For a religion to function it must provide meaning, which it supplies with grand narratives, shared values, moral codes, etc etc. The ‘binding’ is desirable and meaningful. Transcendence, on the other hand, is not essential, and transcendence does not require religion. — praxis

Yes, religion is an institution like anything else, and it has it's utility. But one can say this of ANY institution. GM makes automobiles and UPS delivers packages. These bind, have narratives, rules, as well. The question is, what is this institution religion all about?

From my brief exploration so far (Cartesian...) Husserl rests in the same place as Descartes: not far enough. Both are happy to assume that because the ego is the last trace back (reduction) in knowledge, that in ego appearance is present (I get the sense, like being). — ENOAH

Wait a minute. You are reading Husserl? And not Wiki'ing him? This is earth shattering! I'll get back to you, soon. A bit busy now.

From my brief exploration so far (Cartesian...) Husserl rests in the same place as Descartes: not far enough. Both are happy to assume that because the ego is the last trace back (reduction) in knowledge, that in ego appearance is present (I get the sense, like being). — ENOAH

Enjoyed the chat — Tom Storm

Same here.:ok:

Moral redemption doesn't require religion, and religion may or may not provide it. The essense of religion is simply binding a community in shared values, narratives, etc. — praxis

If the whole affair were not entirely set against radical indeterminacy, then I would agree. Caring in a truly finite setting only has a finitude of redress, a foundation that could be spoken and laid out clearly as one would talk about the nature of a bank teller or fence post: just look in the dictionary and there it is. But the "binding a community in shared values, narratives, etc." begs more basic questions: what is a value? Why bother to bind? What are these narratives there for? Look in a dictionary, and you find more questions just like these. This is because all of our affairs lack a final vocabulary, as Rorty put it, and this "lack" is not simple definitional; it is existential. I mean, ask why we bind, and you may follow Hobbes or Rouseau in some social contract theory, and this justified social binding, the question of why bother in the first place looms large. It is for protection, greater security against threats, in short, it has greater utility than not binding. So what are threats about and why the need for security, and so on? You see, ALL such matters reduce to the ethical structure of our existence: we are "built" to care, and caring refers us directly to what is IN existence to care about: the joys, pleasures, the wretched suffering and terrors.

I think this clear enough. Analysis always goes to the most basic questions. Here we have arrived at the most basic analysis of religion, what it essentially is, and this is a littl difficult: it is not about fear, simply. Think of Ahab from Moby Dick. He is not pursuing in hateful revenge a whale that took his leg. He wants what is "behind" the4 whale. The Being that was there prior to whale and leg that gave forth the reality of the horrors of flesh being torn and shredded. It is the reality that is our world. The plague must have been lovely; and being consumed alive by fire speaks for itself. But this fills the world, saturates it, thinking of the tonnage of suffering our current existence emerged from. Same is true for love, happiness, pleasure, and so on. This is the value dimension of our existence.

Value: what IS it? This is THE question of religion. What is the good and the bad of ethics? There is a way to address this, but it takes analysis.

This makes ethics essentially a meaningless term if it can mean anything. I cannot agree nor see the point in pretending to do this.

Thanks again for your time — I like sushi

And thanks for yours, for reading. One parting thought, though. Can't be helped:

Thrown into a setting of wretched suffering then death. If this were a given a social setting, then it would be "to arms" against it. We would be outraged and heartbroken and would seek remedy and justice. You know, innocent child kidnapped and "things done" to the child: the very idea makes us shudder with disgust. Such is suffering, and we all are "thrown" into it. And yet, when the phenomenon is lifted out of its context of familiarity, as is done when analysis discovers "responsibility and accountability" empty into indeterminacy at the basic level, this moral dimension does not simply vanish. And it is not just the outrage, the "boo" factor: It is what the outrage is about: The suffering itself.

Anyway, I will shut up. Thanks again.

Isn't the point of philosophy to examine the hell out of basic assumptions and our glib answers? Isn't it the case that some of the most obvious questions may well be pointless? Is it not also the case that sometimes the pragmatic response to philosophical questions is better than theoretical dead ends or infinities? — Tom Storm

One has to know how to judge what pointlessness is. You seem to take a lack of definitive answers to things as evidence that they have been exhaustively examined and deemed pointless. But this is not where arguments lead. They rather show us that all along we really didn't know what the questions were. We thought we did, but we were in that world of glibness and bad assumptions and idle talk and banter. Why not read Heidegger's Being and Time to find out? You know, he breaks radically with tradition, and so one can read him with a sense of an entirely different approach. Husserl is like this as well. See how he begins his Cartesian Meditations:

Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim the
decision that alone can start me on the course of a
philosophical development I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing.

You will NEVER find an analytic philosopher talking like this.

Husserl will find a great deal of resistance, but, as he says, it is a "personal affair" of the reader. One is taken to a world of inquiry and one has to go there to be rid of the "tranquilized" existence of "idle talk" (Heidegger, Being In As Such). Heidegger sounds just like someone you could relate to. Two, three months study and you would start to see what it is really like to be free of "glib answers."

How do you know that the transcendent significance you identify is not merely something you put there? — Tom Storm

Exactly what I am talking about. It is argued, that is how. One has to read the arguments, and they are thick and difficult. Kant dominated philosophy for a hundred years, and still does, indirectly. This is for a very good reason. One has to read The Critique of Pure Reason. It'll drive you a bit insane, but in the end, you will be a very different thinking person.

Not just basic questions. Specific questions which you have already stated are impossible to answer. — Tom Storm

Impossible without drastically modifying common sense, that is. It is not the answers that matternearly so much as it is the questions; the world does not wear its philosophical insights on its sleeve. Rather, insight is constructed out of the language of engagement, like everything else. One engages through inquiry, and discovers a new world of "openness" which is one's existence: freedom is our essence (Heidegger). A question IS freedom. If you find this puzzling, it can be argued if you are interested.

What is religion? It is the response to the foundational indeterminacy of our existence, above all, ethical indeterminacy. This is not merely a proposition being either true of false. It is a revelation about one's existence. This is the answer to your Why bother? question. This argument about the essence of religion, if followed through, reveals that in the midst in our living affairs, there is the gravitas of religion, without the churchy fetishes and bad metaphysics. Consider what religion does: it takes this embodied finitude that issues from, as Heidegger put it, the "potentiality of possibilities" of our inherited language and culture, and attempts place human signification in an absolute setting in an effort to resolve the matter of our joys and sufferings: The joys are now consummated; and the sufferings redeemed. This can be, again, argued. See the OP: there is an absolute discovered in the analysis of our everydayness. One is already IN an absolute setting!

Whoa there, parter, you are rushing ahead. Did I ask about why we are born and suffer? No. Did I say I wasn't engaged? No. I'm simply expressing a different view to yours. Does it follow from this that I am therefore against all of philosophy? — Tom Storm

I had read, " We have more than enough to work with in order to talk meaningfully about morality. Leave transcendence to the academics and the religious apologists" to mean you had no interest in basic questions. Oh well.

I'm just trying to cut to the chase. Is there any merit in lingering in the mist and miasma of transcendence when we have useful practical responces we can actually use? You don't have to agree with me, but that's my take on this philosophical conundrum. — Tom Storm

Heh, heh, philosophy....useful?? One has to think of it in Husserl's terms above: It is a personal engagement into the questions of one's own (and others') existence. This openness I speak of (derivative, of course, of those I read. And they derived from and of what they read), this indeterminacy, is US. I try to make this clear to myself constantly: me and my world of rising early in the morning, making breakfast, and the calling, the talking, the cares and interests rising and falling during the day, and so on: THIS is a life, a human existence. Physics cannot discuss this, and if it tries it commits the absolute worst "sin" to the integrity of what we are. Take this Heideggerian "dasein" and put it under the analytic microscope, and now you have an ontology. Taking my trash to the corner for pick up is now an ontological event, not a physical incident. Remember, I often say, ALL one has ever witnessed in the world is phenomena. Impossible to witness anything else, for a phenomenon is "to be wittnessed."

Anyway, of course, I understand this immediate rejection of "transcendental" talk. But transcendence is always already there in the world, and all of those practical matters rest with this openness of our existence. The only issue is whether one takes an interest. You know, starry night, one looks up at the night sky (aka, the inside of one's cranium), and wonders. Wondering deeply enough, one discovers religion. One wonders thoughtfully enough, one moves to Kierkegaard. Then Kierkegaard opens the door to one's self.

If there is no answer then what's next? — Tom Storm

See the above.

What kind of area would you say you are talking in? Is Moral Realism appropriate? Such categorising may be messy but it is useful to understand the general gist of where you are coming from. — I like sushi

If you begin from a position of categorizing, with an intent to bring ethics to heel is a coherent system of thought, then you will be missing the essential idea. Certainly not to take issue with sound thinking, but soundness is about the world, and philosophy taken to its metaphysical threshold has to yield to questions of meaning that are powerful, yet take the matter where understanding has to let go of categorical thinking: One has to witness the world first, is the point, and witnessing cluttered with assumptions that impose clarity that issues from standards that are not fitting to what is witnessed and this leads to nothing but bad thinking. You've read Husserl, so you know he intended his phenomenology to be like a science. He has the most trouble because he cannot liberate the pure phenomenon, his foundation for science, from the nexus of intentionality. I mean, there is nothing "pure" about a phenomenon that is received and constructed in language.

But see philosophers like Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion: Husserl has to be understood in the blatant, palpable living experience. One simply does not sanely deny, say, the agony of suffering. This is where categorical thinking must yield to a world that has nothing categorical about it.

The general gist lies in first questions, ones that issue from the world. The question Why are we born to suffer and die? is one of these.

Of course, we judge through values. Ethical judgement is one value judgement of many. The same would be left if we removed what is prudent. My question would then be does judgement about what is prudent come before the judgement about what is ethical. If so, we can then say that what is prudent is the 'essence of ethics' right?

So a scheme of Value < Judgement < Prudence < Ethics < Religion ... not that I believe all Religion is is its relation to ethics in its original formation. — I like sushi

One should prima facie be prudent, given that prudence can on occasion be counter productive. Why? Cut to the chase: being prudent generally maximizes utility. And what good is this? Well, utility, happiness and well being, and it avoids unhappiness, not to put too fine a point on it. There it is. The bottom line, for we have now reached "the world". Why be ethical? It is the same reduction. And by world, it is not important to distinguish between scientific metaphysics, some kind of physicalism or naturalism, and phenomenology. The prima facie ethical injunction against torturing our neighbors finds its essential ethicality regardless.
A scheme? Too messy? Think, again, of Husserl and his claim about the absolute primordiality of the pure phenomenon. He meant this to give science and everydayness a true foundation, but the "messiness" of meaning made this untenable. Ethics is messy, too, entangled in the "states of affairs" of the world. But when we look at vivid examples of ethical normativity, like the prohibition against murder by a thousand cuts, we see something decidedly not messy at all: intense pain. The moral authority of intense pain: this has the kind of authority Husserl was looking for, and it is both epistemic and ethically grounding, for intense pain isitself entirely noncategorical, and yet, it is "originary" and “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition.” (Ideas I) Husserl was shooting for closing the epistemic distance between agency and the transcendent object, and this is debatable (one has to go through Heidegger's complaint the he was trying to "walk on water"); but intense pain, is there really any epistemic distance between me and my pain? No, I am arguing. Calling it pain, and describing what causes it, and explaining it, these constitute "distance". And what about the authority this invests into the ethical injunction against handing this out to others? It is an absolute. Not discursively determined and not derivative of anything more basically justificatory. It is not IN the world; it IS the world.

How is this possible? How can a moral injunction find its grounding outside of language? This is the question. It is the kind of thing religion is "essentially" about.

No liking, no ethics? Mmm ... I guess so. But that is basically like none of one category of judgement means no ethics. Nothing is surprising there. One would still make other kinds of judgements. — I like sushi

Liking is not a category until one talks about it. The pleasure of this Hagen Dazs as such is not a categorical "discussion". Value, the general term borrowed from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is part of the basic thinking here, does not belong to the mere "facts" of the world.

The 'essence of value' is emotion. I think there is something to the whole "boo!" and "hurrah!" of emotivism in regards to moral judgements. Drinking water when you are thirsty is 'good' (beneficial/targeted), while stealing water from someone else is 'not good' ("boo!"). — I like sushi

No, I am saying. The essence of value is not emotion. The essence of emotion is value. Value is the foundational phenomenal ontology. Quenching thirst is good. Stealing water can be good, can be bad, and there is an indeterminacy of the affair that is lost in entanglements of the case at hand. But this has nothing to do with the thesis here. Here, it is not the utility being weighed, nor some inviolable sense of duty. All of this kind of thing is off the table. I ask a particle physicist what the world IS, what constitutes the world and I will get an account of energic transformations and a lot of technical talk, mostly, if not exclusively, quantitative, but the physics issues, at root, from observation about the behavior witnessed, what the world DOES if you will. My point is simple: Quench your thirst, and observe. Reduce the event to the aesthetic/valuative/ethical essence --- phenomenological reduction, suspending the science and the many assumptions always already in place in the "totality" that makes for the potentiality of possibilities (Heidegger's dasein). There is the residuum, which is "the good" of the quenching. This good, I am arguing, is the essence of ethics and religion. Wittgenstein agrees, indirectly, in the Tractatus.

If my hand is burning it is not an ethical issue. If someone sets my hand of fire then it is "Boo!" — I like sushi

And this is directly to the point. If your hand is burning, it IS an ethical issue. All that makes an issue ethical is the some value-at-risk or in-play. All that is required is a value-agency, a person, for example. Boo! is a deflationary attempt to trivialize the world by reducing its affairs to manageable concepts. It is the great sin, if you will, of analytic philosophy.

This is so obvious me to I am puzzled why you even have to point it out. I am not entirely sure why there is a fixation on ethics though as you could name other judgements OR just say Judgement instead. Is there something I missed in your meaning? — I like sushi

It is not about judgment. Being six inches off the ground in love is not making a judgment. Nor is Hagen Dazs (for me, anyway) and nor is having your kidney vivisected without anesthetic. The idea here is that ethics qua ethics is not grounded in judgment. It is grounded in the world, and that would be Wittgenstein's world, not Heidegger's. Heidegger's world is grounded in hermeneutical finitude, onto theologically defined (historically, that is). The world, Witt wrote, is mystical. This is was not received well by Russell and positivists, and Witt told them to take a hike. The good is what I call divinity, he writes in Culture and Value. He understood this.

I think most think as you do, that it is too obvious to say, just as when I ask how things in the world get "into" knowledge claims, they generally scratch their heads. What is missed is that one's experience IS the world. Events are IN the world, and these are hermeneutically indeterminate, but qualities, the being appeared to redly quale, say, ARE the world. The trouble with qualia is that minus the contextuality of talking about it, there is nothing "said". And Dennett was right about this ( I seem to recall); but value qualia is a very different notion. Pain "speaks". It speaks the defeasable injunction NOT to do something. This prohibition issues first from the world, the qualitative actualities that our existence encounters.

You can probably tell by now that I think you missed some significant steps in your reduction. Ethics is layers above what matters. Ethics comes through other value judgements (it is not THE value judgement, if that is at all what you were hinting at), and value judgement is embedded in emotion ... now we do hit a rather hard problem because what emotion is is also a matter of sedimentation. — I like sushi

It is not a matter of ethics. It is one of metaethics, the nature of ethics. And hence, the nature of religion.

I came to Husserl via studying the Cognitive Neurosciences, and I am rather inclined to use what I have learned there as a check on what is feasible. I do not really see that Emotion is something that can exist separate from Logic. I have been of the broad opinion for some time that they are effectively two sides of the same coin, each necessitating a kernel of the other to exist. — I like sushi

To be clear, emotion, logic, affectivity, reason, pragmatics, and so on, these are analytic terms. Value does not exist. It is a dimension of our existence discovered in the "openness" made by language (gelassenheit). Emotion is not separable from logic because the analysis that produces categorical thought is an analytical imposition. You know, there is no "logic".

Sticky wicket. And as to two sides of the same coin, for me, that is epistemology and ontology. To be is to be known. A cat is not a cat until I bring catness to the cat. Only one thing I can think of that stands as its own presupposition, and that is value-in-the-world: The good cannot itself be bad any more than modus ponens can be a contradiction.

Much like Kant espoused with his “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.”, I am inclined to say “Reason without emotion is empty, emotions without contexts are blind. Logic can intuit nothing, the emotions can think nothing. Only through their unison can value arise.” — I like sushi

I quite agree. Reason without emotion is an abstraction. One can think about reason independently, of course, just as we think about knitting without thinking about the molecular structure of the material. But knitting and physics are taking the world "as" these. The world sustains many interpretative values at once about the "same thing" (though this same thing is transcendental and under erasure, as Derrida put it). The question is, is there anything that can be acknowledged as truly primordial, as God is for many? This is value, though I do not expect to be agreed with on this. Value as such is absolute.

None of what you say is new to me. My point is it need not worry us. Just act and reflect. We have more than enough to work with in order to talk meaningfully about morality. Leave transcendence to the academics and the religious apologists. :smile:

But I am curious - what use do you derive from this: — Tom Storm

Academics, religious apologists, and don't forget philosophers. Isn't this a philosophy forum??

Hmmm, What use is it to ask basic questions of our existence? Curious question. I bit like asking what the point is to ice skating, going round and round in circles. One is either engaged or one isn't. Hard to argue against indifference. Questions like Why are we born to suffer and die? have to be meaningful at the outset for understanding religion.

Part of the response to this question certainly lies in the need to be attuned to basic questions. Kant through Derrida and beyond. Anglo American philosophy is what you get if you ask a logician philosophical questions. An abstraction. Only in continental philosophy does one discover the hidden questions that have always been there but have been pushed out of place by science and technology. See Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology. See Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. See........

Look, you are what you read.

I need not have a full account of 'good' or 'bad'. We can understand them in quotidian contexts without needing to contrive a thesis on the subjects. We already do and it works reasonably well. Abstractions like 'good' or even 'truth' vary with the context. In most usage, I don't need to have a full account of such terms to make robust use of them. That's all I am saying. And if the epistemic crisis is as thick a fog as you suggest, then better to say home. — Tom Storm

It is only a fog because it is in the language of these philosophers that the clarity of these issues can be revealed. It is the same fog one has about physics prior to taking any physics classes at all If you are on the outside looking in, it will all seem like bullshit.

Only if you insist.

I'm not pretending that I have answers to old epistemological questions. I'm not even sure that they matter. But it's not hard to see how morality is pragmatic consequence of experience. Why confuse this with questions about how my knowledge of a lamp works? If we don't know the answer to this (and I suspect there are many healthy explanations already: scientific and philosophical) it would be a shame for an appeal to ignorance to lead us into accepting transcendence as the only explanation. — Tom Storm

Well, just to follow through briefly, there is no answer to epistemic crisis. Not a matter of ignorance. Ignorance implies that there is something that can be known, and one just doesn't know it. Not the case here. There is NO way for knowledge claims to penetrate through the "distance" between objects and knowing. Healthy explanations? Neither healthy nor unhealthy. There simply isn't one.

Epistemology's radical indeterminacy is part of a general indeterminacy of all of our thinking in the world, and one is not going to really understand religion until one cuts loose from "common sense".

But you're right, talk about knowledge issues in philosophy is not immediately to the point; so to the point: You said, "We live together as community and this means holding values." The matter at hand is not about values with an 's'. It is about value, a philosophical inquiry into what it means to value something at all. So before talk about the "resulting conversation" about what to do given that we live in a world filled with values (family values? Cultural values? Workplace values? Child rearing values? Etc.?) there is the unaddressed question about the nature of valuing. Philosophy wants to know.

I won't bore you with a thesis. Just this: If I asked about the nature of logic, what would you say? Logic is there, and it has structure made visible in symbolic logic, the bare bones, if you will, of ordinary talk and thought. Weird thing about symbolic logic: pure formal truths come out of it. One big tautology, the entire system. And each propositional structure is apriori, that is, necessary and universal. So, "beneath" our conversations about this and that, there is this discovery of structure.

Value then: abstract from ordinary situations to discover what value IS, just as is done with symbolic logic. Is there anything "behind" the many occasions of valuing this and that to be discovered? Yes. It is the ethical good and bad. Nothing is all of existence more odd. Value and the good and bad of valuing is entirely sui generis. You are invited at this point to consider G E Moore's way of addressing this: What does it mean for something to be "good"? Not a good couch or a good deal on a car, but good AS SUCH. And bad: what is the bad of a sprained ankle? Yes, we get sprains and have to deal with them, but what does it mean for something to hurt? Moore called it a non natural property. Why non natural?

For this, I leave to you to consider, if you are interested. But I will say this: Facts of the world, natural facts like the atomic weight of helium of the weathering processes that made the Grand Canyon are VERY different from value "facts". Wittgenstein would not call value facts, facts all all. See his Lecture on Ethics (online and very accessible). It is because value cannot be observed at all!

This is the beginning to understanding the nature of religion.

Is it really that difficult and elusive? We live together as community and this means holding values. It's impossible not to. Ethics emerges from the resulting conversation just as surely as poo comes from eating. We couldn't avoid the subject of morality even if we wanted to and the only magic or transcendence inherent in such moral conversations (that I can see) is there if we confuse morality with mysticism — Tom Storm

If questions about the epistemic, ontological and ethical foundations of our existence didn't exist, then I would completely agree. But they are there, right in our midst. Ask the timeless question, how does anything "out there" get into a knowledge claim? So simple and accessible. Just look at the lamp on your desk and ask, how is my knowledge of this lamp even possible? You are not in some abstruse and abstract argument. You are IN the world of eating and pooing, just asking a simple question.

It is difficult to see "through" habits of thought and familiarity. The whole world is like this epistemic problem. The world is a "meta" problem, just sitting there staring back at you.

Part of common sense is knowing when there is no rational answer. — Tarskian

I agree and disagree. Realizing that the pain "as such" of this sprained ankle is in no way at all a discursive event, in no way derivative through logical avenues of inference, is itself rational judgment. On the one hand, nothing escapes this rationality. the moment one brings the matter up at all, one is already IN a rationally structured environment, and the very idea of something being not having an answer is "conceived" rationally. Even the term 'rationality' is interpretatively embedded.

But that sprained ankle and its pain: clear as a bell this is stands "outside" of what reason does. So it is like all things: language and its reason saturate experience WHEN a thing is brought before judgment. But prior to this, it "stands in the waiting" as when someone asks you about the sprain.

The OP is about this sprain and its pain and the ontology of this pain.

Surely you can see why I have problems untangling the meaning/position you are trying to convey here? — I like sushi

I was trying to accommodate what you said here, " but in this instance I would have to argue against this as ethics is about analysis of moral positions." The awkwardness of this really has no bearing on the intelligibility of the idea. The issue is generally conceived as metaethical not metamoral.

Morality and the interplay of reason to distinguish poorly constructed views/arguments ( — I like sushi

Morality begs the same question: what is morality? It is of course an interplay of reason, but then what isn't an interplay of reason? All things have this underpinning of reason and justification, ready at the glance. So we have to think, surely; metaethics asks us to think about the nature of ethics.

Then there is also the stance that ethics is generally referring to the application of moral principles to society at large - as a means of analysis. — I like sushi

Sure. But take the matter another step: When the term is used at all, what is there in a case that makes it ethical? A "meta" question.

Ah! So we are looking at the essence of morality then rather than ethics (as I outlined it)? The 'being' of morality rather than ethics? I will need confirmation here. — I like sushi

See the above. But t is a distinction without a difference, for both terms beg the same question. Some call my position moral realism, yet the ontological question refers us to metaethics. See John Mackie's book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, in which he specifically addresses the issue brought up here, though not as I am defending it, and there are lots of others.

I would have to say we are then looking for the root of judgement rather than ethics, as ethics is a judgement as is prudence. Morality is not intrinsic to value. Valuse can emerge in areas that have no prominent claim to ethics or morality. — I like sushi

No, for Wittgenstein judgment is about all those "facts" on the logical grid (Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics). Prudence presupposes value: why be prudent at all? Morality presupposes value: Remove the value a thing has, it the ethical dimension of the thing vanishes. Simple as that. All ethical situations reduce to this analysis. The many conflicted problems of our ethical lives have to do with facts that in themselves have no ethical dimension. You want to steal meds from the pharmacy needed for a loved one's illness, but you haven't the money because you were born into poverty, and so on. But being born into poverty, the pharmacy having the meds you need, the law that could put you in jail, and all the rest are facts, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun is a fact, and no more than this (unless you want to give this analysis as well). There is nothing ethical about the fact of moonlight. It can be put into circumstances that make it part of an ethical equation: all one has to do is care about it.

It is to ask about practical use of rather than an emotional judgement of 'right or wrong' flavoured values. — I like sushi

No doubt the practical use goes to dealing with the world, and the point is to do things right. The Greek arete comes to mind; and of course, the principle of utility. But this presupposes the more fundamental analysis: what is ethics? Ethics as such, the essence of ethics, that is, that, if it were removed from a situation, the ethicality itself would be removed. This is value.

I cannot even begin to see where/how/if you are trying to insert religion into the scheme, or what you actually mean by religion if you are essentially stating it is synonymous with 'ethics'/'moral laws' (which I still need clarity on also. — I like sushi

What is value? It goes back to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is open for discussion, but one has to give value a proper analysis, and this takes analysis to palpable events in the world, like putting someone in thumbscrews or stealing their dessert. Why are these prime facie wrong? Because one likes dessert and hates thumbscrews, obviously. No liking or disliking, to put it generally, no ethics. But what is liking? This is what I will call truly primordial: it is "among" the facts of the world, but it is not a fact. The good of ethics (and the bad) is not contingent, as Witt said. It is not like a good knife, say, contingent because one can explain it. Ethical goodness is very different. Explaining suffering is just a tautological exercise. It is what it is, or, it stands as its own presupposition, an absolute. It is, like logic, apodictic. Kant found apodicticity (apriority) in logic, I find it in value. The latter is far, far more significant.

Of course, there is the fascinating post modern complaint that even logic is cast in language, and language is contingent, historical (Heidegger), and even the term 'apodictic' is given to us as part of this. Apodicticity really is a term under erasure because it has no language counterpart. This is a tough issue, so I won't go there unless you want to. But the idea here is that even if logic cannot say what logic is, that is, as Witt said, it "shows" itself, but no further. But I do not let this to second guess modus ponens which is intuitively absolute. Nor can one second guess the "bad" of the pain of scorching of live flesh (masochists notwithstanding. Such an issue does not enter into the matter at hand). It would be just as "impossible" to deny the badness of such a thing as it would be to deny modus ponens.

Value as such is not relative or interpretatively derived. It is "the world". Not IN the world. Ethics is IN the world. Metaethics is about the world as world. Our existence is the world. We are IN a world, as well, and we ARE the world. This is something that has to be understood.

This, I am guessing, is unfamiliar language to you. This is due to anglo american philosophy's divorce from metaphysics. It might as well divorce itself from the world itself, which is exactly what it has done. A failed attempt.

Religion: If ethics is discovered to be an existential absolute, in its essence, as I am claiming, then the world is a very different "place". Our familiar ethical entanglements are now matters of far deeper significance. This deeper significance is what religions strive to affirm dogmatically. Here, it is demonstrably done, I claim, after all is said.

Thank you for taking the time to respond — I like sushi

Same here. All of the above is argumentative and confrontational. And quite right, by my thinking. It does take a certain openness and pulling away from standard assumptions. It is an ontological argument, a "what IS it? at the most basic level of assumptions argument.

I wrote "This is logically prior to, that is, it presupposes," and should have written "...is presupposed by..."

You discover judgement before ethics? Sorry, the more I look closely at what you have written the less it makes sense. — I like sushi

ethics is about analysis of moral positions — I like sushi

And the analysis of ethics is the analysis that is about the analysis of moral positions. This is metaethics, and religion is about just this metaethical analysis.

It's not about Kant and the apriority found in judgment. Kant's deduction was an attempt to discover the apriority in judgments about the world. The idea here is the attempt to find apriority in ethics. Here the similarity ends. One could talk like Kant does, though: Take a judgment about ethics, not about reason and logic, and give analysis. What is there that makes ethics what it is? This is logically prior to, that is, it presupposes, as you say, persuasion and social framing and prudence and anything one has to say about how ethics plays out in actual situations. This is, again, logically prior to all of this. It is a question of ontology: the question of the being of ethics, a question that is begged in all subsequent thinking about how to think about ethics.

One is now a scientist, if you will: observe an ethical matter and identify its properties. There are issues of entanglement that are unique to each case, but these presuppose the essence of ethics. One has to look specifically for this essence in inquiry. Kant's emphasis on duty, for example, steers us directly away from the very feature of the world that all ethical affairs deal with. This is, and Wittgenstein uses this term and it seems to work very well, value, the value dimension of our world. Ask, why does Witt insist both that the divine is "the good" and ethics/aesthetics is beyond analysis? See his Lecture on Ethics and the Tractatus (and with Philosophical investigations, Witt still holds firmly to the finitude of language, but never second guesses his earlier views on ethics). Also see his Culture and Value. He talks like this because "the good" is not an empirical or analytical concept. It is not among "states of affairs."

The OP introduces the idea that ethics is, in its foundational analytic, impossible. It is a transcendental term, and Wittgenstein knew this. How? Ask: What IS ethics? Not anything beyond the simplicity of the apriori "observation". This is to ask, What is the good and the bad in ethics? It is a metaethical question.

The "sense" of it lies in the simplicity of discovery. Put a lighted match under your finger and observe. Now ask the ontological question. Religion is ALL about this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note that language itself is the very Being in question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, have to go. Ill finish later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we one day reach trans-humanism — SpaceDweller

A curious notion. What could it mean?

What are sound ethics? — Tarskian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So well said! — ENOAH

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

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

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

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

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

WTF? I'm intrigued. Thanks! — ENOAH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was a bit excessive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll have to finish later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider:

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

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

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

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

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

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