But you have to ask why he took that position. You think the OP is obscure, but I am saying the issue is obscure, the OP is clear. But it does take a penetrating analysis. What is it about ethics that Witt said was beyond the pale of what language can say? It is the Good (and of course, the Bad)! What in Culture and value he calls divinity. One has to ask, why would he say this?

Thus, the failing (obscurity) of the OP. — 180 Proof

Look, it's Wittgenstein's claim about ethics, the world and value in the Tractatus. It is Witt you don't understand. It was so obscure for Witt that he refused to talk about it, yet he admits that it is precisely that which cannot be spoken that is the important part of the work.

The OP says nothing about mortality. This has no place here. Now the caring about mortality, this is quite different.

Radical contingency, this is a Sartrean term as I remember. But Roquentin was haunted by the world's "otherness" vis a vis the familiar rational categories. I find this there, at the threshold of the infamous angst of Kierkegaard and later Heidegger. An important move, but not the matter here discussed. Here we look at metaethics and metavalue.

And what "structural ... death of a thousand cuts" have I ignored? — 180 Proof

Well, fear of the world is obvious and the need to flee is just crystal clear. But what IS it that one has to flee from that is in and of the world? This has to be analyzed objectively as one would analyze anything; what one seeks must be isolated from the incidentals that surround it.

What you seem to be ignoring is just this analysis.

Could caring instead, or also, be the most immanent, most intimate expression of the one who is being religious (or just being)? The place where instead of finding the essence of religion, you find the one being religious. By caring for something, one brings that transcendent thing (the “world”) into one’s immanent care. Still maybe mystical, but a mystery buried inside instead of beyond. — Fire Ologist

In my thoughts, there is no separation of the caring person and the essence of religion. Religion is nothing conceived as some independent objective state of affairs. Just as with value and reason, WE bring religion into existence and it is because of us, these agencies of ethicality, if you will, who care about things and indulge and refrain, loathe and rejoice, love and hate, and on and on, that religion makes any sense at all.

But religion is always treated as if it were no more that the stories it tells and the bad metaphysics of God the creator, and the rest. I am arguing that religion has a demonstrable metaphysics, which is evidenced in the presence of value itself. I am arguing that the vagaries religious expression obscure the real essence of religion: Real metaphysics, the kind of thing philosophers do not talk about because there is nothing discoverable in the talking, and this is because language always already possesses the world.

"The world" is mystical (not Heidegger's world; but then, he does take one to the threshold and gives it thought and analysis, and is VERY helpful for quasi-mystics like me), as is ethics and value, and when I say world I don't mean that "place" science does its business. It is the phenomenological presence of the world, a "purity" discovered in the reflexivity of thought IN the encounter with value experiences, which is all experience because value permeates experience.

The argument here is that caring and its value essence IS religion's essence. One has to look at the Good, a very old philosophical idea; referring to happiness (the summum bonum) and pleasure and all the sundry "attachments" (as the Buddhists put it) and ask, what is the ontology of this Good in this caring? The question goes directly to the CARER. It is all about this agency of aesthetic and ethical possibilities. The "being" of the Good of this bouillabaisse or that love interest. Christians say God is love. The inverse is much better, Love is God. Just drop the agency of God altogether, and stick with the "there" of the world.

How is value the essence of religion and metaphysics? Simple: value is apodictic or apriori or universal and necessary, AS logic. This is the argument is a very small nutshell.

2. Although you might reject metaphysical dualism, you are yet "framed" by what I've found to be the dominating narrative in western thought, which is that the "spirit" is the locus of reason and morality etc, while the "flesh" the locus of gluttony and desire; or,
3. You mean to say, "religious" liberation--presumably tied in with the divine, must transcend both mind and body. — ENOAH

So I did read all, and there are many things I am aligned with, but now I just want to say that all of the terms in play here as well as in religious contexts everywhere do not present a case that makes what is to basic inquiry clear, and this is what is needed to show that religion has important foundational meaning. What is spirit, metaphysics, morality, the divine, transcendence, the body? These may seem self evident, but if that were true, there would be no issue. The reason I cannot make all of these issues go away is that all of my thinking is grounded in phenomenology, and this is not a popular approach. So when I go into ethics and its metaethics, most in this forum think about this with a very active residual physicalism. This physicalism has to be dropped outright, explcitly, but this cannot be done. One has to "read: their way out of it to get to the impossible simplicity you and I agree about. I think you are right int he things you say, but it has to be brought to an even more penetrating analysis in order to show the world that religion is the THE profound center of our existence, not this or that religion, but religion in its essence. How does one talk about tis outside of the outrageous volumes of Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Levinas, Henry, and so on? See, these guys are right, not in all things everywhere, but in the basic thesis of phenomenology, and Husserl's epoche is at the center of this. This "reduction" is the objective way to talk about metaphysics, and therefore metaethics and therefore religion, or meta-religion.

I am arguing that the world is inherently religious as it shows itself in everyday living, and this is because everyday living is grounded in ethical indeterminacy. Not Turtles all the way down, but metavalue, and it stops right there. At metavalue, the Right and the Good, the wrong and the Bad, at root, stand as their own presuppositions, that is, they are stand alone in what they are. When you approve of this notion of non propositional truth, I don't think you mean it cannot be propositionally expressed, for anything can, but rather that this truth is an existential absolute, not a logical one, so just like modus ponens, we cannot imagine the contrary being true: one cannot even imagine the existential Good of, say, bliss, love, ecstasy, being Bad, or not being Good in any way, even if something most clearly Good, like MY hagen Dazs experience is put into some comparison of utility (as is found wiht arguments about utilitarianism. See How Bentham tries to quantify values is disparate kinds), not because they are logically opposed, but because the Good's existence as Good is as sound as a logical construction.

Once this is seen as clearly as I think it can be, then it becomes clear that the metavalue Good IS our manifest divinity, entangled as it is in attractions, compulsions, desires, appetites, and on and on, and this permeates one's existence from the petty likes to the deeply profound. What is spirituality? I say it is what is discovered in the revelation of sublime awareness. What is sublime? Now that IS an interesting question. Value of the sublime experience, whatever it is, is not going to be "explained"; It IS the world, and presence qua presence cannot be spoken. It is an order of value and we have terms like holiness, sacredness, that attend the word divinity, and there is the Christian's "God is love" and love is so ethereal, but the quality of these cannot be argued. One simply has to actually BE in love to know.

But the reasoning in this argument shows, I believe, that one encounters divinity even if one is not really attuned to those religious passions. Divinity lies in the universal caring about the world, for caring itself is transcendental, mystical, as Wittgenstein would say.

But as for the manifestations of one manifestation of Being, tge human being, and its projections, these are constructed out of fleeting and empty representations stored in the organisms memory. They have created amazing and horrible things with real effect upon Being, but they, in themselves are empty images that come and go in shapes and forms, moved by desire, building meaning in Narrative forms.

These, taxes and the flower, perceived as "flower", are imposition thinking and have "removed" us from the reality we naturally share with tge earth and other creatures. — ENOAH

I know what you are saying. You would find in Husserl and Heidegger a way of talking about this that would greatly make the idea more clear and meaningful. When one takes up their "method" of liberating oneself from the language and culture that seems to have a mind of its own, one is headed for some extraordinary exposure to what underlies normal life. It is not really natural at all, I would say. It is entirely unnatural. It is a removal from what is natural as well as from whatever distorting contribution the "tranquilization in unauthentic being of endlessly being busy makes. Heidegger talks like this, but I am taking him a radical step forward: When a person wakes up and looks around and asks questions like, What does it mean to exist? and Why are we born to suffer and die? the degree to which this carries one outside of being-in-a-culture and being conditioned to experience the world in a language, and in social institutions, depends on how well one can turn the tables on this lifetime of education and enculturation. Go all the way, like the Gautama Siddhartha, and one is simply not in this world anymore; yet, nor is one out of it.
You will never find a philosopher 'round these parts speaking well of such a thing, for philosophers are professional academics more interested in arguments then they are interested in the world. Only continental philosophers take this radical move seriously.

And because philosophy too is imposition thinking, religion, in essence, is a means to return, if ever so intermittently and briefly, to tge reality of Being. That is, the essence of religion is to awaken from the fiction in pursuit of the truth. — ENOAH

I'm not going to take issue with what you say here. I think along the same lines. Only to add one thing: when you say the essence of religion is to awaken from the fiction in pursuit of the truth, there is a method to doing this. Call it a kind of jnana yoga. It is Husserl's phenomenological reduction. It is not merely a turning away from bad thinking about metaphysics, but a reduction of the world to its essence, you might say. The essential givenness of the world. For me, the habits of thinking have to become undone in order to finally "see the world" in the pure way you take so seriously. Not natural, but the world free of active world-making assumptions. You might find Fink's Sixth Meditation very worthy, in which he says early on:

Having overcome world naivete' we stand now in a new naivete, a transcendental naivete'. It consists in our unfolding and explicating transcendental life only in the presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit] in which it is given us by the reduction, without entering by analysis into the "inner horizon" of this life, into the performances of constitution

Fink makes the radical move. The reduction is a reference to Husserl's Ideas 1, and Husserl was Fink's mentor. All of the French post -Husserlians I read (like Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, et al) attempt to follow through on elucidating this new naivete. One will become a mystic if one pursues this: common sense becomes more alien, and something else moves in and takes its place, not to be spoken simply due to a lack of shared experience. Of course, Husserl was no mystic. But the basic principles of phenomenology will, if one is predisposed, replace assumptions with questions, and questions are an "openness" rather than a fixity. This goes to your pursuit of the truth, doesn't it? Truth is openness where there once was rigid affirmation. Heidegger said something close to this. Truth is an unhiddenness of a that occurs in the way language creates meaning, but one has to yield to what is there, give up the attempt to close meaning off from possibilities. Hegel probably inspired this. Gelassenheit, a yielding that opens insight.

It doesn't really matter much to me, but it happened again. I clicked "post" and it didn't post. I thought I had missed link with the cursor so a clicked again.

I don't think that I really understand how to follow up your question.
We could start by asking whether logic is as apodictic as it is thought to be. — Ludwig V

Your question was why does this analysis of ethics and religion "end up in the same place." I want say that if ethics were just as coercive (meaning one really has no choice to accept constructions in symbolic logic) and absolute (though logic itself is understood in language, and language cannot be said to be apodictic; I mean, when we ask what language is, we don't get truth tables and theorems. We get history and evolving meanings) as logic, then everything would change. Plainly put, our ethics, so familiar and complicated, would be grounded in Being itself. In Being, this qualitative play of good and bad that is our existence is risen to a new order of significance, one traditionally reserved for religion.

I don't think that I really understand how to follow up your question.
We could start by asking whether logic is as apodictic as it is thought to be. — Ludwig V

Your question was why does this analysis of ethics and religion "end up in the same place." I want say that if ethics were just as coercive (meaning one really has no choice to accept constructions in symbolic logic) and absolute (though logic itself is understood in language, and language cannot be said to be apodictic; I mean, when we ask what language is, we don't get truth tables and theorems. We get history and evolving meanings) as logic, then everything would change. Plainly put, our ethics, so familiar and complicated, would be grounded in Being itself. In Being, this qualitative play of good and bad that is our existence is risen to a new order of significance, one traditionally reserved for religion.

Quite so. But I'm intrigued that you go through a huge process and end up in the same place that I'm in. Pain is part of life. So what is at stake here? — Ludwig V

You know, since this really just nails it, I will attend exclusively to this. Rather simple, really, but this is what philosophy is looking for but never finds because it has given up on simplicity. Intellectuals are lost if there is nothing to say. It is a philosopher's job to elaborate.

What if ethics were as apodictic, that is certain, as logic? I will simply hand this question to you to see what you think.

Already muddled.

You talk about where you think religion comes from — but not about what it is. That would be helpful before discussing where it “rises out of.” What is doing the rising, exactly? — Mikie

It is not to be treated outside of the manner in which it appears. Of course, things are at first muddled prior to a clarification of terms and their meanigns. The OP is not a dissertation. It is an introduction to a theme. The clarification comes in a discussion about what these terms mean. I said, religion rises out of ethical indeterminacy, so what is this indeterminacy and what is the relation between ethical indeterminacy and religion?
That which is "doing the rising" lies with the analysis of ethics and epistemology/ontology. The latter can wait, but ethics and its value-in-the-world, this is what makes religion what it is. I was talking to Jussi Tenila (above) and I referred to Melville's Ahab and I said, " Melville was very aware of the ethical contradictions of our existence at the basic level. Torn off legs just shouldn't BE." This is not about the ethical normativity found in the contexts of familiar affairs in which there are identifiable parties involved. The prima facie ethical prohibition against assaulting one another is generally determined by the particular case and the terms of justification. But "do no harm" IS a well grounded at the outset, prior to the details. Why? Because it hurts. It hurts, and we know it, a philosopher once put it. Pain itself is that which originally generates the obligation, not this pain or that, and no mention yet made of the element of "taste" and its variability nor the relativity of predilection. Just pain as pain, pain simpliciter.

Religion is amorphous, so it’s worth stating what you think it means before discussing your ideas about its origins or essence. — Mikie

I did state that it is the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. You are having trouble because this doesn't mean much or anything to you, and this likely due to the very idea of metaethics to be unfamiliar. Ask, why does Wittgenstein in the Tractatus refuse to discuss ethics?

For my part, I see little difference between religion and philosophy— both ask very universal, difficult, extra-ordinary questions about existence. That being said, your proposition seems a little out of left field. — Mikie

I agree with what you say about religion and philosophy, but there are many who would not. All philosophical questions are essentially questions of religion. As I say, a hard sell. One has to go into the argument. It begins, I am claiming, with Ahab, who loses his leg to a whale. The whale is a big stupid animal that simply lashes out and can do no better when provoked, and one's moral outrage really has no object regarding the offending party. Thus Ahab rages against what is "behind" the whale, existence itself that produces whales, and black holes, and fence posts, and everything! This is a big move. There is a name for this everything, which is Being. Being itself. It has no features for it is not A being, so all that can be talked about and predicated about using the copula "is" as in it IS a rainy day and the flower IS red, and so on, is the incidental expression of the Being of the whale, the tiger and the tax audit that puts you in jail.

So the ethical is all about, if not these extreme examples (severed legs are dramatic and it makes the point so well), then what I call value-in-being. One could follow the way Kant treated reason in his discovery of "pure reason" only here we deal with value, or "pure value" which is the good and bad of the aches and pains as well as the thrills and joys of human existence.

This is the way the argument begins.

I've taken up enough of your time, and appreciate it. I'd say quickly this. Those desires, Icecream, a walk in the deer park, love even, are "spiritual" because they are constructed (mind). — ENOAH

Then a parting thought. Philosophy has one end, and this is the truth at the most basic level. Truth is an epistemic term, and the reality that is "known" is a matter for ontology, the "what is existence at the most basic level?" kind of thing. I argue that these are really one, and this is a tough thesis to defend out of the context of continental reasoning. It offends common sense to say that when one observes something, the observational act itself is part and parcel of the thing being observed. Anglo American philosophy has forgotten this Kantian legacy.

But anyway, the question then is, what is the most basic level? Here I follow the post Husserlians, like Jean Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Nancy, Emanual Levinas, all French, but they have really driven thought to the actuality of religion through Husserl's reduction. So if you are looking for things to read that do just this, that analyze existence down to its essential (philosophical) ontology, then there is this continental undertaking. Begins with Kant, of course, and his Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps you already know about this kind of thing. Just taking a moment to recommend all this as a way to finally get, not closure, but "openness" to the world. In a letter written by Maurice Blanchot talking about Levinas' influence, he says, "philosophy was life itself. . .passion renewing itself continually and suddenly in an explosion of new and enigmatic thoughts." Not the stale old arguments, but this extraordinary encounter with the world. One has forgotten that it is an exhilaration, as Emily Dickinson put it, just to be here. The essential message of Kierkegaard's Repetition.

There are two issues with this. First, the framework that I have learnt is not bounded, in the sense that it has infinite possiblities within it. Second, it is not a fixed framework, but is subject to change and development - Derrida is acutely aware of this, isn't he? So I ask the question, what tells us that we are "bound" to a particular framework? Awareness of history, perhaps, and/or awareness of change. Perhaps we should think of our historical framework as a starting-point, rather than a prison. — Ludwig V

But this is the real hard question. Being in a prison implies one is not free, so the question then is, what is the nature of freedom? And you likely know that Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and so on, including Kant and his rationalism, all have something to say about freedom. Freedom is temporally conceived and the ontology of time has a long history, but the basic analysis is this (which I imagine most have come across in their reading. I think it is essentially right): In the analytic philosophy I have read, there is a refusal to even glance at Kant and the temporal foundation of our existence, and this makes for a serious deficit in philosophical thinking, In the direct perceptual encounter with an object, whether it be a thing, a feeling, a memory, something imagined, it doesn't matter, anything at all, I do not actually witness what is before my eyes, so to speak. The witnessing is bound up with recollection, so I see a lamp and there is IN this an implicit attending of all I know about lamps, their contexts of what, where, how, when about lamps. But this is sooo fascinatingly sticky, because I also face a future that is unmade, and this occurs, this facing, In the recollection, so the recalling and the anticipating are one. There really is no past of future. These are a singularity and past, present and future are just practical and analytical terms, and merely "traces," says Derrida, " of "difference and deference," who puts even this singularity to rest. You know how Derrida completely flattens language's presumptive grasp of "the world". Context replaces ontology.

But anyway, on freedom, as I observe this lamp, I AM this temporal dynamic of recollection and anticipation, though these are not worn on the sleeve of the perceptual awareness, which is just more or less, there is a lamp. So what. But what happens when you put the lamp in question? Not mundane questions like, what's wrong with the lamp? or, Who moved the lamp? But rather, the kind of question that removes one from all presumption? The Being of the lamp? Not the lamp as A being, but just its being there, not AS a lamp at all. This requires the (Heraclitean) determinative flow of the past into the future (ver fallen, the "they", the "idle talk." See Heidegger's Care as the Being of Dasein, chapter six of the first division. No, I am no scholar of Heidegger. I just read Heidegger). And now one stands in awareness not of this or that, but of one's own existence, which IS the flow, and one steps out of the tranquilized "they" of ordinary affairs, and is free to choose among the "potentiality of possibilities" the they has to offer. One can construct a self deliberately.

So freedom is always there as it is our nature, our existence, to stand in this openness of possibilities, but this is forgotten. See what Heidegger says:

temptation, tranquillizing, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement)—characterize the specific kind of Being which belongs to falling. This ‘movement’ of Dasein in its own Being, we call its “downward plunge” [Absturz]. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness.

One's true ontology is freedom. What binds us is our fallenness into, as Kierkegaard put it, the "habits" of (inherited) race. Heidegger got this from Kierkegaard, in part, this idea of this "historical framework (culture, in a word) as a prison, as you said. For K, it is found in the analytic of original sin (The Concept of Anxiety).

I can, and do, acknowledge my cat on the sofa and acknowledge also that I do not know - am not aware of - everything that the cat is. Some things may be beyond any possibility of knowing, such as knowing (i.e. experiencing) the lived world of the cat (because I could not be the cat without ceasing to be me, a human being). There is surely, no harm, in admitting my limitations while at the same time acknowledging the cat is "really" there, and on the sofa. — Ludwig V

But this unknowing is inherent in the known, not like some scientific paradigm waiting for an anomaly to be addressed (as Kuhn would put it), but as something in the structure of our existence. This freedom is a dynamic obligation to create one's own existence, and this causes anxiety, but anxiety that is not about this or that tiger or disease, but about nothing, I mean, this nothing is the indeterminacy of our existence, and you know what this is, the freedom right now to jump off a cliff or to give to charity. To live is to choose! when one lives like this--right on the threshold of the unmade future. We "fall" out of this responsibility by forgetting that we are free and we immerse ourselves in a job, a role to play, an identity.

When we fall like this, we are simply unaware, tranquilized, as H put it. To be authentically aware introduces us to ourselves' true nature, which is freedom:

When in falling we flee into the “at-home” of publicness, we flee in the face of the “not-at-home”; that is, we flee in the face of the uncanniness which lies in Dasein—in Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been delivered over to itself in its Being. This uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is a threat to its everyday lostness in the “they”, though not explicitly.

Perhaps you see what H is getting at. Just going along, day by day, is a bit like being a thing, for a thing doesn't have choices. To face one's freedom is uncanny, and anxious, and we retreat in the routine of living. This uncanniness of our existence is there, right now, in the lamp encounter. A glace at the lamp and it is just there. But when allow the question of my existence to interpose itself between me and the immediate acknowledgement, now the lamp is not what it was in this complacency. It stands in the temporality of possibilities, for it is received in the recollection/anticipation of my temporality, in the freedom of acknowledging it from OUTSIDE of the stream of consciousness. H doesn't talk about this "outside" as a religious "suprasensible place" of metaphysics (the place Nietzsche railed against).

But I tend this way. Long story.

But, yes, the world resists us and obtrudes on us - however much we may try to control it or ignore it. That's how reality becomes real for us as we exist in our framework - and, of course, how our framework has to stretch and adapt to accommodate it. The limitations we posited at the beginning do not exist. — Ludwig V

I can make things unduly difficult because, to be honest, when you read as much of this stuff as I have, you begin to sound like they do when you write, and they are way, way out there.Why is there a very defensible law against breaking one another's knee caps? Because it hurts. I mean, primordially this there logically prior to the prohibition, meaning no hurt, no justification for the prohibition. But can one "speak" pain?

Pain is OF the world, not of our laws that deal with pain. Pain is this primordiality, a givenness of our existence, and will not be spoken. Our ethics and therefore our religion is grounded in just this.

Yes, very good! I agree. Whereas Ishmael, i propose, recognizes the same ”difference/distance” but remains a pure spectator, not succumbing to the frustration of existing in a world filled with nonsense and absurdities like leg amputating whales. He remains a mindful, even meditative (like when he stands on top of the mast on lookout and just watches the sea) witness. Maybe that is the teaching that Melville ment to give us. He lived in a very dynamic age with many upheveals and changes occuring. Maybe he meant to show us two ways to react to the absurdity of life. — Jussi Tennilä

Yes. And Queequeg, calm, adept, spiritually attuned, unquestioning (unlike Ahab who had been to the university, where he no doubt studied philosophy, just like crazy Hamlet at Wittenberg, where Luther nailed his 95 theses in protest. It is a mentality of protest that thought produces) primitive, who, like Stubb, sits comfortably in who he is. A novel so rich in interpretation.

Melville was very aware of the ethical contradictions of our existence at the basic level. Torn off legs just shouldn't BE. The world wears its ethical normativity on its sleeve, and the prohibition of tearing one another to shreds is in the outrageous pain of it. We see this ethicality everywhere, in the givenness of the world, made ambiguous by distracted thinking (to put it succinctly). Faith in God must occur in the struggle to understand, not in the complacency of dogma , nor in the recklessness of rage. The top of the mast is a place to witness and think. Quite right: "mindful, even meditative."

I think there is no disagreement here. My calling it a "difference" is simply one level of abstraction removed from "distance" as distance implies difference.
As to what particular questions arise, that is also downstream from the fundamental realisation of the distinction between the self and the other. Which, I suppose, was the original question of this post - what is religion about in its core. — Jussi Tennilä

I think of Ahab and the whale for this "distance": Note that Ahab did not chase down the whale to get revenge against the mindless brute. It was what was "behind" the whale, and this really does go the the OP. The world's horrors an joys come to us in the usual ways, the lions and tigers and bears, and the falling in love, ice cream, and roller coaster rides. But the most uncanny question of all, entirely ignored, which is, what is all this doing here AT ALL? Ahab struck out at the world that produced leg amputating whales, in an ethical outrage toward the impossible source of his affliction: God. Even if there were no God, there would still be the very justified ethical outrage. The OP is saying God was never there in the first place; this is just a bit of bad metaphysics invented by ancient minds. But the conditions of our existence that PUT God there remain and we stand before Being as such (if you will) with fist clenched toward the world, just like Ahab. And the same goes for the love, bliss, joy, and the rest. Not a fist, but a yearning.

If I am understanding correctly, here is how this kind of "truth" can be said to be about...pure color or sound: because "we" are talking about the sensing (of) the organic (human, but not necessarily) being as it is sensing, presently and in "truth," and "free" of the displacing projections/imposition thinking. — ENOAH

I think you are in the middle of it. If I understand your use of the terms "displacing projections/imposition" you refer to the way language "displaces" non linguistic intuitions. There is a lot that has been said about this. Kant's "intuitions with concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty" remains very strong as a kind of prototype denial that any sense at all can be made of what there is in the world in its bare "givenness". But you heard Colon Conners speak about Henry: we have turned away from life, and gone into the world and become dust and ash, and it is not just Galilean science (from his "Barbarism") but the collective mentality of "right" thinking that we all have that allows us to participate in a culture. The everydayness of mundane existence. Phenomenologists all argue like this, one way or another.

The trick about phenomenology lies with Husserl's reduction, or epoche. He opens his "Ideas" like this:

Pure Phenomenology, to which we are here seeking the way, whose unique position in regard to all other sciences we wish to make clear, and to set forth as the most fundamental region of philosophy, is an essentially new science, which in virtue of its own governing peculiarity lies far removed from our ordinary thinking, and has not until our own day therefore shown an impulse to develop. It calls itself a science of “phenomena”.

I bring this up only to introduce the "method" of restoring what has been lost in the inflated and unwieldy production of knowledge claims science and culture have produced in the modern age. The epoche asks the philosopher to suspend the most common thinking that we naturally settle into in daily living, and reduce the world to its pure phenomena. This term "pure" is of course at issue here. can one actually have a "pure" perceptual encounter with the world such that what is there is received perceptually as it is. The analytics would add to this "as it is independently of the contribution of the perceiver, and this obviously creates a problem in epistemology, for S know P is nonsense if there is no essential "knowing" relation in place, and if P is entirely outside S, and independent of S, then knowledge is impossible.

So when you talk of "being as it is sensing, presently and in "truth," and "free" of the displacing projections/imposition thinking" you are treading close to post-Husserlian phenomenology, idea that if you put "the ordinary world" on hold, and look closely only at the phenomenological pure presence of what is there actually that the ordinary world presupposes, you discover this dimension of truth that is altogether ignored by science. To make this move is uncanny, for the world is reclaimed by mystery or "unknowing". All this is done with and in the language that first opens world to the understanding. This is the paradox of phenomenology. When I look at my coffee cup like this, it is no longer a coffee cup, nor is it qualia, or anything at all. Its "isness" is stand alone, and this is a quasi-mystical state, but language doesn't flinch: I know it is a coffee cup now, Nothing has changed in this as it remains in the background just as I did when I was doing my taxes or talking to an acquaintance.

A bit windy on that. Sorry.

Yes because "qualia" if that "experience" of direct sensation, is before meaning has been constructed and projected.

The Truth as in essence of religion, is unmediated, not knowable by logic or reasoning. More similar, in human knowledge, to "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Or, a God who dies a criminal, to save humanity, no less. — ENOAH

I remain uncertain about things not knowable by logic, because after all, logic doesn't really know anything. It is the form of knowing, that is identified in the structure of judgment. Not that there is any such thing as logic outside of the systems of thinking that recognize it. But that aside, you know, one has to be rational to know since knowing is the affirmation, the denial, the conditional, the conjunction and so on. Even when one is being her LEAST rational, there is the foundation of reason that makes this so.

The best way to look at this is to recognize that when one is finally of age, and questions rise up, and one can freely deal with the world and its ponderables, one is already IN a culture of science and daily living, and this culture permeates thoughts and feelings. It is the collective spirit of the times, the era, the zeitgeist, the historical framework. Call this the "totality" referring to the cultural literacy everyone has. This totality (as in Emanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity. First conceptualized like this by Heidegger, I think). This is the ordinary plain talk, from the idle banter to hard science. THIS is what possesses one such that one cannot understand the "truth" as you have been describing it. One is busy, entangled and fascinated IN the totality.

My only comment here is to acknowledge that physical pain is an example of that kind of truth. The "suffering" we primarily experience is purely constructed and projected and calls for something like "the essence of religion" to relieve us from.

However, though the first instant of physical pain provides a glimpse into that same "truth", just like it is in Zazen, or deep contemplative prayer, the truth in much physical pain is quickly bypassed by attention to imposition thinking. — ENOAH

You would have to explain this to me, that suffering is constructed. Not that I doubt the adept Buddhist's ability to ignore pain. Thich Quang Duc comes to mind, the Vietnamese monk who set himself ablaze in protest. Unless one is Thich Quang Duc, this about physical pain being quickly bypassed baffles me.

But also, from that. The so called order is the determinate world which has displaced the natural indeterminate reality. To me, the latter has neither ethical nor moral concerns. It (literally) just is that it is-ing, and we are that we are-ing. — ENOAH

You sound a lot like a love and peace hippie. This is a good thing, mind you. The hippies may have been a little out to lunch, but they were possessed by something more deeply authentic than, say, the hospital ethicist who deals with matter of bioethics. To talk about compassion, empathy, pathos, caring, conscience, love, as well as "it hurts; it hurts and I know it!" as the Real foundation of ethics, prior to, or more primordial than, principled thinking like Kant's categorical imperative of the principle of utility does not solve complicated entangled ethical dilemmas, but these latter are entirely contrived out of affairs that themselves stand outside of ethics. Robbing a bank to compensate for being thrown into structural poverty and ignorance and this justification standing vis a vis the necessity of the law that prohibits bank robbing---this creates a serious dilemma for justice, and compassion will not resolve this because ethical confusion runs so deep in such a thing. But if compassion had ruled culture to begin with, prohibitive laws like this would be far less necessary.

But keep in mind the OP: Religion has its grounding in something more basic. Go fall in love and observe. Being in love has everything IN love, or, a person in love lives is a world of being in love. Is love reducible to further analysis? Of course, there are neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, and so on who have sometihng to say, but there the question goes to the "pure" phenomenon, the condition itself that is there to be understood. It is a quality of the given world, and science cannot elucidate qualities. It can only talk about quantitative relations, degrees, intensities, causal relations of these, and the like. Now take the ethics of, say, the prohibition of divesting someone of love, which is a prima facie rule: one shouldn't break the heart of another. A defeasible rule, to be sure, for often circumstances are intractable, but note: the prima facie rule is PRIOR to the entanglements, so from whence comes this? It comes from the world itself, for love issues from the world! It is not a principle, but an actuality, not even arguably, the most salient feature of our existence. And moral realism has just been proved. This kind of reasoning applies across the board to any and all ethical cases: find the value that is at stake, at risk, to be won or lost or compromised, etc, and you will find the essence of the ethicality. And value issues form the world (Wittgenstein's Tractatus, e.g.)

Because love is a quality of the, as you put it, "is-ing, and we are that we are-ing" it issues from the world itself, from being. It is as if all ethics had the same metaphysical grounding as those stone tablets written by God on a mountain. Only ethics is Real.

I think the movement we are ripe for today is that philosophy has forgotten we are organic beings. — ENOAH

Spiritual beings, I would say. The word 'spirit' has too much history, I know. Spoils meaning. But our spirituality is really a thing so easily understood. When the question is raised regarding the nature of the self, note that one does not find anything at all that is remotely a thing, all the caring, worrying, thinking, happiness, misery, and on and on and on: there is nothing physicalist in any of this. Then how can one classify this? These qualities are spiritual, this passion for hagen dazs spiritual, this desire to go for a swim, meet friends, etc. spiritual. Objects are what they are, we are what we are. In itself, it says nothing of redemption and consummation and the eternal duration of the spirit. It is a simple observational fact.

Thus, ”all is one”, ”experience of self is an illusion” etc. — Jussi Tennilä

And I did fail to give a comment here: So if experience of self is an illusion, what agency is
"experiencing" that spear in my kidney?

I differ with this only in the order of experience/realization: developmentally humans experience death, therefore instinctively fear it, long before realizing – those who do explicitly – that the 'I-world duality is irreconcible (or even irreparable)', which compounds the fear (i.e. suffering) that requires relief and succor in degrees of self-consoling reality-denial (e.g. dreams of / quests for symbolic / magical immortality) aka "religion". — 180 Proof

A good example of the failure to understand. Death is only an issue if one first cares about dying. Death, to be taken seriously, needs to be understood as to what makes it so serious. Thus, caring is primordial. Caring has an existential counterpart, which is that which is cared about and this moves to the nature of encounter itself. These are the actualities of experience, and they are logically PRIOR to "self-consoling reality-denial."

One must deal with presuppositions. This is the telos of philosophy.

Religion, to me, is about, and rises out of, the irreconcilability of experiencing being whatever ”I” refers to, and the simultaneous existence of the outside world that is perceived as ”different” or ”other”. From this distinction questions arise that cannot be answered leading to suffering. Many religions thus aim to reconcile this difference by denying it. Thus, ”all is one”, ”experience of self is an illusion” etc.
Fear of death is downstream from the realisation of this distinction between ”I” and ”other”. — Jussi Tennilä

What questions arise? This is the most important. One faces a world of terrible impositions and joyful engagements, and religious questions arise. I think you are right in saying, as I put it, that there is this "distance" between the thinking, feeling, intuiting person and the world she is thrown into (so to speak). But to speak of it as simply a "difference" doesn't describe what it is that makes the interface with the world religious. Religion deals with the passion, the need, the angst, the dread, the terrors, all which demand redemption (a churchy word I don't really want to use) as well as the love, the happiness, the compassion, the beauty, the dreams all which demand consummation. Metaphysical redemption, that is.

This is a hard sell because, you know, while it IS an argument, and I can argue it with you if you like, one has to be attuned to what can be called threshold experiencing the world. If one is thoroughly IN the world, and here I mean the unquestioned commitment to the culture's values, the getting married, raising a family, the possessions that follow, the devotion to friends, and on and on. then one is not going to understand this very well. They will be, as Heidegger said, living in a tranquilized world of little if any real meditative thought.

I think if one wants to understand religion in its essence, one has tocare about these foundational issues of our ethical and aesthetic (Wittgenstein thought these were the same thing) existence. Being in the world is caring. We are thrown into caring. Suffering in the world is not simply a question in an equation of thought. It is in the second and third degree burns over half ones body after a car accident, or the gangrened extremities of plague.

We know material being, we live it. So, I don't think it is necessary to witness it, in some way analogous to how one witnesses events, or material beings of the various kinds. We don't know any other kind of being than material being, although of course we can think immaterial being as its dialectical opposite. — Janus

No. It is very important that one is able to witness something they "know". Otherwise, it is just bad metaphysics. You might as well be talking about God and her omniscience, omnipotence or how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Metaphysicl materialism is simply an extension of loose talk about things in the world. Material physics is not a metaphysical concept, but refers to observable properties of things. The underlying substratum of all things will never been observed because it is not A being. It IS being. The only responsible way to talk about such a substratum requires the term transcendence, simply because there is nothing to say. This is Wittgenstein's "world" which is mystical.

I don't deny that the idea of transcendence has moment for we humans; it is an inevitable feature in the movement of thought, just as zero, infinity, and imaginary and irrational numbers are in mathematics. Of course, the indeterminable cannot be determined, but it features prominently as an absence, a mystery, the unknowable, in our thinking. It has apophatic value, in other words. — Janus

On the other hand, experience is not a numerical indeterminacy. Hagen Dazs is not a numerical indeterminacy, nor sex or love or death by a thousand cuts. This is what religion is all about. Analytic philosophers generally deal with the good and bad of ethics/aesthetics as if the normativity of these terrible and wonderful things are to be dealt with just like one deal with facts of the world. But to do this ignores the nature of the normativity itself, which issues from the pain being "bad" and this is in double inverted commas because we are dealing with a "quality" in the presence of pain that makes the "ought" of a prohibition what it is. This is the ontology of value-in-being.

Usually, oughts are contingently conceived, that is, they are part of a conditional construction, IF...THEN, as in If you want get an A on the exam, THEN you have to study, and so, the ought entirely depends on something else. But in ethics, the ought is stand alone.

I agree, we live predominantly in our sensations, feelings and emotions, they are what is most vivid, most real, for us; without them life would be as good as nothing. — Janus

Brilliant! Nothing at all, and in an important way this tells us that the greatest "wisdom" of philosophy is not going to be found in mere propositional truth or the pragmatics, or rational soundness, or representational alignment of knowledge claims. The answer to the question of life the universe and everything lies with the elucidation or the enlightenment about and realization of value-in-the-world.

I'd say it is more a phenomenological question than a metaphysical. Well, at least it is if taking "metaphysical" in its traditional sense. — Janus

Metaphysics is only meaningful to the extent it is realized phenomenologically, for phenomena are all that IS. Anything that is posited that is not grounded this way is just bad metaphysics. Kant didn't see this. He thought of metaphysics as hopelessly transcendental in the absolute sense of this term and impossible to talk about. But then, where are the grounds for the discussion about it being beyond discussion? And how is it possible that noumena and phenomena are to be conceived as separate ontologies when the former has no delimitations for to delimit noumena is to draw a line and one cannot draw a line about something utterly transcendental' it would be like separating finitude and infinity, a separation that occurs only in language! A rope or a snake, asks Adi Shankara.

It is language and its pragmatic nature that so strongly inhibits understanding of metaphysics.

I agree, and that is why I have argued recently in another thread that experience or perception is not "in the head'. — Janus

If you understand this, and I trust that you do, you have realized something very profound about our existence that I won't, following Wittgenstein, trivialize with talk beyond saying that in you are right there with the (serious) Hindus.

I agree with Hegel that all the historical movements of thought are important, but I also believe we cannot go back. I agree with Gadamer that we cannot even be sure what the ancients philosophers meant. This is the problem of anachronism, and to imagine ourselves as returning to think like Plato or Aristotle, is anachronistic. Which is not to say that we cannot find interest there, but we will always interpret that interest as moderns. — Janus

When dealing with an ontology of language and culture, I agree. But then, there is the taboo ontology that Gadamar or Heidegger will not take seriously because it underscores the notion of the "pure" phenomenon, which Husserl took up so rigorously and was rejected for the impossibility of the claim that the phenomenological reduction could bring one to the absolute presence of the object. There are those, particularly Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion who continued forward with this radical taboo ontotheology of religious revelation in the objective study of being (of course, all in the long shadow of Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time and latter works. The very term ontotheology is from Kant then Heidegger from the Greek. For more on this see his [what I consider quite difficult] Identity and Difference and his Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics. Again, a bit of a struggle for me. For clarity, you could ask JoshS).

I, on the other hand, take this taboo philosophy very seriously. I am sure that philosophy leads one to foundations, and here, even the receptive "meditative thinking" can only be an index to "the world," a pragmatic index, if you will, "opens seeing".

I disagree here. I think we do directly apprehend objects. Further thinking about that will of course include what you said, though. I see no reason to think that animals don't also apprehend objects, but I see good reason to think that they don't think about it in general terms as we do. We do that because symbolic language allows us to abstract generalities from particular experiences. — Janus

But you know how this problem goes: The only ontology that can sustain in what-is-and-can-be-known is hermeneutics. Long and involved. I want to agree with you, but I can't see how acknowledging my cat as my cat can discover the "my cat" in an objective claim so familiar, in the language that is in the apprehension of it being my cat. But I do stand with Michel Henry who takes us through a Cartesian path to affirmation (in his Manifestation of Essence): Descartes made a basic mistake in that the cogito is impossible to conceive apart from the cogitatum. The indubitably of "I think" is nonsense apart from an object, and this is, of course, Husserl's intentionality, which Henry uses as the basis of his thinking. the idea is that when I acknowledge my cat, it is patently ludicrous to imagine nothing is happening here and that which it IS: that is not language.

The trouble is, what one can say is bound up in the structural entanglements of the language (the difference and deference, as Derrida put it) and this makes my knowledge of my cat entirely contingent and contextual.

Only one thing survives this analysis: value-in-being. "Ouch!" and "oo and ah and yum" experiences are not language, BUT they "speak" the "language" of ethics. The bad and good, that is; the non contingent "bad" of the "ouch" of having teeth pulled without anesthetics is a "bad" that issues from the world.

A bit much here. Apologies. Talking about these things tests the limits of talking.

You will necessarily consider the government the steward of the rules, science the steward of knowledge, and religion the steward of ethics and meaning if that's the system you've decreed, but that isn't where society began. It's where it happens to be now, but only in some parts of the world. — Hanover

I dont consider empirical science the steward of knowledge at the level of examining the presuppositions of science. Science gets into very serious trouble when it comes to basic questions because it cannot address the simple question as to how knowledge of the world is possible. Its job is not epistemology. Ask a scientist how the world "gets into" a knowledge claim and she will not even know what you are talking about, yet this is fundamental to knowing the world. To be clear: it is not that science has some working paradigm about how knowledge relationships and this will advance based on new observational data; rather, science has no clue at all as to how such a relationship could even possibly work given the scientist's "ontology" of physicalism/materialism.

But of coursr, when it comes to the familiar classificatory work of science and pragmatic efficacy, science is the steward of knowledge.

Government the steward of rules? But prior to this is ethics. Government is right as it reasons ethically, and wrong when it doesn't regardless of the outcome. I refer here to the "good will" of intensions.

That is, some turned to religion not only for reasons to do with death, truth, or meaning, but because they wanted to know what to do if their neighbor's ox gored theirs, what sorts of foods were safe to eat, and when they should have celebrations and when they should be solemn. They also wanted to know why the sun rose and fell and why the animals did as they did, and so they came up with all sorts of explanations. — Hanover

I am not here concerned with any analysis of why people turned to religion. More often than not, there simply was no choice, conform or die. The way we are entangled with other people, desires and fears brings in matters that are not that have nothing to do with the essence of religion, and more than political favor for certain research has anything to do with the essence of science. It is not why people believe in a religion, but what is means for something to be religiously significant at all! What is there in the world that makes religion even possible outside of narratives and power plays, etc. Or better, what makes the world a "religious place" in the same way that it is a place of science? You mentioned ethics, and I agree, but this just opens the door for discussion. What about ethics makes it the essence of religion?

But this conversation isn't about all this. It's about why you folks think people still cling to religion when science and government has prevailed and from there the psychoanalysis follows. It must be, you assume, because the world is scary, uncertain, and otherwise amoral. — Hanover

No, no. I mean, it is scary and uncertain, obviously, but I am arguing precisely that the world IS a moral place. I am arguing that religion, beneath all those absurd assumptions of faith and dogmatism, the essence of religion is the realist thing one can imagine, and lies deep in our existence. This is the value dimension of our world. Ask, what is real? in the philosophical sense, not in the general sense in which this term is tossed around mindlessly. I argue that there is nothing more real than affectivity or the "pathos" that saturates experience in every interest, abhorrence, love, hate, and so on.

Of course, to see this, one has to put aside science's absurd claims about science's metaphysics called physicalism (and the like).

Religion is an all encompassing worldview, just as is scientism. It can reach as far into the realms of science as much as science can reach into the realms of religion. The question is where to draw the line, but I do think the quest for meaning is as inherent a human drive as is the quest for knowledge. While science can tell us why the world does as it does, it can't tell how to live in it. That's why I'd suggest religion perseveres in an otherwise scientific world. It simply provides answers science does not. — Hanover

One has to put aside this kind of categorical thinking. This is metaphysics, but responsible metaphysics, so if it has a name at all, it would be ontotheology, the being of theology that is elucidated through a close look at metaethics. Metaethics, as I am thinking about it here, deals the the notorious "good" and "bad" of ethical matters. Think G E Moore's non natural property, as he tries to explain what the ethical good in essence IS. Contingent goods and bads are easy to understand, as with good knives or bad performances, good news, bad radio reception, and on and on. Ethical goods and bads are very different, for in order to "observe" such a thing, one has to acknowledge something very strange that literally constitutes ethical situations, as in the ethical prohibition against the rack or applying thumb screws. Exhaust the empirical descriptive features of such a thing, and there is the residuum called the "bad" of it. Few take the time to look closely at this: it cannot be seen, yet it is by far THE most salient feature applying the thumb screws has, which is the ethical/aesthetic "bad" of the pain.

Note how one cannot give this further analysis, for pain as such is not a "thing of parts" but is "stand alone what it is," and this makes pain irreducible to anything else, any other explanatory account. It is literally IN the presence of the world, and I would quickly add, MORE SO than anything science can ever come to know, for science's knowledge is essentially quantitative in nature, meaning it processes information through meansuring how qualitative presences can be represented in intensities, degrees, numbers, etc. in quantitative relations. Very complicated, certainly, but, and this is the point: derivative, derived, that is, through discursive reasoning. This is a very rough but accurate way to talk about science's knowledge claims. Take any science, geology, e.g.: ask a question about, say, the orogeny of mountains or plate tectonics or carbon dating, and you will not find anything enlightening about the world cannot be reduced to talk about relative quantitative relations. Qualitatively, the world is there, of course, but the understanding about the world is going to be about relative quantitative relations.

This is why science cannot talk about ethics any more than it can talk about reason qua reason as Kant tried to. Reason, like ethics' value, cannot be observed and quantified. Modus ponens doesn't have a quantitative dimension to it, but this is where the argument gets interesting, because the ethical/aesthetic "good and bad" does, which leads to the most basic part of this analysis: We look here at ethics as Kant looked at reason, trying to isolate the "purity" of value-in-ethics. Kant had to go transcendental because of the apriority of the logic discovered in judgment, and here, we, too, go thsi way. What religion seeks is an account of value-in-the-world that is AS apodictic as logic, but is ABOUT existence. Logic is vacuous, let's face it. It is, as Wittgenstein said, just tautological in nature, so its apodicticity is equally vacuous, meaning, who cares? It only has meaning in contexts of meaningful affairs, like seeing that IF you want to stay dry in the rain THEN you must bring an umbrella. Pure form is only intersting if you TAKE in interest in it. But value: Demonstrate that value qua value is apodictic, like logic, and now you have an extraordinary affirmation of foundational meaning of our existence.

Like proving God exists, but without God and all the churchy fetishes; the depth of meaning is now absolute, and our ethical throwness into the world carries with it the redemptive and consummatory promises inherent in religion.

You are speaking of physical pain, the sufferings of the flesh, no? How is that not the suffering that goes with material being? — Janus

We put the plain ontology of "stuff" out of relevance, but we keep the term "material" if you like, simply because it can be used to indicate the actualities in the world, the "material basis" of ethics and religion is excatly to the point. But as a metaphysical thesis that posits the most basic thinking in ontology, material being it is most misleading, for even at best, it is just a functional place holder for general references. At worst, it is entirely vacuous, for one can never witness "material being" since being is not A being. There is no one thing, but is meant as the eternal substratum of all beings. (But it is not as if there is nothing to this nothing. No name dropping here, but this once: the matter of the nothing of metaphysics and its anxiety is covered in a fascinating discussion by Kierkegaard and Heidegger.)

No, I prefer to keep with reality. What is THERE, evident to our sight, and makes the strongest claim to the Real? I'd say a death by a thousand cuts qualifies, or being in love, or Hagen Dasz, a close second.

Of course there would not be pain without awareness of it. We live to some extent at least, conscious lives. It is very difficult to consciously eliminate intense physical pain from consciousness; we need physical intervention to achieve that. We need analgesics and anesthetics to eliminate pain.

Why do we care? We care because we wish to avoid suffering and experience happiness, joy. We also want our lives to be interesting, and perhaps for some, creative. Above all we wish to be comfortable and confident being ourselves. — Janus

But now you have to take the next analytic step, which is into ontology. I am asking about the ontology of value-in being. It is not so weird as it may sound. Here I am, the observer with my senses and reason in full and clear apprehension, and there is this "presence" emanating from my sprained ankle. One asks, what is this? Of course, if this were an empirical question, one would have context ready to hand for classification, but we are not asking that kind of question. This is a metaphysical question and the classification takes us into far less solid analytical territory, at least at first.

And if this were simply a question of what analytic philosophers call qualia, then it would be a vacuous, for who cares about "being appeared to redly" and the like? Red as a pure phenomenon is unspeakable presence or "givenness". Value, the broad sense of "pathos" in the world. But sprained ankles and the like are not vacuous at all. Indeed, it classifies as THE most salient feature of our existence, and of existence in any context.

It is a perspective that does require a rather unusual intuitve move, I think, I have observed: One has to understand that by dismissing materialism or physicalism, we also dismiss the idea of the metaphysics of locality. It is one thing to say there is a mountain over there, a tree at the base, and I am here, and so on. But one of the most striking features of taking this normal kind of referencing and raising it to the status of metaphysics is this localization is inserted into the question of being. But being is not A being. It is not here and there, but rather here and there are "in" being. The importance of this lies in ontological prioritizing, for science deals with beingS, and this significantly undermines the importance if importance, if you will, for something being important is conceived as a localized affair, and this has led to the absurd analytic view that a thing being important is "there, in that locality called a human being," and therefore of no consequence outside of contexts of, say, anthropology, biology or psychology. The idea here is that this view undermines our existence AS it exists. We are, in the most basic way to put, existence itself, not a localized thing.

We cannot rationally combine different contexts into a comprehensive "master context" (which would amount to a total lack of context), that could unify all our experience and understanding. That is a folly, a delusive dream, born of intellectual hubris, I would say. It is important to know our limits; we cannot be omniscient. — Janus

If all there were, were contextuality of meanings in a finite setting, then I would agree. But this is not the world. Consider that it is not the scientist's hubris that gave us physics. It is the scientific method (or, the hypothetical deductive method of Popper and the pragmatists, if you like) and what does this tell us, I mean, loosely speaking? Observe and think, only here, we have withdrawn from empirical categories because the question is not an empirical one. Nor is it about the analyticity of logic. It is about the analyticity of existence.

What is religion all about? It is about an analytic of existence that gives a foundation for ethics that has the certainty of logical apodicticity. This I would emphasize is what is all about. I should underline it because it is a pretty good way to put it. There.

We can see that myths of omniscience, godhood, grow up around charismatic spiritual figures like Jesus and Gotama, but this only leads to empty dogmatism. The human spirit constantly evolves and we need to find ourselves, become ourselves, in the modern context, not in looking back to the ancients, focusing on and bemoaning what we mistakenly imagine has been lost. — Janus

Well, forget about al this. You and I are responsible thinking people, not mindless dogmatists (though I am sure Gautama Siddhartha was on to something very much to the point here). Not at all intersted in ancient thinking, though the ancients themselves are quite interesting.

For me it seems a step backwards. "Universal" denotes that which applies in all contexts, and I don't believe there is any such thing, Hegel's absolutism was not a step further than Kant. — Janus

Well, one has to look at the language and how it makes knowledge possible. It is not that Hegel was right in all he said. But somethings make some sense. I have before me the full being of a coffee cup. Yet I know my knowing this is through the general, the historicity of coffee cups, cups in general, drinking vessels and on and on. The apprehension of THIS coffee cup is through this language that understands things, not through any direct apprehension of the object. The only thing that is directly apprehended is value-in-the-world, and this is of course received in language like everythign else, but , if you will, pain and joy "speak" which is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about it. Speaking ruins, vitiates the world of importance-in-things.

Your wording seems a complicated way of saying something simple and fairly commonplace - that philosophy has the capacity to lead individuals to deeper contemplation and understanding, surpassing the traditional realm that religion once solely occupied. Perhaps yours is a quest for foundational justification for compassion. — Tom Storm

Yes! But hold on with that word justification. The process of the affirmation is discursive, but the evidence, in the end, is ontologically revelatory. Ontology is a sticky word, meaning it is, as with all philosophical foundational words, inherently metaphysically indeterminate. When one talks about THIS kind of ontological inquiry, one is already in religious analysis. i would put the case like this: Imagine that the ten commandment were true. It's just a supposition, and so you can't just dismiss because one can so easily. That would miss the point. So let's say its all true, as true as physics, but more so. And what is now simply an assumption, an axiom of existential standing, is a proper premise for justification. In the light of this, how does this change the way one understands the world?

Here the question goes not to the gravitas of its commandments, but to the gravitas of what stands behind them, for something like "honor thy mother and father" is still, in itself, just a bit of ethical normativity. God is now the foundational ontological justification, and by definition, if you will, there is no gainsaying God. It is at least as strong as, say, modus ponens or the principle of identity, in rational coercivity. You know, no choice. Even Dostoyevsky's Underground Man would have to bow low. The difference here is, this apodicticity, or necessity, is existential! How would this change the world? So we drop the ten commandments, and we drop God, for the supposition served its purpose, and now what is left is the, heh, heh, "the power and the glory". I really shouldn't use such a phrase because of its connotative bs, but I'll keep it. Because what I am trying to reveal is, IF this argument for the essence of religion I have been trying to defend, is right, and I am sure it is, then we live in just this kind of world. One does not go to ancient texts for justification. It is "written" in the analysis of our existence.

How so? I say, all we need to do is observe the world's ethical and aesthetic dimension. Look closely, that is, analytically. What is the nature of this dimension? This is the question. It is not a question of the way it is historically taken up in the reification of traditions, because all of this is just a bad attempt, bad metaphysics, since it was not conceived responsibly with an eye exclusively on the what is in-the-world. This here is just good science. Just not empirical science.

Given his "fundamental question", maybe Constance has not considered (e.g.) Spinoza's conatus. — 180 Proof

Not quite there. It is more fundamental than this. The value dimension of our existence is something that cannot be further reduced to more talk about metaphysical tendencies, direction, energy, or "impetus" or anything else. It is entirely irreducible, that pain in my ankle and this amazingly delicious hagen Dasz. Of course, facts are facts entangled and singularity is lost in the richness of the world. But this does not alter the nature of the value-presence, which is most evident in the the strongest and most unambiguous expressions, like having your head in a vice.

Maybe it's Schrodinger's — Wayfarer

Something weird going in quantum mechanics. But the weirdest thing I can imagine lies in the simplicity of the epistemic impossibility of there being a cat at all. This is not to say there is no cat, certainly not. It is to say that the HOW of knowing there is a cat is impossible to discover. Epistemology is impossible, unless a new paradigm of discovery is admitted, for causality in a physicalist paradigm is just flat out wrong. The trouble with quantum mechanics, and this is not a technical observation, is that it may be that the only way understand things like quantum entanglement is through the phenomenology of our existence that studies the imposition of the conditions of perceptual possiblity: the "out there" of physics is woefully inadequate. The failure to observe the epistemic connectivity between us and the world is bound up with the failure to see quantum entanglement.

Half dead cats? Adorable.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s what my confrères would have argued. The quotidian is metaphysics. I would have thought metaphysics is unavoidable even if some think their version is ‘real life’ while the metaphysical foundations of others are flights of fancy. — Tom Storm

But then, all this is standing on the outside looking in. Why does one read philosophy? Is it to understand all that your confrères were talking about? What Davidson or Quine were talking about? Or is it to understand the world? I think one has to have one's passions really involved in the pursuit of truth, for truth is not simply, as Rorty put it, something propositions have. Truth lies IN the passion itself, otherwise it is just an abstraction. One has to care about one's finitude in the midst of radical indeterminacy, because our existence is essentially ethically and aesthetically founded on caring. We ARE caring, and caring seeks consummation. Such a thing is generally confined to the usual matters, the owning of things and basic enjoyments. But philosophy takes one thoughtfully where religion once could only go.

I suppose in order to see this, one has to be interested in the first place. I mean prior to sitting down with a text, is it the thrill of combative argument that drives one? Is it like reading a novel, a good narrative? Or is one simply insistent on getting as deeply as possible into understanding this impossible world we are thrown into?

I stopped caring about what my confrères were talking about long ago. I find it useful now, but I don't think about philosophy so I can talk about how Nietzsche was taken up by Heidegger, or how Platonism influenced Christianity, and so on. These are just intellectual indulgences.

↪Constance I think 'general' is a better, less loaded, and less potentially misleading term than 'universal'. For example, a dog is considered to be an instance of a species, an example of a specific kind within a genus. Of course, each dog is a specific or particular example of a species. This is all 'types and tokens' thinking, which is central to the human understanding of the world.

The language changes depending on whether we are considering types of tokens; relative to a particular dog 'species' is a general term, whereas relative to a particular species, genus is a general term, and so on. There would seem to be nothing universal about it, the terms change their references depending on whether we are thinking in terms of tokens or types.

So, the point is that the central idea is contextuality, not universality, categories based on family resemblances, on recognition of patterns of form and configuration, not on essences. — Janus

But go a step further into Kant, where Hegel got it. The universal is part of the structure of language's logic. I say "look there!" But "there" is where exactly? Because the term is used in any and all contexts of location and itself as a spatial index is just a generality. Yes, of course, there means there, under the table. But language doesn't do this. Context does this, and context dealsj ust with more language that has just this universality in their meaning.

I'd say we care because (or if) it is our nature to care. There is not some anterior reason that leads us to think we should care. We are instinctively attached to our lives and want to preserve them, just as animals are. — Janus

I have no doubt that this is true. How does one respond to the question , what is caring? as an ontological matter? What is value-in-being? And what is the real standard for talking about things existing? Consider the pale metaphysics of, say, material substance and how this stands vis a vis, oh, the late stages of beubonic plague and the deep suffering it involves: which one is the stronger basis for what exists? Suffering is presence-in-the-world, while material substance altogether lacks presence, yet the latter rules modern ontology. Patently absurd. No, the real belongs to value, greater or lesser, it is the very foundation of meaning.

I'm not sure what your "this" refers to here. Care is central to everything we do, even for those who don't seem to care about anything much. — Janus

I agree. The point is, what IS it? It has this radically weak ontology in tradition and in popular thought. This is due to, I argue, the rise of technology and the attending dismissal primordial meanings in our culture. God was, to remind, not this absurd first cause, etc. God was redemption and consummation of value in our exdistence.

It is not an intrinsic part of the world (although Heidegger would say it is, but he uses "world" to refer to the specific human world of dasein); the point is the world does not care about humanity, no matter how much humanity might care about the world (not much it seems given the state of the environment). — Janus

The world has to be first defined. Heidegger did not have an ethics, or, did not discuss ethics, much to the alarm of Levinas, Henry and others. Hence their endless complaining. But for H metaphysics (ask Josh __ about this) is the ontotheological structure of a culture, and this is clearly lacking a metaethics. Like Nietzsche, H didn't understand ethics at all. He wasn't equipped, perhaps. But he did deny, with N, the "suprasensory place" of God, not just God.
But one has to look closely at what the "world" does: The world is the source for value-in-the-world. It "gives" us our afflictions as a possibility for ethics to exist at all., The "preference" for "the good" iin the world is NOT a fabrication, like the various institutions that are so easily assailable. The world "makes" these preferences. This is a point I would emphasize.

But is that really the case? I spent much of my young life associated with the New Age movement as it was called back in the 1980's. Most of my friends were idealsits and Theosophists and Buddhists and Hindus and Jungians and Gnostics and Sufi mystics, etc. Quantum physics was seen as proof of idealism, etc. So metaphysics was very much the flavour of the day. I also grew up with Jung, the archetypes and collective unconscious, so I was not exactly immured in 20th century scientism or common sense. — Tom Storm

But, I am arguing, none of this is metaphysics, any more than attending church and listening to sermons about the the resurrection, the ascension, and taking the sacraments. This is talk about metaphysics. I claim something far more interesting and difficult, which is acknowledging that the everyday world really is the setting for metaphysics, metaethics, metavalue. Kant famously drew the line between phenomenon and noumenon. I am saying it is all noumenal.

What is the justification for this? It begins with argument at the basic level. For example: how is knowledge possible? Answer: it is not. Or, what does it mean that the value dimension of our existence is absolute, that is, it cannot be contradicted in its nature? Such questions challenge all assumptions of our existence.

But aren't these questions a bit naff? I don't know about yours, but my cat exists. I know this because if I don't feed him he give me hell. I subscribe somewhat to Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language as being an arbitrary set of signs and signifiers that we use to point to things in the world. General Motors is the collective noun for a company. — Tom Storm

Naff? Well, try not to be put off by this too much, and perhaps allow yourself the indulgence of looking past facile judgment. I mean, if you have read Saussure, then you have to follow through on to Derrida, and grasp his notion of the trace. No space to discuss this, but look, no one is saying your cat doesn't exist. It was Saussure who noted that difference is the principle of language, and so when you see your cat, and experience the singularity of it being there, the language that is implicit in the identification never affords this singularity; rather, the cat is received as a "trace" of the many cat related ideas that rise to the occasion that produce the singularity. And so here, one can say taht the analysis of the knowledge relation with the cat reveals that you are not grasping one thing. Language doesn't do this. Language gives one "regions" of possibilities out of which one thought emerges. It is truly a fascinating account, and contributes significantly to understanding the idea here about metaphysics: Metaphysics never was IN the language act that speaks something.

See the above: how is knowledge possible? Well, it isn't. YET, there is no question I see the cat. And so knowledge is simply a fact. Quite the problem to solve. Only one solution I see: The terms of object intimation (the cat) must exceed the idea of locality. It simply cannot be that that cat over there is independent and localized as normal perception tells us.

An error in consciousness, it has been said. — Wayfarer

But it shows that concepts are not empty things. They are palpable errors. As I see it, when we talk about the world, we are using categories of understanding. These are concepts, so when I see a dog, the particular dog in front of me is known because I have this schematic in my head about dogs in general, the universal that subsumes the particular. Hegel said THIS dominates the understanding, and you can see his point. Language is not about particulars, so seeing anything at all is grasped by the universal. But the universal to particular relation makes the dog a dog, and without it, well, this is impossible to "say". The point would be that when Buddhists and Hindus meditate, the reason why this is so hard to fully realize is because one is not merely shutting up. One is trying to break this powerful bond that creates an understanding of something. This destroys familiarity itself!

I know what you are saying, but it feels too metaphysical too fast, or epistemological, asking “Is it possible for thought and its concepts to understand the world as the world?”. We no longer need the content, such as the “the essence of religion”, to continue the conversation this inquiry might become. — Fire Ologist

To discover the essence of religion, one has to be torn away from default mundane relations with the world. I mean, the world we experience every day. The metaphysics of it has to be treated not as a thesis, but as an encounter with the world, something we don't do in our culture. Curious to ask if we ever did, particularly in ancient cultures where knowledge assumptions were so few compared to this modern and post modern "disillusionment" so common.

The epistemological problem is the same as the problem in ontology (the idea I am pushing here is that of a value-in-being). These are two sides of the same event. It is not as if the world in question reveals itself "outside" of the epistemic encounter, and indeed, it is the encounter that "makes" the world what it is. Not to say there is nothing out there that is not me, but rather to say that what IS before me is the phenomenon, and nothing else, and to behold the phenomenon is in the beholding the beheld object. It is impossible remove affirmations in ontology from those of epistemology.

So we encounter lamps and desks and chairs, and we also encounter feelings, this whole affectivity of our existence. This latter needs to be understood for what it is apart from the "tranquilized" life of passive assumptions. As Wayfarer said, it seems this move is easier for some, harder for others, but no doubt, it is not just cogitating on a thesis. It is revelatory. The metaphysical move you mention as being a bit too quickly affirmed, is first thought out, but the "movement" (as Kierkegaard put it, though he had trouble with this, he admits) is revelatory, and quite fast...that is, immediate. It is essentially aesthetic (keeping in mind the way Wittgenstein conflated the two, ethics and aesthetics. Both are value-driven. Religion, aesthetics and ethics are all about the same thing).

But it feels like we could easily head into a digression away from statements like “the world IS religious.”. Perfectly good questions but, we now need never talk about religion. — Fire Ologist

Or perhaps religious talk has to arise after the most fundamental insight is achieved. Take theodicy, a theological conundrum, but based on the premise that God is the greatest, loosely speaking, and created the world. Now we no longer think like this, as we are up to our eyebrows in faith in evidentially grounded belief. This is the virtue of this phenomenological approach to religion as it frees metaphysics from arbitrary concepts that generate the omni this and omni that and the creator of all things. All of this is dismissed. But we do have this: good and evil, and the metaphysics in which these are revealed, remembering that metaphysics is no longer the suprasensory other world, but is this world, and their "properties" spelled out before us is often vivid and powerful, referring to the burns, abrasions and the rest of the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, as well as love and beauty and bliss. We know we ar "thrown into" this world. Being thrown is a term referring to what happens when one makes this move out of mundanity and sees there is no foundation beneath one's feet, for the myths are gone. The theology is gone. Gone is everything, when inquiry turns to religion.

Metaphysics is now a responsible term.

The same indeterminacy of our existence could also be said to have given birth to science. (I see this is why Nietzsche could say academic science could lie as much as religion could). — Fire Ologist

Yes. Reason itself cannot be conceived, for that would take reason. Where IS this beginning that is so mysterious? Here is a word from Eugene Fink from his Sixth Meditation:

The preliminariness and indeterminateness of the
indications we gave regarding inquiry back to world-constitution
arose from our wanting to be careful that from the outset we not
encumber or even conceal genuine philosophical comprehension
in the phenomenological sense, viz., constitutive understanding, by
a preset "characterization.

When one gets to this, well, call it, hallowed ground of first apprehensions, one is nowhere in a very real way. Science has be denuded. Nietzsche puts it like this in Human, all too Human:

The shaper of language was not so modest as to think that he was only giving
things labels; rather, he imagined that he was expressing the highest knowledge of
things with words; and in fact, language is the first stage of scientific effort. Here, too,
it is the belief in found truth from which the mightiest sources of strength have flowed.
Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they
have propagated a monstrous error.

I get what he is talking about, though most emphatically deny his naturalistic bottom line. He didn't understand ethics or religion essentially. Our ethics IS ethics. Why? Because of the absoluteness of value. (I can't remember if I talked about this here). I think N was just too constantly ill to know anything else but the will to power and overcoming.

Science and religion are equally concept making, indeterminacy regulators. It’s why they always wrestle for the same space with the “why” the how, the what, the whether. — Fire Ologist

I agree. Science should understand that it is just not to be mistaken for metaphysics, which is what so many do these days.

We fill this indeteminacy with laws.l. They could be rational, scientific laws. Be it ethical or not, or only ethical, or scientific or not, or only scientific, it’s all still mixed with the indeterminate.

I can’t argue what I see in where this is going, but I can describe it. — Fire Ologist

Christians are find of saying God is love, but take the step prescribed here, and they will see that love is a terribly burdened word, overused and trivialized. They have to do what Heidegger did, which is to replace vocabulary so as to talk about things anew. Language literally makes discovery possible (" the house of being"), yet it also creates the terms of its own obfuscation. Where this is going is to a dropping of terms that privilege clarity of meaning (the analytic school's obsession), in favor of a truly descriptive vocabulary at the basic level. This is phenomenology, what I think will be the final religion.

What it means, adds to this world, moves it”self” (the existence IS me), ahead of the world, in to the world, like being thrown. We throw our”selves” into this world. — Fire Ologist

You sound a bit like Heidegger: We do not live in time. We ARE time. And the basic furniture of the world is not material things in space and time, but events, forward looking. Hence, Being and Time. Our most authentic existence is our freedom, as free as an unmade future.

But only then, after by some means being thrown to throw our selves back might we start to look for what this becomes, such as a vision of indeterminacy, be it radical ethical, or rational, or ethical first, or rational with ethical color first…etc.

So I’ve lost your point again about religion qua religion. Something making use of the word “essence” about “religion.”

Or does the overlap between scientific objectification (the rational, yielding speech itself). like ethical objectification (yielding religion) show I’m at least standing in the same vicinity as you? — Fire Ologist

Religion qua religion, that is religion that is set apart from all that religious culture and theology, which entangles affairs in so many things that have nothing to do with religion, like long shiny robes and choirs of angels and lent and Easter and Passover, and on and on. What happens when one wants to be free of the culture to see what is there that is real beneath it all, like asking a politician what she really stands for apart from all the posturing asking, is there a real person behind this endless rhetorical blather?

Anyway, religion is metaphysics. Period. Metaethics, to be precise, a pursuit of "the good" and "the bad" in an effort to escape mere contingency of all we talk about. Hard to say briefly, but perhaps you have read Stanley Fish's Is There a Test in this Class? Language does not pin to any fixed contexts, so meanings are all variable, depending on what one is talking about. The search or the essence of religion is a search for something that is BOTH noncontingent and Real. Something that has the apodicticity of logic, but issues from existence, not the apriority of the mere form of thought, apriori, as Kant put it.
We find this in the value dimension of our existence. We can talk about this if you like.

Death is feared because it represents the radically unknown, the radically unknowable, and this is naturally profoundly unsettling, as the very idea of non-existence may also be.

Add to this that death is associated with the humiliating loss of physical and cognitive powers, as well as being possibly associated with terrible pain. Add to this the loss of loved ones and everything familiar. It is not surprising that people should wish for immortality and an afterlife which is perfect, unlike the present life. — Janus

True. But ask a more fundamental question: why do we "care"? Yes, it is traumatic, as are many things. But to be traumatized, so strongly affected has a dimension to it that is glossed over in the descriptive accounts of the things that actually do this, and this passes by a very important primordiality of our existence which is at the root of ethics and religion: caring. Of course, caring itself can glossed over, and rightly so as we are busy trying to understand other things, but implcit in these is the interest, elation, joy of wonder, concern, and so on, and this is IN the essence of ethics and therefore religion. You know, no caring, no religion. Caring's existential counterpart, the experience itself of the elation, the sad disappointment, the humiliation you mention above, it is this Wittgenstein could not find "in the world".

Such a strange thing it is, no? the scalding of my finger the other day hurt terribly, and the philosophical question hovered over the event: certainly there are the facts before me on the "grid" of "states of affairs," but this "badness" is altogether elusive to understanding. This is because, the "qualia" of pain is not at all like "being appeared to redly," say. It informs thought about something else, and it is not the vacuity of being a color. It is momentous, and this momentousness issues from "the world" (which is a confusing term given the way Wittgenstein uses it vis a vis others others) and not in a fetishized (as I call it) factuality. I mean, horrible pain is momentous existentially! It is not contingently momentous, as say a stock market crash and all inversted funds perished. Which is what I call a fetish of value: stock markets are entirely contrived institutions, on the grid of sense making, but only because we put them there. The scalding of the finger, not THIS is the impossible world "speaking" our ethics and religion PRIOR to our institutions.

I see how you are framing this. Interesting. But I'm not sure what the significance of this is, or where it gets us. No doubt it all depends upon how one views the notion of reality and the possibility of knowledge. — Tom Storm

Because you and I have spent our lives in a world that ignores metaphysics. Such a thing is both the furthest away from "common sense" yet the closest to our existence. When I see my cat on the sofa, I am instantly attuned to the same cat, the same thing daily talked about in all the usual contexts, and in this perspective has nothing new at the basic level because the basic level is never challenged, is it, for the thought of it is nonsense. But the difference lies in the interpretative act of receiving the world. Receiving is not done as if perception is a mirror of nature (to borrow a term). How could anyone think that when the cat is processed in a brain, the outcome is the crystal clear cat itself?

There is the famous analogy in Hinduism (I think it was Adi Shankarya) of the snake and the rope that says when I see the cat in the normal way, it is essentially just an error, as if I mistook a piece of rope for a snake walking down the street. It is the same world, but all along there has been this fundamental mistake at the perceptual level. The snake was in the interpretative event, and the fear followed, and one can imagine summoning the townspeople in search of the deadly thing, and so on. Such is what is called culture, the massive sublimation of original energy. For Freud (and Vera Mont may go after me on this. But I speak loosely here) culture is a grand sublimation of original energy, a kind of fetish --parasitical on the unseen original, this language and the institutions so familiar. I ask this question: does General Motors "exist"? This is meant to be taken seriously. Do marriages and funerals or Yale and Dartmouth "exist"? Or, are they "real"?

Such an odd question, but see how things like this get tossed about so readily in conversations, problem solving, actualities in the world. But really, isn't it just as Shankarya put it, an error? Constructed pragmatically to deal with issues more fundamental like people being bound in love, respected when dead, solving technical problems that invented out of the very language and culture that multiplied things in own grand sublimation of the world?

How about my cat: does she exist? How is the word 'cat' such that when I use it, I am dealing with the real? Or is the term just like General Motors?

I think there is probably a lot to this. But of you are correct, doesn't this mean that everyone is religious in some way, even the atheist, who also has to grapple with these issues, and in some way yield to the moral insistence you describe? Do you want to modify your concept to exclude atheists and those who identify as irreligious? Or do you want to say that everyone is religious in the sense you mean it, whether they like it or not?

Atheists tend to base their irreligiosity on the grounds that an essential element of religion is a set of beliefs about the world that there is not reason to believe. But you've explicitly said that's not the feature of religion you are talking about. — bert1

I think this is an insightful statement. Yes, we are always already IN a religious world, whether we are explicitly religious or not. Of course, religion is a term that has a history, a tradition, and considerable connotative baggage, so clearly I am not talking about A religion. I am saying that religion is a lot like art: there was a time when art was everywhere in a society's lived experiences. Art, says Dewey, has its essence IN experience itself. Then came the modern practice of sequestering art, and the museum was born, and art is now a professional's business, and very few of us are ":artists". Something similar has happened with religion, hasn't it? The churches, the clergy, the rituals, the scriptures; I mean, this kind of thing has been going on a long time, of course, but the practice has formalized and specialized and made into an institution something which has its foundation in the structure of consciousness itself.

Atheism is just an opinion about theism, and theism is just bad metaphysics.

Perhaps, linking the two examples, fear is a physiological response to one or more stimuli, either active (say, a loud noise or the sudden, unexpected presence of a possible danger) or passive (a thought or possibility on one's mind that has the potential to become disastrous), that causes a distinct feeling of unease due to the possibility of loss of control or well-being? — Outlander

Perhaps you can see that I am pursuing a rather odd take of this kind of thing. Fear of death is not primordial because it begs the question: what is wrong with fear? referring to the experience itself. Fear, dread, anxiety, terror, and the rest have a great number of explanatory contexts, as you suggest. But what about nature of the experience itself? Very unpleasant. What is pleasure? This kind of question exposes The nature of religion.

Surely that depends on what one chooses to define ethics as. In a simple definition of what is largely perceived to be right or wrong by a given social majority based on absolute factors such as human suffering, malaise, and distress compared to comfort, pleasure, and contentedness, again, more so or "as the majority of normal functioning humans respond and demonstrate", it most certainly has some form of measurement or quantification. How could it not? — Outlander

Anything can have some form of quantification. But consider: in defining the nature of ethics, we have to deal with value, and this looks to the infamous "good and "bad" which can certainly quantified, as in, how bad is that sprained ankle? But the nature of the experience of pain itself, this is simply "there" in the "fabric of things." In the pure givenness of the world. What makes this so important is that givenness at this primordial level stands apart from explanatory possiblities, as all qualia do, as a pure phenomenon. If it were a matter of, say, the color red and one were being "appeared to redly" (as they say) then no big deal: being red carries no significance at all outside of contexts where color is given meaning. But the sprained ankle is altogether different: pain is inherently ethical, that is, has a normative ethical stature: It should not exist! And this is not a contextual "should not" as when we say one shouldn't forget one's umbrella on a rainy day, BECAUSE.... You see, the normativity of this "should" is contingent. It requires a context to complete the meaning. But pain, this is stand alone "shouldn't", or, it stands as its own presupposition, its own foundation, for its own prohibition.

The point of this is to show something by my thinking to be nothing short of mystical (agreeing with Wittgenstein): ethics IS its own presupposition, its own metaethical grounding. Ethics is always already metaphysical.

What I want to say is, to even reach the precondition of being able to talk definitively about something, be it a physical thing or a conceptual idea, one must in fact, have a solid understanding of the thing in question, or in simpler terms "know what one is talking about". So, while it may not necessarily be :reducible" to the given quantification or standards of a given science, it surely has to be well-defined by concrete definitions and boundaries that enable it to be discussed and declared as "this or that" as opposed to something else. In short, it has to be, perhaps "reducible" is not the ideal term but rather "indisputably definable" in some way that effectively does enable it to be discussed and declared as having quality X or not having quality Y, etc. — Outlander

I think simple direct reference to a thing satisfies what you are looking for. There it is, a pain in my ankle. I can quantify this, certainly. But its presence is antecedent to the quantification. I mean, it is first "there" and witnessed. One can say that it is this primordial givenness that precedes anything one can say about anything.

I think this is an interesting claim for reasons I will attempt to explain. You mention just as logic itself requires a brain but discussing logic itself does not require discussion of the brain itself. Imagine, if you will, a world devoid of all sentient life. Where would ethics fit in? Where would value fit in if there is no one to value or be valued or be ethically treated or mistreated? Some might argue WE as sentient beings, rather consciousness, is the source of all value. Sure we live in a physical world and as such we value physical things required for survival, but does your above statement not have some correlation to your previous example of how discussing logic, which requires a brain, does not require discussing the brain itself? — Outlander

This takes the issue perhaps too far for comfort. A world without our sentience, our consciousness, our existence, cannot be imagined, as the very possibility requires that we leave experience to conceive such a thing. It is not as if there are no other things out there, not me or other than me. That would be absurd because, well, there they are. But these are observed in the apperceptual conditions of one's existence. Outside experience, objects are entirely transcendental. In fact, one can argue that to speak of such a thing is entirely impossible because sense can only be made of experiential possibilities.

If there is no one to be valued? It is an interesting thought. Take falling in love. The significant other, what does s/he give or take in the relation? Certainly, the other is a catalyst, to be sure, to what is latent in the beloved, for nothing really passes between the two. The other does not literally "give" anything, suggesting that one might be able to "walk on air" unaided. Like a Buddhist monk?

Assuming this is not a merely rhetorical quesrion, maybe this link (below) will help clarify for you what I mean by human fear of ... — 180 Proof

Ask Wittgenstein how it is with value experiences. There is a reason why he refused to talk about this.

But religion isn't a natural condition, nor did it exist "prior to it being taken up by cultures". It is part of our social system, the direct result of it, so to pluck it out of a culture and dissect it, probing for its "true nature" separated from the human flesh is absurd. If you want to examine religion outside of the social context, you ultimately find a primitive form of philosophy, a desire for understanding. — finarfin

I only meant to say that to understand something, one has to go to its material source, and by material I don't mean some physicality. Rather, the actuality that gave rise to it, and continues to be what it is all about. But if by natural is meant a condition that is not contrived in argument but arises up in the essential givenness of the world, then by all means, natural.

When I talk about religion being prior to culture, I meant logically prior, as a presupposition to religion. A discussion about ethics is just this, for I take religion to be, in its essence, reducible to talk about meta ethics, and meta ethics is what appears when ethics is taken to its basic questions. The institutions of ethics you refer to presuppose a fundamental condition into which we are born, that of value-in-the-world. Think of it like Kant thought of reason. Reason is everywhere, of course, in every thought and every context of engagement, but what is reason qua reason? Here I claim that to ask such a question about religion, asking what religion is qua religion, is a step directly into ethics, for religion is our institutional response to the most basic moral givennes: the deficit and the promise of "the ethical good" and "the ethical bad," as awkward as this sounds, it has to be set apart from the contingent good and bad, as with bad couches and dull knives, say.

I don't know if you care for this kind of thinking, but...

Consider that good knives are sharp knives, one may say. Unless, that is, the knife is for Macbeth, then a sharp knife is a bad knife. Welcome to contingency. But now the ethical bad, as in the prohibition to strangling my neighbor or the like. Strangling someone is terrible in a foundational way, and not to be second guessed by argument or recontextualization. It is an absolute, notwithstanding that it can be contextualized such that one may be obligated to actually strangle someone, in some awful circumstance in which NOT to strangle someone would lead to greater harm. You see the difference? Sharp knives are bad for Macbeth, and in the play the sharpness remains bad altogether. In ethics, the bad of strangulation cannot be undone, even if circumstances favor its being done.

Why is this important to religion? Religion is metaethics, that is, it lies in the analysis of ethics where the absolute is identified. No value qua value can be construed to be other than what it is. This is not to say that value is never caught up in ambiguous entanglements, for just to opposite of this is the case: it is almost always given to us in entangled ambiguities. The argument here is not to say there is such a thing as value. Value is a dimension of our existence, not "a being" of some kind.

So I am saying religion's social nature refers to intersubjective complexities that are inherently pragmatic and imaginative, but this presupposes the deeper analysis of ethics as such. Here we find the true essence of religion.

The human all-too-human fear of death — 180 Proof

I wonder, what is fear? An unwelcome feeling, no doubt. What is unwelcomeness? Some discomfort, a "bad" feeling. Bad? Where did THIS come from (and it is not a question of causality)?