And I agree with that. But I consider that pain must be seen as part of a significant whole. In this sense pain is not only the sensation but the memory, the value, its interpretation, its representation, and so on. This, I believe, reveals to us an element of absence (non-presence, Husserlian non-evidence) in its ethical consideration. Hence, I cannot give primacy to my pain with respect to the pain of the other person. The value of presence and of the evidence of experience in phenomenology is surpassed by the value of absence in order to be able to pose the ethics of pain. — JuanZu

But it is not about the ethics of pain, nor is it about the significant whole. This is not an argument about ethics any more than Kant's Critique is about logic and logically solving cognitive puzzles. It is an apriori argument: What is there in an ethical matter such that in order to be ethical at all, this is an essential part to it being what it is. This is value, a structural feature of our existence, always already in our existence (Heidegger's care comes to mind, but he had little interest in ethics. Curious).What is value? "The good"? One thing is clear, remove value from the world, and ethics simply vanishes. It doesn't vanish incidentally, as when one removes the umbrella from above one's head, protection from the rain vanishes; it vanishes essentially: ethics becomes an impossibility.

I agree that Husserl's transcendental Ego is not exactly the same as the Cartesian Cogito. However the epokhe saves an Ego. Husserl's analyses of the temporality of that Ego in my opinion are irrefutable. The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration, moments that are more intense than others, sometimes it passes, and sometimes it returns. It is impossible to detach pain from the temporality composed of "here and now" and therefore with the relationship with other "here and now" that are not present. Is this not the experience of the other? Another person who has experiences in relation to me is another "here and now" that I do not perceive. The pain of another person is given in a here and now that I do not perceive and is not an experience of mine. — JuanZu

Very much appreciate this passage here, "The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration." Would you tell me where this comes from in the "Phenomenology of the internal consciousness of time"? I have it here but I can't find it.

You have to ask the question, where does the reduction really take one? "What IS it? It is the Cartesian method of doubt that understands one thing Descartes did not: A disembodied cogito makes no sense at all, and really is no more than an abstraction from actuality, which is a fully endowed experience. The reduction takes one the presuppositional foundation of experience, and so the world of familiar nomenclature falls away, yielding to the pure phenomena that stands before one. Husserl laid the basics outm but it is with the neoHusserlians like Michel Henry, I am arguing, that the reduction finds its true center: “So much appearing, so much being.” The issue of evidence simply loses it meaning here. I can take issue with anything that is constituted theoretically. Even if the world of meaningful utterances is essentially pragmatic, and theoretical accounts "come after" this foundation of pragmatic "knowledge" one is still a theoretical setting simply saying this. This, I take it, is what the problem of evidence is essentially about. What is being defended here is the notion that language in its "openness" discovers existential actuality, and this discovery is inherently valuative. What would dasein be without care? It would be a dictionary-self, altogether exhausted analytically by what language can say and the "potentiality of possibilities" found therein.

As to agency and experiencing the entire affective dimension of existence, I hold that the affectivity of discovered "in the world" cannot exist without it. Affectivity cannot exist without agency, or, it is absurd to imagine suffering disentangled from the one who suffers. Just as it is absurd to imagine an analysis of time contradicting the primordiality of suffering, simply because suffering as a pure phenomenon stands outside of analysis. Heidegger said he did not believe in a single primordiality. I am arguing he was wrong about this: value in the world is this. Consider Jean Luc Marion on this: the reduction is utterly primordial as it yields/discovers primordiality itself. Thus, "the Kantian insistence that there are pure ideas in play in the analytic is dismissed because there is no analysis in this disclosure. One stands before givenness and all discursivity is in abeyance. This is not an argument. It is a revelation."

That is why I am not "Levinasanian". The condition for there to be a pain or suffering of another person is that the value of the experience, the presence and the present of that experience is to be transcended by an absence. In this case the experience of the other that I do not perceive and that is given to me as absent. But in the end this absence is constitutive, even of the ethical consideration of myself and of the inscription of pain in a process of signification. The process of signification is like language: it functions with signs. And it is characteristic of a sign to function in different contexts. In this case pain is a sign, it can have existence in me or in another person, different organisms, different contexts, transcending the value of presence "here and now". It is the most common story of meaning: When we read a book we relive what a person thought in the "here and now" and captured it in ink (or in some data), but that "here and now" is completely absent at the moment when I read the book written by another person: I am another "here and now" also absent for the writer. But the meaning of the book "survives" transcends the experience and the evidence (Husserl's evidence) of both the reader and the writer. — JuanZu

The absence is constitutive OF the process of signification. The claim here is that his temporally conceived process of signification belongs to an analytic that is committed to "things themselves" and the nonderivative of their presence. The reduction takes inquiry closer and closer to this and the disclosure becomes more foundational. It is supposed to do this, not wander around in speculation. When you find yourself radically at odds, not with the familiar word and its assumptions, but with this second order of phenomenological awareness, you know something is very wrong your thinking. Consider for that moment as you stand before, say, a black plague victim and all the horrors, you proceed to explain that agency itself is negated by a proper analysis of the temporal construct of engagement, and so suffering is analytically without agency... so all is well.

Frankly, I don't think you think like this. I think you are testing the thesis. I have no problem with this. I'll read more deeply into Husserl's Time, see if I can give you a more technical response.

So, Schopenhauer has a theory of Will whereby it operates in the negative. That is to say, for him, satisfaction is the freedom from pain, not the attainment of a good. He has a deprivationalist view whereby, wants and needs are the given, and satisfaction is simply a temporary stasis that is achieved when goals are achieved/consumed/partaken in. The suffering is that we are dissatisfied, and thus his quote:

The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
— Schopenhauer- Studies in Pessimism/ The Vanity of Existence — schopenhauer1

Fascinating. I trust he is being truthful, and there is only one way to explain his position: He truly did not understand happiness, love, music; of course, music of great bravado is the exception, as is love in the broadest sense, as in the love of boxing or extreme sports, and happiness can be about just about anything. But something profound and positively important, I mean, he could no more understand this than a quadriplegic could understand the joys of gymnastics. Feeling genuinely good as a general sense of well being, was simply absent from his existence. (Note the striking difference between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein: the latter, very passionate, threw himself on the war's front just to face death, and thoughts of Beethoven and Brahms were the ground for his infamous statements about nonsense: not wanting philosophical nonsense to undo the depth of experience.) This was very likely true about Nietzsche, who suffered all of his life and spend his time, free or otherwise, actually being an ubermensch in his day to day affairs.

A strange irony. Likely that some of the greatest composers are among the least able to aesthetically acknowledge music. Explains Schoenberg and Webern.

It is a question of endowment. That is, why philosophical questions remain unanswerable. We "answer" from what we know, and we "know" very different things as we are made of, if you will, different things.

Hmmm I would say maybe anything we can’t know? — John McMannis

Look at it like Rorty did, and he was a qualified naturalist: See out there among the trees, there are no propositions. And here, at my end, there are no trees. What does a knowledge claim do, LEAP over there for content? No. Correspondence theory falls apart almost instantly because one can never get out of the knowledge we have of trees to the things over there. To affirm such a thing would require some third medium through which connectivity is established; but then, this third medium itself would need its own nexus of epistemic connectivity; ad infintitum.

I should quickly add that it is not being argued that knowledge claim never reach their object. Quite the opposite: they clearly do. When I see a tree, it is out there, I am here, it is not me, etc. All registered with acceptance. The question is, how is this possible? This is where we have to turn to phenomenology. What we "see" is an event, a me-seeing-tree event. What else?

Interesting!

Self itself. — 180 Proof

I don't remember the context in which this was said.

Beyond is whatever evolution gets to in the future; quantum fields are the root before in the past. — PoeticUniverse

Before you get to quantum physics, you have to ask more basic questions, those of philosophy. What is knowledge? What is language? What is aesthetics and ethics? To affirm quantum physics or evolution is, of course, not questioned at all. It's just that there are quesitons that underlie science's assumptions that have their own analyses.

Noticed I overstepped with this: "The issue of evidence simply loses it meaning here." Should say it is here that the problematic begins. To say being is uncovered, and this does carry the weight of foundational being and not simply a construct, in radical proximity of appearance refers to something uncovered that is not derivative. But the discussion this opens is not settled.

Fascinating. I trust he is being truthful, and there is only one way to explain his position: He truly did not understand happiness, love, music; of course, music of great bravado is the exception, as is love in the broadest sense — Constance

So actually, he is one of the most notable philosophers of music, raising it to some of the highest levels of his metaphysical system/sotieology. That is to say, in his view, if the problem of suffering is our "Will", then, one way for a brief respite from it is aesthetic contemplation. The artistic genius and to a lesser extent, the observer, they are seeing the very Ideas themselves (pace Plato but not exactly), through their aesthetic lens. Whereas images and other mediums are more stationary, representing the ideas, music solely, has represents the Wills very flowing nature, being even more abstracted from the already abstract nature of art and aesthetics. See here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer%27s_aesthetics

Before you get to quantum physics, you have to ask more basic questions, those of philosophy. What is knowledge? What is language? What is aesthetics and ethics? To affirm quantum physics or evolution is, of course, not questioned at all. — Constance

Given that we are granting evolution occurred, (I presume you mean biological evolution) I'm not seeing much reason to privelege philosophical consideration especially. There is a large and growing amount of scientific investigation into matters of great relevance to epistemology, language, aesthetics, and ethics. Can you make a case for why the philosophy to which you are referring is more important to understand than the growing body of scientific understanding?

But it is not about the ethics of pain, nor is it about the significant whole. This is not an argument about ethics any more than Kant's Critique is about logic and logically solving cognitive puzzles. It is an apriori argument: What is there in an ethical matter such that in order to be ethical at all, this is an essential part to it being what it is. This is value, a structural feature of our existence, always already in our existence (Heidegger's care comes to mind, but he had little interest in ethics. Curious).What is value? "The good"? One thing is clear, remove value from the world, and ethics simply vanishes. It doesn't vanish incidentally, as when one removes the umbrella from above one's head, protection from the rain vanishes; it vanishes essentially: ethics becomes an impossibility. — Constance

What I have said before is also said of value. How could pain be thought of in a being like us, exempt from its valuation? It is not possible insofar as we are beings who react to suffering and pain according to positive and negative valuations, but in the response (be it by judgment or action) the sign already functions. How could the response not be related to pain and suffering? how could it not have effects on our constitution? Pain and suffering transcends to the extent that it is sign and resonates through our being. Its effects transcend its first moment, they are located in the memory, in the judgment, in the representation, in the response. Here pain and suffering is not the simple cause that can be distinguished from its effects, pain and suffering is its effects beyond the abstraction of a first and absolute moment.

Very much appreciate this passage here, "The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration." Would you tell me where this comes from in the "Phenomenology of the internal consciousness of time"? I have it here but I can't find it. — Constance

You find it in Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal time, when he speaks of the three phases that constitute the temporality of consciousness: Retention, perception and protention. This temporality is presented in the epokhé, in which the difference of the "nows" constitutes the living present. But it is necessary to note the difference of the "nows", and how a present-now is immediately past, and gives way to a future-now. In both cases the absence is related and constitutes the living present. In our case, the living present of pain and suffering.

Consider for that moment as you stand before, say, a black plague victim and all the horrors, you proceed to explain that agency itself is negated by a proper analysis of the temporal construct of engagement, and so suffering is analytically without agency... so all is well. — Constance

It is the opposite. When you act in the face of another person's pain, that pain is not present to you. I claim that helping there is an act that transcends the central element of phenomenology (perception and evidence in the living present). You do not have the evidence that the other is suffering (the phenomenological evidence), but you still help the other person. This is what our act of compassion and empathy consists of: The evidence that I am an other for another. The evidence that I am not the only one and that non-presence is so "originary" is something that occurs in my most "isolated and solitary" moment in the reduction of reductions, in the transcendental reduction. It is necessary to be sufficiently other to help and assist in pain and suffering. One must embrace the possible absence of pain and suffering (the pain and suffering of the other is absent in me).

So actually, he is one of the most notable philosophers of music, raising it to some of the highest levels of his metaphysical system/sotieology. That is to say, in his view, if the problem of suffering is our "Will", then, one way for a brief respite from it is aesthetic contemplation. The artistic genius and to a lesser extent, the observer, they are seeing the very Ideas themselves (pace Plato but not exactly), through their aesthetic lens. Whereas images and other mediums are more stationary, representing the ideas, music solely, has represents the Wills very flowing nature, being even more abstracted from the already abstract nature of art and aesthetics. — schopenhauer1

I wonder what you think about Schopenhauer's ethics? I don't think I will read The World as Representation just because I don't have the time and I'm reading other things. But looking here and there, I come to conclude that he doesn't understand ethics. Misery more existentially emphatic than bliss? He fails to see that our preference for the good over the bad, founded on the good as an absolute good and the bad an absolute bad. Our preferences are entangled in wants and needs as Schopenhauer says they are, but a further examination of the nature of a want or need reveals a ground of presuppositional significance he didn't see.

Apodictically good is different from contingently good, the latter being a good couch or a good knife, the former, good itself. As with apodictic logicality, the latter cannot be anything other than what it is. Just as modus ponens will not be contradicted, so the good of being in love and the bad of having your kidney speared cannot be other than what they are. This is the point in the OP.

You know Schopenhauer better than I. Perhaps you can see a way out of this?

Given that we are granting evolution occurred, (I presume you mean biological evolution) I'm not seeing much reason to privelege philosophical consideration especially. There is a large and growing amount of scientific investigation into matters of great relevance to epistemology, language, aesthetics, and ethics. Can you make a case for why the philosophy to which you are referring is more important to understand than the growing body of scientific understanding? — wonderer1

It is a long story. If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL, then all of its knowledge claims rest within the claims as claims only. This is just the way it is throughout analytical thinking, isn't it? A person tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask what the sun is, and not only is there no answer, but the very possibility of an answer is problematic, then the proposition that moonlight is reflected sunlight light becomes very thrown into doubt while the search for what a "sun" could possiblity be moves forward.

Okay, so we know what the sun is. But consider: A scientist tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask, how do you know anything about anything? Not just suns and moons, but anything at all. The scientist brushes this off, but note: she has no answer. I mean, in the language of the science she is so familiar with, there simply IS no answer to this.

This is why philosophical thinking is "privileged": It is thinking about the forgotten indeterminacies of our existence. No one questions science when it does its job. But scientific metaphysics, materialism or physicalism and the variations thereof, fail almost instantly at the mention.

Of course, you can say such indeterminacies are of no consequence. First, the consequence is, up front, not the point. The point is all knowledge claims rest on indeterminacies. This has to be made clear. Second, to see whether there is significance to this kind of inquiry, one has to realize that this indeterminacy: it's you. And me and everyone else. Philosophy takes one away from objective certainties (or, it should) of science, and into the extraordinary world of the self. After all, a perception of the world is not a mirror image. The observer is part and parcel of the event that produces the facts of the world.

I read somewhere that quantum physics is trying to make a similar claim. But this has been around since Kant.

If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL ...This is why philosophical thinking is "privileged": — Constance

Science discovers, expresses, and duly tests stubborn patterns observable in the physical universe.

The resulting output of scientific activity are scientific statements, i.e. abstract language objects.

There are no abstract language objects visible or otherwise observable in physical reality.

Hence, the output of science is not a legitimate input for science. Consequently, science cannot talk about itself. Its method cannot handle that.

Philosophy can do that. Sufficiently powerful self-referential mathematics can often also do that. Science, however, cannot do that. It is not powerful enough to that end.

He fails to see that our preference for the good over the bad, founded on the good as an absolute good and the bad an absolute bad. Our preferences are entangled in wants and needs as Schopenhauer says they are, but a further examination of the nature of a want or need reveals a ground of presuppositional significance he didn't see.

Apodictically good is different from contingently good, the latter being a good couch or a good knife, the former, good itself. As with apodictic logicality, the latter cannot be anything other than what it is. Just as modus ponens will not be contradicted, so the good of being in love and the bad of having your kidney speared cannot be other than what they are. This is the point in the OP.

You know Schopenhauer better than I. Perhaps you can see a way out of this? — Constance

I think you fail to grasp Schopenhauer. Good is not positive because it is temporary. Much like Heraclitus, he sees the flux of existence and sees this as proof that satisfaction is unstable and unattainable. Want is the hallmark of lack. Something we don’t have now. We would not lack for anything if we were whole and not unstable. Instead our very existence as individual beings is inherently intertwined with lacking.

Good and bad in the hedonistic sense..being embarrassed feels bad. Winning a game feels good, is not quite what he’s getting at.

I think you fail to grasp Schopenhauer. Good is not positive because it is temporary. Much like Heraclitus, he sees the flux of existence and sees this as proof that satisfaction is unstable and unattainable. Want is the hallmark of lack. Something we don’t have now. We would not lack for anything if we were whole and not unstable. Instead our very existence as individual beings is inherently intertwined with lacking.

Good and bad in the hedonistic sense..being embarrassed feels bad. Winning a game feels good, is not quite what he’s getting at. — schopenhauer1

I do see what he is getting at. It is not that he says what he says I take issue with. It is what he says. He fails to see the nature of value in ethics and aesthetics. This is a metaethical claim that the ethical and aesthetic matters we all encounter have an actual metaphysical foundation. Kant's deduction from the evidence found in the analysis of the structure of judgment justified the positing of pure forms of reason. You certainly can argue about this, but the point is about method: He made a logical move from what is "seen" to what is unseen. An extrapolation. Here this is done with value.

I am saying that Schopenhauer, based on what I have read, does not see this. First, if you are going to take misery seriously, as he apparently does, then you have to take the entire range of value matters just as seriously. One seeks to escape pain, but why? The logic of pain possesses the logic of relief, and relief is "good" feeling, without question. But simply in terms of the face value of good and bad experiences, these dimensions of value are clear and "equiprimordial" (using Heidegger's term), from thumb screws to Hagen Dazs: the bad and good of ethics has its existential grounding here and nowhere else, an entire horizon of actual possibilities.

Second, I am arguing that this field of equiprimordiality of value (good and bad ontologically on the same order of significance) possesses the "impossible" dimension of an absolute. Simply put, ask, What would it mean for an ethical matter to have the same apodicticity found in logic? It would be a metaphysical revelation. I am saying value and its ethics and aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same and I agree) stand as an evidential basis for an existential apodicticity.

Only religion has been allowed to think like this, and its thinking has been so cluttered with fictional narratives and churchy fetishes (I like to call them) that this has obfuscated the true nature of religion, which lies in the metavalue affirmation of the good and bad.

It is a long story. If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL, then all of its knowledge claims rest within the claims as claims only. This is just the way it is throughout analytical thinking, isn't it? A person tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask what the sun is, and not only is there no answer, but the very possibility of an answer is problematic, then the proposition that moonlight is reflected sunlight light becomes very thrown into doubt while the search for what a "sun" could possiblity be moves forward.

Okay, so we know what the sun is. But consider: A scientist tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask, how do you know anything about anything? Not just suns and moons, but anything at all. The scientist brushes this off, but note: she has no answer. I mean, in the language of the science she is so familiar with, there simply IS no answer to this. — Constance

Thanks for the response.

This is a pretty good illustration of my point about myopic philosophizing without being scientifically informed. I'll bow out now.

Thanks for the response.

This is a pretty good illustration of my point about myopic philosophizing without being scientifically informed. I'll bow out now. — wonderer1

Myopic philosophizing? Without being scientifically informed?? What are you talking about?

I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology. — Constance

Untiringly, the answer I have found, the body, a real organic being, not unlike many other animals, is beyond oneself. But not beyond, where we are looking; turns out, it's what never went anywhere. It's "oneself" which is "beyond" a factor only in the make-believe; but it necessarily pretends to be out there and within.

What I have said before is also said of value. How could pain be thought of in a being like us, exempt from its valuation? It is not possible insofar as we are beings who react to suffering and pain according to positive and negative valuations, but in the response (be it by judgment or action) the sign already functions. How could the response not be related to pain and suffering? how could it not have effects on our constitution? Pain and suffering transcends to the extent that it is sign and resonates through our being. Its effects transcend its first moment, they are located in the memory, in the judgment, in the representation, in the response. Here pain and suffering is not the simple cause that can be distinguished from its effects, pain and suffering is its effects beyond the abstraction of a first and absolute moment. — JuanZu

First, it is not positive and negative valuations nor what can be "thought of" that ceases upon thought at the outset. This is where you have your issue: you think Husserl's analysis of time has privilege over the actualities most poignantly there, in our midst. In this you are mistaken. Certainly we are trying to think about pain and time, but the question will always need to yield according to phenomenological priority, and the way we think must follow upon the way the world is phenomenologically appears, or is "given". Jean Luc Marion's "Reduction and Givenness" posits a fourth principle of phenomenology: “so much reduction, so much givenness.” Time is an analytic; pain is not. Time is ontologically equiprimordial, which simply means it begs questions that are implicit in the concept; pain is ontologically primordial: reduced to its essential presence, it has NO analytic.

See the OP: the effort to discover the essence of religion takes us away from the discursive Kantian transcendental move of "what has to be the case given what is the case," into pure immanence.

You find it in Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal time, when he speaks of the three phases that constitute the temporality of consciousness: Retention, perception and protention. This temporality is presented in the epokhé, in which the difference of the "nows" constitutes the living present. But it is necessary to note the difference of the "nows", and how a present-now is immediately past, and gives way to a future-now. In both cases the absence is related and constitutes the living present. In our case, the living present of pain and suffering. — JuanZu

But this is a disingenuous argument as it blatantly ignores the nature of what lies before one. Affective consciousness is logically prior to the talk about the three phases of time. The latter is discursive, while affective consciousness is foundational. Keep in mind, we are well aware of the problems of concerning making ideas clear, but then, this is the problematic of affirming in metaphysics, the affirmation of what stands outside of language IN the inside of language. In language, we discover that we exist (in the pre Heideggerian sense of existence. The kind of thing Nietzsche decried so emphatically), and the valuative dimension of this existence is is exterior of language.

I have said earlier that it really does rest on where the epoche takes one, and I mean, if you follow the principle of exclusion, you realize that you are practicing the method of apophatic theology. And all that is left, the residuum of the reduction, is something that cannot be reduced, for it stands as its own presupposition. This is value-in-the-world.

It is the opposite. When you act in the face of another person's pain, that pain is not present to you. I claim that helping there is an act that transcends the central element of phenomenology (perception and evidence in the living present). You do not have the evidence that the other is suffering (the phenomenological evidence), but you still help the other person. This is what our act of compassion and empathy consists of: The evidence that I am an other for another. The evidence that I am not the only one and that non-presence is so "originary" is something that occurs in my most "isolated and solitary" moment in the reduction of reductions, in the transcendental reduction. It is necessary to be sufficiently other to help and assist in pain and suffering. One must embrace the possible absence of pain and suffering (the pain and suffering of the other is absent in me). — JuanZu

The problem of this reasoning lies with your "absence". The originary evidence is yours, and it is unmitigated and nondiscursive. The evidence for the ethical obligation is discursive, argues Levinas, but I think the matter has to be taken to the pure givenness of pathos. Pathos is discovered IN the appearing, and pathos itself is primordial and stands as a presuppositionaless evidential basis for ethics. Conversation is entangled, mediated, derivative. Pathos is direct regard for the Other that has an ontological status of an absolute.

Put time's analysis aside: There before one is the Other's wretched condition laid our before one. Of course, the argument that the Other is a moral priority, and the discussion of something that is NOT primordial to us weighs in for judgment, taking the Other's existence in third person references. This discussion constructs a dialog, putting fact against fact, comparing priorities, and so forth. I argue that the reduction removes this discursive matter from our sight, in order to discover the pure empathic response (noting that this is absent in some: the real cause of our political troubles).

Of course, pure empathy does not give one an answer in an entangled world. Nor does logic give us all the reasons for doing and justifying. Empathy is primordial. This is the point. To "feel for" the misery of others is not an argument, but reflects the foundational unity of ethical agencies.

Untiringly, the answer I have found, the body, a real organic being, not unlike many other animals, is beyond oneself. But not beyond, where we are looking; turns out, it's what never went anywhere. It's "oneself" which is "beyond" a factor only in the make-believe; but it necessarily pretends to be out there and within. — ENOAH

I am a little puzzled. Perhaps elaborate, if you would.

I apologize because it is no different than what I have been presenting to you for your consideration through out.

I've been following your discussion since we "broke" and generally agree with your position/depiction, with only this exception (below).

It is clear to me that because I agree with you, I have assumed that I have made my understanding clear, but I have not.

Here it is--skipping all of the "stages" where I agree--starting at the phenomenological reduction to hypothetically arrive at the so called transcendental ego. Where (you/we) ask, what is beyond that self:

I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology. — Constance

I say that the being we are all after (whether wittingly or not), the being beyond the trans-ego (and there has to be one since the trans-ego is the final reduction but is nevertheless a reduction--implying it is the final remnant of that being reduced) is the organic natural body in its aware-ing unobstructed/Unmediated by language. Even the trans-ego Iis knowable, hence requires language, the medium of knowing.
The natural aware-ing body is aware of the language, ego, etc., but does not "move/act/function" in that medium/world. It is experienced unmediated, directly.

I realize you think it impossible. But I respectfully disagree. And it seems, that I'd the only disagreement I have with your otherwise extremely well managed discussion.

The Essence of religion is a god or gods that tests its victims/players, and if his players fail they will be cursed with disease, disaster, and death and punished even in an afterworld for some of them. We can see this as far back as Enkidu and Odysseus. If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao.


In other words, the essence of religion is a tormenter getting off on testing his creations and punishing them for their “misdeeds”. Gnosticism in that sense, if not taken seriously, would have been a proper satire.
:smirk: @Wayfarer

If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao. — schopenhauer1

Have you traced the "manifestations" "back" far enough?

Maybe the "essence" is that personal attachment to deeds and their fruits will ultimately cause suffering, submission/faith in the way of things (many variations to expressing that) will not.

Because--and the essence of religion emerged to express this--natural occurences cause pain; but suffering and torment arise from the imposition of an ego on to these; an ego to which suffering can attach.

I say that the being we are all after (whether wittingly or not), the being beyond the trans-ego (and there has to be one since the trans-ego is the final reduction but is nevertheless a reduction--implying it is the final remnant of that being reduced) is the organic natural body in its aware-ing unobstructed/Unmediated by language. Even the trans-ego Iis knowable, hence requires language, the medium of knowing.
The natural aware-ing body is aware of the language, ego, etc., but does not "move/act/function" in that medium/world. It is experienced unmediated, directly. — ENOAH

Well sure. But as I agree with this, I also have been trying present the idea that the analytic language used to describe how this works has to be more broadly conceived. Language is not prohibitive for the experience "unmediated" and direct. It in fact makes it possible. This is not to your liking, but one has to authentically conceive of the way one can know anything at all. One has to rethink altogether the nature of language. It is not an external artificial imposition, but an imposition that emerges from within the core of experience itself. One cannot speak the nature of language, and it is just as "unmediated" as anything else. But most importantly, language qua language does not interfere. It makes the openness of the unmediated possible. Heidegger has to notion of geworfenheit, or "thrownness," as when you are there minding your own business, when the lecture on Hegel or Kant you attended leaps to mind for no reason at all and it dawns on you that your/our existence really is a powerful mystery underneath all the ready-made knowledge claims. Now you enter into a radically different mode of existence, which is reflective or meditative thinking. Here you encounter the unmediated.

Far better than Kant or Hegel would be the Abbhidamma. "The East" as a theo-philosophical achievement begins where neoHusserlians (the French theologians like Jean Luc Marion and Levinas) leave off, so guarded they are against claims of mystical overreach, that they could never make that mind boggling move to become a sadhu! To actually walk away from everything and retreat into

I have been pushing two ideas to talk about religion, and both are simple, the kind of thing analaytic philosophy despises. The first is that knowledge is impossible without radically redefining consciousness away from standard assumptions about the primacy of physicalism. I cannot make you see this. One simply has to beat this matter into submission: The brain is in no way at all a mirror of nature and causality has nothing epistemic about it. All I can do is put this on the table. It is entirely up to you to go over this again and again until it becomes obvious, because it is simply obvious. It is the second most fascinating thing about our existence, and it sits there clear as a bell. More than quantum physics can ever be--listen to, read about, quantum physics and you find physicists just puzzled, embarrassed, stymied, clueless; well, this is nothing compared to the consequences of this foundational epistemic problematic.

So what do analytic epistemologists talk about? They ignore it. Because the issue is so simple, there is nothing to talk about unless one turns to idealism, and they most emphatically will not do this because of what is now two hundred years of Kantian philosophy, turned "continental" phenomenology, and an analytic complexity so demanding and counterintuitive they have just had it. They want science, as Russell said, to be the guiding light, and hang the fundamental stupidity the whole thing rests on. See this wonderful book by Robert Hanna: THE FATE OF ANALYSIS Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash Heap of History. In the terms you use, analytic philosophy puts an end to the idea of a world" experienced unmediated, directly."

Anyway, this ax that I have to grind with this failing institution called analytic philosophy concerning epistemology is razor sharp, a regular Occam's razor that cuts out an entire century of mostly pointless anglo american philosophy. The second idea: I said epistemology is the second most fascinating thing. The most fascinating deals with value, and I have labored this to death. It as well is painfully simple. What is the nature of an ethical injunction not to do something? No value, no ethics. So what is value? Just observe the spear in your kidney or the happy nostalgia of childhood. This is the unmediated world you refer to. Thus: the essence of ethics is discovered not in the endless analytic of ethical language (analytic philosophers' cleverness lies here. A great book that illustrates this is John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong), but in the world! This IS the thesis of the OP. The essence of religion lies in the unmediated givenness of value-in-the-world. Value comes to us, says Wittgenstein, in a way, from another world. It has no place in this one, this world of states of affairs. There is a wonderful lecture on Wittgenstein on Youtube titled "Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Great War and the Unsayable" you would be interested in.

The Essence of religion is a god or gods that tests its victims/players, and if his players fail they will be cursed with disease, disaster, and death and punished even in an afterworld for some of them. We can see this as far back as Enkidu and Odysseus. If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao.


In other words, the essence of religion is a tormenter getting off on testing his creations and punishing them for their “misdeeds”. Gnosticism in that sense, if not taken seriously, would have been a proper satire. — schopenhauer1

The trouble I have with this is the metaphysics. You take a narrative, or allude to several narratives, and say things that only toy with the theme of religion. Imagine a geologist or an astronomer taking this perspective! Unthinkable.

But what if you were a scientist committed to observation? All narratives fall away, and this includes those that have interesting things to say like Taoism and Hinduism. These presuppose the most basic questions about religion, those about foundational ontology: the What is it? question of ethics. This is the metaethical question of the good and the bad, the should and the shouldn't, the right and the wrong, that must be approached descriptively. One looks at the world clinically, if you will, at the stark presence of what lies before the waking eye (whether there really is a "stark presence" is of course a real issue, but not here, or, not yet, at least). What is the analysis of an ethical matter? Analysis takes things apart and examines, so we need to take ethics apart, so to speak. E.g., we know S knows where the bomb is located that will bring horror to thousands. May we torture S to find out? Here we stop. Putting aside the arguments of utility contra deontology, why is this an issue at all??? This is the analytic question we begin with: the ontology of ethics.

Here we discover what Wittgenstein referred to as value. I mean, it is not because he used this word, but because the word is simply the proper classification of things in the world that are ethical. All ethical matter hinge on this essential presence: the caring about things and the ouches and yums of their actuality of experience. A geologist may observe the crystal structure of quartz; for religion we look at the se actualities of experience. We look to caring and that which is IN the direct observation of caring. What we discover is the nature of ethical/aesthetic good and bad. This is the foundation of religion.

I don’t see how you link

All ethical matter hinge on this essential presence: the caring about things and the ouches and yums of their actuality of experience. — Constance

With religion.


You’d have to actually include something pertaining to religion to complete that linkage. Ethics is not religion. Ethics tied to a deity or cosmic supernatural principle is, for example. But I would argue that ethics tied to the supernatural entity isn’t religion per se, but the relation of the supernatural to the world, and ethics is usually entailed in that with religious worldviews.

You’d have to actually include something pertaining to religion to complete that linkage. Ethics is not religion. Ethics tied to a deity or cosmic supernatural principle is, for example. But I would argue that ethics tied to the supernatural entity isn’t religion per se, but the relation of the supernatural to the world, and ethics is usually entailed in that with religious worldviews. — schopenhauer1

One has to understand ethics as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus. See also the Lecture on Ethics and his Culture and Value. Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. See what he says:

The sense of the world must lie out
side the world. In the world everything
is as it is, and everything happens as i
does happen: in it no value exists—and if
it did exist, it would have no value
If there is any value that does have
value, it must lie outside the whole sphere
of what happens and is the case. For all
that happens and is the case is accidental
What makes it non-accidental cannot
lie within the world, since if it did it would
itself be accidental
It must lie outside the world
So too it is impossible for there to be
propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that
is higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be put
into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the
same.)

You can take issue with a lot that is here, especially about his definition of a proposition, but this about value and ethics is something he did not abandon later on. His point is really about the ethical good and bad, what Moore called "non natural properties": A simply matter, really, but painfully hard for those hell bent on discursive clarity. They don't like spooky "intuitions" but then, when you experience some or other caring and its concomitant good or bad, you can see clear as a bell that this is not simply a state of affairs, as Witt put is. It is a fact that the flame scorching my skin hurts like the devil, but what one cannot "see" is that it is bad, bad, that is, in the ethical sense and not in the contingent sense of a bad sofa or a bad day for golf. This bad: direct and unmediated presence, this is what Wittgenstein says one cannot be put into words. "Sense" he says above, lies outside the world (states of affairs)and all sense is value intrinsic.

You can see why Witt's positivist friends could never understand what he was talking about. He was a deeply religious philosopher as he realized that this dimension of value in our existence is utterly transcendental and yet permeated our existence. It is not about an afterlife, or some divine plan or punishment. It is there IN the fabric of what we are.

So put it in more mundane terms: religion has two aspects, redemptive (a word full of religious connotative meaning which I despise) and consummatory; and these align with, respectively, the ethical or as I call it, the primordial, bad and the good. The former is the suffering of existence, the four horsemen of the apocalypse come to mind, but then, such a thing is a distraction. Better to bring vividly to mind the actual feeling of starving or stricken by plague. Ironic that this, the most salient feature of our existence, is shunned by professional philosophers. Schopenhauer, you know better than I, certainly DID understand this. What he appears not to understand (and I welcome being disabused) is that the wretchedness of our existence is inherently redemptive! That is the "logic" if you will, of suffering requires apriori, redemption. THIS is a tough premise to embrace. I will get no sympathy from anyone in this forum, for it is an "intuitive" matter. One simply has to look to the most wretched of wretched affairs, and realize as stand alone "non natural properties" they demand redemption.

I will get even less sympathy for the idea that the good (what Witt called divinity) is inherently consummatory. Tougher, yet. It cannot be argued, just as Witt would never brings such explanatory indignity to his beloved Beethoven or Brahms. Or being in love. Such things reach out beyond themselves to some unfathomable height that is deeply profound. Again, one does not argue such a thing. Like, say, a lighted match placed under your finger: one observes and acknowledges its nature. With such observations, one has entered into the primodiality of religion.

Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. — Constance

Isn't the problem here that later Witt had a different approach and framed morality in the context of language games? My understanding is that latter Wittgenstein holds that morality is not transcendent but is rather a product of contingent human practices. But I am no Witt expert. I think @Joshs might come closest.

One has to understand ethics as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus. See also the Lecture on Ethics and his Culture and Value. Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. See what he says: — Constance

You can see why Witt's positivist friends could never understand what he was talking about. He was a deeply religious philosopher as he realized that this dimension of value in our existence is utterly transcendental and yet permeated our existence. It is not about an afterlife, or some divine plan or punishment. It is there IN the fabric of what we are. — Constance

I believe Norman Malcom's book Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View provides a nice exposition on his view of religion. In the introduction, Malcolm presents a quote from Wittgenstein that had puzzled him thought-out his life. Wittgenstein said to a former student, "I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." Malcolm then proceeded to present an interpretation of what it could mean to say that there is, not strictly a religious point of view, but something analogous to a religious point of view, in Wittgenstein's later philosophical thought.

The four analogies are as follows:

1. The first analogy involve the notion of explanation. Basically, explanation comes to an end, and what needs to be accepted is the language game or form of life itself. As Malcolm says, "Religious practice are part of the natural history of mankind and are no more explicable that are other feature of this natural history."

2. The second analogy is the Wittgenstein's feeling of the "wondered at the existence of the world" or "the experience of seeing the world as a miracle." This was similar to his views of language games, for example, "Let yourself be struck by the existence of such a thing as our language game of: confessing the motive of my action (PI, p. 224).

3. The third analogy, Malcolm says the following of Wittgenstein's view of "religious emotion, thinking, practice, are an expression of the conviction that something is basically wrong with human beings. From Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, "The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith - as I view it- is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart." Malcom see the similarity in Wittgenstein later approach to philosophy when he says "A main cause of philosophical disease - one-sided diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example. (PI 593)."

4. Fourth, Wittgenstein did not see any value in intellectual proofs of God's existence or theological formulations in general. For Wittgenstein, religion was about changing one life, amending one ways, and helping others. Faith without works is dead as St James would say. Malcolm sees the same kind of thinking when Wittgenstein says "it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game (OC 204.)"

Based on Malcolm's reading, I am not so sure if Wittgenstein would go so far in claiming anything transcendental. He did not believe we needed to explain religion with anything transcendental; that the world was a wonder and a miracle itself; that we need to look at ourselves in mirror and change our lives and help others, and not submit to the temptation to overly intellectualize religion.

But I would agree with you that for him it does permeate our lives and is woven in the very fabric of reality. As he says in Culture and Value:

"Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the 'existence of this being', but e.g. suffering of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, - life can force this concept on us."

Fourth, Wittgenstein did not see any value in intellectual proofs of God's existence or theological formulations in general. — Richard B

Yes, Wittgenstein expresses a feeling that I have also always had.

Rationality is a tool. Spirituality is another tool. They were never meant to be indiscriminately mixed.

If you want rational answers to spiritual questions, you are doing either of both wrong. Probably even both.