Possibility/impossibility points to the quality or diversity of the idea(l) - what do you think logic constructs its concepts out of? Itself? And construction requires a source of energy. Perfect relation is paradox, because nothing else is necessary. And if this paradox exists, then any and all of them do. — Possibility

The paradox you mention is between logic and the actuality. If you go by Hegel, then the real's rational nature is only imperfectly realized in our current Zeit Geist: it approaches perfection in God's self realization, and because we see only as our unevolved reason permits, contradictions rise up. But all this is awaiting so sort of divine completion in which contradictions fall away. So, all relations do have the stamp of paradox, for one can easily find contradictions everywhere since knowledge falls apart with inquiry at the basic level. This is what, by Hegel's standard, contingency is all about: the imperfection of realizing God's perfect rationality.
Hegel was essentially on your side because he agreed that reaosn in the abstract had no great value. Kant's pure reason is not very important here. What is important is the way reason grapples with what is given, making science what it is. Hegel doesn't separate things from reason: they are parts of the same grand disclosure of Truth in God.
I think Hegel is interesting. Continental philosophers take him seriously (though not as he would like); analytic philosophers don't talk about him except in philosophy history classes. You have to go through Kierkegaard: reason and objects are qualitatively completely different. To me this goes directly to ethics: That pain in your side where you were assaulted with a baseball bat: THIS is rational?? No. It has nothing to do with reason.

We can either deconstruct to achieve insight, or construct a big picture consistent with science and physics which I prefer to do. And when I do I find it is all about the evolution of forms. These forms are all self organizing, and they are made of endlessly variable informational structure. So really, everything can be reduced to the self organization of information. We know what information is - the evolutionary interaction of form, but we don't know what self organization is. We know self organization is what creates order in the universe, from which structure and life evolves.

When I consider this issue, I find that if I say self organization is caused by God, or physics, or the anthropic principle, etc. I do not change what it is, but I change myself. I limit my ability to experience reality. It becomes something like Wit's word game, or as I prefer to call it information game. Ultimately this becomes a process of information, where what occurs is an interaction of forms. :smile: So we cannot escape the fact that everything is information, because everything is information from every perspective.

So it makes sense to me not to define the source of self organization, rather to call it consciousness, and this way there is consciousness and information in its many forms. This way I do not limit my ability to experience reality, and in this knowledge I also learn to respect the various forms of reality of others. — Pop

Not sure what you mean when you state at the beginning that you are not interested in insight, so I am reluctant to bring in a response to the rest. After all, philosophy without the pursuit of insight is like a wheel without a carriage.

I believe the world has bad and good elements. Just like God, or the universe, or whatever, it's just the essence of reality — Gregory

Well, sure. I would bring in certain analyses that divides the playing field to make it more enlightening. I mean, you suggest that these terms are somehow equalized by their being in the world, and being differently regarded, and this difference equalizes; which may be true if the matter is handled with an eye on just utility. God is a useful term, used to wipe out civilizations or to bring solace to suffering.
But if one desires to know things at a level of basic questions, doors are opened that are otherwise closed.
I argue that the more one gives the world analysis at the basic level, the more basic level assumptions falter, and this leads to something revelatory, something by the standards of utility is really beyond charted territory.

Well, that's not what I would have supposed, although care is needed here. Russell commented that "Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said". Much of the Investigations, and also of On Certainty, touches on this topic, which his biographers agree was for him or the highest importance. Wittgenstein's enterprise is targeted at the enterprise of scientism; for him what is of the greatest import is what is unsaid. — Banno

But he is he uncompromising in the matter of discussing what is not to be discussed. He would turn his chair, e.g., to face the wall when the attempt to discuss the foundations of ethics (metaethics) came up. Then see his Lecture on Ethics as well as the Tractatus: No doubt, Witt takes God and religion very seriously (in his notebooks: What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.).

My issue lies with his insistence not to talk about the matter, or better, not to talk "around" it, elucidating the periphery, the region where words make partial, even nebulous and obscure, intrusions into the place where familiarity loses its grip.
Language games, I am sure, is derivative of Dewey and the pragmatists and Heidegger, all who came before Philosophical Investigations, and for whom categorical thinking was dismissed in favor of a more fundamental analysis, which is pragmatism, essentially. This is the way I see it: Pragmatism is one of the most defining insights in philosophy of the past century (that I have read. I don't read much analytic philosophy, though. I read Quine and found his Radical Indeterminacy. Indeterminacy in language is a principle theme in post modern thought and Quine and Derrida were saying very similar things, differently).
Any way, there is nothing I can see in Witt that makes the extraordinary qualitative move into discussion about the kind of existential threshold indeterminacy I want to defend.

I taste oysters only with my tongue, and hence I never taste oysters as they really are.

As if this meant one never tastes oysters.

SO there's the problem with the OP. If you adhere to Stove's Gem, if you never taste oysters, of course you can't recognise the beginning.

The alternative is to recognise that you do taste the oysters. The noumenal is a misleading nonsense. — Banno

No, no, no...That's not it. It is certainly not the case that I do not taste oysters when I taste oysters. But point here to see that the tasting is one thing, the proposition is another. The latter is an interpretation of the affair before you. So, if the matter is contextualized such that talk about oysters and how they taste makes sense, then you have a seamless (roughly) contingent account using the familiar vocabulary. But take the matter to the order of philosophical inquiry, THEN interpretations change, and here, since we are in the throes of what I call "good metaphysics" contextual conditions become very different, extraordinary. The tasting, and even the propositional counterpart, become subsumed under the metaphysics, and the metaphysics is not merely a dialectical spinning of wheels: it is real, in the encounter.

The elephant as you've described it here is the phenomena, not the noumena. If not, how do you distinguish the phenomenal and noumenal? — Hanover

Well, you have touched on the very point: Kant was wrong to make this prohibitive distinction. The noumenal is the most inclusive concept imaginable, and this present moment of p henomenological plenum is inherently noumenal; we just don't see it this way because we are too, well, busy. It's philosophy's job to undercut all this by asking foundational questions. It is a destructive enterprise. As to what noumena is when one finally realizes it is there, in the touch, the sights and so on of the phenomenal world, this is presently out of bounds to our concepts, NOT because the world is different from reason (which it is), but because language is a shared exchange of meaning, and this, call it mystical engagement, has not been collectively realized. This, however, in no way diminishes what it is.

Now, "In the beginning was the Word" never made sense to me since the first time I heard it in school. It still doesn't, if I connect "Word" to and with the meaning of speech. If you echange the words, the saying becomes: "In the beginning was Speech". (Not as elegant, of course, but it shows the point.) It certainly doesn't make sense. Yet, Jews and Christians managed to keep alive this meaning with all sorts of explanations, the most important of which are that God created the world by (the power of) his word, that God's Word became flesh (Christ being that Word), etc. Still, all that doesn't make much sense, does it? Instead, I believe that logic and reasoning (the second meaning of "logos") make much more sense ... "In the beginning was Reason". This can be easily extended to mean "Consciousness", something which a lot of thinkers today consider as governing the Universe. "Consciousness" has no language, no face, no location and not time. — Alkis Piskas

Is speech material? Anyway, so you think conscious thought and its reason was there in the beginning of all things? As if God were a rational being who set out to create something? You take issue with the Word, but I think few take this literally. It is more about what you think: in the beginning was the rational creator who fashioned all things according to a rational plan, and so forth. But you know there are terrible flaws in this reasoning: You have to deal with Kierkegaard who argues against this Hegelian view by pointing out that the world of actuality bears nothing of the rationality that is supposed to be its defining feature. The stuff of things is qualittively different from reason. And the ethics of this world, grounded in being kicked around by viruses and other diseases, and all the lovely torments we know so well, as well as the joys indulgences: this has nothing at all that is rational about it. Falling in love is not a rational affair. Of course, you are saying that God's (just a place holder term, really) reason is not apparent to us, but then there is the matter of following the bread crumbs of life: one begins with the world, and infers from it what is the case metaphysically (in order for metaphysics to be at least prima facie adequate). And this world/creation is not rational. WE are rational, and WE are ethical. Then God created US?? But where is there evidence for something like this?
I don't buy into creation myths at all. But you do say consciousness has no language, location or time. No language? Language is logic and meaning. No language, no logos, for language is the bearer of logos, the evidence for positing logos that comes before us giving rise to inquiry at all. So you can't say outside of language. TIme? But it takes time to utter this, and time to conceive at all. How is reason and logic supposed to be outside of this necessary condition? Location? Same objection.

How do you remember what you can't put into words? — frank

Interesting question. First, an animal can remember without words. Second, I think for us, the words are there and provide a backdrop of remembering, as with all those familiar affairs, but if something novel occurs, it finds its place first within this backdrop, but if it it is truly novel, a new paradigm is needed. If God started appearing here and there as an intuitive and undeniable presence, we would not leave language to make this affirmation; rather we would assimilate the experience, but IN this assimilation, God would remain God, like a new color (as unimaginable as this is) would remain what it is, but would be understood contextualized in the usual way.

Occam's Razor is god? — Banno

Not so much the efficiency of reasoning as the simplicity of encounter. One is not simply cutting out what is not required to explain X; one is rather asking more originary questions. You might say it is Occam's Razor at the level of basic questions, such that the superfluous premise becomes the presumption of speaking/writing at all. Occam's Razor is about an explicit act in theorizing, but it can never, ever be rid of the foundation of thought that makes thought itself possible. The best one can do here is allow philosophy to do its work, which is the destruction of assumptions that are implicitly at work defining the world at the basic level.

Wittgenstein proceeded beyond this; as if the Tractatus were his final word. He subsequently showed the limitations of his view in the Tractatus, showing "the nature of logic" in terms of following and going against rules.

And he had much to say about the identification of simples. What is to count as a simple depends on what one is doing. There's a deep tendency for folk to choose this or that to be the ultimate simple - Logos, information, dialectic (@Pop); but any such choice will be relative to this or that activity - that language game.

So answering the question "what was at the beginning..." - the beginning of what? That'll tell us what game we are playing. — Banno

But Witt never thought that language had a place in giving expression to those spooky, mystical, threshold experiences one encounters that yield meaning without perfect clarity. By his standard, he was simply avoiding vacuous thinking. By mine, he set a standard that explicitly denied talk about the most interesting things about being human. Take a problematic term like "ultimate reality". You find this in the Pali Canon in the Abhiidhamma. Wittgenstein said that such terms make no sense, that they are logically impossible terms because even a word like reality, this absolute that is all inclusive, has no possibility of an alternative, an opposite, and terms make no sense if their opposite cannot be conceived (one cannot conceive of an up with out a down, e.g.). But then, there is this awkward intuition that does not listen to logical objections like this, nor does it refute them. Rather, it is IN the indeterminacy that language must deal, elucidate, elaborate, and so on.
Hence, my thoughts on Witt. regarding tis matter. The "game" is certainly afoot, but the point I am making is this: language games are open is the sense that interplay is indeterminate, endlessly reinventing (the world, Rorty and his pragmatist predecessors say, is made, not discovered); but I am claiming there is something that is NOT a game at all in the middle of all this, which is intimated when the game is intentionally, if partially, terminated, yet inquiry moves forward.

Heidegger thought the Buddhists were on to something. I think he was right.

The relationship of one part to another, is where logical structure begins. This is the beginning of knowledge. Knowledge is related and integrated, and is progressively built upon, such that any subsequent structure ( added understanding ) has to fit existing logical structure, as per constructivism. So, things understood tomorrow have to be understood in terms of today's understanding. So, it is a building onto current understanding. — Pop

I don't take issue with this at all. In fact, it is the kind of thing Derrida makes a big deal out of: after all, if (following Saussure) relationships is the kind of thing knowledge IS, then this makes knowledge indeterminate, for the relationship is not direct, but diffuse among that which is not posited but is in relation to what is posited, and the relation itself becomes a part of positing. Nothing singular can stand out, ever. Logical structure refers not to the form of knowledge but the content, and affirmations, say, scientific ones, hold their place only because they await sufficient cause, that is, dialectic opposition, to change. This is Kuhn, or close to what he says in Structures of Scientific Revolutions.
Rorty loved Kuhn, and Rorty helped me confirm some basic ideas. His trouble was that when he got to that threshold where he knew knowledge did not cling to the object, had no ontological claim to the "what" of the thing, he did what all goo d intellectuals do: he dismissed all non intellectual alternatives. Never occurred to him (that I have read) that deconstruction really meant destruction to achieve insight. Can't imagine his type "sitting quietly, doing nothing", but then, this is what I privilege over all esle, for it opens the door to, well, sheer openness, which is where philosophy is directing us.

The word God means moral perfection and innocence. Such a state seems impossible for humans and for a necessary being, although not for a lower "god". There cannot be a being of Pure Act because virtues are divided up between ones a being can have by nature and ones that require the eye of the tiger to obtain. There might be a being of infinite innocence but it couldn't have the maximum of courage if it was always in a blissful changeless state "rolling around heaven all day". Again, there is innocence and acquired goods, childhood-natural goods and goods that must be performed. So are there wizards and a pantheon? Are these who "aliens" really are? It's not bad to think so. I listen to a lot of traditional religious music and connect with the mystical ethos of it. But all this talk of the world coming from a language, whether it be of Genesis or an Om, goes back to the paternal Pure Act being of traditional religion who in reality can't represent all reality because some goods in reality must be experienced in order to partake of. — Gregory

i will put aside much of this. Sorry, because people who think like this are often very good people; I just take issue with what I call bad metaphysics. I would put attention to the interesting parts. For example, moral perfection and innocence? Infinite innocence? Here is a problem: infinite innocence, or, pure innocence. This idea suggests one can do no wrong because one IS a perfectly good will. Being a perfectly good will does not guarantee perfect actions since perfect actions are actions in the world, and all that is in the world is contingent, and knowledge of the world is requisite for action. To know the world is to know all about ethical entanglements, their complexities and the institutions of culture and language that make them so, and this is the very essence of what is NOT pure innocence. A purely innocent person is like a child, full of joy and spontaneity, but really not challenged in the ways of intersubjective thinking.
Then this talk a "paternal Pure Act". I frankly don't like the paternal part, but I do like the idea that "some goods in reality must be experienced". But what IS this Good that needs to be experienced? You can say it is a good of divinity, but then, what is there in the world that suggests divinity? It really does come down to this: We make claims, assertions, but the validity of these depends on the world having something that "says" this. The world must speak first! to warrant any claim at all. What is there, I ask, in the world, that gives warrant to this "Goodness"?

A speculative thinker who is almost unreadable and readily misinterpreted is unlikely to help. How about one of the numerous physicists writing on the subject? — Tom Storm

But these comments are altogether vague. My experience tells me you haven't read Heidegger at all. Physics presupposes exactly what needs to be examined, therefore, they say little or nothing of philosophical interest.

Conclusion: Unfortunately, the statement "In the beginning was the Word", wherever it comes from, has no value for me as interpreted by the Bible and the majority of the Jewish and Christian people. — Alkis Piskas

I tend to agree with a lot of what you say, the gist being that talk about "the word" really should be taken as a way to describe God's creation of the world, or, the foundations of existence, and so on. This is an absurd presumption of language and a testament to the boundless need we have to bring things under our control. It is on this point I would begin a response. While this anthropomorphic tendency certain does lead to absurd thinking, it is important to observe that the anthropomorphic presence is also presence of what is not anthropomorphic at all, for to see that this cup on the table is a "worded" situation, that is, I think about the cup, the table, "being on" something, and so on, even if I don't explicitly say this on recognition. And when I look up and behold all things, there is the stamp of logic and language all over it; it is what makes the world familiar to the understanding for us (not so much animals, and this is an interesting point for another time).

Any presence that comes before a person is a thoughtful presence, otherwise it is not a presence at all, as in an infants mind blooming and buzzing, there is no presence of anything until singularities are carved out of the world via language (the notion of mere familiarity and language being joined at the hip is an interesting one). So, when it comes to something being at all, we are deep in language, the word. The foundational analysis of existence must be about the language that separates, individualizes and carves out meaning out of "difference".

When the issue of God and creation and the beginning of all things, one way to think of this is to respect that language brings "the world" into being qui9te literally. Now, what is beyond language is another matter, but it needs to be approached not as a distant metaphysical impossibility, but a very close, intimate one: after all, the language in question is all over the place, there, when I awaken in the morning in eerything.

My thinking is that we need to allow the term beginning loses its value here altogether, just as you say, but this must be done in the intimacy of the actual encounter with the world, not with an understanding historical metaphysics of the Bible and Jewish metaphysics (though this latter brings to mind things I know little of, but have gathered some through Levinas and Buber and other who live in two worlds, really, philosophy and religion. If you have something interesting to read on this, let me know).

You're referencing sort of a raw data feed that enters your brain, unprocessed at all by reason. It's a hyper-empiricism, devoid of rational organization within the mind. Was this not part of Kant's project in responding to Hume? That is, we can't see the causation when one billiard ball hits the other, so our mind imposes it, which is no different than all the other things our mind imposes on the world in order to understand it, whether that be space, time, or other sorts of things?

The immediate sense impression you reference doesn't make sense to me because it would necessarily be mediated in some way. That mediation isn't limited to sense organs, but by reason itself, which is in fact impacted by language.

So explain to me the elephant just as it is, unmediated by sensory organs or reason. How could that ever be done - the pure unadulterated elephant? — Hanover

Take Kant's position, and there you are , this noumenal entity whose very thought structure prohibits access to the noumenal eternity that is the metaphysical setting for, well, where we really are, and what we really are; but you absolutely cannot speak of this, understand this, because it is beyond the categories of thought, as well as space and time. By this account, you night as well just sit back, try to be a good person via the categorical imperative, and drop all pretentions of making sense out of this metaphysics.
My claim (borrowed, put together) is that this conception can only lead to one conclusion: that cat on the sofa is really not a cat on a sofa at all, but I cannot see this because I understand the world only through my cognitive and sensory limitations ( and , I should add, you get the same conclusion with the materialist's assumption that all we actually perceive is the inside of a brain). But consider: the very noumena that is supposed to be utterly hands off to the understanding cannot be exclusive in any way: it is the transcendental whole, all inclusive, and this include the this obsevable world. Finitude and infinity are not mutually exclusive; rather the latter must subsume the former, and this means my perception of the cat being on the sofa is no less noumenal than that which is supposed to be beyond the threshold of Kantian epistemology.
The elephant in t he room is this "presence" that is noumenal that is right there IN the empirical event unfolding before my eyes and mind. Looking for eternity, divinity, the absolute is therefore a matter of destruction of the conceptual dynamics that keep this extraordinary apprehension at bay.
Real meditation is destructive.

And this insight is not from a transcendent vantage point? — frank

A most revealing question: How is it that within logic, we can acknowledge logic's limitation in a way that is non trivial, non abstract? We see delimitations all the time, but these are contingent, that is, set up by equational details, but to question logic itself is not to deny logic, which is impossible, a performative contradiction, but to set oneself apart (Dosteovsky: Am I a piano key?) from it, for logic does not come to us as an empty form, but full of the language and culture that makes a claim on belief, sets the terms of engagement in the world. It is not the logic, but the world and its institution (Kierkegaard's sense of original sin) that occlude something "Other". And we stand on this primordial and very unfamiliar threshold. My claim is that this is where philosophy is trying to take us.

The passage in John 1:1 is mysticism with roots in platonism and stoicism. I think the assumption running through it was that the world's logic is our logic. We perceive the world's logic through a kind of sympathy that could be described as having access to the divine mind through logic. Or you could say our minds are the Divine mind, just muddied.

Two side effects were:

1. The One, which is a higher, unexpressable truth, and

2. Matter, the mind's dead end.

These are like poles between which the mind swings like a pendulum. And this is the trinity, btw: the Christian translation is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The original was One, Logos, and Anima. — frank

And to make that dramatic step toward the one: how is this done? Isn't the logos, in this extraordinary affair, simply a term that would possess what it is that lies so impossibly before the inquirer? Philosophy is, one might say, the true final frontier, and the obstacles it presents are about its own structure and history. The utterance itself turns on, militates against, the endeavor! For the finality lies not in a more and more elaborate construction of a grand thesis, as if Hegelian Geist were unfolding in the dialectical path of conceiving it, but in the impossible simplicity that is originally there. Impossible because, recalling Kierkegaard, actuality is NOT rational. Divinity discovery is not rational achievement.

"In the beginning" there were (are?) vacuum fluctuations. — 180 Proof

Certainly. But it depends on if you are interested in philosophical analysis or scientific. This latter is not at the basic level, for it presupposes phenomenal presentedness.

The Greek ‘logos’ as presupposed by a beginning has precedence. Yet the ultimate in logos means not just ‘word’ or ‘logic’ - it points to the possibility/impossibility of experiencing the perfect relation or absolute interconnectedness (omniscience). And logos is not alone. — Possibility

But to talk about possibility of impossibility points first to the "'words or logic" that constructs concepts like possibility and impossibility. Perfect relation? What is this if not a language construction? Absolute interconnectedness in the logos? What is this if not a logical interconnectedness? That is, the "saying" is always analytically first.

What else is presupposed by a beginning? Aristotle refers to logos alongside ethos and pathos in terms of one’s capacity or potential to persuade. Except an ultimate notion of ethos is not just about character, but points to the possibility/impossibility of achieving quality, or excellence (omnibenevolence) through distinction. And the ultimate in pathos is not just about feeling or motivation, but points to the possibility/impossibility of tapping into an infinite source of energy (omnipotence). — Possibility

And this tapping into eternity, how does this cash out in analysis? Terms like finitude and infinity are fascinating to me, but it is not as if they are exhausted in the mere utterance, the incidental usage. for the question posed here goes to the structure of time itself. Time, I claim (and I am no more than what I read) is the structure of finitude, and finitude is subsumed by eternity, both, obviously, difficult terms and deserve discussion, but the final discussion to be had on this and any matter looks at the th phenomenological analysis of time. What is time? This is presupposed by talk about beginnings.

It is at the intersection of these possibilities/impossibilities of absolute, infinite perfection, which both limit and are contingent upon each other, that we find a beginning, the origin of ideas and meaning, to potential and value, and from there to events and ‘beginnings’. No relation, however perfect, could even exist without experience: the possibility of energy source differentiated by quality. And no source of energy, however infinite, is even useful without identity: the possibility of distinguishing the quality of proper relations. And finally, there can be no distinction of excellence or quality without the fundamental laws of physics: the possibility of ideal relation in the use of energy. And vice versa. — Possibility

Don't know what you mean by infinite perfection. Not that I have no ideas about such a thing, but what you mean is not clear. At any rate, This intersection: is there just this (leaning Heideggarian) construction? Or is there not something, if you will, behind this in the reductive act of suspending all these possibilities? Once you step into that rarified world where language's grasp on the givenness of things is loosened, and meaning is free from interpretative restraint, is there not some undeniable qualitative change in the perceptual event as such?

What you say about identity is quite right, I think, and this then makes a turn toward agency, for identity is general, definitional, as in the identity of a term, a concept, but agency is all about the actuality of what it is (who it is). Most clearly an issue for ethics.

λόγος? Or as a can of tomato soup. But actually, neither. The rest pure nonsense, at least wrt λόγος. — tim wood

This term has a long history. It is taken up to refer to a basic analysis of the world as it is understood, received by the understanding. It is the property of language that makes thought possible as if the thoughts of individuals are strung together by something essential, the very essence of intelligibility, the way the world "discloses" itself in language, if you like.
But don't see how this is all nonsense (or, maybe I do), unless you tell me how.

You touched upon it with your quote from Wit. Dig a little deeper and you find that the relationship of two things, is the metaphysical base of logic. It turns out that this relation, or interaction is information. A bit much to unload here, but If you skim this short thread, you'll get the idea — Pop

I skimmed. The metaphysical basis of logic, as you say, and Wittgenstein: you know such an idea is an oxymoron in his thinking?
As to the tutorial, I found it a bit elementary. Not wrong, but a bit off the mark. Such discussion of perceptual knowledge relationships begs the question, what is knowledge? which is presupposed in all this. Wittgenstein's Tractatus draw lines between sensible propositions, and nonsensible one, claiming that even in his own exposition he was in violation. Many take this as they take Kant: an endorsement of positivism, which attempts to reduce what is unclear available, familiar language. this, I claim, cleanses philosophical thought of all that is truly extraordinary about being human, the opposite of philosophy.

God! Or a joint effort of more of them. The usual meaning of a beginning doesnt apply to his act of creation. His word must not be taken litterally. He usher the words "let it be", and the universe, in its eternity, came to be. It's the eternal and infinite universe we see today. Describable by physics (and math describing the physics) as far its material an spatiotemporal structure is concerned. God(s) stands on the outside of it (again, not an outside applicable litterally, as outside the house) and on the inside as well, as he created the universe from within himself.

So when you curse, God(s) curse(s) himself (themself). Comit suicide and you kill a part of God(s). Not that he (they) would mind, after all, that would be to confess his (their) own fallibility. — DeScheleSchilder

He "ushers" the words? What could this be? Speak, usher, actually ushering is so vague one might as well leave it alone altogether: God.....then there was a world. But this "then" is a causal word, or is it meant to be sufficient reason, so the creation is simply a mere thought? But thought and speech cannot be separated, can they?

But then, it is the literal I am most concerned with. Not the idea and its intent, obviously, but the simple, albeit ignored, fact that in order to conceive of God, creation, or anything else, one has to conceive, that is, think, use words. It is here, in the language relationship to the world that the term God and creation that such things have to be unpacked. What we find, I claim, is a world reduced to its actuality that has been neglected in all the clutter. Here you find disclosure of what these concepts mean, but it is existential disclosure, not discursive. A reduction (see Husserl's epoche) simplifies.

Language is the technology for negation and absence. It's allows us to say what the world isn't, and that allows us to say what it is.

It makes the world that way. — frank

Very Hegelian, and not wrong, by my thinking. But what happens when one explicitly allows language's abundance to fall away, and loosen its tacit grip on the given moment? One can do this; it is philosophy's job to do this, that is, to hammer away at assumptions that most don't even know are there. This is a process of litereally unmaking the world, for these assumptions were never inert eidetic entities sitting in some mental basket just waiting to be summoned. They are actively, quite literally, defining the world, making it a familiar place. It is this familiarity that is the enemy of philosophical enlightenment.

So yes, let's say an assertion, an affirmation carries in its meaning the all that is not what sits before one, just as a number sits, in its affirmation, a broad range of contextual "other" numbers. One is not two, but were it not for two, one could not be one, for to apprehend one is a diffuse, "regional" affair, and there is no real singularity.

Then how do my assertions acquire validity at all? It is via the elephant in the room: existence. Put one's attention on the reduction of the actuality that lies before one, reducing its Being to appearance, to phenomena only, dismissing all else. My claim is that this is an astonishing method of foundational thinking that intimates something deeply important about being here.

How are you defining “primordial” exactly? Is it an abstract term with some concrete meaning, or just a ritualistic and impressive noise one might make - a group identifying chant? — apokrisis

I take my place among those who genuinely think that philosophy's job is to "discover" something original, beneath the complexity of language and culture and all of its indulgences and presumption, that is the existential basis for terms like divinity or the metaethical good. Real philosophy begins with a reduction method of suspending the vast number of competing claims that clutter thought and give misleading impression that what we seek is complex, like a scientific theory.

What is primordial or if you prefer, originary, is intimated through a pursuit of givenness as such. Of course, such a claim is readily dismissed by most. Such is the thinking that holds whatever can make a cell phone or a flat screen tv must also be suitable for philosophy. Naïve.

Here is the terminal point of "beginnings" where religion finds its existential reality: the impossibility of conceiving beyond the boundaries of the thought that makes beginnings possible by conceiving of them, for what is possible that cannot be thought? One must take Wittgenstein very seriously here; but then, one must put him down very emphatically: it is in the saying, the twilight world, where meaning meets its dark underpinning, and the world is a naked impossibility---this is brass ring of both religion and philosophy.
— Constance

Could you expand on this? — frank

Remember Wittgenstein in the Tractatus was adamant about stepping beyond what the rules of logic prohibited. There is this line that cannot be crossed, the line of impossible utterances, for what is given to us must be able to be cast in logical structure, which prohibits, for example, talking about the "nature" of logic itself: to explain what logic is, one would have to step out of logic to a point of observation through another medium of symbolic representation, and this would need further to be validated in the same way, and so on. So one is stuck within the self affirming givenness of logic.
But this encourages a positivistic take on analyzing the world at the level of basic questions. Clarity of what logic permits is the best we can do! And this is where my complaint begins, for the world is not clear at all at the basic level, yet it does yield meaning when analysis is brought to bear on it at its foundations. One could call this an apophatic approach to philosophy, which is where the logic takes one: not the dull precision of making finer and finer adjustments in arguments, and not the attachment to empirical science so popular today. Rather, the "openness" of thought that encounters itself, and instead of merging more abstractly into discursive trains of thought, one is brought into the the world "itself", back into Being, into presence.
Of course, all this is much debated. I would say this is exactly where the debate should be.

One might call this the ‘metaphysics of presence’, after Heidegger and Derrida. Indeed, if one begins with presence , then one finds oneself ‘before’ language , becuase presence, as self-presence, auto-affection, self-identity, must be before language since it precedes relation. The trick is to think before presence Then language reappears , not as that which takes place between presences , but as prior to presence. — Joshs

But Kierkegaard (and I am in the middle of Paul Ricoeur Time and Narrative. see how he handles it) will "leap" upon this: that past is always already (not his language, of course) the present, for every moment of cognition that can call the past the past, is not executed in the past, but the present, and the past "adumbration" (Husserl) is really a subsuming present.
For me, there is no way out of this, though Heidegger would say I am with Husserl, walking on water, I respond, the world is walking on water: not turtles all the way down, but intimations, foggy but profound, that reveal something extraordinary, occluded by everydayness and the presumptions of science. The trick for me is to follow the reduction to its end: the more reduction, the more givenness, is Michel Henry's way of putting it. He ignores Derrida....of does he? Caputo thinks Derrida is the very height of apophatic theology. His discussion confuses me.

Unless we are elite physicists we have no idea how to even conceive of these matters. Any wonder that literature/religion/myth/philosophy are so attractive. For my money any discussion of this subject is exceptionally speculative and the best we can do is read the distilled ideas of experts and pretend we understand.

'Big Bang' is a term used by Fred Hoyle in 1949 to gently mock the event, so don't get bogged down in the wording. Physicists do not believe there was explosion but an expansion. Personally I couldn't care less.

The idea of beginnings and endings seem to me to be human conceptions and preoccupations and, while such frames certainly match lived experience on earth, they can hardly be expected to describe all which is the case. — Tom Storm

Sure. Which experts do you have in mind? How about Heidegger?

I agree with your post. As Kant said about the series of past causes, it's indeterminate. We can speculate if it's eternal or not but time itself is either material or mystical. Both options seem as absurd as a finite or infinite past seemed to Kant. So we have a casual series which science makes rational sense of. Where it starts is beyond us which is why religion talks about a "beginning" so much. It becomes a religious question because science can't know the whole of reality — Gregory

But then, it is this Kantian prohibition I want to put to rest. Take a qualified Hegelian look at Kant: What lies before your eyes is a microcosm of God, unfinished, but in it there is the noumenal presence, and there is no sharp line that sets noumena off from phenomena. Beyond Hegel, I invite one practice the infamous phenomenological reduction (Husserl) in order to witness a world reduced to presence.
Of course, there is a world of argument here, through Derrida and beyond (see the French theological turn in Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, et al). But basically i agree with working to divest theory of its metaphysical encumbrances as well as its scientific encumbrances, and I actually believe this can lead to something revelatory, call it Husserl's yoga.

There is no prior. God created the whole if infinity of time. No time involved. The word was spoken and BANG. The eternal universe was there. His wird is revealed. I heard him speak. The is the holy trinity. His own image. Thats from what he created. From himself. The contemplation of the holy trinity is the contemplation of god. But Rishin no care about god. God can go to hell says Rishon. As far as I'm cincerned god is dead. I care about his creation though... — Prishon

Not quite along the lines I had in mind. Don't think about temporal priority, rather think about logical priority as in something presupposing another and the other then is logically prior to it, meaning you cannot conceive of the one without the other. So, what is prior to this whole enterprise of talking about big bangs and creation is the process of thought itself that is presupposed. Thought is not a mirror to nature, but is extremely opaque, with its logic, vocabularies, semiotics, and its signifiers and signifieds, and on and on.
As for God, it is not a vacuous concept, but begs to be put under the microscope of inquiry: what does it mean? Its meaning is laid bare by examining what is present in the world to find what it is that the concept does, what it is a response to, why it was ever conceived, and so on. So before one talks about God, one needs bring out this essential meaning.

If God contains of the good of (1) he has no more casual power than the universe. If he is a necessary being he can only have (1) and not (2) because he doesn't change and can't be tested or do wrong. The conclusion is God has no casual power unless he is contingent — Gregory

But go back to the beginning: the good? What do you mean by this word? Why do you take this God idea seriously? I mean, if you're going to talk about God, why not put aside traditional metaphysical notions God being a necessary being or a changeless being? What does this term 'God" mean; address this question, then move on to implications of His being.

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was god. This is very much the same as all beginnings, in the sense that they are a relation of one thing to another. We see this at the base of all theories: energy and it's information ( frequency and amplitude ) create a wavicle, a field and its excitation, a string and it's vibration, order and entropy, 1+1. These are the limits of logic / metaphysics. — Pop

Odd that you make that left turn into "energy and its information" for it is a move away from where you might have headed, which is the analysis of meaning and difference (and deference). Or: diffusion of meaning in the positive assertion. One cannot say what a thing is and have the meaning fixed and singular, as if the saying definitively grasped what it was. More basic than logic, for it goes to the very possibility of a positive assertion.

To construct anything one has to begin by relating one thing to another. Here begins our relational understanding. The construction of a relation is necessary to create a distinction, such that in relation to each other two things become distinct. The distinction creates information. This is the beginning of consciousness "as we know it". Of course, assuming a systems understanding, this relational beginning would have it's counterpart in the real world. So the "real" world starts in exactly the same way. :smile: — Pop

Sounds like you're close to something, but then ...information?? Counterpart in the real world? At any rate, the construction of relation as constituting meaning is close to a good point, I think. The distinction: can you elaborate? say more about this "counterpart" if you would.

These merge, or tend to, in simplicity. Try some. — tim wood

Well then, the proof is in the pudding. Clarity simpliciter is not the issue here. It is clarity at the sacrifice of substance. The substance I have in mind is the final confrontation of philosophy whereby the world reveals it own inner militation against any thesis that would possess it. The simplicity here is the final simplicity, whereby one acknowledges that all along it is not the pursuit of conceptualization and its endless inventiveness that is sought by philosophy, but value, and here, not the endless valorization of novel amusements, but existential simplicity: the eternal present. Herein lies God.

God's word has the power of creation. — baker

Sure. But in a more realistic way, we can ask how it is that language, "the word", constructs meaning that makes it possible at all to conceive of anything at all. The tree in the Eden was a knowledge tree, so what is knowledge? It is the power of language and logic. We were kicked out of Eden because we developed that supreme violation of comfort and familiarity: the ability to inquire. Nothing but trouble from there.
Language "creates" the world. Prior to this, there is no world; there is what cannot be said, but talking like this raises Wittgenstein's, and the Buddhist's, ire. But once acquired, language is the backdrop of understanding that constitutes a person, who can then drop the explicit, move back into the primordial through the regressive (call it) method of yoga, and let the world speak as it once did.

This is from John 1:1 from the New Testament. My understanding is that "the word" is the translation of the Greek logos, which is understood as Jesus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos_(Christianity). — Hanover

It is from the Greek, and can be taken to refer to language and logic, and how it is essential to apprehend the world: apprehending the world, taking it in to the understanding, realizing what things "are" is all done in the meanings generated by language, and since this already there as essential prior to any specific field of understanding, a study of the way language and its meanings structures the world is considered by many to be where true foundational philosophical inquiry rests. The true bedrock of analysis at the level of the most basic questions is language. The question that is presented here is, when one sees this, and learns to think at this level, the world shows itself as more, much more than language can say. Consider terrible pain as a very simple example. Is my apprehension of pain an expression of logos? Now, my understanding reaches into my vocabularies for different things that bring the pain to light and raise my awareness, but IN this contextualizing, the pain stands out as entirely Other than logos.

Richard Friedman in "Commentary on the Torah" offers a direct translation from the Hebrew as "In the beginning of God's creating the skies and the earth - when the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God's spirit was hovering on the face of the water, God said "let there be light,."

This does not suggest creation ex nihilo, but suggests God created order from the pre-existing chaos. — Hanover

I do like the way the Bible takes matters that are foundational and constructs meanings to explain things. At the very least, it shows a regard for matters of fundamental importance that is all but lost in modern culture (busy, busy, distracted). At most, it bares the soul in its primordiality, prior to the "distance" created by culturally valorized trivia.
But let's face it, God didn't say anything. BUT: this saying can be seen as the way language in its iterations, its propositions, its theorizing, its dialectics, and so on, constructs meaningful possibilities that ar beyond language. Language makes it possible for one to see that at the basic level, our ideas are never equal to the ideatum, and our desires are never equal to the desideratum.
Closing in on Hegel here......

And this you have done. In a sense, such questions push us out of our boat - sink the boat - and leave us in a sea. What then? The ancient answer is to swim. — tim wood

The sea? Boats? This is rhetorical, right? But I don't deal in vague metaphors. Do you think Kant was a good sea faring captain? Why, pray, continue....

Then, of course, the actual arguments step forward. My claim is that first, one takes the world as it is rather than what it is reducible to in order to accommodate the lame assumption that nothing can be said. Second, what can be said

The sea is a common metaphor for alienation at the basic level where meanings lose their grasp of the world, but it is also the place where one confronts this alienation: one has to "experience" this, in they way Ahab experienced that whale: with passion. But Ahab did have the "advantage" of being offended, illustrating that the world does not disclose itself in the deep recesses of its being unless one has somehow put the mundane attachments at risk. A person needs break he bonds that tie one to trivial interpretations. As with Ahab, it does not always go well. But then, it can go very well indeed, as with the Buddha. How well? Read into the Pali canon. I wonder if this rings a bell, the Abhidhamma. Weird to read, granted, but make the effort to grasp the essentials, and things get very interesting. Even Heidegger thought this contains something primordial.
Talk about primordiality to analytic philosopher and you will get only blank stares.

Not if there is an eternal universe. A 4d spatial static substrate on which our universe evolves. And a next one.
There was a fluctuating time before it took of in one direction (entropic time). — Prishon

But the question here is about the religious dimension of human existence, and 4d spatiality is a science term that has no bearing. You are working in a world of scientific assumptions, but this has little to do with the foundation of meanings that constitute the human condition at the level of basic questions, the level where the most important issues arise. Too much analytic philosophy has turned philosophy into exactly this kind sanitized theorizing.
Authentic philosophy does not assume things to be the case that can stand a more fundamental analysis. Before you can even talk about time, one has to ask, what is the structure of time that is there PRIOR to, that is, presupposed by normal science.
Eternal? What can this possible even mean?

I don't agree that "religion [[i]is[/i]] a philosophical matter." For one thing, religion answers unanswerable questions all the time, and in so many different ways, step right up, take your pick something for everyone at every price point, catering to every belief. Non-sense, then, seems to be a common choice of an answer.

And as to nonsense, my own view is that people are not completely stupid, so if they deal in nonsense, it must be for some reason, some purpose to some end.

Beyond that, however, what would you have philosophy say? That is, what's your point? — tim wood

But what is nonsense? Vague talk about the limits of logic and how this renders the most salient dimensions of human existence unspeakable is just dismissive, and sets one on a course of inquiry that, in positivist fashion, prizes clarity over substance, and if "Making our Ideas Clear" (Peirce) were the be all and end all of philosophy. This is rubbish of the worst kind, closing doors to contents of meaning and experience.
My point is to ask basic questions as if we actually existed, to follow Kierkegaard, and inquire as if the weight of the world and all its significance were more than an abstract study of the law of the excluded middle. Such questions go to the core of what a question is, which is never to be exceeded by what is abstracted FROM it, as with cognition in search of cognitively constructed equations that can neatly packaged and sold off to deluded academics.

See the question about the big bang. There is no beginning. The universe is eternal. Once in a while, when the remnants of a big bang have fled into infinity, there are only fluctuating (virtual) quantum fields in spacetime. Giving rise to excitement. ie, reality. After new inflation (new big bang). — Prishon

But the question is begged: Prior to the Big Bang as a meaningful notion at all, there is the language out of which this theory in physics is constructed. Big? What does this mean? It is a particle of language, so what it means is contingent on what language means. How can language be examined, given that it takes language to do the examining? Now you are in a world of thought bound, not open, for the struggle to make language make sense ends, inevitably, with a compromise, a reduction, and delimitation, and this approach has been exhausted, evidenced by the bankrupt endeavors of analytic philosophy.

No: the matter has to be taken more, if you will, personally: there is no objective world of mountains and valleys and car washes simpliciter. Such thinking is naive to philosophy. There are only worlds and mysterious connections. This mystery has to be experienced intimately, just as one experiences one's daily affairs with all the passions being diffused among trivialities, and one is always already spent prior to getting even to the threshold at all.

The idea that reality inhabits "the dark places where language cannot go," is pretty common. Kant's noumena, Lao Tzu's Tao, Schopenhauer's will are all grappling with what comes during "the original encounter with the world." — T Clark

Kant had one thing in mind: NOT to go there. Read his transcendental dialectics. No, they do not bring into its thematic distinction. Saying the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao is indicative merely and presents no substantive work on threshold philosophical experience. Schopenhauer , as far as I've read (will read into it if you have something in mind) does not make an existential issue of the alienation that constitutes the encounter with the world logically prior to all else. He presents the concept of the will, , but does not examine it fully as a crisis that lies beneath the mundanity of normal affairs and a real underpinning to being in the world that can be exposed, brought to analysis. This latter can only occur when a philosophical assault is brought to bear upon the living event of being in the world.

What I have in mind is the truly hard question of philosophy, which is not consciousness (though indirectly, one can claim this) but presence.

I am not committed to the view that phenomenal states are reducible to physical brain activity although I hold it tentatively. I also agree that the brain, under this tentative view, will be the threshold of all epistemic events (true beliefs, false beliefs, believed propositions, etc...). I don't have anything that permits moving across this boundary and I am not aware that I argued that epistemic events can be extended beyond the brain? If I did imply this then I state now that I do not argue this. My point was that if I am a brain in a vat, then I am the only mind in existence. Therefore, there is no other mind for me to share the sematic content of my language with or to form a benchmark of following the rules of attributing meaning to the terms "brain" and "vat" correctly. I'm not quite sure what you are trying to argue here. — Ghost Light

When I say committed I mean the same kind of regard we have for any other fact of the world, and "facts" are doxastically binding . Mind/brain correlation very binding at this level of discussion because there is so much evidence for it. But then, ALL facts are tentatively posited, we just don't think of it like this because we are too busy. That is simply the nature of the world. Another way of putting this is to make one move to a deeper order of thinking, which is phenomenology, something I read and try to encourage in others. In this method of understanding affairs, what you call tentative is called hermeneutics. I am committed to believing many things, like the direction of gravitational pull or that the stars are not gods, but when the very act of knowledge itself comes under review, I find such things open to inquiry, not closed as in the usual way of getting along in the world.

The only mind? Two ways to look at it: In the actual scenario, there is your brain, the brains of the scientists, those who built the vat, those who clean their streets, and so on. But this is not how this spells out philosophically at all. We are being called to question our epistemic relation to the world as a relation, all other details being incidental. So now we can observe this relation freely. There is me, my cat on the sofa and I know this to be the case, e.g.

As to semantic content, this is where the whole thing gets interesting, spooky, really. There is no doubt that there are others, and that we have the various sematic exchanges with them, and all that happens in the first order world actually happens. This is not being doubted here. What is being acknowledged is that all this is "happening" somehow in a brain. The question is how, and the answer to this must lie beyond the simply naturalistic attitude, for by this account, I should know my cat any more than my dented car fenders "knows" the offending guard rail.

In order to state, even mentally, the proposition that you are not a brain in a vat, you first need to hold a consistent meaning of the world "brain" and "vat". The meaning needs to be stable from the moment the ideas first form to when the proposition is stated and from that point onwards. If you are a brain in a vat (the only mind in existence), then this cannot be done. You would have no way to know that what you meant by "brain" and "vat" 10 seconds ago is the same as what you mean by the terms now. Without external minds anchoring the meaning through agreed rule following systems (Kripke, 1982) the proposition you state of not being a brain in a vat cannot even be made sense of for you to know its truth or falsehood. — Ghost Light

Brains and vats are pretty stable, aren't they? Like any other common nouns. External minds do indeed anchor affairs through agreement and nothing changes this fact as it is all laid out clearly as ever. The only difference is that we have entered another order of analysis, coerced, really, to do this by the inexplicable epistemic connection between a mind and the observable world. As to time and knowing, I am not clear on you point. But it does open a very interesting question of the structure of time, with its past, present and future. Can sense be made of this at all?

especially in your first paragraph about my dismissal of the proposition "I am a brain in a vat" as ad hoc. — Ghost Light

Ad hoc because when the question is raised about this relation between the knower and the known, it is often disregarded (Gettier problems are like this) because his is the way of analytic philosophy which along with Wittgenstein simply puts the matter in the bin of impossible questions and disregards it. This is ad hoc, dismissing something with a singular justification just to dismiss it.

A good argument against brain in vat scenarios is the idea that the semantic content of our language (meaning of words) would make no sense if I was the only brain/mind in existence. If I was a brain in a vat, then I could not even make sense of the proposition that I was a brain in a vat (via the private language argument and rule following paradoxes showing that language, semantic content and meaning are publicly held phenomena). It would be impossible for the terms "brain" and "vat" in my conceptualisation of the proposition - 'I am a brain in a vat' to actually have semantic content and meaning to refer to anything such as a real brain in a real vat. — Ghost Light

But then a couple of things come to bear. First, if you are, as I am, committed to the empirical thesis that phenomenal affairs are reducible to brain activity (though, keeping in mind that this in turn may be reducible to something more fundamental), evidenced by many occasions of brain surgery while completely awake for the treatment of epilepsy, etc.), then the brain is going to be the threshold of epistemic events. Period. What do you have that permits exceeding this boundary? The BIV simply presents this impossible issue. Can it be doubted that my thoughts of my cat in the occurrent perceptual moment are enclosed in a context of referentiality that is brain and only brain? One is not here asking how seems to be the case, but what follows from undeniable premises. You have to work this out, otherwise, your dismissal is purely ad hoc.
You can make sense of being a brain in a vat; of course: one simply deploys a thesis that does not insist on this impossible relationship: phenomenology and hermeneutics. the idea that my cat is on the sofa (or that I am not a brain in a vat) is an interpretation of the events before me, and terms like inside and outside the brain are all interpretative, contingent, resting on assumptions about the world that are, well, contingent. There is no solid ground beneath the feet epistemically speaking; only more thinking, ideas, more interpretatively bound language.
The question then goes to what is there in the world that is not a contingently bound idea that gives rise to all this talk about things outside me. The answer appears to be that there is inherent in the world of our existence this "sense" of the Other. It is IN the phenomenal reality of our affairs, but in the most basic analysis, it is not to be found there in it finality.
An odd business, this world we are IN.

Why? — baker

Because we say inside this and outside that all the time. The matter here turns on whether "inside/outside" talk has any meaning here. It's like a hall of mirrors in which what appears to be the out there, apart from you, is really just a reflection of yourself: Everywhere you turn to establish the "outside" of the cat affair, you are referred back to the phenomenological. No exceptions seem possible, for to even say "cat" you are referred to someone's understanding, and the analysis of this understanding has nothing to do with anything extra-phenomenological; except! for the mysterious "otherness" which stands at the threshold of what is "other". Lots of phenomenological studies on this business, this other that is an inextricable part of phenomena. How is it possible? One cannot reach across the room and put the otherness of the cat in the brain, so how does otherness get there?
Few even see this as a question, let alone THE question on which the most profound insight into human ontology rests.