Are you not proposing something? And do you not need some justification that can be intersubjectively assessed in an (hopefully) unbiased way? Let's say for the sake of argument that spiritual insight, even enlightenment, is possible—what one sees is not explainable, not propositional, and yet ironically it is always couched in those terms, and people fall for it because they are gullible and wishful.

If altered states of consciousness were explainable, we would have all long been convinced. So, your epiphany may convince you of something, but it provides absolutely no justification for anyone else to believe anything. If they do believe you it is because you are charismatic, or because they feel they can trust you or they believe you are an authority, and so on. If you could perform miracles that might give them more solid reason to believe what you say. — Janus

Not about spiritual insight. And not an epiphany in the sense of something hiding in the discourse discovered as a surprise in the calculus. As with all philosophical problems, I argue, this matter is discovered in the simplicity of the world's manifest meanings. A proposition as such has no value, and this is true of anything I can imagine, a knowledge claim, an empirical fact or an analytical construction. States of affairs considered apart from the actuality of their conception sit there in an impossible abstract space. Never been witnessed, really, because to witness IS an actuality. I am reminded of Dewey's pragmatic analytic of experience: cognition and aesthetics are only divided in the pragmatic dealing with the world, but this makes for a "vulgar" (borrowing a Heideggerian word) ontology (certainly not vulgar in the everyday use). (See the way Heidegger talks about time in section 64 and onward of BT. I am leaning a bit on him here.)

NOT that the world has none of this divisional labor in its existence. I mean, that would be impossible to conceive; but rather that at the level of basic questions, we have to keep the foundational structures as they appear, and the essential "event" of an experience is a unity.

So my point is that in all the talk about truth, justification and knowledge, the foundational analytic goes missing; that truth apart from the aesthetic (or the affective or the pathos of engagement) that is, conceived in, say a mere propositional equation or as discursive complexities, belies the actuality in the world. It ignores affective meaning! And affectivity is the wellspring all meaning.

No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. It nevertheless is the 'cause of sorrow' as the Buddha teaches it, radical though that might be (and it is radical). — Wayfarer

This is, of course, brilliant.

Philosophers chasing after propositional truth (logos) is patently absurd. It begs the question, Why do it (for it is assumed one does it for a reason)? No one wants this. The summum bonum is not a "defensible thesis."

But a naturalist with a proper understanding of perception wouldn't say that. Brains don't generate experiences of objects by themselves. This is what I mean by inappropriate decomposition and reductionism. Take a brain out of a body and it won't be experiencing anything. Put a body in a vacuum and what you'll have is a corpse, not experiences. It's the same thing if you put a body on the surface of a star or the bottom of the sea. Nothing looks like anything in a dark room, or in a room with no oxygen, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

And how does one speak about brains and bodies and vacuums star and seas? One observes them, like anything else. And what IS an observation? THIS is the rub! Observations cannot be merely assumed any more than, say, gravity can with the claim that well, things fall down. Yes, they do fall down, and observing a star or a dna molecule does have this same simplicity about it, that is, one observes it and there it is. But gravity is perhaps the most difficult and elusive concepts in physics. Why, one has to ask, is observation allowed to be so simple?

Make the move to explaining what it means to observe something. Are you a scientist? You know where this leads: to a very complex account of the brain physiology. But note: how does one begin here? By observing. Surely you can see the obvious question begging here. Egregiously ignored, just because it is so obvious. It is what it means to observe at all that is in question, and one cannot simply assume it.

But then, clearly we DO have a world and science is certainly not wrong about everything. It is just not right when its assumptions are carried into this strange place we find ourselves, which is metaphysics. This impasse is real. One has to simply raise one's head, observe the lamp on the desk, and understand that this observation is an ontological and epistemic radical indeterminacy at the basic level of analysis.

Ok, but you haven't, as far as I can tell, done anything to justify the claim that we cannot know things through their causes or effects, you've just stated it repeatedly. Prima facie, this claim seems wrong; effects are signs of their causes. Smoke, for instance, is a natural sign of combustion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're living in a fantasy world if the discussion is about basic questions. Science and everyday observations do not ask basic questions. Analytically prior to smoke is perception itself.

If effects didn't tell us anything about their causes, or causes about their effects, then the main methods of the empirical sciences should be useless. But they aren't. Likewise, if pouring water into my gas tank caused my car to die, it seems that I can learn something about my car from this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is nothing about causality that is epistemic. One has to look hard and clear at this. Nothing. But in this reasoning, it is worse, because every causal sequence has plain as day a causal beginning and an end. Rain washes open the rock, the rock is weathered down, becomes smooth and is dislodged from its place, falls and hits Odysseus on his head and kills him. Weathering then causal sequence then Odyseuss's concussion. But here, in this problematic, we have the OTHER side of a perceptual event, any event, for it is perception itself that is the object of inquiry, and to affirm what it is requires ... a perceptual event. There is no weathering, no smoothing or erosion, for this kind of thing merely assumes what in question.

I'm sorry, I couldn't parse this. Nothing can exemplify anything? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, if one is committed to a scientist's epistemology of brain events, then one has to explain knowledge of said events in science's terms. But these are established on observation. See the above.

Look, it is certainly NOT that the world falls apart, and I say this again for emphasis. I trust science as much as you do (in fact, the scientific method, pragmatists argue, is built into language itself, in the structure of a conditional modality). But the question raised was about metaphysics, and my point here is to show where is begins from a standing of everydayness and science. Metaphysics haunts, if you will, our entire existence because it is discovered everywhere. No? Try to think how not.

No? Where exactly do you suppose we lost it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This small stretch of thought is meant to be an introduction to metaphysics , in a nutshell, an introduction to someone entirely convinced that no alternative to "the empirical spirit that animates science" (Quine, a confirmed naturalist) should be taken seriously. Getting lost is what happens with the naturalist assumptions are used to try to talk about epistemic relations.

Saying "we only see light that interacts with our eyes, so we never see things," is a bit like saying "it is impossible for man to write, all he can do is move pens around and push keyboard keys." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which sounds like you're saying we see with our understanding. But this isn't the issue. The issue is how the object is delivered into a knowledge claim. If one thinks a brain is a physical organ that generates perceptual events, then it has to be explained how it is possible that these events can be about objects in the world. If one is a naturalist, like Vera Mont, then there is going to be lots of complex talk about subtle organic systems of connectivity, but the trouble is, of course, such things are essentially grounded in causality, and, as Rorty once put it, if causality is the explanatory ground to epistemic relations with objects, then I no more "know" my cat is on the rug (and it is) than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail. Simply because causality is entirely devoid of epistemic meaning.

I already have a quote ready for this: "...every effect is the sign of its cause, the exemplification of the exemplar, and the way to the end to which it leads." St. Bonaventure - Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If is far worse, than this. First, I only pointed out that causality does not make a knowledge connection just in response to the claim of a physicalist's metaphysics. But the above seems plainly false for the only way for an exemplification to exemplify is assume a particular causal series that demonstrates this. This is rare, and when it comes to a causal matrix of neurons and, synapses and axonal connectivity, well: my cat in no way at all "is exemplified" by this.

But I said it is far worse. If causality cannot deliver "knowledge about" this means ALL that stands before me as a knowledge claim--explicit or implicit, a ready to hand pragmatic claim or a presence at hand (oh look, there is a cat) claim, or just the general implicit "claims" of familiarity as one walks down the street---requires something entirely other than causality to explain how it is possible. Because the argument isn't that I really don't know the cat is on the sofa because I am solipsistically bound to an epistemically closed world; rather, it says I DO know the world and all things inner or outer, privately or publicly. It doesn't question that we have knowledge of the world. It asks what has to be the case given that we do have such knowledge.

1. Representationalism and correlationalism are the correct ways to view perception and epistemology.

2. Truth is something like correspondence, such that not being able to "step outside of experience" makes knowledge of the world impossible (and, in turn, this should make us affirm that there is no world outside experience?)

3. Perceptual relationships are decomposable and reducible such that one can go from a man seeing an apple to speaking of neurons communicating in the optic nerve without losing anything essential (reductionism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Number one: representation and correlation are just ambiguous terms. Almost without meaning. Is it a Kantian representation? And the thing out there impossibly distant? Or is the thing something of primary qualities, space and time. I mean, what correlates with what?

Number two: Not being able to step outside of experience means either everything is IN experience, or experience is IN everything, in order to account for knowledge. Pragmatists fail to explain the phenomenological encounter. Only phenomenologists can address this. The cat is there. Undeniable. It is crowded by regions of associations that give it its full presence. Truth as alethea: A discovery in the affective, conceptualized object that is predelineated in the potentiality of possibilities of a finite historical totality, and so on. Language brings the object out of hiddenness, Heidegger; but Heidegger did not take, as far as I have seen, epistemology up at all, because phenomenology begins with description, and so, the object is there and this being there is primordial, an "inexorable" presence. Period.
I want to know how its being there before me, reaches me, or I reach it. What spans that epistemic distance?

Number three: I don't follow. A reduction moves from what is extraneous to what is essential, thus, A person's social troubles can be reduced to an account of his, say, unresolved infantile issues, the details being incidental. A decomposable perceptual relation? meaning one that can be constructed and ignored at will, no one having privilege over any other: is this yarn, or is it the sum total of a molecular aggregate? Both, depending on the context of the matter at hand. Derrida concludes that there is nothing outside the context. But, like early Wittgenstein, the point really is apophatic, a "reduction" that preserves what cannot be said.

Well argued.

What discussion? You make incomprehensible statements about what you do not and can not know, and then double down on them with gobbledegook.
Done here. — Vera Mont

No, it's philosophy.

I read that concept of his as the "gentleman of faith", comparable in some sense to Nietzsche's "over-man", at least in an existential sense. — Arcane Sandwich

They both declare war on Christendom and rationalism. But what happens when all that "structure" is removed from metaphysics? One faces existence without it, hence the term existentialism. But here is where the similarities end. N goes the way of the gladiatorial, while K follows an existential Christianity.

He makes the case there that belief in the divine must be irrational by definition, since the divine (if it exists) transcends human reason. — Arcane Sandwich

Hard to say this, for it is a performative contradiction: "the divine must be irrational by definition" is itself a construction of reason, a well formed proposition exhibiting logical features of predication, universals, modality, and others (see Aristotle's of Kant's logical categories). Better to be clearer: In the context of discussing existence, there appears a superfluity that is not rational in its essence at all, yet is discovered only in discursive thought. To understand this is simple: put your finger over a flame for a second or two. Now, that experience has no rational dimension to it, nor does the color yellow or any "quale" you can think of. Yet it is thought that brings it before the understanding so that it can be recognized; and without recognition, it would remain in the darkness, hidden (lethe).

One has to take a long hard look at this, because it is important.

This kind of talk leads one to Heidegger (who borrowed significantly from Kierkegaard without due respect, calling him a "religious writer"). What is it to "recognize" a truth? To know something to be the case? Heidegger thinks the Greeks understood this with truth as alethea, and to see the significance of this would take some serious reading. But in a post: consider the standard truth tables taught in logic classes, and see how abstract they, referring to propositional values only. What happened to actual world?? It simply does not matter, which is why ango american philosophy collapsed in on itself. Heidegger's alethea refers to the presencing of the world that issues forth in thought. Language is the house of being, he writes. It cannot be relegated to abstraction, for it is the dynamic of our very being (dasein) that lights up the world, so to speak. From whence does reason have its existence? Transcendence, just as the terrible pain of your finger in the flame. Truth as alethea brings us OUT of abstraction and into the world where metaphysics has its ground.

Kierkegaard knew very well about this problematic, for he had read Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and so on (he was, of course, literally a genius). One must know in the first place in order to acknowledge the "collision" between reason and existence. Reason cannot, keep in mind, understand what it is, cannot "get behind" itself (Wittgenstein). for this would take a pov outside outside of logic itself and this cannot be "conceived".

So you take Kierkegaard's word over Hegel in matters of Theology? Is that it? — Arcane Sandwich

I would say a qualified yes to this. My view is found more in the vicinity of philosophers like Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion. These are post neo Husserlian thinkers. Husserl argued that philosophy needed to ask the basic questions about what lies in the presuppositions of science and the "naturalistic attitude". To look this deeply into the essential givenness of the world, one had to suspend of "bracket" knowledge claims that otherwise dominate ideas. Just look at the world around you and try to "reduce" what you see to what is actually there in the perceptual content which constitutes the actuality of what is before you. Scientific categories are on hold, as are any of the usual associations. There is Kierkegaard in this, for when thought is reduced to a bare minimum, something startling happens (or can happen. Depends on whos is doing this): the actuality that has always been there rises to prominence, and one sees the world generally ignored in the "habits of the race" as K put it. He refers to the endless idle talk and cultural engagements that have come to rule one's world.

I take issue with his knight of faith. I do not think, and you find this is Meister Eckhart, that the world can be made at all compatible with the call to divinity, if you will. See his Fear and Trembling. He thinks the model of faith lies in a radical simplcity that can go about business, as a cobbler or an accountant, and the like, all the while possessed by god's grace. I think the two are quite antagonistically related.

'Only what is known is real (happens)?' – idealist-solipsist / antirealist nonsense (pace G. Berkeley ... pace N. Bohr et al). — 180 Proof

A little less naivete, if you will. If you read what is written, then you will have noticed that the world remains the world, and science and everydayness is accepted in all of its objective verifiable and falsifiable conditions. No one is raising the absurd specter of solipsism, which is pure straw here.

Not "only what is known is real"; this is too ambiguous and carries the burden of ill conceived ideas. Rather, when an encounter with an object occurs, it is an event, and must be analyzed as such. What lies "outside" of this event requires a perspective unconditioned by the perceptual act, which is impossible. Unless you actually think that the world intimates its presence to a physical brain...by what, magic? Just waltzes into the brain and declares, here I am, a tree! I assume you do not think like this.

Wrong. The leaf or whatever exists outside and independently of the human organism. The organism has sensory equipment to inform the brain about various attributes of an encountered object. The brain is told what a leaf looks and feels like; its size, shape, colour, texture, temperature, tensile strength, pliability, flavour. The eyes may have recorded similar objects attached to a a large, hard, branching object and noticed that the small ones fall off the large one every fall and new ones grow every spring, suggesting that the thing named 'leaf' is a product of the living organism dubbed 'tree'. Other objects, small and large are observed to grow and shed 'leaves'. Putting all this information together, the brain forms an approximate understanding of deciduous vegetation. That understanding can be expanded and enhanced by further study. While some humans' understanding of 'leaf' remains rudimentary, others' may learn a great deal more about the varieties, forms and functions of leaves. We can all claim some knowledge, but certainly not the same knowledge. — Vera Mont

Look, all of this is rudimentary. Trouble lies where least expected. It is about the assumption that there is an object outside of the reach of perception. This brain that is being "told" what is "over there" and entirely apart from the content of what the brain thinks and generates as experience: To affirm this, one must leave experience. That is impossible to even conceive.

Again, this is not to say flowers are not flowers and cats are not cats. All remains what it is and science goes its merry way. But what dramatically changes is the analysis of the relations and content of what is given in the world, for they are no longer reducible to abstract quantitative values that science takes for reality. Now the entire human presence is "present" in the here and there, the before and after. Affectivity, THE most salient feature of existence (even by a naturalist's standard) is now front and center IN the object, for what one encounters is an event of conscious apprehension and that which is apprehended.

Or did you really think a human brain was some kind of mirror of nature? A brain and its "sensory equipment"--a MIRROR? Let's see, the electromagnetic spectrum irradiates this grass, and parts are reflected while others absorbed, and what is reflected is received by the eye and is conditioned by cones and rods and sent down the optic nerve and....now wait. Have we not entirely lost "that out there" in this? And again, for the third time, it is not being said that perception is impossible. I am saying that what perception IS must be radically reconceived.

Okay, I'll bite. How? You're the metaphysician, tell us. What does life mean? Why is is is? — Vera Mont

This is absent from the discussion, the meaning of life. I am only asking about the matter above. It is a matter of epistemology and ontology. One basic, but ignored premise must come to light: there is NOTHING epistemic about causality.

Much can be said about the process of observation, taking measurements, hypothesizing, experimentation and testing. The 'basic data' is already there, in the physical world, to be noticed, recorded, studied and understood. There is no single 'perceptual event'. Conscious beings notice their environment and make sense of it to the best of their ability. — Vera Mont

No one argues otherwise. Here, the argument is about the presuppositions of such things. To begin to philosophize is to ask questions about what is presupposed in science. Saying the basic data is already there in the physical world is true only if one really doesn't want to think about philosophy, which is an option.

No, that is a question. — Vera Mont

What??

1) Hegel was right when he suggested that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit.
2) If so, then Hegel is History's Last Philosopher.
3) If so, then there have been no philosophers since Hegel died.
4) But there have been philosophers since Hegel died.
5) So, Hegel was not History's Last Philosopher.
6) So, Hegel was wrong when he suggested that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit.
7) But (1) and (6) are contradictory.
8) So, Anything Goes (i.e., from a contradiction, any premise follows)

Now, that can't be correct, at least one of the premises must be false. I think that the first premise is the false one: Hegel was not right when he suggested that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit. Or perhaps it did, but only in the sense that Hegel's personal history ended when he died. In that case, either Hegel will reincarnate, or he will not. I say that he will not. There is no such thing as reincarnation. Therefore:

Theorem: Hegel could only have been right that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit, if that means that his own personal history ended when he died.

That, is why Hegel was an existentialist, in the same sense as Kierkegaard. That's my theory. — Arcane Sandwich

Hegel never said he was the last philosopher. Kierkegaard certainly did not hold as Hegel did that one's existence was grounded an historical dialectic. If you are looking for someone who brought Hegel and Kierkegaard together, then Heidegger is who you should read.

The victim of a fatal birth defect does not even have an "affective sense" of what's happens to her. Likewise, natural disasters do not happen because of our "pathos" or we want them to. Again, which equivocating (meaning with feeling) avoids ...
random events ... are instances of 'meaninglessness' — 180 Proof

But this is due to your failure to understand that no event has ever been witnessed that is without meaning, and no event has ever occurred unless witnessed. Ontology and epistemology are analytically bound. The witnessing is all that has ever been submitted as data for the construction of anything one can even bring to mind. Any "instance" can only be conceived in a meaning context of the instance itself.

If I take you rightly, you want to say, say, that it is raining (if it is) and this is entirely beyond the perceptual act that acknowledges it. I say you are living in a dream world, as if such an event could ever pass through the boundaries of perceptual conditions. No sense of this can be made at all. Pure nonsense.

In my view the Eden myth referred to in the opening, was designed to express that humanity's desire for meaning is its downfall. In a nutshell, its message was, although humans have the physiology to go beyond nature and construct a universe of make-believe, don't. Choose living over knowing. — ENOAH

Not quite. It is saying that the myth reveals something about the nature of inquiry and discovery. A tree of knowledge, wasn't that it? Which bore apples that enlightened? Of course, God's injunction not to eat the fruit IS an inherent part of the problematic: no injunction, no disobedience. What is an injunction? A law, a principle. What is a question? It is a standing in the openness of what lies before one, rather than in the fixity of acceptance (obedience). A question is an openness to the world that defies closure (hence the hermeneutic circle: inquiry has no rest for nothing stands that is born of language that is beyond question). This defiance IS the defiance in the old story of the bible.

Make believe? This requires a standard of something that stands as an absolute, against which other things can be judged. "Make believe" is pejorative. This has to be put aside. Think like Rorty: truth is made, not discovered, not make believe.

But as a species, we definitely chose knowing over living, and that has lead to an insatiable desire to construct meaning. — ENOAH

Mostly pragmatic in nature. That is, we do make institutions and these are like fetishes as meaning gathers around them. Most of knowing lies in dealing with, coping, problem solving.

It is only because we construct meaning that we have irresolvable suffering.

As an animal, I fracture a bone, or cannot sustain my group with adequate food and safety, and that leads to pain, which prompts my next actions. The pain may continue until I am able to heal or procure the necessities. Then I return to a stable bliss until the next painful trigger comes along.

As a child of so-called Adam/Eve, I take those pains, and construct meaning to attach: damn it, why did I have to climb that tree and sprain my ankle? Damn it, why are my kids worse off than my neighbor? Etc. I know why, because Im stupid, or a sinner, or that is the plight of humankind, etc. Now, with a narrative [made up meaning] to attach to the pain, it is able to linger as suffering. — ENOAH

It is an interesting way to look at things. How is this narrative constructed? In time. To recall (and thus, to "know" one is stupid, a sinner, etc.) is to invoke the past, an integral part of a temporal sequence, but the past is no more (by definition), so the recollection is entirely devoid of any actual past, for there really is no such thing. To refer to yesterday's events, this mornings coffee and toast, the tidal wave the drenched Lisbon on 1755, is, and only can be, a present event about the past; the but the past is integrally produced AS a present event of recalling, but, the present event has no existence either, for it is ever fleeting into the future, and what is the future if not the "not yet" of a past possibility recalled (for what else is there to anticipate the future with?). Past, present and future are thus, on closer analysis, really a singularity that is utterly transcendental, for one cannot imagine what it is without recalling and anticipating. Time is the structure of our existence, yet it shows itself to be entirely other than the standard, vulgar, everyday, linear phenomenon.

The point I want to make about all of this is that here in this brief sketch of an analytic of subjective time (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger--they all have their version. Paul Ricoeur even wrote a book, Time and Narrative, that you might find interesting, given your thoughts above), leads, if one really follows through, to extraordinary existential insight. this vast language game we are in makes a lot of trouble, true, but it also possesses the dialectic possibilities for profound disclosure. Profound? There is the rub: one can only recognize them as such if one pursues them, and one only pursues them if one is possessed by the desire for the profound. Alas, this is how it goes. No one is going to take the time to read Augustine through Derrida unless one simply has to know this kind of thing.

What does 'good' metaphysics add to good physics? And why is an addition required? — Vera Mont

Well, this is a big question. It begins with seeing how physics cannot explain basic assumptions. Assumptions about knowledge and ontology. I know, for example, that the tides are due to the gravitational pull between the earth and the moon. But then, what can be said about the perceptual event that produces all of the basic data? This is a metaphysical question.

What 'knowledge claim'? Human brain processes information delivered to it through sensory input and names the things - objects, events, changes - that are relevant to its own and it's vessel's functioning. — Vera Mont

I'll assume that existence of a knowledge claim is really not in dispute. You know something? That is a knowledge claim. Why is your brief description problematic? It isn't if you are thinking as a scientist does about such things. "Processes information"? You mean it takes something out there, a leaf, an organ tissue sample, a supernova, or anything, really, my shoe laces, and delivers what it is to the understanding of things one has, right? You perhaps see the trouble in this: Not how DOES, but how is it at all possible, that processing like this "delivers" anything at all? This is a metaphysical question.

One has a right to ask any question that pops into one's head - unless one is devout and forbidden by his religion to ask a certain category of questions, or a slave with no rights at all, in which case one must keep one's own silent counsel. One, however, does not have a right to receive answers. One can always invent answers, which is what philosophers do. — Vera Mont

the fact that "information processing" cannot explain at all how a world is epistemically accessible did not pop up as, say, a question about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. It is there, right before your eyes. Like asking what a bank teller is or an accountant or gravity. The question here is how in knowledge possible? Perhaps you have read a lot of bad metaphysics. Among the worst is the metaphysics of science, which is the ignoring of its own foundation of assumptions.

Knowledge of the presence and description of a tree, yes. Knowledge of poplarhood and spruceness, no. — Vera Mont

Explain.

You can lead a jaundiced realist to metaphysics, but you can't make her drink. — Vera Mont

Sorry, but what do you mean by 'metaphysics"?

Well, let me ask you this, then. Let's replace "tree" with "this Thread". That being the case, I'll say the following. My brain is under the impression that this Thread has a Kierkegaard-ish tone. Is that impression accurate, yes or no? If yes (or no), is it entirely accurate (or inaccurate), or is it accurate (or inaccurate) to a degree? — Arcane Sandwich

Kierkegaard is an essential part of Heidegger, especially the former's Concept of Anxiety. Reading Concept, one finds Sartre here, Heidegger there, throughout. In the matter of metaphysics, there is K's notorious reference to nothing, which is the failing of language to speak existence. The book is devoted to a philosophical exposition of original sin and he essentially uses this idea, bound in myth and theology, to bring to light the human struggle with her own existence vis a vis eternity. One insight: rationalism (Hegel's, which was popular at the time) fails to affirm that we actually exist. Existence is deeply personal (subjective) and one has to discover this. K's argument with Christendom (Attack on Christendom) tells how the church as an institution has displaced the essential thinking and engagement of a authentic Christian. K is of course well aware of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century Dominican Priest who was charged with heresy, and was aware of thinking like this: "The true word of eternity is spoken only in solitude, where a man is a desert and alien to himself and multiplicity." So much for the church! But more: so much for the world! For the world is the multiplicity Eckhart is speaking about. Kierkegaard gaveto the reader the hiddenness of our existence beneath the certainties of everyday living. To discover this hiddenness is the hard work of phenomenology. Some think like this: Here you are, there is a world of trees, people, and yes, even this post. It stands before you in a very, very different way if you allow yourself to withdraw from typical contexts of engagement, and move "out" of context all together. And witness the world as if for the first time.

Another insight: this relation we have with the world has analytic possibilities.

Explain in what way (e.g.) a fatal birth defect is "meaningful". — 180 Proof

A better question would be, why do you think only good things are meaningful? Meaning, and of course, this is not the dictionary sense of meaning, but the affective sense, referring to the pathos of one's regard for something, is about something affectively impactful, and this includes have an interest, being concerned, loving, hating and the entire range of value possibilities. A fatal birth defect is meaningful to the extent it occurs in the context of such engagements.

Some of us have nothing better to do than ask questions to which there are no answers. Most of us, most of the time, are busy trying to survive. That doesn't make the underprivileged majority less human or the leisured minority more meaningful. — Vera Mont

There is here a lot that is extraneous to the issue. Underprivileged minority? At any rate, it does sound like you are a bit sour on metaphysics, but this entirely depends on what metaphysics you are thinking of. A lot can be said on this, but in the space of a post, I would say there is bad metaphysics, the kind of thing Christian theology has long held to, say, but there is also good metaphysics, and for this one simply has to take seriously real questions, that is, questions found in an honest assessment of the way the world is. Here metaphysics is no less valid than physics.

Consider this simple question for the "naturalist" where naturalism here says philosophy should occur in "the same empirical spirit that animates science." (Quine): you have two objects, one is a human brain and the other is a tree. The question is, how is a knowledge claim of the former about the latter possible? SImple as that. This is not some extravagant nonsense from deep in left field, but rather is a clear naturalist question, the kind of thing one has the right to ask because it is there, in the world. (Note: the accepted premise here is that one DOES indeed have knowledge of the tree. Knowledge here is not being denied, but affirmed. It is a question of its possibility.)

This leads directly to metaphysics, and by a naturalist's standard!

This statement doesn't make sense (e.g. birth defects, natural disasters, mass murders, vague utterances, discursive nonsense, random events ... are instances of "meaninglessness"). — 180 Proof

No, I mean, you know this is wrong. Meaninglessness means without meaning, and all the things you mention are certainly meaningful. Meaninglessness would be an abstraction from reality, as with a proposition and its content, qua being a proposition. Or a truth table as a truth table, and entirely outside of any context in which people are talking, engaged, interested, and so forth.

Why do you need to understand "what it means to be human"? You're already human; it doesn't have a meaning; it's just one of the facts about which you have no choice. Why set up a straw-god to contend against/ depend on/ fear/ venerate/ make sacrifices to?
What's your simply [and briefly, if possible] stated point? — Vera Mont

Well, I did say in the OP that the naive straw god was not what is in play here.

But understanding what it means to be human is to ask questions about our existence, and we ask these questions because the question is literally an expression of what we are. To question is part of the structure of perception: You see a rabbit on a fence post, a simple recognition, yet how is this possible? The presence of the rabbit does not intimate its rabbit essence to you, but rather, you encounter the rabbit already equipped with rabbit familiarity, so the issue turns to your rabbit familiarity--what makes something familiar? Past experience. Ah, but prior to this experience, long ago, there was no rabbit when you encountered a rabbit. There was, however, a perceptual openness, ready to receive language and the world. This openness is a structural feature of infantile existence, and it is the very nature of the inquiring business of a mature mind. The question (doubt, says Peirce. See his Fixation of Belief. I don't abide in all they say, but the pragmatists were qualifiedly right), is the residuum of the original, abyssal infantile openness of our early existence.
And philosophy is a rediscovery of this original primordiality.

Btw, why do you assume being human "means" anything at all? — 180 Proof

Our existence is saturated with meaning. Never once has a human being witnessed meaninglessness, for such meaninglessness would have to lie beyond the boundaries of experience. It is nonsense to even imagine meaninglessness for a human being.

So Arcane, there is a jot of connectivity. But here is a good place for an observation:
Conscience, mentioned in the lyrics: This appears when one second guesses one's position. What was at first confidence turns to inquiry, for what one was confident in has been undermined somehow. Think of this as a universal condition, that is, the condition of ALL one has confidence in, and all things have lost the absolute confidence one had in them. Earth crisis, or world crisis, is a crisis in everything, so there is no sanctuary since the world is all there is. Now you have encountered metaphysics. The question the OP asks, indirectly, is where IS one once conscience, the call, beckons, or insists (one can never go back) that all things, values and meaning is without foundation?

Well, depends on what they have to say.

Yes, fear – conatus as ineluctable striving to overcome – escape from – fear (e.g. mortality ... manifest in burying our dead, etc). H. sapiens (aka "h. religiosus")¹ first, oldest, perennial escape plan – the quest for magical/symbolic "immortality" – is what we now call "religion" as such. — 180 Proof

Of course you are right! No one would ever argue against it, who understands this issue. But you have not taken the analytical step into the question begged, which is what is all the fuss about? This fuss is a structural feature of our existence, this death by a thousand cuts, say, IS the fuss, and to simply ignore it is entirely disingenuous to philosophy, for it is by parsecs THE most salient feature of our existence at the level of basic questions

Though I do sympathize, for the reading is daunting.

Yes, please. I am an enthusiastic gardener, but I lack the training and the tools. And yes, not this or that--though I don't begrudge their efforts; we get sucked in easily — ENOAH

Then why not go through it, the issue that is, as it is plainly put: Question that I asked Ludwig V: what if ethics were as apodictic (apriori, universally and necessarily true) as logic? Try to see how very weird this question is for it possesses nearly everything the issue deals with. For now I just leave it to you.

I believe no idea stands on its own, but emerges as a locus in the history of that idea. — ENOAH

Now you're talking. But as I see it, one has to withdraw from the arguments, and move into the world (professional philosophers are too busy to do this. I mean, to write a paper, one has to be in the conversation about what others say and have said, comparing, contrasting, aligning ideas. They are good at arguments, but generally not good at "the world," which is the original point. I like to say, I don't read Heidegger to understand Heidegger; I read Heidegger to understand the world. ANd he is VERY helpful in this. Phenomenology is the only to understand the world): You know that perception is an historical construct, even though it occurs without pause. This is evident in that one's own personal history provides that language learning from infancy, yet when we engage with this language, there is exactly this immediacy in the way a knowledge claim is affirmed in and by language. The object is entirely mediated in its apprehension. And, following Heidegger, this language itself, apart from one's personal history, has a history that goes back through the ages and evolves in historical movements (sound like Hegel? Of course). But make that move into the world (this is what Michel Henry argued with passion) and there we are in this "fleshy encounter" of a very direct apprehension that is NOT qualified by the interpretative values of language. Feel the grass, the pinch of the flesh, and engage the senses in "real time" and all arguments in abeyance. Think of Walt Whitman, the 19th century poet of the living experience. He writes:

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

Henry and even Nietzsche likely applauded Whitman (Nietzsche adored Emerson, too). The point is, creeds and schools in abeyance means an unmitigated, unconditioned apprehension of the pure phenomenon that stands before one in vivid presence, and THIS will not be gainsaid by the philosopher's insistence that all perception is interpretative and constituted by language. This leaf of grass pressed between my thumb and finger is simply undeniably THERE in all the energy of a live experience. And the more you allow yourself to engage the world like this, the more you see what metaphysics is really all about: Language implicitly there, attending the qualitative moment, stabilizing existence, and yet, what appears before one, the reduced phenomenon that is most emphatically NOT language. This is where metaphysics is revealed, for in the mundane perception, the "presence" of the world stands entirely "Other" than what the understanding has to "say".

You say the Eastern religio-philosophies have not made the significant move out of the habits of ordinariness, but serious meditation does not have any explicit ideational content. It is precisely a "liberation" from just this, and its telos is not to calm the mind and deal with the world more happily. Its telos is to literally leave the world, and by world I refer to the very historical construct you refer to. You sound a lot like Derrida when you say no idea stands out on its own. Derrida does what meditation does, two "yogas" and Derrida is the ultimate jnana yoga, thought discovering the delimitations of thought and IN this "apophatic" revelation, one has zazen, if you want to talk like this. And all schools are in abeyance.

but here, I'm wondering if I misunderstood. I would say, that this truth, not being a logical one, does not imagine, period. — ENOAH

You think like this because of this language prohibition when we talk about mysticism. I read once in a preface to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that monks speak often about their experiences in meditation. One can talk about anything if the talk is simply reporting and describing and quantifying. Liberation in the mystical tradition does not preclude language, but understands that language itself is transcendental, and here consider what Wittgenstein had to say about logic: Logic shows us what it is, but cannot tell us what it is. The same is true for my cat: it appears, and I know this in the contexts of cats and my cat and the knowledge base this is informed by, but this contextually conceived knowing is itself radically indeterminate, that is, belongs to no subsuming context. You understand this, and you understand the idea metaphysics, but to make a further move, one has to leave the text, the thesis, and behold the world and KNOW the world cannot be possessed by language. One is at once possessed and dispossessed by language (that "by" is VERY tricky. After all, as I speak these words, there is an independence of the language, as if the language were doing the dispossessing. The "I" of me is conceived in the language that conceives, is it not. See my point? See how this very language I am deploying NOW as I write about language is somehow entirely independent of ME if the "I" of me is so completely indeterminate. Every time I try to find myself , I encounter the language "doing" looking. "I" am not accessible to language! But then, what is this "I"? This is discovered not by language but by value, in "the religious" dimension of our existence: the metaphysics of "I".

would give neither logical nor Ethical, for that matter, any consideration in regard to this truth. Good is an imposing construct. Logic belongs to it. As does Ethics. But to The Ultimate Truth that we are the being which breathes, not the becoming which thinks, the only "concern" is being. Religion is that sublime mechanism built into the imposing projections, a peek hole into being.

But this and that religion, like us in every endeavor, soon lost sight of that essence. And so we bicker instead of peek. — ENOAH

When one considers the Good, one has to escape the metaphysics of Plato, the idea or form of the good, but when the subject is broached, it is done IN language. This "peaking" you refer to will never escape language in this way, for one is not reduced to a babbling feral adult when one meditates or when one is in meditative thought. Language is the house of Being Heidegger said, and while there is a great deal more to it then what H, the strong intellectual who cared little for ethics and the nature of value talk, meant by this, he was most clearly correct to say that when we have an acknowledgement of the world AT ALL, we have this in language and Time. A simply profound analysis, Being and Time. All the French post-post modern "theological turn" philosopher I read are deeply schooled in Heidegger and Husserl. They don't "bicker" like paper writers saying what Husserl was "really saying". They stand apart from this scholarly arguing, mostly.

On truth: Please note the above on language.

I have to remind myself that language is not intrusive into the endeavor to realize fully what the world IS. Language is what brings one to that peak you talk about. An once there, language is suspended, explicitly, anyway, and one realizes one really doesn't know what language is at all, and Plato comes back to haunt one. And this is registered at the perceptual level, not merely as a thought.

Ok, I didn't misunderstand. Yes, "divinity" is caring; not about the projected becoming of mind and history; but in the being of "God and Its Creation" to put it "religiously." To put it philosophically, it is caring (about) being; or, being caring-being, rather than distracted-being, or becoming. — ENOAH

Just to remind, I think it is very important to steer clear of God the creator and the rest. I want to see the world as it stands there before my gaze, and have none of the explicit interpretative historical ideas rush in to claim it. This is the phenomenology of Husserl, or thereabouts. Husserl didn't understand ethics either.

To be more considerate, given the historical timeframe of the supernatural stories, and the sheer explosion of very complex human thought and belief emerging from written language, it makes complete and perfect sense that such people used language in the ways they did to come up with such explanations for 'why' things were/are the way they were, and/or 'will be'. — creativesoul

The Op asks, what is behind "such explanations"? "Behind" here is, of course, not a determinative matter. If it were, the human existence would be VERY different. Religion is about metaphysics, even though those etymological stories and crowd the issue with imagination. Clear the board of all that fabrication, and what is left? It is not nothing, but is the isolated condition itself, there to examined, not unlike that way a geologist well remove isolate quartz from granite or a psychiatrist will seek out more primary pathologies to explain behavior. Certain thing must be cleared away to discover what is there. Call this a scientist's reductive effort to research something. She may find plate tectonics, or childhood trauma, but to do this, a great deal has to be dismissed as incidental.

But here, the matter is metaphysics, and empirical (a category that has rather arbitrary boundaries) research will not do. Ethics is transcendental. One has to see this before moving into the argument all all. Seeking out causes is certainly important, but first one has to see clearly what one is trying to track down, and if analysis stays at the level of story telling in ancient texts, then analysis stays with cultural anthropology, or the literary classics (I took a course once called "The Bible as Literature"), or mythology. But this is just not interesting philosophically.

Philosophy wants to know what things are at the most basic level of inquiry, and the narrative account is the first thing to go. What does it mean to be "thrown" into a world like this with this impossible ethical dimension? The being thrown into disease, and countless miseries, as well as the joys, blisses, and the countless delights? Ethics does not simply deal with such things; it IS these things, meaning none of this value dimension, then ethics simply vanishes. No bads and goods, to put it bluntly, then no ethics (or aesthetics). And as the OP says, religious is the foundational ethical/aesthetic indeterminacy of our existence.

I do not understand how that counts as being 'on the other hand'. Looks like a different way to say "what causes what", both of which refer to causality, which is what I started with. Occam's razor applies. — creativesoul

Right. What is IN the causal matrix of the world is not causality itself, but the world that is being observed. The qualitative matters of ethics and religion are not addressed if the essential meanings are not recognized. So ethical situations like returning an ax to its enraged owner bent on revenge have a great deal of content that has nothing to do with the "essence" of ethics. Metaethics asks, what IS it about this that makes it ethical AT ALL. What makes something ethical at the basic level? What is the "good" and the "bad" of ethics?

Presupposes a giver. Occam's razor applies. — creativesoul

Givenness refers to "being thrown" into a world that is foundationally indeterminate. How is it foundationally indeterminate takes one to the issue of language. Language deals with the world, but does not speak its presence, so to speak. Long and windy issue.

A mystery is behind the stories? Seems like those stories spell it all out fairly clearly. So, I see no mystery to speak of. The stories are mistaken, but clear enough to be clearly mistaken.

Value and ethics are embedded within stories. They grow with stories. They change with stories. So, to say that values and ethics are 'behind' the religious stories, as if they are somehow the basis underlying/grounding of all those stories seems suspect, eh? Cleary not all. Some. Sure. — creativesoul

It is not the story itself, but what gave rise to the story. Jump to the chase: Religion is all about our being thrown into a world to suffer and die. Because this world is foundationally indeterminate, this "throwness"
has no identifiable cause that can provide remedy. So understand what religion IS, we have to understand the very real presence in the world of value, a general term that designates a dimension of our existence which makes ethics possible. The issue takes thought deep into metaphysics.

Yes, that's exactly his argument. What is not clear is whether he thought of that as debunking metaphysics or legitimizing it (in some form)? (Throwing away the ladder once one has climbed up it.) I can't see that he might have intended to allow (or would have allowed), if he had known about it) a project like Husserl's or Heidegger's - both of whom abjured metaphysics (as traditionally understood.) — Ludwig V

Russell thought Witt was a mystic, because Witt thought, in a letter to a publisher, that the Tractatus had two parts, the part that is spoken and the part that is not, and it was the latter that was most important. Heidegger's lecture The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics, What Is Metaphysics, and in Being and Time's Care as the Being of Dasein, and also in his The Word of Nietzsche's God Is Dead (I happen to be reading these now) shows that he does not cross that line into forbidden metaphysics, but stays always in the historical grounding of Hegelian ontology. "Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger’s Destruktion of Metaphysics" by Iain Thomson works this out so well, and I should read it again. Husserl is another matter. His epoche is notoriously borderline, and the so called French theological turn is entirely grounded in Husserl, and I find Michel Henry and Jen Luc Marion to be the torch bearers of this phenomenology that takes what appears before us down to the wire, the pure phenomenon of the encounter. I think they have a very good point: though language is always already IN the manifestation of what is perceived, the "life" of experiencing the world is so vividly there, in the "pathos" (broadly conceived) of our existence, that the metaphysics of that which cannot be spoken stands emphatically clear. It is just insane to think away the reality of this world's engagement, and this has to do with the value in the raw encounter. The pure phenomenon cannot be dismissed as an interpretative indeteriminacy. Its determinacy is AS apodictic as logic. But then, when we speak, we are in this historical ontology. This sounds close to Wittgenstein, no?

I'm all for giving a central place in philosophy to human life. But classifying that as metaphysics is a bit of a stretch don't you think? — Ludwig V

But what is metaphysics? What does Witt mean when he says the world is mystical and ethics is transcendental? He was not talking about a surprasensory world. What would one classify as metaphysics? Heidegger was very down to earth.

It certainly would. Ethics as we know it would not exist. It would reduce to determinism. — Ludwig V

But you are talking about freedom. At its essence, religion is not about freedom. It is rather purely descriptive: What is there in the world that makes religion what it is? Talk about creative minds fictionalizing things to make the world more agreeable begs the question: More agreeable? Why is this needed? Then we encounter Schopenhauer very accurate descriptions of our world. Of course, he didn't really understand the world's ethics: Our ethics IS Ethics. This is the dramatic change. As if the gravitas of the Bible were to be affirmed, but minus most of the narrative content, including it metaphysics, and, of course, God: God the creator, God the almighty, God the all knowing, and so forth. All the things the Bible (and other such texts)we may find wise and true are wise and true because that is what they are.

This is where the OP is going. Observe ethics the way it is, and qualitatively, there hangs in the balance matters of profound importance, and here I say, see Schopenhauer. But see that ethics is also constituted by the "optimistic" side, a word chosen just to contrast Schop's infamous pessimism, as well. These are really deflationary terms, pessimism and optimism. One has to move into the language of poetry, from Baudelaire's amazing Flowers of Evil (Better than Schop) through to Emerson's Nature (In a bare common, I am glad to the brink of fear). In other words, to talk about this world's ethics, one has to talk about this world's value actualities (for these are what is in play in ethics, though often not so emphatically of vividly , and these are powerful; as powerful as burning living flesh and ecstatic visions of "holiness". We don't have language that can give such things their due place beyond "the Good" and "the Bad". These are simply their "own presupposition" entirely resistant to analysis (which is a major premise of the OP). AND: they issue from the world itself. One may be miserable because of condition she caused to be, but no "caused" misery to be there AT ALL.

That depends on what you mean by "grounded". You seem to be attributing some sort of coercive force to Being and that is the nightmare of a world without ethics or even value. — Ludwig V

Not to personify Being at all. The matter is simply descriptive. The ground of something is that from which it comes. The ethical imposition upon me not to strangle my neighbor and steal his money is traceable to the value in play, which is simply "there".

Yes, that is not just a prerequisite, but the "hypotheses" informing me suggests that the Truth being sought is necessarily "beyond" logic. That is why "we" have "placed it"/"found its place" outside of conventional philosophy and in, say, "religion." — ENOAH

And just to be clear, this kind of "truth" can be said to be about qualia, the phenomenologically pure color or sound, say. But qualia really doen't carry meaning. One cannot even imagine qualia, really, because the moment one acknowledges it, the quale is IN thought, language, context. Only value-quale "speaks" itself, apart from these. Pain is not analytically contextual even though it is contextualized all the time. A sprained wrist is worse than, has a biological counterpart, a social context, a political context, a history, and on and on. But the pain is stand alone. There is a reason Wittgenstein refued to talk about value. It issues "from the world itself". a very important, the most important feature of our existence. Religion is ALL about this.

And this "need" we have for truth to be objective and verifiable if not empirically then by "shared" experience is only applying the laws of the very framework that the "essence of religion" which I am positing (admittedly, also within that same framework) is a refuge from. — ENOAH

Yes, I conditionally agree. It's just that I think it's important to note that this framework is always already there, even when one is questioning it's limits. It is IN the questioning. To me this brings out the extraordinary nature of the affectivity of the essence of religion. Philosophers want to bring this down to the clarity of thought (positivists) or the disclosure possibilities of language (Heidegger). But few are willing to see that religion essentially IS the world because the world is indeterminate and it is in the ethical indeterminacy of the world, or our being-in-the-world, that insists on meta-redemption and meta-consummation. This may sound confusing, but it's not: Redemption is about being "thrown" into a world of suffering, the negative dimension of ethics; and consummation refers to the positive completion found in the incompleteness of desire.

Long story. Comes from reading Levinas, Husserl, Henry, and others. Phenomenology leads to only one place, which is the impossible (because value is OF the world and cannot be spoken) affirmation in its aesthetic/ethical dimension.

Agreed. "Understand." But we are Truth (not propositional, but the one nondualistic truth) by being [It] by [being its] doing. — ENOAH

I think this is right, and not a bad way to put it, for truth, an epistemic term, and being, and ontological term, are two sides of the same thing. You know, you might find the brief discussion about Michel Henry very interesting. You seem to be predisposed to this as am I. On youtube titled Why Study Phenomenology and The Turn to Religion, an interview with Conor Cunningham. Only ten minutes long and one does have to ignore the bible references if this sort of thing is not to your taste. Henry is mostly mostly not a religious writer. He is a phenomenologist and can be difficult (The Manifestation of Essence is a doctoral thesis on Husserl and Descartes). But this interview is very good at exposing how religion is to be understood in light of the pure givenness of our "pathos" in the world. (See henry's "Barbarism" where he is accessible and gives well constructed thought to this elusive theme.)

Afterall, human Mind (like our concern about AI today) is a tool that got away from "us". — ENOAH

Interesting way to put it. One could say this about technology, a tool that got away from us. It took our perspective away from our living reality and gave us an objectification of the self in science's terminology. Nothing but bones and ash, Henry says. It presents the question as to whether this is something lost through the modernist culture that has forgotten, as Kierkegaard put it, that we exist.

I expect that's true. On another thread recently, someone remarked that he never read Aristotle; from the context, it seemed natural to infer that this was a deficiency. I thought it remarkable that someone would think that any philosopher who had not read Aristotle was deficient in some way. — Ludwig V

I suppose it depends on one's priorities and how technical the historical analysis is going to be. But then, one can pretty much grasp the ideas in Being and Time without that much Greek (though H would disagree. He though Greek and German as privileged. See his surprise when it was the American William Richardson's "Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought" that got it right: "Who is this guy? So many have gotten me wrong, but here is someone who has gotten me right-and he's an AMERICAN! How is that possible?")

Yes, his position was much more nuanced than many of his contemporaries. But he had very little, if anything, to say about it. We are left with the business about speech and silence, which is a blank sheet of paper on which we can write more or less what we wish to - and people do. — Ludwig V

He actually petitioned to go to the front lines of the war just to know what it was to face death. And his brothers committed suicide (all of them?) and Witt constantly thought of it. So there is this extraordinary dimension to this rigorous thinker. I think the difference between him and positivists, then and now, is summed up in his letter to a publisher in which he said the Tractatus has two parts, the first is what is said and the second is what is not said, and it is by far the second that is the most important. Otto Neurath added to "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" the idea that one must indeed be silent, but about nothing. This makes the difference clear. Russell called him a mystic.

He's certainly an impressive figure. But those accolades come and go. They said that about Russell at one time, and Wittgenstein. I'm not good at hero-worship. — Ludwig V

Well, the century has come and gone. The trouble is that philosophy is so split. If you lean continental, Heidegger will not be outdone, and postmodern French and German all work in within the ideas he laid down, agreeing or not. But anglo amercian philosophers no longer deal much with Kant and his legacy (esp the three H's, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger), and they don't want to be bothered with the Greek, German and French. But in the end, it will have to be admitted that once metaphysics is removed from philosophy, philosophy simply vanishes.

I'm not sure about apodicticity, so if you don't mind, I'll just talk about certainty.
That doubt is unresolvable, because it frames the issue in the wrong way. In the first place, as Wittgenstein argues (mostly in the early period) just as one cannot draw a picture of a picture, one cannot expect to explain in language what the relationship is between language and the world. As he would say, it "shows itself", just as a picture (once we have learned to interpret it) shows what it is a picture of.
But the big mistake is to think that the problem is about the relationship between language (as given, and our starting-point) and the world. Language arose in the world, from the world, to be of use in living in the world. Hence the only question is about the relationship between the world (as given, and our starting-point) and language, just as we assess a picture by comparing it to the world and not the world by comparing it to a picture. — Ludwig V

But this does not show the real problem posed by metaphsyics. Take the position of moral realism. Rejected for essentially the reason you mention: when one encounters the world first, logically first, that is, prior to, presupposed by, all that can be said, one encounters a body of language engagement possibilities, that is, what CAN be said, and this totality is finite, or historically finite, in that the world can only make sense when taken up in the "potentiality of possibilities" possessed by the historical framework that makes for meaningful utterances. So one is always already IN some historical framework (this for Heidegger was the essential ontology for dasein), bound to a particular finitude.

See, I agree with this. But I stand outside both Heidegger and anglo american views here. It is not science that has this privileged relation to the world, but the body of language possibilities that a given culture can yield. Science and its categories are part of this. If ethics is approached with this assumption determinatively in place, then ethics is thereby finitized. Is it?

Consider Wittgenstein's statement in the Tractatus that Ethics is transcendental. But he doesn't make this clear, perhaps purposely. Ethics is transcendental because the ethical good and bad issue from something that cannot be quantified. It is a quality of the world, and like logicality, one cannot get "behind" such a thing, only witness it. Take a lighted match and apply it to a finger and witness "the bad" that is the essence of the ethical rule against doing such a thing. Or the good of hagen Dazs, if this is to one's taste. Note that "taste" is not the issue. The attempt here is not show how all tastes and their variances are finally settled. The matter is value qua value, or, the ontology of value, the radical "other" of this good and bad that drives all ethics.

Another way to put this is to refer to earlier on in the Tractaus when he says the pointof the book is to draw a limit to the expressions of thought. What lies on the other side of language is nonsense, and what is on the other side of language? Metaphysics. But a very real and palpable metaphysics in the burned finger, the falling in love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, and so forth. These and the value that is pervasive in our existence, from vague interest to thrill and excitement, literally constitute ethical possibility.

Wittgenstein was a moral realist, though doesn't say this, as in his Lecture on Ethics. The good is the divine, he says in Value and Culture. He is right about this.

What makes those rules certain is that we keep them - nothing else. — Ludwig V

And they are useful. And this applies to ethical rules as well. Ethics is powered, if you will, by value, but entangled in culture, and culture evolves. If there is an telos to this, it is found in value, not in the language that would "speak it". Language doesn't do this.

In itself, however, language is neither true not false. It is the means by which we assert and ascertain what it true and what is false. The certainty that Descartes was after was to be found or lost in the use of language, not in language. — Ludwig V

The idea is that it is nonsense to even speak of a thing "in itself". It has to be kept in mind that everything Derrida wrote was, from an "in itself" pov, under erasure. No context, no meaning. As I see it, there is only one thing that is not nonsense at this level, and that is value-in-the-world, that is, the pain from this broken knee cap is does not issue from a construction of beliefs about pain, and the prohibition against bringing this into the world some from the pain itself, not as the pain is construed, interpreted. Pain qua pain makes sense even though the language that speaks it cannot speak the world, so to speak.
So I agree, there is no true or false outside of context (Structure, Sign and Play). But it is a very sticky matter simply because one has to bite this absurd bullet that says as I acknowledge my cat on the sofa, it is somehow existentially remote from possible understanding. There is this impossible distance between me and the cat that says I know, but I really don't know in the deeper ontology. This distance is about language and the world.

You can. But it is the first step into a swamp that sucks you in... But then, you are mired in it anyway, so perhaps it will help to point out that there are ladders that can get you out. You just need to ask the right questions. — Ludwig V

Phenomenology asks the right questions.

I deduced that. But it already palms off on me a model of thinking about thinking. — Ludwig V

That is not the way it works. Once the object is accepted as part of the structure of the cogito, one faces questions about the world and our relationship with it. Ontology is no longer parasitic on the discursive method of deriving objectivity from the thinking ego (as with Descartes appeal to God), but now the world stands before inquiry as it appears. Take a look at the way Henry puts it:

when I say 'I am happy' or more simply 'I am', that which turns out to
be 'aimed at' by my affirmation is possible only insofar as Being has
already appeared. Thus should not the true object of an inaugural
inquiry be the Being of the ego rather than the ego itself, or more
precisely, the Being in and by which the ego can rise to existence
and acquire its own Being? This is why the Cartesian beginning is
not at all 'radical',

This "being in" is the legacy of Heidegger, and means being in the world. In the world, that is, of everything you can imagine. Descartes was right to affirm that certainty about the world and its "beings" begins with the perceptual act which is inherently "thoughtful" but wrong to think this thoughtfulness that attends egoic awareness is the true "inaugural" place for ontological study. This "place" is the world, the touching, and feeling, and all of the physical and affective intimacy of our being here. There is IN this that which it is insane to doubt, and this is not a philosophical argument that lies at the beginning of all sound philosophy: it is the world itself. This is Husserl.

"Parent" and "child" are interdependent. Both are defined at the same time. This may be somewhat hidden here because of an accident of our language. "Certain" has two meanings, one psychological and one objective. The opposite of "certain" in the objective sense is "uncertain", which seems to have no psychological correlative; but it does exist, since we have "doubt". — Ludwig V

This appears to be an appeal to the binary nature of language, and of course, you take this to its fullest expression, you encounter Derrida and the "trace" that has in its nature nothing of the singularity we think it has in common references and conversation. To reason this way, one encounters an extraordinary and novel kind of doubt. All meaning is contextual, and it is context that generates particularity, and there is nothing that survives what amounts to a critique of propositional knowledge, and therefore knowledge. Of course, this is self refuting because the thesis itself is expressed in propositions; but regardless, take all this indeterminacy Derrida throws us into (even Heidegger's hermeneutics does not survive. I think H knew this, though. See Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. I would have to read again), and now , face the world! Literally, observe, feel the fullness of the tactile
"presence" of the cup on the table, the smell of the coffee, and so on. It is not that Derrida is wrong, and I di think he is right, but rather, it becomes clear that when language is "put to rest" so to speak, and one engages with "originary" intent, there is something primordial that has been "forgotten" (Heidegger) that is now allowed to step forward.

This kind of thinking will not set well with most. It does take a certain predilection. But you call into question the post modern concern about language and this takes analysis into a very deep and fascinating rabbit hole. One can find down there things genuinely insightful that go far beyond anything the petty talk about atheism has to say.

"I doubt whether p" means "I don't know whether p is true or false", which implies "I know that p might be true or might be false", which implies "I know that p might be true". — Ludwig V

Consider that there is doubt that runs through the analyticity of this proposition. Mostly, as I pointed out, it is framed in language and analyticity itself is a language construction, and so one would have first establish that language itself is apodictically certain. In other words, even if the stream of implications seems valid, streaming itself can never counter the doubt inherent in implication itself. And speaking of validity, such a thing does not generate insight about the world. Only about itself, the tautological system of self referencing symbols.

The message must be getting drowned out. But you are missing out all the others who have tried. Hume, Russell, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and maybe others. — Ludwig V

Wittgenstein was not aligned with the positivism that so emphatically rejected metaphysics. He was different. A great admirer of Kierkegaard, he insisted that meaningful talk had no place in metaphysics because it would offend the most important part of our existence. He writes in Value and Culture: Divinity is what I call the Good. And would go no further. Also, he never read phenomenology beyond Kierkegaard. As to Russell, please no. He is the poster child for what went wrong with anglo american philosophy. Hume is useful. Kant, very useful. Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, perhaps ever.

As to "all things can be doubted", do you include "If P implies Q, and P, then Q"? — Ludwig V

Yes, as I said. One cannot doubt the apodicticity, but one can doubt the way language takes up the world. How is it that a term like 'certainty' could embody the actuality we encounter when we are "certain"? Logic cannot critique itself.

Not necessarily Buddhist meditation, nor Christian prayer. These were raised to point away from the direction of "imposition thinking." Not sure if OP intended the same, but I am coming from the angle that knowledge is superimposed, displacing truth.

Philosophy (also, theology, myth, dogma, ritual) no matter how clever or eloquent, is messing with superimposed knowledge.

"Authentic" practice (whatever that is, if I define it, I bring it into superimposed) I am proposing (which finds its source in religion) allows a (brief) turning away from superimposed knowledge and, presumably a glimpse at Truth.

Needs more, but defining it brings it into superimposed. It must be practiced in order to be accessed. — ENOAH

This would be a very different kind of truth that has to be set apart from propositional truth, and I don't think the matter is all that easy leave behind, and I say this because there is nothing really that cannot be said. After all, God could actually appear to me, and I could somehow be allowed to experience eternity and the gravitas of divinity, and there would be nothing at all stopping me from telling you about it, PROVIDING you have had the same kind of experience. Language was never about embodying actuality. Rather, it is essentially social, pragmatic, and depends entirely on shared experience.

Also, language is always there in the experience for us. We understand the world through language. Try to imagine a feral adult understanding anything outside of how to swing from a tree. No symbolic life to interpret the world. On the other hand, language becomes a "totality" and this is where your thoughts come in: In fact God has not imparted us with divine knowledge, and so we are left to the possibilities contained within our cultural delimitations and THIS is an imposition of finitude upon the infinite, you could say.

There are, I've read, Tibetan monks who can speak readily about things way outside of common understanding. They are, if you will, scientists, or no different, essentially, from scientists in that they observe and report.

I think a "superimposed knowledge" would be dogmatism, which is accepting without justification.

The Philosophy Forum is responsible for tripling my post. Not me.

That could be the beginning of a long argument, which, I guess, would be a trip through very familiar territory. For me, "Apprehended world" and "cogitata" are the dubious interpretations, not the everyday world. In my view, what Descartes missed was the elementary point that doubt implies the possibility of certainty; doubt would be meaningless without it. — Ludwig V

An odd thing to say. Perhaps you could go into this a bit. Cogitata a dubious interpretation? But it is not an interpretation, just a term that designates the the cogito's objects. And apprehended world, I wonder where your objection begins? And then "doubt would be meaningless without certainty": depends on what is meant by certainty. If this is familiar territory, then I can push just a bit. Take a logician's idea of apodictic certainty, as with something from symbolic logic like modus ponens which is intuitively coercive, but it still can be doubted. How? Because all that can be produced in a knowledge recognition is cast in language. Even as I call logic apodictically certain, I do so in the context of something that cannot be subjected to the same apodicticity, and this is the contingency of language. Language makes thought possible, and when it expresses a principle, like MP, it is not as if doing so discovers the nature of the intuition that is so strong. This is a pretty important insight about apodicticity and terms like certainty: one can ALWAYS doubt anything, because that which is posited is a language event and language is not apodictic. We cannot say what it is (Wittgenstein), because this presupposes language.

But while certainty implies doubt, for all things can be doubted, even logic, you would have to clarify how all doubt implies certainty.

Yes, those are the reasons I think that the concept is incoherent. Getting rid of traditional metaphysics is a lot harder than many people thought in the mid-20th century (and, indeed, earlier, back to the 17th century). I am skeptical about whether it is going to happen. — Ludwig V

Well, it has already been done, but this, of course, has not reached the ears of "people". Kierkegaard started it, then Nietzsche. Then came the phenomenologists, especially Heidegger. I am reading his Nietzsche now and other of his later works, and while one doesn't have to fall in line with everything, one has to admit traditional metaphysics is turned on its head. Especially take a look at his Onto Theological Constitution of Metaphysics and his The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.

Heidegger will never replace religion for the general public, for this would take a lot of leisure time and a commitment to philosophy. Perhaps after AI has delivered us from drudgery, the world will see that phenomenology is the one true view.

That could be the beginning of a long argument, which, I guess, would be a trip through very familiar territory. For me, "Apprehended world" and "cogitata" are the dubious interpretations, not the everyday world. In my view, what Descartes missed was the elementary point that doubt implies the possibility of certainty; doubt would be meaningless without it. — Ludwig V

An odd thing to say. Perhaps you could go into this a bit. Cogitata a dubious interpretation? But it is not an interpretation, just a term that designates the the cogito's objects. And apprehended world, I wonder where your objection begins? And then "doubt would be meaningless without certainty": depends on what is meant by certainty. If this is familiar territory, then I can push just a bit. Take a logician's idea of apodictic certainty, as with something from symbolic logic like modus ponens which is intuitively coercive, but it still can be doubted. How? Because all that can be produced in a knowledge recognition is cast in language. Even as I call logic apodictically certain, I do so in the context of something that cannot be subjected to the same apodicticity, and this is the contingency of language. Language makes thought possible, and when it expresses a principle, like MP, it is not as if doing so discovers the nature of the intuition that is so strong. This is a pretty important insight about apodicticity and terms like certainty: one can ALWAYS doubt anything, because that which is posited is a language event and language is not apodictic. We cannot say what it is (Wittgenstein), because this presupposes language.

But while certainty implies doubt, for all things can be doubted, even logic, you would have to clarify how all doubt implies certainty.

Yes, those are the reasons I think that the concept is incoherent. Getting rid of traditional metaphysics is a lot harder than many people thought in the mid-20th century (and, indeed, earlier, back to the 17th century). I am skeptical about whether it is going to happen. — Ludwig V

Well, it has already been done, but this, of course, has not reached the ears of "people". Kierkegaard started it, then Nietzsche. Then came the phenomenologists, especially Heidegger. I am reading his Nietzsche now and other of his later works, and while one doesn't have to fall in line with everything, one has to admit traditional metaphysics is turned on its head. Especially take a look at his Onto Theological Constitution of Metaphysics and his The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.

Heidegger will never replace religion for the general public, for this would take a lot of leisure time and a commitment to philosophy. Perhaps after AI has delivered us from drudgery, the world will see that phenomenology is the one true view.

That was by way of a sardonic guess at how long it will take for religion to be eradicated from the world. Not the delving into what's been lurking under it. — Vera Mont

I understand, almost. I thought, well, the OP was about the logic of atheism, and the logic of something goes immediately to its presuppositions where the trouble always lies. It IS a fascinating exposition of theism's basic logic. But if you must be off, then farewell.

Best of luck in your remaining 20 years.

I hate to say it, but I would not be able to reject an accusation of "whataboutery" if I tried to change the subject to a general philosophical discussion about knowledge. My reaction may be conditioned by my view that much of epistemology has been thoroughly distorted by Cartesian scepticism and the belief that the only certainty is logical certainty; the latter of course, rules out all empirical knowledge out of hand. There is also a danger that if your interlocutor is not convinced by Descartes, your opportunity to persuade them on this specific issue will be lost. Faced with an argument about the existence of God, you try to prove that we don't know anything anyway. No, I don't think so.
Mind you, with a suitable interlocutor, I would be inclined to try to persuade them that the question of God's existence cannot be answered by purely empirical evidence. — Ludwig V

Stickier than that. Descartes made the mistake of positing the cogito as the only certainty. But an examination of what is there in the structure of the cogito shows that there never was a thinking agency that was a stand alone apart from the cogitatum. In other words, if the cogito demonstrates indubitability, then its object must have the same epistemic value. Descartes didn't see this. SO if you are put of by the doubt that his intrudes upon common sense in affirming the world in simple perception, you might reconsider. A careful examination of the cogito shows exactly the opposite: the apprehended world is just as indubitable as the conscious perceiving agent that affirms it. In an important way, there simply is no such thing as Cartesian skepticism, that is, until one makes the move toward interpretation. One does doubt in ordinary ways, and certainly one can doubt the science and everydayness that is constructed out of the cogitata, things present before us.

As to this "purely empirical evidence" I think you are right. But if one is going to take theism seriously at all, even if the interest is to refute it, the idea has to be delivered from all the traditional thinking that generates so much ado about nothing, like all of those omni's, and notions of the creator and the source of judgment, and so on. Most who take up this issue do not really care to ground their thinking in something substantive, but move directly on to arguing about contrived assumptions.

I argue that it is possible to be quite clear about God. Only one has to lose a great deal of historical metaphysics.

Yes, death – ritually denying, or wishing away, its finality (i.e. anti-anxiety terror management — 180 Proof

Now you're talking! Of course, the question remains untouched: what is all the fuss about? Now one has entered phase two of inquiry. Phase one is mundane.

Yes. I do accept that it means something to those who talk about it. My problem is that I don't really understand what that meaning is. Too often, it seems like a way of escaping awkward questions. — Ludwig V

The hard part is finding the most awkward questions one can imagine and ask about them seriously. Here is a hard question, the second hardest question I can think of: how is knowledge possible? When one goes deeply into this, there is the inevitable discovery that it si not, that is, not be any familiar assumptions about the world at the basic level. Knowledge is impossible unless there is a truly radical reconstrual of what knowing agency is. An epistemic agency is one that knows, and knowing can either be a thoroughly constituted matter (if you read this kind of thing, think of Hegel or Heidegger's historicity, or Kant's idealism), or it can be something that "mirrors nature" such that when I see a lamp, there is in the perceptual analysis something over there and not me. You know, this is the way it goes with epistemology: how much of what I witness is actually IN the constituted perception, and how much is beyond this, "over there" and this is a sticky wicket, for the moment one speaks one's speaking lies with the former.
How does this effect inquiry into atheism? Knowledge claims are about EVERYTHING, and so any respectable discussion about God and metaphysics will begin here and the foundational indeterminacy of knowledge and ethics.

Everybody has to die, but the distribution of suffering is quite uneven. But there was still that "why?" attached to the "just this", which renders your acceptance incomplete. — Vera Mont

The question so far has only bee about what theism if grounded upon. Distribution is a matter of justice and ethics in the entangled world of evolving affairs, and this is where my question will not go, simply because it is far too complicated: ethics in the world of factual affairs presupposes an understanding of what ethics is . That is, before one is confused about whether to steal the cash from the local store's register in order to pay one's rent, there is presupposed in this that very matter that it all matters, meaning, when one goes through the justificatory process weighing the pros and cons, there is the implcit assumption that what is in the balance really matters: no mattering, no ethical issue. The philosophical question then is, what is this mattering about? This mattering qua mattering that is "in the mix" of our worldly affairs. All ethical inquiries lead to this when taken to the foundation of the issue.

Where have I expressed any such repugnance? All thinking interests me. I reserve repugnance for exploitation and cruelty. — Vera Mont

No, I mean by repugnance just the intellectual rejection. Not a reference to the strong state of mind associated with disgusting things, though understanding that religious foolishness causes a great deal of trouble for others, and one perhaps would, even should, feel a bit more than simply disagreement. Not that important, though.

I can't wait to see what that's like. Literally: I have 20 years left on Earth, at maximum stretch. — Vera Mont

I do suspect the argument may not be framed in familiar ideas. Philosophy is questions, so here is a first question (and just to keep in mind, this is only the beginning. Proving objectively that theism, beneath all the bad thinking, has a dimension that is deeply profound and real, takes a process).

How is it that knowledge is possible? More precisely, how does anything at all get "in" a knowledge claim.

This is the beginning. One has to stay the course. Of course, you are free to "move right along" as you put it. It may not be a comfortable inquiry.

I gets interesting only when the smoke has cleared after the table has been duly cleared. To discover anything insightful about atheism, theism has to be made clear, and a lot of the clearing requires suspending a lot of what is standardly there, in the culture of believing. It really comes down to whether one is willing to do this, to be fed up with the culture and taking a purely philosophical view, and by philosophy I mean phenomenology: the taking the world to BE as it presents itself and no further, but no less than this. It requires a reduction that suspends all the familiar thinking.

It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist, because serious meditation is so radically reductive: the whole world of historical thinking arrested. Now, what is there, before your eyes? Atheism and its theism have to examined like this. E.g., God the creator? From whence comes this premise? Is it anywhere in the revealed presence or the given world? No. It was simply made up, to put it bluntly. There is a LOT that is made up in our general vocabulary about this matter. Hard to let go, but first, one has to see HOW to let go.