...it's not a phenomenal existent, but a noetic or noumenal existent. — Wayfarer

I think you need to be consistent with your qualifications. Is Whalon saying "god does not [phenomenally] exist"? If he is, he needs to qualify his assertion. That's why I say he's "contorting or molesting language."

I'm not familiar w/ the 'genie,' — softwhere

It's worth posting:

Genie (Arthur Rimbaud)

He is affection and the present moment because he has thrown open the house to the snow foam of winter and to the noises of summer—he who purified drinking water and food—who is the enchantment fleeing places and the superhuman delight of resting places.—He is affection and future, the strength and love which we, erect in rage and boredom, see pass by in the sky of storms and the flags of ecstasy.

He is love, perfect and reinvented measure, miraculous, unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine loved for its qualities of fate. We have all known the terror of his concession and ours: delight in our health, power of our faculties, selfish affection and passion for him,—he who loves us because his life is infinity…

And we recall him and he sets forth…And if Adoration moves, rings, his Promise, rings: "Down with these superstitions, these other bodies, these couples and ages. This is the time which has gone under!"

He will not go away, he will not come down again from some heaven, he will not redeem the anger of women, the laughter of men, or all that sin: for it is done now, since he is and since he is loved.

His breathing, his heads, his racings; the terrifying swiftness of form and action when they are perfect.

Fertility of the mind and vastness of the world!

His body! the dreamed-of liberation, the collapse of grace joined with new violence!

All that he sees! all the ancient kneelings and the penalties canceled as he passes by.

His day! the abolition of all noisy and restless suffering within more intense music.

His step! migrations more tremendous than early invasions.

O He and I! pride more benevolent than lost charity.

O world!—and the limpid song of new woe!

He knew us all and loved us, may we, this winter night, from cape to cape, from the noisy pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from vision to vision, our strength and our feelings tired, hail him and see him and send him away, and under tides and on the summit of snow deserts follow his eyes,—his breathing—his body,—his day.

I can't claim access to a mysticism that escaped a return to everyday life. — softwhere

I'm not sure there's anything like a permanent escape from (let's say) "everydayness." After all, as they say, samsara is nirvana.

Meditative practice has a permanent effect on brain wave patterns. That might be the best we can do.

Understanding that grand scheme was seen as the aim of philosophy (before it became regarded as a separate discipline to science.) — Wayfarer

The sages who have compassed sea and land,
The secret to search out, and understand—
My mind misgives me if they ever solve
The scheme on which this universe is planned.

— Omarian thought

Clues:

Parts:

What 'IS', as the Fundamental, cannot have parts, for then the parts would be more fundamental; thus, mind, as well as any system or composite compound is out.

Something like a wave is simple and has no parts. Science has thrown out the higher prospective fundamentals on down to a near final and much lower prospect, that of quantum fields.

Timelessness and the Block:

Something Eternal and permanent is implied due to no available source such as 'Nothing', and thus it simply ever 'IS', known as timeless 'being', instead of 'becoming' in time.

Science suggests this as a block universe.

Completeness:

The 'IS' block doesn't change; it is already ever complete, so it must contain all events/particulars.

Philosophy/logic suggests that what has no beginning can't have any input, leaving it to be all possible events/particulars there all at once.

Observation of daily life shows that change is ubiquitous, for not anything remains the same even for an instant; there is a constant sequence/transition/transmutation of particulars coming and then going away in a flash, in a way that appears to be sensible to natural laws.

Either the block gets traversed or it is presented to us.

Realness:

There is something to be said for a non-real implementation virtual kind of presentation scheme to be taken as real when the difference makes no difference. For example, the message of hearing music is so, whether from real live band implementation/messenger or from a recorded device implementation/messenger.

What is the message of the Universe? How does everything happening have any information content beyond what a lack of anything would have?

But there's a real point at issue. We have developed these fantastic instruments that can measure the entire universe and see into the sub-atomic domain. For us, that is all there is. Whenever we speak of 'what exists', then we think of what is 'out there somewhere'. It is the 'phenomenal realm', the domain of appearances. Modern naturalism insists that this is all that is real - 'the cosmos is all that exists', per Carl Sagan. Our orientation towards that subject-object perspective is instinctive and culturally ingrained. So this kind of argument is directed - as it says! - against those who say that the absence or non-discoverability of 'the divine' anywhere within this picture, is an argument against it. — Wayfarer

Sure. It's a cultural catastrophe.

No argument against the existence of god can tarnish the mystic's insight and moment of ecstasy. Philosophy is impotent here.

I like the poem. It reminds me of Whitman, and I love Whitman.

I'm not sure there's anything like a permanent escape from (let's say) "everydayness." After all, as they say, samsara is nirvana.

Meditative practice has a permanent effect on brain wave patterns. That might be the best we can do. — ZzzoneiroCosm

That's how I tend to view it. There is no enduring escape, but moments of insight and ecstasy leave traces on everyday living. And I love my favorite philosophers for unveiling what is profound in the apparently mundane. There's a 'spiritual' ambition or intention in the great philosophers that is bigger and brighter than technology-as-truth ('If it's gear, it's hear.', 'If it's useless, it's unreal.') As you may know, Derrida's first paper was on the 'ideality of the literary object,' which is arguably the 'spiritual realm,' our intersubjective participation in the 'holy spirit' of language. This embarrasses the tough-minded pragmatist who sides ultimately with worldly power against fleeting 'private' insights.

I also like God as the abyss of our unknown selves. I think that's what Feuerbach means by the species essence. As mortal beings in time, we can live out only a tiny part of our potential, of the species as still-unknown possibility (including paths that others take and we don't). And then I love the God in Job, a dark transrational or subrational God justified only by the beauty and terror of the real. In short, the idea of God or gods seems central to human existence.

Thanks. I bumped into Eckhart by way of Derrida. I forget the name of the book. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I bumped into Eckhart in Caputo's book on Heidegger. Also Angelus Silesius.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition identifies these epigrams as Reimsprüche—or rhymed distichs—and describes them as:

...embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Böhme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior to himself; but he cannot be an object of love to himself without going out, so to speak, of himself, without manifesting his infinity in a finite form; in other words, by becoming man. God and man are therefore essentially one.[9] — Wiki

I think this is what Hegel wanted to rationalize.

Also this:

The rose is without 'why'; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it. — Angelus

This reminds me of Wittgenstein: It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical. Such an insight is repeated in Nausea, albeit in its unsettling aspect.

Humans insist on 'magic,' and the billboards are happy to give us magic commodities. When I remember great parties, I also recall great music and great conversation, everything aimed at the 'magic' of life and its ecstasies and opportunities. — softwhere

This is the thrust of a book I hope to put together before I'm cozy in my coffin. Instead of "magic," I like to say "mystique." Mystique and Nothingness.

I have a load of research ahead of me. But say you have the world-mystique of the Middle Ages and the loss of world-mystique concurrent with the loss of Christ or death of god. The billboards exploit the loss of world-mystique. Political figures exploit the loss of world-mystique. Etc.

It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical. — softwhere

Absolutely.

The rose is without 'why'; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it. — Angelus

That's pretty.

Such an insight is repeated in Nausea, albeit in its unsettling aspect. — softwhere

In Nausea I see the intimate link between mystic union and schizophrenia. Joseph Campbell writes: "The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight."

not a phenomenal existent, but a noetic or noumenal existent — Wayfarer

This makes it extra clear that you're talking about the same thing I am talking about as "concrete vs abstract". Concrete things are phenomenal, abstract things are noumenal. Your early comment about the tree being "partially real" fits into there as well, as I say that the most concrete things are the local, present, actual occasions of experience that oneself is having, and ordinary things like trees are abstractions out of patterns in patterns in patterns in those occasions of experience, and things like electrons are abstractions out of patterns in those ordinary objects, and eventually things like numbers become completely abstracted away from any concrete instances of them, but can still be further abstracted into things like sets.

So if you're saying that God something completely abstract like numbers, then you're saying he is not (as I would phrase it) concretely real, which I take to be the ordinary sense of reality we're usually talking about: abstract reality is a weird, well... abstraction, of ordinary concrete reality, projected behind the concrete phenomenal reality we're directly in touch with. But the thing is, all kinds of fictional objects like unicorns are also abstractly real in that sense: that's why we can say things like "unicorns have three horns and scales" are false, in the same way that "triangles are concave" is false: fictional objects are defined into (abstract) being like mathematical ones are, and a three-horned scaly unicorn contradicts the definition of a unicorn. There can be a (concrete) universe with no (concrete) triangles, and a universe with no unicorns, and a universe with no God, even though we can say things that are necessarily true of all those things; just like if humans went extinct, there would be no (concrete) bachelors, but it would still be necessarily true that all bachelors are unmarried.

Basically, by putting God into that category, you're saying he's just an idea (in the colloquial sense) that might not actually exist (in the colloquial sense). Which... doesn't sound like anything contrary to what any atheists think, and so makes that a pretty vacuous form of theism.

I'm also wondering if you're aware of Kant's equation of empirical realism with transcendental idealism, and likewise transcendental realism with empirical idealism. In saying that the abstract, noumenal, or transcendental is more real, you're saying that the concrete, phenomenal, or empirical is all just ideal, i.e. just ideas, images, fallible impressions of true reality. Kant conversely endorsed transcendental idealism (abstract noumenal are just ideas that we have) and equivalently endorsed empirical realism (reality is made of concrete phenomena), as do I: where what we directly experience is the most real, and abstractions from that are ideas that we project behind it in a fallible attempt to understand and explain it.

This is the thrust of a book I hope to put together before I'm cozy in my coffin. Instead of "magic," I like to say "mystique." Mystique and Nothingness.

I have a load of research ahead of me. But say you have the world-mystique of the Middle Ages and the loss of world-mystique concurrent with the loss of Christ or death of god. The billboards exploit the loss of world-mystique. Political figures exploit the loss of world-mystique. Etc. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Nicely put. These are also themes I'm interested in. Mystique and Nothingness would be the kind of philosophy I like. Great project.

I think the transformation of world-mystique is what Heidegger had in mind in terms of the understanding of being. 'If it's gear, it's here', 'If it spends, we're friends.' 'If it get clicks, it sticks.' What does a culture take as real, true, valuable, authoritative? Have you seen Debord's film? If you get in the mood, here's a link: https://vimeo.com/139772287

In Nausea I see the intimate link between mystic union and schizophrenia. Joseph Campbell writes: "The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight." — ZzzoneiroCosm

I read The Masks of God recently and was quite impressed. Anyway, that quote makes sense. The shaman is perhaps the survivor of a schizophrenic crisis.

Have you seen Debord's film? If you get in the mood, here's a link: https://vimeo.com/139772287 — softwhere

Sweet, I'll check it out.

I'll download a subtitled version... :)

I think the transformation of world-mystique is what Heidegger had in mind in terms of the understanding of being. — softwhere

I wonder if you'd be willing to offer a reference or exposition.

So if you're saying that God something completely abstract like numbers, then you're saying he is not (as I would phrase it) concretely real, — Pfhorrest

Classical theology would say that God is ‘super-real’ - the real in reality, the being of being. Whereas what you and I take to be concretely real, is actually ephemeral and only existing because of the being that has been lent to it. Don't agree with it, by all means, but at least understand what it is you don't agree with.

Kant conversely endorsed transcendental idealism (abstract noumenal are just ideas that we have) — Pfhorrest

This conveys a misinterpretation of Kant. When you say that the noumenal are 'just ideas that we have', it's because you, as a modern, understand 'ideas' as being 'subjective' or something in your mind or my mind. So in other words, they're a product of mind, which in turn is a product of (material) evolution, which in turn is a product of chance. (Everything is skewed in modern thought by the notion of biological evolution. Darwin was not a philosopher, and evolutionary theory is not a philosophical framework. And this shows up in many different ways.) So, to you, ideas have a kind of derivative reality, and are only real at all insofar as someone has them. Whereas, Kant would say that the categories of the understanding, and the various rational powers of the mind, are what makes coherent experience possible in the first place. They are in that sense ontologically prior to any naturalistic theory of the nature of mind (for instance) because it is only by virtue of those faculties that we can have theories of any kind.

quote="Pfhorrest;363791"]Basically, by putting God into that category, you're saying he's just an idea (in the colloquial sense) that might not actually exist (in the colloquial sense). Which... doesn't sound like anything contrary to what any atheists think, and so makes that a pretty vacuous form of theism.[/quote]

I'm saying nothing like that but again it's inevitable that you will see it that way. But it is interesting, that all the ID types think that the philosophical theology of a David Bentley Hart is also 'like atheism' - which just goes to prove my original point, that nearly all atheists are criticizing a straw god.

Joseph Campbell writes: "The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. — ZzzoneiroCosm

There's a kind of nietzschean transgressive thrill in such notions, but I'd rather swim than sink, myself.

There's a kind of nietzschean transgressive thrill in such notions, but I'd rather swim than sink, myself. — Wayfarer

:fire: :scream: :fire:

...nearly all atheists are criticizing a straw god. — Wayfarer

I absolutely agree with this. God is a strange word. In some important sense, all god-notions are straw gods.

Like Feynman said about quantum mechanics - if you think you understand god, you don't understand god.

I wonder if you'd be willing to offer a reference or exposition. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I highly recommend A Thing of This World by Lee Braver. It weaves Heidegger into narrative that stretches from Kant to Derrida. I read it for free as a pdf and then bought the paperback.This is review by another book by Braver, relevant to the history of being.

In the chapter ‘History, Nazism, the History of Being and its Forgetting’ Braver argues that Heidegger, in his later writings, emphasizes the history of being rather than pursuing explication of existential phenomenology. He provides a short history of being, divided into four separate parts: pre-Socratics, Platonic, medieval, and modernity, with each area having its own unique understanding of being. Accordingly, human beings’ way of being alters throughout history, due to an ontological understanding of being that shapes a culture’s entire way of acting and thinking. Braver, in Groundless Grounds (2012, p.117), wrote that “Only Greeks can be tragic heroes, only Medievals pure-hearted saints, and only moderns comfort-seeking gadget-users”. He pursues this idea in the book while claiming “And our way of being changes with them so that a Greek citizen, a medieval monk, an early modern gentleman-scientist, and a modern iPhone user are different kinds of subjects” — review

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/05/18/book-review-heidegger-thinking-of-being-by-lee-braver/

In my own words, the 'I' is only possible on the foundation or background of 'we.' One uses a word this way. A road is for driving on. A sidewalk is for walking on. Time is money. For instance, 'I' think about 'myself' in a language I did not create and starting from 'values' (still too abstract and theoretical) that I did not choose. We are 'thrown' into our cultures way of living and thinking, and of course into having particular parents. If we rebel and want to bring down the house, we use pieces of that house. We use an inherited language to for instance try to transcend that language or see around it. I think lots of Heidegger and Hegel are contained in Joyce's/Stephen's 'history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' For Hegel, we dream toward an awakening. For Heidegger it's less clear, though in one interpretation there's no structure, no telos, just various unfoldings, clearings. Which aren't in our control. For if we could choose, we'd choose in terms of our thrown-ness. For the later Heidegger, there is an irreducible passivity in human existence, which the technological interpretation of being covers up. So Nietzsche is the last metaphysician. Platonism rots into pragmatism and will-to-power as a late manifestation of being (what counts as real & significant).

The fantasy of not-being-thrown is connected in my mind to a god independent of nature and especially time and philosophy's lust to be without presuppositions, its own father, to have given itself its own name. Man is time trying to crawl out of itself. (?)

The quotes below described being within what I'm calling (got it from Braver?) an 'understanding of being.' The quotes on 'the nothing' remind me of Feuerbach. These connect to our larger conversation about God.

The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures.
...
Where one dwells is where one is at home, where one has a place. This sense of place is what grounds Heidegger's existential notion of spatiality, as developed in the later philosophy (see Malpas 2006). In dwelling, then, Dasein is located within a set of sense-making practices and structures with which it is familiar. This way of unravelling the phenomenon of dwelling enables us to see more clearly—and more concretely—what is meant by the idea of Being as event/appropriation. Being is an event in that it takes (appropriates) place (where one is at home, one's sense-making practices and structures) (cf. Polt 1999 148).
...
Even though the world always opens up as meaningful in a particular way to any individual human being as a result of the specific heritage into which he or she has been enculturated, there are of course a vast number of alternative fields of intelligibility ‘out there’ that would be available to each of us, if only we could gain access to them by becoming simultaneously embedded in different heritages. But Heidegger's account of human existence means that any such parallel embedding is ruled out, so the plenitude of alternative fields of intelligibility must remain a mystery to us.
...
Because the mystery is unintelligible, it is the nothing (no-thing). It is nonetheless a positive ontological phenomenon—a necessary feature of the essential unfolding of Being. — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#HisHis

I think of this 'nothing' as what makes poets the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world.' It's a pregnant darkness. People like Descartes see the world in a new way. Later we take what was visionary for granted. Another Heideggerian theme is restoring force to the most elemental words, which I understand as rediscovering the radicality of metaphors that have cooled and hardened into common sense.

I offer all of this humbly. I just love this stuff and enjoy trying to make sense of it with others.

Thanks for all of that. I wonder if you have a link to the pdf you mentioned.

If not, I'll have to get myself some Braver. Looks like my cup of tea.

Classical theology would say that God is ‘super-real’ - the real in reality, the being of being. Whereas what you and I take to be concretely real, is actually ephemeral and only existing because of the being that has been lent to it. Don't agree with it, by all means, but at least understand what it is you don't agree with. — Wayfarer

I understand that model, I'm just trying to get clear if that's what you endorse yourself, because the things you've said and quotes you've agreed with haven't made that at all clear. It seems clear to me now that you are talking about the abstract-concrete / transcendental-empirical / noumenal-phenomenal spectrum, and taking the position that things on the abstract/transcendental/noumenal side of it are more real than things on the other side. It's still not clear why you make a distinction between being real and existing, but it looks like you conversely say that things on the concrete/empirical/phenomenal side exist more than things on the other side.

Because you have this weird divide in the way you use the words "real" and "existing", and your apparent misunderstanding of Kant (addressed further below), it's less clear to me whether you think "reality" or "existence" as you use them is more "objective", but I have the impression so far that you take it to be "reality", i.e. the abstract/transcendental/noumenal, and that you take "existence", the concrete/empirical/phenomenal world, to be a "subjective" ephemeral shadow or interpretation of that "reality".

This conveys a misinterpretation of Kant. When you say that the noumenal are 'just ideas that we have', it's because you, as a modern, understand 'ideas' as being 'subjective' or something in your mind or my mind. So in other words, they're a product of mind — Wayfarer

That is exactly what Kant means. The etymology of "noumenon" even comes from the Greek word for "mind". The view you seem to espouse is what Kant would call "transcendental realism", or equivalently "empirical idealism": that the transcendent/noumenal world is objectively real, and the pheomenal/empirical world is just our subjective impression of it. Kant explicitly rejected that in the so-called "Copernican shift" of which he is perhaps most famous, instead saying that it is the phenomenal/empirical that is real, and the transcendent/noumenal world is just the ideas we have about it: "empirical realism", or "transcendental idealism". He explicitly says that noumena are forever beyond our direct knowledge, that basically all we can do is speculate about them, and try to find the boundaries of what they might possibly be through reason.

which in turn is a product of (material) evolution, which in turn is a product of chance. (Everything is skewed in modern thought by the notion of biological evolution. Darwin was not a philosopher, and evolutionary theory is not a philosophical framework. And this shows up in many different ways — Wayfarer

You keep bringing things back to Darwin as though I (or everyone you think I'm like) start with evolution as a premise and then build the rest of things from there. Evolution is entirely a contingent theory as far as my philosophy is concerned; it could in principle turn out to be false and nothing about my philosophy would change, just some contingent questions would turn out to have different answers. Much the same as with the existence of God, really, as I think we discussed at length in my "How important is (a)theism to your philosophy?" thread. For the entirety of my philosophy book I don't weigh in one way or another about whether or not God exists, until the very last chapter when I raise the question merely as an aside to answering another question and, using the rest of my philosophy which had thus far been agnostic to the existence of God, determine that there's almost certainly nothing anyone would want to call God in existence. The relationship of evolution to my philosophy is the same, except I never even have reason to pose the question of whether or not it's true, because it has no bearing on anything else I ever discuss.

Kant would say that the categories of the understanding, and the various rational powers of the mind, are what makes coherent experience possible in the first place. They are in that sense ontologically prior to any naturalistic theory of the nature of mind (for instance) because it is only by virtue of those faculties that we can have theories of any kind. — Wayfarer

Yes, but that's different from saying noumena, or abstract, transcendent things, are ontologically prior. The whole "Copernican shift" that Kant is famous for is saying that rather than something abstract and transcendent, external to us, being primary or central to reality, but shielded from our view by a veil of concrete, empirical particulars, as we circle around it trying to peer in... instead we are in the center, the world circling around our minds so to speak, the empirical and concrete world of phenomena forming the true reality in which we are embedded, and transcendent, abstract, noumenal things being what we imagine to be "out there" beyond that. (That is not only the root of the logical-empirical tradition of the Analytic branch of contemporary philosophy but also, perhaps even more so, the phenomenological tradition of the Continental branch.) In that model of the world, the categories of understanding are a part of us there in the center, conditioning how the empirical, concrete phenomena appear to us, but they're not identical with our ideas of transcendental, abstract noumena, which are even further out in the periphery, metaphorically speaking, beyond the pheonomena.

I agree with that Kantian model, and before you ask how a physicalist philosophy of mind can fit into that, I'll just explain preemptively: each of us is at the center of such a model, and finds other people to be objects out there in our own sphere of empirical phenomena. So you're a physical object from my perspective, and it stands to reason that I'm also a physical object from your perspective, even though I'm the subject at the center of all phenomenal experience of all physical things from my perspective, just like you are from yours. So if I can devise a physical explanation for your behavior, it stands to reason that you can do the same to me, and the difference between being a physical object and a mental subject is a matter of perspective: my mental subjectivity is just what it's like to be this thing that is a physical object to you. (This is, incidentally, also where my panpsychism comes in: the only difference between physical and mental is a perspective shift, so all things that are objects in the third person perspective are subjects from their own first person perspective, not that that really means a whole lot for something that's not as interestingly complex in reflexive function as a human brain).

I'm saying nothing like that but again it's inevitable that you will see it that way. But it is interesting, that all the ID types think that the philosophical theology of a David Bentley Hart is also 'like atheism' - which just goes to prove my original point, that nearly all atheists are criticizing a straw god. — Wayfarer

This still just leaves me wondering what the heck you actually believe that is actually different from what an atheist believes, not just nominally. It reminds me of when I used to call myself a pantheist, holding that the universe itself is God, but that didn't hold any kind of import about different expectations for how the world did or should work or anything like that, it was just a kind of reverence of the universe. In time I realized that plenty of atheists revered the universe and nature and held basically the exact same views and feelings and everything that I did, they just thought it was silly to apply the word "God" to the universe, and made it sound like I believed something different from them when I really didn't. I've been trying to figure out for a while now what exactly you think differently about the world than me, in more than just nominal terms, although now that you're saying "God doesn't exist" (or agreeing with a quote to that effect at least) it's not even clear that there's a nominal disagreement.

This still just leaves me wondering what the heck you actually believe that is actually different from what an atheist believes, not just nominally. — Pfhorrest

Perhaps there's a clue, found in a previous post.

However an interesting dialogue may be had between Christian humanists who posit that God is bound within language and does not exist beyond it (e.g. Don Cupitt) and Tillich who posits that our understanding of God is bound within language yet presumes (but cannot verify) that God exists beyond it. — Wayfarer's post in Tillich

To me the 'realm of meaning' which includes noetic objects like 7 is related to the 'ideality of the literary object.' I think this realm as it wanders from simple math depends on material for signifiers, but nevermind that. It seems that people can have an I-thou relationship with an 'ideal' or 'noetic' God who isn't physically there. I sometimes feel a bond to writers of texts I love, long dead. Don't we live in a world of such ghosts? Imagine how we should have continued conversations? Interact with people from our childhood, long lost, in dreams?

As something like a 'Christian humanist,' I'm happy with the ghost as a ghost (the 'Holy Spirit'). This spirit passes to and fro a community of saints (sinners who forgive one another). Others are concerned perhaps with justifying the possibility of a God that exists beyond language and such community, by which I understand beyond the ideality of the literary object or field of shared meaning and feeling. Within this realm of meaning, within language and culture, we can gesture beyond to a more metaphysical God. Perhaps being itself is God. Or all being is the 'incarnation' or representation of God.

If God is a noetic object, that more or less seems to make sense to everyone. If God is (or refers to) the ground of being (being itself perhaps), that also makes a certain sense. But God as ground of being seems to open the problem of evil and/or shift us into Job's meeting with the whirlwind. Perhaps this is the 'God of God.' Personally the metaphysical issue seems less important than the divine predicates, which only make sense to me as human virtues. One can cast an amoral Father as a demiurge in the whirlwind and a tender (mother and) son who restores the loss.

The etymology of "noumenon" even comes from the Greek word for "mind". The view you seem to espouse is what Kant would call "transcendental realism", or equivalently "empirical idealism": that the transcendent/noumenal world is objectively real, and the pheomenal/empirical world is just our subjective impression of it. Kant explicitly rejected that in the so-called "Copernican shift" of which he is perhaps most famous, instead saying that it is the phenomenal/empirical that is real, and the transcendent/noumenal world is just the ideas we have about it: "empirical realism", or "transcendental idealism". — Pfhorrest

The etymology of noumenon is actually from nous, which is nowadays translated as 'mind'. But 'nous' and 'noetic' have many connotations which are not captured by the modern sense of 'mind' and certainly not by most modern philosophies of mind.

To refer to the source text:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. (CPR, A369)

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The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing –matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. (A370)

So 'transcendental realism' holds that time and space are real independent of our sensibility. And I don't hold that, so I'm not advocating transcendental realism. I am drawn to transcendental idealism on the grounds that, as Kant says, it doesn't conflict with empirical realism - and I am indeed an empirical realist. The principle is that empirical knowledge is inherently limited or conditioned by our cognitive and intellectual faculties, so therefore empiricism as such is limited in principle. So this understanding doesn't overlook or 'bracket out' the role of the observing intellect in the act of knowing. Whereas the typical naturalist view is to believe that the world seen by the senses and instruments is real 'in itself' or possesses intrinsic reality. That is what 'transcendental realism' holds. And you can see quite clearly how in most scientific realism, and certainly in naive realism, this attitude holds sway.

I'm also a physical object from your perspective. — Pfhorrest

Objection, your honor! You're only so in a certain sense. If a person was deceased, then their physical remains would amount to a physical object. But the fact that they're subjects of experience distinguishes them from mere objects, and in fact this is the very distinction which I suspect much modern philosophy insufficiently recognises. All living beings are subjects of experience, but their nature as subjects is not something we can objectively know (a point which is central to Thomas Nagel's life work.)

I've been trying to figure out for a while now what exactly you think differently about the world than me, in more than just nominal terms, although now that you're saying "God doesn't exist" (or agreeing with a quote to that effect at least) it's not even clear that there's a nominal disagreement. — Pfhorrest

In the spiritual traditions of (for example) Catholic and Orthodox monasticism, and also Hindu Advaita, 'knowledge of God' is itself liberative. In other words, such expressions as the 'beatific vision' and their equivalents in various spiritual lexicons, denote a state of insight or knowledge of the reality beyond the phenomenal, of which the phenomenal is an expression. The idea of 'higher knowledge' in such contexts is direct cognitive awareness of the ground of being (for example, as mentioned earlier in the sayings of Angelus Silesius and Meister Eckhart.)

So realising such states of being is radically different to anything naturalistic epistemology can provide as this naturally assumes the perspective of object and subject; the intelligent subject situated in the domain of objects. Which is, no irony intended, natural, but, I think, precludes any real notion of a summum bonum, beyond physical well being.

Part of this is also a radical shift in the way 'the world' itself is seen. This too is something that is allegorised in many spiritual texts - the vision of a new heaven and new earth is arguably a parable for the perspective that arises from these states.

But, not everyone who has experienced such an awakening is necessarily centred around theism - Buddhism is the stand-out example. But where all such philosophies differ from atheism, is that they do pursue a soteriological end, 'soteriology' being the pursuit of awakening, mokṣa, spiritual liberation. Whereas most modern atheism sees humans as a more-or-less accidental outcome of a fortuitous process which is essentially physical in nature.

And these kinds of insights find current expression in spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti, to name a couple.

...they just thought it was silly to apply the word "God" to the universe... — Pfhorrest

The universe is the aggregate of experience and knowledge. It is objectively real, yes, but what is objective requires a subject. Again modern naturalism assumes that 'the Universe' exists independently of any human observer, neglecting the fact that human observers provide the all-important factor of perspective, without which no notion of 'existence' is meaningful. See The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience.

But God as ground of being seems to open the problem of evil and/or shift us into Job's meeting with the whirlwind. Perhaps this is the 'God of God.' — softwhere

One of the things I learned from my very cursory study of Hinduism, is the significance of the figure of Siva 'the destroyer'. He's not Santa Claus, but a deity of terrible, awesome power. But still not, on that account, evil, because possessed of no malicious intent, but of an awesome power which both spawns and devours universes. And I think there is an element of that sensibility in the Book of Job.