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.

While I didn’t technically ask a question, I was querying Tim, as to how he thought the one grounded in the other. The quote merely relates to Tim’s assertion, as a preliminary reference. — Mww

Yes, I see. But you did "ask" an implicit question of Time Wood, with "I shall await your exposition as to how the one might be grounded in the other," which is, "How can the one be grounded in the other?" Sounds more like a clear, if impilcit, question.

One hears the same sort of thing from those who explain what supposedly keeps us from accepting Jesus as our Savior. — Ciceronianus

Certainly no argument should be determined ad populum. But then, consider that when it comes to Jesus, the standards are quite low, and often ridiculous. Heidegger commands the respect of generations of philosophers, is a seminal thinker which changed the face of philosophical thought. I mean the body of post Heiedggerian thought is staggering.

And btw: you don't think Jesus is our savior? This entirely depends on how this is interpreted.

Maybe I missed the issue coming in as I did. I took it that your question as to how the one might be grounded in the other referred to how an analysis of reason and judgment could be a ground (a general notion) for practical affairs in light of the fact that prior to any formal exposition there is first the "everyman" acting spontaneously, not thinking analytically, and so, any analysis of thinking as such would not come to bear on the practical end of things.
I read through your discussion quickly, so I could have missed the mark.

This shouldn't be required. He's not God, after all (though it sometimes seems some think he is). I'm not obliged to break the "Heidegger Code."

I can understand quite well (I think) what you've written about this essay or article and what you believe it says. If it says what you believe it says, however, he could simply have said it much as you did. The rest is mere mummery--the use of ancient Greek, Aristotle, ascribing human feelings to chalices and wood mills and hydroelectric plants, vaguely suggestive phrases, etc. — Ciceronianus

You find this an issue with everyone who has their education, from elementary school onward, grounded in empirical science. Heidegger cannot be accessed through this; one has to begin at least with Kant, who had jargon of his own. Then Hegel, who is ridiculously counter intuitive vis a vis common sense. I mean, all continental philosophy is like this. But if there is one who is both accessible and prerequisite for reading Heidegger, it is Husserl, from whom Heidegger derives a great deal of his basic thinking (certainly not all). Cartesian Meditations, Ideas I open doors.
As to the weird language,, I am told it makes more sense in the original German, but then, German and English are very close languages. He intentionally wants to use new language because he realizes that old usages and contexts reinforces the errors of the past. One must break away, and this has to occur at the level of basic vocabulary, which is always given to us with assumptions built in. the only way to escape the old narratives is to construct new meaning with novel use of language. He finds this in the Greeks.
What can I say, one has to follow through. I looked at Heidegger, Rorty and others with a desire to know, no matter what, and if I had to read Kant first, then so be it. There is a reason Heidegger is considered a giant, the the only thing that stands in the way is oneself, and one's rationalizations for not making the considerable effort.

Kant must have attributed to reason three fundamental conditions, for there are ....DUH!!!....three critiques, to wit:, theoretical (CPR), judicial (CofJ) and practical (CpR). Everydayman thinks more about his actions than about how he comes up with his actions, which implies practical reason has more importance overall than either of the other two conditional forms of reason. Nevertheless, given the two basic kinds of reason qua reason, pure and practical....

“.....To this question we have given a sufficient answer; for we have shown that, as the former stands in a relation to a different kind of condition from those of the latter, the law of the one does not affect the law of the other and that, consequently, both can exist together in independence of and without interference with each other....”

....I shall await your exposition as to how the one might be grounded in the other. — Mww

Hmmmmm, a question: Of course, this division between the practical and rational is subsumed under conditions that make thought even possible at all. One has to think through the categorical imperative and practical matters in general, that is, synthesize representations. to determine what to do, so the Critique of Pure Reason is analytically presupposed by the practical, one could argue. If the matter is "the law" of the one not affecting the other, then the matter rests with what is meant by "affect" which requires contextual clarification.

First there's a cat independent of your experience. Then there's no room independent of your experience. Where does the cat live?

Just as shrugging off the private language problem is no answer, so it stirring up dust and contradiction. — Cuthbert

The cat lives in the room, of course. But what is a room? one needs to ask, at the level of basic questions. It is a thing of parts. There is the concept, the perceptual act that, were these to be absent, there would be no room. Is there a ?place" all the same? Well, all "room" meaning is absent. All sensory intuitions absent. Where is the basis for the room still being there?

The only conclusion has to be that the affair of the cat in the room was localized in my head, but strangely, there is the abiding "whatever" that is "there" all the same. To talk about it is impossible. The cat, as with all things, abide in metaphysics. As I type these words, I am sitting at a desk and all familiar things; but I am also, and in finality, "in" metaphysics. No contradictions, just deduction.

You speak for philosophy and you know what it cares about. But listen more carefully to philosophy itself. It has on occasion shown concern for the ways in which words carry or fail to carry meanings. — Cuthbert

An idea I have carried to its logical end in this very matter. "Listening" to philosophy? Interesting. The idea would refer to the understanding. So, what is you understanding telling you regarding the cat and that which I wrote in the paragraph just above this one?

By slowing down. Clarifying the questions. Checking each thing you write for absurdities. Listening to objections. Yes, it's the long hard slog. — Cuthbert

By slowing down. Clarifying the questions. Checking each thing you write for absurdities. Listening to objections. Yes, it's the long hard slog. — Cuthbert

Long hard slogs call for accountability in reasoning. So by all means, reveal yours regarding that cat.

I just tried to read The Question Concerning Technology again. Technology is a "revealing." The silver chalice is "indebted" to the silver of which it's made; it "owes thanks" to it. Modern technology "is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such." And much, much more. He may as well assert that modern technology poisons the purity and essence of our precious bodily fluids when he makes such claims, for all they can be said to mean anything without a friendly, improbable and generous interpretation. — Ciceronianus

Had to see where this was coming from, and reading The Question Concerning Technology is an extraordinary engagement. You see, Heidegger takes the matter of philosophy to a more basic foundation of analysis, which is why analytics philosophers don't understand him, for it takes a withdrawal from culture and its familiar interpretations to go where Heidegger goes, and analytic philosophers are bound to the clarity of science, and therefore never taking an analytic of being human to its foundations. Existentialists look at the entire breadth of "experience" as Dewey does, but the difference is that Dewey never takes the matter to its foundations: Pragmatism is a proper characterization of human knowledge (forward looking utility), but not of human meaning.
Having said that, the question turns to meaning, and it is not simply the utility dimension of meaning, but the qualitative distinctness of standing in the world in full openness; only here can one overcome (see Nietzsche's use of this term) alienation. Alienation is a principle theme of this philosophy, and others (Marxian alienation, e.g.), and it comes from Kierkegaard, a "religious writer" Heidegger called him, but then, he owed him a great debt: where Kierkegaard concluded we are alienated from God, Heidegger turned to language, the "house of Being", and essentially secularized Kierkegaard, holding that technology rising to dominate our relation to the world has come to alienate us from some primordial original condition. In this discussion, I think of my cat, sitting in the window, very content and there is no trouble, like some foolish metaphysics telling the cat about sin, about how awful the world is and our need for redemption, There is this enviable, untroubled unity there in which everything is well, an "openness" that simply accepts, that my cat experiences. We "had" this, once, and lost it, and now we are scrounging for redemption.
So, in the above, don't get too hung up on the language, which is not German, and Heidegger uses language to construct meaning, not to simply denote and deduct.
Indebtedness? Heidegger is simply giving analysis to the traditional concept of cause, for he wants to move on this toward a clearer idea of technology. Don't see any basis for complaint in this. It is important, no, essential, to see that to understand Heidegger requires one to meet him on his terms. It is a world of original thinking that has as its underpinning, Being and Time. Nothing is as it seems, at all. All hinges on phenomenological ontology, which needs to be taken up as an enterprise, not as a this and that quotation.

As to the "unreasonable demand", the principle term in this is "stored as such". It is a bit like Dewey's complaint against they way the art world puts art on a pedestal and "stores it" in museums. Art thereby becomes restricted to the few, enabled artists, which is a perversion of art which belongs in our lives enriching in the actual making of things. Something primordial has become an estrangement. And just as Dewey is not suggesting all art museums be torn down, Heidegger is not saying all "standing reserve" causes alienation. It is standing reserve comes to dominate our idea of who we are and what the world is that is the danger. Essentially, Heidegger is claiming that the world has lost its original (and this is certainly from Kierkegaard) wonder and awe that we feel when we encounter the world freely, as if, I would argue, a child again. I certainly agree with this.


Let's take a look at what is meaningful for Dewey? It is defined as a "consummatory" experience, that is, a completion whereby something is "wrought out" in problem solving that is successful, and meaning, the aesthetic, the cognitive, all issue from this event. What is counter to this? The rote experience that moves statically, automatically, smooth and clear, free of obstacles.
Note that in Dewey's view, an object made is defined, identified, in terms of a pragmatic compound of experiential aspects, this makes the object's meaning identical to the pragmatic self that produced it. That object's meaning is the agency's consummatory pragmatics. Language is just this as well. All meaning is bound to the consummatory conclusion of some problem solved, from infancy onward, and this is, to me, the great merit of his thought. To "know" is a matter of mingling thought, affect, moods, in short, experience, with the given.
Not how Dewey and Heidegger are closer than one might think, here: Dewey makes the "consummatory" affect of an object made, bound up with cognition, so the thinking is inherently poetic, so to speak; inherently aesthetic, and I think he is right about this. Heidegger in this essay, could be saying, there in this consummatory experience, an abiding sense of well being, of unalienating satisfaction in the world, just being there. In a pragmatic conception, the state of rest is this settled sense of problems solved generating its own foundation of well being. Heidegger doesn't talk like this, but then, he does say our aesthetic (poetical) meanings are not natively apart from cognition, and these must be balanced so the original "presencing" (everything is in the present continuous tense for H because Being is an event). Modern technology presents an imbalance such that what was originally there, say in the hunter/gather's resting world, has been lost, and this resting state is primordial to being human. Treating people like things, the world like "standing reserve" creates this imbalance.

I just tried to read The Question Concerning Technology again. Technology is a "revealing." The silver chalice is "indebted" to the silver of which it's made; it "owes thanks" to it. Modern technology "is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such." And much, much more. He may as well assert that modern technology poisons the purity and essence of our precious bodily fluids when he makes such claims, for all they can be said to mean anything without a friendly, improbable and generous interpretation. — Ciceronianus

Hold on. I am reading it.

Yes yes yes. Heidegger is great, Phenomenology is great, Pragmatism isn't great, analytic philosophy is most emphatically not great, even bad. You've made your feelings quite clear. — Ciceronianus

Why not just read Heidegger and be done with it. Dewey was great, though I don't follow him religiously because I find he is out of touch with post modern thinking, which is amazing.

It's been some time since I looked at it, but I'm referring to his essay featuring the monstrous hydroelectric plant, cruelly commanding the river to serve our purposes (as if we haven't been "commanding" rivers for thousands of years through irrigation, and harnessing their flow for thousands of years using water wheels), and our evil proclivity to store sources of energy (was it coal?) and use them by destroying them when we see fit (as if we haven't been storing and using sources of energy like peat and wood for thousands of years). All this being hideous compared to the simple peasant who lovingly placed seeds in nature's bosom (not to mention the back-breaking and constant labor that entailed). Only a god can save us from technology (well, that was in Der Spiegel I think). That sort of thing. — Ciceronianus

Well, that only god can save us idea was rather cryptic, and in the same interview he gave Buddhists a thumbs up, which is less cryptic, one might say. But this opens an issue where Dewey and Rorty fall flat on their...ideas. I don't think the argument would be received well by a devotee of Dewey, but it is closer to Wittgenstein: first philosophy exceeds philosophy, because ethics exceeds philosophy, and this is because value, value simpliciter, or, value-qualia, or the pure phenomena of value (there are others) is the essence of ethics, and this issue of "meta ethics" cannot be spoken. A tough issue, which is why Witt. would never speak of it. The Good, he wrote in his journal, is his idea of the divine. Heidegger could have been close, but I'd have to read up.
Heidegger was observing the effects of the industrial revolution and the rise of technology on a scale never witnessed before, and saw, as Kierkegaard did a century earlier, that there was coming out of this a corruption of something very meaningful. I agree. He was influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and shared their distaste for Christian metaphysics and the way it undermined dasein's authenticity. But he did see, one could argue, there was something deeply meaningful about being human, and here is where he is criticized, stepping beyond the boundary of what hermeneutics allows.
Anyway, of course, we've been storing peat for centuries, but things have changed dramatically in the last two centuries, and the worst has come to pass: societies are now little capable of, if you will, romanticizing the world at a primordial way.

If you can accept the conclusion that communication is impossible, why attempt it?

No conclusions are inevitable if words do not make sense, even to the user of them.

Shrugging off problems is easy enough but it's different from addressing them. The private-language problem is one that confronts the view that all we can know for certain is our own perceptions. — Cuthbert

But did you read "on the other hand"? I wrote:

But there is a big "on the other hand" to this: Obviously there is in my knowledge of my cat something that is not me, but something else entirely, and it is seems to be there, across an expanse of space. But again, one runs against Kant, who may not be altogether right in his details, but space and time are forms of intuition, if not as he explains it exactly (Heidegger complained, and many others). We are stuck with this event of me knowing my cat is on the sofa, occurring as a phenomenon, but this notion of "noumena" takes the stage again: what IS this "out thereness" that is entirely off radar in our brains? Well, many look, not to the out mystery, but the inner; after all, there is a noumenal "direct" access to the unknown X world, and that is the self, for while the "outer" ness of things seems to be altogether impossible, the "inner"ness of things is some core essence of the self. Where, after all, in metaphysics are all things? All things are impossibly grounded in eternity, or better, finitude is "really" eternity, and this applies to our inner self especially. So if one wants get intimate with with this impossible "other", one need look within, deeply, apart from the "totality" of our constructed selves.

This little bit above is part of the religio-apophatic turn in phenomenology.

The reason why the Vat matter is important is that it tells us something about the world foundationally, which is philosophy's business. It tells us that knowledge relationships cannot be explained by physical/material/causal models. Quantum connections? These will always be problematic as well, for one never can get beyond the "wall of phenomena" and quantum physics is structured by thought in a dense, opaque brain. Philosophically, it is an extraordinary advance in understanding, though philosopher, analytic ones, are out to lunch on this.

And what words do not make sense? Look, words are our interpretative medium, and if something doesn't make sense it is not the words, but their contexts. No one made up this context. It is a genuine philosophical problem. Walk out of a room, take with you all the meaning making apparatus, sensory producing apparatus,, you know, experience itself, can you say there is a room still there absent all this? this is the Brain in Vat issue in its essence.

As to private language, obviously language is a very public affair, for reasons I don't need to go into. this makes all matters public affairs, because such things have their meanings bound to language: institutions that make our economic, ideological, cultural, valuative, and so on even possible. So the whole business of being a person in the world is built out of language, and language is a social phenomenon, but when we look closely, like everything, absolutely everything, this model falls apart; and I am referring to the obvious social nature of language. Philosophy cares about issues like this, not the mundane affairs of exchanging meanings that are well familiar.

So, how does one approach this? The entirety of the social dimension of existence is placed in question.

We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world. — apokrisis

This is where the post modern turn to language steps in: no, biology is not antecedent to language. Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. If this idea is new to you, it is very unlikely you will find favor with it here, for it is a very difficult business to get familiar with. This is because it turns conventional science orientation on its head. I am confronting the world, and wish to know it intimately, I have to get into original proximity to what is there, that is, as "originary" as is possible. When I behold objects, wherein lies this generative source? It is within the perceptual presentation: a thing is a perceptual object first, a logical construction first. If I wish to move into regions of apprehending the world, like biology or knitting, then this is fine, but here I am removed from phenomena simpliciter, the "given" of the world prior to be taken up for some other than philosophical purpose. Philosophy is the attempt to maximize proximity by reducing the world to its foundational terms, and biology, for one, is derivative.

I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,

So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense? — apokrisis

Ultimate reality is first given to us in language. It is not as if the world just reaches into your consciousness and declares its nature. Rather, we receive the world within a body of always already there language and interpretation. Ultimate reality is an idea first received by an active interpretative agency, and it is here meanings step forth and try to made sense of the given intuitions. These intuitions by themselves come to as language possibilities, out of which ideational constructs are made. According to this thinking, there is no pure intuition of anything, for intuitions are composites of thought. Derrida takes this to its logical conclusion, denying even the possibility of a singular affirmation, but then, consider that what this amounts to a a denial that language can speak the world, and this is what Wittgenstein talked about in the Tractatus, and in this work there is the famous, or infamous, reference to the mystical, the transcendental.
The real issue lies with Time, for our understanding is and eventful awareness, not a static "presence" but then, presence is the key to ultimate reality. See the Abhidhamma.

Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers. — apokrisis

But note: to conceive of language as a semiotic tool, we need language to do this. The point is, we have the vocabularies first, and these vocabularies construct meaning. It is not that calling it a semiotic tool is wrong at all; rather,, putting language first, we move into a theoretical field called hermeneutics which denies "ultimacy" to anything that can be said because language itself is a constructive feature of the very reality that is the object of questioning. There is no terminal juncture where language ends its inquiry.
I don't really with this to its conclusion. I think there is an end, and ultimate reality makes sense, though the sense that is delivered up, is not discursive, not contingent, not bound to some novel ways to take up the world via an existing vocabulary. I think Michel Henry in taking up Husserl's epoche has it right, though I can't exactly tell you what this is and how I use it here. A rather lengthy affair.

Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things. — apokrisis

What I mean is that, if numbers are to somehow hold the key to foundational meaning to, well, life the universe and everything, then numbers would have to be conceived more fully in their conception. A number simpliciter is just an abstraction. Where is the meaning, the affect? What we are trying to explain is not a body of lifeless facts, but a world of meanings, and the meta-question of which is that of metavalue: not quantitative, but qualitative. The first question we encounter when asking about ultimate reality is, what is there in reality that is being called ultimate? Here, in our midst, we find the most salient presence to be qualitative experiences, like falling in love, being tortured, haagen dazs and tonsillitis; you know, joy and suffering. The basis for what is ultimate has to be conceived on these terms, not in abstract structures.

Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling. — apokrisis

But again, this talk about science is derivative, resting on something else, which is the phenomenological description of matters prior to being taken up in science.

Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions. — apokrisis

Of course. And Peirce had read Kant thoroughly, and understood the Copernican revolution that underlies this. After all, concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind; and if the entire affair is pragmatic in nature, then this is a pragmatic phenomenology. I think pragmatism is right up to a point.

The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable. — apokrisis

I don't quite understand this "rational structure of the cosmos" at all. It must be the way it is put here, but Peirce was a long run thinker, and he is criticized by some for his view that truth is what emerges in the long run. Don't recall well about this though. But I take issue with this phrase as you state it. After all, the structures revealed to us are inherently pragmatic, and any conception of the cosmos is, as you say, a co construction. Nature does not reveal itself apart from this doubt moving to belief equation.
I read Making Out Ideas Clear and his Fixation of Belief. I'll read them again.

The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc. — apokrisis

Oh. I see. Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered.

I've mentioned this more than once in this forum, but the philosopher Joseph Margolis supposedly asked Dewey to read Heidegger. He did (I don't know what he read). Margolis asked Dewey what he thought after reading whatever of Heidegger's he read, and claimed that Dewey responded "Heidegger reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me."

Dewey was by all accounts I've read not a man inclined to sarcasm, but usually mild and gentlemanly, so I have my doubts about this, particularly the "Swabian peasant" reference. But the similarity of their views in some respects has been noted.

My problems with H aren't limited to the fact he was an unrepentant Nazi and made some preposterously worshipful claims regarding Hitler. I see him as unduly romantic and something of a mystic. I'm thinking of his The Question Regarding Technology, which I think is sentimental and anachronistic, and of course such things as his rhapsodic statements regarding The Nothing and the unique superiority and destiny of the German language and people.

Dewey was criticized for his emphasis on practical experience as knowledge by such as the aristocratic Santayana, who felt Dewey neglected the higher, better aspects of reality and Nature. Dewey didn't claim that only a certain kind of experience was significant, or that true knowledge was limited in some sense. That seems to have been what his critics felt, in fact. — Ciceronianus

Heidegger didn't sound at all like Dewey. He was working in a vein of thought that moved from the Greeks, to Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and many others, but certainly not American pragmatism. To say he tried to sound like Dewey makes, truly, no sense at all. And I mean absolute zero. Heidegger's Being and Time hangs close to Husserl, and there is nothing even remotely Husserlian in Dewey. Hermeneutics is alien to Dewey.

Heidegger was miles ahead of Dewey, but thematically, they can be seen to move along the same lines. Pragmatism, this essential idea that our everydayness is epistemically an instrumentality defined as a temporal sequence of events, this forward lookingness of experience (a Kierkegaardian notion first, nearly a hundred years before Dewey. See his Concept of Anxiety for a thematic summary of existentialism. K started it all, of course, standing on the shoulders of Kant and Hegel. All roads, Dewey's as well, lead back to Kant, not in full content, but in the phenomenological structure of Time). An attempt to deliver back to philosophy the entire experiential reality, the rejection of rationalism, and perhaps more. Heidegger probably baffled Dewey, which happened quite a lot. Analytic philosophers don't read him, nor did Heidegger read them. Their problem is that they are bound to positivism, that call for clarity over meaning, and they end up being monumentally boring.
Rorty understood.

Unduly romantic and the position on technology? Are you referring to his claim that technology turns people into useful objects, and nature becomes a utility reserve. THIS anachronistic? Have you not been paying attention? Heidegger was right. Just a note, this was a time in the early 20th century when Talorism and time management concepts were popular. And Dewey was outraged.

Heidegger was NO metaphysician, though Derrida did accuse him of the very thing he criticized Husserl for: the metaphysics of presence. Interesting discussion on this in Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics and Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (a must read).

What is the "perceptual apparatus" you speak of? The person? In what sense is a person similar to a hammer, or an apparatus? Regardless, neither the person nor the hammer is removed from the world nor are they in a different one. Why think they are? They moved to a different location in the world, but how does it necessarily follow that the room disappears or becomes something else unless you think of the room as in a different world than the person? — Ciceronianus

Hmmmm You're not really dealing with the previous thoughts, just prior to this. Oh well.

Of course, which is evidenced by asking questions such as, "How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats?" You wouldn't be asking this if you wouldn't think that inside vs. outside is a meaningful distinction. — baker

Outside/inside certainly is a meaningful distinction, but it is articulated within the unity of phenomenology.

The problem of knowledge exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, — Ciceronianus

Just a follow up: in the natural setting, call it, it is not absurd to note that when a person leaves the room, then s/he takes away all of the pragmatic meaning possibilities, just as when I remove a hammer from the tool box, I remove the possibility of hammering in some setting. Why is it that talk about the hammer is not nonsense but talk about removing perceptual apparatus is? Clearly this latter makes sense: here I go, out of the room, and what is behind me is no longer a room, for the term 'room' is a pragmatic construction, and just left bringing this construction with me.

What happened to the room? Simply, it became metaphysics, something still "there' but unspeakable. There is your division, and I don't think pragmatism is slippery enough to avoid it.

The problem of knowledge exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world. With analogous assumptions, we could invent and discuss a problem of digestion in general. All that would be required would be to conceive the stomach and food-material as inhabiting different worlds. Such an assumption would leave on our hands the question of the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any transaction between stomach and food.

But because the stomach and food inhabit a continuous stretch of existence, because digestion is but a. correlation of diverse activities in one world, the problems of digestion are specific and plural: What are the particular correlations which constitute it? How does it proceed in different situations? What is favorable and what unfavorable to its best performance?—and so on. Can one deny that if we were to take our clue from the present empirical situation, including the scientific notion of evolution (biological continuity) and the existing arts of control of nature, subject and object would be treated as occupying the same natural world as unhesitatingly as we assume the natural conjunction of an animal and its food? Would it not follow that knowledge is one way in which natural energies cooperate? Would there be any problem save discovery of the peculiar structure of this cooperation, the conditions under which it occurs to best effect, and the consequences which issue from its occurrence? — Ciceronianus

Take it bit by bit. I don't assume there is a knower outside the world to be known. Assume the world and I are one. Then in this unity there is a divide that has to be explained. If it cannot be explained, it may be that there is in this unity something that is occurring perhaps requires a new assessment of what the unity is. Look, there are differences all around, in fact, if not for differences, no affirmation is possible: what is an affirmation without differences? (see Saussure) Anyway, what this brain in a vat suggests is that perhaps there is a primordial division in this unity, that is, a division that isn't about the phylar distinctions in some taxonomy, but about something at a fundamental level? How do scientists handle differences? They make a science out of them. That is what phenomenology is: the science of phenomena. It takes the world at the basic level, where experience (to use Dewey's language) takes up things and generates meaning, value, and everything else, at the generative level, where thing first "appear" and asks how should we understand this? Of course, Dewey answers this question in terms of pragmatism: all knowledge is essentially pragmatic. What does this mean? It means knowledge is forward looking and meaning is generated out of the consummatory product of problem solving. He of course, is a evolutionist, as am I, and when I think of a pragmatic concept of knowledge, I think about our personal and collective history out of which language issues, and I think about the structure of a thought as well as the ontology of the thing the thought is about: I see my cat, but how do I know it is a cat? I learned this term, of course, long ago, as it was modeled by others. pointing to that furry thing, I "made" the association, started using it myself, was encouraged, and it became knowledge of cats in various contexts in my world.
I would need to read a lot more of Dewey to draw on his ideas to make this point, but to be a pragmatist, you have to have a pragmatist theory of knowledge, and this reduces meaning and understanding to the essential thrust of a problem solved.
You may not like Heidegger, but he is certainly close to Dewey. What is a hammer? It is ready to hand; it is the picking up, the hammering, and the possibility of these there, when I turn to the hammer and "know" what it is, what I "know" is this future looking possible event, this "IF I approach the hammer, THEN it presents possibilities, which are x, y, and z and so on. There is for Dewey no of the mystical apprehension of a cat "out there". The cat's meaning and knowledge possibilities are bound up in what works, nd that's it.
BUT, what are the consequences for this? Dewey has to be a pragmatic phenomenologist. This is the only possibility, for if what I know is all about pragmatics, then knowledge is a synthesis the problem solving agency (not to put any metaphysical significance to this) and what comes in as the "givenness" of things.
This kind of thing makes questions like the brain in a vat into nonsense if applied to actual world, as Wittgenstein told us. It is an error in reasoning to conceive of an "in the brain" and "outside the brain" in this way, to ask what are things without the participation of a pragmatic agency/perceiver. Pure impossible metaphysics. This is the way of Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and on and on. Not all pragmatists, exactly, but they agree, this is nonsense.

I say, well, this is one way to get rid of metaphysics: just pretend it is nonsense. Well, it is and it isn't is the only answer to this. No time to go into this, there is alot on this. My principle thought are about ethics and value. Another avenue has to do, not with the out thereness of things, but the "presence" of phenomena. And so on.

How do we deal with the problem of private language? If naming-words refer necessarily to internal phenomena - all singularly private and mutually incomparable - then we cannot communicate. 'Yes, I understand, you are saying things are like such-and-such!' - But 'such and such' can be neither like nor unlike anything shared between us, for nothing is shared. Worse, we cannot distinguish one phenomenon from another even in our own case. If the distinctive criteria for some experience make sense to the person having that experience, then those criteria have a sense that can be explained, communicated and shared between us.

If your view is true then necessarily you cannot explain it to me. Your explanation is a kind of accompanying music to a phenomenal film that is playing in your mind. And my understanding is whatever I might be hearing. — Cuthbert

Let the conditions unfold then. I don't think we are bound to this phenomenological singularity because I think it makes all problems go away. I simply ask the question about basic epistemology, and find this inevitable conclusion. How move from here is another question, but one thing remains very clear: on a materialist model of causal relationships, one cannot explain knowledge of objects. Causality does not deliver epistemology, for one thing. For another, all explanatory possibilities are inherently phenomenological. How does one ever get "out" of this?

But there is a big "on the other hand" to this: Obviously there is in my knowledge of my cat something that is not me, but something else entirely, and it is seems to be there, across an expanse of space. But again, one runs against Kant, who may not be altogether right in his details, but space and time are forms of intuition, if not as he explains it exactly (Heidegger complained, and many others). We are stuck with this event of me knowing my cat is on the sofa, occurring as a phenomenon, but this notion of "noumena" takes the stage again: what IS this "out thereness" that is entirely off radar in our brains? Well, many look, not to the out mystery, but the inner; after all, there is a noumenal "direct" access to the unknown X world, and that is the self, for while the "outer" ness of things seems to be altogether impossible, the "inner"ness of things is some core essence of the self. Where, after all, in metaphysics are all things? All things are impossibly grounded in eternity, or better, finitude is "really" eternity, and this applies to our inner self especially. So if one wants get intimate with with this impossible "other", one need look within, deeply, apart from the "totality" of our constructed selves.

This little bit above is part of the religio-apophatic turn in phenomenology.

But language systems can be mathematical. Ordinary language is speech from some social point of view - developed to (re)construct the society that is speaking it. And now - through the practice of metaphysical-strength reasoning - modern humans have constructed a culture of technical speech that is rooted in the habits of logic and arithmetic. We have language that is designed to transcend our social being and so move towards some conception of "ultimate reality" - as the limit of this new displaced and third person point of view. We "see" the world through the "objective" eye of axiom and measurement. — apokrisis

A provocative set of ideas. First, I should say that the reason I want to give rationalism some presumption of favor is that individual identity insists. The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. To sit, and make a dramatic move into the "eternal present" (Kierkegaard, Buddha?) free of what Husserl calls predelineated determination (memory) still requires an implicit language world that is always, already there, making, stabilizing, normalizing all things. This language structure is not something that can be put down, for one would have to put down "the world". Of course, languages are each one arbitrary, but the logic that makes it even possible, this is my interest here.

Metaphysical strength reasoning? What would this be if not the dialectics, about which one has to be very careful, as Kant was pretty good at explaining.

So Hegel got that to the degree he developed a logic of dialectics. This was the intellectual project that got modern rationality and science going back in Ancient Greece. Hegel tried hard to update it in the age of Newtonian mechanics. But he bent his arguments away from the third person and back towards the first person to the degree he placed God, spirit or goodness at the centre of his metaphysical scheme. Too anthropomorphic. Although that was an understandable cultural response in an age where the pendulum had swung too far from the very idea of points of view - Newtonianism being understood as the view from nowhere ... rooted in the nothingness of a void, rather than in a plenum of possibilities. — apokrisis

This rootedness in the plenum of possibilities sounds Heideggerian. I hold that such words as God, spirit or goodness are dialectically unfinished, or better, reach their end in the confrontation with actuality. Clarity is challenging here because philosophy, if allowed to follow its internal course, leads only to one place, and that is the eternal present. Wittgenstein followed Kierkegaard on this strange bit of metaphysics, but it is, by my lights, the coveted brass ring of philosophical endeavor. Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic.

It is important to remember that all of our vocabulary is hermeneutic, and when we use a term, any term, like 'logic', we are taking up some part of the world AS, as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this).

This expression "nothingness of a void", I would add, is simply a hermeneutical place holder, a way of abstracting something that is manifestly there, in the world. As to goodness, well, what is this? Ethical/aestheitic goodness or contingent goodness? God? Spirit? These are not terms with no existential underpinning. I claim argument bears this out.

And then mathematical reasoning and scientific method arose out of the development of a new metaphysical language - one that ends up speaking in numbers rather than words, and dialectical logical structure rather than an everyday causal grammar based on a narrative tales of who did what to whom. — apokrisis

Perhaps. But there is the inevitable "goodness" question begged here" What if there were discovered some Pythagorean harmony of the spheres (reminds me of an interesting, if creepy, movie named "Pi" in which a mathematical genius was chased down by religious zealots who thought he possessed mystical insight). Any way, if such a thing were determined, then so what? This revelation would have value only if it were attended by a valorizing agency. Hume once wrote that if reason had its way, it could annihilate the world with no regrets (so to speak); facts have no value and logic has no value conceived as such. Reason has to be conceived, not in terms of "pure" reason, logical or arithmetic, which is an abstraction, but in some kind of reason/value matrix of experience.
Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language.

There is a proper way to talk about ultimate reality. Or at least the relevant community of inquirers have agreed much about the current state of the art in this regard. Nature is symmetry breaking and thermodynamics. A dialectic of constraints and uncertainty. Or as Peirce said, synechism and tychism. — apokrisis

I really don't have a complaint abut this in a qualified way, though I do recall that positivist ideal in which all meanings were reduced to their essences, and language simple, what, mirrors to reality. This kind of thinking has grave flaws.

The problem here is that there is no point just swinging the pendulum between the dialectical extremes of the third and first person point of view. — apokrisis

Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, if as recall Hegel. I didn't used to think this either, and I don't now, really. But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. I simply understand that reason is an essential part of the construction of the meaning, and it is possible that its depth is beyond contingency.

I am looking at that question, and the answer I see is "it has no worth". — Banno

I see. No greater motivation for joining a philosophy club, eh? Analytic philosophers are in it for the "fun" of puzzles, and are generally bound to clarity and logic. But Continental philosophers can be quite different, sincere and intuitive. Trouble is, Continental philosophy is hard to read, though here is the foundation of basic inquiry as to the issues of the self, meaning, value, reason, and so on.It is unfortunate that important things are so difficult. Oh well.

I feel bad that I haven't responded before this. I really like talking to you. I think we share a common outlook, an openness, on many of the issues we're discussing. It's just that you are playing on a piano, maybe a pipe organ, and I am playing on a three-string banjo. This old banjo is just right for the song I'm trying to sing. — T Clark

If you read what I wrote and find agreement, then by all means, feel free to disagree here and there. "Play" as you please.

We don't need phenomenology in order to explain how a prism works. Indeed, it adds nothing. — Banno

It adds nothing in terms of explaining how a prism works. Nor does it explain how a prism is taken up as an amusement for a child, or how rainbows inspire or romanticize, or how the gaseous content of stars produces different spectral analyses, and so on. Looking at matters such as these are not the "how" of philosophical analysis, which is, as with all the above mentioned, distinct and assessed according to a different set of standards.
The question you should be looking at is, What is the standard for assessing the worth of phenomenological philosophy? Prior to this, one has to look at philosophy itself, and inquire as to where the value lies here.

If Heidegger invented the light bulb, I'd use it. It actually has a use, and a beneficial one, apart from its inventor. But I don't read him merely because he was a loathsome man. — Ciceronianus the White

But he is a beneficial one, philosophically. It's just easier to turn on a light than it is reading Heidegger. This is the essence of the matter.

Perhaps it is, and what you are doing isn't.

Either way, this stands:
You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake. — Banno

This is pure flippancy. And arbitrary. If you put something out there, then you have to explain it. I mean, go into it, and don't be shy about it. Either way it stands???? How so?

You claim it is a phenomena; I claim it is stuff in the world.

I can explain how it bends in a prism.

Can you, using only phenomenal analysis? — Banno

But this is not philosophy's job. Obviously.

No it doesn't. Light is not phenomenal. It's a thing in the world, not a sensation. In so far as phenomenology treats things that are not phenomenal as if they were, it is wrong. — Banno

So tell me how it is not a phenomenon.

You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake. — Banno

It depends on your level of analysis. A five year old will not understand the idea at al but simply talk about light i a natural way, but then, material reductionists talk like this all the time. Phenomenologists will say both are right, but rightness and wrongness depends on context. They do think, however, there is one context called phenomenology that looks at light as phenomenon, an eidetically formed predication. Here, one is not using light in the "naturalistic way" as in "turn off the light when you leave" but rather as reduced to its features as a phenomenological presence. The more reduction, the greater the presence, says Jean luc Marion.