A note on Tillich (various sources)

Consciousness is part of the world. How is that in question? — Patterner

Because it's not! You can observe other people. and animals, which you can safely assume to be conscious, and which you can safely assume feel just like you do. But you will not observe consciousness as such - only it's manifestations. The only instance of consciousness which you really know, is the instance which you are, because you are it. Not because it's something you see. You can't experience experience. The hand can only grasp something other to itself (from the Upaniṣad).

I don't sponsor authoritarian religions. — javra

I agree with you, but I already acknowledged somewhere in this thread (can't find it now) the role that ecclesiastical Chrisianity had in spawning atheism. Paul Tillich said the same! The inevitable consequence of 'no other God beside Me' and 'I am the Truth.... no other way but Me'. My way or the highway, and woe betide unto anyone who differs.

But again, there are literalistic and esoteric ways of understanding. The Gnostics had a completely different way of understanding these things, but they ended up on the wrong side of history - which is, as you know, written by the victors.

And the jealous God dies hard! A great deal of atheist polemic is clearly derived from its Christian forbears. No other substance, but matter energy, and no way of interpretation, save by the Method! Woe betide unto anyone who differs.

does that necessarily put science on one side of an impermeable line? — J

It certainly puts modern Western science, as understood since Galileo, on one side of it. Unambiguously. You know that German culture has a word, Geistewischenschaft, meaning 'sciences of the spirit', right? You could put Ricouer, Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl under that heading, but there's no way you could include them under the heading 'science' in a Western university.

I think there's a clear, bright line.

Although my overall knowledge of Aristotle is pretty slight, this is one of the passages that has stayed with me (previously quoted)

But if happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudomonia) consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect (νοῦς nous), or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [θεωρητική, theoritikós) — The Nicomachean Ethics 1.1177a11

The suggestion, in Aristotle, and indeed in Greek philosophy generally, is that nous, the instrument of reason, is able to discern immaterial truths, those being the universal forms or ideas. 'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the faculty that enables rational cognition. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which animals possess. For Aristotle, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same rational ways. Derived from this it was also sometimes argued, in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it also came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it'.

Practicing a religion/spirituality works in the exact same way as going to school or taking up some other course of education or training. It's supposed to transform the student, and in a standardized, predictable way. — baker

I just noticed your post now, but what you said in it, seems completely at odds with this conclusion. Karen Armstrong says something very similar:

Religious truth is ...a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

Which is, admittedly, how they must seem to many contributors.

Why is this not a conversation, but an ex cathedra lecture? — baker

Is it? I have not been aware of lecturing. I presented an argument, and am prepared to defend it, but only up to a point. The reference to Edward Conze's essay was intended to illustrate a point. But then, I suppose you take that as an 'appeal to authority', which naturally has to be shot down.

That's why physicalism is untenable. Science is broader than that. — J

But think it through in relation to Chalmers' 'facing up to the problem of consciousness'. What you're saying is, you already agree that physicalism is untenable. But Chalmers, Nagel and Husserl are giving arguments as to why it is. And while their arguments are different, the distinction between the first- and third-person perspective is intrinsic to all of them. @noAxioms has already explained that he can't see any distinction. To be sure, many others say the same. But I think there's a real distinction that is not being acknowledged.

I think he (Nagel) would say that it isn't a physical science. — J

But think that through. If it's not a physical science, then, according to physicalism, how could it be a science? It must by definition be metaphysics.

:100: But, you know, that book was subject of a massive pile-on when it was published. Nagel was accused of 'selling out to creationism'.

Another passage from the same book:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36

There's a typical forum style of argumentation I think of as 'the coconut shy'. A coconut shy, as you will recall, is a popular sideshow attraction, whereby coconuts are put on poles, and punters then try to knock them off by throwing tennis balls at them, thereby winning a prize.

This is one of those kinds of questions. :wink:

Obviously, many people have been gravely hurt by the religions. The history of religion in historical Europe is marred by episodes of appalling violence and repression - the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Cathars, the religious wars. The institution of the Papacy was a model for authoritarianism. There is no question about that, but it was not only that. David Bentley Hart makes the case eloquently in his book Atheist Delusions, which I’ve already mentioned. The social institutions of universities, hospitals, organised charities, and much else besides, grew out of the soil of Christian culture. The ideas of Christian humility, ‘all believers equal before God’, was also profoundly influential. (India still has a caste system to this day.) James Hannam makes an excellent case for how medieval Christian scholars laid the foundations for modern science in his book God’s Philosophers. Of course they all drew on an amalgamation of theology with Greek philosophy, which is foundational to the genius of Western culture.

As an undergrad, I was struck by the fact that so much of characteristically modern philosophy (starting with Descartes) was shaped around the unspoken premise of ‘anything but God’. It was a pervasive but largely unspoken theme. As I’ve explained many times, my own quest was shaped by 1960’s counter-culture and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, which at that time I did not associate at all with religion as such. But then I went on to study world religions and the perspective of the perennial philosophies and began to realise that the enlightenment I thought was the sole prerogative of the East was also to be found in Christianity (mainly via the early 20th C scholars of mysticism, Dean Inge and Evelyn Underhill.) It changed my view considerably, and there are now many Christian philosophers whom I hold in high regard (although I must confess a considerable degree of scepticism in regard to Reformed Theology.)

In any case none of this is an appeal to a ‘return to a golden past’. But religious symbolism inevitably portrays, in symbolic form, many of the archetypal factors and forces that underlie everyday thoughts and actions. They need to be understood and re-integrated, rather than fought against due to the animus we’ve inherited from the religious conflicts of the past. That’s where Vervaeke’s lectures are exemplary.

f someone can come along and challenge me, why shouldn't I challenge them in return? — baker

No reason. This entire milieu revolves around it.

The premiss of the OP is to explore the historical causes of the divisions between religious/secular, mind/matter, and so on, whereas many of the contributions just exemplify the very division at issue.

Don't we both agree that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, a part of the "given world" rather than some sort of intrusion into it? Do you think science is hobbled by its methods so that it can only inquire into certain parts of that world? — J

I'll refer to the potted quote I provided from Husserl again:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl (PRS 85; Hua XXV 13). Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one — Routledge Intro to Phenomenology

Also, as you mentioned Nagel, another passage I quote regularly:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Thomas Nagel, the Core of Mind and Cosmos

I would further claim that consciousness is a necessary postulate for many scientific inquiries — J

Not as an object of science, but as its pre-condition. Note the juxtaposition of 'natural' with 'transcendental' that Husserl refers to, which he derives from Kant, although he differs with Kant in signficant ways. Transcendental is 'what is necessary for experience but not given in experience.' So consciousness is not an 'intrusion' into the world, but neither is it an object within it.

:up:

Why, thankyou. Nietszche is not among my normal sources, but I'll take that on board.

Yes and no. Yes, methodologically. But no, not ontologically. There is nothing in the scientific viewpoint that has to deny subjectivity, or claim that it must be reducible to the currently understood categories of physical objectivity. — J

I'm afraid that's not the point. Modern scientific method was founded on a deliberate division between what came to be called the primary and secondary qualities of bodies — a move that located objective reality in quantifiable properties (extension, motion, mass) and relegated qualitative appearances to the mind of the observer. Locke and the British empiricists codified this, and Descartes’ separation of res cogitans and res extensa reinforced it. And none of that is a matter of opinion.

From that point on, the objective sciences proceeded by isolating the measurable, repeatable, intersubjectively verifiable aspects of phenomena — the features that should appear identically to any observer. That methodological bracketing was enormously fruitful, but it gradually hardened into an ontological assumption: the belief that the model thus produced is the whole of what is real.

This is the confusion Nagel examines in The View from Nowhere: the tendency to mistake the “view from nowhere” for a perspective that could exist independently of the conscious beings who adopt it.

When you say “it’s objectively true that you are conscious,” you’re appealing to an abstract inference that science can register only at one remove. The felt reality of consciousness — what it’s like to be an observer — is not something that can be observed. It’s not one more item within the world; it is the condition for there being a world of items at all.

If all agree that consciousness has always been there, and had just been ignored for certain purposes, then I don't know what the debate is about. — Patterner

The debate is about what you mean when you say 'there'.

Indeed. And isn't that the central factor in this debate?

I don't agree that this is what panpsychism is attempting to do. — Patterner

The metaphor Schrodinger gave was, 'once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit." 'Putting colour back in' is a metaphor, but, leaving aside whether the metaphor itself is apt, Schrodinger's starting-point is accurate. Scientific method disregards or brackets out the subjective elements of phenomenal experience so as to derive a mathematically-precise theory of the movements and relations of objects. Consciousness is 'left out' of this, insofar as it is not to be found amongst those objects of scientific analysis. So panpsychism proposes that it must in some sense be a property of those objects, even if current science hasn't detected it. I think that's what Schrodinger's criticism means, and I think it is an accurate description of what panpsychism proposes to do.

As for whether its advocates are really trying to do that:

“Experience is the stuff of the world. Experience is what physical stuff is ultimately made of.”
— “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(10–11), 2006.

“If physicalism is true, the experiential must be physical, because the experiential exists, and physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical. The only way to avoid radical emergence is to suppose that experiential being is present throughout the physical world.”
— ibid.

It is exactly this kind of gambit that Schrodinger's critique anticipated.

Rather, it (panpsychism) is saying that if and when we understand what consciousness is, we will discover that our current division of "objective" and "subjective" into areas that can and cannot be studied scientifically, is just plain wrong. — J

But this division is intrinsic. Science depends on the bracketing out of the subjective. Its power lies in its ability to treat phenomena as objects of measurement and prediction, abstracting from the first-person standpoint. But that same abstraction ensures that consciousness — the condition of possibility for any object to appear — cannot itself appear as an object in that framework. In Husserl’s terms, consciousness is not one more thing among things; it is the ground within which “things” arise.

Bitbol’s point in Beyond Panpsychism is that phenomenology doesn’t try to patch consciousness back into the scientific picture (as panpsychism does) but to reverse the direction of explanation: instead of asking how consciousness arises within the world, it asks how the world appears within consciousness. That’s what makes phenomenology radical — it goes to the root (radix) of the knowing relation itself. The goal is not to extend the scientific image to include the subject, but to reveal that the scientific image itself is a derivative construction grounded upon experience. And you can see how this dovetails with Chalmers critique.

Sure but this isn't just about you and your individual take on the meaning crisis. — Tom Storm

Subjective, right? Personal preference. Edifying, but personal.

I know what you think of this, — Tom Storm

That there is bad religion, and it's worse than no religion.

It interests me that Hart has called fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (as is practiced widely in the US and throughout MAGA lands) a cult and heresy. Which is not hard to see. But it does beg the question what counts as the real thing? — Tom Storm

It doesn't beg the question. Begging the question would be 'The Bible is the word of God, because God says it is.' What I was responding to, was the blanket assertion, often made on this Forum, 'religion is belief without evidence'. To which I respond, what counts as evidence? I was pointing out the fact that Christianity, for instance, had a huge impact on the formation of Western culture. That furthermore the sacred literature and testimonial evidence of world religions amounts to an enormous corpus of actual information. Of course most of it is not subject to peer-reviewed scientific analysis, which as good as invalidates if for many of our number.

I'm not seeking to revive Christianity so much as the 'sense of the sacred', in light of which human life and suffering are meaningful and intelligible, and not just something to be borne, Sisyphus-like. As I've said already, it's why I've always sought the cosmic dimension in philosophy. As one of my analytic philosophy heros, Thomas Nagel, put it:

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. He even seems to have suffered from a version of the more characteristically Judaeo-Christian conviction that we are all miserable sinners, and to have hoped for some form of redemption from philosophy. — Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

Or Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

(Although as far as empirical evidence is concerned, I recall a 2025 NY Times article on the review of so-called miraculous cures associated with candidates for Sainthood, written by a medical doctor who was called on to revew a case. It might make for an interesting discussion.)

Agree. I think an awful lot of specious reasoning is associated with multiverse ideas. (Not that it isn't fertile ground for science fication.)

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. — Janus

So says A J Ayer. There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius. David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empire’s pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted—human dignity, equality (in some form), charity, care for the vulnerable, the idea that the strong have moral obligations toward the weak, the notion that human beings are more than cogs in an imperial machine. He says that many secular cultural “goods” have Christian roots. He argues we need to recognise this transformation if we’re to assess religion’s legacy honestly, whilst also acknowledging that Christian culture has its faults and shadow sides. For sure it wasn't always beneficial but it demonstrably was foundational to the formation of Western culture.

Furthermore in religious epistemology, knowing is not merely an act of detached cognition based on third-party observervation, so much as participation in a transformative way of being. Truth is verified not only by correspondence between propositions and facts, but by a reorientation to the nature of existence towards that which is truly so in the holistic sense — the change in being that follows from insight. As Gregory of Nyssa or the Upaniṣads would say, to know the divine is to become like it.

Scientists don't know what Energy & Fields are in substance, but only what they do in causal relationships between material objects. To avoid misleading, when I use the Quantum Field or Universal Gravity as analogies to the Cosmic Mind notion, I try to make clear that these "forces" are not "objective" and observable, but rationally inferrable from observed processes. — Gnomon

Right - so what you're saying is that 'cosmic mind' is analogous to the 'noumenal'. Agree they might be rationally inferred, but as such cannot be empirically validated.

So my point is that what we know about the Big Bang should act as a constraint on our metaphysical claims. — apokrisis

Do you think that the 'multiverse speculation' (that there are potentially infinitely many 'other' universes) can be or ought to be similarly constrained?

As Erwin Schrödinger cogently pointed out, once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts; and as such it becomes wrong”. Panpsychism is the unambiguous target of this criticism. It represents a clumsy attempt at overcompensating the consequences of adopting the intentional/objectifying stance needed to do science, by adding to it (or by replacing it with) patches of experience very similar to the patches of colour added on the surface of an uncoloured drawing. As soon as this is done, the new picture of the world looks like a scientific picture, apart from the unfortunate circumstance that its additional elements cannot be put to test as it would be the case of a scientific theory. This does not make panpsychism plainly wrong, but rather torn apart between its phenomenological origin and its temptation to mimick a theory of the objective world. As a consequence, panpsychism proves unable to define adequate criteria of validity for its own claims. — Michel Bitbol, Beyond Panpsychism

Reference is to Schrödinger E. (1986), What is Life & Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press

I think this criticism applies to all the current proponents of panpsychism - Philip Goff, Anakka Harris, Galen Strawson, etc. They're all trying to preserve the veracity of the scientific model while injecting an element of subjectivity into it 'from the outside', so to speak.

@Patterner

Perhaps because I don't see anything as a matter of fact. I call that closed mindedness. So I have instead mere opinions, and yes, ones that don't correspond with your 'facts'. — noAxioms

Well, that solves it. All living beings are made from marshmallows, and the moon really is cheese. Time we moved on.

A very short geneaology of idealism from an essay on Buddhism:

The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating it as the primary substance while reducing the remaining substance to derivative status. Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.). Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.).

Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism.

Idealism, in its broadest sense, came to encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality. Most forms of theistic and theological thought were, by this definition, types of idealism, even if they accepted matter as real, since they also asserted something as more real than matter, either as the creator of matter (in monotheism) or as the reality behind matter (in pantheism). Extreme empiricists who only accepted their own experience and sensations as real were also idealists. Thus the term "idealism" united monotheists, pantheists and atheists. At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited a mind (or minds) as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism) metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisions and creates the universe.

A more limited type of idealism is epistemological idealism, which argues that since knowledge of the world only exists in the mental realm, we cannot know actual physical objects as they truly are, but only as they appear in our mental representations of them. Epistemological idealists could be ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially; they could even accept that mental states derived at least in part from material processes. What they denied was that matter could be known in itself directly, without the mediation of mental representations. Though unknowable in itself, matter's existence and properties could be known through inference based on certain consistencies in the way material things are represented in perception.

Transcendental idealism contends that not only matter but also the self remains transcendental in an act of cognition. Kant and Husserl, who were both transcendental idealists, defined "transcendental" as "that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience." An example would be the eye, which is the condition for seeing even though the eye does not see itself. By applying vision and drawing inferences from it, one can come to know the role eyes play in seeing, even though one never sees one's own eyes. Similarly, things in themselves and the transcendental self could be known if the proper methods were applied for uncovering the conditions that constitute experience, even though such conditions do not themselves appear in experience. Even here, where epistemological issues are at the forefront, it is actually ontological concerns, viz. the ontological status of self and objects, that is really at stake. Western philosophy rarely escapes that ontological tilt. Those who accepted that both the self and its objects were unknowable except through reason, and that such reason(s) was their cause and purpose for existing - thus epistemologically and ontologically grounding everything in the mind and its ideas - were labeled Absolute Idealists (e.g., Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), since only such ideas are absolute while all else is relative to them.

With the exception of some epistemological idealists, what unites all the positions enumerated above, including the materialists, is that these positions are ontological. They are concerned with the ontological status of the objects of sense and thought, as well as the ontological nature of the self who knows. Mainstream Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle has treated ontology and metaphysics as the ultimate philosophic pursuit, with epistemology's role being little more than to provide access and justification for one's ontological pursuits and commitments. Since many of what are decried as philosophy's excesses - such as skepticism, solipsism, sophistry - could be and were accused of deriving from overactive epistemological questioning, epistemology has often been held suspect, and in some theological formulations, considered entirely dispensable in favor of faith. Ontology is primary, and epistemology is either secondary or expendable. — Dan Lusthaus, What Is and Isn't Yogācāra

I'm nearest to epistemological idealism, although transcendental idealism also appeals to me. But I take Lusthaus' point that Western philosophy on the whole has had an ontological tilt, concerned with the nature of what ultimately exists, although I don't think that can be said of existentialism or phenomenology.

faced with his own mortality, which is both terrifying and freeing..... — BitconnectCarlos

That would depend on whether there is karmic retribution, in which case one's mortality would not be freeing at all. A lot of modern culture is fundamentally nihilist - nothing matters in the end, right? We'll all end up dead. ( I didn't end up watching Breaking Bad, although it had a reputation as a cracking drama, and many other streamers I have watched are equally nihilistic in that sense).

OK, from this I gather that your statement that you're asserting an ontological distinction, a distinction in the mode of being, you're merely expressing opinion, not evidence of any sort. — noAxioms

I see it more as a matter of facts which you don’t recognize.

Thank you. Must read some more.

Very true :pray:

A comment I read about the distinction between the New Left and the conservative religious critique, was 'For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and Enlightenment are dialectically intertwined: Enlightenment arises from myth but reproduces myth’s structure of domination in a new, “rationalized” form. Thus, the way out is neither regression to pre-rational faith nor blind progress through science, but a self-reflective form of reason — one that is conscious of its limits and its entanglement with power.'

But I still sense a lack in their spiritual anthropology, so to speak. I think, for the religious, humanity has a cosmic signficance with which it seeks reconciliation. I think, perhaps, this is what Habermas was getting at in his dialogues with Ratzinger and his subsequent books.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing?

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I'd say maybe they are 'spiritual' rather than religious. It seems to me religion implies something more public with practices and institutions that curate a certain tradition. — ChatteringMonkey

We did touch on this theme a few posts back. It's an important point. Like many others, I set out to sort the wheat from the chaff of dogma and tradition when much younger. I believed (naively, in hindsight) that there were experiences or epiphanies which would provide first-person insight into spiritual realities outside the strictures of ‘churchianity’. (This was the 1960's, when such ideas were in the air). Why only believe, when you can see! This was associated with hallucinogenic experiences, Timothy Leary and Alduous Huxley. (There was an amusing line in a streaming comedy recently where a sub-adolescent girl was told by one of the principles that ‘you meditate so you don’t have to go to Church any more’.)

There were some real insights coming out of that. Needless to say however such experiences are fleeting and can't be stablised. But I vividly recall the realisation of an ecstatic dimension of existence, the extraodinary richness of natural beauty, and thinking 'why isn't life always like this?'

But what I failed to reckon with was the accumulated momentum of cultural conditioning and of one's own habitual pre-dispositions. They are real obstacles in the development of insight and they're deeply rooted and culturally re-inforced. I'm sure that's where many of the practices associated with religion originated - memorisation, repetition, ritual. They operate on both the symbolic and the somatic level to remove those obstacles. But then over time the original vision is lost sight of and they are repeated because - that's just what we do. That is when they loose their connection with the insight that originally motivated them.

I assume that in Plato's day they just called it Philosophy. Perhaps, you are stating the obvious, that modern versions of Platonic Idealism are not ancient. But I was referring to the general belief that A> Reality is fundamentally Mental*1, or B> that the Human mind's model of reality is as close to true reality as we are likely to know*2. — Gnomon

These are very difficult distinctions. But the point of my other thread, Idealism in Context, was that the human sense of their relationship with the nature of being has fundamentally changed over the course of history. (This is an Hegelian theme). The ancients did not have the sense we do that the world comprised material objects being driven by physical causation. Because of their religious sense, the Cosmos was seen as in some sense purposeful or as alive, in a way that is very hard for us to grasp. The way I put it in the other thread was:

The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight). — Wayfarer

So here, at the risk of sounding trite, the theme is the at-one-ness of being and knowing. Not as an intellectual construct or as the idea in the subject's mind corresponding to the object in the external world but as a way of being-in-the-world. That innate sense we possess of subjective awareness in a realm of objects had not yet taken hold. (I suppose, in some ways, this can be related to Julian Jayne's 'bicameral mind' or to R M Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness'. )

It is often said that Aquinas is a realist - which is true, but he was a scholastic or Aristotelian realist, which means something completely different to what we mean by 'realist'. For Thomism, with God as Being, reality is inherently participatory, in a way that it can't be for us. It is ecstatic realism, if you like. But as the belief took hold that the Cosmos was not an expression of the divine Intellect, then physical reality was accorded the kind of inherent reality that scholastic philosophy would never grant it. This is the origin of the 'Cartesian division' and the pervasive sense of 'otherness' that characterises the modern mind. (See this blog post on Radical Orthodoxy).

So Berkeley's idealism was a reaction against the whole idea of matter as a mind-independent substance - something which wouldn't have occurred as neccessary in earlier philosophy, as material form was always seen in combination with the intelligible idea which was immaterial as a matter of definition (but emphatically not an 'immaterial thing'! :brow: )

This is why expressions such as “cosmic mind” are inherently misleading when taken to denote some objective existent, as if it were on par with scientific concepts like fields or forces. In classical thought, the divine intellect was not conceived as an object within the universe but as the very ground of intelligibility — the condition under which being and knowing are possible at all. To interpret it as a thing among things is already to have shifted into a different ontological register. Whenever such expressions are used, we risk reifying what was never meant to be reified — trying to understand the source of intelligibility from within the subject–object framework that depends upon it.

I know that the Upanisads (for example) were described as 'idealist philosphy' by a German scholar, Paul Deussen. But the term 'idealism' only entered the philosophical lexicon with Leibniz, Kant and Spinoza. Once the term was introduced with its associated ideas, then precursors to it could be seen in Greek and Indian philosophy. But at the time, they didn't use that terminology and they didn't have the same categorical distinctions between mind, matter and idea, that modern idealism contains. "Idealism” in its systematic sense — the thesis that reality is in some way dependent on mind or spirit — only becomes a defined philosophical position in early modern Europe, with Leibniz’s monadology, Spinoza’s substance monism, and especially Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Once that vocabulary existed, scholars like Deussen and later Radhakrishnan could look back and identify idealist currents in Plato, Plotinus, and the Upaniṣads. But those traditions themselves never used the conceptual apparatus of Idee, Bewusstsein, or Geist — their metaphysical language was quite different.

The abstract noun “idealism” appears in French as idéalisme by the late 17th century and in English around the mid-18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first philosophical use in 1702, referring to “the theory that external objects are known only as ideas.”

So, yes, there are ancient pre-cursors to idealism, but idealist philosophy really only appears in the early modern era. This is further discussed in the thread Idealism in Context (of which yours was the first comment.)

I'm not sure I fully understand K's "reasonable" and diligently documented update of ancient Idealism. Also, in order to maintain a philosophical line of reasoning, and to avoid getting into Religion vs Scientism diatribes, I prefer to use less dogmatic & divisive terms than "God". But Kastrup is bolder, and more self-assured than I am. — Gnomon

'Idealism' is not ancient. The term first came into use with Liebniz, Berkeley and Kant. In hindsight, it is possible to describe some elements of Platonism as idealist, but it is not a term that was used in Plato's day.

As for Kastrup, I think he's worth reading, or listening to. He's an articulate defender of idealism.

I think the pushback is the natural reaction to test someone's claims to authority. Especially religious people seem to think that they can go forth into the world, make claims to authority, and the world then owes them submissiveness. — baker

That is how quite a few here will inevitably categorise any discussion of what they consider religion. As I said upthread, I think much of this stems from the oppressive, indeed authoritarian, role of ecclesiastical religion in historical Western culture. After all, religious authoritarianism is what Enlightenment humanism so painfully liberated itself from. But on the other hand, that requires an implicit acceptance of that this is all that religion or spirituality can mean or amount to.

Consider this passage from Edward Conze, a Buddhologist who was active in the mid 20th c in his essay on Buddhist Philosophy and it’s European Parallels.

Until about 1450, as branches of the… "perennial philosophy,” Indian and European philosophers disagreed less among themselves, than with many of the later developments of European philosophy. The "perennial philosophy" is in this context defined as a doctrine which holds [1] that as far as worthwhile knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted, than others; and [3] that the sages have found a wisdom which is true, although it has no empirical basis in observations which can be made by everyone and everybody; and that in fact there is a rare and unordinary faculty in some of us by which we can attain direct insight into the nature of the Real --through the Prajñāpāramitā of the Buddhists, the logos of Parmenides, the Sophia of Aristotle and others, Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, Hegel's Vernunft, and so on; and [4] that true teaching is based on an authority which legitimizes itself by the exemplary life and charismatic quality of its exponents.

Of course, this is highly politically incorrect and I wouldn’t expect many here would accept it - but I still believe that there are such degrees of insight and understanding, and that not everyone has them by default, as it were. Of course it is also true that spiritual hierarchies have often been the source of egregious abuses of power, but they’re not only that, even if that is the only thing that some will see when they look at them.

Good work by the way pointing to the epic/etic distinction, it is something I studied in anthropology and not often noted here.

Its own dogmas become transparent (one being the prizing of multiplicity as a sort of proxy for freedom) — Count Timothy von Icarus

The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.

Yet that is the secular view of secularity, its own self-understanding. — “David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole

———

” (Sam) Harris makes it sound as if there is empirical, scientific evidence for the Buddha's normative teaching, including the ideal norm of buddhahood and the possibility of its attainment. I disagree.” ~ Evan Thompson — Joshs

I remember that passage from Thompson’s book, Why I am Not a Buddhist. Whilst I concur with a lot of what he writes in that book, I’m not so much in agreement on this distinction (not that I’m any fan of Harris, perish the thought.) I agree with Thompson that Buddhism is not the ‘inner science’ that many of its modern adherents seek to portray it as. But the question of why it isn’t or cannot be is not, I think, so clear-cut as Thompson makes it out to be. Agree that whatever evidence there might be, is not empirical in the sense of able to be reviewed in the third person. But at the same time - and this goes for religions other than Buddhism as well - there are fairly coherent and consistent schemas of (let’s say) experiential insight that aspirants progress through on the spiritual journey. Whilst not scientific in the sense that physics or chemistry can be, neither do they rest solely on the idiosyncratic expressions and utterances of their adherents (although there will always be idiosyncratic types as well). But then, on the other hand, many of its modern enthusiasts may take it to be a science in the way that is not, in lacking the deep enculturation that it’s emic adherents naturally possess.

I’m not going to get near to resolving that question here, or possibly ever. But I think there are disciplined structures, methods, and practices in these traditions that do traverse and replicate recognised states and stages in a way that popular devotional religions do not. Agree that these practices are not scientific in the third-person sense but I don’t know whether that makes them automatically and only doxastic (matters of belief).

The point that interests me is his refutation of the ‘is/ought’ distinction. He phrases it in terms of relevance realisation This revolves around discerning relevance - perceiving what features of a situation could be important in each moment. It puts questions of value, importance, significance and the sacred at the center of the ‘salience landscape’.

Why bring in ‘the sacred’? Where most cognitive scientists stop at mechanism — mapping functions, algorithms, and neural correlates — Vervaeke insists on situating cognition within the broader context of human condition: the experience of being a meaning-seeking, self-transcending animal prone to self-deception. His language of “salience landscapes,” “relevance realization,” and “ecologies of practice” attempts to harmonise descriptive science and philosophical anthropology.

Sorry Wayfarer. — Tom Storm

Not at all.

What I was going to say is that surely the whole concept of the purposelessness of the Universe, with any sense of purpose or meaning being relegated to the individual prerogative, is precisely what the thread is about. It is also what my earlier thread On Purpose was about (although there it was an effort to provide a phenomenological perspective on the question.)

I agree completely with @Pierre-Normand's Aristotelean perspective on the issue. But I also think we have a burden of responsibility. The fact that we are able to grapple with these questions says to me that we must. It is part of the burden of rational sentient being. In some ways, I think the physicalist denial of free will (a la Galen Strawson et el) really amounts to an unwillingness to face up to that responsibility. It is far easier to believe that we really have no ultimate responsibility for our fate than to face up to what having it might entail. But then, as I've already owned up, I recognise that this is the residue of the Christian concscience that my cultural heritage bequeathed me.

Vervaeke argues that normativity doesn’t need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law.
It’s implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.

Our “is” — our biological and cognitive architecture — already entails competencies that can be exercised well or badly. “Ought” simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences.

So instead of:

facts ⟶ mysterious jump ⟶ moral prescription (the classical 'is-ought' problem)

he proposes:

cognitive agent ⟶ degrees of competence ⟶ appropriate normative orientation (“ought”)

It’s a kind of naturalized virtue ethics: to be the kind of being you are is to strive to actualize your capacity for insight, relevance-realization, and flourishing.

Furthermore, Vervaeke recognises that as rational, sentient beings, right action isn’t an optional add-on but intrinsic to the topology of our salience landscape — the way we perceive and value what matters. Acting well refines perception itself. It doesn’t require an appeal to a supernatural judge or cosmic law; it arises naturally from our capacity to discern and realise relevance more truthfully. (Which is not to deny there is a cosmic law. Me, I accept the reality of karma.)

Let's ask ourselves, where do we get these [standards]? The way [this is] asked this is how do we come up with our normative theory — not meaning statistically normal here, but normative meaning the theory about the standards to which we should hold ourselves accountable when we're reasoning. So where does our normative theory come from?

Reason has to be autonomous. Let's say I believed that my standards were given to me by some divine being, in the sense that it is commanded of me. There is some Moses of rationality, and then he comes back with the commandments for how we're supposed to reason. If we follow these just because we are commanded to do so, that is ultimately not a rational act. That is to give into authority, to give into fear...

If we follow the standards because we acknowledge that they're good and right, that means we already possessed the standards. This is an old argument that goes back to Plato. It's in the Euthyphro dialogue, right? Where normativity has to be really deeply autonomous. If something is only good because the gods say it, then the gods aren't good in saying it...

So we have to possess the standards internally. This is an argument that's crucial in Kant. Reason is ultimately autonomous… it has to be the source of the very norms that constitute and govern reason because that's how reason operates. So we have to be the standard.

Ought implies Can. … If I lay a standard upon you, ‘You ought to do this,’ then you have to be able to do it. It makes no sense to apply a standard to you that you do not have the competence to fulfill… So we are the source of the standards. People acknowledge the standard, but they fail to satisfy them. … We have to make a distinction between competence and performance. — John Vervaeke, AFMC, Lecture 40, What is Rationality?

I’d hate to associate myself with Steve Bannon :yikes: I’d much rather Charles Taylor.

I was an undergrad student alongside a fellow by the name of Harry Oldmeadow, who went on to become an independent scholar in the area of the perennialist philosophers.(He won the University Medal for his Honours Thesis. His brother, Peter, was one of my thesis supervisors in Buddhist Studies. They were both really good people, I don't know if they're still with us.) As you will probably both know, the perennial school was a kind of clique of academics and artists, notably René Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, and Ananda Coomaraswamy (among others), who extolled the 'philosophia perennis' (Liebniz' term) - that the various spiritual traditions of the classical period are diverse expressions of an underlying primordial wisdom tradition.

At the time, I was quite impressed by these scholars, although I never fully assimilated their books. But as time went on. I don't feel their ouevre has worn that well (ironic, considering the subject matter). Some of those associated with them, notably Julius Evola, became associated with reactionary fascism. (In his later years in Bloomington, Indiana, Schuon became embroiled in controversy over ritual gatherings that included nudity and were alleged to involve minors — allegations that were investigated and ultimately dismissed. It did tarnish his reputation though.)

In any case, the point I'm making is that expressed in the title of a critical book about it - Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick (his blog). I have discovered there was quite a lot of common ground between the perennialists and reactionary politics, which I don't want to be associated with. (I was also dismayed to learn that Steve Bannon used to quote Guenon.) Neverthelss, I really do understand why one can be 'against the modern world' and the way in which the post-Enlightenment project can be seen as a kind of degenerate age (the 'Kali Yuga' in the perennialist terminology, taken from a Hindu myth.) I don't necessarily agree with it, or endorse it, but I can see the logic. Guenon might be considered an eccentric, but I don't think that's all he was.

(There's something similar in some of the current French cultural critics - Rémi Brague for example - a more temperate and academically grounded critic of modernity who situates his analysis within the Western philosophical tradition itself.)

Perhaps I misunderstand 'mode', but I see 'being' simply as 'existing', which is probably not how you're using the term. To me, all these things share the same mode: they are members of this universe, different arrangements of the exact same fundamentals. — noAxioms

Which is, in a word, physicalism - there is only one substance, and it is physical. From within that set of assumptions, Chalmer's and Nagel's types of arguments will always remain unintelligible.

Am I missing something in Vervaeke's perspectives on the matter? — javra

I think you're misunderstanding the intent of that particular message. Vervaeke would not dismiss nor deprecate any of what you've said in the preceeding paragraphs. Indeed, a large part of his work is restoring 'the sense of the sacred' (e.g. this course). And he's in respectful dialogue with diverse disciplines and traditions.

What that post is criticising is the kind of buffet-style syncretism where you choose the elements you think you want from the 'spiritual supermarket' and attempt to practice them or apply them by yourself. It seems feasible, especially with the abundance of educational resources on the Internet. But this can easily become, and often is, self-centred and self-seeking. Hence the importance of others - a spiritual community or companions on the path.

Vervaeke stresses both 'ecologies' and 'communities' of practice.

Ecology:

• It is plural (practices) and integrated (they support, check, balance one another). One practice alone (e.g. solitary meditation) is not sufficient
• It is purposefully arranged (there is a “logos”, a rationale) rather than just a random aggregation of habitual actions.
• It spans domains of being: cognitive/intellectual, embodied/somatic, imaginal/creative, relational/dialogical. His program describes four “domains”: Dialogue, Imaginal, Mindfulness, Embodiment.
• It addresses what Vervaeke calls “perennial problems” (structural, developmental, functional) that underlie our meaning-crisis (e.g., alienation, absurdity, reflexiveness gaps).
• It is pragmatic and lifeworld-oriented: not just theorising, but practising, training, habituating. Compare “having” (propositional knowledge) with “being” (skillful engagement).

Community:

• Practices are done together with others in fellowship and “mutual support” (i.e., not simply individual meditation or movement but relationally embedded).
• "practice, discussion, friendship”.
• Modern isolation undermines our ability to cultivate meaning and wisdom hence the requirment for communal practice environments or 'spiritual friendship' (Buddhist kalyāṇa-mitratā)

All of which rings true for me. For about ten years I was member of a Buddhist fellowship that met monthly or bi-monthly to present and discuss themes and practices. My practice has really gone downhill since that broke up.