I don't know what you are getting at here. You are discussing redemption, and then this looks to be about the notion of "inherent good and bad" or so it seems. — schopenhauer1

I think you have it. Redemption is a fairy tale, as is consummation of faith, unless there is an absolute decree making it so. What would this be? Traditionally, God. But what is God once the traditions and bad metaphysics are removed? I am arguing that the surviving metaphysical residua of a God reduction down its essence is metaethics. Metaethics, in the continental sense (not the analytic vacuity) refers to "the good" and "the bad" and we all know how these are played out in the metaphysical Christian fiction, but this reduces to, simply, the good and the bad as absolutes. Now, what is an absolute? If something is apodictic, it is an absolute, is the claim. Can't even imagine, say, an object moving itself, as its own cause. This is not logically possible. One can argue about the apodicticity of logic, and I am willing to do so if you like, but for now the idea here hinges on this: in logic we have apodictic truth (again, Derrida aside. But then, you will find Derrida's position VERY interesting here, though). If this apodicticity were a feature of ethics, then ethics would be just like God's decree. After all, what is the basis for the absolute authority of God? In popular religion, it is pure dogmatics, but what does the dogmatic position say? It says one cannot even imagine a greater authority that could gainsay God. The greatest possible being is Anselm's idea. I.e., apodicticity. Cannot be gainsaid on pain of a contradiction. I am arguing that the good and the bad cannot be gainsaid, just like logic.

So, your question about redemption: What is redeemed? Suffering. What is the necessity of the redemption of suffering that makes it apriorii necessary, like logic? The apodicticity of "the bad". In logic we have the conditional form, the affirmation, the negation, the disjunction and so on. There are rules to their concatenation, expressed in symbolic logic. In ethics there are two "rules" which have to do with the good and the bad. There is here NO toleration for evil. One has to observe this "logic of ethics" which is primordial just as one observes the logic of modus ponens. The "form" of ethics, if you will, is the good and the bad. Just as a contradiction in logic formally upends an argument (the reductio ad absurdum), so in the "argument" of our ethical lives is upended by evil.

Which is a way to say, the evil must be redeemed by necessity.

Keep in mind here the simplicity of this. Logic itself is simple in its basic rules (Kant's categories). But for ethics, we are NOT directed toward an argument and logical form. We are directed toward the world, existence, the real. This has always been the jurisdiction of God: an absolute grounding of our ethics. But God, divested of the usual anthropomorphic features and all the absurd narratives, reduced to its essence, remains, as does the authority it possesses.

Neither good nor bad, or both good and bad. I don't think it matters which way it's conceptually considered. — praxis

It is about putting conceptual considerations aside. This is the point. Suffering as such is not a concept.

Truth is in present being; not in the I's comings and goings — ENOAH

Just to add: This turn from the "comings and goings" to "present being" is not a turn away from language. One has to incorporate language into the revelation of presence to be on meaningful ground. This turn is away from prereflective engagement, prior to the question of being that throws everything off course. The matter of ontology only rises up if the ontology of everyday affairs is thrown into question. The question abides throughout, for the question is the very openness you stand in as you stand before "presence". Apophatic philosophy is the philosophy of negation, negating, that is, the autonomy or free flow of conscious matters, and stopping them quite vigorously, if you are a serious Buddhist. But that "space" that opens up to the Buddhist is the same space of the epoche's deconstructive movement toward the impossible affirmation, that is, your "presence"; as John Caputo puts it, "The voice of “negative theology”—one of them, for it has several—is deeply, resoundingly affirmative. Oui, oui."

You think I go too far in abstracting from the contextual because I abstract from the abstracter in the end; I think you do not go far enough because you leave the abstracter in place; you do so because the result is absurd otherwise. A compromise? At least admit the abstracter is a necessary fiction, because ultimately the abstractions are done in its name and for its sake. — ENOAH

Abstractor? But consider that it is just the opposite in the case above: It is not the abstraction of thought and the imposition of an interpretative identity called an ego or a transcendental ego. The basis of the idea presented here is not the abstract idea of a self. When you observe a value event (the very substance of ethical concern) you observe something altogether "tout autre" from what language can do (keeping in mind that all along as I defend the notion that there is nothing abstract about language, I have been trying make clear that when we turn to something "tout autre" like this, we are committed to a language setting that makes this possible. I have been saying that when we encounter anything, it is affirmed in language, notwithstanding it being entirely OTHER than language. This is the paradox of deconstruction.

These conversations about deconstruction and theology are very weird, but it is Derrida that takes the argument to this very place I have been trying to hammer out: me and my language standing before a world that is not language, telling me this is a tree and that is a computer, but entirely mute when these are delivered from their explicit knowledge claim (recall Kierkegaard's riposte to Hegel's rationalism: Hegel has simply forgotten that we exist!. This is essentially what his infamous absurdity turns on). I use the term tout autre because Derrida does, and this wholly other is, I am confident, what you have in mind, here and there, in your thinking.

Language is NOT abstract. Rather, abstraction is conceived IN language. And it depends on what one means by the term. Often it is meant to refer to something that is just an idea, and ideas are not like furniture or fence posts. Here, it is intended that ideas do not exist. You insist that the self argued about here is like this, a fiction conceived in nonreal ideas, and there is a lot about this I agree with (you might say I "half" agree with this) but it is not the language that is unreal, but the ideas conceived IN language that are in error. If I say the moon is made of cream cheese, I am wrong.

Just to repeat the essential point: I do not argue an abstract transcendental ego. I argue that caring and its value dimension, because it is entirely other than language (perhaps joined at the hip, as Heidegger would have it) affirms the transego's "existence" exactly because it lies outside of language.

But it’s not in the least bit a contingency. Pain is good. Pain, like pleasure, moves life to homeostasis. — praxis

Because it moves life to homeostasis? This is the very meaning of contingency here: Pain is good IN the context of moving life to homeostasis. Remove the contextual contributions to meaning making, then all you have is the pain, the pain as such. pain simplciter, pain that stands as its own presupposition, therefore presupposing nothing for its existence.

Homeostasis? What "good" is this? It encourages survival and reproduction? What good is this? Eventually, after you've put enough of questions like this forward, you find that you are chasing language around. You have to make that fateful move out of language and into actuality. There is the pain now free of contextual presumption. What IS this? This is the question. It does not issue from established thinking about evolution, biochemistry, or anything at all. It is about something that issues from the givenness of the world, "outside" of language (yet, concurrent with language, in us).

Observe how well it cauterizes a wound, proving its value, expressing its goodness. — praxis

This kind of thinking is inevitable. One has to make the move from the way contingencies create multiple contexts of engagement. When we observe suffering in our regular affairs, this is what we witness. The argument is here apriori: Just as we see logic played out in such affairs, and abstract from these to conceive of the purity of symbolic logic (or Kant/Aristotle categories), so here we abstract from all of the contextual variations in which we find the good, bad, should, shouldn't, right, wrong of ethics, and inquire about the nature of what is in what is observed.

Truth is in present being; not in the I's comings and goings — ENOAH

As an old prof used to tell me, you're not going to get that tart to your dessert plate. Hard to argue this because it has this uncanny quality in the meditation on trying to release value from agency. To me, it is a fascinating intuition. I simply cannot even imagine suffering (or bliss or some simple pleasure or irritation. The magnitude of the value experience is the the issue, but the most intense are the most vivid and telling) apart from agency. This is what, to use a term I use repeatedly, picked up from Edith Stein, Husserl and Heidegger, primordial: It is apriori true that suffering cannot exist apart from agency.

As I see it, philosophy's job is criticism at the basic level, so of course one can ask why, find no explanatory basis and then proceed to deny this. I CAN argue this position, I believe, but the strongest justification for this apriori claim lies in this intuitive affirmation. What is not being discussed here is the language construct, the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception as he calls it, that sythesizes the world into general terms. This is the "I" that has its stamp on each thing perceived, and while this is right, I think, and wherever my attention goes, it encounters the me and mine of what is witnessed, the me and mine here, and this is critical, is, entirely unlike Kant, existential, palpable, the very core of meaningful engagement.

If I were to argue the case, it would in the direction of affirming the local nature of an experience and hence the horizon of value events, showing that it is not a disembodied object, floating among the debris of the journeywork of stars. Next, the matter would turn to the quality of what is in play and how it presents entirely novel relationships with the world. And so on.

But just to give emphasis: the argument would inevitably find the inextricable bond between agent and value. Value issues from us; we bring it into the world.

Here, I see some agreement with scientific metaphysics, in particular on how this is manifested in the debate of determinism and freedom. That said, in your very first post you said:

"My thinking is this: Religion rises out of the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. This simply means that we are thrown into a world of ethical issues that, in the most basic analysis, are not resolvable. Yet they insist on resolution with the same apodicticity as logical coercivity. Meaning, just as one cannot but agree with something like modus ponens or the principle of identity in terms of the pure logicality of their intuitive insistence, so one cannot resist the moral insistence of moral redemption."

This smells of the odor of "determinism" from my humble nose. How does "freedom" and "logical coercively" exist where I can continue to feel human and not like the Mac I am typing on. — Richard B

Not really about freedom, but about a value ontology, or value-in-being. The nature of religion tells us nothing about freedom and determinism, for the analysis of ethics is not concerned with whether one is free to do what one should; this is a practical matter, one that has accountability written in the law of the land in order to make it appear that responsibility is real. Rather, the question is, what IS ethics in its nature? Yes, this creates an account of the origin of responsibility, obligation, guilt, and so forth, what it is that makes an ethical obligation meaningful, but to say one is obligated to do something begs the more basic question asked here, which deals with an analysis of what makes an ethical issue tick, so to speak. What makes something ethical at all?

Religion essentially is about this metaethical question dealing with the nature of ethics, as it is an expression of the indeterminacy of the good and bad of our affairs that demands closure or completeness. consider the rather mundane but nevertheness, profound question, Why are we born to suffer and die? It is a question that takes inquiry face to face with suffering: what is this? I claim it is an absolute. Wittgenstein knew this. He just refused to talk about it because he thought language and philosophical analysis had no place here. I beg to differ. We can talk about this in rigorous argument.

If I may step back into meta mode for a moment, I would like to point out that in the OP you promise to provide metaphysical satisfaction to the world, and despite my sincere attempts to feel this satisfaction I keep ending up in a thicket of obfuscating weeds and a Mick Jagger tune playing in my head.

It appears to be an empty promise. — praxis

Now, asking if knowledge claims are possible is not a lot of obfuscating weeds. And Mick Jagger is confusing.

A long story short, ask, what does it mean for something to be apodictic? It means the kind of certainty such that it is impossible to be gainsaid. Logic is like this. Value is like this, too: Unlike logic, the "proof" of ethics' apodicticity lies in the actuality, not in the formal and vacuous structure of judgment. Put your hand beneath an open flame and observe. Now, anything can be made the object of a verbal dispute, but the purity of the ethical "bad" that stands as the existential injunction not to bring this into the world constitutes the purity of the injunction itself. In other words, we are not measuring utility nor are we looking at the "good will" driven by duty. Rather, the suffering is a "stand alone" basis for the ethics that would center around such a thing. Like logic and its modus ponens, we are "shown" and are coerced into acceptance that one "should not" bring this into the world, and this will not be gainsaid! This latter is the key, the nature of apodicticity, that it is impossible to deny or argue such a thing. One can argue about the language that gives the injunction conversation and understanding, but the injunction itself is absolute.

Absolutes in dealing with ethics is something reserved for God and faith, generally. But religion is, at its core, just this: the metaethical insistence on the redemption of suffering and the consummation of happiness. Since ethics is at the basic level, apodictically insistent, we are coerced into accepting this redemptive and consummatory feature of our existence. A but like saying, apophatically reduce something like the bible, down to its essence, and you find the only residual religious content here, in the simple analytic of ethics.

I have to say your position is a bit of a mystery. It seems you have a particular disdain for science, or dare I say jealousy of its status in modern life. Yet you are a bit annoyed of Wittgenstein's rather egalitarian attitude that religious needs no rationale foundation from philosophy or science, that it can stand on its own to freely be engaged in what matter a group of human so choose. — Richard B

I am a bit annoyed when lines like this are drawn. Things you cannot say and things you can. The finitude of science and everydayness, and the impossibility of metaphysics. Knowledge and faith.

One has to be aware than when we speak of the world, our categories are an imposition and the best we can do at the outset is describe it such that this imposition is reduced and the world is seen most primordially (a term lifted from Heidegger and Edith Stein to talk about something at the most basic level of identity). Wittgenstein's work draws lines at this level. As I see it, ethics and religion are metaphysically available for exposition. One has to look closely at ethics (and aesthetics) and ask, what are ethical injunctions "made of"? It is a phenomenological reductive look at the anatomy of an ethical problem.

It is not the egalitarianism that bothers me at all. It is that all religion popularly conceived moves one into a world of fantasy and bad metaphysics. It is (speaking here with a healthy respect for Eastern religio-philosophical "methods" and thinking) possible to make real progress in understanding the "meta-world" we actually live in.

Not disdain for science. Disdain for scientific metaphysics: talk about material substance, naturalism or physicalism, as if these were primordial concepts.

I know you know what I mean. Can we skip the tedious part and get to your point? — praxis

Errr, not really. Tell you what, jump to the chase, skipping all the tedious parts, and just tell me how a knowledge claim is possible, then I can make the point. But note one important condition: there is nothing epistemic about causality. I mean, nothing at all. So if you are going to go through a process of external events, saying portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are absorbed by an object while others are reflected and these enter the eye, through the lens then to the optic nerve, and so on, and the like, just forget it. Such an explanation is lost the moment it begins.

This is not to say we do not perceive the world. Not at all. We obviously do. But by all familiar accounts, this is impossible.

One has to think about this; its simplicity is astounding. Keeps me up at night, really.

There may have been other means of detection before probes were sent to Saturn, I don't know. In any case, the cat at your feet and the ice rings of Saturn are both known to the human mind in the form of sensory patterns. These patterns match our internal model of cat and ice rings. How is this relevant? — praxis

Transcendence: that cat or any thing you might imagine is a transcendental object unless you can tell me how it is that that, whatever it is, gets into an actual knowledge claim. Sensory patterns? You mean my cat is sensory patterns?

Ancient minds didn't contrive transcendence, right? — praxis

Transcendence? How about let's start with the epistemic relation I have with this cat at my feet. Tell me how it is I know that there is a cat there in the same way, say, a scientist knows Saturn's rings are made of ice and dust.

I have here a book, Wittgenstein and the Metaphysic of Grace by Terrance W Klein. I'll get back to you if I discover an insight into how his thinking accommodates or yields to or condemns religious practices and belief.

The priesthood is an institution, not the religion? — praxis

A religious institution. What is an institution? Something instituted as an integral part of a culture. A formal way to say, regarding religious tradition, that ancient minds, most sincerely, made it up.

But isn't there something deficient about Wittgenstein's apodictic religion? After all, he was claimed as the emblem of the vociferously anti-religious Vienna Circle, and even if they were wrong in so doing, they were a highly intelligent group of individualis who found support for their views in his texts. On this forum, the last lines of the Tractatus are most often used as a kind of firewall against discussion of anything deemed religious. His religiosity can be discerned only with difficulty. As i understand it, his acolyte Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband both became committed Catholics. Were they prepared to make explicit what was only implicit in Wittgenstein's texts (I understand he was buried with Catholic funeral rites, but that this caused some disquiet amongst many of his associates.) — Wayfarer

One's sees the same in Quine: "there’s mystery at the bottom of every question ultimately." When the priority is science and clarity at the level of basic questions, one finds Quine's indeterminacy staring back at you, and there is the abiding Kantian making way for faith through a kind of apophatic method of seeing where thought has its limitations. I have always had contempt for this kind of thinking, and I don't think Wittgenstein is right to dismiss ethics and value from meaningful philosophy, which I think addresses your thoughts. Analytic philosophers, at least in Quine's time, really did have that "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem" style of Fideism, and Witt has been said to be just like this. Here is a passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion by John Cottingham:

.....for fides, like its Greek counterpart pistis, always connotes a stronger
volitional component than simple assent— some further element of trust and
commitment. As one moves towards extreme forms of fideism, such as that of Søren
Kierkegaard, the volitional element becomes stronger. ‘Faith does not need proof,’
asserted Kierkegaard, ‘indeed it must regard proof as its enemy’ (Kierkegaard 1941
[1846], p. 31).. And in a famous passage he observed: ‘Christianity is spirit, spirit is
inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essential passion."

He adored Kierkegaard. A family of suicides, Wittgenstein himself living on the edge. The more you objectify something, the more it loses its primordiality and philosophy kills religious primordiality if one takes it like Simon Critchley does where he says, philosophy begins in disappointment! BUT: what is disappointment? It is the question. The question, the "piety of thought: Intrudes into this primordiality and undoes the beliefs that are there, but only to bring one back with a more ponderous and justified interpretative pov. This is what Witt didn't see, both he and Kierkegaard. Certainly philosophy can cheapen the meaning of religion, but religion stays interpretatively naive without it. And interpretation is what allows us to make progress in understanding, an apophatic process delivering the bare givenness of the world, the latter being the positive foundation of religion (contra the indeterminacy, which is the entirely negative).

There is an ancient tradition of aphophaticism in Christianity, the acknowledgement of the deficiencies of speech and reason to reach out to the divine. But that tradition was still sacramental and sacerdotal, much was embodied in and conveyed by the liturgy, the rites and rituals, even the architecture. All of which was driven by the awareness of the imperfection of ordinary human nature, a.k.a. the fallen state. Only an exceptionally perceptive reader might be able to glean that from reading Wittgenstein. — Wayfarer

Well, it depends on what you are reading, He doesn't talk like a religious person at all in his serious writing (recall Kierkegaard's serious writing is a lot like this), but in the implications of wht he says, and in the letters and conversations and various other places, he makes it clear (again, the copy of Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief that he nearly memorized comes to mind) that he was a spiritual person, indeed, but philosophy just should mind its own business in this. As he says in Culture and Value, the good is what he calls divinity. I believe he tags this with, "that about sums it up." He won't talk about it, but I have read a few papers on his religious thinking, and that is as far as I will go, because I am far less interested in getting Wittgenstein right than I am in understanding the world and our existence. Wittgenstein I find very helpful in this.

I was simply making the throwaway point that just because someone contemplates transcendence or the priesthood does not in itself mean much. — Tom Storm

Yes, I gathered as much. The priesthood is an institution, transcendence in the context of religion is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. To contemplate the former is just mundane as I see it. A love of those churchy fetishes or some Freudian or Humean retreat from reality. The latter is an entirely different. This latter is Wittgenstein. Russell called him a mystic.

So did Stalin. (the latter actually made it to the seminary but was booted out) — Tom Storm

Heh, heh, why Tom Storm, what are you suggesting? That Wittgenstein's spirituality was just as stuipidly conceived and corruptible by power...as Joseph Stalin??

, I don't buy, unfortunately for us all. — schopenhauer1

THIS is what the OP is about. There are things you that belong to opinion and things that are certain, putting aside the aporia that questions can heap upon a statement like this can bring up. What if ethics were grounded in the same apodicticity found in logic? Then opinion would yield to certainty.

Religion makes this claim about ethics when it talks about God. Here, we eliminate such fictions, and abide by only what is in the world and the presence of what is before inquiry. An apriori analysis of ethics shows, I argue, and fortunately for us all, that the redemptive and consummatory features of religion actually issue from existence itself with the apodicticity equal to that of logic. That is, one cannot even imagine the bad being good and the good being bad, taken as pure expressions: the meta-good and the meta-bad.

4. Fourth, Wittgenstein did not see any value in intellectual proofs of God's existence or theological formulations in general. For Wittgenstein, religion was about changing one life, amending one ways, and helping others. Faith without works is dead as St James would say. Malcolm sees the same kind of thinking when Wittgenstein says "it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game (OC 204.)"

Based on Malcolm's reading, I am not so sure if Wittgenstein would go so far in claiming anything transcendental. He did not believe we needed to explain religion with anything transcendental; that the world was a wonder and a miracle itself; that we need to look at ourselves in mirror and change our lives and help others, and not submit to the temptation to overly intellectualize religion.

But I would agree with you that for him it does permeate our lives and is woven in the very fabric of reality. As he says in Culture and Value:

"Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the 'existence of this being', but e.g. suffering of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, - life can force this concept on us." — Richard B

I have Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Grace by Terrance W Klein which gives a similar account.

So Wittgenstein was, call it deeply spiritual (fair to say about a person who all but memorized Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, adored Kierkegaard, in fact, the latter's "dark nights of inwardness" is something Wittgenstein's suicidal personality related to) and had contempt for philosophy that tried to impose itself on this sacred dimension of our existence, which is why there is precious little coming from him about religion. "The whole project of ‘philosophical theology’, he once remarked, struck him as ‘indecent’ (Drury, 1984, p. 90)." I am trying to show that something can be said, and it is not the violation of belief doubt brings, which is so easy, but rather, an affirmation. If ethics is about, as he says in Lecture on Ethics, an absolute, then lets take a look at what an "unspeakable" absolute is and speak about it.

What if ethics and aesthetics were apodictic in nature? Like logic, universal and necessary? This is what Wittgenstein is suggesting. The good is what I call divinity, he writes in Value and Culture.

Then what of the "the bad"? The OP puts this idea to the test. Wittgenstein is a moral absolutist or a moral realist. This can be discussed in an examination of the essence of religion.

Isn't the problem here that later Witt had a different approach and framed morality in the context of language games? My understanding is that latter Wittgenstein holds that morality is not transcendent but is rather a product of contingent human practices. But I am no Witt expert. I think Joshs might come closest. — Tom Storm

There are two Wittgensteins: The one found as a kind of demigod for analytic philosophy because he drew a line, and as I have read, this line remains in place throughout his thinking, between the sayable, whether it be described as a logical layout of states of affairs vis a vis the world or language games, and the unsayabled, the the latter was by far the most important. You know, he once confessed a desire to becoming a priest.

Joshs' thoughts are always welcome.

You’d have to actually include something pertaining to religion to complete that linkage. Ethics is not religion. Ethics tied to a deity or cosmic supernatural principle is, for example. But I would argue that ethics tied to the supernatural entity isn’t religion per se, but the relation of the supernatural to the world, and ethics is usually entailed in that with religious worldviews. — schopenhauer1

One has to understand ethics as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus. See also the Lecture on Ethics and his Culture and Value. Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. See what he says:

The sense of the world must lie out
side the world. In the world everything
is as it is, and everything happens as i
does happen: in it no value exists—and if
it did exist, it would have no value
If there is any value that does have
value, it must lie outside the whole sphere
of what happens and is the case. For all
that happens and is the case is accidental
What makes it non-accidental cannot
lie within the world, since if it did it would
itself be accidental
It must lie outside the world
So too it is impossible for there to be
propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that
is higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be put
into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the
same.)

You can take issue with a lot that is here, especially about his definition of a proposition, but this about value and ethics is something he did not abandon later on. His point is really about the ethical good and bad, what Moore called "non natural properties": A simply matter, really, but painfully hard for those hell bent on discursive clarity. They don't like spooky "intuitions" but then, when you experience some or other caring and its concomitant good or bad, you can see clear as a bell that this is not simply a state of affairs, as Witt put is. It is a fact that the flame scorching my skin hurts like the devil, but what one cannot "see" is that it is bad, bad, that is, in the ethical sense and not in the contingent sense of a bad sofa or a bad day for golf. This bad: direct and unmediated presence, this is what Wittgenstein says one cannot be put into words. "Sense" he says above, lies outside the world (states of affairs)and all sense is value intrinsic.

You can see why Witt's positivist friends could never understand what he was talking about. He was a deeply religious philosopher as he realized that this dimension of value in our existence is utterly transcendental and yet permeated our existence. It is not about an afterlife, or some divine plan or punishment. It is there IN the fabric of what we are.

So put it in more mundane terms: religion has two aspects, redemptive (a word full of religious connotative meaning which I despise) and consummatory; and these align with, respectively, the ethical or as I call it, the primordial, bad and the good. The former is the suffering of existence, the four horsemen of the apocalypse come to mind, but then, such a thing is a distraction. Better to bring vividly to mind the actual feeling of starving or stricken by plague. Ironic that this, the most salient feature of our existence, is shunned by professional philosophers. Schopenhauer, you know better than I, certainly DID understand this. What he appears not to understand (and I welcome being disabused) is that the wretchedness of our existence is inherently redemptive! That is the "logic" if you will, of suffering requires apriori, redemption. THIS is a tough premise to embrace. I will get no sympathy from anyone in this forum, for it is an "intuitive" matter. One simply has to look to the most wretched of wretched affairs, and realize as stand alone "non natural properties" they demand redemption.

I will get even less sympathy for the idea that the good (what Witt called divinity) is inherently consummatory. Tougher, yet. It cannot be argued, just as Witt would never brings such explanatory indignity to his beloved Beethoven or Brahms. Or being in love. Such things reach out beyond themselves to some unfathomable height that is deeply profound. Again, one does not argue such a thing. Like, say, a lighted match placed under your finger: one observes and acknowledges its nature. With such observations, one has entered into the primodiality of religion.

The Essence of religion is a god or gods that tests its victims/players, and if his players fail they will be cursed with disease, disaster, and death and punished even in an afterworld for some of them. We can see this as far back as Enkidu and Odysseus. If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao.


In other words, the essence of religion is a tormenter getting off on testing his creations and punishing them for their “misdeeds”. Gnosticism in that sense, if not taken seriously, would have been a proper satire. — schopenhauer1

The trouble I have with this is the metaphysics. You take a narrative, or allude to several narratives, and say things that only toy with the theme of religion. Imagine a geologist or an astronomer taking this perspective! Unthinkable.

But what if you were a scientist committed to observation? All narratives fall away, and this includes those that have interesting things to say like Taoism and Hinduism. These presuppose the most basic questions about religion, those about foundational ontology: the What is it? question of ethics. This is the metaethical question of the good and the bad, the should and the shouldn't, the right and the wrong, that must be approached descriptively. One looks at the world clinically, if you will, at the stark presence of what lies before the waking eye (whether there really is a "stark presence" is of course a real issue, but not here, or, not yet, at least). What is the analysis of an ethical matter? Analysis takes things apart and examines, so we need to take ethics apart, so to speak. E.g., we know S knows where the bomb is located that will bring horror to thousands. May we torture S to find out? Here we stop. Putting aside the arguments of utility contra deontology, why is this an issue at all??? This is the analytic question we begin with: the ontology of ethics.

Here we discover what Wittgenstein referred to as value. I mean, it is not because he used this word, but because the word is simply the proper classification of things in the world that are ethical. All ethical matter hinge on this essential presence: the caring about things and the ouches and yums of their actuality of experience. A geologist may observe the crystal structure of quartz; for religion we look at the se actualities of experience. We look to caring and that which is IN the direct observation of caring. What we discover is the nature of ethical/aesthetic good and bad. This is the foundation of religion.

I say that the being we are all after (whether wittingly or not), the being beyond the trans-ego (and there has to be one since the trans-ego is the final reduction but is nevertheless a reduction--implying it is the final remnant of that being reduced) is the organic natural body in its aware-ing unobstructed/Unmediated by language. Even the trans-ego Iis knowable, hence requires language, the medium of knowing.
The natural aware-ing body is aware of the language, ego, etc., but does not "move/act/function" in that medium/world. It is experienced unmediated, directly. — ENOAH

Well sure. But as I agree with this, I also have been trying present the idea that the analytic language used to describe how this works has to be more broadly conceived. Language is not prohibitive for the experience "unmediated" and direct. It in fact makes it possible. This is not to your liking, but one has to authentically conceive of the way one can know anything at all. One has to rethink altogether the nature of language. It is not an external artificial imposition, but an imposition that emerges from within the core of experience itself. One cannot speak the nature of language, and it is just as "unmediated" as anything else. But most importantly, language qua language does not interfere. It makes the openness of the unmediated possible. Heidegger has to notion of geworfenheit, or "thrownness," as when you are there minding your own business, when the lecture on Hegel or Kant you attended leaps to mind for no reason at all and it dawns on you that your/our existence really is a powerful mystery underneath all the ready-made knowledge claims. Now you enter into a radically different mode of existence, which is reflective or meditative thinking. Here you encounter the unmediated.

Far better than Kant or Hegel would be the Abbhidamma. "The East" as a theo-philosophical achievement begins where neoHusserlians (the French theologians like Jean Luc Marion and Levinas) leave off, so guarded they are against claims of mystical overreach, that they could never make that mind boggling move to become a sadhu! To actually walk away from everything and retreat into

I have been pushing two ideas to talk about religion, and both are simple, the kind of thing analaytic philosophy despises. The first is that knowledge is impossible without radically redefining consciousness away from standard assumptions about the primacy of physicalism. I cannot make you see this. One simply has to beat this matter into submission: The brain is in no way at all a mirror of nature and causality has nothing epistemic about it. All I can do is put this on the table. It is entirely up to you to go over this again and again until it becomes obvious, because it is simply obvious. It is the second most fascinating thing about our existence, and it sits there clear as a bell. More than quantum physics can ever be--listen to, read about, quantum physics and you find physicists just puzzled, embarrassed, stymied, clueless; well, this is nothing compared to the consequences of this foundational epistemic problematic.

So what do analytic epistemologists talk about? They ignore it. Because the issue is so simple, there is nothing to talk about unless one turns to idealism, and they most emphatically will not do this because of what is now two hundred years of Kantian philosophy, turned "continental" phenomenology, and an analytic complexity so demanding and counterintuitive they have just had it. They want science, as Russell said, to be the guiding light, and hang the fundamental stupidity the whole thing rests on. See this wonderful book by Robert Hanna: THE FATE OF ANALYSIS Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash Heap of History. In the terms you use, analytic philosophy puts an end to the idea of a world" experienced unmediated, directly."

Anyway, this ax that I have to grind with this failing institution called analytic philosophy concerning epistemology is razor sharp, a regular Occam's razor that cuts out an entire century of mostly pointless anglo american philosophy. The second idea: I said epistemology is the second most fascinating thing. The most fascinating deals with value, and I have labored this to death. It as well is painfully simple. What is the nature of an ethical injunction not to do something? No value, no ethics. So what is value? Just observe the spear in your kidney or the happy nostalgia of childhood. This is the unmediated world you refer to. Thus: the essence of ethics is discovered not in the endless analytic of ethical language (analytic philosophers' cleverness lies here. A great book that illustrates this is John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong), but in the world! This IS the thesis of the OP. The essence of religion lies in the unmediated givenness of value-in-the-world. Value comes to us, says Wittgenstein, in a way, from another world. It has no place in this one, this world of states of affairs. There is a wonderful lecture on Wittgenstein on Youtube titled "Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Great War and the Unsayable" you would be interested in.

Untiringly, the answer I have found, the body, a real organic being, not unlike many other animals, is beyond oneself. But not beyond, where we are looking; turns out, it's what never went anywhere. It's "oneself" which is "beyond" a factor only in the make-believe; but it necessarily pretends to be out there and within. — ENOAH

I am a little puzzled. Perhaps elaborate, if you would.

What I have said before is also said of value. How could pain be thought of in a being like us, exempt from its valuation? It is not possible insofar as we are beings who react to suffering and pain according to positive and negative valuations, but in the response (be it by judgment or action) the sign already functions. How could the response not be related to pain and suffering? how could it not have effects on our constitution? Pain and suffering transcends to the extent that it is sign and resonates through our being. Its effects transcend its first moment, they are located in the memory, in the judgment, in the representation, in the response. Here pain and suffering is not the simple cause that can be distinguished from its effects, pain and suffering is its effects beyond the abstraction of a first and absolute moment. — JuanZu

First, it is not positive and negative valuations nor what can be "thought of" that ceases upon thought at the outset. This is where you have your issue: you think Husserl's analysis of time has privilege over the actualities most poignantly there, in our midst. In this you are mistaken. Certainly we are trying to think about pain and time, but the question will always need to yield according to phenomenological priority, and the way we think must follow upon the way the world is phenomenologically appears, or is "given". Jean Luc Marion's "Reduction and Givenness" posits a fourth principle of phenomenology: “so much reduction, so much givenness.” Time is an analytic; pain is not. Time is ontologically equiprimordial, which simply means it begs questions that are implicit in the concept; pain is ontologically primordial: reduced to its essential presence, it has NO analytic.

See the OP: the effort to discover the essence of religion takes us away from the discursive Kantian transcendental move of "what has to be the case given what is the case," into pure immanence.

You find it in Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal time, when he speaks of the three phases that constitute the temporality of consciousness: Retention, perception and protention. This temporality is presented in the epokhé, in which the difference of the "nows" constitutes the living present. But it is necessary to note the difference of the "nows", and how a present-now is immediately past, and gives way to a future-now. In both cases the absence is related and constitutes the living present. In our case, the living present of pain and suffering. — JuanZu

But this is a disingenuous argument as it blatantly ignores the nature of what lies before one. Affective consciousness is logically prior to the talk about the three phases of time. The latter is discursive, while affective consciousness is foundational. Keep in mind, we are well aware of the problems of concerning making ideas clear, but then, this is the problematic of affirming in metaphysics, the affirmation of what stands outside of language IN the inside of language. In language, we discover that we exist (in the pre Heideggerian sense of existence. The kind of thing Nietzsche decried so emphatically), and the valuative dimension of this existence is is exterior of language.

I have said earlier that it really does rest on where the epoche takes one, and I mean, if you follow the principle of exclusion, you realize that you are practicing the method of apophatic theology. And all that is left, the residuum of the reduction, is something that cannot be reduced, for it stands as its own presupposition. This is value-in-the-world.

It is the opposite. When you act in the face of another person's pain, that pain is not present to you. I claim that helping there is an act that transcends the central element of phenomenology (perception and evidence in the living present). You do not have the evidence that the other is suffering (the phenomenological evidence), but you still help the other person. This is what our act of compassion and empathy consists of: The evidence that I am an other for another. The evidence that I am not the only one and that non-presence is so "originary" is something that occurs in my most "isolated and solitary" moment in the reduction of reductions, in the transcendental reduction. It is necessary to be sufficiently other to help and assist in pain and suffering. One must embrace the possible absence of pain and suffering (the pain and suffering of the other is absent in me). — JuanZu

The problem of this reasoning lies with your "absence". The originary evidence is yours, and it is unmitigated and nondiscursive. The evidence for the ethical obligation is discursive, argues Levinas, but I think the matter has to be taken to the pure givenness of pathos. Pathos is discovered IN the appearing, and pathos itself is primordial and stands as a presuppositionaless evidential basis for ethics. Conversation is entangled, mediated, derivative. Pathos is direct regard for the Other that has an ontological status of an absolute.

Put time's analysis aside: There before one is the Other's wretched condition laid our before one. Of course, the argument that the Other is a moral priority, and the discussion of something that is NOT primordial to us weighs in for judgment, taking the Other's existence in third person references. This discussion constructs a dialog, putting fact against fact, comparing priorities, and so forth. I argue that the reduction removes this discursive matter from our sight, in order to discover the pure empathic response (noting that this is absent in some: the real cause of our political troubles).

Of course, pure empathy does not give one an answer in an entangled world. Nor does logic give us all the reasons for doing and justifying. Empathy is primordial. This is the point. To "feel for" the misery of others is not an argument, but reflects the foundational unity of ethical agencies.

Thanks for the response.

This is a pretty good illustration of my point about myopic philosophizing without being scientifically informed. I'll bow out now. — wonderer1

Myopic philosophizing? Without being scientifically informed?? What are you talking about?

I think you fail to grasp Schopenhauer. Good is not positive because it is temporary. Much like Heraclitus, he sees the flux of existence and sees this as proof that satisfaction is unstable and unattainable. Want is the hallmark of lack. Something we don’t have now. We would not lack for anything if we were whole and not unstable. Instead our very existence as individual beings is inherently intertwined with lacking.

Good and bad in the hedonistic sense..being embarrassed feels bad. Winning a game feels good, is not quite what he’s getting at. — schopenhauer1

I do see what he is getting at. It is not that he says what he says I take issue with. It is what he says. He fails to see the nature of value in ethics and aesthetics. This is a metaethical claim that the ethical and aesthetic matters we all encounter have an actual metaphysical foundation. Kant's deduction from the evidence found in the analysis of the structure of judgment justified the positing of pure forms of reason. You certainly can argue about this, but the point is about method: He made a logical move from what is "seen" to what is unseen. An extrapolation. Here this is done with value.

I am saying that Schopenhauer, based on what I have read, does not see this. First, if you are going to take misery seriously, as he apparently does, then you have to take the entire range of value matters just as seriously. One seeks to escape pain, but why? The logic of pain possesses the logic of relief, and relief is "good" feeling, without question. But simply in terms of the face value of good and bad experiences, these dimensions of value are clear and "equiprimordial" (using Heidegger's term), from thumb screws to Hagen Dazs: the bad and good of ethics has its existential grounding here and nowhere else, an entire horizon of actual possibilities.

Second, I am arguing that this field of equiprimordiality of value (good and bad ontologically on the same order of significance) possesses the "impossible" dimension of an absolute. Simply put, ask, What would it mean for an ethical matter to have the same apodicticity found in logic? It would be a metaphysical revelation. I am saying value and its ethics and aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same and I agree) stand as an evidential basis for an existential apodicticity.

Only religion has been allowed to think like this, and its thinking has been so cluttered with fictional narratives and churchy fetishes (I like to call them) that this has obfuscated the true nature of religion, which lies in the metavalue affirmation of the good and bad.

Given that we are granting evolution occurred, (I presume you mean biological evolution) I'm not seeing much reason to privelege philosophical consideration especially. There is a large and growing amount of scientific investigation into matters of great relevance to epistemology, language, aesthetics, and ethics. Can you make a case for why the philosophy to which you are referring is more important to understand than the growing body of scientific understanding? — wonderer1

It is a long story. If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL, then all of its knowledge claims rest within the claims as claims only. This is just the way it is throughout analytical thinking, isn't it? A person tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask what the sun is, and not only is there no answer, but the very possibility of an answer is problematic, then the proposition that moonlight is reflected sunlight light becomes very thrown into doubt while the search for what a "sun" could possiblity be moves forward.

Okay, so we know what the sun is. But consider: A scientist tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask, how do you know anything about anything? Not just suns and moons, but anything at all. The scientist brushes this off, but note: she has no answer. I mean, in the language of the science she is so familiar with, there simply IS no answer to this.

This is why philosophical thinking is "privileged": It is thinking about the forgotten indeterminacies of our existence. No one questions science when it does its job. But scientific metaphysics, materialism or physicalism and the variations thereof, fail almost instantly at the mention.

Of course, you can say such indeterminacies are of no consequence. First, the consequence is, up front, not the point. The point is all knowledge claims rest on indeterminacies. This has to be made clear. Second, to see whether there is significance to this kind of inquiry, one has to realize that this indeterminacy: it's you. And me and everyone else. Philosophy takes one away from objective certainties (or, it should) of science, and into the extraordinary world of the self. After all, a perception of the world is not a mirror image. The observer is part and parcel of the event that produces the facts of the world.

I read somewhere that quantum physics is trying to make a similar claim. But this has been around since Kant.

So actually, he is one of the most notable philosophers of music, raising it to some of the highest levels of his metaphysical system/sotieology. That is to say, in his view, if the problem of suffering is our "Will", then, one way for a brief respite from it is aesthetic contemplation. The artistic genius and to a lesser extent, the observer, they are seeing the very Ideas themselves (pace Plato but not exactly), through their aesthetic lens. Whereas images and other mediums are more stationary, representing the ideas, music solely, has represents the Wills very flowing nature, being even more abstracted from the already abstract nature of art and aesthetics. — schopenhauer1

I wonder what you think about Schopenhauer's ethics? I don't think I will read The World as Representation just because I don't have the time and I'm reading other things. But looking here and there, I come to conclude that he doesn't understand ethics. Misery more existentially emphatic than bliss? He fails to see that our preference for the good over the bad, founded on the good as an absolute good and the bad an absolute bad. Our preferences are entangled in wants and needs as Schopenhauer says they are, but a further examination of the nature of a want or need reveals a ground of presuppositional significance he didn't see.

Apodictically good is different from contingently good, the latter being a good couch or a good knife, the former, good itself. As with apodictic logicality, the latter cannot be anything other than what it is. Just as modus ponens will not be contradicted, so the good of being in love and the bad of having your kidney speared cannot be other than what they are. This is the point in the OP.

You know Schopenhauer better than I. Perhaps you can see a way out of this?

Noticed I overstepped with this: "The issue of evidence simply loses it meaning here." Should say it is here that the problematic begins. To say being is uncovered, and this does carry the weight of foundational being and not simply a construct, in radical proximity of appearance refers to something uncovered that is not derivative. But the discussion this opens is not settled.

Beyond is whatever evolution gets to in the future; quantum fields are the root before in the past. — PoeticUniverse

Before you get to quantum physics, you have to ask more basic questions, those of philosophy. What is knowledge? What is language? What is aesthetics and ethics? To affirm quantum physics or evolution is, of course, not questioned at all. It's just that there are quesitons that underlie science's assumptions that have their own analyses.

Self itself. — 180 Proof

I don't remember the context in which this was said.

Hmmm I would say maybe anything we can’t know? — John McMannis

Look at it like Rorty did, and he was a qualified naturalist: See out there among the trees, there are no propositions. And here, at my end, there are no trees. What does a knowledge claim do, LEAP over there for content? No. Correspondence theory falls apart almost instantly because one can never get out of the knowledge we have of trees to the things over there. To affirm such a thing would require some third medium through which connectivity is established; but then, this third medium itself would need its own nexus of epistemic connectivity; ad infintitum.

I should quickly add that it is not being argued that knowledge claim never reach their object. Quite the opposite: they clearly do. When I see a tree, it is out there, I am here, it is not me, etc. All registered with acceptance. The question is, how is this possible? This is where we have to turn to phenomenology. What we "see" is an event, a me-seeing-tree event. What else?

So, Schopenhauer has a theory of Will whereby it operates in the negative. That is to say, for him, satisfaction is the freedom from pain, not the attainment of a good. He has a deprivationalist view whereby, wants and needs are the given, and satisfaction is simply a temporary stasis that is achieved when goals are achieved/consumed/partaken in. The suffering is that we are dissatisfied, and thus his quote:

The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
— Schopenhauer- Studies in Pessimism/ The Vanity of Existence — schopenhauer1

Fascinating. I trust he is being truthful, and there is only one way to explain his position: He truly did not understand happiness, love, music; of course, music of great bravado is the exception, as is love in the broadest sense, as in the love of boxing or extreme sports, and happiness can be about just about anything. But something profound and positively important, I mean, he could no more understand this than a quadriplegic could understand the joys of gymnastics. Feeling genuinely good as a general sense of well being, was simply absent from his existence. (Note the striking difference between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein: the latter, very passionate, threw himself on the war's front just to face death, and thoughts of Beethoven and Brahms were the ground for his infamous statements about nonsense: not wanting philosophical nonsense to undo the depth of experience.) This was very likely true about Nietzsche, who suffered all of his life and spend his time, free or otherwise, actually being an ubermensch in his day to day affairs.

A strange irony. Likely that some of the greatest composers are among the least able to aesthetically acknowledge music. Explains Schoenberg and Webern.

It is a question of endowment. That is, why philosophical questions remain unanswerable. We "answer" from what we know, and we "know" very different things as we are made of, if you will, different things.

And I agree with that. But I consider that pain must be seen as part of a significant whole. In this sense pain is not only the sensation but the memory, the value, its interpretation, its representation, and so on. This, I believe, reveals to us an element of absence (non-presence, Husserlian non-evidence) in its ethical consideration. Hence, I cannot give primacy to my pain with respect to the pain of the other person. The value of presence and of the evidence of experience in phenomenology is surpassed by the value of absence in order to be able to pose the ethics of pain. — JuanZu

But it is not about the ethics of pain, nor is it about the significant whole. This is not an argument about ethics any more than Kant's Critique is about logic and logically solving cognitive puzzles. It is an apriori argument: What is there in an ethical matter such that in order to be ethical at all, this is an essential part to it being what it is. This is value, a structural feature of our existence, always already in our existence (Heidegger's care comes to mind, but he had little interest in ethics. Curious).What is value? "The good"? One thing is clear, remove value from the world, and ethics simply vanishes. It doesn't vanish incidentally, as when one removes the umbrella from above one's head, protection from the rain vanishes; it vanishes essentially: ethics becomes an impossibility.

I agree that Husserl's transcendental Ego is not exactly the same as the Cartesian Cogito. However the epokhe saves an Ego. Husserl's analyses of the temporality of that Ego in my opinion are irrefutable. The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration, moments that are more intense than others, sometimes it passes, and sometimes it returns. It is impossible to detach pain from the temporality composed of "here and now" and therefore with the relationship with other "here and now" that are not present. Is this not the experience of the other? Another person who has experiences in relation to me is another "here and now" that I do not perceive. The pain of another person is given in a here and now that I do not perceive and is not an experience of mine. — JuanZu

Very much appreciate this passage here, "The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration." Would you tell me where this comes from in the "Phenomenology of the internal consciousness of time"? I have it here but I can't find it.

You have to ask the question, where does the reduction really take one? "What IS it? It is the Cartesian method of doubt that understands one thing Descartes did not: A disembodied cogito makes no sense at all, and really is no more than an abstraction from actuality, which is a fully endowed experience. The reduction takes one the presuppositional foundation of experience, and so the world of familiar nomenclature falls away, yielding to the pure phenomena that stands before one. Husserl laid the basics outm but it is with the neoHusserlians like Michel Henry, I am arguing, that the reduction finds its true center: “So much appearing, so much being.” The issue of evidence simply loses it meaning here. I can take issue with anything that is constituted theoretically. Even if the world of meaningful utterances is essentially pragmatic, and theoretical accounts "come after" this foundation of pragmatic "knowledge" one is still a theoretical setting simply saying this. This, I take it, is what the problem of evidence is essentially about. What is being defended here is the notion that language in its "openness" discovers existential actuality, and this discovery is inherently valuative. What would dasein be without care? It would be a dictionary-self, altogether exhausted analytically by what language can say and the "potentiality of possibilities" found therein.

As to agency and experiencing the entire affective dimension of existence, I hold that the affectivity of discovered "in the world" cannot exist without it. Affectivity cannot exist without agency, or, it is absurd to imagine suffering disentangled from the one who suffers. Just as it is absurd to imagine an analysis of time contradicting the primordiality of suffering, simply because suffering as a pure phenomenon stands outside of analysis. Heidegger said he did not believe in a single primordiality. I am arguing he was wrong about this: value in the world is this. Consider Jean Luc Marion on this: the reduction is utterly primordial as it yields/discovers primordiality itself. Thus, "the Kantian insistence that there are pure ideas in play in the analytic is dismissed because there is no analysis in this disclosure. One stands before givenness and all discursivity is in abeyance. This is not an argument. It is a revelation."

That is why I am not "Levinasanian". The condition for there to be a pain or suffering of another person is that the value of the experience, the presence and the present of that experience is to be transcended by an absence. In this case the experience of the other that I do not perceive and that is given to me as absent. But in the end this absence is constitutive, even of the ethical consideration of myself and of the inscription of pain in a process of signification. The process of signification is like language: it functions with signs. And it is characteristic of a sign to function in different contexts. In this case pain is a sign, it can have existence in me or in another person, different organisms, different contexts, transcending the value of presence "here and now". It is the most common story of meaning: When we read a book we relive what a person thought in the "here and now" and captured it in ink (or in some data), but that "here and now" is completely absent at the moment when I read the book written by another person: I am another "here and now" also absent for the writer. But the meaning of the book "survives" transcends the experience and the evidence (Husserl's evidence) of both the reader and the writer. — JuanZu

The absence is constitutive OF the process of signification. The claim here is that his temporally conceived process of signification belongs to an analytic that is committed to "things themselves" and the nonderivative of their presence. The reduction takes inquiry closer and closer to this and the disclosure becomes more foundational. It is supposed to do this, not wander around in speculation. When you find yourself radically at odds, not with the familiar word and its assumptions, but with this second order of phenomenological awareness, you know something is very wrong your thinking. Consider for that moment as you stand before, say, a black plague victim and all the horrors, you proceed to explain that agency itself is negated by a proper analysis of the temporal construct of engagement, and so suffering is analytically without agency... so all is well.

Frankly, I don't think you think like this. I think you are testing the thesis. I have no problem with this. I'll read more deeply into Husserl's Time, see if I can give you a more technical response.

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative. — Joshs

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. As does Caputo.

But regarding his endless references to absolute consciousness, it seems clear that Husserl was talking like a foundationalist. On the other hand, there is this paper by Bence Peter Marosan, Levels of the Absolute in Husserl which argues along the lines you mention. I tend toward Henry, Marion, et al.

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future. — Joshs

Right. I surely can't speak for everyone, but for me, the hardest thing about reading Heidegger is that through his long discussions, everything is derivative of time, that is, has its most primordial discussion in time. Human dasein is time.

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity. — Joshs

The fault lies in the analysis that would compromise the singularity of valuing which is most vividly revealed in intense examples. "Pure" value lies outside understanding as something, notwithstanding that it is discovered

Nothing outside the text: certainly not enclosed meanings, any more than a context itself can be truly closed. But "displacing, transcending futurity," this I haven't encountered on Derrida. I'll have to look see.

..."these are.." not what I wrote. I never proof read. Bad habit.

This seems the foundation for Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion and thus the foundation of his ethics: — schopenhauer1

I take this to be VERY important questioning:

The attainment of a goal or desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such attainment results in suffering. Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since satisfaction of this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by suffering.

Frustration is not what results in suffering, nor is want or deficiency. There, of course, are examples of suffering, but suffering itself "stands as its own presupposition," requiring no wordy accounting, and again, not that wordy accountings are wrong, they just miss the point: The bad experience (not a bad couch or a having a bad day) finds what makes it bad in the pureness of badness itself. One is inclined to take issue with this "ontology of the bad"? I can see why (but some of those who take strongest issue with this are so happily inclined to talk about something like material substance independent of the agency's perceptual contribution, and idea of the absolute worst kind of metaphysics; after all, such a thing has never even been witnessed, nor is it witnessable), for the "good" and the "bad" of ethics is occluded by contrived philosophical issues.

I am saying, if you want to know what the basis is for the injunction not to bludgeon your neighbor with a hammer, the basis for the laws against doing this, all one has to do is bludgeon oneself, and the authority of the injunction not to do it rests solely with what it feels like to be bludgeoned. It is not a deficit nor the frustration of being bludgeoned (whatever that is), but the "presence" of this value-in-the-world we call bad. Likely due to Schopenhauer's exposure to Buddhism which, as you likely know, puts the onus on the idea of attachments, but this too begs the same question: what is wrong with attachments? Such inquiry always comes down to the foundational pure phenomenon of value.

I claim that there is indeed a process of interpretation. As I said, suffering does not occur in the absolute singularity that you claim. And this is demonstrated in the exercise of the recognition of pain. What is the link between pain and memory? If pain were not part of a process of signification, we could not even say that memory, insofar as it has as its object of memory, is somehow related to pain. In this sense, what is it that memory brings out of pain? Meaning. Pain cannot be thought of without its inscription in a process of signification being already given at the very moment of its existence. That would be to make pain something absolute, but so absolute (absence of relation) that neither thought (nor memory) could relate to it. — JuanZu

A curious position to take indeed. Even if I were to grant that the experience of pain was memory contingent, this would not, nor can anything, undo or diminish the manifestation of the pain qua pain. I don't at all think what you are saying is right about how pain becomes manifest AS pain, for, on the one hand, it is like the temporal forward looking occasion of encountering my cat, an occasion which possesses the habit of familiarity, hence recollection, in the recognition, making recognition possible. This is Heidegger's "taking something AS" in dasein's possibilities. I take "that there" AS a cat and when he says the whole world of possible objects is like this, I think he is right, but only to the extent that what appears is reducible to a reduction to "taking as," the nature of hermeneutics.

While it is true that pain is contextually defined in different ways: in this context it is an opportunity to show strength of endurance, in another there is a Hippocratic oath taken to see pain as a pathology, and so on. THIS is what is meant by hermeneutical taking something as: "regions" of possibility are "desevered" when one enters a doctor's office or someone's kitchen (see his section on Space in B&T). But for this to hold, and hold disingenuously, one would have to observe that the pain witnessed in the palm of your hand as you hold a lighted match beneath it, is entirely contextually constituted.

Look I mean, you can SAY this is the case, but such a thing would be patently absurd.

This even occurs at the level of presence that you point out: Husserl's understanding of temporality. It is not convenient here to recall Husserl's analyses of temporality. Husserl refers us to a differentiated structure of the moment in which something presents itself to the cogito, and this moment is related to the traces that are retained (retention, protention) in this moment (such as the moment of pain). Thus the aforementioned presence of the experience is inscribed in a chain of signification. That to which I have constantly referred. It is not an absolute, and its meaning is not given from itself. Language, therefore, is not a mere accident that survives the experience, but a possibility that is given by essence insofar as the experience is imbricated and inscribed in the signification. — JuanZu

Husserl's is not a Cartesian cogito. It is a transcendental ego that stands in an intentional relationship with its object, and these relationships are not simply knowledge relationships, but include liking, disliking, anticipating, dreading, and so forth. But no matter. Note that that which is inscribed in a chain of signification is merely an "adumbration" of the experience. I recall that I sprained my ankle, but that recollection does not relive the pain of the sprain. The pain itself is transcendentally occurrent, meaning it issues from a "now" that is not discovered in the retention.

I claim that this transcendent reality of which you speak when you speak of pain belongs to what Heidegger calls Western ontotheology. And this is so insofar as you have referred to the absolute, to purity, and to authority about something like pain. That reference to purity, to the absolute, and to the presence of pain is the classical element of the unconditioned and that whose meaning and being is given from itself. — JuanZu

Yes. Though, along with Nietzsche, most of this tradition is declared off the table. One has to be very careful approaching this, and Derrida comes to mind, along with the so called "French theological turn" of Michel Henry, Levinas and others. Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. Our words are, after all, "open" interpretatively.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound.

But how do we make this compatible with ethics? Such an absolute makes impossible the recognition necessary for empathy and understanding of the pain of others. More ethical than "I suffer" is "the other suffers". And the suffering of the other is not my experience! Ethics at this point must challenge and transcend the value of presence and experience, just as memory and language do, and just as the process of signification in which pain is inscribed invites us to think. — JuanZu

This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy.