And I agree with that. But I consider that pain must be seen as part of a significant whole. In this sense pain is not only the sensation but the memory, the value, its interpretation, its representation, and so on. This, I believe, reveals to us an element of absence (non-presence, Husserlian non-evidence) in its ethical consideration. Hence, I cannot give primacy to my pain with respect to the pain of the other person. The value of presence and of the evidence of experience in phenomenology is surpassed by the value of absence in order to be able to pose the ethics of pain. — JuanZu
I agree that Husserl's transcendental Ego is not exactly the same as the Cartesian Cogito. However the epokhe saves an Ego. Husserl's analyses of the temporality of that Ego in my opinion are irrefutable. The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration, moments that are more intense than others, sometimes it passes, and sometimes it returns. It is impossible to detach pain from the temporality composed of "here and now" and therefore with the relationship with other "here and now" that are not present. Is this not the experience of the other? Another person who has experiences in relation to me is another "here and now" that I do not perceive. The pain of another person is given in a here and now that I do not perceive and is not an experience of mine. — JuanZu
That is why I am not "Levinasanian". The condition for there to be a pain or suffering of another person is that the value of the experience, the presence and the present of that experience is to be transcended by an absence. In this case the experience of the other that I do not perceive and that is given to me as absent. But in the end this absence is constitutive, even of the ethical consideration of myself and of the inscription of pain in a process of signification. The process of signification is like language: it functions with signs. And it is characteristic of a sign to function in different contexts. In this case pain is a sign, it can have existence in me or in another person, different organisms, different contexts, transcending the value of presence "here and now". It is the most common story of meaning: When we read a book we relive what a person thought in the "here and now" and captured it in ink (or in some data), but that "here and now" is completely absent at the moment when I read the book written by another person: I am another "here and now" also absent for the writer. But the meaning of the book "survives" transcends the experience and the evidence (Husserl's evidence) of both the reader and the writer. — JuanZu
So, Schopenhauer has a theory of Will whereby it operates in the negative. That is to say, for him, satisfaction is the freedom from pain, not the attainment of a good. He has a deprivationalist view whereby, wants and needs are the given, and satisfaction is simply a temporary stasis that is achieved when goals are achieved/consumed/partaken in. The suffering is that we are dissatisfied, and thus his quote:
The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
— Schopenhauer- Studies in Pessimism/ The Vanity of Existence — schopenhauer1
Hmmm I would say maybe anything we can’t know? — John McMannis
Beyond is whatever evolution gets to in the future; quantum fields are the root before in the past. — PoeticUniverse
Fascinating. I trust he is being truthful, and there is only one way to explain his position: He truly did not understand happiness, love, music; of course, music of great bravado is the exception, as is love in the broadest sense — Constance
Before you get to quantum physics, you have to ask more basic questions, those of philosophy. What is knowledge? What is language? What is aesthetics and ethics? To affirm quantum physics or evolution is, of course, not questioned at all. — Constance
But it is not about the ethics of pain, nor is it about the significant whole. This is not an argument about ethics any more than Kant's Critique is about logic and logically solving cognitive puzzles. It is an apriori argument: What is there in an ethical matter such that in order to be ethical at all, this is an essential part to it being what it is. This is value, a structural feature of our existence, always already in our existence (Heidegger's care comes to mind, but he had little interest in ethics. Curious).What is value? "The good"? One thing is clear, remove value from the world, and ethics simply vanishes. It doesn't vanish incidentally, as when one removes the umbrella from above one's head, protection from the rain vanishes; it vanishes essentially: ethics becomes an impossibility. — Constance
Very much appreciate this passage here, "The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration." Would you tell me where this comes from in the "Phenomenology of the internal consciousness of time"? I have it here but I can't find it. — Constance
Consider for that moment as you stand before, say, a black plague victim and all the horrors, you proceed to explain that agency itself is negated by a proper analysis of the temporal construct of engagement, and so suffering is analytically without agency... so all is well. — Constance
So actually, he is one of the most notable philosophers of music, raising it to some of the highest levels of his metaphysical system/sotieology. That is to say, in his view, if the problem of suffering is our "Will", then, one way for a brief respite from it is aesthetic contemplation. The artistic genius and to a lesser extent, the observer, they are seeing the very Ideas themselves (pace Plato but not exactly), through their aesthetic lens. Whereas images and other mediums are more stationary, representing the ideas, music solely, has represents the Wills very flowing nature, being even more abstracted from the already abstract nature of art and aesthetics. — schopenhauer1
Given that we are granting evolution occurred, (I presume you mean biological evolution) I'm not seeing much reason to privelege philosophical consideration especially. There is a large and growing amount of scientific investigation into matters of great relevance to epistemology, language, aesthetics, and ethics. Can you make a case for why the philosophy to which you are referring is more important to understand than the growing body of scientific understanding? — wonderer1
If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL ...This is why philosophical thinking is "privileged": — Constance
He fails to see that our preference for the good over the bad, founded on the good as an absolute good and the bad an absolute bad. Our preferences are entangled in wants and needs as Schopenhauer says they are, but a further examination of the nature of a want or need reveals a ground of presuppositional significance he didn't see.
Apodictically good is different from contingently good, the latter being a good couch or a good knife, the former, good itself. As with apodictic logicality, the latter cannot be anything other than what it is. Just as modus ponens will not be contradicted, so the good of being in love and the bad of having your kidney speared cannot be other than what they are. This is the point in the OP.
You know Schopenhauer better than I. Perhaps you can see a way out of this? — Constance
I think you fail to grasp Schopenhauer. Good is not positive because it is temporary. Much like Heraclitus, he sees the flux of existence and sees this as proof that satisfaction is unstable and unattainable. Want is the hallmark of lack. Something we don’t have now. We would not lack for anything if we were whole and not unstable. Instead our very existence as individual beings is inherently intertwined with lacking.
Good and bad in the hedonistic sense..being embarrassed feels bad. Winning a game feels good, is not quite what he’s getting at. — schopenhauer1
It is a long story. If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL, then all of its knowledge claims rest within the claims as claims only. This is just the way it is throughout analytical thinking, isn't it? A person tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask what the sun is, and not only is there no answer, but the very possibility of an answer is problematic, then the proposition that moonlight is reflected sunlight light becomes very thrown into doubt while the search for what a "sun" could possiblity be moves forward.
Okay, so we know what the sun is. But consider: A scientist tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask, how do you know anything about anything? Not just suns and moons, but anything at all. The scientist brushes this off, but note: she has no answer. I mean, in the language of the science she is so familiar with, there simply IS no answer to this. — Constance
I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology. — Constance
What I have said before is also said of value. How could pain be thought of in a being like us, exempt from its valuation? It is not possible insofar as we are beings who react to suffering and pain according to positive and negative valuations, but in the response (be it by judgment or action) the sign already functions. How could the response not be related to pain and suffering? how could it not have effects on our constitution? Pain and suffering transcends to the extent that it is sign and resonates through our being. Its effects transcend its first moment, they are located in the memory, in the judgment, in the representation, in the response. Here pain and suffering is not the simple cause that can be distinguished from its effects, pain and suffering is its effects beyond the abstraction of a first and absolute moment. — JuanZu
You find it in Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal time, when he speaks of the three phases that constitute the temporality of consciousness: Retention, perception and protention. This temporality is presented in the epokhé, in which the difference of the "nows" constitutes the living present. But it is necessary to note the difference of the "nows", and how a present-now is immediately past, and gives way to a future-now. In both cases the absence is related and constitutes the living present. In our case, the living present of pain and suffering. — JuanZu
It is the opposite. When you act in the face of another person's pain, that pain is not present to you. I claim that helping there is an act that transcends the central element of phenomenology (perception and evidence in the living present). You do not have the evidence that the other is suffering (the phenomenological evidence), but you still help the other person. This is what our act of compassion and empathy consists of: The evidence that I am an other for another. The evidence that I am not the only one and that non-presence is so "originary" is something that occurs in my most "isolated and solitary" moment in the reduction of reductions, in the transcendental reduction. It is necessary to be sufficiently other to help and assist in pain and suffering. One must embrace the possible absence of pain and suffering (the pain and suffering of the other is absent in me). — JuanZu
Untiringly, the answer I have found, the body, a real organic being, not unlike many other animals, is beyond oneself. But not beyond, where we are looking; turns out, it's what never went anywhere. It's "oneself" which is "beyond" a factor only in the make-believe; but it necessarily pretends to be out there and within. — ENOAH
I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology. — Constance
If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao. — schopenhauer1
I say that the being we are all after (whether wittingly or not), the being beyond the trans-ego (and there has to be one since the trans-ego is the final reduction but is nevertheless a reduction--implying it is the final remnant of that being reduced) is the organic natural body in its aware-ing unobstructed/Unmediated by language. Even the trans-ego Iis knowable, hence requires language, the medium of knowing.
The natural aware-ing body is aware of the language, ego, etc., but does not "move/act/function" in that medium/world. It is experienced unmediated, directly. — ENOAH
The Essence of religion is a god or gods that tests its victims/players, and if his players fail they will be cursed with disease, disaster, and death and punished even in an afterworld for some of them. We can see this as far back as Enkidu and Odysseus. If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao.
In other words, the essence of religion is a tormenter getting off on testing his creations and punishing them for their “misdeeds”. Gnosticism in that sense, if not taken seriously, would have been a proper satire. — schopenhauer1
All ethical matter hinge on this essential presence: the caring about things and the ouches and yums of their actuality of experience. — Constance
You’d have to actually include something pertaining to religion to complete that linkage. Ethics is not religion. Ethics tied to a deity or cosmic supernatural principle is, for example. But I would argue that ethics tied to the supernatural entity isn’t religion per se, but the relation of the supernatural to the world, and ethics is usually entailed in that with religious worldviews. — schopenhauer1
Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. — Constance
One has to understand ethics as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus. See also the Lecture on Ethics and his Culture and Value. Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. See what he says: — Constance
You can see why Witt's positivist friends could never understand what he was talking about. He was a deeply religious philosopher as he realized that this dimension of value in our existence is utterly transcendental and yet permeated our existence. It is not about an afterlife, or some divine plan or punishment. It is there IN the fabric of what we are. — Constance
Fourth, Wittgenstein did not see any value in intellectual proofs of God's existence or theological formulations in general. — Richard B
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