We agree that art and philosophy are not the same. — Moliere

Not the same, but not separable. either, for thought is inherently aesthetic. What we call aesthetic is what is abstracted from the original experience. Art and philosophy are categorically distinct, obviously, but when one does philosophy, as when one does/thinks about anything, one is engaged in ways that deal with something other than arguments and their justifications. One is interested, intrigued, transfixed, curious, etc. in the affirming, denying, questioning, resolving, contradicting, etc. Note how all of this is qualitatively part and parcel of the art world.

Let's say you are viewing Van Gogh's Boots, and your thoughts turn to the plight of the poor. Is this sympathy part of the "art" of the piece? Or is it rather a thesis embedded in the art that says poverty is an awful thing? And so, what IS the nature of the ethical issues that center on poverty? Is this not a philosophical question? Or take a thesis that declares the bombing of Guernica immoral--can this be removed from the artwork by Picasso without removing part of what makes it art?

The trouble with defining art is that art is an open concept that continues to redefine itself. All concepts are like this, are they not? What is a bank teller? Surely the answer to this question will not be the same a hundred years from now? Or five hundred? Will there even BE money at all?

Yes, that's the possibility I was getting at. In addition, I was hinting at the possibility that the "truth" or maybe just something deeper (whatever that means) might lie in the totality or intersection of the different ideas that have been presented (assuming that each of them works in its own context). That's not really a particularly exotic idea.
So how might we proceed? Let's start by identifying where we agree. — Ludwig V

Consider: Wittgenstein was wrong about the limitations of language (in the Tractatus), for there really is no limit to what language, as structured meaning, can say, or, whatever limitations there are, are trivial. Content is the issue, not logic. There is, I have read, a language that is shared among Tibetan Buddhists that is impenetrable from outside of this culture because there is no shared experiences with those on the inside. Hume once said of reason that it really had no value In it, and that left to its own nature, it would just as soon annihilate humanity as save it. Reason is an empty vessel, and if there were anything better than reason, reason would discover it. And finally, structural limitations are, of course, language limitations, and these are indeterminate. How does a term like 'logic' really pin things down without itself having been pinned?

I like to note that if God were to show up tomorrow at my doorstep, reason wouldn't flinch. So when Derrida says that language use generates a "trace" that is based on difference and deference within language, and there really is no way language reaches objects because the possibilities of positing a being rest with this trace within language as a whole (a contextual whole), I see this not as a prohibitive on what can be said, but rather a critical declaration of freedom. The world is not simply a logical structure of dictionary meanings interrelated to other dictionary meanings, but is an overwhelming content that has nothing to do with trace, or better, that "escapes" the grasp of the trace.

To understand something? Clearly there is a fence post there, but analysis cannot reveal how this epistemic connection is possible. So where does one begin to understand this? Start with the clarity of the encounter, the clear and forceful event, for THIS is what rules "primordially," and not Derrida's analysis. I grab the post "physically" and gaze at its "presence" and the certainty will not be challenged. Language is in play, but the encounter is not possessed by this. What is a world without all the thinking? One could say (Kierkegaard, for one) that the ancient mind was more attuned or aligned "authentically" not because their thinking was so free of error, but because there was so little of it. Imagine a mind that could look up at the sun and believe it to be a God, unfettered by a massive cultural embeddedness and a high school and college education.

Yes. I want to add that language is an essential part of knowledge, at least in philosophical discourse, so we need to bear that in mind. Also, what an affirmation is may turn out to be complicated. Not all affirmations are the same. For example, affirmation of God's existence is not simply an empirical scientific hypothesis - or so I believe. — Ludwig V

But being in love or suffering a burn is not complicated. These are entangled in complexity, just as working for General Motors is entangled, but does GM "exist"? I think the hard part of philosophy is determining if it is at all possible to say that there is something that is not language, not a construct, with neither a long historical lineage, nor a brief personal one.

Just because one can say it, doesn't mean it's real, and just because one cannot say it doesn't mean it is not real, and this doesn't divide the world into sayable and unsayable things, for ANYTHING can be said if it appears before one: Oh look, there it is! Remember when God appeared and you could fathom eternity? Why yes. Extraordinary! Language was NEVER about speaking the world. It was about shared experiences and the pragmatic requirements of doing this. Language is pragmatic.

God is no more unfathomable than my cat or this pencil. The question about God is not how unfathomable the concept is, but rather, what there IS in the world that tells us the term is not a fabrication, like General Motors or unicorns.

Yes, Berkeley had to amend his slogan to "esse" is "percipi aut percipere", thus allowing that inference from an appearance to an unseen reality was not always illegitimate. That enables him to allow not only that other people (minds) exist, but also that God exists. (He classified these additional entities as "notions" rather than "ideas", so that his principle was, he thought, preserved.) This seems to me to undermine his argument somewhat. But you only assert that appearance is the basis of being. SO I think you could accept adding "capable of being perceived" to the slogan. (My Latin lets me down here.) I can accept that, though I might be more generous than you in what I consider what might appear to us or what might count as the appearing of something to us. — Ludwig V

Of course, there are things to be discovered, but if these are going to have philosophical significance, they have to elucidate at the most basic level. Quantum mechanics may demonstrate a startling acausal connectivity between events in the world, and who knows, this may lead to a revolution in epistemology, for I am convinced that this openness to the world which allows me to encounter other things is not reducible to any kind of idealism, but then, you can see why this has prima facie objections, for science presupposes the original setting of being and beings in the world. Epistemology is a relation between me and the world, and the agency I call myself is not empirically "observable" so what a quantum physicist observes is not going to be the original relation.

I agree that the conventional dismissal of the existence of God is not the end of the discussion and that an understanding (explanation) of the phenomenon (if you'll allow that word to apply in this context) is desirable and should be available. But whether that is possible without taking sides in the argument is not at all clear to me — Ludwig V

I argue that Religion hangs on value in the world and the world's foundational indeterminacy. The joys and sufferings of the world are not contingent in their nature. Their entanglements are contingent, but not the ethical/aesthetic "good" and "bad" that is discovered IN these entanglements. All ethical issues are value-in-play issues, so the question as to what value is, is essential to understanding ethics. Value is the essence of ethics, meaning you take value out of a situaltion, and the ethics of the situation vanishes altogether. God is a construct, but the world's horrors are not, and nor is the indeterminacy of understanding of what these are.

I'm puzzled about the "epoche" which I would have thought was meant to distinguish phenomenology not only from all other sciences, but also from religion and theology. Also, I would have thought that "demonstration [monstration], disclosure, pure manifestation, pure revelation, or even the truth," were also keywords for science. I must have misunderstood something. Perhaps I haven't understood "monstration" which quite specifically means the display of the host to the congregation; but I don't see how that can be clearly distinguished from the display of an experiment to its audience. — Ludwig V

The phenomenological reduction (epoche) is a method of discovery of is "really there" as opposed to what is merely assumed to be there prior to inquiry. It is mostly a descriptive "science" if the original givenness of the world, and this is where philosophy belongs. A physicist will tell us Jupiter is mostly gaseous, a phenomenologist will say this simply assumes what Jupiter IS prior to calling it gaseous or anything else. Science's Jupiter is first a phenomenological construct, and science sits like a superstructure on top of this essential phenomenological structure.

The four principles of phenomenology:
1. so much appearing, so much being.
2. every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”
3. “zu den Sachen selbst!”(to the things themselves)
4. so much reduction, so much givenness.

The reason I think phenomenology is right is a bit complicated, but essentially, I have come to understand the bare simplicity of the idea that all one can every witness is phenomena. This is analytically true, for to be is to be witnessed. As I see it, there is only one way to second guess this, and this is through indeterminacy. It is, after all, caste in language, and language itself is indeterminate.

As to religion, I argue that this term has to first be liberated from its metaphysics and institutions. One does this by making the phenomenological move: what is there after we eject all of the superfluous thinking? Science does this with its regions of inquiry, the same rigor here. The ontology of religion is value-in-being. Like ethics, remove value, that is, the value dimension of experience, from the world, and religion vanishes as well. Religion is a metaethical and metaaesthetic phenomenon.

But, just for fun, here is another possibility. We approach this question by distinguishing language and world, epistemology and ontology, and then trying to work out how to get beyond the first to reach the second. But language also has its place in ontology (language exists). So if language is part of the world, perhaps we needs to understand it, and knowledge, by starting with the world and working out the place(s) and ways that they exist in it, taking their origin from it. — Ludwig V

Of course, I take a stronger view: it is not that language has its place in ontology, but that the two are analytically inseparable. You cannot speak in any meaningful way about an ontology without an epistemology; or, it is impossible to affirm an ontology without affirming an epistemology simply because it is, after all, an affirmation, and this is an epistemic idea. Any attempt to talk about 'material substance," say, as foundational ontology apart from epistemology has no basis in observation and is just bad metaphysics. Observation here is meant in the most general sense: something must conform to the principles of phenomenology, which is to say, it must "appear". Appearing is the basis for being. That objects are "out there" and apart from me appears just in this way, and this is not challenged, our "difference" is not challenged, but the way this difference is expressed in language remains contextually bound.

Perhaps you can see, as I do, how liberating this is. It is essentially Cartesian, but Descartes didn't really understand that the cogito's affirmation issues from the beings it realizes in its gaze. This is what is not to be doubted, the very intimacy is encounter qua encounter, once the perception is cleared of busy assumptions that are always already there when I sit before a computer or look up and notice the time. Husserl provides the direction for this kind of philosophical thinking with his epoche.

Why it is so important, in my view, that phenomenology should rule our thinking in philosophy lies with religion and metaphysics. I should let Michel Henry speak on this:

Phenomenology is not the “science of phenomena” but of their essence, that is, of what allows a phenomenon to be a phenomenon. It is not the science of phenomena but of their pure phenomenality as such, in short, of their pure appearing. Other words can also express this theme that distinguishes phenomenology from all other sciences: demonstration [monstration], disclosure, pure manifestation, pure revelation, or even the truth, if taken in its absolutely original sense. It is interesting to note that these keywords of phenomenology are also for many the keywords of religion and theology.

When one makes the move toward a philosophy of our existence, then one moves into religion, and philosophy's job is define what this is minus the things that are extraneous to its essence, that is, one has do to religion what Kant did to reason, which is discover what is there in experience makes religion what it is, grounded in the world rather than in the extraordinary imaginations religious people.

On the contrary, finitude is the eternal return of the different and the unique. — Joshs

Ah, you mean as in Kierkegaard's Repetition, as opposed to the "recollection". But in the liberated "moment," we are still bound to that which is there to be liberated, and this is cultural, bound, that is, in the sense that there is nothing else "there" in the possibilities.

He confirmed it early on, too, but he said that people misread Being and Time. For H. , both early and late, one’s thoughts project historical possibilities from ahead of oneself. History comes from the future, not the past. — Joshs

We are essentially "not yet" even in the grasp of a memory, the memory as grasped is a "not yet". Our existence is "fundamentally futural." But in "the moment" (what looks to me like Heidegger's version of nunc stans) one is still bound to finitude: "So neither must we take the fallenness of Dasein as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status’. Not only do we lack any experience of this ontically, but ontologically we lack any possibilities or clues for Interpreting it. (p. 336 Stambough). There is nothing of a singular primordiality in this analytic. I read this to say that truly novel possibilities are simply bad metaphysics based on extravagant thinking about presence at hand (like Descartes of the Christian God).

Also oddly, perhaps, this resonates with Buddhist attitude of no-self (anatman) and emptiness (śūnyatā), which is also precisely about the lack of any intrinsic self. But in Eastern culture, so far as I know, that is not described in terms of the absurd. — Wayfarer

Well, you know this is the way it leans among those I pay attention to. Camus no doubt word this differently. And Heidegger doesn't talk like this. He takes one's finitude to be the only way to construct an authentic self. Camus' Sisyphean rock pushing is nihilistic, and he argued explicitly against Kierkegaard. What binds them is realizing that freedom is our existence. Freedom is the standing apart from the lived life and affirming it from a distance. THAT kind of existence doesn't possess you anymore.

Heidegger, later on, affirmed the value of gelassenheit, the yielding to the openness allowing the world to "speak," if you will. A very important move, I think, for even if one's thoughts are constructs of historical possibilities, there is in this openness things that are alien to this. And language may gather around this and discover a new "primordiality."

Buddhists and Hindus (metaphysics aside) cut to the chase.

Odd, that. I would have thought with all his musing about sin and despair, that it would seem a self-evident truth to him. My personal belief is that it signifies something profoundly real about the human condition, albeit obviously mythological. — Wayfarer

Kierkegaard thought that reason and existence were a train wreck. What can be said is qualitatively other than what IS. No wonder that Wittgenstein valued K so highly.

Just looking over what I wrote to make sure my failure to proofread didn't cause a calamity and found this: "Well, if this is meant to be a summery, then one should dismiss the actual things he says."

Of course, it should read, one should NOT dismiss.

FLY
A fat fly fuddles for an exit
At the window-pane,
Bluntly, stubbornly, it inspects it,
Like a brain
Nonplussed by a seemingly simple sentence
In a book,
Which the glaze of unduly protracted acquaintance
Has turned to gobbledly-gook.

A few inches above where the fly fizzes
A gap of air
Waits, but this has
Not yet been vouchsafed to the fly.
Only retreat and loop or swoop of despair
will give it the sky.
Christopher Reid, Expanded Universes, — Ludwig V

Brilliant! But has there not been anything vouchsafed for the fly, that is, embedded IN the delimited world of fly existence. Not the sky that summons like an impossible "over there," as the fly conceives the over there from the "in here" that establishes the distance to be spanned. It depends on the details of the carry over of meaning from the metaphor to the relevance at hand, which is our metaphysical quandary. A Buddhist would say the distance between fly and exit is no distance at all. We are always already the Buddha! Wittgenstein would agree, but in his own way. We should be silent about that which cannot be spoken, but only to leave the latter unconditioned by interpretative imposition, that maligns and distorts. For Witt, he says briefly, the good is the divine. Language has no place here.

Wait. Why missing in Kierk? Isn't that exactly his point? Arriving at belief through reason is "inferior" to arriving by a leap. — ENOAH

Let him tell you:

my courage is still not the courage
of faith and is not something to be compared with it. I cannot
make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and
plunge confidently into the absurd;18 it is for me an impossibility,
but I do not praise myself for that. I am convinced
that God is love; for me this thought has a primal lyrical
validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably happy;
when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than the
lover for the object of his love. But I do not have faith; this
courage I lack.

And later:

The dialectic of faith is the finest and the
most extraordinary of all; it has an elevation of which I can
certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can
make the mighty trampoline leap20 whereby I cross over into
infinity; my back is like a tightrope dancer's, twisted in my
childhood, and therefore it is easy for me. One, two, three—
I can walk upside down in existence, but I cannot make the
next movement


For me, K takes this too far. He was, after all, a religious thinker. His complaint against the church was with the culture of the church, not the church as a standing historical institution. But then, his analyses are not religious. Original sin he calls a myth, though no worse than the myths of intellectuals. He didn't see that religion taken seriously, as he took it, was dangerously too disengaged to evolve ethically, which is something we see today in the narrow provincialism of the far right. Philosophy's job is negative, bringing question and doubt to basic ideas. What emerges is more pure, even if it is Derrida telling us language has no meaning outside of context. Things like Mill's "do no harm" are vague yet authoritative. "God is love" is like this. Int he simplicity lies the key, for after all, what IS the "referent" of this notion love? Once it is divested of the assumptions that fill this concept, and ground it in everydayness, what is ls after this reductive movement?

This is where post Husserlian thought takes one. Right to the place where it is realized that the world is a staggering presence, irreducible.

You remind me of Wittgenstein's fly trapped in a bottle. — Ludwig V

He stepped beyond the very line he drew explaining the way out. Russell called him a mystic. Wittgenstein then walked away, for he knew they, the positivists, had missed the point: it wasn't about the lack of meaning in the world. It was about language's inability make statements about logic wouldn't allow (in the Tractatus). This frees meaning rather than inhibits it.

Can one dock one's being-in-the-world without docking one's self, and is that possible? Philosophy often seems to me to under-rate the difficulty of such things. In philosophy, all that is needed is a flourish of words and the thing is done. That's where religion scores, because it recognizes and addresses the need for "metanoia" or conversion. Yet one can find traces of it in what is said in philosophy. — Ludwig V

Depends on the philosophy. Philosophers differ most radically, especially considering the anglo american analytic vs the continental, the latter being European, mostly the German and the French. It is the continental tradition that continues to take metaphysics seriously, even when it's principle aim is to cancel metaphysics.

In analytic philosophy, words and meanings and their combinatory possibilities are intensely argued about. And these, as the original idea goes, work because snow is white, iff, snow is white. This is THE way to trivialize our existence.

Some thoughts: If you can stand the metaphor, the boat is never to be docked and abandoned, because the boat, too, is part of what unfolds. Put it this way: it is not thought that is to be discarded, but, I'll call it derivative and inhibitive meanings, these have to be put aside. Science has a lot to say, but it presupposes a lot, too. It presupposes the very structures of experience that lay the groundwork for observation. Continental philosophy goes here, to this grounding. Eastern meditation practices cut to the chase, so to speak. Where following through on Husserl's reduction ("Ideas" is a very worthy read!) is long and it wrestles with assumptions over and over, meditation simply cancels meanings, that is, as I see it, cancels the superstructure of pragmatic meaning that conceals the world. Nothing at all stops one from talking about this, but the talk will be filled with a strange uncanny problematic, because what unfolds is not, as Heidegger would put it, a being, or beings; but being as such. This pervasive "suchness" is "open" not simply to further interpretative work, but is existentially open. All concepts are interpretatively opens concepts, meaning if you track them down, you run into Derrida. This can remain in its mundanity and can stay, as you say, in a flourish of words, but this "metanoia" needs unpacking.

The knight of infinite resignation who wavers and cannot complete the leap (emphasized in your excerpt from F&T), is an alien in the world and suffers the existential tension of knowing the mundane, to put it simply, is not ultimately true or what ultimately matters*, while at the same time incapable of faith that he Already is what ultimately matters. By contrast one who doesnt even know is happy in the mundane, ... So far, so good, right? ...

I add, and do not think this a step further than SK, but you may tell me differently, That Knight of Infinite is what traditional philosophy is; those who pursue, like Heidegger and Hegel before him, the Infinite, because he knows it is there, but does not make the leap. — ENOAH

By traditional philosophy you mean what is called continental philosophy. I think neither Hegel nor Heidegger fits into Kierkegaard's thinking, but yes, I think you are qualifiedly right. It was Kant who drew the line in the sand. I mean, he was the one said you can know this, but never that. Never ever! Hegel was just as adamant, certainly considering Kierkegaard's complaint that Hegel attempted "to support a reduced existence as a clever expression of the logical." Heidegger's "nothing" is a concept entirely grounded in out finitude. He has a lot to say about this in Chapter 4 of B&T: Care as the Being of Dasein, and while his language sounds as if he is talking about some mysterious great beyond, he's not. This finitude is our "not-yet" existence which is anticipatory, and we face the "nothing" of an unmade future. Nothing otherworldly about it, but to realize one's freedom to create a future does require that we stand apart from possibilities, and are no longer blindly adhering to some predetermination.

and the knight of faith... here is where I think SK was moved by a real intuition conditioned by his locus in History, but we dont need that back story: whether he said this or not, this is my bold read: The KOF is happy in this world, knowing the mundane is not ultimate, not because of faith in the crucifixion, the absurd historical fact that god died a criminal. Thats SK's locus. The KOF is happy because he can abide in both. He knows conventional existence is mundane and empty, he also knows it is inescapable But he also knows he already is the Infinite Truth as a living breathing being. Yes, there is the painful sub-reality of the becoming; but there always has been the Ultimate Reality of the living being. — ENOAH

Well, if this is meant to be a summery, then one should dismiss the actual things he says. The Concept of Anxiety is not something to be reduced to a few general notions, for example. I think one has to remember k's nostalgia for the time when there was no "culture" to speak of. Imagine Abraham's life with goats and sheep and family. Who in such a community of "Abrahams's" was literate? Rituals were simply acts of piety. His Attack on Christendom issues from a distain for the church collapsing into culture of the church, lacking that extraordinary simplicity in which there was nothing to compromise earnest faith.

Anyway, sure, the metaphysics of Kierkegaard seems along the lines of a faith of such implicit acceptance that it stood above the most inviolable rules of ethics. The rule against filicide, I think it is called, murder of one's son. This IS what is missing in Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, and even in Kierkegaard himself: it is one thing to reason and believe, quite another to be nailed to a cross of push the knife into your child.

In plain language, the absurd is the experience one has when realizing that whatever stands before one in the world that might be defining as to their true nature, their essence, turns out to be contingent, ephemeral, and entirely "other" than what they are. So this question, who or what am I? never finds an answer in all of the possibilities one can conceive. One is not a teacher, a father, a business woman, lover of pizza, or anything one can think of. One stands outside all of these in the asking itself, because, as Heidegger put it, the "question," that "piety of thought" intrudes into spontaneity of just "going along"; it interposes between one's existence and the familiar affirmations that are "always already" there. In the most general sense, these are knowledge claims in a world where knowledge cannot make claims at all.

The question takes one to the "nothingness" of the indeterminacy that one faces when realizing that there is no "being" that one is anxious about, like a lion, tiger or failing grades in school. It is a "nothing" that pervades everything, this impossible question that interposes itself between who/what one "is" and possible identities in the world. Eternity is now, no longer the vague sense of space and time having no end so familiar. Eternity, so to speak, is IN the world of normal dealings. Everything is, at this level of inquiry, indeterminate.

And this is, I argue, where discovery begins for questions about the nature of religion.

Hence, your "living and breathing is...meditation" fits. The kof carries on embedded in the mundane and nobody even knows it. It's not because, in the kof's newly acquired superpower the kof can fool everyone. No. The kof cannot leave the mundane. No one born into History can. But the kof simultaneously "knows" its real self is not the mundane, but rather the [eternal] "that" which is presently breathing. — ENOAH

In Fear and Trembling, this is how Johannes de Silentio describes the knight of faith:

With the freedom
from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take
care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys
the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do
even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd. And
yet, yet—yes, I could be infuriated over it if for no other
reason than envy—and yet this man has made and at every
moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the
deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the
blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing
everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet
the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never
knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would
have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine, and yet he has
this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were
the surest thing of all. And yet, yet the whole earthly figure
he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He
resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything
again by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making
the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision
and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it, and
no one ever suspects anything else. It is supposed to be the
most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific
posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture
but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there
is no ballet dancer who can do it—but this knight does it.
Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and
sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the
dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have
elevation. They make the upward movement and come down
again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not
unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are
unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a
moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the
world.


A long quote, but worth the read. This last line reveals what he means by the absurd, and it is something Heidegger lifts from Kierkegaard. Here is how H puts it:

In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the “nothing and nowhere”. But here “uncanniness” also means “not-being-at-home”

Or as K put it, being an alien in the world. Heidegger, like K, sees his authentic dasein as one who lives, and does not retreat from, one's ownmost existence, which reveals one's freedom, and this makes the world's affairs "uncanny" for one is free and not possessed by the interests and values of normal living, yet ,as you say, no one born into history can leave it (save a Buddhist recluse?): normal living is all there is to be in one's finite existence. This puts a person in a threshold existence that thematically runs through existentialism, this tension between freedom and existence. A baker or a teacher IS just this. But in freedom, one is not this at all. The baker is both the baker and free of being a baker.

The being which is thought to be pursued in an inquiry into Human ontology is, tragically, not the true self which is breathing, but the very mundane self caught up with the mundane. That is, as you aptly noted, SK like all (most?) philosophy, at least Western, intuited that the Truth was in the breathing, but remained trapped in the mundane, the thinking. — ENOAH

'"REAL" angst is rare," said Heidegger. Especially considering that one has to always already be IN the "existentiell" role, that is role that is played, when one comes to understand this onto-philosophical weirdness of our existence. So one wants to understand, and pulls away, threatening the integrity of, say, being a baker in-the-world. The original conviction weakens. Kierkegaard wants to make the move to live fully with God in faith and in-the-world. He says he never met anyone who could do this.

Some eastern approaches, particularly, (not the philosophy of Mahayana, but) the physical practice of Zazen, seems to have grasped the locus of the kof. That is, in being, not thinking. — ENOAH

Thinking traps the philosopher, like Kierkegaard, who was too smart for his own good, I guess.

Such a radical and onerous method, serious meditation. But it pushes one outside of philosophy. A strange matter to say the least. But I am with Kierkegaard, in that I am SURE that what is in play here is momentous. Hard to argue such a thing.

Most Asian Buddhists Don’t Meditate, Lewis Richmond. — Wayfarer

"Yes, in one sense most Buddhists don't meditate, but in a more universal sense all people, of whatever faith, are as close to meditation as the nearest cushion or chair. In that sense, everyone can meditate."

Which is not the same as what I suspect is the real reason they don't meditate: living and breathing IS a meditation. Interesting comparison to Kierkegaard whose knight of faith is simple yet penetrating, living entirely in the confidence and light of something that overrides all mundane meaning, yet being still embedded in familiar affairs, carried through as if all things were the same, but they are not the same at all. There has been a transformation. Something not demonstrable or arguable, any more than one can "argue" pain or happiness. Kierkegaard longed for this simplicity, but it was beyond him. It is the bane of being a philosopher that the very thing that lead the world to "visibility" is thought, yet for something to be purely visible requires at its core the cancelling of this very thinking.

I think you mentioned the boat being docked on the shore metaphor, then left behind as one walks onward. The boat, as this goes, is yoga. Hard to simply "dock" the meditation, the thinking and the curiosity. It is like docking one's very being-in-the-world (which Kierkegaard called inherited sin, though doing so entirely outside of the Christian assumptions). So radical.

This thinking no longer opposes subject to object , existence to nothingness, truth to untruth. — Joshs

A liberation from these with only one authority remaining: ethics.

I agree that Sartre was not an "anti-determinist" but he was also not a "determinist". And that can be seen with my comments considered as a whole.

I suspect Sartre, like Heidegger, would consider the determinism/free-will issue to be philosophy as industry and would have no interest in engaging on the issue (as I also suggested in my initial comment.).

I was answering a hypothetical and my intent was to suggest that Sartre is never going to be backed into a determinist corner. Perhaps I should have used those words rather than suggesting he would always come down on the side of "free will." — Arne

Yes. These phenomenologists are descriptive, and because we make choices, and "things" don't, freedom is the ontological description of a being who makes choices. We have options and possibilities, but where THESE come from is, and this comes from Heidegger, historical, our words and our culture, and where THIS comes from stops there, because no words are determinate or fixed. Even the term "determinate": thinking of Wittgenstein's emphatic insistence that certain terms are just nonsense, like "the world" and "ethics" and its "value". Of course, we use these contextually all the time, but in philosophy where terms are understood at the most basic level, their meanings vanish because language cannot talk about language. Even modus ponens is "conceived" to be what it is. Does this mean we have a grasp on its foundational ontology? Of course not. We live and breathe in the indeterminacy of anything that is spoken. Derrida showed this, but then, Derrida was no ethical or moral nihilist! You see, that too would be talking about the enigmatic and impossible IT of the world.

Simon Critchley wrote that philosophy was the great spreader of doubt and despair because nothing survives inquiry. But I disagree. Like the Hindu's jnana yoga, philosophy is a liberation from tthe presumption of knowing.

Let's back up from metaphysics for a second. A phenomenological explanation of intelligibilities might be something like "the sum total of true things that can be elucidated about an object of discussion across the whole history of the global Human Conversation." Here, "truth" is defined in phenomenological terms, e.g. the truth of correctness, whereas a metaphysical explanation is set aside for now. An important point made by phenomenologists is that predication emerges from human phenomenology and intersubjectivity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is a lot in this. Husserl is a little dated and the excruciating detail that you posted is an example of why. Here is what remains that interests me, the four principles of phenomenology:

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

This is Michel Henry. Analytics philosophers don't like this kind of talk because they essentially are following Kant, of all thinkers (they would hate me saying that as well): Kant spelled out in many pages how there is nothing to say about metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic and elsewhere. We know where this goes in the division today between anglo american and continental philosophies, the former being all about clarity of ideas, the latter often taking up problems about the the mysterious connection between the plainly visible world and the world unseen that Kant called noumena. This conversation has evolved. You know all this, I gather, and I bring it up just to make a brief statement about where phenomenology has taken thought. A LOT of it is post Heideggerian. Heidegger's Being and Time is something I take as the the standing paradigm for resistance for the postmodern thought, and the more I can grasp his phenomenology, the better I can see where Derrida comes from. Heidegger was the "Greek" while Derrida was the final critic of any and all perspective in ontology.

So the four principles of phenomenology, these are the terms at the center of the discussion about Husserl that are reaffirmed in the post Heideggerian movement. The French are in the middle of this, and they are not the "scientists" Husserl was, meaning the hope Husserl had for a greater elucidation of the noematic field of phenomenal interface, which is wonderfully anticipated by Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, turns into a rather extravagant extension of words that take the strange threshold of our finitude into places where language barely has meaning, as with Jean luc Marion's notion of the "transpiercing" nature of the icon vs the existential opacity of the idol. If one is looking for clarification in the words that are there in the "potentiality of possiblities" that the "totality" of our history of language can provide, one will be sorely disappointed here. But then, this is the where the point is to be made, and it is a BIG point: Words can be made clear, or clearer, and we look to analytic philosophers for this, but the WORLD is not clear AT ALL! Apologies for the capital letters, but it can't be stressed enough that philosophy has reached it end with Derrida, and, well, Buddhists and Hindus knew the end was at hand long ago. What happens when language meets the world? This is the question that haunts the issue.

Michel Henry (above quote) is emphatic on this Husserlian movement toward the pure phenomenon: put down the text, walk away from the desk (as Emerson told us, one must "to retire as much from his chamber as from society), and for the first time, if you will (think Heidegger's verfallen. Authenticity can come as a jolt of rebellion, as Kierkegaard put it, seeing that one actually exists!) behold the world as a free agency, bound to nothing but your own existence. For these theo-phenomenologists of the "French Turn" the "truth" lies in the thrusting oneself into the world, digging fingers into its soil, in "fleshy" encounters. You see, there is NO denying this. One cannot return to the armchair and reason it away. One encounter the absolute.....only one cannot speak this. For language is entirely OTHER that this.

History and language are neutralized.

Sounds correct. Existence is not free. Existence is random, contingent, limited and fated to become nothing. — Corvus

But that rewords it in a way I can't agree with. All there is for us to witness is our existence and other things that appear in our existence. What is contained therein is a matter to be determined. Important to see that these terms, fandom, contingent, limited, are ALL themselves indeterminate. They have meaning, but these meanings are themselves contingent. This is hermeneutics. To me, the revealing power of phenomenology is the foundational indeterminacy, the openness that one stands in when one's language potentialities proceed in open inquiry and discover the threshold, and NO words are fit to do the foundational work. One does as Heidegger, later on, suggested with his term gelassenheit: one yields, bends to attend to what is there.
For me, this leads only one place, which is value-in-being.

Not sure if we are IN our existence. Aren't we existence? — Corvus

An excellent point to make. Both. Being-in IS our existence. Questions like that beg for a reading of Being and Time.

Yes that is right. Husserl was trying to get to some common ground between various experiences by explaining different tiers of consciousness, in my opinion. They all were trying to describe experience, so I guess Sartre was not so antithetical to phenomenology after all. — Justin5679

Sartre was a phenomenologist, and he followed it the tradition of both following Kant and rejecting Kant. Kant was the one who said all we can ever know is phenomena, and nothing more, separating knowledge from the metaphysical Real and denying phenomena its rightful ontological standing. Phenomenologists refused to throw experience under the bus like this, and argued that our finitude IS existence not secondary to anything.

Well, sure! But teasing out the implications of that, actually treating it as a discussion in analytic philosophy, may also cast some light. There is that which is beyond words, ineffable, 'of which we cannot speak', but we can nevertheless can try and develop a feeling for what it is, and where the boundary lies (rather than just 'shuddup already'.) — Wayfarer

It would be more, shuddup and attend! How does one attend? This takes thoughtful insight, not just shutting up, the thoughtful insight that is implicitly THERE in the shutting up. As the epiphany comes to the mathematician or the scientist, it seems to come from nowhere, the discursivity of thought in the underpinnings of realization unnoticed. Shutting up and allowing the world to "speak" is a matter of all of our speculative resources at bay, yet in an anticipatory silence. Drove Kierkegaard to his dark nights of torment.

Da-sein is the grounding of the truth of beyng. The less that humans are beings, the less that they adhere obstinately to the beings they find themselves to be, all the nearer do they come to being [Sein]. (Not a Buddhism! Just the opposite).

Stunning, really. This from the unapologetic Nazi (that Robert Solomon and others say he was. I've read some of the "black notebooks" and they are pretty hateful.) ?? Levinas' "totality" is premised on just this moral deficit in B&T.

I believe the important philosophical perspective they bring is that of non-dualism. The modern world, cosmopolitan as it is, is then able to consider these perspectives through dialogue with its representatives. (Heidegger seemed aware of this, there's a televised discussion between him and a Buddhist monk on the Internet, and quite a bit of literature on Heidegger and Eastern thought.) I'm also aware of the well-grounded criticisms of Buddhist modernism but nevertheless the Eastern tradition can help cast light on many deep philosophical conundrums of the West.

(Also I will acknowledge that whereas your approach seems defined in terms of the curriculum of philosophy, mine has been eclectic, as I encountered philosophy in pursuit of the idea of spiritual enlightenment. Consequently I am not as well-read in the later 20th C continental philosophers as others here, including yourself, although I'm always open to learn.) — Wayfarer

As you can see, I am no expert. But I do read and think like you, just different books and essays.

Consider that non dualism only makes sense when played off of dualism. I read a paper by Dick Garner, who was a professor at Ohio State, in which he tried to logically formulate the Buddhist resistance to being spoken about plainly, and it was not in the assertion that something is the case or not the case. The Buddhist "truth" was to be found in the cancelation of these (and he drew out the symbolic logic for this).

There is a strange threshold one gets to reading phenomenology, where the "nothing" get a lot of attention. I am reading, and have been for a while, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, Jean luc Nancy, when I get the chance.

Heidegger and a Buddhist monk. An interview? Of course, there is that famous Der Spiegel interview where he mentions Buddhism, briefly. Where would I find this?

Yes, Heidegger: Thinking of Being. I'll take a look. Thanks!

Isn't OUR existence devoid of freedom? Everyone on earth came with no choice of theirs. According to Heidegger, we are all thrown into the world by chance. Having biological bodies mean you are not free either. You must eat, drink, sleep, breathe ... in order to keep the life get going, while getting older. Then the body you have been carrying all your life suddenly will give up on you one day for certain, whether you wanted or not. That is no freedom is it?

Freedom is a relative concept. One is free only in certain conditions, movements and actions and thoughts. It is a limited concept too. But existence is definitely not free. — Corvus

Thrownness is the source of freedom. Look at it like this: Freedom is what is provided as possibilities for choice. One, by being-with others (mitda-sein) is thereby freed FOR being with others, that is, because one is capable to be with others--and in the mundane sense this means the obvious, sharing, describing, confessing, commiserating, sympathizing, and on and on, one thereby has certain possiblities open to their freedom. One can now do all those things because one has this "with-others" within one's own existence.

It may sound like an odd way to put it, but Heidegger sees freedom as something that issues from a "potentiality of possibilities" which is, essentially, one's history. Because I lived in the suburbs of a Connecticut city, I am now free or enabled to talk, criticize, recall, etc. about this kind of suburban life. We are free because the future is unmade, and when we realize that our unmade future is "open" we are no longer determined in our actions and thoughts. It is when one simply goes along with the world, believing, acting, obeying as if we were nor free to choose, that one is not free.

But no, we don't choose our existence. We choose IN our existence.

I read the other day that Sartre wrote 17 pages of text for everyday he was alive. And I’d be willing to bet that de Beauvoir did the same. So lots to read, just from those two. — Rob J Kennedy

Heidegger's Being and Time is by far more important. Sartre is derivative. Not that I didn't find him helpful. I like the way he brought for the "uncanny" nature of contingency of the world in Nausea. Creepy, but fascinating. But the foundational for this is best explored in Heidegger, who is seminal: post modern thinking, most of it, is a response to him.

I see no reason to doubt it. The basic facts of arithmetic and logic are not made up but discerned. I think confusion arises from treating objects as mind-independent, when all our judgements about objects are contingent on sense-experience. But then, metaphysics proper never understood objects as being mind-independent in that sense. Yes, we construct the object from experience, but there are real objects, or at least objects which are the same for all observers - ideas, in other words. And as for basic arithmetical facts, they are not objects at all, but the operations of mind, and also invariant from one mind to another. Whereas it seems to me that you have adopted an attitude of unmitigated relativism. — Wayfarer

Unmitigated relativism: There was a time when I would agree with you. Now I am convinced that the lines drawn between the world we are IN and what is supposed to be beyond these lines don't really exist at all. Nothing changes in science nor in our familiar affairs. Relativism? But if a thesis says all knowledge is contextual, and nothing can be affirmed outside of a context, and contexts themselves are relative to other contexts, and there is no way out of this, for one would have to actually demonstrate a contextless propositional environment is even possible to make sense of it, and this necessarily requires, you know, context!; then the very idea of noncontextuality (at this level of the most basic assumptions) is out the window. The great rub is this: This is NOT saying everything is relative, for even relativity is a contextual and contingent idea. Everything is OPEN!!

This is the strength of Heidegger. From here, one can move forward, for we have a new horizon of possibilities that is grounded in the "given" vis a vis the openness of interpretation. Eternity is no longer spatio/temporal eternity, for what we called eternity is now the indeterminacy IN the givenness of the world we are IN. You know how Kant divided ontology, making noumena completely remote from understanding. In this openness, we now are "allowed" to embrace the noumenality IN the phenomenon,
for when we are no longer committed to fixity of any kind interpretatively, we can practice true "gellasenheit".

Rorty, of course, we leave behind....and keep. There is no such thing as non propositional knowledge, her says; yet what it is that is to be fit into a proposition is indeterminate. As I see it, the world can once more BE, what it once was, arguably, prior to the bloating of knowledge assumptions that fixate it with such vigor and authority. Standing in the openness of Being is not a philosophical exercise. It is something else. The world is something else, something "tout autre".

Thank you very much. I didn't know that Wittgenstein articulated this thought. — Ludwig V

Just to say, when you read this in the Lecture on Ethics (online and free) you will not find exactly my interpretation. You read it an make up your on mind how this goes.

I think Buddhism is far better at mapping these ideas of what can and cannot be said - much more so than 20th century philosophy, although to explore it would be beyond the scope of the thread. Suffice to point to the 'parable of the raft', an early Buddhist text, in which the Buddha compares his instruction to a raft, thrown together out of twigs and branches, necessary to cross the river, but not to be clung to as being in itself a kind of ultimate. I think it contrasts with the absolutism of Judeo-Christian culture. Anyway, that's a major digression as far as this thread is concerned, I won't pursue it, but thanks for your replies. — Wayfarer

I think Buddhists, Hindus (not everyday Hindus praying to Ganesh) are the most advanced people in the world. The serious ones, dedicated to overcoming the self, overcoming all "attachments". Dock the raft, and move on, away from yogas. Language is a yoga. It may be more, that is, it may have an ontological significance we know about, and I suspect this true, for language and agency itself seem inseparable. Without language, where is the "I" of an experience, mundane, profound or otherwise?

No, I wouldn't say so. This would seem to flatten out what makes the "scientific method" distinct, why it only emerged in the modern era, etc. It renders all perception, seemingly even animal perception, "scientific," and collapses the meaningful distinction between pseudosciences, such as astrology, and the sciences.That is, it generalizes the term "scientific" to the point where it no longer has anything like its original meaning, which I don't think is helpful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, no. Pseudo sciences are what they are because there is no repeatable results, the essence of the scientific method. And the scientific method certainly did not emerge only in the modern era. The wheel, the pulley, the lever, and on and on, is science. Animal perception? The cow sees grass is greener on the other side and relocates. Was this science? It was proto-science. Our conditional sentential structure "If P, then Q" is a formalization of this. We don't use this "principle" when we conduct our affairs, generally, either.
Nothing at all about the scientific method is undone by observing that such a "principle" is grounded in everydayness, any more that logic is offended by it, too, being ubiquitous in ordinary affairs. Sometimes we are illogical, sometimes logical. Logic remains what it is, even if I leave the house on a rainy day without an umbrella.

I think it might be more useful to say that there are general principles that are essential to making the scientific method work that are also relevant to statistics, probability theory, perception, Hebbian "fire-together-wire-together" neuronal activity, and how physical information works at a basic level. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is about ontology: the Being that is presupposed by talk about neuronal activity. See Karl Popper on this. It is called the hypothetical deductive method, or, this is how I learned it, and this is offered as a replacement to induction. The idea is that when an object is encountered, we are always already equipped with a body of theories that already define the object. Knowledge is predelineated. See Thomas Kuhn Structures of Scientific Revolutions: Normal science is paradigmatic meaning assumptions already in place that make "shifts" even possible. The mind works like this, and one does not encounter an object ex nihilo, but rather the object is "deductively" determined from an existing data base, if you like that term.

No one denies the terms you talk about have validity. But "how physical information works at a basic level," in philosophy, has to be THE basic level. Otherwise you are just doing science.

It doesn't seem helpful to make every human action "scientific," in the same way it doesn't seem helpful to make it all "pragmatic." What exactly is the universal goal that is being pursued such that all things are pragmatic? Moreover, importantly, there seems to be a useful distinction between what is commonly called pragmatic and what isn't — a notable difference between pragmatist epistemology and Aristotleanism, etc. If the point is simply that people have purposes, why not just say that? — Count Timothy von Icarus

We don't just "say that" because it is not about the vague sense of people having purposes. It is a rigorous description of what a knowledge relationship is between epistemic agents and their objects. Walk into a classroom and there are chairs, desks, a white board, markers, and so on. The question is, what ARE these to you AS YOU KNOW what they are. They are use-values to you. A chair you can sit in, a desk you can write on, and so on. Of course, these all just sit there as well, as things merely present, but it just sitting there is not what knowledge is about. Knowledge is about what happens when you turn your attention to them and activate their meaning. Encounter a bank teller and think of all that comes to mind in terms of what a bank teller qua bank teller is, and you will have a list of all a bank teller Does.

But this really is not the point. The reason pragmatics is foundational is TIME. It starts with Augustine (earlier, I know) and then Kant comes along. To understand pragmatism, you would have to read Kant's deduction. Not that pragmatists are Kantians, but that is a very long story. When one encounters something, an object, a feeling, an idea, what is this encounter? Everything hangs on the answer to this, but alas, it is a very long story. When an infant, the encounter had no knowledge dimension, this "blooming and buzzing" knew nothing. A chair was not a chair, nor a cat a cat. How do you think knowledge relations are made? In the learning process.

Is the meaning of what? The meaning of a door is opening a door or the meaning of opening a door is opening a door? Is it that things are known in terms of their final causes? I'd agree with that, but the formal, material, and efficient causes can be objects of our inquiry as well, and these are all made manifest to some degree in perception. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is about the knowledge relation. You are the knower. What do you know when you say you know what a car door is? This is the point. You know what will happen when you approach the door, try to open it or close it, roll down the window, etc. When your eyes meet the car door and you are engaged with its possibilities, this is the essence of your knowledge of what a car door IS. The OP is saying that it takes an epistemic agent to "make the door what it its" because apart from these pragmatic engagements, there is no meaningful ontology. Talk about its existence independent of this agency is impossible. Major idea of the OP is this.

I don't know what to make of this. Truth is often a constraint on freedom, something that asserts itself in the world against our will our expectations. How does this definition apply to usual cases of truth and falsity? E.g., if someone tells me Miami is the capital of Florida or a mechanic claims to have fixed my car and it starts having the same problems again?

Freedom would seem to be posterior to perception. It is the sort of thing that must be developed. Infants do not have much by way of freedom.

Hamlet's stoic lemma that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," was understood by the Stoics as a very limited sort of freedom. Rather than a declaration of moral relativism or moral freedom, it assets our affective freedom as we respond to events. Yet even the Stoics admitted that this freedom was limited.

But "nothing is either true or false but thinking makes it so?" I am not sure about this one. Yes, there is a sense in which thought and belief are required to give the appearance/reality distinction content but truth does not arise from mere "thinking that it is so." I would say that, to avoid a sort of nihilism, truth has to be grounded in the intelligibility of the world, which is a part of thought, but which transcends it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Truth is made, not discovered. See Rorty's Mirror of Nature and his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (goes without saying my thoughts derive from others). When we encounter an object, it is an interface, a construction of a phenomenon in a pragmatic interface. What there is "outside" of this is impossible to say, for even to speak of an outside is to borrow from contexts where something being outside makes sense, like the outside of a house. There is no outside that can be imagined. This is Wittgenstein.

It is not a mere "thinking that it is so." It is a matter that thinking is "of a piece" with the object. One is not a mirror of nature. Does this idea make any sense at all? If you talk about the physical neurons of a brain as you did above, as part of what explains knoweldge, the question is begged: how does one affirm such a thing, neurons, that is? Why, IN this very neuronal matrix. But this physicality is supposed to be outside of the brain's interior.

Intelligibility of the world? I assume you mean by world you mean the things laying around. These have intelligibility? How does one make the move from the intelligibility of the mind, to that of the world? One can simply affirm this, true, and suspend justification, but you know justification is everything to a meaningful assertion. I can't imagine how this works.

Isn't ontological freedom a misnomer? Ontology doesn't have anything to do with freedom. Ontology deals with the issues on existence i.e. what is to be existent or non-existent? viz. Does God exist? Does soul exist? Can nonexistent object exist? ... etc etc.

Freedom is a property of actions, motions and thoughts.
X is free to move, do, go, carry out, decide ...etc.
Y is free from contamination, illness, breaking, mistake, death ...etc.

Isn't ontological freedom an inappropriate combination of the words? Maybe Sartre had some argument for making up the combinatory concept. If he had, could you further elaborate on it? — Corvus

It is OUR existence. Freedom, that is.

Is there any doubt that Sartre will always come down on the side of free will? — Arne

Freedom, not free will. Sartre was not an anti-determinist. Freedom is not a concept, but a structure of consciousness. Phenomenologists are descriptive, and freedom is evident when one stands before choices and is free to choose. A tree or a stone doesn't have choices, this is the basis for positing freedom.

Think of it like this: there you stand on the precipice of an unmade future, and this is an abiding condition, that is, there is no way out of this for it is the very constitution of your existence, to be at this threshold. This is our freedom. Most of the time, we are, in Sartre's vocabulary, in bad faith, meaning we deem ourselves like things with a nature or essence, and we simply go along with the world as a teacher, an electrician, a mother, lover of cheddar cheese, and everything else in your "totality" to use a Heideggerian term, and it never occurs to us that we can bring these roles on life's stage under review and gainsay them. But once this happens, and you interrogate your auto-pilot living in habits (Kierkegaard) and routines, you see that everything that can be done by you can be brought before judgment. So there you are, again, on this precipice of a decision to go to the market, feed the cat, collude with the Nazis (as lots of Frenchmen did), and here one has to see that as one stands in this "place," no possibility for action escapes notice. If it does, and you just don't think about it, then your freedom cannot review it and you are beneath responsibility (this is entirely derivative of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. Reading this book one finds over and over, oh, here is where Sartre gets it). One cannot be responsible for what one doesn't explcitly know, as I am not responsible for ritual greeting practices in some remote society, for in the choice, one cannot reject or accept it.

As to psychology: I refer to Heidegger, and Sartre is the same, I am sure. When one chooses freely, it is a choice made from the "potentiality of possibilities" of one's own existence. When one chooses, the nature of the choice cannot exceed these possiblities any more than I can choose to marry or not marry according to 19th century Zulu customs; I don't even know what these are. The psychology of it is more the way choices are finite within a culture. Nazi collusion among the French during occupation, which Sartre resented greatly and wanted to argue that this was freely chosen behavior, was in full knowledge of the moral context this was in. Sartre was saying excuses for collusion were not acceptable. They knew.

The over-arching issue of modernity, and of human existence generally, is the illusion of otherness, the sense of separateness and apart-ness that is part of the very condition of being born. As you suggest, Zen has bearing on this - which is why, I think, Heidegger acknowledges it (in the well-known anecdote of him being found reading one of D T Suzuki's books and praising it. Recall that Suzuki was lecturing at Columbia University during the latter half of Heidegger's career and was a contemporary. There was also a considerable exchange of ideas between Heidegger and the Kyoto School.) But Zen is an exotic tradition and can't simply be assimilated or appropriated by Western culture, while Heidegger, as I understand it, wished to maintain the philosophical dialogue within the bounds of the Western tradition. But nevertheless the convergence of phenomenology and existentialism with Buddhist praxis has become a factor in current discourse (mainly through publication of The Embodied Mind but also in other works.)

Anyway, I've spent some time with Japanese Buddhists, and the point of their culture is precisely to 'enter into a dynamic of temporal dealings in the world' but to do so whilst fully mindful of both its transience and its beauty. They have ways of understanding the centrality of 'the unmanifest' (mu) without absolutizing it. That is what their culture is, being able to maintain that, and it's still largely lacking in Western culture, and one of the main reasons the West has turned to Zen as a meaningful philosophy.

Agree you're not preaching positivism, but the 'all metaphysics is bad metaphysics' comes dangerously close. Many depictions of metaphysics in modern philosophy are poisoned in my view. — Wayfarer

Consider that the moment it is spoken, it is bad metaphysics. This is the point. Of course, this is a philosophy forum and one does have to speak. But nothing in the Japanese exotic tradition is going to make any difference. The world as such does not speak. Logic does not tell you what logic is and value the same. This philosophical metaphysics in Kant through Derrida culminates in, well, let John Caputo say this:

If Derrida thinks that the surcharge of surreal, hyperousiological being dreams the dream of pure presence without différance, does that imply that something that would be plainly and simply “absolutely other” is plainly impossible? Now this is a delicate point about which we must be clear because, as we have seen, Derrida is not against dreams, is not against the impossible, and is not against the tout autre. Far from it. Everything in deconstruction, we are contending, turns on a passion for the impossible, on setting a place at the table for the tout autre, which is the impossible.

Caputo, John D.. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) (p. 20). Indiana University Press.

The moment it is spoken it is taken up in a totality of possible thought. Language is pragmatic, and has nothing to "say" about the world. It is a tool for discovery. It "stands in" for things in the world. It is not that enigmatic terms like ineffability, ultimate reality, nirvana, the sacred, the holy, and so on are nonsense. They are a means to an end that itself is not a means to and end, but is an end, as Kierkegaard put it, it stands as its own presupposition. This is value-in-being. There is a very good reason why Wittgenstein refused to speak about "the world" and "value" in the Tractatus. These are simply given. Heidegger's dasein can be talked about for centuries because the language possibilities are endless if one is committed to the totality of language possibilities. The endless conversation humanity is having with itself, as Rorty famously said. But this is not metaphysics, not really. Metaphysics is in the cat, the sofa, the coffee cup--these are Wittgenstein's world, which is mystical, a miracle, if you like.

I am not really sure I've understood what you were trying to get across. Language and knowledge as a whole are pragmatic? But then why does the theory vs praxis division seem so obvious to us and why is it useful in philosophy? Is truth not sought for its own good? It would seem to be in many thinkers.

I'm more confused by the idea that perception could be "pragmatic." It seems like perception just happens, regardless of if you intend to use it for something or not. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What happens when you "see" something? Why are you not shocked? Because memory informs the occasion, making it familiar. So what is familiarity? Repetition of results. This is the scientific method, isn't it? Every time I see something, I can predict what it will do or not do. This is the basic knowledge relation with the world, to experience, have repeated outcomes, then "know" something to "be" because the seeing is inherently anticipatory, a "consummated" anticipation, to use Dewey's term, is when what is an anticipated outcome is confirmed, as when I tie my shoes or open a car door: I grab the handle and push or pull or whatever, and this frees the door from its holding, and just like that, the door opens! So, what IS a door? Just this consummatory event, the process to consummation, the door opening, is the "meaning".

In pragmatism, this kind of explicit activity, like opening a car door, is IN the perceptual event itself. This is the point. To take note of something at all is an event that is familiar, and familiarity is due to this "forward looking" consummation of an existing belief, i.e, experiment confirmed in the occurrent event: I look up, see a rabbit, I "always already" know rabbits! Nothing new here, just a confirmation of what I already know, pretty much. We are walking embodiments of the scientific method, confirming what is there already in the potentialities of possibilities afforded by past experiences.

I am convinced this is right, but then, one has to reconceive what it is to be a self in-the-world, as Heidegger does. His "ready to hand" in environments of "equipmental" needs and meanings. What you call perception just happening is likely what Heidegger calls presence at hand. Things just sitting around here and there which I understand to be use in waiting. Turn your attention to them, and they are alive we meanings that issue from your personal history, as well as your culture's history (where it all comes from). But Heidegger isn't exactly like the pragmatists (Dewey, Peirce, James, later Rorty) and his view of language is more complicated. But his analysis of human dasein and time is extraordinarily revealing. We are not IN time; we ARE time. We ARE forward looking beings, and perception is historically interpretative. You can see the Hegelian influence in this: Heidegger doesn't not talk about the personal soul, and I believe this is Hegel as well. The Zeitgeist of the Hegelian time frame is found in Heidgger,

Truth is not traditional truth, some kind of agreement between subject and object. Truth is dynamic disclosure, aletheia, revealed in the event of the self creation by the explicit act of drawing upon one's potentiality of possibilities in the openness of one's freedom.

You're familiar with the 'myth of the given'? It critiques the view that knowledge is based on a foundation of given sensory experience, saying that all perception is conceptually mediated; that is, our understanding and interpretation of sensory data are always shaped by our prior knowledge, beliefs, and concepts. So there can be no pure or immediate knowledge derived directly from sense data. I don't see how that can be avoided. And your reference to 'bad metaphysics' sounds like A J Ayer! — Wayfarer

Derrida and his criticism of Heidegger is the "final" critique, isn't it. After deconstruction one can either follow Husserl's reduction to it grand finale, or retreat back into more conversation, aka analytic philosophy. For if language can only produce the "trace" effect of its own existence, and philosophical correspondence and representation are thereby obviated, then language hangs eternally on its own peg. "Turtles all the way down" is what Hawking told when talking about foundations of ontology.

But sense data is no longer sense data, and this is most important to see that deconstruction liberates absolutely. And though it seems like a sleight of hand, it is most powerful if realized for its existential insight. What is it we are liberated from? Knowledge assumptions that clutter perception. What is knowledge? It is essentially pragmatic. To know is to enter into a dynamic of temporal dealings in the world. Language is really this, even in the saying "language is really like this" Heidegger runs through Derrida, only the latter takes the final breathe of philosophical meaning making, accusing Heidegger of the same thing Husserl was so rightly accused of, which is affirming presence, i.e., "the given". Even Heidegger gets pummeled by the Zen master's fan!

Husserl's reduction leads to only one place, being silent whereof one cannot speak. And one cannot speak of Being as such, which is where we are.

No, not A J Ayer. Reading positivists' writing is an exercise in learning why one should not be reading positivists' writing. It is conceived in a mentality of narrow logical rigidity. Very good at arguing arguments; terrible at understanding the world.

This seems to me the right way to approach the problem. Is it too brutal to observe that the description of the cat is not the cat. Why should it be? It would be pointless if it were. But when we are dealing with the cat, interacting with it, it is the cat we are interacting with, and not a description of it. Is describing the cat inter-acting with it? Clearly not in the sense required to state the problem. To accept a sense of interaction that includes description as interaction is to dissolve the problem by definition and will satisfy no-one. — Ludwig V

As I see it, yes. And when one turns attention to this or that cat issue, this, too , refers us to anticipated possibilities. Even if God were to come down and announce her presence, this would be greeted by an awe and wonder based on the familiar things in the world. Wittgenstein said in his Lecture on Ethics that, say a man's head turns suddenly into a lion's head. We would all be shocked, suspect a miracle; that is, until science got a hold of it and a discovery, perhaps something completely new, was measured, compared, tested in different environments, etc. And if this were simply not explainable because the results defied the repeatability requirement of science, then this, too, would be admitted and normalized. We would call this "chaos". There are many things called chaos by science.

I made an entire argument to the effect that beliefs aren't propositions and certainly not propositions of a formal system obeying the usual laws. If they were, the use of truth predicate would be impossible and understanding of the Godel sentences would be impossible. And we do understand (are able to asses the truth conditions of) the Godel sentences like "this statements is unprovable". As I said, understanding must be something more more than a set of sentences. That's why Carnap's syntactic view of theories failed and he himself changed sides to the semantic one. — Johnnie

Depends on what you mean by a sentence. And re. "formal system of obeying usual laws," the same. I call sentences pragmatic constructions that are demonstrated by the conditional form if...then... This does not mean at all that one brings out this sentential structure whenever one crosses the street. But what we call beliefs about streets are really established anticipations at the ready whenever streets enter one's actual affairs. Knowledge is "predelineated," there as a potentiality prior to street crossing, street repair, street anecdotes, and so on. The truth as a propositional property amounts to this anticipatory feature of any given knowledge claim.

Beliefs are propositional because propositions are expressions of actual engagement. I take logic as an abstraction of this. i suppose I would treat Godel sentences accordingly, noting that there is nothing, save logic itself, that prevents such constructions, for there is no other system that can be used to see where things go wrong. Self contradiction are then, not an issue any more than modus ponens is. It is just the structure of language.

But I don't really know about how logicians handle Godel sentences.

Opening statements such as this really help people getting on your side. Keep it up. — Lionino

Just responding to your preemptive, "You are jumping from topic to topic chaotically. First, JTB, then intentionality, now solipsism. This is my closing statement for this thread ヾ(¬ _ ¬)" which I thought rude.

By "an epistemology", I imagine you mean an epistemology system. Surely by telling you things I commit myself to some epistemological claims, but that is a truism. By telling you what I think the nature of existence is, I am talking to you about ontology, not epistemology — you are yet to prove otherwise. So I don't know what epistemology I am committing myself to by telling you something, because as far as I know, everybody is also committing to it by saying something.
You are speaking in vague terms, I can't know for sure what you are referring to because you don't give examples. — Lionino

Speech and existence: how can you separate these? Examples: One may point to a chair, and say, that is not language, but is entirely apart from the language we use to talk about it. I say, if this were true, then there must be a means of affirming it to be true outside of language. Not unlike one affirming the brain to be an entity beyond the thoughts and experiences the brain produces, but having to deal with the brain itself being generated by thoughts and experience. Once analysis reveals that all one has ever, or can ever, acknowledge about the word is the phenomenon, then the chair/the brain, and the thought that conceives, that is, "speaks," its existence are delivered from the delimitations of ordinary dealings. The point is, even when the thing is right before your eyes, there is no way to affirm this "radical exteriority" of the thing. This is why I discuss causality itself, which is not "truth bearing" in any way. All roads lead to phenomenology.

this is NOT to say there is nothing there that is not language and experience. Important to see this. Rather, it is saying that when we think about what that is, there is nothing to say, and we should keep quite about it. Can we say it "exists"? Well, this itself is a language-structured inquiry. Language is always, already there, IN the apprehension.

And, when you are "talking to you about ontology, not epistemology" you are nevertheless talking! The "talking about" is inherently epistemic. You bring the knowledge claim, and a great number of knowledge claims implicitly, into the ontology...that is, of course, unless you can demonstrate that the language and structures of experience that are integral to the perceptual act can be set aside allowing you to apprehend the object "as it is." I just do not think this possible. You would, and this comes from Wittgenstein's discussion about logic and its foundations, have to be in a third pov, outside language, and this in turn would require yet another outside pov to affirm this, and so on.

Is it because you know what it is? — Wayfarer

Knowledge is a strange bird. Does mouse know cheese? Or the excitement in seeing it? Or its own reproductive urges (putting it nicely)? Yes and no. Yes, because knowledge is familiarity. No because it is not our symbolic familiarity. My thinking is that language stands "open" to the world, and truth is aletheia, a disclosure or unhiddeness. What it discloses is its own nature, that is, language is reflexive, and discovery is the self, so language is the pragmatic modality of the telos of self discovery.

the basis of the forms is that they are the what-it-is-ness of a particular. So you know a post as a post, because you recognise it as such. To a post itself, it is nothing, of course, because it's an inanimate object, so its form is imposed on it by the fencemaker, but the same general idea applies to particulars of other kinds - they exist insofar as they exemplify a form, which is what makes them intelligible. If they had no form, they wouldn't be anything. — Wayfarer

Well, they would not be nothing at all. But they remain transcendental. The qualia of being appeared to redly, e.g., is not nothing because, you know, it's just not nothing. "There" it is. MOST telling is events of explicit value, like having your flesh scorched of eating Hagen dasz. Or experiencing real happiness. These arise in the givenness of the world and while they certainly are entangled interpretatively, as in, ice cream makes you fat or "no pain, no gain," the value experience as such actually HAS an "as such" nature: the good and the bad of experience, designated in philosophy as aesthetics and ethics. The mouse "knows," that is, is familiar with this as well. It is truly primordial and its transcendence, that is, its has stand alone independence of language and cannot be spoken (as Wittgenstein was so emphatic about in his Tractatus). Givenness cannot be spoken.

The "form" we give the object, the entity of some kind? For me, one has to go through the likes of Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida as well as the pragmatists...okay, LOTS of thinking that culminates in Derrida and post modern thinking. I certainly am no expert on this, and my thoughts thus far are: Philosophy is a pragmatic endeavor, for all language is pragmatic, the essential telos of which is the discovery of one's own being, a "beyond dasein," if you will. Evidence for this lies int he pervasive "sense" of existence or reality that is IN the givenness of our being, and IN this givenness is the presence of value-in-being. Our dasein leads us to one inevitability: out of dasein, that is, our "existence" and into our transcendence, discovered in what Kierkegaard calls a "qualitative movement" when one realizes one's essential alienation in the everydayness of things. What is our transcendence? This is evidenced in the affective dimension of our existence, and this is difficult to pin because we all are different.

Honestly, few have interest in this kind of esoteria. I consider Buddhists, the serious ones, among the most "enlightened". The quintessential phenomenologists, taking the Husserlian reduction to its conclusion, its telos. Buddhism gets VERY simple, doesn't it? Meditation is the radicalization of the Husserlian Cartesian method, which is apophatic. Husserl's "epoche" leads to an annihilation of "the world," (our being in the world) and its telos is not truth as correspondence, or coherence, but truth as a radical existential affectivity. This is a long argument.

A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble. — What's Wrong with Ockham, Joshua Hochschild

Interesting to compare what Husserl has to say about "realism," not referring to the tradition, but to the issue of what is "out there" affirmations:

As phenomenologists we avoid all such affirmations. But if we “do not place ourselves on their ground”, do not “co-operate with them”, we do not for that reason cast them away. They are there still, and belong essentially to the phenomenon as a very part of it. Rather, we contemplate them ourselves; instead of working with them, we make them into objects; and we take the thesis of perception and its components also as constituent portions of the phenomenon.

Affirmations here refer to the "affirmation that posits a “real” thing or “transcendent” nature as a whole, or “co-operates” in setting up these positions." He understands that we "posit" real things as things beyond the conditions of our experiencing them by "making" them into objects. The traditional position of reals res extensa is reduced to a "part of" the phenomenon. So the idea here is this: True, reality ha(s) an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole, but reality is phenomena. All phenomena. Anything posited beyond this is just bad metaphysics. Where is the justification to invent realities beyond what is given? Husserl is essentially not denying realism, but insists that analysis goes further to embrace the real of our contribution in the perceptual act. Reals things are there, and they are intelligible, and they are over there, not me. But ALL of this is in the phenomenological presentation.

It doesn’t follow that if something is a statement then it’s a belief. It can be knowledge or deliberate fiction. — Johnnie

No, this is not the claim. The claim is that if something is a belief, it is a proposition. This may not hold for the pigeons outside my window, but their existence is not ours.