I would not confine language and all the mediatedness in which we are involved as a simple medium that divides two poles so easily: man and the world. My view is that the medium is more than what can be confined in a cogito, in a self, or in man. Language for example is not a mere medium for thought but a possibility of it which reveals to us -perhaps even better- the very nature of thought itself, or rather, something essential to thought which does not allow itself to be secluded in thought and which slips into language as a necessary possibility of thought.

For example, if we take an affirmation such as "I am" supposed for thought, it never presents itself in a pure singularity but in a repetition (Kant said that the I accompanies all our representations) in which its meaning implies the possibility of repetition. Thus the "I am", or the "I think", makes sense on condition of my own absence and disappearance. Hence man can speak of the I am as something that even makes sense in language, in writing, etc. According to this, if thought did not "begin" as repetition, it would not be possible to write "I am" in a book and for another person to understand it when reading it.

Perhaps this is what Husserl was referring to when he spoke of the original intersubjectivity at the level of the cogito. But do we see the passage from one to the other? So language is not an accident of thought, nor something that is simply recruited into a cogito, it becomes a necessary possibility of intersubjectivity. And why not beyond? All this indicates that there is an element of exteriority in our interiority. Derrida said that the outside is the inside. Ultimately I agree with him: the separation between subjectivity and the world cannot be maintained so clearly. Not if it is analyzed from the point of view of the whole framework of exteriorization that implants us in the world and does not allow for a radical gap as has been thought since Descartes.

Religion is at the heart of this matter. Our evaluations from the origin contemplate its repetition (something that is valid for other men). The divinity that man thinks is perhaps an act of recognition of the exteriority of our valuations. In the sense that my evaluations escape from me (just like the I am of which we spoke above). The error of religion in general is perhaps not to consider that repetition and exteriority escape subjectivity. Thus, we still make the presentation of our evaluations too subjective. The divinity, as will, thinking being, etc., is the cogito trying to reappropriate that which exceeds it.

It's like Soto and Rinzai. Two schools both already having gotten caught up in the finger pointing. One, like yours, I presume, says the method is the philosophy; the other thinks of ways to transcend language with language.

At the end of the day, you know they are both the same thing, same as science, minds constructing functional models out of representations.

So, and I'm really asking, what if they're different?

...isn't taken seriously by those who have never read it. To those who have read it, it is taken very seriously. But Wikipedia is not reading. — Constance

I have read much. I don't take it seriously. Neither do the vast, vast majority of academics and students I've interacted with through Philosophy education.

Weirdly, this response is the kind of outlandish, comedic set of assumptions that has most trained philosophers rejecting continental philosophy as fart-sniffing. I tend to agree.
Pretending you understand Heidegger is not exactly a good thing.

I can't grasp what I'm to get from your comment.
It seems plain to me Continental philosophy had, and carries a relatively specific agenda among its number regardless of consistency or coherence. Haabermas may be the best of them, because he's had to contend with the accurate retrospectives on his predecessors.

Philosophy 'proper' lets say, without wanting to be too condescending, does not. Philosophers carry them, but not the arena. Continental philosophy is explicitly deconstructionist, for instance.

Ok, forgive me with respect to you. You may have very technical reasons for your view. Reasons I would need to consume your time understanding, given my vague understanding of the comment above. Which would mean your reasons were well thought out following extensive study of both. And I admire that.

However I'd think you'd encourage rather than disparage others from arriving at their own view having undertaken that same process.

As I say, I can tell you have studied tge matter, but as a courtesy, your presentation sends the (unintended) message that you are at best being political at worst an indoctrinated evangelist for a movement.

I am no academic, true. But I can't believe philosophy should be a movement.

I think Continental philosophy is demonstrably stupid and self-referential. It is bad writing, bad thinking and even worse social discourse. Those are my views. If you appreciate how I got there, then:

at best being political at worst an indoctrinated evangelist for a movement. — ENOAH

This sounds suspiciously like an authoritarian government pretending to be kind. Philosophy is not a movement, but Continental philosophy is. I have been quite clear that this is the distinction that I see as relevant.

Ok, sorry. I can see how I was being passively aggressive. I recognize you may have legitimate views. That part I repeat very sincerely. I don't purport to disagree with you.

In my mind, the question remains, why not just present the so called anglo american view?

But I too became argumentative. So yes. Sorry

In my opinion, rationality is a tool and spirituality is another one. If your only tool is a hammer, then the entire world will start looking like a nail.

We know very well that rationality cannot deal with the question about the meaning of life. It would be the same as asking a computer why he exists. Humans can answer that question. The computer cannot, at least not rationally. The computer would have to ask us, because only humans know the answer to that question.

Concerning the meaning of life, we would only be able to rationally answer the question, if we had created it. So, since we didn't, we can try to ask the one who did. That is not a rational endeavor but a spiritual one. — Tarskian

The idea here is that when you when you talk about the meaning of life and basic questions, you have to look to the most basic understanding of what is there before you, just as a scientist might say about what science does, though keeping in mind that a scientist is never free of the presuppositions of her field and the "purity" of observation is nothing pure at all, but, to think like Kuhn, is packed with the paradigmatic assumptions of "normal" science. (See Karl Popper, not that I read much of him, but the essential idea of the hypothetical deductive method rings true with the pragmatists, and I think they are often right.). Since philosophy is a "regressive" discipline, meaning it moves back to the most basic questions assumed in popular thinking, it becomes a search for foundational ways to talk about the world. So how does one do this?

The scientific method comes to mind, which is the hypothetical deductive method, which says, simply put, that when you approach the object of your inquiry, you are always already IN an interpretative setting. This is what it means to ask a question at all. One is not free and open to receive what is there, but is equipped with ideas already in place, in search, if you will, for an anomaly.

Religion, too, has its paradigms in etiological stories and metaphysical narratives, but these are not scientifically conceived at all. This is where the interest in an objective account begins. One has to put aside a lot, most, probably, because religion through the ages has occluded the responsible thinking concealed in the actual metaphysics of our existence. Rationality not being able to "deal" with the meaning of life is simply an assumption grounded in badly conceived religious epistemology, the impossible "distance" between me and ultimate issues, treating the absolute as a land far, far away. This has to be, well, at least put aside so that one can take the time to be free to understand what really is in-the-world at the basic level.

Science (above) is burdened by its own paradigms and popular religion is burdened by bad metaphysics. But religion IS metaphysics, so how can one proceed in analysis? Close down knowledge claims altogether so one is no longer possessed by science and popular religion and what is revealed? It is the world of presuppositions ignored by science. Knowledge of rock strata and shifting star spectrums presupposes the basic epistemology of receiving the world in a knowledge claim at all. If this epistemic relation is not defined, the ALL of science's claims have to be reconstrued at the basic level. Simply put, the astronomer tells me the chemical composition of Jupiter's great eye, but the philosopher asks, how is it that the very presence of Jupiter is even possible in this knowledge claim?

See, this is where science ends. It has no epistemology, just assumptions. It is not reason that falls short, but simply the unquestioned assumptions! Epistemology/ontology (same thing) is one of the cornerstones of religion's essence for it reveals, objectively and not in the "absurdity of faith" as Kierkegaard put it, but clear for all to see, the foundational indeterminacy of our existence.

But by far religion's essence lies with value. The indeterminacy of value experiences, meaning the question, What is value? is open. Again, reason does not fail one. The givenness of what is there, rather, is not fully reasoned through, and when reason faces the "place" where paradigms "run out" it is fully within reason that this occurs.

More on value if you like.

I think that I agree with Witggenstein on this matter. There is no confrontation. Spirituality is the solution for a problem that rationality cannot solve.

Anybody trying to determine rationally if God exists or not, is wasting his time. The correct question is: Does faith in God give you spiritual satisfaction? If yes, then you are one of the lucky ones, blessed with the ability to stave off the absurdity of meaninglessness. If not, then you are unlucky because you will almost surely fail to find a satisfying alternative. — Tarskian

I would agree that it is a waste of time ONLY if one has not asked about the nature of God in the first place. What sense is there in talking about God if you haven't at all understood what the term means?
The same goes for spirituality.

What is God apart from the atheist's strawman arguments of a bearded old man in a cloud? One has to first observe the world and find the basis for the metaphysics that makes God a meaningful idea at all. The dismissal of reasonable talk is careless. You are right to side with Wittgenstein's passion to preserve the dignity of divinity. But wrong, I argue, to think one cannot bring clarity to what we mean by this term.

Free of all the omni's, free of the anthropomorphic assumption of God the creator (especially the Thomist view of creation ex nihilo. Truly the worst metaphysics imaginable to posit something literally unimaginable). These are entirely superfluous and groundless, and Occam's Razor, again, I argue, cuts them loose from thought.

God in really grounded in two essential indeterminacies of our existence. One is consummation and the other redemption. These are very discussable.

My point is that cognitive architecture comes first, not some inescapable reality standing outside all narrative. — hypericin

Not first, but, as Heidegger put it, equiprimordially. He simply is agreeing with you, saying the moment something is apprehended at all, it is always already IN a context of thinking, and since thinking is complicated, a thing that crosses one's mind is complicated. A "feast of thought" he calls it, the working through an idea.

But one has to ask, when the thumb screws are applied, is this really equiprimordially received? Is it discursively concluded? Of course not. In fact, it is given most purely, this vivid pain. The What is it? question is going to have to include the recognition that the knowledge of this pain is very different from that of, say, a bank teller: a bank teller interfaces with bank customers dealing with their money matters. What is money? Money is a name for the medium used in the exchange of goods. What are goods? In this context, things bought and sold, and so on. Easy. Now value/ethics: What is ethics? a term that designates issues of good and bad behavior. What is good? Two kinds of good/bad: Contingent goods are things like good shoes and good weather. Absolute good/bad refers to things like thumb screws and falling in love. Value qua value. What is this?

Now we have reached religion's essence, so I argue. It is open for discussion. Pain IS outside all narrative, yet it is conceived inside a narrative. One has to look into the nature of a narrative to understand this. It is a language construct, so what is language? Language possesses the possibility for truth as alethea, in which truth is conceived as "openness". ALL of our words are open, that is indeterminate.

I have read much. I don't take it seriously. Neither do the vast, vast majority of academics and students I've interacted with through Philosophy education.

Weirdly, this response is the kind of outlandish, comedic set of assumptions that has most trained philosophers rejecting continental philosophy as fart-sniffing. I tend to agree.
Pretending you understand Heidegger is not exactly a good thing. — AmadeusD

Yes, but all of these "most trained" philosophers are trained in analytic philosophy. Those who have actually read serious philosophy see this kind of thing as a waste of time, a trivializing of philosophical questions. It is primarily due to a lack of French, German and Greek and a realization that to study continental philosophy one has to have studied these language, at least somewhat, as well. Americans are the absolute worst: the best way to avoid this language prerequisite is simply to deny the thematic content that requires it. Now they have slipped into an intense and well stated vacuum of inquiry.

Fart-sniffing? This is rather juvenile. Anything interesting to say?

I think the essence of religion is belief in something beyond yourself and what you can see. A simple idea I know but it has always served me well. Good post.

I would not confine language and all the mediatedness in which we are involved as a simple medium that divides two poles so easily: man and the world. My view is that the medium is more than what can be confined in a cogito, in a self, or in man. Language for example is not a mere medium for thought but a possibility of it which reveals to us -perhaps even better- the very nature of thought itself, or rather, something essential to thought which does not allow itself to be secluded in thought and which slips into language as a necessary possibility of thought. — JuanZu

As to language revealing to us the nature of thought, there is that problem that language cannot tell us what language essentially is because to say what it is presupposes language. Wittgenstein said this about logic. It would require a perspective removed from language, but this too would find its analysis question begging and would also require yet another pov, ad infinitum.

But on the other hand, language is inherently open. It confines or limits content in no way, even regarding its own nature, meaning when I ask what language is I get answers, as with symbolic logic and semiotics, but ask what these are and there are more answers, but these, too, are questions deferring to others, and so on (Hermeneutics). But there is in all, when one tires of running through a dictionary, this a truly basic question ALSO conceived in language, and this is the question of existence itself which inquires about everything's being. One can now say language has discovered its own existence! The question is now the true "piety of thought." To stop everything and notice that inquiry leads one to self revelation goes to the point you make about language revealing its own nature. Analytic philosophers tend to close shop at this point. This is what happens when you put questions of our existence in the hands of logicians! You might as well ask a mathematician to get such clueless understanding.

Yes, I do have an ax to grind with the empty spinning of wheels in analytic philosophy.

For example, if we take an affirmation such as "I am" supposed for thought, it never presents itself in a pure singularity but in a repetition (Kant said that the I accompanies all our representations) in which its meaning implies the possibility of repetition. Thus the "I am", or the "I think", makes sense on condition of my own absence and disappearance. Hence man can speak of the I am as something that even makes sense in language, in writing, etc. According to this, if thought did not "begin" as repetition, it would not be possible to write "I am" in a book and for another person to understand it when reading it. — JuanZu

This is why the whole matter has to be reconceived, just as you say. The universal cannot grasp the singularity, but only itself, and this is undone by Derrida who argues it does not even do this, and one feels a kind of thud as one hits the bottom of the rabbit hole. The question ends there, for it has turned on itself as one's curiosity faces a world, perhaps for the first time, as an uncanny presence. Important to see, I am saying, that once in this "no man's land" it is thought that got you there. Thought is the way "in" as well as the way "out" (in and out, two particles of language. But why should language be set apart from the very uncanniness it brings one to? There is an epiphany in this: ALL is indeterminate, or transcendental, if you like.

This I argue is the foundation of religion.

Perhaps this is what Husserl was referring to when he spoke of the original intersubjectivity at the level of the cogito. But do we see the passage from one to the other? So language is not an accident of thought, nor something that is simply recruited into a cogito, it becomes a necessary possibility of intersubjectivity. And why not beyond? All this indicates that there is an element of exteriority in our interiority. Derrida said that the outside is the inside. Ultimately I agree with him: the separation between subjectivity and the world cannot be maintained so clearly. Not if it is analyzed from the point of view of the whole framework of exteriorization that implants us in the world and does not allow for a radical gap as has been thought since Descartes. — JuanZu

Does Husserl span the distance with the nexus of intentionality between thought/knowledge and object? Thereby establishing an epistemic intimacy with and in eidetic essences? What a question, I struggle with this. Note that I am not a professional philosopher and I read and write posts for interest's sake. Anyway, it is THE struggle to have. There is my cat, lamp, a tree, and here am I, and I know they are there. How? As it stands, the cat is transcendental, an "over there" that is entirely other than me. You mention language to be a "necessary possibility of intersubjectivity" but while language brings this to light, I mean the whole affair is "thought" to a conclusion or an insight, but then, the terms of actual engagement is something other than this. There is Kierkegaard's "collision" with actuality, and the realization that, as you mention with Derrida, all lines drawn are lines of contextuality, not actuality, and such lines are an imposition, and actuality is only JUST "coming into view," there on the cusp or in the residua of the "trace" (that leads us to water but cannot make us drink, so to speak) that is both there and not there. Under erasure as written.

As to the "original intersubjectivity" and Descartes's cogito, Descartes provides the basis for method of phenomenologizing, the phenomenological reduction, which looks to the intimacy of apprehending, and finds that the pure phenomenon is absolutely intimately bound to the consciousness that beholds it. Consciousness is always "of" its object and the Cartesian cogito is just an abstraction from the actual interface. Descartes pinned the real on res cogitans, but this makes no sense, some disembodied thinking thing; thinking is NEVER disembodied. And since the object (broadly construed) is part of the essence of consciousness, unlike Descartes' Deus ex Machina, the object becomes indubitable as well. Thus, the event is indubitable, but it is not science's object at all. It is the phenomenon that is absolute. I think this is where you come in. The phenomenon has no parts. The sun does not emit light nor do planets revolve around it. Nor do dogs bark, or even make a sound. The world of phenomena is a very strange place, no inside or outside for all contexts are suspended. It is the world presupposed by the familiar, entirely ignored by science. It takes the reduction to discover this "world".

I argue that once one has gotten to this point, religion becomes much more clear. For we generally live in a body of assumptions that do not survive the reduction the reduction: a kind of apophatic approach, a "neti neti" as they say in the East: not this, not this.... (See John Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida).

Religion is at the heart of this matter. Our evaluations from the origin contemplate its repetition (something that is valid for other men). The divinity that man thinks is perhaps an act of recognition of the exteriority of our valuations. In the sense that my evaluations escape from me (just like the I am of which we spoke above). The error of religion in general is perhaps not to consider that repetition and exteriority escape subjectivity. Thus, we still make the presentation of our evaluations too subjective. The divinity, as will, thinking being, etc., is the cogito trying to reappropriate that which exceeds it. — JuanZu

This sounds very Hegelian, and I would respond, in a qualified way, recalling Kierkegaard's response where he says Hegel has forgotten that we exist (something I would apply to the entire field of analytic philosophy). Subjectivity is more than the error of universality in the "sense" of one's "I". Jab a knife under my ribs and the pain is exclusively me and mine. It is not a cogito at all that experiences this. The transcendental ego, I argue, IS existence, made evident by the actual singularity of experience.

Divinity? I follow Witt from his Value and Culture: divinity is what I call the Good (or the inverse. It matters not).

I think the essence of religion is belief in something beyond yourself and what you can see. — John McMannis

I take this in the affirmative. I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology.

Wittgenstein said this about logic. It would require a perspective removed from language, but this too would find its analysis question begging and would also require yet another pov, ad infinitum.

But on the other hand, language is inherently open. It confines or limits content in no way, even regarding its own nature, meaning when I ask what language is I get answers, as with symbolic logic and semiotics, but ask what these are and there are more answers, but these, too, are questions deferring to others, and so on (Hermeneutics).[....]

Jab a knife under my ribs and the pain is exclusively me and mine. It is not a cogito at all that experiences this — Constance

"We use language to talk about language". In this sense, language becomes the space of essentiality. It is what Heidegger pointed out when naming language as "the house of being". That is why I point out this exteriorization of language, even of language on itself. We give ourselves in language, not so much by language but by the transcendentality of language that is even at the level of the cogito. And I would go further, to the level of perception and sensibility: memory. When you say that pain is something mine and mine alone, you are already carrying out a re-appropriation: there is no pain without duration. So the repetition already takes place even at the level of sensibility. That is why we can remember a pain, because its meaning as pain transcends it and makes it possible (as duration or repetition). It is almost like the movement of a language, full of signs and signs of signs. Pain is also a sign.

This is why the whole matter has to be reconceived, just as you say. The universal cannot grasp the singularity, but only itself, and this is undone by Derrida who argues it does not even do this, and one feels a kind of thud as one hits the bottom of the rabbit hole. The question ends there, for it has turned on itself as one's curiosity faces a world, perhaps for the first time, as an uncanny presence. Important to see, I am saying, that once in this "no man's land" it is thought that got you there. Thought is the way "in" as well as the way "out" (in and out, two particles of language. But why should language be set apart from the very uncanniness it brings one to? There is an epiphany in this: ALL is indeterminate, or transcendental, if you like. — Constance

The thing is that it is not universalization in the strict sense. It is transcendence, and singularity begins with transcendence (as has been said above about pain qua singularity) and signification. Hence we can establish an ethics about pain because if it were so absolutely singular it would be impossible to remember, or even to be aware of it. Religion, according to my reasoning, is a case of reappropriation of the field of transcendentality. It is something that still establishes universal maxims that must be followed by humans. God according to tradition is a cogito, but his condition of possibility (transcendence) exceeds the cogito.

"We use language to talk about language". In this sense, language becomes the space of essentiality. It is what Heidegger pointed out when naming language as "the house of being". That is why I point out this exteriorization of language, even of language on itself. We give ourselves in language, not so much by language but by the transcendentality of language that is even at the level of the cogito. And I would go further, to the level of perception and sensibility: memory. When you say that pain is something mine and mine alone, you are already carrying out a re-appropriation: there is no pain without duration. So the repetition already takes place even at the level of sensibility. That is why we can remember a pain, because its meaning as pain transcends it and makes it possible (as duration or repetition). It is almost like the movement of a language, full of signs and signs of signs. Pain is also a sign. — JuanZu

The space of essentiality if you think like Heidegger. Husserl was an absolutist who thought that there is a true actuality in the eidetic presence, a "pure" phenomenon and Heidegger thought he was trying to walk on water. For me, I think callinglanguage the house of being can only made sense if you take being to be an ontological analytic, such that meaning at the level of basic questions lies in the combinatory possibilities of what can be said in the "potentialities" of what lies in a finite culture (Kierkegaard called this the "sin' of the race). See Heidegger's lecture on ontotheology and his " Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition." In the old Christian or Cartesian or Platonic sense of metaphysics there is this substantival view being, like Descartes' cogito, a thinking substance, this substratum of perceived affairs that underlies all (for us, res cogitans, for the world, res extensa). For Heidegger, this is simply out the window, making all that IS reduced to what language can construe something to BE.

Husserl is obviously not a substantivalist. But he does, to use Heidegger's language, defend the idea of a singular primordial Being discovered in the reduction. What is before me, my cat, is not a cat at the basic level. It IS pure presence. I mention all of this just to get here: I think Husserl is right! And Heidegger wrong on this single point. Heidegger is probably to most helpful philosopher I have ever read because, for one thing, he helped me articulate why I think Husserl is right. Being and Time gave rise to an entire culture of philosophical responses, among them are the post Heideggerian neo Husserlians, whom I read.

I believe you are right about the way language constitutes the Being of what can be said. But not the Being of what cannot be said. When language is deployed to speak the world it encounters the impossible, that is, what is "exterior to itself. A toothache's ache is not a thesis. I put most emphasis on the value dimension of our existence which is so emphatically underscored in the existential declaration of what it is. This I hold to be evident beyond question: screaming agony, say, as the most poignant example, is NOT an interpretative phenomenon in the purity of its presence. Heidegger is notoriously not an ethicist, and I think the reason he was able to reduce religion to ontotheology (see his THE ONTO-THEO-LOGICAL CONSTITUTION OF METAPHYSICS) is because he could not see this monumental point. There is no constituting interpretative language for value qua value (the essence of ethics and religion). Of course, when I speak of the pain, I am committed to the content of my time, culture and language, but value experience, when cleared of entanglements, is absolute. "The Good," I often mention Wittgenstein as saying, "is what I call divinity." This from a philosopher who took Occams' Razor to the radical exclusion of all metaphysics. He is not Heidegger, but they certainly align in their insistence that nothing may be said about the unspeakable. Heidegger speaks "around" the unspeakable in the section Care as the Being of Dasein, which is a fascinating discussion. But I part ways with him here, using the terms you raise: The exteriority of metaethics is "pure" metaphysics, not his ontotheology. Ethics is absolute at the level of basic questions.

The thing is that it is not universalization in the strict sense. It is transcendence, and singularity begins with transcendence (as has been said above about pain qua singularity) and signification. Hence we can establish an ethics about pain because if it were so absolutely singular it would be impossible to remember, or even to be aware of it. Religion, according to my reasoning, is a case of reappropriation of the field of transcendentality. It is something that still establishes universal maxims that must be followed by humans. God according to tradition is a cogito, but his condition of possibility (transcendence) exceeds the cogito. — JuanZu

If you confine the world's apprehension to the delimitations of language, then you will end up in Heidegger's thesis. But here, I invite you to take Husserl seriously, that is, Michel Henry, a post Husserlian (along with Levinas, Marion, Nancy, et al): terminate thought and allow yourself to participate in the vivid sensation of being here. The trouble with Heidegger is that he, while running a very different course of arguing, finds himself sharing the same end game as analytic philosophers, which is the attempt to address the living experience of our dasein in terms of language and its "potentiality of possibilities." This essentially is a reduction to dust, says Michel Henry (Barbarism). But the epoche of Husserl leads us out of this and into an affirmation that cannot be affirmed in the contingencies of language. Hermeneutics throws a broad blanket of contingency over all meaning. Yet when the reduction (epoche) is taken all the way to the direct interface with the world, contingencies dissolve yielding to revelation, seeing that we actually exist, as Kierkegaard put it.

I cannot see that pain being an absolute would make it impossible to remember. This is true of, say, in the way I am able to acknowledge an environment of equipment, as Heidegger put it: I walk into a classroom, familiar with all I see, and these are ready to hand, the desks, the lectern, and the rest. And each moment is a recollection/anticipation unity, and all is, as Husserl put it, predelineated in time. To know is to always already know PRIOR to encounter, and this is "desevered" (see his section on "Space") when encountering classrooms, etc. But pain as such is not recalled IN the painful moment. The knowledge desevered when reviewing what happened, how intense it was, how familiar and in what ways, all of this IS an experience of interpretative nature, true; but while IN the pain, one is not recalling pain, one is not desevering pain to recall what it is. Its BEING, I want to remind Heidegger, is stark evidence of the actuality that lies "outside" language.

Here, I do not care if I am caught in the middle of interpretative necessity (after all, saying something is outside language is itself an occasion pf language) which have no limit in subsuming phenomena, and the "purity" of the pain. The screaming pain of this sprained ankle IS absolutely authoritative, and this sense of absolute IS aligned with the traditional sense of ontology, which Heidegger wants to ignore.

As to universal maxims being followed by humans, we take no issue with this. But the analytic of ethics/aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same thing, and I agree) reveals a transcendental Reality that has nothing to do with the Kantian/Heideggerian ontotheology.

And God is, I argue, certainly NOT a cogito. This is a rationalistic perversion invented by logicians.

I believe you are right about the way language constitutes the Being of what can be said. But not the Being of what cannot be said. When language is deployed to speak the world it encounters the impossible, that is, what is "exterior to itself. A toothache's ache is not a thesis. I put most emphasis on the value dimension of our existence which is so emphatically underscored in the existential declaration of what it is. This I hold to be evident beyond question: screaming agony, say, as the most poignant example, is NOT an interpretative phenomenon in the purity of its presence[...] — Constance

Here, I do not care if I am caught in the middle of interpretative necessity (after all, saying something is outside language is itself an occasion pf language) which have no limit in subsuming phenomena, and the "purity" of the pain. The screaming pain of this sprained ankle IS absolutely authoritative, and this sense of absolute IS aligned with the traditional sense of ontology, which Heidegger wants to ignore.

As to universal maxims being followed by humans, we take no issue with this. But the analytic of ethics/aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same thing, and I agree) reveals a transcendental Reality that has nothing to do with the Kantian/Heideggerian ontotheology.

And God is, I argue, certainly NOT a cogito. This is a rationalistic perversion invented by logicians. — Constance

I claim that there is indeed a process of interpretation. As I said, suffering does not occur in the absolute singularity that you claim. And this is demonstrated in the exercise of the recognition of pain. What is the link between pain and memory? If pain were not part of a process of signification, we could not even say that memory, insofar as it has as its object of memory, is somehow related to pain. In this sense, what is it that memory brings out of pain? Meaning. Pain cannot be thought of without its inscription in a process of signification being already given at the very moment of its existence. That would be to make pain something absolute, but so absolute (absence of relation) that neither thought (nor memory) could relate to it.

This even occurs at the level of presence that you point out: Husserl's understanding of temporality. It is not convenient here to recall Husserl's analyses of temporality. Husserl refers us to a differentiated structure of the moment in which something presents itself to the cogito, and this moment is related to the traces that are retained (retention, protention) in this moment (such as the moment of pain). Thus the aforementioned presence of the experience is inscribed in a chain of signification. That to which I have constantly referred. It is not an absolute, and its meaning is not given from itself. Language, therefore, is not a mere accident that survives the experience, but a possibility that is given by essence insofar as the experience is imbricated and inscribed in the signification.

I claim that this transcendent reality of which you speak when you speak of pain belongs to what Heidegger calls Western ontotheology. And this is so insofar as you have referred to the absolute, to purity, and to authority about something like pain. That reference to purity, to the absolute, and to the presence of pain is the classical element of the unconditioned and that whose meaning and being is given from itself. But how do we make this compatible with ethics? Such an absolute makes impossible the recognition necessary for empathy and understanding of the pain of others. More ethical than "I suffer" is "the other suffers". And the suffering of the other is not my experience! Ethics at this point must challenge and transcend the value of presence and experience, just as memory and language do, and just as the process of signification in which pain is inscribed invites us to think.

I claim that there is indeed a process of interpretation. As I said, suffering does not occur in the absolute singularity that you claim. And this is demonstrated in the exercise of the recognition of pain. What is the link between pain and memory? If pain were not part of a process of signification, we could not even say that memory, insofar as it has as its object of memory, is somehow related to pain. In this sense, what is it that memory brings out of pain? Meaning. Pain cannot be thought of without its inscription in a process of signification being already given at the very moment of its existence. That would be to make pain something absolute, but so absolute (absence of relation) that neither thought (nor memory) could relate to it. — JuanZu

A curious position to take indeed. Even if I were to grant that the experience of pain was memory contingent, this would not, nor can anything, undo or diminish the manifestation of the pain qua pain. I don't at all think what you are saying is right about how pain becomes manifest AS pain, for, on the one hand, it is like the temporal forward looking occasion of encountering my cat, an occasion which possesses the habit of familiarity, hence recollection, in the recognition, making recognition possible. This is Heidegger's "taking something AS" in dasein's possibilities. I take "that there" AS a cat and when he says the whole world of possible objects is like this, I think he is right, but only to the extent that what appears is reducible to a reduction to "taking as," the nature of hermeneutics.

While it is true that pain is contextually defined in different ways: in this context it is an opportunity to show strength of endurance, in another there is a Hippocratic oath taken to see pain as a pathology, and so on. THIS is what is meant by hermeneutical taking something as: "regions" of possibility are "desevered" when one enters a doctor's office or someone's kitchen (see his section on Space in B&T). But for this to hold, and hold disingenuously, one would have to observe that the pain witnessed in the palm of your hand as you hold a lighted match beneath it, is entirely contextually constituted.

Look I mean, you can SAY this is the case, but such a thing would be patently absurd.

This even occurs at the level of presence that you point out: Husserl's understanding of temporality. It is not convenient here to recall Husserl's analyses of temporality. Husserl refers us to a differentiated structure of the moment in which something presents itself to the cogito, and this moment is related to the traces that are retained (retention, protention) in this moment (such as the moment of pain). Thus the aforementioned presence of the experience is inscribed in a chain of signification. That to which I have constantly referred. It is not an absolute, and its meaning is not given from itself. Language, therefore, is not a mere accident that survives the experience, but a possibility that is given by essence insofar as the experience is imbricated and inscribed in the signification. — JuanZu

Husserl's is not a Cartesian cogito. It is a transcendental ego that stands in an intentional relationship with its object, and these relationships are not simply knowledge relationships, but include liking, disliking, anticipating, dreading, and so forth. But no matter. Note that that which is inscribed in a chain of signification is merely an "adumbration" of the experience. I recall that I sprained my ankle, but that recollection does not relive the pain of the sprain. The pain itself is transcendentally occurrent, meaning it issues from a "now" that is not discovered in the retention.

I claim that this transcendent reality of which you speak when you speak of pain belongs to what Heidegger calls Western ontotheology. And this is so insofar as you have referred to the absolute, to purity, and to authority about something like pain. That reference to purity, to the absolute, and to the presence of pain is the classical element of the unconditioned and that whose meaning and being is given from itself. — JuanZu

Yes. Though, along with Nietzsche, most of this tradition is declared off the table. One has to be very careful approaching this, and Derrida comes to mind, along with the so called "French theological turn" of Michel Henry, Levinas and others. Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. Our words are, after all, "open" interpretatively.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound.

But how do we make this compatible with ethics? Such an absolute makes impossible the recognition necessary for empathy and understanding of the pain of others. More ethical than "I suffer" is "the other suffers". And the suffering of the other is not my experience! Ethics at this point must challenge and transcend the value of presence and experience, just as memory and language do, and just as the process of signification in which pain is inscribed invites us to think. — JuanZu

This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy.

This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy. — Constance

This seems the foundation for Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion and thus the foundation of his ethics:
https://iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#:~:text=The%20dictum%20of%20morality%20is,thus%20does%20not%20affect%20us.

This seems the foundation for Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion and thus the foundation of his ethics: — schopenhauer1

I take this to be VERY important questioning:

The attainment of a goal or desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such attainment results in suffering. Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since satisfaction of this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by suffering.

Frustration is not what results in suffering, nor is want or deficiency. There, of course, are examples of suffering, but suffering itself "stands as its own presupposition," requiring no wordy accounting, and again, not that wordy accountings are wrong, they just miss the point: The bad experience (not a bad couch or a having a bad day) finds what makes it bad in the pureness of badness itself. One is inclined to take issue with this "ontology of the bad"? I can see why (but some of those who take strongest issue with this are so happily inclined to talk about something like material substance independent of the agency's perceptual contribution, and idea of the absolute worst kind of metaphysics; after all, such a thing has never even been witnessed, nor is it witnessable), for the "good" and the "bad" of ethics is occluded by contrived philosophical issues.

I am saying, if you want to know what the basis is for the injunction not to bludgeon your neighbor with a hammer, the basis for the laws against doing this, all one has to do is bludgeon oneself, and the authority of the injunction not to do it rests solely with what it feels like to be bludgeoned. It is not a deficit nor the frustration of being bludgeoned (whatever that is), but the "presence" of this value-in-the-world we call bad. Likely due to Schopenhauer's exposure to Buddhism which, as you likely know, puts the onus on the idea of attachments, but this too begs the same question: what is wrong with attachments? Such inquiry always comes down to the foundational pure phenomenon of value.

..."these are.." not what I wrote. I never proof read. Bad habit.

Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. — Constance

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound — Constance

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time.”

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity.

Even if I were to grant that the experience of pain was memory contingent, this would not, nor can anything, undo or diminish the manifestation of the pain qua pain. — Constance

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.

Husserl's is not a Cartesian cogito. It is a transcendental ego that stands in an intentional relationship with its object, and these relationships are not simply knowledge relationships, but include liking, disliking, anticipating, dreading, and so forth. But no matter. Note that that which is inscribed in a chain of signification is merely an "adumbration" of the experience. I recall that I sprained my ankle, but that recollection does not relive the pain of the sprain. The pain itself is transcendentally occurrent, meaning it issues from a "now" that is not discovered in the retention — Constance

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.

This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy. — Constance

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.

Frustration is not what results in suffering, nor is want or deficiency. There, of course, are examples of suffering, but suffering itself "stands as its own presupposition," requiring no wordy accounting, and again, not that wordy accountings are wrong, they just miss the point: The bad experience (not a bad couch or a having a bad day) finds what makes it bad in the pureness of badness itself. — Constance

I am saying, if you want to know what the basis is for the injunction not to bludgeon your neighbor with a hammer, the basis for the laws against doing this, all one has to do is bludgeon oneself, and the authority of the injunction not to do it rests solely with what it feels like to be bludgeoned. It is not a deficit nor the frustration of being bludgeoned (whatever that is), but the "presence" of this value-in-the-world we call bad. Likely due to Schopenhauer's exposure to Buddhism which, as you likely know, puts the onus on the idea of attachments, but this too begs the same question: what is wrong with attachments? Such inquiry always comes down to the foundational pure phenomenon of value. — Constance

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

The bolded part is the major metaphysical point for him. For his definition of suffering (what I call "inherent" suffering versus "contingent/situational suffering"), is there is a dissatisfaction at the core of animal being. The dissatisfaction is akin to an "incomplete" state. This is what he is deeming as "suffering". And this conception I again demarcate as "inherent" or even "Eastern" definitions of suffering, which elevates it to a metaphysics, one of incompleteness as its definition. The mainstream version of suffering is more akin to what you may describe. It is the hedonistic harms we face based on biology, circumstances, and contingency, that play out in everyday life.

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative. — Joshs

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. As does Caputo.

But regarding his endless references to absolute consciousness, it seems clear that Husserl was talking like a foundationalist. On the other hand, there is this paper by Bence Peter Marosan, Levels of the Absolute in Husserl which argues along the lines you mention. I tend toward Henry, Marion, et al.

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future. — Joshs

Right. I surely can't speak for everyone, but for me, the hardest thing about reading Heidegger is that through his long discussions, everything is derivative of time, that is, has its most primordial discussion in time. Human dasein is time.

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity. — Joshs

The fault lies in the analysis that would compromise the singularity of valuing which is most vividly revealed in intense examples. "Pure" value lies outside understanding as something, notwithstanding that it is discovered

Nothing outside the text: certainly not enclosed meanings, any more than a context itself can be truly closed. But "displacing, transcending futurity," this I haven't encountered on Derrida. I'll have to look see.

Yes, but all of these "most trained" philosophers are trained in analytic philosophy. — Constance

That is a wild, unsubstantiated and almost certainly dead-wrong assumption. Most philosophers are not continental philosophers. Most philosophers are well aware of continental philosophy and it's short-comings. It's pretty rich taking the "everyone is wrong but my club" line.

There is a reason you're getting 'juvenile' responses. They aren't juvenile. They are on point, and perhaps have an effect on your ego as you seem quite committed to a school quite readily dismissed by tthose really working on life's problems. Tinkering with language is all Continental's have left to give us.

well stated vacuum of inquiry. — Constance

The level of irony you're on is impressive. Go forth and waste your time...

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. — Constance

The simplicity Henry is after seems to depend on belief in a pure self-affecting ipseity. Zahavi is sympathetic to this stance, as he also argues that there can be no meaning without subjectivity and there can be no ground for subjectivity without an ‘I’ which comes back to itself as identically the same in its self-affection. As he says:

“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”

“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”

This is where Henry departs from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, who all insist on the ecstatic nature of self-awareness.

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

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

I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? — Constance

Self itself.

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

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