Just to add: illusion and time, these are the same. Time is anticipation, a "not yet" at the ready when one sees an object, and when the object is confirmed, it too is confirmed in a "not yet," that grasps to fill the future with the same, and it is what defines normalcy. It is a living presence IN the object of awareness, this dynamic knowledge claim. I hold that Eastern enlightenment and liberation is all about what stands in the perceptual moment telling me it is a cup, a rose. It is temporally existentially dynamic, not spatially inert, as scientific physicalism/naturalism tells us. Meditation literally stops time, anticipation, the "not yet" of the vacuum of a future unmade. Time is karma, not an abstraction. Time designates all of the passions, desires, etc., in the anticipatory moment. One's desires are flung forward in the "not yet".

There have been comparisons made between śūnyatā and the epochē of Husserl, — Wayfarer

I think of sunyata as an absence of knowledge claims in the perceptual event, knowledge that is "always already" in normal experience, and is the essence of existential illusion. But then, it is IN knowledge claims that one is a person at all in-the-world. What is revealed in putting explicit knowledge to rest, if you will, is a revelation, and this, too, is received by the understanding which is what constitutes "normal experience". One could have a deeply profound meditation in which all mean appearances fall away. Now, what just happened? Now this self that has been transcended in the sublime experience is called upon to explain the very thing that could only be shown by its own annihilation.

What is a knowledge claim? This is important. It is pragmatic and forward looking. It is TIME. The mundane self is time, and meditation annihilates time. To cancel an attachment is to relax the desire that attempts to create a future in the image of the desire, again, so to speak. Sin, in Kierkegaard's terms and my interpretation, is time (the sins of the race, that is, the cultural/historical body of institutions that constitute our world).

Husserl's epoche has this trajectory, leading us to an absolute intimation of being. It is essentially apophatic, like the Upanishad's neti neti, annihilating assumptions that are always in place when we see the world in familiar ways. What is canceled is time itself, not the abstract concept of time, one thing following another in some apriori quantitative model, but existential time, the right now in a room with lamps and coffee cups ALL of which are familiar and prima facie holding the world in place. This living structure of existence is time, the knowing of all these things being essentially anticipations confirmed in the mere recognition. To me, this cuts directly to the chase of the issue of Eastern spiritual illusion, or maya: holding this cup right before my eyes, feeling its warmth, its weight--then notice when the mind is cleared in radical meditation, how time evaporates as the anticipatory "veil" falls away.

Knowledge is forward looking, and so, knowledge is time. But to experience AT ALL, even profoundly, time cannot be altogether dismissed in explaining what a spiritual experience IS. Even as time slips into nullity, this is done in "metaphysical" time. Our finitude IS noumenal., something Kant missed in the deduction (a long but fascinating argument there).

But, never mind. I was only trying to discover some common ground between phenomenology and Buddhist Studies. — Wayfarer

There is the self and then there is the "self". One is the everyday self, and this suspended in meditation, and I think this is likely not in dispute by anyone. What is an issue is the nature of the "I" that endures the suspension. I can't make sense of this, but so what. I do know that there are intimations that emerge when one does this push the question into metaphysics, what I call good metaphysics, "The Cloud of Unknowing" kind of metaphysics. There is an extraordinary affirmation in this.

From an article on 'emptiness' in Buddhism:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in. — Wayfarer

You know, I agree with this. The trouble comes in several places, but the one that stands out for me is agency. Though there is "no thought whether there is anything behind things," that refers to explicit thought. In the familiarity of the world there is history that constitutes this sense of things, and that constitutes my "I". I am not like an infant for whom there really is not world at all, just a private localized and limited environment. It is culture and language that takes time to imprint a foundation, so to speak, and when this interpretative "nothing" meets some thing, the thing not just loses whatever might be behind, but very ground for familiarity itself. In other words, when I am comfortable just sitting doing nothing, the world is still held within the grasp of memory.

To me this is not to question the meanings that rise up in a liberated state. Quite the opposite: It suggests that the enculturation that is always already there, in the perceptual event, tacitly telling me that everything is such and such and so and so and no need for alarm, and really, makes this moment possible (because an infant, unenculturated and pure, cannot meditate, or do yoga of any kind) does not stand as an obstacle at all, but is necessary for encountering the world as a singular agency. The "I" that is a social construct is ALSO a construct for liberation and enlightenment.

One, perhaps, likes to think that serious meditation is a true negation of the self, but this is, I would argue, mistaken.

As model of personal development, it focuses upon the crisis of adolescence and the perils of becoming a 'single individual'. — Paine

You mean how the child emerges from innocence and in receiving the world's language and culture, the "sin" of the race, discovers freedom and guilt. Very Freudian (who had read Kierkegaard). If the father is God, this imposes a metaphysical commandment which has as its principal injunction the having "no gods before me" and "no idols" kind of thing. And so, the knight of faith lives the mundane life (Fear and Trembling) but in the "light" of the father, in all things.

On becoming a single individual: Kierkegaard's is an interesting analysis about the genesis of morality (not that I think of things like this so much, but it is important the way it contributed to Freud's famous psycho-metaphysics):

K first points out that it cannot be the case that Adam could at once be innocent and know the difference between good and evil. Of course, the story says Adam is first innocent, but then how is guilt at all possible if the prohibition is meaningless simply because Adam has not yet learned of its nature? This will come after the disobedience. Prior to this, all Adam has is authoritative compliance. So the impulse to bite the apple is the first act of true freedom, and, alas, discovery of consequences. Adam is a child. But then: the whole concept rests with, begins with, the assumption of a commandment, one that insists Adam obey commandments. Adam first has to have this belief in place, but this belief is not fixed and is fragile, assailable, for Adam does have the option to disobey, which is freedom, an essential condition of our existence..

The child first is born into a kind of animalistic servitude to its own desires, and this innocence is challenged by the commandment, which is disobeyed (probably the first sin is concupiscence. What Eve really gives Adam is lust). Eden is the infants crib, a place of polymorphous sexual perversity, as Freud thought of it, in which there is a feeling of absolute power, the breast comes at one's insistence, as does relief from all discomfort.

The apple is a symbol of freedom and the discovery of anxiety and guilt and sin. Later, the apple will become the sin of the race---- the expansion of culture such that it rules one's desires and drives one away from the father. This is sublimation, and so what we call civilized living Kierkegaard calls inherited sin, this erection of social institutions and indulgences that displaces the father's commandments.

Something like that.

Will there be a trial of the soul after all? — javi2541997

Far be it for me to be father confessor. But I can say with considerable thought behind it, that many of the things we are told are taboo are just historical contrivances. One rule in my book: do no harm. Okay, two: pursue love, and peace and all those lovely passé hippie values. Outside of that, there is the structure of behavior norms held by a consensus, and there you are in the middle.

You know, be careful!

True, killing the child is bad, no way around it. Brilliant. But could it be that that does not illustrate that the Ethical/Moral isn't entirely a human construction(s), nor that there is an inherent to the Universe, and absolute Ethical/Moral? But rather, the universal antipathy to killing a child is seated in our organic natures. Sure, our morality was constructed on the Foundations of the first dozen times we began re-presenting that organic drive/anti-drive against infanticide. But the universal and absolute--which, you sold me, I totally agree--antipathy is Nature in this particular case, not Ethics. — ENOAH

Well, you'd have to put aside ideas like our organic nature, as well as any naturalistic assumptions about the world. It's not that these are not true, but that the one thing that demonstrates the validity of moral realism is the phenomenon itself, not the historical, evolutionary, scientific framework we are so used to putting things in as a kind of default explanatory setting. One simply stands before the world and examines the presupposed underpinnings that general knowledge claims never notice. So, without going into paragraphs about this, just consider: there you are, and you put your finger into a flame and keep it there, just to be a good scientist and observe pain objectively. You are not interested in how the nerves deliver signals to neurochemistry, or the evolutionary advantages of having such a system, or the evolutionary psychology that might find young life most precious. All of these are important ways to interpret the world, but here, we are isolating the phenomenon as a distinct classificatory distinction not at all unlike what, say, a geologist does when she describes a sample of quartz, first looking to the distinguishing qualities, then aligning them with the standard model.

So the first order of business is simple description: what IS pain, examined like this? All other classificatory modes in abeyance. Observe your finger. The burning finger, the destruction of tissue, the auto-response to pull away, and so on, but none of this quite exhausts the phenomenon before you. Something more than the empirical observations is there, in the pain. One needs no convincing of this, and it is a confusion to insist on such a thing, for this classification is the moral dimension of pain: the bad. The Bad defies reduction to or references to other things. It is a stand alone quality you witness. A "presence" that is descriptively singular and irreducible. And it cannot mitigated of interpreted away.

While it's likely there was deliberately no logic. If there was, I'd wager this:

While sequestered he was not alone, but with his Body, and thus one with everything.

The reporter reminded him of his Subject (because Subject requires Other) and thus the seeming utter isolation/alienation.

But ultimately, we are utterly not alone; neither in Body where we are one with Nature/Reality, nor in Mind where we are one with History/Maya. — ENOAH

Well, let's not forget the presence of divinity, a metaphysical term that refers to love. As a term, it is woefully inadequate, for it has a lot of connotative baggage associated with it. This is one the the remedies of meditation: it is "reductive" in that is suspend the familiar language that would otherwise dominate the understanding. 'Love" is far worse, so bound up in romantic squabbles and other BS. But the experience of love is happiness, and happiness is not about anything. It is about nothing. It has no object. True, love is generally about the significant other, but the feeling one has while in it is an unqualified happiness, at least until the inevitable heartbreak. One walks on air. Love has to be liberated from language and culture to be understood for what it is.

It is a great guidance to feel myself better. But, sadly, I don't always understand Kierkegaard. This is due to my lack of knowledge about religious topics. Thus, th content of the Bible or Christian dilemmas. Being a spectator of K coming from an atheist background is fascinating, but I assume I lack key points that maybe a person with a religious background would have. For example: An atheist background would affect me in the sense of denying the existence of a spirit. Thanks to K, I learned this actually exists, and I can experience a tormenting trial of the soul because I often suspended my ethics. — javi2541997

No, to be honest. I don't think it is the lack of a religous orientation. If anything, this is an advantage. His most serious work is not about this at all. Have you read The Concept of Anxiety, A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin? Idiosyncratic and a very difficult work to take in. It was for me. But Kierkegaard was responding to Hegel. One has to read Hegel. I haven't read the entire Phenomenology of Spirit, but perhaps soon I'l take a month off from reality and do it justice. Of course, Hegel was responding to Kant. Now, the Critique of Pure Reason is a must.
It is not the case that K was so religiously bound that one had to know the bible and the story of Abraham and Christian metaphysics to understand him. He really was a very disciplined philosopher. A genius, and too clever for clarity. I suspect your trouble with K is the same trouble others have with him: they haven't read what K read and can't figure out what he is talking about. He assumes the reader knows! Everybody in his time that would read him, had read Hegel, who was all the rage. As to the existence of spirit, do you think religious people understand what spirit is? Of course not. K analyzes the self through the story in Genesis about Adam and Eve and the Garden, etc. See the very intro how he lays his critical review of how badly historical authorities have dealt with this. As you read, you see it has almost nothing to do with scriptures or belief. It is purely analytical.

You often suspend your ethics? Errrr, that doesn't sound so good.

So you mean W told us not to "speak" of these things, not to preserve the dignity of logic, but to preserve the profundity of these things which are before/beyond both speaking and logic. Right? — ENOAH

Yeah. I think this right. Gotta have a lot of respect for a person who insisted on going to the front lines in WWI because he wanted to know what it meant to face death. He was no armchair philosopher. His brothers, three of them, committed suicide. This was a genius endowed as well as passionate family of people. Loved Beethoven. Hated the idea of trivializing such a thing in a philosophical thesis. Value is unspeakable.

1. Are you saying there is an ontological "Real" for Morals/Ethics, and that that "Real" is good vs bad? That these are what is indefeasible, or, absolute?

2. Why aren't "good" and "bad" also just "features of a society's entanglements"? Granted, I see that good and bad speak to the pith and substance of ethics. But why isn't Ethics itself, right down to its pith and substance, a functional construct? — ENOAH

Because of the good and the bad. Take an ethical case, one particularly striking to make the point. I am given the choice, either torture an innocent child for a minute, or else a thousand children will be tortured for hours and hours. the principle of utility is clearly applicable here, and I should choose the lesser evil. But then, note how this works compared to a case of mere contingency, as with a bad sofa or a bad knife: a bad knife is bad because it is dull, poorly balanced, etc. But what if the knife is for Macbeth? Well then, what is good is now bad, because we don't want anyone to get hurt. This is how contingency works. There is no absolute standard dictating what good knives are. But the torturing of the child, this is in no way undone or even mitigated by the choice of utility. Indeed, there is nothing that can mitigate this, and this is the point. It isimpossible for the the pain to be other than bad, even when contextualized to make it the preferred ethical choice. The bad is indefeasibly bad.

And the good as well can be argued like this. We don't notice this because all of our ethical decisions are entangled in a world of facts and the complexity they impose on our thinking. But when the value-essence is abstracted from these complexities, we discover a dimension to ethics that cannot be undone. We expect this kind of apodicticity in logic, of course. But certainly not existentially!

This is NOT to say there is some Platonic "form of the good and bad" that resides in "ultimate reality". It is merely being descriptive of the world.

It's a dramatic way of putting it, but I believe this means 'the negation of ego'. 'Not my will but thine', in the Christian idiom. Dying to the self. It is fundamental to religious philosophy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Another passage from the Buddhist texts. 'The Tathagata' is the Buddha (means 'thus gone' or 'gone thus'. 'Reappears' refers to being reborn in some state or other. 'Vaccha' is Vachagotta, a wandering ascetic who personifies the asking of philosophical questions in the early Buddhist texts. )

Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Both does & does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Neither reappears nor does not reappear' doesn't apply."
— Aggi Vachagotta Sutta — Wayfarer

Interesting to see how language falls apart when these threshold experiences call for expression. But it is not language as such that is at fault. Rather, it is that something new has manifested, and the shared vocabularies we have can't respond because they haven't yet achieved intersubjective agreement as other things have. A step further, our inherited structured experiencing of the world, something that issues from language itself, prohibits such things. Perhaps you will find what Derrida says here interesting:

“The system of “hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak” through the phonic substance which presents itself as the nonexterior, nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier-has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical, etc.”

The idea here is that this monolog/dialog of one speaking to oneself, which we call thinking, has a prohibitive structure of its own. Talking about Foucault and Beckett, see the way Antoaneta Dontcheva puts it:

Headed toward death, writes Foucault, ”language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits.” (Foucault, 1977, p.54) And Beckett gave birth to its own image.

As I see it, the Tathagata emerges when this identity in mirrors, that is, this speaking that is spoken in its own constitutive delimitation that is the "I" of me, is suspended. The question that presses upon this is one of identity, the identity of one's agency as a self. Does one have such a thing when the language lights go out? See, finally, the way Beckett's Molloy, dying, grasps for "life" as death vanquishes his living self:

‘I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I
must say them until they find me, until they say me . . .’ (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable, quoted in DL, 215)

When language ceases, the self ceases, that is, the self of everyday living constructed in a social world. Meditation, the kind dedicated and rigorous, makes a truly radical move toward the death of agency. Unless, there is something that underlies this "room of mirrors" reality that speaks what it IS.

I am convinced there is. Very much so. But this goes into argument that are not demonstrable in a language. It gets interesting when one sees that even where language is self annihilating, as in the expression you mention above, language understands this. I mean I, you, others who think along these lines, understand this, albeit as a profound mystery, and so the such delimitations perhaps are not so delimiting? Wittgenstein's Tractatus is notoriously self contradictory for just this reason. But remember, I say, even in this discussion about the nature of language, we are still facing language's own indeterminacy. I have no idea, really, of what language is. It is buried in metaphysics. As am I.

as its annihilation is likely impossible. — ENOAH

Buddhists are a strange bunch. I have read of those who are buried alive breathing through straws. There is that story of the sequestered monk asked by an intruding reporter if he was ever lonely, replying, not until you showed up.
Solitude is an extraordinary thing.

f one assumes the concept of moral development, I would argue that the lack of progress towards an active moral conscience correlates to the lack of variation in one’s exposure to morality and ethics as practices and principles. In other words, it is the lack of variation in one’s life experience (ie. the trial and error of a moral dilemma, like whether it was right or wrong to lie to your parents), and a lack of variety in the consideration of other moral principles and practices as found in the record of moral literature, that inhibits the growth of the conscience. As a parable, how might the Buddha have come to suggest the middle way or reach enlightenment if he himself hadn't lived through a variety of extremes? — NOS4A2

I tend to agree with most of this. But I would just add that it is just a beginning. Certainly, ethics emerges out of a culture full of nuanced thinking and behavior. But there is in this a question of ontology: what IS ethics? This is about the nature of ethics and looks into whether or not there is something about ethics that is absolute. I, for one, am a moral realist, meaning I think that after the incidental features of a society's entanglements, features that are not ethical in themselves, like the rules that settle ethical matters that are spontaneously accepted and in play, are suspended, there is a, call it a residual value-in-being. Case in point: I am ethically prohibited from knocking the old woman down and taking her money. We have laws against this, and we could argue about how the laws might apply, how mitigating circumstances might apply, how analysis that reveals justification might "defeat" the principle prohibiting the action, as so on. But these entanglements conceal the nature of ethics itself for the question is not raised here if there is anything indefeasible about these affairs.

It is commonly accepted that one has a prima facie obligation to obey the law, and generally, to behave decently. But what is decent is a contingent matter, each social world having its own ways of living. But the Real the underpins ethical entanglements and makes ethics what it IS, is value, and by value I mean the good and the bad that generates obligation outside of, logically prior to, the language constructs we use. Remove the dimension of value, and ethics vanishes.

Kierkegaard didn't want to be a philosopher in the literal sense, and he, in opposition to Hegel, didn't preach Christianity as an illusion. K also considered himself an undoubtedly Lutheran, etc. I personally think Kierkegaard felt more comfortable debating about theology, the Bible and Christian Ethics. He became a philosopher accidentally. I see him as one of the representatives of existentialism. I really like K and I always like to get deeper in his thoughts. I think this has already been discussed here but Kierkegaard, apart from other things, is dialect! He used specific words in Danish which are difficult to translate into our languages, like 'anfægtelse' which means 'spiritual trial'. Kierkegaard shows the anguish inherent to the authentic God-relationship and also the dangerous possibility of the individual imagination's. It is here that Kierkegaard's emphasis upon individual responsibility. — javi2541997

I don't think this is all right. Just a few things: He did his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, on Socrates, and he was completely aware of the philosophical issues of his day. He was a "religious writer" but analytic through and through. So I don't think it was accidental. The Concept of Anxiety is written by a very strong academic if with an idiosyncratic style. But on the other hand, he was not a typical dry humorless intellectual. You can see why he loved Socrates so much: irony is the soul of wit. And Luther. Consider what he says here:

The Smalcald Articles expressly teach: hereditary sin is so profound and detestable a corruption in human nature that it cannot be comprehended by human understanding, but must be known and believed from the revelation of the Scriptures. This assertion is perfectly compatible with the explanations, for what comes out in these are less terms of reasoned thinking thinking than the pious feeling (with an ethical intent) that vents its indignation over hereditary sin, takes on the role of accuser, and now, in something like a feminine passion and the intoxication of a girl in love, is concerned only with making sinfulness and its own participation in it more and more detestable, itself included, so that no word is harsh enough to describe the individual’s participation.

Not a very flattering account of Luther regarding his position on original sin. But I haven't read everything he said on Luther, and I am sure he appreciated the 95 theses posted on Wittenberg's door. Luther was a very sincere rebel, as was Kierkegaard.

But yes, K was very disturbed in his struggles with faith, his long nights of inner struggle. Good thing he didn't marry Regina Olsen.

But the idea I was trying to offer is, how does a "deeply spiritual" person proceed? I am certainly not against such a thing, but I think one has to rethink Kierkegaard as a model for spiritual guidance. The existential revolt against Hegel's rationalism puts all eyes on existence, one's personal existence. There is a fascinating discussion of this in phenomenology. I think those like you, committed and in earnest, would do well to read the French post Husserlian movement in theo-ontology. Perhaps read a bit of Jean Luc Marion or Michel Henry. Or Emanuel Levinas, who is devilishly abstruse. But this is the power of language, to open ways to understand the world. Really, Heidegger is a must. Not that he was so "spiritual" but that he takes the entire human existence up in such a new light that it can be breath taking. There is a LOT of Kierkegaard in Heidegger's Being and Time. If you want to see how K's original thinking is laid out in massive exposition that breaks away from tiresome metaphysics, then this is the work to read.

As I read H, I come closer to what I want to understand about human spirituality.

Sorry Astrophel, annihilation? Would you accept, a rest, vacation, respite? I think I know what you mean, but meditation is a simultaneous turning away from "existence" and turn toward Reality, or True Being. — ENOAH

Here is a question: what is the self? There is the thick theory and the thin theory, as a philosopher might put it (discussing issues like euthanasia or abortion, say). Heidegger's is what you could call a thick theory, meaning a self is a social construct, a historical self, a cultural entity whose existence is the collective body of meanings that circulate through the institutions that fill our interests (obviously there is a lot more to it, but for now...). So a self is this constant going to the grocery store, getting married, gossiping about friends and movies, and on and on. Kierkegaard's great complaint was that even the church had yielded to this, reduced to the rituals, assuring sermons and the entire "finitude" of social possibilities related to this institution. I think when it comes to defining what a self is, this "thick" self is what we have available, I mean, ask who I am, and I will tell you what I do, where I work, that I am married with kids, and so forth. So serious meditation is a method of discovery and liberation FROM this mundane self. The more you turn off these sources of interest, the less they possess you.

Of course, if the idea is simply to live a less stressful life, then fine. But this is not what Gautama Siddhartha had in mind so long ago. I have read the Abhidharma which I understand to be as close to the ancient thoughts as it goes, though I know nothing of Pali and the issues of transliteration that keep me from basic meanings, but anyway, I have read a lot of it, and it is a VERY radical doc.

I think, like Abraham's temporary suspension of the ethical ( specifically the law against infanticide, broadly, "existence," our world) meditation as we are using it here, is a temporary reprieve from our world, which removes its obstructions and allows brief glimpses of Truth. But the world has become the inescapable* default setting for humans in human existence.

*I think there might theoretically be a "meditative" process which might allow one to exist in a permanent state of Truth, hence "annihilating" existence; but, man, is that unlikely.

Have I misunderstood? Intruded? — ENOAH

Misunderstood, intruded? Of course not. I only come online in the first place so I can hear what others have to say and see how well I can respond. As I see it, this is how we test, modify our thinking.

Is it temporary? And I think Abraham's faith is abiding. Certainly he went back to tending sheep and goats, and thinking in casual and familiar ways, But you're right, he didn't just stand amazed for the rest of his life. But he did likely stand in "divine grace," which is very different from the familiar. This is where I think Kierkegaard went too far. The "movement" to qualitatively affirm the existence of the self is not a movement that cancels ethics, for the body of rules K wants be subsumed under and defeated by God's authority are themselves of God. This is a long argument. It goes to defining the essence of religion and "metaethics" that is, the essence of ethics.

Philosophy is difficult per se. I never found a philosopher who wrote his essays or texts with clarity. I guess this is one of the main features of philosophy. Furthermore its difficulty, I haven't limited myself to jumping and reading classic philosophical authors. Kierkegaard is the philosopher (or theologian, according to others) who I read the most, and I even reread some of his works, like 'Fear and Trembling'. I don't attempt to diminish the great quality and quantitative value of philosophy. It is very important, and I am always interested in it. Nonetheless, I have been coming through different perspectives thanks to reading Kazantzakis and Dostoevsky. I hadn't accordingly rated Christian Ethics with sincerity until I read those authors. They changed my view on life, and well, thanks to them, I discovered an important premise in my beliefs: I fully believe I have a spirit (which can be corrupted by bad actions), but I struggle with religious faith/dogmas. — javi2541997

Dostoevsky opens the mind to miserable frustrations of reconciling faith with the world. If you read D. then you are already exercising the disillusionment that looks deeper than religion can go. Kierkegaard is a radical philosopher, complaining about the church as an institution, on the one hand, and Hegel on the other, and I take this latter to be most insightful: I would here briefly mention the themes K puts to philosophy. Our existence and its indeterminacy, especially its ethical indeterminacy. This will show up in phenomenological thought (though Kant was a phenomenologist. The true progenitor of this thinking) and is at the heart of the problem I am trying to make clear here: Religion has an essence, and one has to remove one's thinking from the endless narratives, religious, literary or otherwise.

There comes the point at which one simply has to see that reading Dostoevsky or serious literature in general is the beginning, as it announces the question of our existence in the light of metaethics, which is the question we put before all others. The question of why we are born to suffer and die. But the question like this begs other questions, and this is philosophy's job! For the question is not, if you will, primordial, not yet, because the nature of good and evil haven't yet been exposed, and this brings inquiry to the direct encounter with the world, and we leave literature behind, as well as the Greeks, Kant and everyone else (though they raise up later, modified), for all questions lead back to the world, back to what it is we are trying understand: our being-in-the-world. To understand why we are born to suffer and die, we have understand what we mean by these terms, and these term are in-the-world, in our existence. So, what is our existence, I mean, and most emphatically, what is this IN the most direct apprehension of the world? What is missing in familiar even technical scientific thought?

It begins with questions that are embedded in our existence and have to be discovered. It ends with an account that is the most "sincere" possible, which is staying with the world, not allowing contrived thinking and tradition to pull you away from it. One is now a scientist and onto-theology is the study of the way the world presents the need, crisis, and foundation for our existence in the world. Sure, there are sage things said by religious leaders, but these are as a non scientist would think about physics or biology. Heidegger can take on deep into inquiry, into a "disembodied" conception of the self, that is, a self conceived apart from the primacy of scientific physicalism, what can be called scientific metaphysics, which is implicit and pervasive in everyday thinking. Thinking needs to be explicitly liberated.

The most radical approach? Meditation. This is another route. Where Kierkegaard holds that he can never be a knight of faith because he could never truly suspend the ethical as Abraham did, meditation goes further (as yet not as far): meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence". Abraham is simply suspended, as are daily affairs, politics, one's personality, everything. Suspended, put out of play, forgotten. All in search of one's true primordial self, which is rapturous.

It is not necessary to take all those religious concepts are granted and I fully respect the people who don't buy sacred texts and ideas. Due to religious books are always that controversial, I wonder if I can believe I have a spirit without getting tangled in religion or not. — javi2541997

Buying into sacred texts or not doing so is beside the point, I am arguing. It is a matter of going beneath these texts so as to liberate thought from just bad metaphysics. Philosophy is mostly negative, for it spoils belief, throws questions at assumptions that want to be left alone. Nothing survives in popular religion as it is stated from the pulpit. But, heh heh, like a phoenix, out of the ashes of bad metaphysics, there arises, I hold and try to argue, a singular primoridiality. Calling this God just, as Wittgenstein was so aware, works to undo what it IS. Being in love, for example, is irreducible in the the metaphysics of this, in the meta-question, what is love? Same goes for pain. Put a lighted match to you finger---now you are truly IN the world most intimately, no?

Exactly. This is one of the main concerns I exchanged with MU. It is unfair that the Church seems to be the only place where my spirit may be heard. Some institutions take natural worries as part of them... — javi2541997

The church will give you nonsense and faith. Kierkegaard knew this!! But then, one myth for another, for, for K, science, culture, reason stood entirely outside faith. Faith is the "qualitative movement" that even K couldn't make. But K didn't understand, like Witt (who adored Kierkegaard), that the prohibition against speaking was only a structural delimitation, and is no limitation on content. Divinity no more lies beyond language than this I call my cat. What they didn't get is that the world at the threshold of metaphysics is an open door for discovery.

Of course you are sincere about wanting spiritual understanding. But is it the kind of sincerity that motivates you to make the painful decisions to actually change the way you live and breathe? Could you, for example, start meditating for several hours a day? Now THAT is sincerity! How about difficult philosophical reading?

There are dimensions of the discovery process that in themselves seem to have nothing to do with spirituality, but nevertheless stand as the very constituting basis for what is there in the world that makes the 2question ever arise in the first place. To address such a thing, you must change the questions. Popular religions don't do this because they are dogmatic, which closes inquiry. One must be open to inquiry FIRST. This is the point.

How to do this? One must find the most basic questions about our existence. Whether or not Jesus is our lord and savior, e.g., is not one of these questions, because it assumes what needs to be explained, namely, what is it in the human condition that needs saving? (It is not saying Jesus is NOT the savior, but saying rather that when we speak like this, what are we saying?) What is this about, this terms that are so much in play when religion discussed, terms like redemption, the soul, divinity, holiness, heaven and hell, the glory of God, miracles, eschatology, and so on? And how about their philosophical counterparts: the problem of the good (metaethics), the self (our existence) and the consummation its liberation, the impossible, the purpose found therein? Frankly, the matter gets wickedly difficult because one seeks something so occluded by historical institutions and these have to be argued out of one's thinking. This is why Heidegger is such a bitch to read, for he is trying to take a completely new course of thought that takes the entire history of philosophy and extracts (with emphasis on the Greeks) what survives the reduction to simplicity (primordiality) in the descriptive enterprise of revealing what it means for us to exist.

These ideas are at the very heart of spirituality, and one must understand them. Read Kierkegaard (in some ways worse than Heidegger in Sickness Unto Death or The Concept of Anxiety) and you will find great talent for cutting to the chase, but he is, as Heidegger called him, a religious writer. Regardless, he had read Kant and Hegel thoroughly. It is a discussion that will radically change your thinking and perceiving of the world. You don't have to master all this (the Greeks through Derrida) at all. Just get in the boat and start paddling.

A real test of one's sincerity.

You said: "My basic point is that I always have a deep spiritual concern for morality and values." There are genuine ways to approach this issue philosophically. Spirituality is not a term so irrational that it defies discussion, in fact, it is the kind of thing one finds in the very essence of philosophy once mundane conversations are put on hold and more penetrating inquiry is desired. I am simply pointing out that if you are sincere about this, but you are fed up with with the wishy washy thinking and the equally deplorable dogma of popular religions, and want something substantive and meaningful that is not instantly assailable, then philosophy can accommodate. It does take some work, though. Sincere people are willing to put in the work.

You must be setting a pretty high bar, then. Do you have any examples of those you think might have? — Wayfarer

Yes, I am aware this sounds high minded, but there is nothing to stop one from second guessing philosophers. Everyone does this all the time. Why Witt? Referring to the Tractatus: I find no limits to what can be said at all in the structural features language. Language is entirely open to possibilities. the limitations that do exist have to do with the mundane interpretations we are locked into when we see these as absolutes. Kierkegaard wrote about ethics a lot, in Fear and Trembling and many other places, but one is struck by his model for surpassing ethics with faith, Abraham, who was ready to put the sacrificial knife into Isaac just like that! K argues that such faith is impossible for him, but defensible.at a level beyond his own faith. I argue that K's thinking about ethics fails to understand the metaethical grounding that stands apart from mere principled thinking. I argue that our ethics is grounded in the absolute, and is already part and parcel of divinity. As Witt himself put it (in Culture and Value), the good is divinity

And what is the essence of religion, which I assume you have tracked down? — BC

It's complicated. In short, religion is reducible to the indeterminacy of our ethics and aesthetics. Note how Wittgenstein put these on his list of unmentionables. He knew the reason one could not speak of these is because they have a dimension to their existence which has no place in the facts or state of affairs of the world, and are hence unspeakable. It is not that he wanted to draw the line so as to preserve the dignity of logic. He rather wanted to preserve the profundity of the world, not to have it trivialized by some reduction to mere fact.

But this is just grazes the issue. One has to inquire about the foundational indeterminacy of our existence to discover the essence of religion.

Just to repeat what I just said, it looks like you are looking for religion in all the wrong places. You must begin and end with the world. The trouble with this lies with the assumptions about the world that inquiry hasn't even touched for most, assumptions that make faith look absurd. Kierkegaard was right about many things, as was Wittgenstein, but I argue they failed to understand religious metaphysics.

I still haven't finished forcing myself to believe in God anyway. — javi2541997

I've read through much of this thread, and it occurs to me that you are putting terms into play that are through and through ambiguous at best, and cry out for clarification. How can you talk about believing in God when the term is so bloated with historical and metaphysical extravagance?

Ask first, what is the essence of religion? How does a term like 'god' have any justification at all? I hold that it does, but you have track it down like anything else to discover what the essence of religion is. Looking for a religious connection without understanding what religious really is at all is going to end in disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let him tell you:

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

And later:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History and language are neutralized.