Thanks to the scriptures we still know what we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to behave. It is a fantastic tool against the manipulative narrative of the ruling mafia. They handsomely benefit from growing depravity. We don't. — Tarskian

I missed this. I beg to differ: Scriptures are ancient thoughts about a time of very different social entanglements. It simply is not helpful today, and what is found that is helpful is helpful because it works, not because scriptures say it is right.

The ruling mafia? I like that. Scriptures, speaking generally, stand as a remedy that issues form a higher moral authority, one that will not be gainsaid. AND, this is exactly what the OP is all about: Scriptures are historical documents that lay claim to a higher moral authority and bring ALL of our "mafia" tendencies to heel, but it does this dogmatically, and this is no way to believe, meaning belief works according to justification: The case for a higher authority, an absolute authority, has to be argued philosophically. Not religiously, that is, not according anything so instantly assailable.

The trouble is, even philosophy has a hard time seeing what is there in the midst of our existence. All of our in-the-world experiences are inherently ethical because our being-in-the-world is value-saturated. There is caring in every glance and every thought, private, social, technical, rhetorical; and caring is the engine, if you will, that drives ethics. But caring itself is not the analytic bottom line, for it is dyadic: one cares ABOUT something' or monadic: caring and that which the caring is about are one and the same.

This is not meant to be confusing, just analytical. I care about whether is rains today because an outing is planned. But why is an outing important? It's a good time? What is the meaning of "good" in this locution? Fun, enjoyable, pleasurable; but these are just synonyms for good, I mean fun is inherently good.

The point? The argument is not complete in these few lines, but an essential idea is exposed. This has been a brief metaethical discussion that reveals something this "higher moral authority": it is about the Good. The Bad as well, of course. The argument moves forward to show how this analysis moves inevitably toward metaphysics, only, it is not going to be about ignoring justification just to keep us in line and rid us of our mafioso ways. It will be about a clear, justification for metaethical grounding of our ethics.

The case for a higher authority, an absolute authority, has to be argued philosophically. Not religiously, that is, not according anything so instantly assailable. — Constance

Well, Christianity is indeed collapsing. Ever more rapidly.

Christianity has indeed turned out to be assailable but certainly not easily or instantly. It took centuries until the French Revolution for its assailants to finally make a dent. The other religions are still doing fine. I think that it has become clear that it is not possible to dislodge them. It is not possible to convince a traditional Jew out of Judaism or a traditional Muslim out of Islam.

We just don't have time to figure out alternative solutions to religion. If you don't have something handy that works right now, and that already has a track history of success, then you are going to be too late to still make a difference. Life moves on. Life is also short. I cannot wait for a solution to fall out of the skies. In fact, it has already fallen out of the sky. So, why not just use it?

The argument moves forward to show how this analysis moves inevitably toward metaphysics, — Constance

Insightful! Everything--even value, thus, ethics--is "hiding" in the metaphysical. But where is the latter "hiding"?

I know not actually hiding.

Everything--even value, thus, ethics--is "hiding" in the metaphysical. But where is the latter "hiding"? — ENOAH

Maybe within grammar (Nietzsche).

[W]hat is meant by Religion ...? — I like sushi

By "religion" I mean 'official cultus' (i.e. collective ritual telling of ghost stories) that denies – symbolically escapes from – mortality.

Maybe within grammar (Nietzsche). — 180 Proof

I can get behind that.

I must have confused you. "Business" is what we can't leave. Assuming the hypothetical staring at the abyss of being is even possible (if anything, it's a micro-glimpse, not a stare; an aware-ing, not a vision), it's not so much a returning, as a being smothered (once again). — ENOAH

But one does leave it the more one brings questions to bear upon the world at the most basic level. It is an inevitability, for belief is not sustainable without justification and it is justification that the question assails. Someone tells me she is a doctor and a mother, and I have no issues with this. But then I read Derrida's Structure, Signs and Play and others and I begin to see that when one speaks, the assumptions in place about the knowledge claims implicit inn being a doctor cannot be verified. This is nothing at first, for such an insight really has no redeeming features; but in time, one realizes that one is living in a kind of dream world. Ask, does General Motors really exist? I can talk about it in many, many ways, but all this amounts to is reified talk and pragmatics. GM is a pragmatic "function" and ontologically vacuous, save its pragmatic ontology. But to understand being a doctor like this, to take the idea apart and look for its basic meanings, once done effectively, it makes, and it SHOULD make, the mundane world itself into a question. It is not turtles all the way down; it is questions all the way "around".

Not just originally, continously. We "pursue" being because we are being.

It's just that we "pursue" being; thereby, ignore that we are. — ENOAH

It does depend on what you mean by "that we are." This is a point of disagreement I have been laboring. You think like an Eleatic Parmenidean. But this is not conceivable. This is simply to say that to "pursue" refers to a basic structure of consciousness itself. Being cannot be extracted from becoming. All one calls being is in subjective time, and when something that IS appears before us, the stillness and the profundity does "appear" and there is an event and the agency of this event is a self, capable of implicitly grounding an experience such that there is someone "there" to experience.

And this is notwithstanding spiritual identity, whatever that is. Consider one of those near death experiencers who often say time stands still when there is no profusion to the brain and they leave their body. They no longer have the sense of their own identity, many relate, in this other world. Perhaps, I say; maybe more than just perhaps. But note, their experiences have a beginning and an end, and events come and go and are recorded in memory, and so forth. Their IS, let's allow, an encounter with Being-as-divinity. The point I would make is that THIS is time. It is senseless to talk about otherwise. Time actually standing still would be an absurdity, like two colors occupying the same space or two velocities at once. Logically, it makes no sense.

Though the latter may suffer from the misfortune of thinking they are two things. Both are "pathological," if by existential enlightenment, you are referring to the "pursuit" of being, thinking you will access being by such pursuit. It's the same for you and I, if either one of us denied the inherent contradiction/futility in a dialogue which intermittently (to wit: now) pointed out it's own futility.

While schizoid, as you say, or any other pathology recognized as such yields no functional benefits, not so for philosophy, though the latter seems futile. Philosophy, just as it is wilfully blind to the futility of its pursuits, is wilfully blind to its own actual role: to make sense/navigate the meaning making system. To order the Narratives in functional ways.

Philosophy gets us even to the essence of religion, that pursuit of and glimpse into the real truth outside of our Fictions. — ENOAH

You think of Being as a kind of finality. Perhaps. I argue that to think like this makes being vacuous, literally vacuous. Being requires agency. "No one" there implies no experience at all. The "no self" of the Prajnaparamita is an explicit no self, and has nothing to do with the constituting agency.

The schizoid condition I refer to puts aside the notion of pathology, at least in the familiar sense. It could be called a spiritual pathology, the Kierkegaardian pathology of spirit dialectically subsuming soul and body. This is the introduction of the question that interposes itself between the self and the affirmation. The "no self" intrudes into the, as Fink put it, "construct of acceptedness" we live and breathe in. We are always already existentially schizoid, for the division between acceptedness and the question is implicit in the paradigm of normalcy, just as, as they say, one does not become the Buddha, but rather realizes that one IS this, and has always been this. But without the reflective self, I am arguing, the Buddha vanishes into nothing. Again, to BE requires agency, metaphysical or mundane.

Ontology of the real self would exclude the ego/subject and therefore necessarily all signifiers, including but not limited to all words/thoughts/ideas. So called ontology of the so called Subject self, I, would yield much intriguing discussion, but I would recognize that we are analyzing the laws and mechanics of Mind. — ENOAH

Yet "mechanics and "Mind" are themselves signifiers. As my prof once told me, you're never going to get that tart to your dessert plate. You cannot work within a field of meaning making and posit something outside this without having access to this "other field"; just as one cannot speak the nature of logic unless one can step outside and into a third pov from which one can observe; and this third pov itself, to be affirmed, requires yet another pov; ad infinitum. To posit something entirely outside of what is possible inside (ignoring the problems of sense making these two notions present) is what bad metaphysics is made of. One has left the phenomenon, the presence-in-the-world, to seek remedy in lands unseen!
Derrida, and this is Caputo's reading, exposes "real" metaphysics by showing how language's analysis puts radical distance between the word and the referent. An impossible distance, for the very reason anticipated by Kierkegaard: reason and "actuality" (in double inverted commas, of course) never cross streams, if you will, of their respective existences, and when this is understood, one finally sees that finitude has always been an imposition of language that really never "touched" the "life of the world" (Henry), and this is, or should be, a massive assault on common sense. BUT: you already know this. What you resist is what I will call the metaphysics of language: language is the structure of finitude itself, among language beings like us (dasein), but it is ALSO the medium of discovery, and agency, and thought, and revelation. Imagine a revelation without language: no backdrop against which the novelty of what is revealed to play against. No interest set against a predelineated set of conceptual values. No one there to receive the experience.

With all due humility and modesty, we are applying western analysis to the concept of no-self; not to the level of technical precision you might prefer, but still; despite phenomenology, mahayana is permeat. — ENOAH

This is something I rather emphatically argue against: My world is Thic Quan Duc's (sp?). The technical precision you refer to is in no way exclusive of the analytic I willingly apply, any more than it would be exclusive of physics or geology. Why? Because what we have here is not merely a system of logically connected terms. It is an openness unto the "truth" that is, as you are fond of reminding me, not conceptual. I have been disagreeing and agreeing with you the whole time. Yes, the world stands apart from the language identity assigned; no this "standing apart" is not free of language and signifiers, or rather it is and it is not. The whole affair is transcendental when issues like this come up. Everything is under erasure, so we try as best we can with the hermeneutically grounding of meanings. Note how Derrida's thesis itself is under erasure! The very term hermeneutics is under erasure. For me, things are made clear in the truly objective sense, this is the point. Eastern thinking is not so far from phenomenology. It is parsecs from anglo american philosophy, yes, but not phenomenology. These are very close disciplines. Meditation and Husserl's epoche are, I argue, simply the same thing, only meditation is the reduction radically executed. And argue this.

This is why post modern thinking is so notoriously obscure: They theorize in a world that dances around metaphysics, daring not to make a move too far, yet trying to make meaning there, at the threshold of sense making.

Hah, like an uncarved block, actionless action. That Heidegger! I have to imagine he knew more than he let on to, delivered it to his world in the most progressed language of the day. But that sounds like wisdom beyond logic. — ENOAH

Plainly put, one should read Being and Time. Just read it, then you will see. You will never think the same way again. You will, of course, disagree often, but you will realize that these disagreements are THE disagreements. He articulates the terms of disagreement soooo well.

Sorry, have to go. Ill finish later.

it is questions all the way "around". — Constance

Yes, I'm totally with you on everything preceding. It is a "dream world," which happens to be a label constructed by tgat very dream world, and so on. That too, all the way down. No access that way, to ultimate truth. So what to do with it? Abandon? No. No need. It's not in all respects a dysfunctional thing, quite the contrary. What to do? Tend to it. Tend to the business knowing that knowing is incessant "asking".

This is simply to say that to "pursue" refers to a basic structure of consciousness itself. Being cannot be extracted from becoming — Constance

Sorry. Not careful/skilled. It's exactly the point I too think I have been expressing. Of course being cannot be pursued; pursue is the very meat of becoming.

What I mean to say is just that. To know Being is what philosophy ultimately desires. But being cannot be known. It can only be.

The same, unironically, can be said of any organic activity. They can be discussed, represented in ways which justify belief because they serve ancillary functions, but they cannot be known truly for what they are.


I'm saying that about the whole human being. Knowledge is necessarily not truth because our truth is in our organic functioning, period.

We love our imaginations, they have enhanced our prosperity, but they are still just our imaginations.

Even our excitement about metaphysics, phenomenology, existentialism, etc., is just imagination excited about imagination.

Being requires agency. "No one" there implies no experience at all. — Constance

I think Agent desires agency and has structured that into the laws of reasoning

It is in the same way the Subject has been so structured by grammar, and from that logic, and general reasoning to the extent of common sense. No one would wonder when this body presses these buttons, triggered by autonomous movement of images in this body's image-ing organ, to produce signifiers which surfaced because they "won" the incessant lightening speed dialectical process to project the fittest, that it isn't I doing it.

But I submit, it is not. Do a simple tracing of the Signifier and find what is the natural root of I. If it's anything but the silent, thoughtless, body, unconcerned about protecting its identity because it has none, concerned only with perpetuating life, then it's part of the story, following an evolved--because fit--rule of grammar. It's out of the latter, grammar, that the soul or spirit Narratives arose. We did not create tge Subject to signify the soul.

We are always already existentially schizoid, for the division between acceptedness and the question is implicit in the paradigm of normalcy, just as, as they say, one does not become the Buddha, but rather realizes that one IS this, and has always been this. — Constance

Well, yes. I totally agree with you here. For me, what we have always been is Nature, rudely put by science, matter. Mind despises that. It is not fit for mind's prosperity to project such a construct, so it's outright denied by the melancholy poets/mystics of philosophy, metaphysics. But the silly truth is, I am this biological being. Why not praise God for that? Because we don't want what we already are, Living. We want knowledge.

Meditation and Husserl's epoche are, I argue, simply the same thing, only meditation is the reduction radically executed. — Constance

I agree; maybe you mean this, but my modification might be, meditation is an exercise of the body/epoche an exercise of the mind. H's epoche is arguably as close as one can get without turning away from tge intellect altogether.

A curious notion. What could it mean? — Constance

It could mean a blend of technology and our body in such a way where we're no longer human in it's true meaning, we might become entirely new species, changed not only in look but also mentally.

Yes, I'm totally with you on everything preceding. It is a "dream world," which happens to be a label constructed by tgat very dream world, and so on. That too, all the way down. No access that way, to ultimate truth. So what to do with it? Abandon? No. No need. It's not in all respects a dysfunctional thing, quite the contrary. What to do? Tend to it. Tend to the business knowing that knowing is incessant "asking". — ENOAH

And incessant answering. Pull as far away from this as possible, and questions become one question, that of being qua being. But to get here, this is the issue. For interpretation haunts inquiry, and interpretation is built into the temporality of our existence: I see a tree and tree memories rush in to make "seeing a tree" seeing a tree. But, and I refer to a prior post, this temporal structure shows memory to be holistically bound to presence and anticipation. To say "I saw" is itself a saying that will one day be recalled, and the recollection will not be of a "genuine past event" but of a holistic unity and this remains analytically clear ONLY in the positing of transcendence: One simply cannot talk of a condition or state of affairs "out" of the basic structure of subjective time. When you refer to a dream world, I think the best possible analysis ends here, with time. This is fundamental to Kant's Transcendental Deduction in his Critique. This deduction needs to be read over and over just to get the essential idea. I continue to go back to it. You might find an excerpt from the Deduction interesting, just to see how Kant's mind works and how his analytic of time moves along. He says some extraordinary things, full of penetrating insight. Consider that time is one moment occurring after the next and in order for the mind to grasp a whole thought, these moments must be linked together or "synthesized" into a unity. I see a cup, and the seeing it "as" a cup, there must be a unity of these temporal "moments" sequenced one after the other. Consciousness is this unity. In the Synthesis of the Recognition of a Concept, "If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of
representations would be useless." For it would simply be a jumble of unrelated "representations". Something must bind moments together to make them the unity that they are. "Cup" is a temporal unity of a sequence of moments. What is a self? It is the grand sythesizer of all experience: Without consciousness, the manifold of the representation would never, therefore, form a whole, since it would lack that unity which only consciousness can impart to it." This is Kant's rationalism.

Of course, Kant, as he explains all of this, is IN a perspective of finitude. His rigorous apriori arguments are themselves behind a veil of the medium of explanatory language. And this IS the most fascinating idea to me: Go the Kantian route, and "final determinate knowledge," call it, is hidden as a permanent and structural impossibility, for in the unity of the manifold of a consciousness of a cup on the table, there is no "getting behind" the unity itself, because one's own thinking issues from this unity. Hence the "transcendental" dimension of transcendental idealism. On the other hand, and this is the place where you and I step in, while this thinking may be well reasoned, once we understand that the entire analytic itself is transcendental as well, in its foundation, we then pull away sharply, for the epiphany puts the states of affairs of the world completely OTHER than what knowledge claims can produce, and this "otherness" is right before your eyes. We are thrown back to the original phenomenon that gave rise to all this philosophy in the first place. The transcendence that puts "truth" as you referred to it earlier, at an absolute distance from understanding (Kant), now is IN the intuitive grasp of the cup. Now one is the Buddha, that is, if one sees this with complete clarity, and the body of implicit knowledge claims that possess the world in ordinary perception are suspended, and no longer hold sway. This is liberation, and this is where phenomenology takes one, one who is, of course, inclined to be "taken" (thinking of the expression gelassenheit, again. This yielding to the world, away from the "totality" of egoic insistence), and if Buddhism's and Hinduism's very strong spiritual claims are right (as in the Abhidhamma, the Prajnaparamita, the Vedas, and so on), and I think they are qualifiedly right, then the world becomes Nietzsche's worst nightmare: This world itself becomes a reality of the radically Other, other than, that is, the world in "plain" sight.

Yes, a dream world. You sound like a Hindu, but it makes perfect sense in phenomenology. You might find Henry's statement of the basic working ideas useful. The Four Principles of Phenomenology (following Husserl):

Phenomenology rests on four principles which it explicitly claims as its foundations. The first—“so much appearance, so much being”—is borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term “appearance,” we prefer this strict wording: “so much appearing, so much being.”1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: “zu den Sachen selbst!”[ (To the Thing itself!). The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”3

It could mean a blend of technology and our body in such a way where we're no longer human in it's true meaning, we might become entirely new species, changed not only in look but also mentally. — SpaceDweller

I suspect it will not be a technology of synthetic materials, but organic. AI will master the human genome, and we will live in a brave new world. Only without Aldous Huxley's unfortunate Delta class. All Alphas! But this will lead to a new world of leisure time, and leisure time is freedom, and freedom opens basic questions, and the question of the self will loom large. We will all probably becomes Buddhists.

AI will master the human genome, and we will live in a brave new world. Only without Aldous Huxley's unfortunate Delta class. All Alphas! — Constance

Interestingly despite the brave new world being banned in the US some scientists are already proposing a solution to genetically modify us to withstand higher temperatures.

Pull as far away from this as possible, and questions become one question, that of being qua being. — Constance

Yes. The only question in which the answer transcends Mind.

But to get here, this is the issue — Constance

Yes. But you are here. You don't know it. Not for want of brilliant effort, but because it transcends knowing. You are-ing it; that's where you'll find it.

see a tree and tree memories rush in to make "seeing a tree" seeing a tree — Constance

Yes. Everything is that. Even the self, where memories of "I" flood in to make seeing me, "seeing me."

excerpt from the Deduction interesting, — Constance

Thank you. I intend to read Husserl for the first time beyond Anthologies and intros to Heidegger. And reread critique and being and time. Agree?

Consider that time is one moment occurring after the next and in order for the mind to grasp a whole thought, these moments must be linked together or "synthesized" into a unity. — Constance

Yes. I think that's exactly what happens--in the process, Mind--a synthesis of successive presents into a constructed unity. Two of the mechanisms having evolved to make that now functional linear, narrative form happen are the Subject (/object duality ie difference) and Time. Yes, constructed. Hence becoming. Being may be in some space/time universe. But being just is-ing, the movement of that time, if any, has no meaning.

You might find Henry's — Constance

Right, and Henry. Which I assume is either not a Husserl phenomenologist or has radically modified it?