All inquiry eventually ends but not in clarity but in confusion. There are always some presuppositions that haven't been examined in the philosophical sense i.e. they were put into service as (vague) intuitions - like Clarky keeps reminding us about how metaphysics is about utility rather than truth notwithstanding truth is most useful...or not (lies can be quite handy as well). — Agent Smith

Confusion only if one is confused. Science proceeds on a body of assumptions, but does not claim because these assumptions have reached their conclusive and final completion that they are confused. It is a "work in progress." What takes up indeterminacy is where determinacy leaves off. It is finding that field of inquiry which takes up at the basic level themes of indeterminacy that is first order of discovery.

Confusion at first is always the case. Who gets Einstein at first glace? But language constructs contexts, and contexts are interpretative settings for the world to be seen, understood. How is this division between metaphysics and the given world contextually framed? It goes first to Kierkegaard and the "impossible" difference between language/logic and the world. As I see it, the difference between a toothache and its misery, and the language we use to "know" what toothaches are. The understanding is conceptual, is Kant's old claim. But he was right.

So, how can one study, consider or even bring to mind actuality without language. "How to Avoid Speaking" Derrida asks. The world, in this raw presentative sense, is entirely other than language, so when we speak of it, we are always already at a distance. And we can see this at the intuitive level: there is a letter on my desk. I know what it is, but I also know the letter is not as if the essence of "being a letter" does not leap out at me from the thing there before me. I give it a context in which it acquires its intelligible identity, and it is this I am able to speak, tell others about, and so on.

Here, we have actually encountered metaphysics. It is there IN the actuality I face. We "call" things, that is, take them AS contextualizing language, the unnamable what it IS, is utterly alien to the familiarity that is context.

Heidegger thinks language is of a piece with the letter, and I think he is right, that is, as I see it as a letter, this "seeing as" fills the object, cannot be extricated from it as what-is-not-actuality. However, this does not change the actuality that is there and presents a profound deficit of understanding. It does not follow that actuality therefore "fits" into the schemata of established and familiar thought. We "face" metaphysics as a radical OTHER, just as we face, say, spatial eternity as radically other: It is not confusion we feel when we put our intuitions to the task of acknowledging infinite space. It is an event of our interiority, not a logical contradiction. We do this kind of thing all too seldom, I mean, allowing exercise to these threshold intuitions. Eternity is an existential confrontation, an impossibility that is IN the world's finitude. Massively interesting by my thinking. The letter on my desk is precisely this.

I tentatively agree with the ethical indeterminancy you mention in that everyone has to follow their conscience. Not everyone will agree on those. But we do agree that we share a world. That's how we can have this discussion. It's spirit to spirit. The unconscious and the super-ego are united parts of us, although we usually live in the ego. They show the ego has value as an identity. They mediate each other. I've struggled a lot with the idea of anatman and I think it is resolved in finding more unified states of consciousness. Who knows what it is in its essence! How we experience the soul/spirit is key (and I think overuse of the word consciousness is a problem). And I think I can know that truth is real and also that the past happened somewhat like I remember. If I eat fudge and I latter have the taste of fudge in my mouth, I know why I'm tasting it because I connect the logic with the memory. — Gregory

What follows will sound a bit odd.

It is not a mundane indeterminacy, as in cases of moral differences of opinion It is a meta-indeterminacy, an ontoethical (I suppose you could call it) deficit that shows up at the level of basic questions. This is the kind of thing religion is made to address. It is a progress in existential philosophy that moves from Kierkegaard through to Derrida. Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety puts forward the radical distinction between thought and actuality, then Husserl has his way: the world of daily lived experiences as they are articulated by science sits on top, so to speak, of an intuitive landscape. The philosopher's mission is to describe this phenomenological world, a VERY different "place" from science's world.

This requires a method of reduction, the phenomenological reduction. Hard for one to imagine there being anything "mystical" about Western philosophy (putting aside Eckhart, pseudo? Dionysius the Areopagite, and others), but Husserl really opened a strange door: We live in a world of implicit and explicit foundational assumptions; what if we terminated those assumptions and could witness the world itself?

Are we here aligned with the prajnaparamita? Isn't the metaphysics of meditation a reduction of the familiar to the "thereness" that underlies it? Now we ask, what is ethics? and are faced not with centuries of intellectualizing, but the world and its essential presence, and inquiry into ethics is metaethical, a purified experience, if you will.

As for memory, it is not being challenged that we have memories. The question is, what does it mean to have memories? Husserl's reduction, I am arguing, delivers the world from a reality constructed out of assumptions grounded in familiarity and pragmatics. What we call the past is a pragmatic concept, i.e., it works to think like this in solving problems. The whole world of language and culture is just this, and their claim to truth, reality and the rest are reductively annihilated in meaningful meditative states.

Of course, all of this is impossible. Just ask Heidegger. But I think Heidegger just didn't have those kinds of experiences, those weird, quasi mystical, Eckhartian intimations of....whatever. The Husserlian phenomenological reduction, I argue, has only one consummatory end: the apophatic termination of the world (very Kierkegaardian, really).

There is also a connection to the world. We can make some sound judgment about what animals and bugs are, right? Confusing one's imagination might be a problem because it is our connection to imagination that gives us access to memories. I know the memories were formed in this world because I am still in this world. I know my thoughts come from me and also that memories come from the past. Otherwise you are just a thought floating in nowhere — Gregory

Heh,heh--a thought floating nowhere. I like that. But what if being here is shown to be just that? the trouble lies in a reliance on common vocabulary, but historically, we can see how vocabularies have come and gone. What it is to be "somewhere" is very different from, say, Christendom in the middle ages. Being somewhere now means being an evolving organism whose reason and emotions are what what hve been viable in the competition for reproduction and survival through millions of years. This is the planet Earth, just ask a geologist for an entire library of discussion on this.

The question goes to a "discovery" of something that is not subject to revision, something not made by cultures' languages and values. If there can be nothing discovered that is both actual and immutable, then we are floating nowhere, and there is nothing in a scientists telescope or microscope that is going to change this. Now a true epistemic nihilist will say, like Rorty (who would deny, like Nietzsche, that he is a nihilist; he would claim that it is the metaphysicians who are the nihilists, denying this world in favor of another) that talk about a nonpropositional intuitive knowing is just absurd. There are language games with bad vocabularies, and a bad vocabulary is one that says there are things that can be "discovered" in the world. We are not floating nowhere because this idea of nowhere is simply a meaningless term, borrowed form familiar usage then thrown out of bounds into some made up otherworldliness.

I call Rorty and his ilk nihilists because they are intuitively deaf. Religion is largely a fiction, I will grant that, I mean, if you're reading a bible and its tales, it's a good yarn. But to think religion was conceived out of the need for entertainment is simply, if you'll pardon the term, stupid; massively so. Religion is a response to our foundational indeterminacy, especially in ethics. This indeterminacy is not a fiction. It is not where my cat is. It IS my cat. It IS myself and all things. THAT is the difficult intuitive transition to make. Our language must deal with our "floating" as a problem to solve.

There are two other sorts of camps. In one, indeterminacy is a failure of knowledge, the breakdown of certainly that leads to a skepticism , alienation or even nihilism. In the other camp, it is the determinacy associated with certainty that leads to lack of intelligibility, alienation and fragmentation, because understanding and meaning are functions of relevance , and relevance is a function of the structure of time , whereby the present occurs into a past history such that the world a always recognizable and familiar to us at some level. Meaning , understanding , determination and relevance require a dance between past and present in which the past is adjusted to the present, while the present bears the mark of its past. To determine a present is to produce it. If rather than a making, we think of determinism as a finding of what was already there, we have been lured into confusion. — Joshs

Interesting the way skepticism, alienation and nihilism works: the more one puts the question to regular affairs, the more these affairs become that which that which is alienated. To see that indeterminacy is there, "in" the cat, is to see that all along, "cat" assumptions have been radically incomplete. Usually inquirers work from an assumption of "the usual" being a baseline for deviation; I think it is the opposite: one sees in the pervasive aporia that it is the ordinariness of things that is out of touch, somehow wrong, a failing to understand.
Relevance a function of the structure of time? Well, yes, insofar as everything is. Time just has to be drastically qualified to be made sense of. Because IN the, for lack of a better word, present, not a fleeting anything but a firm reality, past has its only place, and it brings question to whether these words really are covering up something that does not fit common sense.

Last Thursdayism? Have you read about it?

You're on the mark that the past is a question mark i.e. we can't be certain as to whether it's real or just our minds playing tricks on us - memory ain't perfect (Mandela effect, confabulation, false memories, etc.)

Memory-past skepticism, what does it entail? You say we're led towards metaphysics. In what sense? How? — Agent Smith

Consider two camps: in mine, everything is metaphysics. In the other, everything we call metaphysics is nonsense. For me, it is clear: all basic level inquiry leads to indeterminacy, whether is it about quantum physics or my cat. Ask me what my cat is, where it is, how old it is, if my cat exists, properties my cat has, etc., and I will show you the road to deconstructing my cat into oblivion, referring to all knowledge claims that make cats cats and fence posts fence posts. Time seems particularly fragile because it falls apart so readily. Yesterday? You mean that-which-is-not-this-occurrent-event? Something outside "outside" an occurrent event? No sense can be made of this. Such a thing is unwitnessable.
What does this entail? It depends on how interested the inquirer is. You start putting everything into play in terms of basic meanings, then the world can fall apart. After all, what makes the world what it is a learned phenomenon. We "make" the world from moment to moment. The question is an intrusion, undoing certainty, useful for solving problems. Metaphysics is simply the final problem, which is where religion usually dominates. But religion is reducible to philosophy.

Philosophy's purpose is to eventually replace religion.

I can show time by speaking of my life. I know surely that these events happen. Some people doubt this philosophically and say the world could have started last Thursday but they betray a lesser understanding of time if time is so unreal the past may never have existed — Gregory

But the response to this invites a broader discussion of "speaking of my life." What "event" are you talking about, that is, how does such a thing bear up under analysis? I can tell you with confidence that I just had breakfast. How is this confirmed? By more recollection of language that was taught to me when I was a child and reinforced constantly and became a part of the fluidity of experience. People do not question this kind of thing, and the certainty runs high! But here, I am taking this assumption and revealing its instability at a basic level; simple, really: no past event has ever been encountered as a past event. And this whole affair of the recollection confirming what-is-not-a-recollection, that is, the past, is nonsense. The past can only be affirmed within a language "game" if you will, in which things make sense WITH other things; I mean talk of today, yesterday last century and so on are meaningful only with a system of time words.
Time is just as real as any other useful contextualized idea. ALL such ideas are analytically "fragile" when attention is put on a more basic level of assumptions.

The past-memory infinite loop conundrum

Q1. How do you know the moon landing happened in the past?

A1. Because we have a memory of it!

Q2. How do we know it's a memory and not our imagination?

A2. Because it happened in the past!

Goto Q1, happy riding the merry-go-round! Tell me when you've had enough, ok! — Agent Smith

I am saying that the concept of the past is nonsense AS some kind of demonstrable, witnessable, logically sustainable possibility. The thinking leads to an apophatic denial: The moon landing, e.g. i remember it, hearing of it, reading about it, witnessing televised accounts and so on. Let's say I was there and observed it first hand. In order to say the past IS the past, there would have to be some observable presence taken AS the moon landing in my recollection that reveals true past and not just an adumbrated past, a mental simulation. Past would have to demonstrably past AS past, as if the past could leap out of its no-longer-there and declare itself as there; it would at least have to show up at least once, and even in theory would have to be plausible. But all of this is precluded immediately given that every accounting the the past can only be a present adumbration, a memory we call the past.

This has implications that are quite interesting, by my lights. It introduces us the impossibility of language's possession of the world; to an apophatic cancellation of knowledge claims "beneath" the regularity of assumptions of given time words. I am late!; see you next Tuesday; yesteray was my birthday' and on and on. We know time vocabulary is a common feature of lived experience, but this is philosophy: what is it really?? One encounters metaphysics instantly, IN the simple analysis of our routine conversations.

Hegel in the first chapter of his Phenomenology also says that the present cannot be settled. I don't know what he means by this. I see time as if a point traveling along a line. The line doesn't exist but the point does. It seems very unfragile to me. I'm not sure about the unconscious — Gregory

Time as a concept can make sense in different ways. You can think of it a fleeting "now" or as past, present future. You can look at time as an apriori intuition, that is, a succession of events that has a structure of the form, two distinct events cannot occupy the same moment (as two colors cannot occupy the same space); such a thing is impossible. But is this just a logical impossibility? Or an intuitive one?

The line you speak of is first a geometrical representation. It is not "what time is" but a way of illustrating it, and like all analogs there is going to be the problem of not allowing that which is analogized to be affected by that which is brought in to illustrate. Time is not an object, and so it is a different, and far more difficult problem: you don't really have before you that which the analog is supposed describe, in the way you have a cat that has it very apparent ability to "pounce suddenly" carried over to someone you know who argues in a way that exhibits this same quality. Where is time itself to make the comparison? is it an intuition? Sure, in the same way logic is an intuition, that is, the structures we use to illustrate logic, the modus ponens, etc., have something there that shows itself, but never does logic itself "show up"!
What we try to do when we talk about time is metaphysics. There is the world and we give the world expression in language. I am simply pointing out that language falls apart instantly on examination of the way time is put together as a concept. Past? Show me the past. At the very moment you try, the past is not there; only a "sense" of presence that presents itself AS past. And all possible accounts of the past cannot reveal the past, demonstrate its existence.

Will to power does not mean that the will wants power. Will to power does not imply any anthropomorphism in its origin, signification or essence. Will to power must be interpreted in a completely different way: power is the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will; it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power.” — Joshs

I cannot imagine something that is not "anthropomorphic". Not in the naïve sense, but in that all that I acknowledge is of a piece with myself. I am, if you will, all over it and through it, even if it is other than myself.

Had to read deleuze to to respond so I "read through" Nietzsche and Philosophy". This is a metaphysical concept, as I see it, a metaphor grounded in the material acts of "will" that are witnessed in dasein (if you want to talk like that; I think dasein is useful when I want steer clear of science and its largely unthematized metaphysical assumptions about what a person is).

As I see it, when I recognize time and the unconscious as obvious impossiblities, it is a far more simple analysis, prior to Deleuze and Nietzsche. It comes off as a logical abstraction at first, but a close and honest look at it is something of a revelation. It "finds," on close attention, an intuitive counterpart, not at all unlike reaching out intuitively to eternal space and encountering the impossibility of it. This is not an abstraction.

The unconscious: A contradiction on the face of it. Certainly it does not put psychologists out of business, but at the basic level of analysis it directs one away from a confident empiricism and more toward, say, Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation which discusses the "primal philosophical act of the reduction."

Not without its opposition, I know.

As I recall , determinism for you is closely tied to intrinsicality, a property inherent to something that can be located dependably outside contextual change. I believe this kind of determinacy is another name for meaninglessness. — Joshs

I would call it, depending what "it" is, threshold meaning, which is where we "are". It is not as is if there were some line firmly drawn between propositionable determinations and the world. We impose this kind of rigidity on the world, and philosophy's job, I claim, is to take us to where meanings run out, and see this the way Caputo does (though without the biblical intrusions): as an an apophatic and revelatory philosophy, free of the both Freud's claims of illusions and Nietzsche's brand of nihilism, and wide open in the vicinity of affirmation. What is, after all, love, happiness, suffering, wretchedness? This is the kind of question that I privilege over all others. Truth is what leads to affective affirmation and Nietzsche was right about this, but wrong about will to power, whatever that could possibly mean (if all you do in life is overcome illness, as it was with Nietzsche, "will" takes on a perverse reification, is the way I see him).

he present ( primal impression) isn’t indeterminate, it’s specious, complex. Retention and protention (anticipation) belong to the present. They are a part of the immediate ‘now’.

Gallagher(2017)writes “primal impression, rather than being portrayed as an experiential origin, “the primal source of all further consciousness and being” is considered the result of an interplay between retention and protention. It is “the boundary between the retentions and protentions”

The primal impression comes on the scene as the fulfilment of an empty protention; the now, as the present phase of consciousness, is constituted by way of a protentional fulfilment. — Joshs

Indeterminacy is what you get when determinacy is out the window. All claims that exhibit a determinate designation of time possess a baseline indeterminacy due to a collapse of determinate language. One says she is in a room. Is this sustainable as a knowledge claim if she does not know where the room is? Yes, if the conditions of the proposition are settled entirely within the conditions of being in a room and no more (as, say, an electrician might want to know only if the power outlet is in a room of outside, and no more than this). But no if inquiry is taken to its limit.

I can see that Gallagher would be right about this as well as I can see that psychologists are right about short term and long term memory, and that Kant is right about time's structure being apodictic. But the point I want to make is more simple. The immediate now has no meaning if not played against a past or a future possibility. But these possibilities reduced to immediacy are instantly contradictory: what is immediate is impossible to conceive without temporal dimensions, that is, having a beginning and an end, but such a structure analyzed in these time words suffer the failure to produce instances, "observable" either intuitively or otherwise demonstrably, of past of future. These collapse into indeterminacy, I am saying, because no determinacy can be made about them at the most basic level.

I believe you are correct. It is about "reality." But "reality" is a difficult subject → that most people do not want to address. It requires a very careful vocabulary. — Rocco Rosano

Or, it requires a clear reduction. It is not a furtherance of theory we are looking for, but a clearing of theory. What it is about the world that intimates "reality" is a clutter of historical metaphysics. But beneath this, one would ask, isn't there something intuitively foundational? E.g., when we speak of God, but deliver the concept from its fictions, is there not something undeniably there that necessitated the fiction in the first place? This is the "essence" of God, one could argue. The concept is only as meaningful as the meaning it possesses.
Being careful about vocabulary is right, but it also has put metaphysics IN language, the ALL of cognition, as Rosenzweig put it. But the language of the world is indeterminate.

I think it would be better if Metaphysics was thought of as the study of reality. It would be difficult to mention something that might not be entangled with the fundamental of reality. — Rocco Rosano

But then, this is just what I have been talking about, reality. What else?

Exactly. You gave no argument. — Jackson

Trust me Jackson, 180 Proof is clueless about Kant. His Wiki is the full extent of it.

I don't think it is such a hard job, because something like religion of philosophy, with spiritual exercises, was already practiced by the ancient Greek philosophers: Pierre Hadot has shown us this. Today there are several movements, like philosophy experienced as life, secular spirituality, atheist spirituality, postmodern religions, atheist Christians and so on. I think they just need to clarify their positions, to gain awareness of what the core of their tendency is. I think all of this can be fruitfully embraced by the umbrella term "spirituality", once it is cleaned from its confusion and ambiguities. — Angelo Cannata

I would bow at the alter of the phenomenological reduction!

The harm principle is an important principle, but there are a number of problems with it. First it is overdetermined. If every harm done was unjust, then self defense would be unjust. However, in many legal systems (All I now of in fact) self defense serves as a justification, not only as an excuse. So some harm must be just.

Then again, it is also underdetermined, because sometimes one's action (or inaction) might not directly cause harm, but are still considered unjust. You do no harm when you do not save a drowning child because her drowning is not caused by you, but we might hold you acountable for not aiding nonetheless. This is more controversial, but I think it is relatively uncontroversial to think that when you can prevevent big damage by sacrificing very little one ought to do so.

You might well end up with the harm principle as an important principle after you complete your via negativa, but it is not the bedrock of justice, unless you define it so broadly that it totally covers justice. (envery injustice is harm and every harm is injuctice, that renders the principle meaningless). — Tobias

Do no harm IS general and nondescript. It is also the default defeasible position of ethical/just actions. IF you are looking to cancel over and under determination, then you will have to do away with principle making altogether, for principles are essentially general, dismissing the accidental features of a particular case. This is the final stopping place for apophatic inquiry about ethics, and all things, really (which is why it is relevant to religious enlightenment). But you're right, it really doesn't take one to a place where theory can move forward, that is, unless one is interested in looking at the affective underpinning of ethics/justice.

Apopahtic inquiries work like dialectics: what IS the case plays against what is not, and from this something emerges (unless you're a Hindu or the like; then "nothing" "emerges"). An innocent man is put in prison, and this is unjust. See what Strawson has to say about this: there is that collective resentment that responds to this. Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?

I see no real difference between ethical issues and those of justice. The latter rests on the same values, the same principles essentially the same arguments; the only difference is the context, that is, issues of justice are often involved with legal entanglements.

Not clear about doing no harm by not saving a drowning child because the drowning was not one's doing. Holding one accountable for harm and that one doing harm have no discernable difference regarding ethics/justice. Why else accountable?

I like the inclusion of love, that draws us to the analogy of love and law. So, is there something loving about law? I think there is, but that is difficult to articulate. Staying on the path of the negative, law is not love, but is it then a kind of love, what relationship may there be between the two? — Tobias

Love, empathy, compassion, on the positive side; then resentment on the negative side. These are affective, not argumentative. Interesting, the dialectical interplay here: we are livid that a woman, say, strangled her child, but then the case comes out and we find she was severely mentally ill. The resentment lingers, but there is no one to pin it to, and we are forced to relegate it to the amoral, "ajudicial" bin of natural events where resentment sits, "unconsummated" if you will. The dialectic: anger, a sentiment well grounded and established in the collective regard for such things, then meets its nemesis, a failed justification. But the anger is repressed, collectively, and we do not appreciate this. We want, so it goes, Justice! there is no synthetic resolution here, and we all just have to live with this, the rotten things happening to good people. This is part of our foundational ethical relation with the world. We are ethical being, but the world is not ethical at all.
Even the most heinous criminal behavior loses its connection to justified resentment when the the cards are genuinely played out, and motivations replace freedom.

So Kant's categorical imperative should have resulted in his being a Utilitarian since the hedonistic principle of Bentham was synthetic a priori? — Hanover

Bentham was not doing metaethics. He simply accepted the premise that pleasure could be quantified. Very hard to do, but there is something in the attempt: better to be a pig satisfied than a philosopher unsatisfied, or not? Quantifying the "good" of experiences, addressing the claim that Beethoven is better than rock? One would have to "observe" the aesthetics to compare, and most would say this can't be done, or, shouldn't be. But the ethereal against the "hard", this is not an impossible question.

Anyway, what Bentham was dealing with, value, generally speaking, is, if you want to talk Kant, synthetic apriori. It is there in the midst of the world (though Kant's idealism remains an open question) yet, and this has to be carefully considered: the joy of being in love or the agony of torture, are not contingent. The "propositional" putting it forth IS contingent, for language is interpretative and its contingency lies with meanings bound to other meaning to make meaning. But the non-propositional experience of agony is not contingent.
As I see Kant, there are two problems. One is the indeterminacy of the universalized maxim. I mean, should I steal? No. But wait, the "principle" in question is not about stealing in general. it is a bout stealing under conditions x,y, and z. What are these? This question so relativizes the principle that it vanishes altogether: the choice before one is a completely unique entity of impossible complexity to distill into a principle. The ought, in other words, meets reality, and is reduced to a homily the universalization of which is nor more than a heuristic.
the other problem has to with duty: Is not one motivated to do one's duty? One must "desire" this, no? There is no such thing as rational disinterest.

You are making an impossible distinction here, arguing that there are two definitions of terms (1) the absolute meaning and (2) the contextualized meaning. All actually fall under category #2. — Hanover

That is right, and it is a big issue.

But think of it as Kant thought of reason. All rational affairs are given to us embedded in experience in the world, the actual content of which is, as he calls it, sensory intuition. Add to this the bulk of the living experience teaming with affectivity, etc. and you have all that Kant wants to dismiss, for analytic purposes, in the effort to discover the apriori form of judgment. He calls his foundational concepts 'pure'. Now, there are no pure concepts, really. This is an abstraction from the actual experienced world which is messy. But, it is not as if there is nothing in this actual world that aligns with Kant. This is logic. Again, there is no "logic" in the world; it is an abstraction from judgments we make. But the logical structure of thought is a feature of the lived experience. There is "something" in experience that is rigid and uncompromising, like modus ponens, in deductively structured thought.

Here, the issue is not logic and pure reason, but affectivity, or value. It is given to us in all of the messiness of lived life, yet analysis recognizes in this a feature which belongs to it, to the contextualized affairs of everydayness. The analysis doesn't obfuscate the quality, it simply brings it out and reveals it. Affectivity is already "reified", if you will, for it is discovered, not made (something Richard Rorty doesn't deal with well, if you've read him), so there is no chance of inventing it. Kant is essentially describing! the world's structural features. Here, I make this same claim: it is not about they way the world is interpreted historically in religion and so forth; It is about a descriptive feature of the world that is there for analysis.

The question then turns to affectivity. We have to look to the way it is experienced to discover what it is (and thereby discover what the world is). Music, art, being scalded and burned, falling in love, getting a splinter, you know, the various and sundry afflictions and blisses we deal with. These kinds of things saturate life. And it is here I claim we discover this "absolute" presence. That it is discovered IN the world cannot be understood as a a deflationary reduction to the mundane interpretations of everydayness. Just the opposite: It is found IN the world; this makes the world something that is just this.

There is no essence to the term "yellow." "Yellow" means however it is used, and there is not a Platonic form that represents true yellow from which to measure. You're arguing essentialism, which isn't a sustainable position. — Hanover

Not that. the term essence is ill advised, so if I used it, I invited ambiguity. Yellow as presence, is all I mean. You may argue that presence is also an embedded term, but this would lead to arguments of higher complexity. It is being understood as a "pure" phenomenon. The language that gives us this is and interpretative indeterminacy, but the presence is not. A tricky issue.

If one holds to hedonism, pleasure is good by definition, but that position isn't universally held. — Hanover

That pleasure is, call it apriori good, is my position. Pleasure qua pleasure cannot be other than good. It is apodictically good.

But I'm saying sometimes we ought to harm and that your view is idiosyncratic, but you just keep telling me it's obvious we shouldn't harm. — Hanover

I'm telling you that do no harm is a foundation that gets entangled with complex affairs in which things are brought into competition and contextualized, relativized, and it is here doing harm becomes ambiguous. But harm itself carries an absolute proscription. Consider the color example. It remains what it is, most emphatically and without exemption, an absolute one might say (though this term is difficult); yet it can be taken up is countless ways that compromise this simplicity. Generally speaking, pleasure os good. But there is that exam on the horizon, so now it is bad to simply indulge and fail to study. This has no bearing whatever on the good of pleasure, though. That caviar Hitler had as he ordered thousands to a horrible death was no less delicious.

The idea that love is undisputably good is a most Christian sentiment and is understandably a sentiment that might be thought of as universal by someone immersed in Christian society, but, believe it or not, Judaism finds hate a virtue when deserved, drawing a sharp contrast against the Christian virtue of turning the other cheek.

"Regarding a rasha, a Hebrew term for the hopelessly wicked, the Talmud clearly states: mitzvah lisnoso—one is obligated to hate him." — Hanover

I take it to be neither Christian nor anything else. For me, it is simply observation, nothing more. It is a reflex to assign a metaethics to some familiar institution, I know. But do consider it to be entirely independent of any of these contextualizations. Look at it as a phenomenon, a pure phenomenon, as you, say, luxuriate in the thought of the beloved, sitting in a meadow. All judgment and relativities in abeyance. The feeling simplciter is simply there.
Ethical issues are often hard, obviously, and Jews and their nazi tormentors are among the worst cases. Strawson argued in favor of resentment as part of the social morality, and I suppose it is. As long as we see that when we draw up these ideas, there is a foundation upon which this sits. Do no harm. But why not? Because harm hurts. What is wrong with something hurting? And then, what is right about something happy and pleasant? You see how these questions answer themselves?

But, once we clarify that spirituality is not a belief, but rather philosophy practiced as a whole human experience, the language of spirituality is automatically set in the context of philosophy, and philosophy has in itself a long and strong tradition about cleaning language from confusion. — Angelo Cannata

Well yes, something like this I would agree with. The devil is in the details. Hesse's Siddhartha imagines a world where every young boy wants to be a sadhu, just run out to the forest and meditate and find God. No more than a nostalgia, now. I suppose for a society to take philosophical religion (??) seriously, it will require serval cultural revolutions. Perhaps when AI delivers us from all labor, or Skinner's Walden II catches on. Who knows.

Not trying to be difficult here, but the idea that there is universal agreement on what is good (or not good as the OP suggests) and we just need to talk it out to see what it is so we can arrive at this naturally understood goodness necessarily assumes Attila the Hun and Adolph Hitler don't get a seat at the brainstorm session. On what basis do we exclude them? — Hanover

It's a merely descriptive matter, like the color yellow. One can imagine the color yellow being worn by fascists, the favorite color of a serial killer, and so on. But yellow remains yellow. Context relativizes. Then, there are the two kinds of love, aren't there? One is an exaggeration, perhaps, as, Freud loved cigars. Then there is being IN love. The latter serves the point best, but the love of a cigar, exaggeration or not, is still inherently a good thing, whether it is Stalin smoking it or Jesus (and we all know Jesus loved a good cigar!).
It does get confused when love becomes entangled with other affairs, and even the loving, liking, adoring, and so on, can become ambiguous, as with masochism: how much is he genuinely enjoying this? Not so cut and dry as a school boys romantic affection. But when it is good, it is not contingently good, is the point. The "goodness" is there on the sleeve, so to speak, and unalterably so, unless it becomes entangled in a competition, a comparison, and then, it is problematized.

No, that is not the principle I seek. Sometimes harm is needed for the greater good. Punishment, afterall, is harm. So, would you abolish all of criminal law? What about self harm? How far would you take harm? For instance drug addiction harms yourself but harms society as well, because of the costs of healthcare. When I am talking to a pretty girl or man, I might harm you because you wanted to talk to her / him instead. So no, unfortunately the harm principle sensible though it is, does not cut it. — Tobias

But your approach is apophatic. This leads you to foundational things. Do no harm is THE defeasible default principle. It is arrived at, not in the complexities that stir the pot of ethical issues; there is nothing apophatic about this. After all of the "not this, nor that's" of apophatic reduction, do no harm is simply what is left. 'Harm" is exceedingly general, but it covers all possibilities for what justice COULD BE about. No harm in the balance, then no issue of a justice nature.
Of course, once IN the actual world of human affairs, the harms of the world get entangled and indeterminate. But prior to this, harm carries its own injunction NOT to do something; it is inherently wrong, bad, evil; it is the existential basis for anything at all being wrong.

Silence however... prhaps there is a deep insight here. The claims to justice might do more harm than good. So, perhaps, one of the first insights of the via negativa on justice is that one should not impose one's conception of justice on others... — Tobias

I think justice is a subcategory of ethics, and ethics is has an existential essence: the bad or good of actual experiences, like scalding water on living flesh, or falling in love. These are absolutes. One does not argue about love being good. It always, already is. This means that it survives apophatic inquiry, the kind of weeding out what isn't necessary, or is merely accidental. Love cannot be bad. It is as impossible as a logical contradiction.

Too bad that in my question you don't recognize Joseph Campbell's question. He wondered how it is that one can tell whether one has indeed had a religious/spiritual experience, or whether the feel good feeling one has is simply due to having had a good meal. — baker

But this just begs the question: what does having a good mel have to do with the qualitative nature of experience? Certainly there can be a causal relation between the two, but this says nothing about WHAT the experience IS. Looks as if you are looking some kind of reduction of experience to physical brains states, such that a brain chemistry's analysis can yield up what an experience IS. This is obviously not true; the worst kind of question begging: how does one know what brain chemistry is? Why, through brain chemistry!? You should see that this is one way to approach the justification for a phenomenological approach.

Some "spiritual practices", "tips & tricks", consumption of intoxicants, altered states of mind due to physical exertion readily produce in one's mind a feeling, feeling x. This, however, doesn't yet mean that one is x. — baker

Same problem. An experience due to exertion, the light headedness, the runner's "high" and the like, are seen to be causally related to the exertion and it effect on physical systems like the brain's, but talk about this, even at the detailed chemical level says nothing at all about what the elation itself is. It tells you nothing about the nature of value. You will have to deal with the Tractatus here: the good feeling of a runner's high is entirely transcendental. Of course, all experience is, at the basic level, transcendental. We, e.g., think before we commit to ontology. Thinking is a structured experience, so the ontology can be no other than someting that issues from this structure, and since we have no access outside of this, we are committed to a general indeterminacy in all things--THE foundation to our existence is indeterminacy.
So what I claim is that experiences need to be assessed and understood for what they are, as they "appear" for appearance is all one ever has. And this is not to invoke talk about "representations" and their objects that do not appear. The world "appears".

For example, one can read some productivity literature, hype oneself up, put some of the advice into practice, and then one feels more productive. But whether one is actually more productive or not is something that yet needs to be measured. — baker

This raises the issue of making an error in judgment. Certainly this happens all the time, as when my dogmatic Christian neighbor insists the gay couple down the street is going to hell for eternity. But this is not about unjustified beliefs. It is descriptive, merely. Go into a strong effective meditative state, control the breathe, especially the release, out and slow, and at the end when the breathe cycle is complete, linger. It is a remarkable experience of control.

Serious meditation is not an easy thing to account for. One must, I hold, see that it is not about the brain, even though there is science's strong causal claim in the background. The brain is just another phenomenon, and it has no more relevance here than knitting. The brain is a phenomenon, and its causal relation to experience is phenomenally acknowledged. So, one simply witnessed the breathe, the intruding thought or feeling, the dismissal. the breathe is simply this rising and falling and the work one has is about controlling this, for the breathe is a most insistent attachment. After all, we yield to the breathe's insistence as we do to a thought or a feeling. The calm that issues from this exceeds familiar calm, and the world "settles" in such a way that one actually stands on the threshold of a sublime stillness, and the concepts of existence and reality take on an extraordinary meaning.
Look, I can't convince of the validity of this. But if you're going to criticize it, you should know something about phenomenology. A medical diagnosis is inherently pathological in its judgment, and this implies a standard of what is normal that issues from everydayness. In serious meditation, you are not in everydayness at all! Meditation is the cancellation of just this.

One can make oneself "feel the presence of the Holy Spirit", through prayer, going to a church, using intoxicants. But that alone doesn't yet mean the Holy Spirit is indeed present.

There is a difference between feeling safe, and being safe.

There is a difference between feeling that one has overcome egoic thinking, and actually overcoming egoic thinking.

And so on.
Feelings are easy enough to conjure up. Facts that can be measured, not so readily. — baker

But all of this talk belongs to a world of assumptions one gets from high school text books. Here "all schools are in abeyance" says Walt Wittman. You have to go there. I live in a world of dogs and cats and shopping just like everyone else, but I also read Kant through Derrida, and I have learned that this everydayness is a fraud, at the level of basic questions, lacks reflective justification altogether. Facts? Are these Wittgenstein's facts, on the logical "grid"? These are free of value content. So then, what IS nirvana? The most extraordinary value experience.
One thing Witt did was he took value off the table for discussion by claiming to be transcendental and unspeakable. This gave analytic philosophers the license to ignore THE most salient feature of our existence: affectivity. The meaning of life is not about facts; it is about the depth and breadth of affectivity.

Strange that the Buddhists say the Noble Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths. — baker

Heuristics! That is all this is. Sitting under that fig tree is not at all about the four noble truths.

I am afraid I do not understand you. Yes, Rawls offers us a cataphatic approach; under the veil of ignorance we would necessarily choose a system in which advantages for some are only justified when they also benefit the least well off. However, why would he need God? It is just the light of reason. Anyway, my approach would then be to look at cases which we find unjust and see whether we can distill such a principle from it, instead of resorting to reason under the veil of ignorance. — Tobias

A reduction, then. It is there already, from Mill and before: do no harm. This is the principle you seek. Not so much apophatic, which is reductive to a vanishing point, like the eastern notion of neti neti, which leads to a vacuity where one finally discovers that it was language and the world of particulars that was obstructing insight. Apophatic inquiry leads to "silence".

I highly suggest the entire video though, even if you're familiar with the concepts. I'm curious to see what people think. — Philosophim

Not that causality is more fundamental than time. Causality IS time. You have to put Einstein on hold: time is the condition of the perceptual apparatus that is available to Einstein so that he could make observations and think at all. First perception, then science, is the order of analysis.

For example, let’s think about the faith in God that is in Christianity. In this context, God cannot be conceived but perfect. The only alternative, in order to conceive God as not perfect, would be to conceive God entirely as a human creation. If God is not a human creation, then he must be perfect. If God is a perfect being, he is exposed to all the contradictions implied by perfection, that are, in a synthesis, all about being not human. But we, as humans, need something human. This is the problem of all religions: they have depth, profoundness, they are revelatory, but they lack humanity, exactly because they need to be based on something conceived as perfect, otherwise, if it is not perfect, it cannot escape being a human fantasy. — Angelo Cannata

But philosophy's job is avoiding the devolvement into fantasy. I take issue with it "all about being not human". God is constructed out of what is human. The issue is to avoid the enlightenment philosopher's talk that misses that misses the side of the barn by parsecs. See what Rorty says in a footnote:

All that I (or as far as I can see, Derrida) want to exclude is the attempt to be no propositional(poetic, world disclosing) and at the same time claim that one is getting down to something primordial--what Caputo calls "the silence from which all language springs."

See, he wants to commit to idea that the whole of our world, the logical grid of the tractatus, the being-in-the-world of B&T, Levinas' "totality" (which he gets from Heidegger and this probably comes Husserl somewhere), simply has no metaphysical foundation. My thinking is that it is ALL metaphysical, but not the extravagant Platonizing; just the, as Levina put it, realization that the desideratum exceeds the desire and the ideatum exceeds the idea. That is, our indeterminacy at the level of basic questions.

Anyway, the missing the barn door is here: it is not "the silence from which all language springs," as Caputo put is, but from which all affectivity springs! Language is nothing without affectivity; it is simply an abstraction. We are beings bound to a world of caring, of music and art, loving and hating, and on and on, and this is what cries out for meaning beyond the totality: it is that ethical/aesthetic dimension of our being. E.g., why are we born to suffer and die? And have blisses and miseries and horrors, and so on.
Non Christian philosophers almost Never go here. Metaethics has been theology and affectivity, well, a matter of "taste".

but which tells us nothing about the world in-itself or its meaning.

But Wittgenstein would never put it like this. The world-in-itself? This is Husserl talk. Tractatus-Witt would say this is just nonsense. The world is the totality of facts, not of things; and facts are in "logical space" and logic does not permit talk like world in itself.

So, I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. It seems to me computer science relies on the connection between the two - microprocessors basically comprise chains of logic gates to effect physical outputs. And more broadly, the link between logical necessity and physical causation seems fundamental to science generally, and even to navigating everday life. — Wayfarer

But if you are in Witt's world, causality is going to be understood as a logical concept. An odd idea, if you ask me: Kant on this is apodicticity: I cannot even imagine my cup moving by itself. It is intuitive, not logical; but logic is intuitively received, yes, but it is qualitatively different in the intuition.

Similarly we can translate the approach to the philosophy of law or ethics. — Tobias

But then, God IS ethics, an embodiment of ethical indeterminacy. That is, at the end of inquiry regarding what ethics is about and the search for justice and redemption, we face our own nothingness, the nothingness that shrouds our existence: indeterminacy. So your question about ethics and politics is really about ethics, or metaethics. Take Rawls' thinking on justice: if you're going to go apophatically on this, the call for the most advantaged to address the needs of the least advantaged is essentially an ethical obligation, and so rests with ethics; so then, what is the apophatic indeterminacy of ethics? God, that is, meta-God (delivered from the incidental cultural and political BS).

Not sure if gathering knowledge follows a program. — Haglund

It's forward looking process of programmed responses. If......then..... is essential the structure. This reflects the basic structure of experience itself as it engages the world. What is a coffee cup? It is one of a number of this structures. If I hold it and lift, then the cup will rise, enabling access to the mouth, and so on. There are presumably an infinite number of such "programmed respo0nses," variations of such things, and on and on, in our relationships with the world. What is anything at all? Well, IF......THEN.....What is nitroglycerin? If it is thrwon with a certain velocity.....THEN it will impact in such and such a way.
We are all of us living laboratories, confirming hypotheses and theories about what the world is. The "is" of this is pragmatic.
Of course, this is just a construct. Our actual relationships (???) is pure metaphysics.

Are you claiming belief is a physical object? Explain. — Jackson

Pull back from this, whatever it means. All things that are known to be can be analyzed as known in a knowledge relation. This relation bears analysis. Don't get hung up on object classifications.

This presupposes there is such a method to arrive at knowledge. But is there truly? Wouldn't we be able then to write a computer program, feed it with sensory data, and run the program? — Haglund

I believe that would be the algorithm.

Notice I said, physical. Physical object. — Jackson

All knowledge relations

Philosophy does not require a reference to physical objects in order to discuss an issue. — Jackson

Philosophy discusses the presuppositions of knowledge relationships. No object, then nothing to discuss.

I am not saying philosophy is a science. But consider taht language itself is an application of the "scientific method", the hypothetical deductive method: I see an object, but what is the event of its recognition? It is a temporal event that has a beginning and an anticipation and a "success" in the satisfaction of this anticipation. The cat walks and behaves just like I anticipate her to do, and this happens so seamlessly and spontaneously, I think I am in a direct relationship with the cat, only I am not. The past rises up constantly in the stream of events of experience, and is met with confirmation in things turning out exactly as anticipated, as when you put your foot down on the pavement and having the resistance and forward motion all come to pass as it should. Dewey thought like this, I and think he was in the right ball park.
Of course, this all gets very interesting further on.

I do not think philosophy has anything to do with science. — Jackson

The aim of the Meditations is a complete reforming of
philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation.
That Implies for Descartes a corresponding reformation of all
the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-selfsufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can
they develop Into genuine sciences. (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

The history of philosophy shows changes in the issues philosophers take seriously. — Jackson

Granted. But it can be argued that all of the elaborations and elucidations in philosophy are far more determinatively based that literature. The latter is the broad and inclusive world of engagement, the body of which is the body of literature. Philosophy is the aloof observation, closer to science, really, which is why philosophers often place themselves within the same rigor of standards of validation: it is specialized, like science, and has focus.

Having said this, philosophy as an historical discipline is at its end, or it will be, as soon as it completes its housekeeping duties, the "cutting out" of Occam's razor, of the legacy of religion and its language and the "bad metaphysics" that so entangles basic questions. I think Husserl points to the residua that remains once the coast is clear.

Literature is messy, in comparison, like life itself, allowing insights to emerge from the original fabric, but more poignantly. A great philosophical value of literature is that, not only does it not dismiss the affectivity of our lives, it highlights them. Rorty understood this.

Isn’t actually metaphyisics a quest for a system of ideas that is expected to work with absolute perfection? I cannot conceive a metaphysics of something imperfect. — Angelo Cannata

Not perfect systematizing of our affairs, but perfect happiness. The former is an entanglement, and the confusion take place in thinking the logical grid "upon which" the world sits and is divided (thinking of Wittgenstein's Tractatus here; but also Kierkegaard before him) is a model for human perfection. Such is the plight of rationalism). Call nirvana? But really, closer to home, think of Wordsworth and childhood. Was there not once a time when the world was almost perfectly realized? The trouble was, we were infants, we were, if you will, nobody, no reflective agency to realize the significant depths of the what was happening. Language and culture make this happen: in the evolvement of a human being there is that Heideggerian moment of geworfenheit (Kierkegaard called this posting spirit; Husserl's epoche is clearly in this-- I'm sure he had read Kierkegaard. Something of a profound moment, for me, anyway, this existential line that is crossed where all things recede in their implicit knowledge claims that possess everyday affairs, and the world is shrouded in mystery, Heidegger's "wonder" in What Is Metaphysics? But is it the vacuity of nothingness? Or is it a liberation?)
Is Emerson simply passé and naive? Certainly that "transparent eyeball" is an amusing image, but that walking through a bare common, glad to the brink of fear...curious at least. Is religion, essentially, just about systems of organizing our thinking about metaphysics? Or is it revelatory, and deeply profound?

All modes of culture, including the sciences, literature and philosophy, are evolving concepts which move ‘with the times’. This is why historical movements such as the Classical period , Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernism and the Postmodern are defined by the inseparable interrelations among these cultural modalities. It’s meaning less to say that philosophy always asks the same questions if the sense and meaning of the questions changes with the times , which it does. If philosophy really asked the same questions over and over, it would come up with the same answers. — Joshs

Just two things. One is that lack of signified. The self effaced signified is meaning self deconstructed. That is, deconstruction is self deconstructing, what Meister Eckhart was looking for is his plea to be rid of God, the way to apophatic affirmation. The other is ethics and value. It may be that the spectral analysis of star is bound to context for its meaning, but being in love is not. When we put words to it, certainly, but it HAS an altogether mystifying stand alone presence (knowing full well that my utterances here about this are contextually bound).
Sartre called it the superfluity of existence--this is really about the superfluity of value or affectivity. The philosophically the human situation is grounded in value, not vacuous signifiers. Another word for the lostness of signifiers-in-play is metaphysics (not the ridiculous kind), and this is no less than the palpable presence of affective meaning.

No, it's more systematic than that. Can't you tell? — baker

Just the obvious point that one tells the different between experiences according to their, well, differences. Clear as a bell; so clear one wonders why the question is raised at all. Surely you know the difference between being in love and lasagna. You're grasping at straws. Curious.

Killing oneself in a public place for a political reason is not a sign of a noble attainment. — baker

Do better. It is not the killing oneself that is in question nor the noble attainment. It is the inner state of mine that made such an act possible; to suffer so little, or not at all, inspires the wonder that perhaps there is such a thing as nirvana and its perfect detachment. So then, what IS nirvana? Not simply happy as a child, but removed, distant from engagement, the manifesting of something profound and beautiful. One has to take this kind of think seriously, and no summarily dismiss it. Buddhism is certainly NOT about a "noble attainment" in the usual sense, the term 'noble' being a social and ethical concept.
Again, a bit obvious. Oddest yet: no respect for someone who almost without argument did the most extraordinary thing one could do.

So it is with shooting heroin up your veins. — baker

A little juvenile.

I'm averse to hocus pocus and to shallowness being masqueraded as depth. — baker

And yet you toss around such terms as if you know what they are. Is kriya yoga hocus pocus? Well, my goodness. Sorry to trouble.

If after all this time, you still think that ... then go fuck yourself. — baker

Couldn't help but notice. Hope things improve with whatever is troubling you.