No, we’re dealing with personal constructs, which to say that emotional pain and pleasure are inextricably bound up with the breakdown of our constructs to make sense out of the chaos of events. Moral emotions like anger and guilt express our struggles to cope with the changes in others and ourselves which take us by surprise, which force us to choose between a sweeping overhaul of our ways of understanding them and trying to put the genie back in the bottle by demanding conformity to our original expectations. Unfortunately most approaches to morality take the latter route. — Joshs

Can't argue with that.

But this goes to the very point I am trying to make: This embeddedness of our affairs in complexities that defy categorical answers makes the value dimension of our lives seem chaotic, and I agree that this is so. But this does not undo the nature of what is IN these entangled affairs. What is painful can be ambiguous, which is why the strong examples are revealing: there is no ambiguity in a sprained ankle qua outrageously painful event. That is no construct to work out in one's entangled affairs. The world "does" this to us.

Two of the greatest impacts on the history of philosophy are St. Thomas Aquinas, the father of Thomism, and Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology. We see two ways of doing philosophy: A philosophy concerned with the nature of Being and a philosophy concerned with the nature of consciousness and this union births Phenomenological Thomism (sometimes called Existential Thomism). It is through a marriage of the classical Aristotelian-Thomist tradition and the modern phenomenological-existential tradition that we find an objective ethical and metaphysical dogma; One needs both objective fact and subjective experience to understand reality. The project undertaken by Edith Stein, the Lublin School of Thomism, and to some extent Dietrich von Hildebrand all sought to fulfill this. A version of personalism, another movement in philosophy and theology, could be considered the brainchild of this marriage, and John Paul II called this "Thomistic Personalism," which I identify closely with. Inspired by the ethical personalism of Max Scheler, John Paul II saw the union between these two as essential for the development of a concrete Christian ethics. Personally, I think it is unwise to try to base everything in phenomenology or humanistic existentialism (Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Buber are a different topic). There needs to be some presupposing objectivity. On the contrary, it is unwise to boil everything down to the nature of Being. There needs to be room for lived experience. Phenomenology and existentialism provide adequate methods of analysis of Thomistic metaphysics. The traditions of Phenomenological Thomism and Thomistic Personalism provide a healthy balance between subjective experience and transcendental truth. — Dermot Griffin

If you are looking for a way to breathe some life into phenomenology, perhaps you would find Michel Henry helpful. I for one find the epoche is only as meaningful as one is predisposed to predisposed to reduce the world. Some will read Husserl and find it jarringly out of place with common sense, as
Maritain seems to. But if one takes Heidegger's pov on gelassenheit (Discourse on Thinking and elsewhere) and allow oneself to stand in the openness of being, withdrawing one's "totality" of possible engagement to let the world stand forward, and allow the epoche to find its mark, then all forms of naturalism fall away.
Naturalism has, putting aside the way it fits with our familiarity of the world, only one foundational principle that lies in its analytical depths, and that is causality. And causality has nothing epistemic about it, and while this really doesn't refer to the epoche, it does make an astounding discovery: the naturalistic realism cannot conceive of how any knowledge claim about transcendental objects, those out there, the dogs and cats and fence posts, can be grounded. This needs time to set in, but it is a powerful motivation to seek knowledge affirmation somewhere else than in a naturalistic account.
Certainly not that one is trapped in some solipsistic idealism; this is not what phenomenology reveals, for nothing really changes in our day to dayness. Phenomenology insists there are objects in the world that are not me/ Itis just that when one thinks in the phenomenlogical attitude and out of the naturalistic one, the world becomes a very different place.

I do not understand why the better explanation would be “these are moral facts” than “these are deeply rooted sentiments, which are presumably biological, that can have heavy impact on our behavior”. I don’t see how these tell me what I ought to be doing as the subject: just because my body is biologically wired to enjoy falling in love and not sticking a needle in my eye it does not follow that those are morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ things to be doing.

For example, imagine, that we discover that human beings on average, along with not liking being stabbed in the eye, really love torturing animals for fun: this seems to meet your criteria of something that would be factual morally good...but I am not seeing how it would be factual nor moral. — Bob Ross

Hard to remove one's perspective from scientific orientation that is ingrained in us through our education. Not many out there telling us how to analyze the world from a philosophical pov.

I did say that there are many explanatory contexts that can be brought to bear on bringing to light what pain and joy are. But a biological analysis doesn't rise to join with the experience and its content. The absurdity of attempting to do this, and in general to reduce experience to ready to hand paradigms, is clear if we let the matter itself make the case: stick my hand in a pot of boiling water and while the evidence is made clear to me regarding what pain is, proceed to tell me that how my biological wiring is producing this, or how pain was "selected" in the evolution of our bodies because it was conducive to reproduction and survival. You do see the radical incongruity of "reducing" what lies before me to an explanation like this.

Biological accounts and the like work, of course, in explaining common matters of contingency, I mean, ask me what a dentist is or a bank teller, and consulting a text would be entirely appropriate. But talk about ethics and pain is about what is Real, and reality is not something exhausted by references to something else. Biologists cannot talk about what is real because this is no more up their alley than knitting wool sweaters is, so I am not going to ask them what pain is AS SUCH, and this is where this is going. I look at pain as a geologist would observe a mineral deposit. What IS it? One has to first look and register its properties. A experience the pain and observe the prohibition to be at one with it.

And then, no one is saying there is a one to one correspondence between what one should and should not do and the realities of pain and pleasure (not to put too fine a point on it). This is a very important point: We are examining a dimension of our existence, NOT matching the chaos of our affairs to their Real counterparts that existentially address the each occasion of moral indeterminacy. That is absurd. The prohibition that is apriori joined at hip with our moral obligations does not sort out the massive oddities of our lives as some kind of metaphysical counterpart to whatever comes up. Again, pain, joy and all of the ooo's and ah's and ughs of our existence have this moral dimension such that when such a value is in play, we are not dealing with mere social constructs.

Are you saying?

People may experince pain and suffering. We ought not do anything which deliberately cases pain and suffering to others. Doing so is morally wrong and thereby an objective moral fact?

Is that an ought from an is?

I agree re Descartes - I have generally held that 'I feel pain therefore I am' is a lot more explicit than thinking and 'aming'. — Tom Storm

Right, and I think you get the idea. "I think" is frankly vacuous if plain thinking is going to be the ground for existence, because thought's purest form is logic, and logic is only about the form of propositions, not the content, making "I am" merely a formal concept. (I picked this insight up from Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation.)

But this is/ought issue: It is quite right to insist that an "ought" requires and ought already in the "is" but this makes the is/ought a tautology, saying the ought itself is logically embedded in the is, thus, the moral insistence not to smash another's knee caps is part of the essence of the pain of having one's knee caps smashed. Pain entails the prohibition against causing pain. This is right.

However, this does not generate unproblematic conditions for moral decision making, for out moral affairs are entangled in complicated ways contextually with other facts, and this holds for our attitudes and predilections and beliefs in the world. The idea here is that there is this dimension of morality that grounds such things in the real, making our ethics real, if contextually ambiguous.

Interesting. So, let me see if I am understanding you correctly. It seems as though you are advocating that either (1) moral facts are ingrained in or (2) inextricably tied to our primitive, basic biology (akin to feeling pain when getting stabbed in the kidney).

Would this be kind of like a hedonist view that the moral facts are identified with the primitive notions of pleasure and pain (or happiness and suffering)?

Am I on the right track? — Bob Ross

I think close, yes, but the devil is in the terminology. When I observe the pain, it is not a biological description I am observing. Nor a moral fact. These are accounts that presuppose the pain actuality that presents itself for analysis in the first place.

As to hedonism, primitive notions of pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, these terms are at least delivered from extraneous explanations, but once there, attending to the pain in the kidney, that is, literally IN screaming agony, one then asks then asks the question, how is it that this is NOT real? One needs a reality test, and this would require a nonproblematic example of what is real to be able to answer it, and what, in the matter of the real, is nonproblematic? and this is a hard question for the obvious reason that the real deeply ambiguous.

I hold that the only way to address the question of what is real, is to witness what is clearly free of ambiguity regarding its ontological status. We find Descartes useful, for his method was to do just this: discover what cold not be doubted and entirely beyond ambiguity. Though Descartes made the mistake of affirming the cogito as this, failing to first define being. I think, therefore I am? Well, what do you mean by the verb "am"? The Being question is begged, but the method sustains: what is absolutely beyond doubt? How about this agony in my kidney? I CAN certainly doubt the multitude of prepositions one can make about the pain dealing with categorical knowledge claims (the pain is really this or that or some other reference to a science category), for these are constructs ABOUT the pain; not the pain itself.

This is where Moore comes in. Pain, the qualia of pain, if you will, or the pure phenomenon of pain, does not belong to interpretative error because it is not an interpretation. It, if you will, screams reality!

And once again, the extreme example is only to make for poignancy. Ethics is at its core, about value, and value is the general term for this dimension of reality, only made clear by example--you know, fall in love, stick a needle in your eye, ice cream and ice picks to the groin, and everything else one can have amoral issue about. Something has to be at stake like this, or no ethics. And things "like this" are as real as it gets.

SHOW ME WHAT YOU'VE GOT! — Bob Ross

Well Bob, the way to understand moral realism is to first go an account of what it is for anything to be real. I ask: is the pain you feel when someone deposits a spear into your kidney real? I argue that not only is it real, but value events, call them, like this are more real than any of your factual reals, which is something found on Wittgenstein's logical grid in his Tractatus. There is a reason Witt wouldn't talk about ethics, which is not so much that such statements are nonsense, which he famously holds to be the case, and more at the depth of their importance that would be trivialized by theory. He called value transcendental. Anyway, if that pain in your kidney is real, then pain qua pain, not as a concept, and not the "essence" of the pain, as when we would find license to "speak" what it is, which Witt denies is speakable, would have to be examined. So: apart from all that could be said of the pain, is there an existential residuum that remains after a reduction that suspends all that can be said? You see where this goes? Once all that can be said about this pain is removed from our consideration, and this includes everything Mill or Kant said, or evolution or a neurologist, and so on, is there something that remains standing, once these contingencies are removed, is there anything that is NOT a contingency, something stand alone about pain which is not reducible?
I argue that there is such a thing, which lies with Moore's claim that a moral Good or Bad is inherently a matter of a "non natural property." Of course, this is the very talk prohibited by Witt. But why did Witt write the Tractatus knowing full well he was speaking about the unspeakable? There are those that say it is meant to be a ladder to be used as a means to abandon all bad metaphysics. But he took ethics very seriously, saying the importance of the Tractatus lies in what is NOT said, and herein lies the case for moral realism: more real than real, this pain in the kidney; a Real that is in the "fabric of existence" itself, which is why it is both irreducible and and unspeakable.
And so, the moral prohibition against stabbing people with spears has this dimension of the real at its very core. And since all moral claims are essentially of the same nature, this example pf the spear in the kidney being only a radical example of what lies behind ALL moral issues.

Compare the Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Judgment. The first takes objective reality of immediate perception to be false. It's not the thing in itself. This I see as his Buddhist method. With faith in God and total admiration for the teleological argument he retain his Christian side but realizes he left the world *empty*. This is why inn paragraph 57 of COJ he mentons the "indeterminate concept of the supersensible substrate of the appearances" and of "purposiveness without purpose". And also the picture Kant paints in The Critique of Practical Reason is that of spontaneity of applying moral action to ourselves. Is his philosophy too man centered for you? The perennial philosophy of man has always been that thought and will are prior to matter, instead of the other way around (matter being the substrate of consciousness). Was Hermes an existentialist? — Gregory

I would pull back form invoking Buddhism, a method, really, that leads to enlightenment and liberation that has little to do with an analysis of the structure of rational judgments. But then, the Buddhists do claim, along with Kant, that desire for things in this world stand outside of ethics and higher meaning. Finally though, Kant's "method" of reducing the pursuit philosophical truth is a turning toward an anaysis reason as such and applying this across the board, while the Buddhist terminates all processes of engagement. This make their endeavor more like phenomenology's reduction, that is, the Husserlian reduction BUT as this is played out in post Husserliam thinking (Husserl himself being too much like Kant's detailed analyses. See Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation where he explicitly brings the Copernican Revolution up as the beginning for further investigation.

I wil have to look into COJ.

Hermes? There is a book by John Caputo that places Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as the cord of connectivity between our philosophical endeavors and the revelatory possibilities in the world. And he invokes Derrida, first Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Husserl, but Derrida as the radical interpretation that is at the end of where hermeneutics can actually go, which is to the "radical" confrontation with the world's "presence". A long story in this, continued by Michel Henry and others. But Hermes: Derrida wrote a paper on Levinas on the Metaphysics of Violence, and he explores, here and evlsewhere, this impossible interface with the world where "totalities" (Heidegger's term lifted from Husserl) are mitigated to yield, what Heidegger called in his Discourse on Thinking gelassenheit, a familiar term among the Amish, meaning a kind of yielding, a withdrawing of interpretative imposition to allow the world to "speak" if you will.
What does Hermes deliver from the gods? a true encounter? But Heidegger's position is one of a radical finitude, so Hermes is more like a single shaft of light issuing from a source that is beyond reach. But note, we have left Kant's rationalism altogether, have we not? Kant seems like he does well understand what Wittgenstein said about logic and value, that these are only shown to us, but one can never speak of their nature and logic, value and world to understand what they are would require a perspective beyond them, which makes talk like this impossible and nonsensical. But the reduction! Where does this actually take us? To the things themselves, says Husserl. This si a movement that suggests a mysticism, something of the order of Meister Eckhart, who Heidegger briefly allows into the conversation in Discourse.

This is proto-existentialism. The thing in itself is him doing the Buddhist thing where you empty everything of mental constructions and try for a moment to see things as they are to themselves — Gregory

What an interesting thing to say. Where does he say this?

Are you a reductionalist? What Kant said is similar Malebranche, Rosmini, and many others. The world is yet is not. It's contingent. But the nous in our minds is in the structure of matter and how it interacts with itself. The source of reason is experienced in our knowledge of the world we live in. The world becomes necessary by our interactions with it. If I jump or fall from the Eiffel Tower, it's at that moment necessary that I fall and die if there is nothing to caught me. Yet it's contingent because the tower could have never been made and myself not there to die by it. Contingency and necessity are dualities that stand as thesis/antithesis. Experience is their sum. The universe is Nature and we are in its unity — Gregory

But you can't really take something like Kant's pure reason as a basis for understanding what our existence is about. Reason doesn't give one knowledge as it is the mere form of knowing, and in itself has no value at all. Nor does sensory intuition, as Kant calls it. The intuition of the color red or a tone in middle C played by a clarinet does not as such carry one to understand the our world. Because these do not, conceived as such, have any meaning. Kant failed to understand the basis for meaning in the world. It is not definitional meaning, but affective meaning that is first philosophy.

As to contingency and necessity, Kant's apriority had only to do with logic's pure form. Consider what this is: a complete abstraction, devoid of the palpable content of experience, the ooo's and ahhh's and ughs and yuks, you know, the blisses and miseries we experience. Herein lies the theme for analysis that can reveal the essence of what is meaningful. Other matters are important only to the extent that they are useful to this end.

For science the world is contingent while for philosophy the thing in itself is necessary, only by being in-itself can it make the contingent share in its necessity by application of universal laws. Fitche comes to mind — Gregory

Share in its necessity. But this which is shared is, for Kant, found in logical necessity, not in the full reality of what we experience. One problem with Kant is the same for Descartes who gave a privileged place to thought with the cogito, I think, but inferred from this being, I am. Rationalism always ends up making an abstraction out of being, Kant's TUA being no more than a formal definition of a unifying synthesis. It is patently absurd, as if our existence were reducible to this.

To the things themselves" said the phenomenologists. For them experience was primary. Colors may be said to be in the mind but everything is. Color is "there" just as much as primary qualities. I think this is what they meant. — Gregory

Well then, there is some sense in calling it realism, but generally this is not the way the term is used, which is not the affirmation of the reality of the totality of phenomena, but rather an affirmation of science's physicalism, of some sort or another. To the things themselves! This is Husserl, of course. if there is a single way to find favor of a view like this, which entirely rejects the popular metaphysics of science, it lies here: the can be witnessed only phenomena. Period. Any references to something that is not a phenomenon is a reference to something it is impossible to know, and thus, the existence of which is impossible to conceive, the very definition of bad metaphysics.

This of course runs counter to our education, which puts science in the privileged position of authority not to be second guessed. Philosophy is not, however, science.

The turn from Kantianism to modern phenomenology was a turning toward realism. It was for the world. Which is not to say it's not spiritual in any way. Mystcism has been a big part of German philosophy since the Romantic period — Gregory

Why call it realism?

But, with respect to that comment, I’ve been there myself. Pure reason’s intrinsic circularity has been obvious for millennia, and advances in neurological science has made it even worse.

The brain goes so far as to manifest itself as an immaterial something-or-other, imbues the seemingness of knowledge into it, but prevents the seemingness of knowledge for informing the immaterial something-or-other of what it is or where it came from. Like, brain says…..YOU are allowed to know whatever YOU think YOU know, in a progressive series, but YOU are not allowed to even think YOU know anything at all in a regressive series, which, of course, includes YOU.

The brain in its mighty magnificence gives its self-manifested subjectivity QM science, a progressive series. One of the tenets of QM science is the fact that observation disrupts the quantum domain by intruding into it, also progressive. A sidebar given by the brain in its mighty magnificence is the incredible density of the constituent parts of itself, informing its self-manifested subjectivity of its ~3b/mm3 synaptic clefts, which is the very domain of QM science….progressive. So eventually the self-manifested subjectivity goes so far as to invent a device for exploring the quantum domain of itself, progressive, searching for a YOU that has been allowed to know…..oh crap!!!!…..regressive.

Now the self-manifested subjectivity takes the chance of disrupting itself, in which case….was it ever there? The brain has tacitly allowed the extermination of its own avatar. — Mww

Disrupting or liberating? Consider that these are the same. What you call QM disruption is reducible to "the question," the piety of thought. It precedes science, even the most disruptive, for it is the essence of disruption itself: the dialectical mechanism that allows no thesis to go unchallanged. Brain talk always ends up in refutation simply because the question it begs subtends everything conceivable. I have no doubt there is a brain/experience connectivity, and this needs some emphasis. But if some form of Cartesian doubt (the question!) always already insinuates itself between belief and its objects, one is left trying to find an Archimedean point, if you will, that is unmovable to thought at this level, and QM is not this, for it remains a concept embedded in a context of "regionalized thought" and one remains in the hermeneutic indeterminacy.

My position is this: Such indeterminacy is impossible to overcome, and Derrida makes this clear. But Rorty and his pragmatism (as well as others) make all of our language endeavors into pragmatic endeavors and philosophy is just this pragmatic reaching out into metaphsyics, where language terminates, which is impossible. But if you follow Husserl and post Husserlian thought (the French "turn" with Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, et al), you are taken to the only logical extenson of hermeneutics and Cartesian doubt (this all encomapssing aporia!), which is to the things themselves, the revelatory appearance of the world in the wake of the most radicial reduction.

What makes this radical and opens the door to discovering philosophy's real purpose is that the phenomenological reduction is not simply a thesis; it is a method. An existential method, if you will, one that brings one into greater intimacy with existence by bracketing or suspending everything that is not, to put it roughly. Even Husserl didn't understand this.

Disruption is only a beginning.

Yes. Kant, who died in 1804, was not aware of what is described today as Enactivism and Innatism. However Philosophers working today in 2023 should be aware of these concepts, and should take them into account when contemplating about non-propositional knowledge. — RussellA

Heh, heh, I don't mean historically. I could equally say the post Heideggerian insights of Michel Henry are entirely missed by the positvism that seems to rule the thoughts of science oriented metaphysics. Henry died early this century.

Transcendence has different meanings. It depends what you mean by transcendence. For Kant, "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them. (Wikipedia - Transcendence (philosophy). Kant does not explain how we can know objects before we experience them. Today, however, because of the concept of Innatism, we are able to explain how we can know objects before we experience them. — RussellA

Sorry, you have to look at that "before" term very differently. He means logically prior, such that when one encounters an object, analysis reveals a structure that is invisible to observation, but is latent within it. In other words, before making, or, in order to make, experience possible at all, there has to be these structure in place just due to an analysis of what experience is.

Why? Why should it follow that because the understanding of causality is innate within the brain the principle of causality would not apply outside the brain? The concept of Enactivism shows that an understanding of causality is innate within the brain precisely because the principle of causality applies outside the brain. — RussellA

Because, to borrow Rorty's reasoning, the innateness is not out there, in the same way that propositions and their logical forms are not out there, in the tree, the chair or the compute mouse. Truth, moving into a strong but inevitable position, is not out there, among things. There are no numbers, no concepts out there. We do this.

It depends what the word "brain" is referring to. Yes, in the sense that the "brain" as a word in language is a construct of the brain as something that physically exists in the world. — RussellA

But to affirm what is not brain, you would have to step out of one. Otherwise, all of your brain references will be about other brain produced phenomena. All the "out thereness" would remain among the complexities of neuronal interface. Keeping in mind that this is NOT the position I represent at all. I am pointing out the impossibilities of such brain talk.

For the Idealist, reality only exists in a mind, meaning that the reality the mind perceives has been created by a mind. For the Indirect and Direct Realist, there is a reality outside the mind which the mind relates to. This reality outside the mind has not been generated by the mind, but how the mind relates to this reality is generated by the mind. For the Indirect Realist, the reality they perceive is a representation of the reality existing outside the mind. For the Direct Realist, the reality they perceive is the reality existing outside the mind.

There are different opinions as to the source of one's perceived reality. — RussellA

For the phenomenologist, reality is just reality, it is exactly s it appears, and when I say the tree is over there and it is not me and there is spatial separation that separates us, etc., all of this stays in place. Recall that Kant said just this. He just further said that when it comes to philosophy, we have to deal with transcendence and the presuppositions in ontology and epistemology have to be explored and this leads to a whole diffenent set of questions and ideas.

You know, Ryle knew this; they all did and do. Kant wasn't dismissed because he was essentially wrong. He was dismissed because he had been worn out, and after more that a century of post Kantianism, it was understood that there was simply nothing left to say. But analytic philosophy then took a course away from this into common sense (Moore holding his hands up declaring "here is a hand!") and positivism and took off, ignoring what Husserl and Heidegger and the French were doing with phenomenology, basically initiated by Kant. And the further it got away from this, the more science informed its grounding.

Maybe the noumena is that which connecs the appearances to reason, not behind but within — Gregory

Yes, I ma sure this is right, but it is not going to be a causal connectivity, as causality in itself is a term that belongs to finitude. What causality really is is like asking what modus ponens really is: it belongs to Kant's impossible metaphysics. As I see it, Kant drew boundaries where he should have. Can one really talk about where eternity and its absolute being ends and finitude begins?

Agreed, having space and time already eliminated from them as conditions for being appearances. But it remains that they were conceived for some purpose, and it turns out there were two. — Mww

I can't see where we disagree, then.

There needs to be some flexibility in what we mean by knowledge. For example, I have the innate ability to see the colour red but not the colour ultraviolet. The distinction between knowing how and knowing what is relevant here, a distinction that was brought to prominence in epistemology by Gilbert Ryle who used it in his book The Concept of Mind. (SEP - Knowing-How and Knowing-That). I am born with the innate knowledge of how to see the colour red even if I don't have the innate knowledge of what the colour red is.

In today's terms, we can account for our a priori knowledge by Innatism and Enactivism, given that life has been evolving in synergy with the world for at least 3.7 billion years. We are born with a brain that has a particular physical structure because of this 3.7 billion years of evolution.

Enactivism says that it is necessary to appreciate how living beings dynamically interact with their environments. From an Enactivist perspective, there is no prospect of understanding minds without reference to such interactions because interactions are taken to lie at the heart of mentality in all of its varied forms. (IEP - Enactivism)

Innatism says that in the philosophy of mind, Innatism is the view that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism. (Wikipedia - Innatism)

Innatism and Enactivism explain our non-propositional knowledge of red. — RussellA

But of course, you know this is miles from Kant. Ryle thinks within a tradition that explicitly against Kantian phenomenology and those who follow through in what is called continental philosophy. This tradition has the utmost respect for science and well supported theory of evolution, and does not dismiss any reasonable thing it says. But then, this is not Kant at all. Start talking about an account for the apriority in the structure of thought, and the way hard wired organic brains produce phenomena that have this sense of logicality making all that we experience appear as rigid rules of thought, and you will have to face the obvious question begged: This whole structred conception of evolution itself is just this, a phenomenological consturction, leading right into Kantisn thinking's hands, which is that the true source of rational thought is transcendence.

We see a snooker cue hit a stationary snooker ball and see the snooker ball begin to move. It is not our ordinary experience that snooker balls on a snooker table are able to spontaneously move. Whenever we see a snooker ball start to move we have seen a priori cause, either another snooker ball or a snooker cue.

Where does our belief in causality come from? For Kant, our knowledge of causality is a priori because the Category of Relation includes causality. In today's terms, our knowledge of causality is a priori because of the principle of Innatism, in that the principle of causality is built into the very structure of our brain. The brain doesn't need Hume's principle of induction to know that one thing causes another, as knowing one thing causes another is part of the innate structure of the brain.

Suppose we perceive the colour red, which is an experience in our minds. As we have a priori the innate knowledge of causality, we know that this experience has been caused by something. We don't know what has caused it, but we know something has caused it. We can call this unknown something "A", or equally "thing-in-itself."

The fact that we know "The most distant objects in the Universe are 47 billion light years away" does not mean that we know 47 billion light years. The fact that we know "for every effect there has been a prior cause" does not mean that we know priori causes. Both these statements are representations, and the fact that we know a representation does not mean that we know what is being represented. Confusion often arises in language when the representation is conflated with what is being represented. What is being represented is often named after the representation. For example, Direct Realism conflates what is being perceived when we say "I see a red post-box" with the object of perception, a red post-box.

So what exactly is "thing-in-itself" describing? When we say "our experience of the colour red has been caused by a thing-in-itself", the thing-in-itself exists as a representation in our mind not something in the world. — RussellA

This account of causality is one example how absurd this account can get. First, it should be made clear that what we call causality is actually an historical construct, and the term is, like all terms, merely a hermeneutical designation, a taking something up "as" causality. This point here being that our language is essentially a pragmatic mode of engagement, so we use this term and refer to soemthing in the world, an intuition, a nonverbal apprehension, like the color red or, here, the impossibility is imagining a spontaneous cause, and this referring is done in a context of an entire body of coherent language use that is implicitly in play as a contextual matrix out of which meanings arise. In other words, there are no stand alone meanings, no one to one correspondence between the term causality and any given occasion of its appearing. Meanings and worldly designations are "whole language" phenomena" and to see this argued out, one should go first to Sausseure's Semiotics, and then on to Derrida. Not that Derrida really cancels the dignity of individual references, but he does undo any confidence we might have in language's ability speak about the world. Second, the absurd part, which is just mind blowing: Localizing the apodicticity of what we call causality in a brain's structure suggest that outside such that this the principle would not apply. So what is outside of a brain? Well, a brain is a finite object in the company of other objects, so outside would indicate being among these other objects---plants and hills and stars and cats and dogs, etc., and the conclusion is, that these objects are not subject to the principle of causality, not being IN the brain matrix, and my pencil may start rolling across the desk with movement being ex nihilo!

Sorry, perhaps I am missing something. Anyway, as I see it, phenomena, and the logical intuitions that bind them in causality and other principles, are all that is and that ever will be experienced. Brains must therefore be phenomenologically conceived; but brains are also what generate phenomena, that is the appearances acknowledge routinely. Therefore, the brain is a construct of the brain.

But, as I like to remind people, it gets far worse: So causality is an innate, brain generated manifestation? But how does brain generated anything produce a reality that is anything but brain generated somethings? This writing I am producing is reducible to brain activity, and so the term brain activity, is also this, as are all sentential constructions, thoughts and any other manifestations, which includes self referencing. One is literally nowhere.

Of course they do. In what other world would they lie?

They do not lie in the perceived world.

A thing-in-itself is still just a thing. — Mww

No. Things in themselves are neither apriori nor aposteriori. They are not empirical, not in time and space; just postulates. Pure reason is only shown in our visible affairs. They themselves cannot be witnessed.

It is true that the names "A" and "B" don't tell me as much as the names "the colour red" and "the colour green", but they do tell me something, that "A" and "B" exist and that "things-in-themselves" exist. — RussellA

That will be a tough sell. Things-in-themselves, for Kant, did not lie in the perceptual world at all. But this here sounds more like Husserl's things-themselves, referring to the eidetically structured visual presence before one's eyes. Philosophers today tend away from this kind of thing, which suggests some kind of non propositional knowledge of red that is there prior language and naming.

My understanding of Kant on this point is that if the world is timeless and without space, objects are eternal and the becoming we see is like the motion of the experience of motion pictures. The vase is real but it's eternity acting as becoming, presence showing life. We don't really know what things are in eternity but we can speak of them while in time by observing them acting outside eternity. Try not asking first what noumena is and instead focus time and space being intuitions. Then maybe noumena come into focus — Gregory

Kant wouldn't put it like that, but there is something close in what you say. His question really is, how are apriori synthetic judgments possible? Take causality: before me lies a context of causally related things, like two pool balls on a collision course with each other. Causality explains the possibility of their altered trajectories at the time of impact. But can you even imagine one pool ball just changing course all by itself? This not just a case of pure logicality, of agreement in a tautology; this is in-the-world impossiblity. Regarding things out there, among the trees and lamp posts, I have knowledge that is apodictic, as Kant put it, apriori, universally and necessarily true, and this isn't supposed to happen. KNowledge about the world like this should be at best inductively acquired. How do we know about gravity? We observe the world and things fall to the grounded repeatedly and without exception. But this doesn't mean things MUST fall to the ground. They just do. But causality tells you something must be the case, just as logic does, e.g., modus ponens or the principle of contradiction.

How does one account for this apriori knowledge IN the outside world? Apriority is supposed be confined to mental constructions. It must be that the outside world isn't "outside" in the usual sense at all. The perceiving agency must be making a contribution to its empirical existence.

Anything that bears the mark of apriority must have its origin in the perceiver's mind, and this goes for time and space, the very formal conditions for the possibility of objective experience. Space and its geometry, time and its sequential structure, both have apriority in their analysis.

Seems clear to me that that is precisely the wrong way around. We do not go from propositional and cognitive understanding to non-propositional and non-cognitive understanding. There is no such thing as non-cognitive understanding. There is such thing as non-propositional thought, belief, knowledge, and understanding. It's what precedes the propositional. — creativesoul

It is a tough cookie, but take the cognitive dimension of a model proposition like: the cup is on the table. What is the cognitive part of this? It lies with the understanding, in the Kantian way of putting it, and as he says, the synthetic work of the mind to apply universal concepts like 'cup' in an instantiation. I would point out the "blind" sensory intuition ("intuitions without concepts are blind") part of the equation. Put it ike this: in order for this to make any sense at all it has to be that one cna even talk about intuitions absent a concept, but this is impossible, because such talk would itself possess a "blind" claim. Kant can't talk alike this, in other words, for this is just nonsense to talk of a blind anything in this way.

But, and here is the point, we clearly CAN talk like this. I can apprehend the, call it X that is designated by the term 'red'. There is a presence I can existentially grasp as something that, while held within the cognitive act, is identified as altogether noncognitive.
This opens the door to certain existential claims Kant never imagined.

Kant's response to Hume was that we ARE time and space. Both held the world to be phenomena but Kant held that world to be inside us in a sense. If we are time and space than the world would appear to us falsely because we usually experience time and especially space as outside us. Hence the noumena is the world minus time and space — Gregory

What does one make of this Kantian claim? AN excellent question for me is, How does one reasonably defend the limitation of what stands outside phenomena, if one's perspective is solely within phenomena. That is, how is it that this notepad stands outside the ontology of what is absolutely real? It would require the real to be somehow exclusive of this notepad, which sound absurd, because such a line would require an understanding on both sides to makes sense and a line (Wittgenstein made an argument like this in his Tractatus).

...to there... from where exactly? — creativesoul

Well, this is the question. One might say, with Derrida, that since there is no center from which springs the basis for all meanings, nothing inscribed in the world that gives the world to our understanding, we stand rudderless in a fathomless no where. But then, Derrida didn't exactly mean for this to be altogether a nihilation, for it does a kind of apophatic job of ridding us of thought and discovering actuality. It may be from a context or determinate form, and to the same, but then, there is also in this realization an opportunity to terminate the invocation of context entirely. LIke a Buddhist might do. This leads to a disclosure of a radically different kind.

Phenomenology :
1.the science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.
2. an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience. — Gnomon

Number one is a powerful statement. Being here refers to what can be "totalized" or assimilated into a system of understanding. I thing does not appear before one at all without it being a part of a totality, a matrix of contextual embeddedness. No object has this "stand alone" non categorical status, for context is an epistemic necessity. The question is never whether this "eidetic horizon of structures" is there to constitute the knowldege experience, because this structure is what makes intelligibility possible. The question is, IN this matrix of possibilities (Heidegger's potentiality of possibilities) can one encounter the world of actualities ('actuality' being itself a contextualized partical of language)?

A massively interesting question. Is there anything prohibitive about language being the "opening" to the world, that which makes things "unhidden" (alethea is the Greek term) to us and that defines our radical finitude, that makes the "leap" (Kierkegaard) to a non cognitive and non propositional understanding impossible?

I hold the answer to be, no, there is nothing prohibitive like this about language and logic and the context nature of knowing.

It wasn't that this distinction was lost on him, but that in his philosophy, the terms signify different aspects of the world. He uses pheomena in the standard sense as 'what appears'. Noumena is a different matter and a source of both controversy and confusion. First, etymology - 'noumenal' means 'an object of nous', which is usually translated as 'intellect' albeit with different connotations to the modern equivalent. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy." — Wayfarer

Definitions of terms I don't hold with any great value. Heidegger went to the Greeks because he found something closer to the phenomenological account he was trying to put together which was intended to distance philosophy from traditional metaphysics. But to him, Plato's metaphysics was the first step away from the "primordial" world of what lies originally before one prior to philosophy. I am interested in this primordiality and not in other realms of possibility. To me the theory of forms places the grounding of what is real in this world "elsewhere". Take a look at that infamous Third Man Argument, the one about a form including itself, ad infinitum: This is close to Wittgenstein's objection to logic being able conceive of itself: in order to understand what logic is as logic, one would have to assume a perspective apart from logic; but then, to understand this, one would have to assume yet another perspective, and so on. This is the kind of thing that a rationalist metaphysics will produce. It is nonsense to think.

Plato is entertaining to read, but little help for understanding the world. And historical definitions only muddle things: concepts are open, not closed affairs, and this is radically true for concepts like noumena and phenomena. One must ask about the context Kant was in when postulating noumena. Talk about pure forms of the categories of pure reason as the ultimate grounding for reality is a flat out dismissal of experience as we know it, and this "as we know it" is all there is from which a metaphysics can be determined. The noumena/phenomena distinction he discusses has to be abandoned, as do all such talk of an impossibly distant metaphysics.

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

I have come across a lot of such things and they all miss the direction of metaphysics in the givenness of phenomena. One has to put aside tradition suggested by this passage altogether. You are in the history of philosophy, this puts the discussion in a context of academic interest, like writing a paper about who said what and how things are different, arguing one way or the other.

What is needed is a method, not an argument. Of course, one has to argue for the method, but this insists on a descriptive approach to the world, and Kant is useful for this. He just left out the part about the world, as Schopenhauer alludes. However, the direction Kant took is now basic to responsible thinking in philosophy: ontology follows on epistemology. And for this, one has to be descriptively responsible, like a scientist, committed to the evidence that lies before one, and no more or less, for knowing is an integral part of what there, in the phenomenon. This does harken back to Plato, no? See Theaetetus where we get the ancient equation for knowledge as justified true belief. The reason those absurd Gettier problem analytic philosophers obsessed about (still do?) is because they simply refused to admit that there is no P in S knows P, independent of justification. We are bound to P and P to us in the construction of P.

Consider this from Michel Henry's Essence of Manifestation:

Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. This means that it is a
description anterior to all theory and independent of all presuppositions,
of everything that presents itself to us as existant, regardless of order
or domain. Understood as a description, phenomenology inrplies the
rejection of all hypotheses, of all principles having some unifying
value, whether real or supposed, with regard to some area of knowledge,
and finally, the rejection of a sector of reality which would contain
in it a rule of intelligibility as a necessary condition for its existence

I offer this only as an indication of the way I think philosophy must move forward. Henry jumps directly to Husserl's reduction. This reduction is, as I see it, the only way OUT of philosophical inertia. How so? The drive is toward, well, the thing itself! The terminal point where indeterminacy falls away.

This, I argue, is exactly what being Buddhist is all about. And I hasten to add that this idea finds agreement in the literature, in the Buddhist philosophical tradition, only to the extent that is it has its justification in the clear exposition of phenomena. A term like noumena is simply absorbed in the discovery. This is not about an historical thesis or a paper on Kant.

Pitiful, ain’t it? Just as ol’ Henry didn’t understand production efficiency. Landry didn’t understand football. Gandhi didn’t understand civil rights. Wright didn’t understand buildings. Just what we of the vulgar understanding didn’t realize we always needed, huh? Another fool coming along, disrupting the status quo, knocking us from our collective intellectual comfort zone. — Mww

I love irony, but spell it out for this fool. The question is, why am I saying Kant didn't understand metaphysics? I also insist Kant knew nothing of the essence of ethics. Indeed, he had no understanding of the generational basis for ethics at all. His position rests on unexamined presuppositions. This as well can be discussed.

My issue with his transcendental idealism is that it entirely fails to grasp the Wittgenstieniam point that if someting is affirmed to be true, then we have to be able to make sense of it not being true. This is why he refused to discuss ethics and metaphysics in terms of value and "the world." Their denial makes no sense. This is another way of saying they are not contingent terms, but absolutes, that is, simply givens int he world. Kant didn't understand that what is transcendental is what is right before one's perceptions IN the empirical phenomenon. His exposition on synthetic judgments was important, of course, but he didn't ask why it is that one simply must postulate noumena; he didn't face the requirement that given that all we ever experience is phenomena, the term must have its grounding IN phenomena.

This is borne out in post Husserlian thinkers like Michel Henry. Husserl posited that the object, this candle in front of me, stands, without the intentional epistemic cord to constitute a relationship, as a transcendental object, which simply means it is there and away from me and transcends me. Kant's world had the Real noumenal X entirely beyond recognition. Husserl starts with what is clearly there, in the phenomenal event that is originally given, and the candle is not questioned for its distance "over there". Fink called Husserl's method the completion of Kant's Copernican Revolution. See the way he opens his SIxth Meditation:

.....the phenomenological reduction, brought us into the d imension in which we stand before the problem-field of philosophy. Instead of inquiring into the being of the world, as does traditional "philosophy" dominated by the dogmatism of the natural attitude, or, where inquiry is not satisfied with that, instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being,

The ineffability that inspires the transcendental positing is an actual threshold for Fink, where analysis can go and reveal. You see here here Fink talks in dramatic terms like "the dimension of origin for all being." Analytic philosophers rolls their eyes skyward at something like this. But then, that is all they do, because they simply cannot and will not deal with the world. They only deal with arguments.

Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. Most analytical philosophy deprecates such endeavours, on the grounds that the world is all that is the case. Hence

it pleases some of us to 'find' meaning, and others not to find meaning.
— Tom Storm — Wayfarer

That statement sounds Kantian, the extrapolation from phenomena to an impossible metaphysics. I don't really disagree, because it is right to say that there is more to what IS the case. I take the matter differently: When we observe the world and its phenomena, the metaphysics is not on the other side, so to speak, of what is witnessed, impossible to reach perceptually, but making for sound and necessary postulation. Rather, the radically "other" lies undisclosed, as if forgotten, IN what appears. Kant's "concepts without (sensory) intuitions and empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" rests on the assumption that normal, ordinary apprehensions of the world are all that can constitute experience, and the idea that the noumenal was identical to the phenomenal was entirely lost on him. Noumena entails phenomena, is a way to put it, for the term is supposed to be what really IS real, and therefore cannot have this exclusivity. But this leaves the matter in the hands of logic and speculation about what 'noumena' means, and this doesn't really make the most important point about metaphysics. This latter is IN the actuality of the encounter with phenomena. This is the idea. One has to step out of Heidegger's dasein, out of being. Literally leave this world, if the world is defined as he defines it; a suspension of all assumptions. We are in the mystics world.

Tom Storm is right. But why are we so different? Meaning is discovered in the openness of what Heidegger called gelassenheit, a term associated with the Amish and others, referring to a yielding and suspending of one's understandiing's insistence. He even refers to Meister Eckhart in his Discourse on Thinking. Some may be naturally inclined to take to continental thinking, like myself; but others certainly can be intellectually persuaded for the objective case is there. Husserl was no mystic. Nor was Heidegger. Kierkegaard? I don't think so. But their thinking is rich with metaphysics.

A Case for Transcendental Idealism :
By ‘transcendental idealism’, I just mean the original view, plus my interpretation of it, made by Immanuel Kant; which starts with the core idea that we cannot know what is ‘transcendent’ to us (viz., what may exist completely independently of our representative faculties) but, rather, only what is ‘transcendental’ (viz., the necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience) . . . .
Quote from OP
Note --- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that we "we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy". But we don't have to fantasize those properties, we can interpolate them ("what may exist") from observational evidence. Physics is about what we can know via the physical senses. Metaphysics is about that which transcends the capabilities of our senses. The fact that our senses have limitations is not a fantasy. For example, invisible Oxygen is an interpretation of relevant evidence, not a perception --- yet it's essential for life. Likewise, electrons have never been seen or photographed, but they are essential for material properties. The orbit "image" below is calculated from mathematical data, not from visible light. — Gnomon

Caught my eye, this one. Consider: An alternative way to think about metaphysics would be this: it is not that our senses have limitations, nor about what we can know via the physical senses nor about transcending the capabilities of the physical senses. This kind of thinking suggests a kind of meta-science, as if science were on the cusp of metaphysical discovery, making speculative science the cutting edge of metaphysical disclosure. Of course, this kind of thing is miles from Kant, but Kant didn't understand metaphysics at all. He didn't understand that metaphysics is another order of thinking about everything.

Metaphysics makes its appearance not in the laboratory or on the white board of equations and their speculative "interpolation" where paradigms leave off, but in the simple relation between me and this cup on the table in the inquiry that brackets or suspends all superfluous and implicit assumptions that construct the knowledge relationship. The idea is that when I encounter the cup, the perceptual moment is a construct of mine, in which I already know cups and the like and this one here is, upon the familiar encounter, is already known---you know how Hegel made a huge deal out of this, justifying his "rational realism". How, after all, does one get OUT of the universal and TO the actual particular? (noting with some frustration that 'actual and 'particular' are both universal concepts themselves! No way out),or, how does one step out of language to affirm this cup which has a presence that is clearly not at all language? is how someone like Derrida would put it. Anyway, this "already" thickens, you might say, perception, defines and makes conditions for knowing something to be the case. Husserl thought that one could, through his method of suspending the vast bulk of knowledge that implicitly attends me seeing a cu--the cup as a body of coinditioned forethought, acknowledge the pure manifestation. This is existential metaphysics, it might be called.

There are those, including myself, who think that the direction of this Husserlian method takes perception to an impossible clarity of the world, which I want to call the threshold of metaphysics. Very personal, yet, not at all at odds with language and logic, as such. Its "impossibility" lies in its defiance of a shared culture of understanding. Get enough people practicing this method and talking about their experiences, and then a new language emerges. Tibetan Buddhists have a language of words only they can understand, I have read; and Heidegger talked a bit like this in his famous Der Speigal Interview referring to Buddhism.

Transcendental idealism? It is right before your eyes. Drop the term 'idealism'. Better: transcendental phenomenology.

If you haven't been able to follow the thread so far, there's not much point in continuing. — Banno

Is there nothing I can do to make you explain something? By any standard, you're just too vacant and glib. Is this what analytic philosophy's positivism has done to you? An economy of expression of such efficiency that sparsity itself is its primary tenet?

How about this piece of yours: "Metaphysics sets out the background against which the world is ordered, and is as much fiat as observation. One can avoid the circularity by recognising this."

Of course, here, with this OP, the metaphysics starts with Kant. So, and we all know how this leads on to discussions about epistemic failings of naturalistic models, like Quine's. This doesn't sound muddled to me. The issue here is principally how one can establish what is the case in the world at the level of philosophy, the most basic level, without an analytic of the structure of the relation between the known and the knower. This relationship is foundational to any ontology, and this goes directly to what BOB ROSS opened with.

Let the analysis begin, Banno. What say you regarding this matter of the lack epistemic grounding that pervades any and all that can be the case?

No. I read certain philosophy, and found it was wrong. There's a tad too much presumption in your prognosis. And very little of any substance to your replies. — Banno

Remember I asked you: "What philosopher that seems muddled are you talking about? What is the source of the muddle? This is the question is begged here."

Come on Banno, speak!!

I don't see why we should take any interest in your acts of faith. — Banno

Never liked the word faith. Endorses silliness. But if you take a few years to study and actually come to understand what this post Kantian tradition in philosophy is about, then you would realize you've been duped. It has been very clear for a long time that conversations in analytic philosophy are no more than painfully well written justifications for avoiding metaphysics. I mean, absent metaphysics, there is really nothing to say. This reduces philosophy to a trivial play of words, and does little to advance an understanding of the world at the most basic level.

MY acts if faith?? Look, someone told you long ago not to read certain philosophy, and they were wrong.

Not sure I can use this and I have, of course, heard such things expressed for much of my life. I spent my early life with Theosophists, followers of various forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Gnosticism and mysticism. What is the discovery that one actually exists mean? — Tom Storm

This is a huge question, and I have found reading mysticism and the Eastern descriptions of deeper insight simply assumes what has to be shown. The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart sermons, say, are extraordinary statements, but how does one get there, to the essential thought and experience, from here, this everyday world, given that the latter constitutes a level of engagement history has really never seen before. This didn't exist when Eckhart was around, this inflated cultural construction that is entirely open to expansion, reducing our world to stereo instructions, if you will.

Only way competent inquiry can begin, is with the infamous phenomenological reduction of Husserl. Husserl speaks through European tradition, so we can understand as he does and follow along, and not in some exotic distant language of another time and mentality. Husserl is meticulous (boringly so) but he takes this OP line of thinking to its only possible conclusion: when we start asking those Kantian questions about the relation between a thought, its consciousness, and the world, the original relation is between transcendence and and me, not to put to fine a point on it. Transcendence here is really just a simple concept: I am me and there is a cup, so the cup transcends me because it is over there and not me at all. So how is it that one spans the gap between the two? Notice that if this cannot be dome, the cup is simply, and rightly called, transcendent.

Kant never went this way. He held transcendence to be perceptually beyond access. Husserl puts it there, right in your face. This is where the entire body of mystical writing humans have ever produced begins, in this simple encounter with transcendence: this cup is noumenal; phenomena are noumenal, if you want to talk like that. Husserl was no mystic, but this is because he was like Kant, strong intellectual gifts, but weak on intuition.

I don't disagree, but how far to take it? I think of science as a tool for acquiring tentative models that are useful in certain contexts. Is the gap between science and reality or the gap between anything and reality worth filling with speculations? For me it isn't. An issue for me is that reality itself is a gap. It's an abstract idea, we fill with our values and anticipations. — Tom Storm

Take Kastrup's Is Reality Made of Consciuosness (someone mentioned earlier and I looked him up): Certainly not that he is wrong. Not at all! But this is more at scienctific speculation than it is philosophy. But, I won't quibble about words. Talk about particles and particle interactions just beg the question: how does anything out there get in here, a brain? He is right to dismiss ontological divisions and tossing out mind body pseudo problems, but he stays in the scienctific speculative mode. The problem of consciousness is always personal, in the extreme personal, for there is no actual collective consciousness, and therefore the concrete evidence lies not public affirmation that science makes, but in the actuality of consciousness itself. The premises one seeks for one' argument about the nature of consciousness and the world lie in the objectivity of scientific inquiry (there is no other than the scientific method. Tying my shoes and affirming the Eiffel Tower is in Paris are applications of the scientific method) into consicousness itself. That is, in "me".

Here? Following on from the OP. — Banno

The OP refers to Kant and post Kantian thinking. The muddle is what is in question. It is a difficult question for anyone who takes the categories of empirical science as a sound board for philosophical inquiry, but what you call muddle is simply the nature of our world, which is foundational indeterminacy. If you don't deal with Kant and his legacy and try to imagine two centuries of continental philosophy (I continuing on into the present through Levinas, Derrida and post Heideggerians) as something you can just "skip" and still remain in in good faith, then you are simply deluded.

No offense intended in saying this, but to speak of a cupboard, as you do above, like Moore speaks of his hands, then you really haven't even begun.

I'll admit the possibility and then choose silence. Many a philosopher will wax prosaically at length on this topic. That seems muddled. — Banno

Consider what it is that is silenced: it is the ordinary sense of the world that usually and immediately makes the claim on the moment. This is suspended. Where those who takes this kind of thing seriously differ is what this "nothing" reveals, but to even grasp at all what is at issue, one has have the prior exposure to the philosophy that opens inquiry into this.
What philosopher that seems muddled are you talking about? What is the source of the muddle? This is the question is begged here.

I guess I also find myself wondering, if accurate. so what? Does it make any difference to how one lives? How is this way of thinking of use? — Tom Storm

I'm of no use here, Bob, apologies. There wasn't an argument. It was simply the fact that for practical purposes idealism makes no difference to my day-to-day experience. So it just faded as I got on with life. Additionally, I'm not all that concerned if the nature of reality remains forever elusive to humans. Since we conduct ourselves in a realm which appears to be material (whatever it may be in itself), that's all I need to make effective use of the life I have. — Tom Storm

Looking through comments, you caught my eye. Just a comment or so. I would guess (guess, not know) that you haven't come to see the course of thought that lies through and beyond Kant. Something Kant did not see, for he was a rationalist, rigidly so, and therefore was unable to draw certain conclusions about where inquiry ultimately goes in philosophy. But when he affirmed that one had to go through epistemology to get to ontology, that is, that claims about what is real are entirely contingent on what one can know, he made it clear that it was impossible to disentangle the former from the latter. But he was such a dyed in the wool rationalist, he couldn't make the Kierkegaardian "qualitative move", something that rings throughout subsequent phenomenology: This cup on the table is bound to my mental grasp of it being a cup, and this latter defines the extent the understanding can know the cup. But what about the irrational feels and fleshy tonalities (Michel Henry talks like this) and the bare presence of this thing?

There is, of course, a lot written about this, but the point would go like this: when we turn our attention to this conscious grasp of its object, and we turn explicitly away from its contextual and logical placings, which is to say we shut up about it and thereby allow (Heidegger borrows the term 'gelassenheit' to talk about this yield to the world as opposed to applying familiar categories) the world to speak, so to speak, the presence of the object steps forth. This is an existential move, not a logical inference, away from all that makes the cup the usual familiar cup.

Why bother to do this? Because the reality of the world rests with familiarity, not with some sublime connectivity between science and reality. When Kastrup talks about the brain, he simply assumes what Kantians, or neoKantians, take up in analysis. But Kant gets lost in his own tendency reduce things to form and structure, and it never occurred to him that he was making assumptions in his "objective" thesis that were themselves grounded on a profound and pervasive indeterminacy. Or, he did know this, but could make the move to affirm it, because he didn't see what Kierkegaard saw: that a concept, on the one hand, and this bare givenness of things on the other, had absolutely no continuity between the two. They are qualitatively radically "other" than one another, and this is made profoundly clear in extreme phenomenal affairs, like having your tooth pulled without anesthetic: clearly on is not witnessing reason at work; nor is a simple phenomenological grasp of the color yellow reason at work IN the yellow color.

Didn't realize I had written so much. At any rate, the value of this line of thinking lies not in some propositional statement. It is existential, like an awakening, because one realizes for the first time in this discovery that one actually exists. This is the existential foundation of religion. Of course, this take practice and study, but this is the brass ring of philosophy.

It's strange to think of the phenomena/noumena distiction in relation to one's own body parts. Is there a nose-in-itself vs the phenomena of it? — Gregory

Well, this doesn't make the essential move, which begins with the logical structure of the statement about a nose bleed. Kant is doing an analysis of knowledge relationships, so there you are observing such a thing, the nose bleeding, and within an everyday sense of things, it is routinely familiar, something everyone knows about, like grass growing. But what is the knowledge relationship? This is what Kant wants to analyze. And epistemological determinations dictate ontological ones.

This is really a pretty familiar method. After all, your nose bleed has a number of analytical perspectives. What would a particle physicist say it "is"? Or an immunobiologist? Kant is a transcendental idealist. Look at the matter from his perspective. Alas, you have to read the Critiuqe of Pure Reason to do this.

What contentions do you have? — Bob Ross

You are on the right path, by my thinking. But you need to take the next step, and this is a very big step: Kant found noumena in some impossible beyond, but this entails that all that stands before us in intelligible structured existence stands apart from noumena, which makes talk about noumena impossible, rendering the concept worse than a mere necessary postulation: it is no less than nonsense of the order of, say, denying the principle of contradiction. Apodictically impossible, as Kant would put it.

Not only does this make any proposition about noumena nonsense (like Wittgenstein said about "the world" or value), it draws an impossible line, that between noumena and phenomena, as if all that is there in plain sight is of another ontological order entirely. If noumena is supposed to be true, unconditioned and eternal Real, then how is it possible to draw such a line which excludes my occurrent apprehension of this lamp on my desk? Excluded how? To draw such a line, as Wittgenstein reminds us, one has to know both sides to make sense, so how does one make sense of delimiting noumena?

What the Kantian concept fails to see is that noumena is all pervasive. This obviates the nonsense about ontological divisions: there are none. (One odd conclusion of this is that analytic philosophers lean toward the Kantian side of the issue, maintaining that talk about metaphysics is nonsense, while seriously opposing any talk about Kant.) One has to except that this lamp is noumenal, that phenomenal events are noumenal events. The trouble lies not in ontology but epistemology: there is something about this lamp that I am not seeing yet is there always already IN the seeing.

This is the kind of sh** that drives analytic philosophers crazy. Keep in mind that Russell called Wittgenstein a mystic because of his "threshold" claims and there is an entire philosophical tradition called phenomenology that travels right up this alley.

Well this is an entirely different topic (that I have addressed elsewhere—or could explain by msg) but I’m not saying he sees through language like a wall that he makes transparent, but that he examines (looks AT) the kinds of the things we say (the possible expressions) about a certain thing (at a time and place) because those are evidence of our criteria for that thing. It is a philosophical method. And taking Wittgenstein to be dividing what we can and cannot talk about is a remnant of the Tractatus; part of the point of the PI is to show how we can actually have rational, quasi-logical discussions about all kinds of things, and, thus, that the Investigations is actually an examination of why we imagine we can’t. — Antony Nickles

Yeah, I will take a close look at Investigations soon. After I finish with Michel Henry and others. But two things: As to it being an entirely different topic, it certainly is thematically different, but since the issue is of the "when" we exist, is it not that this "when" lies outside discussions of epistemology. All philosophy has to pass through this, for at the basic level, all that is, is known to be, and so knowing is foundational, presupposed. The when of one's existence goes to time and time is the essential structure that receives and produces the world, then talk about a self and anything else is about time. That is, before I can talk about anything at the basic level, I have to talk about the conditions that structure and constitute that thing. This goes directly to "subjective time."

At the outset, one is greeted with a paradox: normal talk about time presupposes something that is not at all normal and familiar, which is the temporality of thought and experience itself. This is us. The paradox is Wittgensteinian: To speak at all presupposes the assumptions about the validity about speaking, but these presuppositions cannot be addressed in the speaking. This is the worst kind of question begging. But while a perspective outside of our own subjectivity is impossible (like trying to talk about the basis for the principle of non-contradiction), one has to wonder if there is anything that is beyond indeterminacy.

The second thing is this, speaking of a method as you did: In inquiring about the "when" of the self, is there anything at all that survives the Cartesian doubt that rules philosophical inquiry (per the above)? Is there not a method that is at once radically negative (or, apophatically negative, I might put it), yet radically positive as well? Something that both tears down all assumptions, yet discovers what lies beneath that cannot be torn down. This is Husserl's reduction, which is a method. As he says in "The Idea of Phenomenology":

Phenomenology: this term designates a science, a complex of scientific -
disciplines; but it also designates at the same time and above all a method and
an attitude of thought: the specifically philosophical attitude of thought, the
specifically philosophical method.

The difference here is this: Husserl thought he had discovered the solution to epistemological and ontological transcendence, which was achieved through his method, the phenomenological reduction. Witt would have thought this insane.

But Husserl was qualifiedly right.

Yes, a moral agreement works differently than walking, or measuring an atom, or having a self. But they are all going to be “cast in language” as the means by which we communicate about them (or, meant how else?). We think we understand what “Language” is (as some general thing), but this is just to take the possibility of, and our part in, failing to communicate or reach agreement, and to project it—out of fear—onto something other than us (to put our failings onto “language”). Another way of doing this is to say we (or language) cannot communicate “me” (my “constant” self), “my thought”, what “I mean”. This mischaracterization is not a misunderstanding of “language” (to be corrected) but blindly homogenizing the world in requiring something certain (even in creating an “uncertain” fall-guy). We ignore that things are more complicated so we don’t need to be responsible for what we say, or do, or judge. — Antony Nickles

There is something to this, if I take your meaning. Language produces generalities that fail to speak the complexities of one's subjective world. One can thus toss out casually words and their meanings into an arena of standardized thinking, and this pretty much belies the rich interior of one's true actual world. Worst yet is that this inner world gets lost entirely, yielding to the general (Heidegger's das man), and this is a crisis of identity. One becomes this body of generalities.

Phenomenologists have the cure: Kierkegaard's qualitative leap, Husserl's epoche, Heidegger's turn to
authenticity. Of course, the Buddhists, the quintiessential phenomenologists, have their liberation and enlightenment. But it is not, as you say, things being "more complicated," presumably referriing to the complexity of one's inner world. Rather, here the brass ring is a simplicity. Sure, their philosophy is dense and alien to common sense, but the "turn" itself is simple. Fascinating the way this works if one has a mind to pursue it. Buddhists take the whole idea to its impossible end, which is an altogether termination of this world.

This “anticipated response” comes, as I think we also agree, from being raised into a culture, a way of living together, which comes before us, prior, “already” (though perhaps not “known” as in: not always aware of, explicated, examined; thus philosophy). But there are times where a practice moves into a new context, when there is an act which we do not anticipate. I find you basically the same place in saying “Ontology begins when we insert the question about this world and its being.” (Though I’ll just qualify, if needed, that this is not to question the “whole” world, in seeing the situational nature of our various customs, etc.). And, like any moral situation, that we have the means of addressing it, understanding it (because it is in contrast to the already-existing expectations (standing possibilities you say). This is the moment of the self, its being in relation to our history, our culture, against our conformity to it. — Antony Nickles

The reason I take the matter to the level of philosophy by referring to the world, and not just some particular context of categorical belonging is because the question you ask is about the self-in-time, the "when" of the self, and talk like this refers the totality of what the self is and not any of its specific, as Heidegger put it, potentialities of possibilities. The self is taken as an aggregate of these, not too far afield from Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, though here, I am not concerned with his grand reduction to structure of the rational mind. Kant's concept of the self is an abstraction from what Michel Henry (my newest infatuation) calls life, for which he has a strong phenomenological designation. One cannot "fit" the self into a box, to speak loosely, and the same goes for time, the "when" of the issue at hand. Objective time is everyday time, all to familiar. Subjective time's examination begins when we understand that all of our objective possibilities of thinking about time (the whens, how longs, what time it is, being late or early, and on and on) issue from a temporally structured self: thought and the experience it belongs to itself IS time. Kant said this, of course, but again, his "when" of the self is an examination of the mere vessel or form of our existence (per the Transcendental Aesthetic). Phenomenology conceives the entirety of the self.

I agree with what you say regarding the self historical grounding in morality. But I want to take ethics to its true grounding which lies in the metaethical issue: what is the ethical/aesthetic good and the bad? This is where the self finds its essence, for such a question goes, as do all things, to the question of the pure givenness of the world, the value-qualia, if you will: OUCH! What IS that?

This does wander away from the "when" of the self, granted. But then the when is always a when of the self. Any analysis of value-qualia, as I call it, is an attempt discover the nature of the when-self, itself. Our existence is time. AS I experience I anticipate, I summon the past, both at once to write these words. My affective being, the caring, interest, doubt, dread, and so on, built into this, making the normativity of ethics a wholly temporal affair.

I am not arguing for certainty, what I am saying is that humanity craves it. We are afraid of the fact that knowledge doesn’t get us all the way there, that we must insert ourselves behind our words, to stand by them; “accepting the possibilities” especially when extending those possibilities, living in a way that gives them new life, shows what it is to be, say, “just”, by being an example of it. That fear of our fallible human condition creates the desire for something that can take us out of the equation, e.g., if there are rules, then I can just follow the rules and I will be right; as if conformity absolves me. So we impose upon everything the same desired outcome which generalizes over each things’ possibilities. So the self is imagined as a constant, given, maybe unknowable thing, so I can have it (and I can keep it from you) without having to answer for my expressions and actions. I take this as Kierkegaard “sin” that is possible in this moment. Or that in not answering, we are still held to account, but only in that it doesn’t matter if it is us, because the usual expectations and answer, etc. apply, so I am unnecessary, or, that I do not exist, which I take it you mean by “failure to confirm to be applied to one's own existence qua existence.”

I should also say that reflection at these moments is the purpose of philosophy. That to have “consciousness of one’s freedom” is not a given, but an effort, a change in not knowledge, but attitude (perspective), such as contained in a paradox like: we are born free but are everywhere in chains. — Antony Nickles

Well said, I say to much of this. Kierkegaard's sin, there are two parts to this, historical (the sin of the race, as K calls it), and subjective sin, an existential and highly personal affair. Best book by far is his Concept of Anxiety. Couldn't possibly do it justice here. Suffice to say that metaphysics is an actuality

As to craving certainty, Peirce's Fixation of Belief fits your account, I think. Belief is the stability and freedom from doubt, and we take the pragmatic route toward fixity. But fleeing doubt is a fleeing of the discomfort of doubt, and this begs a question of value-in-the-world, or value-qualia. one analytic step further in leads to the question of value qua value, the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, as Hamlet said. This presence of value-in-being is by far the most important question one can even conceive, I say.

Of course, many existentialists will take this as a basic description of our religious condition, where doubt is alienation from God. A good point in this, though: What kind of doubt? Ordinary doubt in the bus arriving on time or doubt in someone's behavior in some circumstance is clearly contextual and doubt is no real mystery, in itself, because one can explain it, cast it terms that make sense. But doubt about the self is different because here we stand on the threshold of metaphysics: what is a self? Why am I (are we) born to suffer and die? And love and hope and dream? To me, this threshold is deeply profound, for it is not just an abstract issue, a premise in an argument (though it is certainly this). It is the palpable presence of the world, the "life" we are thrown into, this living vulnerable flesh "rubbing abrasively" against the brute physicality of it all. Here I take your point (as I see it) about language to heart: language and culture (the two are really the same, for one cannot speak without being IN a context of beliefs, values, assumptions, etc.) distract, ameliorate, reduce to a palatable form, this world existence. We live lives of cultural fixities with all of those concerns we deal with every day. Life is reduced to a manageable triviality. This is K's complaint, and the essential complaint of phenomenology as a social commentary.

Quite right about the effort to be free. But again, Rousseau's thinking was political, playing against Hobbes, as I recall. Inquiry will take this to the wire and I am reminded of Foucault's thoughts about Bentham's panoptical prison concept in which there is no need for guards for we possess the censure for bad or inordinate behavior. We are our own prisoners, so to speak. The question is, what is there to be free for?

But philosophy does not always “talk about language”. To ask what the good is is not to talk about the word “good”. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein just looks through language (specifically, what we say when...) to see the world, because our interests and judgments of the world are reflected by what we say in a situation (during an activity). — Antony Nickles

The good is a special question. But what it IS is going to be cast in language. I don't see Wittgenstein looking through language. I do see him having the insight that propositional knowledge cannot "speak" what the good is, because this is a question that goes to value, and value is the intuitive irreducible presence. One cannot, for example, say what a pain as a pure phenomenon is. One can talk about it is many contexts, but pain qua pain is just the pure givenness of the world. But unlike qualia, it has an ethical/aesthetic dimension (Witt says these are really the same thing, for ethics and aesthetics are essentially about value).

Philosophy is about inquiring into anything at the most basic level. The Tractatus, Witt said, is mostly about what is not said. The limits of meaningful talk show us the threshold of our existence. In Culture and Values he says divinity is the good. A bold statement for someone who drew such a line between what can and cannot be said in the Tractatus.

I say philosophy always ends in a discussion about language, I mean anything that can be said is question begging. This is because saying something meaningful always gets its meaning from the "difference" and the "deference" of words, sentences, etc. Obviously we humans do more than explain knowledge claims. It is the everydayness of living that goes on people are not really interested in underlying existential assumptions at all. This is the job of philosophy and, for most, religion. Philosophy understands (say the phenomenologists) that our everyday thoughts and engagements are, in the Cartesian/Husserlian vein, wreathed in questions, if you will. This is where epistemology discovers its own foundational failure.

Analytic philosophers don't like to consider this, but this is because they despise any hint of Kant and indeterminacy. This, in my view, trivializes philosophy, and the world, this positivist insistence on clarity over meaning and content.

The world is foundationally indeterminate. This is hermeneutics.

By “activity” I just mean what Witt terms “concepts” which is just to say, regular human stuff: pointing, apologizing, being just, measuring, excusing, following a rule, extending a series, etc., some of which he uses as his examples in the Investigations. To say “we already know it” is the same as the fact that we get indoctrinated (or, as you say, “enculturated education”) into a history of criteria and judgments for things which we operate on without reflection; I take this as the social contract and conformity. That Kierkegaard says we inherit the “sin” of it I take to record that we are compromised by conformity, comprised of nothing but our culture (the means of production) if I do not claim what is mine from it, against it. — Antony Nickles

Kierkegaard analyzes Christian original sin down to hereditary sin. He uses the Bible story to do this "psychological" analysis. The Concept of Anxiety is a fascinating read! One finds Heidegger everywhere in this book. Of courwe, K is a Christian, so alienation is not going to be the nothing that beckons from metaphysics. It is going to be alienation from God. Human culture is alienation from God when one is mesmerized by day to day affairs and refuses to face the "nothing" of its foundation.

Familiarity for human dasein (Heidegger's term) is a language phenomenon. It's a big issue for Heidegger, for at its center is time, and knowledge is a forward looking affair. Indoctrinated? This term has connotations of a particular kind to learning, but learning, but more generally one could call it conditioning into a collective understanding of the world. One IS dasein, and the historical process of language's evolution and the personal acculturation are conditions that constitute being human.

Etc., etc. Long, long story.

Well, we would need to unpack this, but to be as poetic: the self IS only WHEN (in relation to conformity). — Antony Nickles

One cannot unpack Heidegger like this. His phenomenology of time is too complex. There is, though, this quite simple pragmatist account. What IS nitro glycerin? The most basic analysis is contained in a conditional proposition: If you take some quantity X of nitro travels at some velocity Y and impacts some surface, Then, the result will be an explosion of some magnitude Z. Crudely put, but it makes the point. A think IS the anticipated response in a certain environment (H calls these environments of Equipment). Everything is like this, for an encounter with a thing is always already known, anticipated, prior to the encounter, like taking a step and knowing the sidewalk will not sink but support the step.

Mind/body issues vanish, and the pragmatic time analysis is basic. This little forward looking analysis is the basis for H's hermeneutics. Massively interesting.

A handstand can be explained (how to do one, etc.), but what is essential to a handstand (what it IS) is reflected by the criteria we use to judge, for instance, what makes one better. or a handstand different from a… to switch examples, say, walking different than running; what goes toward counting with this activity, mattering to us. Thus the self IS only in its alignment or aversion to these terms of judgment, when those things are at issue for me. — Antony Nickles

That sounds like Heidegger.

All that is being said here is these "terms of judgment" belong to language, as in describing the utility of one way over another. There is the acting on judgment, the practical end of things, and this would be looking to outcomes, making knowledge forward looking. Thought itself is forward looking and our existence is a forward looking stream of events. Observing my cat is to anticipate the "potentiality of possibilities" that come to mind when I see my cat and assume it will just sit there and sleep. Obviously, my cat does the same with me, anticipating food in the morning, etc. But my cat is not dasein. Human existence is a language construct through which there is an understanding of the world, Dasein does not HAVE this. It IS this. Heidegger dismisses the duality of consciousness/object. Objects in the world ARE the language embodiment! They are something else, too, but this "something else," until this is taken up in dasein's language/culture "inheritance" (Kierkegaard's original idea on this) is nothing to us but the potentiality of possibilities.

We are far afield here, but knowledge is “inherently anticipatory” only if we require that certainty (only accept the outcome of predictability, predetermination), as if equating “knowing” gymnastics is like the knowledge of facts. Thus, in the light of this requirement for certainty, the self must be an ever-present, unique "fact". — Antony Nickles

In the doing, there is not the thinking of what the doing is. This is clear. But this, call it oblivious doing belong to what H calls preontology, our everydayness, and we live in this just as typing these words requires has nothing to do with thinking about where the fingers go or if the keyboard is in working order. This world of just carrying on is us in the ready-to-hand mode of our existence. Ontology begins when we insert the question about this world and its being. In this "movement" we see our freedom to make an unmade future (as I see it, the question, the piety of language, opens possibilities that stand before our freedom. This is existential anxiety. K said this a hundred years before H.

So knowledge is always anticipatory. This lies not in accepting the out come, but in accepting the possibilities, which seems the opposite of certainty. One creates one's existence in this consciousness of one's freedom.

said knowledge is not our only connection to the world. Thus the importance of an occasion regarding the self. Our understanding of what is essential about a promise are the ordinary (unreflected on) criteria for identity of a promise, the appropriateness, the completion, etc. It is when these criteria (our shared conformity) come into question (in a situation, not stripped of everything to be “basic”, contextless), that we are not making a “knowledge” claim, but a claim of what is ours, what we are prepared to live by as mattering to us in a situation where knowledge has failed, or does not rule, as in a moral moment. But there is a time and place when we are lost, as you say, “where everything is epistemically indeterminate”, which is the moment for the self to assert itself, claim itself.

I appreciate the further connections and the effort, thank you. — Antony Nickles

Apologies for all the writing. I have the time lately.

The knowledge claim would go to the assumptions that are already in place when one enters into a situation. They may fail, as when my car doesn't start, or they may, as is usually the case, be part of the continuing confirmation that cars start in the usual way. The car not starting imposes the question, why? This is when freedom and its indeterminacy steps in. Take that question conceive of the failure to confirm to be applied to one's own existence qua existence. Now this is metaphysics: to stand before the nothing where one's potentialities to respond a mute, and existence just stares back.

For K especially, this is an existential crisis, and sin in born.

But we aren’t investigating language, and I don’t know how an activities’ possibilities are “contingent” or “propositional” (somehow not how the world works?). The ordinary criteria come from what has mattered to us about stuff over the vast history of our lives; the “possibilities” are what count in the judgment of a thing. We define ourselves in relation to them (against, re-invigorating, etc.), so this is not a social theory but how the self is differentiated from our shared lives. — Antony Nickles

It would be argued that whatever you talk about, you are always talking about language when inquiry moves to basic assumptions, which is philosophy. Wittgenstein's Tractatus' states of affairs are facts and facts are propositions in the logical grid of sensible talk. An activity? What is this? This is a predelineated event, that is, I already know what it is before I do it. We live in this always already knowing.

The point is that language is not simply in our everyday lives. It IS this. Heidegger holds that there really is no mind/body separation at all. For dasein, to see a thing is to already know it, and the knowledge is part and parcel of the thing. A human being IS a WHEN (interesting to note that the same holds for dogs and cats. I think animals have a proto-linguistic grasp of their affairs, as memory informs the present matter and establishes a sense of familiarity and habit of responding. This temporal construct is their existence), not IN a when (as might be said of objective time, when we say, you're late! or, what time is it? We speak here, rather, of Subjective time, what Augustine started in his Confessions, through Kant, and Kierkegaard, and others).

Doing a hand stand is not explaining a hand stand, this understood. But what a hand stand IS, is in the explanation. One could say that language is reducible to pragmatics, as Rorty does. But this gets into a technical discussion. E.g., if for S to know P is inherently anticipatory, and knowledge is a time event, then my knowing where to put my hands on the uneven bars is essentially like my knowing oaks trees are deciduous: no more than the forward looking engagement that anticipates an outcome.

This that you say about our "vast history" sounds very Heideggerian. All that we think is spontaneous and present issues from an enculturated education. (what Kierkegaard called inherited sin!).

Well, kudos for reading Levinas. There is a thread of similarity here. When we are just conforming, we are “living naively” (as Plato will say, unreflectively), and just “carrying out the acts proper” and “allowing ourselves to be led”. Wittgenstein is investing the “motives that operate therein” as the fear of skepticism and thus the desire for certainty, which we turn from to realize our “real need” (PI, #108)—as we do in differentiating the self. He will similarly “set all these [he will say “metaphysical criteria”] “out of action”, not to “take no part in them”, but to understand why we desired their certainty. — Antony Nickles

Not Levinas, Husserl, from his Ideas I. To understand "why we desired their certainty" is interesting. I'll have to read this in whole (having just looked here and there). I think Peirce had a good take on this in his Fixation of Belief: doubt steps in, creates unrest, then the movement away from unrest toward certainly or fixity anticipates solace. Something like that as I recall. Of course, we will be reminded that while this explanation (a good one!) intends to reduce one thing, belief, to another, the pragmatic move toward stability, we begin all of this in language. We cast our concepts at first IN language. 'Pragmatism,' say, is a particle of language prior to being about anything at all. It is not that there is nothing other than language, but our understanding is contingent on what language is and can do. Hence, hermeneutical openness.

In relation to the self, things don’t “epistemically transcend my reach”. Knowledge does not do everything; it is not our only connection to the world. We “access” apologies, and justice, and chairs each differently, through the ordinary criteria for each: for their identification, how our judgment of your acts with them work, how porous the boundaries, how change happens or not, etc. So there is nothing which connect these things; and, even if there were—say, all: objects—it would be the criteria for objects, not “me”. “I” am not “foundational”, and my self-awareness and internal dialogue are unremarkable in this regard. This picture of “me” and this conception of a “transcendent natural world” is based on the desire to have something fixed, pure, math-like, dependable, predetermined, universal, complete, generalized, etc. If our ordinary criteria are Emerson’s “conformity, the “social contract”, then I don’t only “know” those or not, I claim them, or defy them, live them, or don’t stand up for them, etc. — Antony Nickles

You would be hard pressed to argue that knowledge is not our connection with the world. I am not saying language is all there is to human existence. I am saying that when we try to understand anything at the most basic level of assumptions, THEN we face language, and the question of what language is is antecedent to anything else. Everything is a knowledge claim when we try to say what a thing is. I ask you, what IS justice? or, what IS a promise? Then we are deep in language and logic.

To claim this is not the case runs squarely into a performative contradiction, for the denial itself is a language/logic phenomenon.

There really is no way around this. The good news is that language is entirely open. God could literally appear before me and impart an intuitive wisdom of all things, and language would not be somehow undone, for the only requirement here would be a shared intuition with my interlocutor. We could talk all day about it, notwithstanding Derrida. Hermeneuticists don't deny this possibility, for they are assuming such a thing would constitute mystical knowledge and this is just bad metaphysics, that is, bad metaphysics UNTIL it actually happened. And this supposition is not logically impossible for this to happen---there are no contradictions necessarily assumed if God did this. Just something entirely other than what is familiar.

The bad news is that unless divine wisdom were intuitively deposited in one's mind, thereby establishing a true absolute foundation for understanding the world, we are bound to a world where everything is epistemically indeterminate.

Until ethics and aesthetics are considered. Again where Wittgenstein feared to go. He was right about this, and Heidegger agreed.