To what extent is the artist just expressing personal feelings? Is there any danger if art, music or fiction is too 'dark', such as metal music? Does it matter what art we create? — Jack Cummins

I used to live in South Korea and AFKN was the American military broadcasting station. It was not unusual to see men in arms doing exercises, running through courses, drilling. And then they began playing rock music to the mock combat activities, and the effect was appalling as it put the whole matter within a context of carefree play, a nd rock music has a certain violent nature of its own, with its hard driven beat, so there was a kind of natural fusion of primitive impulses. What was lost was the gravity of the deadly violence they were preparing for. It all became so light and free and exciting, and I felt as I watched them that the spectacle was a kind of Hollywood production.

So what is objectionable about this? It turned what should be the most dreaded thing imaginable into a juvenile fiction of sorts. Of course, we see this kind of thing in movies and television all the time, and while I do get a kick out of these things as much as anyone else.....I do not approve (one of the great benefits of reading philosophy is that it can give rise to second guessing one's own impulses and gratifications).

But then, art has no natural affiliations in ideologies, in purposes and intentions. It can be used for propaganda (See Stalin era posters; see WWI posters encouraging enlistment, glorifying the cause. Siegfried Sassoon and Wifred Owen wrote their poetry opposing the war, and art was put to service on both sides), advertising, movies scores (what would a movie without a soundtrack? Note how music transforms the mundane the dramatic, the romantic, the comical).

Art is only as dangerous as its context.

You mean my regard for others is ethically irrelevant? And which person I am is ethically irrelevant? If we divorce ethics from particular interests and a point of view, doesn't it just become irrelevant to that person? I mean I need a reason to do the right thing that is consistent with what I want. If x y and z are ethically correct, but I don't give a shit about them, I'm not sure where we go from there. Objective ethics are irrelevant ethics. They don't connect to anything.

EDIT: convergent intersubjective ethics are quite different from objective ethics. They are still wholly relativist. — bert1

No, I don't mean your regard for others is ethically irrelevant. I am saying that in the analysis of a given ethical issue, what drives the whole affair prior to any and all possible entanglements, what is essential for the matter to be at all ethical in the first place, is value, and value qua value is not "relative" or contingent or context dependent, but is a stand alone given in the world, in the, to quote Mackie, "fabric of things". This certainly and by no means, means that we can produce ethical principles in our lived affairs that apply absolutely, as Kant tried to do. It does mean that value as such where's its determinations pretty much on its sleeve. If I don't like something, if it causes pain, misery, I know it, and for simple physical matters, well, the judgment is generally very clear: it's hard to be mistaken about splinters and broken bones: they're bad, bad as hell, often. And of course the same goes for good experiences as well.

What makes ethics contingent is value's embeddedness in the muddy waters of things that are extraneous to value, as with beliefs, competitions for valued things, value hierarchies, ethical institutions, legal complications, political lying, and so on. The point is that beneath all this dynamic play of human affairs there is this stand alone foundation, and tis makes for moral realism.

Can we just assume there has to be an essence? A lot of philosophy historically has been about trying to extract essences out of things, to its detriment I would say.

I do agree that if there is something at the heart of ethics than it would be value. But I don't think value is something unmediated, directly given like you seem to be pointing to with value-qualia, but rather something constructed socially.

I'm not sure I have much to add here, it seems i'm going the opposite direction. I think more can be learned if you look at morality from a societal and historical perspective, rather than trying to look for essences or basic principles. — ChatteringMonkey

Then the consequence to this needs to be made clear: If value is both given in the world, not some theoretical construct or simply part of the ethical equation which subsumes valuing under a complex contingent consideration, but an actual given simplicter, that is, irreducibly "there"; as well as being the foudation of ethics (and aesthetics, says Wittgenstein) then we must conclude the unpopular view is true: moral realism.

I'm going to need a Buddhist canonical reference for this, please. — baker

Nirvana?

So, graphic details aside, what was there?

It hurt, but the hurt was overshadowed by the fear that the injury might be serious or that the wound will get infected.
There was also, "I need to take care of this wound."
And, "This shouldn't have happened."

What did you have in mind? — baker

Alas, the proof in IN the graphic details. You are looking at the post wound, the overshadowed hurt, the taking care of and the regret, and all of this is extraneous to the argument. The argument is far less complex. It has an implicit premise that what it is that grounds ethics is staring one right in the face, kind of the way Heidegger talks about being: the furthest from being understood, yet the closest, most prevalent in everyday affairs. But Heidegger didn't get it. Caring is an essential part of his phenomenological ontology, but caring is ABOUT something that is cared about, that is, the embedded yet most salient feature of caring: the concrete event of having your eyes gouged out by vultures!

I use extreme examples for they are the most poignant, and this is not unusual in philosophy to illustrate a point. Utilitarians have their utility gluttons as counterexamples, after all. I could talk about how yummy pizza is or how inconvenient having to do homework is, but nothing says a moral issue quite like the extremes.

Anyway. what I have in mind is an ontology of value, a metavalue. Not at all interested in how things are practically worked out, how they get entangled with the affairs of others, with value hierarchies, and the the rest. These are important, of course, but not the concern here, where all simply want all eyes on the experience give a proper, objective analysis. My claim is that once all "accidental" matters are put aside, the particulars of entangled cases, there is the, as I have said, residual metaethical: the "badness" the pain, or the "goodness" of the pleasure. If Hitler smoked a fine cigar and it just hit the spot right when he issued extermination orders, this latter would in no way whatever metaethically intrude upon the pleasure he experienced, for we are considering only the pleasure as a phenomenon, the pleasure itself as Husserl might have put it (maybe he did. Haven't read all of his works).

See I don't know if I agree with this. I spoke about meaning and identity, and added the examples of rape and racism to my previous post, probably after you read it. It seems to me that meaning and identity as part of a larger social context, play a large part in why we consider certain things immoral. And those are I think underdetermined if you would view them only from a present moment. Meaning and identity precisely play out in time, over extended periods. What is the most damaging thing about racism I'd say, is not any direct physical pain or direct material consequences it may have (those are bad too to be clear), but social exclusion and the fact that it prevents people from building up a meaningful life in society. — ChatteringMonkey

If it were a matter of what you call mundane qualia, being appeared to redly, and the like, then I would agree that what presents itself to inquiry is a blank when considered apart from (conceptual) meaning and identity, which is reducible to pragmatics, I would add. But qualia is infamously vacuous. A spear in your kidney is not. What makes a spear in your kidney "bad" at all, in any possible disputed judgment, is not mundane qualia, but value qualia.
I do share your thoughts about rape and racism. But this argument is really very different as it asks more fundamental questions. I say rape is morally bad, not to put too fine a point on it, but then, why? I say the same about many things, but the matter always turns to some pain or gratification, some discomfort or joy that is THE determining ground at the level of basic questions. No pain or pleasure, suffering or bliss in play: NO ETHICS.
I am dismissing the particulars of a given case, in the same way Kant dismissed such things, such accidents. Kant was looking into a specific dimension of experience, the rational structure of judgments. Here, I am abstracting from all the is an accident, a mere contingency, vis a vis ethics, like the conditions of a rape AS a rape: not all ethical affairs are rape affairs, nor are they stealing affairs, not this nor that, and on and on. No specific conditions are essential, and are therefore dismissible in determining what the nature of ethics is. it is the essence of ethics I am on about: what has to be the case in order for ethics to be possible. Value is this, or, metavalue. Yes, you can also look to conflicts of value acquisition: no conflict, no competing value-things, no ethics, but note: it is the value that is at the heart of what makes an entanglement what it is: all issues turn on what is at stake, and this is always value.

Morality is not only about screaming pain is my point. In some extreme case it might be the only thing that matters, but it usually is not.

And yes and no, I think suffering is an interpretative event, which I would argue we care more about than pain. — ChatteringMonkey

Suffering is an interpretative event after the fact, no doubt, when it is contextualized, weighed in theory and among competing justifications, and so on. But pain as such? How can this in any way be interpretative? Interpretation requires language, consideration, a taking something up AS something. How is this there, in scorching of the live finger? One receives this instantly, not deliberatively.

Morality is analyzable, and so I agree morality is NOT only about screaming pain (or intense gratification), and I would add, obviously. But the argument then asks about what this complex affair is and finds that the essential part of it is the element of the presence that carries its own measure of valuation. We cannot say what this is, and this is why Wittgenstein would never talk about it (save in the Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics where he essentially says it should be passed over in silence), but its presence does, as with logic, "show" itself in the event.

A loose way to put this is to say that pain and pleasure speak for themselves, but looseness like this invites casual responses, and is not that kind of question. It is an analytic of ethics that tries to bring out this salient features at the level of basic questions.

I don't think "greater good" is entirely reducible to pain, value-qualia or something like a primordial actuality... it also has to do with the identity and meaning we give to our lives. This is I'd say what is missing in most of these account, we are also beings who live in societies, have certain roles to play, identities to assume, societal goals to reach etc... all of which give our lives meaning. And this is what determines morality for the most part. Ofcourse some of this bigger story will be determined by these value-qualia to some extend, but I don't think you can skip straight past this bigger picture from value-qualia to morality and still have something that would be remotely the same. — ChatteringMonkey

Frankly, I don't see your position on this. Do you think there is something of the "identity and meaning we give to our lives" that intervenes between you and the screaming pain? Do you think pain is an interpretative event?

How about injuries to one's body that are intended as part of the greater good? Think, for example, of that mountainhiker who fell into a crevice, got stuck, and cut off his arm in order to free himself and get out. — baker

Of course I know this case. And the greater good is certainly a moral priority. But the metaethical question is begged: What do you mean by "good"? For this, one has to go to the source, the primordial actuality, the "intuition" of pain or bliss and everything in between, the raw thereness, the value qualia--just take a hammer, bring it down hard on your kneecap and observe. You are not facing a fact, a caring, a negative judgment, an aversion, a denunciation, a condemnation, and so on. What is that there, in your midst, that screaming pain "itself"?

False. I think it's very clear that badness is contextual. Murder is bad, killing in self defense is not for example. Similarly, torturing a child is not bad, if they are a child of Satan. — khaled

Yes, I know. One does have to look more closely at the argument. I am not arguing that the judgment against the child isn't a contingent matter. I am arguing that such cases are not, qua ethical, analytically simpliciter. You may say that it is right to torture the child of Satan because s/he is a child of Satan, by definition evil, and therefore evil is what is deserved. But this has no place in these thoughts here.

Here, we are examining the anatomy of an ethical act, judgment. There are usual suspects, the contingencies that are complex and are responsible for much of the messiness of our world, and it is this that brings ethical ambiguity into our lives. But here, I am doing what Kant did with reason and judgment: Abstracting from the many convolutions of disagreements in our everyday lives and giving analysis to determine its basic structures and contents. So, put aside all that is there in the complexity of ethical problems, and ask, what makes this ethical at all? It is here that the metaethical makes an appearance. It is wrong to torture others for fun, say. But this "wrongness" looks to the nature of torture, the pain itself which is the basis of the ethical in actuality, apart from how it fits into the many complexities. THIS pain as such is an absolute in the what I will call "pure injunction" against inflicting it.

Is it more important to understand love or experience it? You will come to understand that love is quite understandable and acts in quite irrational ways. However, no matter how irrational it might seem, love will always confirm the perfection of life. — Thinking

But to understand is to deliver one from the nonsense that would otherwise define it. Look at the understanding as a kind of jnana yoga (as I do): is it first a pragmatic function that brings clarity, that prevents one from holding crazy beliefs and committing atrocities in the name of love. But there is also the Kantian insight: As integrated agencies, we are bound together by logic and language, keeping in mind that such things are in themselves transcendental: I use logic, a recall memories within the structures of logic and solve problems and even have a sense of self in logic, but the nature of logic is utterly alien to me. The nature of all things is transcendental.

Having said this, I agree with everything you said.

To the extent that I understand, I fully agree that the self is intimately tied to ethics as nowhere else is responsibility as central and as critical as in ethics and responsibility is all about the so-called self. — TheMadFool

I would add that ethics is a thing of parts. On the one hand, there are the entanglements of our affairs, which is all you might find in Wittgenstein's great book of facts (Lecture on Ethics); on the other, there are the concrete actualities that are in the middle to these entanglements, the pains and joys themselves, looked at phenomenologically, released from the many contingencies and contexts that might otherwise possess them.

The facts are not incidental to ethics, some are scientific, fixed and abstract, like the Earth being closer to the Sun than Mars, they also vary across the board between people, cultures, principles, and so on, as in the "fact" that marriage stabilizes relationships; however, they are incidental to metaethics: the reality, if you will, behind our ethical entanglements, our arguments about the shoulds and shouldn'ts in this or that situation, that which all the fuss is about, is value, and its "thing itself" dimension, metavalue: The badness of the "ouch!"

Of course, such bads and goods are an integral part of experience. Even as I type, I have interest, concern, there are worries in the background, and so on. This the reality of the self that "shows" itself through its "value qualia" and is the genuine object of inquiry into the nature of the self.