This reminds me of Foucault’s research showing that the Victorian era, which many see as a time of the repression of sex , was also time of incessant talking about and interest in sex. The repression of sex and obsession with it went together. The sexual revolution, then, was not simply a liberation from an anti-sex position but a furthering of a sex-oriented culture established in Victorianism. — Joshs

I recall in Madness and Civilization how institutions create a vocabulary of pathology, and thereby create, to an extent, pathology itself; but also, as Zizek (loved and not so loved) put it, freedom seeks a new vocabulary to define what it is, and thereby becomes greater manifest freedom.

According to my recent reading on recognition, people who have any kind of non-binariness probably experienced neglect in childhood, so that they never developed a clear sense of self, which requires being recognized by others. So if someone tells you they have no favorite football team, you can ask them if they were neglected. They probably were. — frank

So, the reason I find political categorical rigidity unable to express the fullness of complex ideas is because.....I was neglected as a child?

Someone who self-identifies as non-binary is strongly left with regard to whatever trait he's describing. That is the connotation of that word. If you simply mean you're politically independent or unaffiliated, then using those terms will eliminate the confusion you're creating by borrowing a term from gender orientation and sexual preference discussions that is used almost exclusively by those to the far left. — Hanover

You're right about the connotative play of that word, but in a political context only. Pull out of this polarized political thinking, and move into, say, talk about post modern criticism of "binary" language structures, and this connotation vanishes. And regarding this political connotative environment where terms are in play, I can think of few things less transitory, considering how terms can be thrust into the conversation, rejected, then discover to have staying power and become standard. Of course, it IS the left that creates these new conversations, because the left thinks, and generates analytical terminology, and it is the right (putting aside the issue of the binary nature of talk about left and right for now) that is forced to respond, albeit negatively and derisively, and in doing so, encourage their entrenchment.

In other words, political contexts of connotative impositions are "soft" in their authority to designate meaning.

Not politically unaffiliated; as I said, I decidedly lean democratic. And not creating confusion. Quite the opposite. Binary thinking creates confusion by stating simply something that is not simple at all. But then, that is the nature of language in all things. Thought is inherently binary.

And note what I said about the way social analyses of the left become an accepted part of the conversation in the very resistance of the right. Something like lgbtq is now a fixity, or "rainbow coalition," even if it is prefaced with "so called" by the opposition.

One who sincerely identifies as politically non-binary doesn't alert me to any uncertainty as to his social views, as if that person bounces between trans rights advocacy and opposition to gay marriage. "Non-binary" expresses a worldview, which included within it is the self perception that one is more open to a multitude of political views than their opponents, which you have expressed. I'd submit though your position is probably better described as being more open to challenges to the status quo, but that necessarily limits the sorts of views you would be open to. It's not a difference in open mindedness. It's a difference in values, particularly as to how you might weigh the value of promoting merit versus pluralistic participation. — Hanover

I look at it like this: Binary views of any kind implies a simplicity that ignores complexity. In gender identification, one may experience thw world in ways that are not at all represented by a binary determination, and being non binary here is a matter of accommodating feelings, needs, desires that do not conform to this either/or imposition. And so it is with a political view: As for me, I do not agree with the simplicity of a party affiliation, democrat or republican in the US, meaning my views are more complex than this, though I lean decidedly liberal, just as a my gender preferences may fall outside of the strict designation, though I lean toward the simplicity of the traditional model.

This is the way I look at being non-binary in anything. It is a defiance of categorical conformity, of the authority of a simple designation that attempts to reduce complexity to thoughtless complicity.

Consider the phrase, "I am politically nonbinary.". Do you discern the speaker's intent differently if they are liberal or conservative? — David Hubbs

I like the term, myself. Of course, it sounds like some liberal (like me) trying to bring awkward, non standard phrasing into an established discourse, but this is true of lgbtq and a great many other things in contemporary language, things that never existed a few decades ago. I like it because it alerts us to the openness of thinking. Binary thinking, that is, thinking at all, is ALWAYS assailable, doubtable, contingent, and we should know this, even as we march against kings.

What is the significance of seeing opposites as complementary? How useful or 'true' are such conceptions and what significance does it make in how life is lived? I would argue that the idea of good and evil as aspects of a larger whole is a fuller picture and one which allows for a less aggressive approach to 'otherness'. I see it as relevant to so much conflict in the world. What do you think? — Jack Cummins

Putting conflict aside, and putting aside the binary definitions, narratives: to address good and evil, one has to first look to their essence: what ARE they? And why would a rigorous thinker like Wittgenstein hold, in Culture and Value, that "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics"? (This from one who carried Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief wherever he went, for a time).

Whatever one inquires about at the basic level, one is always committed to being-in-the-world and the bottom line for analysis. Ethics (and aesthetics) is variable only, as Max Scheler put it (Formalism in Ethics and Non Formal Ethics in Value), in purpose, intentions, use, because these are themselves variable, the entanglements we all have in society and culture make them so, not because the good itself is variable. An analytic of the Good suspends all contingencies in order to move to an analytic (where binary thinking emerges, for all analytic thinking is categorical, because language itself is categorical) of the good as such, and here the Good gets very weird. What IS it? Something Good is different from mere states of affairs. Moore said called the essence of the ethical a "non natural property (though he said a lot of other things far less enlightened. And they say Principia Ethica was derivative. I'll leave it at that). Analyze an ethical issue, and you will find the Good and the Bad there, staring back at you; if not, it is not an ethical issue. 'Value' is the foundational word here. Wittgenstein knew that value/ethics/aesthetics could not be reduced to facts and language possibilities, for once the reduction was complete, there remained this very mysterious dimension that "we bring into" the world. The Good and the Bad, in this level of thinking, can only be "observed" apriori.

I can only approach understanding this philosophy, never be as solid as you. I am convinced that Henry is close to, well, heh, heh, the one true view.

I take it that here "experience" means "our experience." So the Earth becomes what it is because we experience it, not because form is itself intellectual. Yet if nothing is prior to man (or life), if we rule out any distinctions in being that are actual prior to finite consciousness, why would consciousness be one way and not any other? Why would we be men and not centaurs? The sky blue and not purple? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I found your ideas interesting, loaded with questions. Here: Someone like Rorty would say a discussion like this is just bad metaphysics, and thereby creates its own issues removed from what the world "gives". I don't agree with Rorty on many things, but here he is right. "Prior" refers to some substratum of the "world" without the perceptual act's contribution. But such a term is borrowed from familiar contexts only and to bring it into a conversation necessarily brings ordinary delimitations to bear upon it, and this finitizes what stands outside finitude, meaning this: appearances cannot be treated as derivative or contingent on what what cannot be identified at all. Why is the sky blue? is a question that belongs to science, and philosophy, I argue, has nothing to say about this. But to bring the principle of sufficient cause, looking for a "cause" on the "outside" side of experience that makes experience what it is, carries the assumption that talk of causes belongs to metaphysical relations, and the question follows on the heels of this: What metaphysics are you talking about if this is supposed to be about what is "outside" of experience? Stepping beyond experience....does this make sense?

Not to say something like experience is a radical delimitation of all meaningful propositions, for the point here is not to defend any delimitations at all. The world remains the world, and what is discovered in this world is open. I am arguing that a lot of philosophy deals with invented issues. But then, if you want responsible metaphysics, there really is such a thing in the world, and it is in clear sight, if neglected and "forgotten" sight, and it is all too forthcoming.

There seems to me to be a crucial difference between acknowledging that the experience of finite creatures is always filtered through their cognitive apparatus and denying the actuality of being as such prior to creatures' finite conscious awareness of it. The latter move puts potency prior to act if the idea is that the two (finite mind and world ) are the result of self-generation, with nothing outside this process. The world becomes the result of a self-moving process which, having nothing prior to it, is random. That is, sheer potency moving itself to generate the world, potency "co-constituting itself" into determinant actuality ex nihilo (or eternally I suppose, but the eternal framing doesn't make the question of quiddity, why being is one way and not another, any less acute). It's the same sort of issue you get with the physicalist claim that being and quiddity are "brute facts." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Filtered? Well, what is being filtered?

What is arbitrary, really, is the failure to acknowledge the world as it "is" as a stand alone givenness. To understand what this is requires first to be alert to its presence and no more, and there is nothing arbitrary about this, nothing needed to stabilize its presence, for such a need is, again, lifted from a totality finite possibilities, then needlessly thrust into a meta-explanation about what is NOT existence. We cannot have a discussion like this that makes apriori demands about requirements "behind" the solid presence of things, for there is no "behind" to conceive. A bit like talking about two continental plates colliding, erupting into mountains and volcanic activity, etc., and then asking about the nature of the collision apart from erupting into mountains and vocanic activity. But the collision IS the eruption, the seismic movements, the friction and its heat, and so on. The essence of the cup on the table is discovered in the revealed features of the cup on the table, and nothing more. Its being there is exhausted by the evidential ground of its being there.

You wrote, "sheer potency moving itself to generate the world, potency "co-constituting itself, yet in order for something to co-constitute itself, there must be two of something in the constitution, and this is not the case. One can go two ways in discussing ontology: One is Heidegger's, and this would be to talk about equiprimordiality at the basic level, which just means when analysis turns to issues of ontology, one is faced with the structure of experience (dasein) which is complex. The other is where my thoughts lie: There really IS a foundational primordiality to existence (and I do not divide "my existence" from "existence"; they are one. A very difficult point to understand, for generally, one is analytically bound to divisive categorical thinking, and this pins thought), and this lies in its transcendental phenomenality, transcendental because it is stand alone, or, standing as its own presupposition (what you call co-constitution). There is no interposing intentionality that undoes the absolute immanence. Michel Henry takes the structure of existence, our existence, which is the only, well, "place" you will find existence (and this by no means at all closes analytical possiblities), and pursues Husserl's Cartesian reduction beyond Husserl, and exposes a radical disclosure at the heart of being-in-the-world. Pure phenomenality cannot be gainsaid, and this most emphatically is about the affective or meta ethical/meta aesthetic dimension of our existence. This is, notwithstanding Heidegger, one "true" (truth as alethea) reality (presumptuous as it sounds).

Another difficulty is that if things' actuality is not prior to their being known, then it's hard to see how they could have any essence. All predication would be accidental (or essential, the difference is collapsed) and so there would be no pre se predication. Rather, things change what they essentially are when known differently. You get all the issues of Heraclitus, without the Logos as an ad hoc backstop. Presumably, there might be ways to iron this out, but it comes to mind. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But for this you would have make a move to actuality that has never been, nor can be witnessed. A fiction. But to be aligned with what is given in the world, a thing's actuality IS its being known. It has to be overcome that things have some secret identity, perhaps like Kantian noumena, that simply must be there. In fact, your claim that "all predication would be accidental is a LOT like Kant's attempt to explain the need to postulate noumena. You can see how uncomfortable Kant is having to talk like this, given the way he annihilates metaphysics: noumena is "just a concept" that has no meaning at all, a place holder for an undesirable absence, because...there must be "something"! Fo course, he gives no gravity to, or not nearly enough, there more basic insight that 'something' is a concept, and belongs to finitude's phenomena.


Of course, there are things here and there and over there, next to the mountain, and so on, but these are declared to be what they are in OUR existence, and not only the Kantian synthetic structures of pure logic, but moods, attitudes, memories, anticipation, contextuality, and so on (as well as the "uncanniness" of Being). The "over thereness" of that train depot simply cannot be conceived "outside" of its "hereness". The trouble that it can is the residuum of naturalism that intrudes into philosophy, which is understandable given how pervasive it is in general affairs and education; but naturalism falls away when basic questions are raised almost instantly.


Essence, what something IS. Of course, language is inherently contingent (accidental, if you like) in that concepts are part of a totality that gives contexts for meanings to arise, and essences are conceived, historical, part of a cultural evolvement. In philosophy, essences deal with basic ideas, like what it is for something to be/have an essence, and if I understand you, essences require consistency, repeatable results, if you will: what IS nitroglycerin? Part of its essence lies in the fact that if hurled, of a certain quantity and velocity, against a hard surface, it will explode, and consistently repeatably explode in rigorous testing. Of course, there is nothing apriori about this essence, and logic would not bat an eye if tomorrow it stopped doing this. Anyway, this is how objects can come by their essences. We create essences, also. What IS Toyota, the car maker? This essence was made.

So what does it mean to require the world itself, where essences' possibilities are grounded (due to consistencies like nitro's), to have an essence? Prior to talk about some abiding metaphysical essence, what makes the world as such "consistent," we have to look at what is IN the basic analysis, and this is Time, the apriori structure of existence. It is not that there is nothing outside of time. But that to think about it itself is a temporal act. Heraclitus? Time is Heraclitus' river. The point of this is that the substratum you support has a more basic analysis, and this lies with Time as a foundational feature of existence. Time is ontically (to borrow Heidegger's term referring to, well, normal affairs of thinking and naming) linear, sequential, but analysis shows it is here we find the true ground for metaphysics, evidenced in the ecstatic nature of Time's structure. Long discussion on this.

Now, the idea that there is only flux prior to our "constructions" mentioned earlier strikes me as different. Here, flux is prior. But this still seems to me to be heading towards the idea of man as the source of the world, if not in the role of God, then at least a demiurge. Are the principles of things contained in the flux (say, virtually), or is the flux a sort of prime matter on which man imposes form and makes everything what it is? And if the latter, from whence this form? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Phenomenological analysis takes the issue to its core. This form stands as its own presupposition.
If it is entirely laid aside that objects, the world, is given to the "openness" of our existence, then analysis has strayed from it content, due to the residuum of naturalistic thinking, the kind of thinking that looks at an object and considers it apart from the perceptual act that produces it. This is disingenuous on the part of many philosophers who got tired of Kant and idealism. Naturalists and scientific metaphysicians know that the epistemic/ontological problems they generate cannot be dealt with on their terms.

By definition.

God is something which may have created us and the world, may be with each of us and every animal and plant, every planet. May be performing a task via these things. May have a purpose in mind. All of these actions are beyond our capacity to understand (unaided). — Punshhh

But none of this is by definition. The essence of God is not determined such that definitional proofs can simply be brought forth. What comes to us is a long history of dogma and theological speculation, and whatever can be analytically derived from this would carry the same arbitrary thinking. One has to drop everything, just as empirical science has dropped nearly everything evolving through the centuries, dropped and added through endless paradigms (as Kuhn puts it) that hold sway and then yield. It is a dialectical process of discovery. But what if something came along that truly was as apodictic (certain) as a logical proof? Or even more so? We think of logic as apodictic, cannot be second guessed, a tautologically structured system, like mathematics, but consider that logic and math are brought to us through language, and language is not apodictic, but is historically wrought out, so when one faces a logical construction, the rigor of insistence is there, but we really cannot say what this IS as absolutely as we are compelled to yield to it. Logic gives us the strongest analytic basis for truth making, but it is entirely abstract, and it is a pure formal truth that "If P, then Q"; "P"; therefore Q. It has no content, just form.
But the world has content, IS content, and this content has always been deemed, as you say about God, infinitely remote (impossible) to determine, for knowledge about the world comes to us from induction, and induction is statistical and indeterminate. Gravity is confirmed in "repeatable results" as science says about its experiments, not apodicticity. Thingscould fall up or sideways, for there is no logical constraint to contain their behavior.
The point is, consider what Husserl says about his phenomenology:

I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing.

Absolute poverty is the clarity of observation, like not having the church interfering with well reasoned thinking about celestial events, dropping all assumptions about what the world is, so as to have before one the world that is there and unassailably so--pure phenomenality, pure presence. Reading through his "Ideas" one discovers his "method": the phenomenological reduction. Now God can be conceived apart from the traditions, the bad metaphysics/theology, the presumptions of science, the clutter of busy thinking. God is a concept of invention, mostly, and this concept is suspended! God emerged out of the language of cultures first, that is, it is a construct made of language possibilities, disregarding along the way, well, the world. The idea is to begin from poverty of thought so as to allow the world to "speak" (gelassenheit, Heidegger's use of the term), to yield to what is there to yield to and allow it to come forward. Here philosophy discovers metaphysics, the Real metaphysics.

Not that all is disclosed, but that disclosure is now in the "right place" and the inexorable enigma (Heidegger again. One MUST read Being and Time. Pretty much my mission in life is to get people to read continental philosophy) of metaphysics is palpable, with a depth of meaning thought impossible. Phenomenology is freedom to realize "God" IN finitude, for finitude never was finitude, but is eternal. In Kantian terms, there can be no line between phenomenon and noumenon. The former IS the latter, and vice versa. Everydayness IS metaphysics.

The mystic does all this internally, rather than inter subjectively. Infact it may not be possible to cover the same ground inter subjectively. Because doing it internally is a much more integrated process of knowing the self, working with the self, developing personal dialogue, narrative and walking the walk. The fact that in the spiritual schools there is direct interaction and communication between teacher and student at a profound level, would indicate that there is a process of guiding and communion going on, which goes well beyond the intellectual and intellectual analysis. — Punshhh

I guess I am asking, what does it mean to guide? Phenomenology is not an invitation to think in the abstract, but to see the world "for the first time". What does this mean? is answered in the process of realization. When one is comfortably encountering the world, one is ensconced in the past as it gives familiarity to the present that makes the anticipation of the future secure. Time separates God from us, you could say.

In fear? Yep. In pain? Yep. In Genghis Khan? Yep. In Nazism? Yep. — Leontiskos

There is no argument or reasoning in "yep". Sounds like you stand by a naïve interpretation without saying why.

On the contrary, Eckhart would say that God is in General Motors, and the one who says otherwise does not understand God. The one who cannot find God where he is is not looking for God:

God is in all things. The more He is in things, the more He is out of things: the more in, the more out, and the more out, the more in. I have often said, God is creating the whole world now this instant. — Leontiskos

Well, with Eckhart, one has to be very careful with context. I mean, what he says belongs to a discussion, and shouldn't be isolated from this for its meaning. Eckhart was not talking about, heh, heh, GM being divine in its nature, GM as a manufacturing institution hiring thousands of people functioning in a thousand ways. He was not saying, say, that the advertising department at GM was doing God's will (though, there are those who hold that America and its businesses are privileged in mind of God. Keeping in mind that Genghis Khan was doing God's work, as well). Read his broader discussion, as well as other sermons and works; see, e.g., On Detachment: "man who stands thus in utter detachment is rapt into eternity in such away that nothing transient can move him, and that he is aware of nothing corporeal and is said to be dead to the world, for he has no taste for anything earthly." This is rather typical of the way he speaks of our relation to God vis a vis the world. But GM?? Surely as transient as it gets, no? I only bring it up to raise the point that language has brought into "existence" a great deal of useful fiction, but it goes deeper than something so obvious, for the question is begged: Why stop with an obvious institution? Is there really a world that language is "about"? Or are all of these just useful fictions as well? I mentioned biology, which carries the same ground for same question: Once there was no biology, so where does its "existence" come from? Surely, 'biology' is just a systemic imposition on what was there prior to the categorical rigor placed upon things. Rorty puts it, " Truth is propositional, and there are no propositions "out there." So what ontological standing does language have? Depends on who you read.

Anyway, regarding that the enigmatic quote you cite above, the question: what the fuck is he talking about? More in, more out..... Eckhart begins by talking about what is within and without at once, citing Paul, and making public the word of God. So looking at this little phrase again:

God is in all things. The more He is in things, the more
He is out of things: the more in, the more out, and the more out,
the more in

So, does this mean God is "in" GM? Yes, but one has to look at "being in" more closely. He says God is divine and intelligible and is in all things, so in all things insofar as all things are divine and intelligible, and the intelligibility of GM and its many facets is of course, qua intelligibility, of God, God being the source, the ground of reason itself. Not qua its being a social construct with a finite purpose, for such being the case would giving the divine endorsement to anything intelligible, like Nazism or well planned child molestations. Divine? The same: the divine as such, not as an institution of corporate interests. Where is the divine "as such" evidenced in GM? This is a longer answer.

Yes, this is also something I work on. But I would say that God is something that is beyond our capacity to either see, or comprehend, while it plays the role of guide, in that we revere it. Commune with it. — Punshhh

The question then is, when it is affirmed that God is something beyond our capacity, from whence comes the ground for this claim? Language opens experience to interpretation. It carries the "non formal" affectivity (intimations of immortality?) into a region of analytic work that puts, explicitly, the mundane into brackets, and this allows the understanding to take hold and do important work. In other words, when we philosophize, we gain access into what is being examined. Language opens what is simple allows elucidation which brings whatis hidden into view, not unlike what a scientist does with her observations, that are at first quit easy and accessible, gravity or acceleration or centrifugal force. A scientist does not know what a force is, but can work up a vocabulary of analytical detail that brings this term into various contexts. making simplicity into complexity, and for a naturalist, a scientist, this opens wide the possiblities. With phenomenology, something rarely even acknowledged is brought out in the same kind of examination, very rigorously, and here is discovered the ground for religion, and God, and divinity, redemption, consummation of "meaning" and importance (see Von Hildebrandt on this. What does it mean for something to be important, not for something, but important as such?)

Now there is discovery where before there was only faith and indeterminacy. This is a very important idea, for now one can research metaphysics by "observing" what has been silent through the centuries; observing "apriori" that is, things unseen, if you will.

Agreed, but the phenomenological approach is so discreet as to be available to a very few who have the capacity. — Punshhh

Yes, right. But if the matter is going to be just left to what those who don't think and study, then the understanding is left with a lot of medieval drivel. This here I am talking about is a plea for taking religion and God seriously enough to put time and work into it in order for DISCOVERY to take place.

when I say beyond us this can be because;
It is a reality which is inconceivable to a being using the human brain to exercise thought.
It may be hidden from us, for some reason, or purpose.
It might require the person to be hosted by the deity, thus enabling them to witness things that we cannot witness unaided. Or to reach some state unaided.

These are the questions that phenomenology must account for when the phenomenologist claims to have an alternative route to the mystical path. It is the realisation of our limited abilities, our human frailty which underpins the religious, or mystical life. That in order to see beyond these limitations a belief, or faith in some form of guidance, or hosting is required. Otherwise we are blind to that which is beyond our scope. And by blind, I don’t mean, haven’t worked it out yet. But rather we are entirely unable to see, we don’t have the eye to see it. — Punshhh

But this sense of "beyond" is speculative, and while I have no doubt that the more one moves into this strange terrain, the more is disclosed, it is not a move into a confirmation of a speculation. It is an openness that is its own disclosure that leaves speculative anticipation altogether, because it is openness itself. But whatis openness? It is found in mundane affairs in the question itself. So how is it that something as familiar and plain as a question be of the same essence as "spiritual enlightenment"?

Phenomenology discovers the supramundane IN the mundane, and reveals that all along in the daily course of things we stood before a world that had extraordinary dimensions of possible insight. Two worlds: my cat as the usual adorable annoying pet, and my cat that is not a cat at all, but something else not bound by "totality" of meanings that circulate through culture, something "Other". This issues goes on and on, and there are tensions here as to the nature of this Other vis a vis the conscious act in which it is encountered, and the term 'intuition' comes into play, and this is a controversial matter, but in the end, it really depends on if one is the kind of person who is capable of "pure eidetic" apprehension, and this refers to pure presence, pure givenness of ordinary things. This is where the epoche takes one, to this unconditioned givenness of the world: one does not go anywhere but realizes that what and where one already is is somewhere else entirely. The only (ontological) divide there ever was lies within the understanding--- the absolute hegemony the habits of familiarity that are always already there, ready to hand at a moment's notice to acknowledge something "as" such and such (a book, a table, a democracy, a right, and on and on), on the one hand, and the freedom (openness,the Greek's "alethea") from all of this on the other.

So getting back your thoughts above, this kind of thing is offered instead of "belief, or faith in some form of guidance, or hosting." Would you want science to take the same approach? Does science rest with these, or is it more rigorous and bound to evidential grounding? Phenomenology is called, and I agree in a qualified way, the science of pure phenomena. It is about a method that takes as its object the realization of he world at the most basic level of apprehension. Analytic schools call this qualia, but have no sense at all of the method that drives inquiry deeper, the phenomenological method that unpopulates, if you will, the horizon of awareness itself, such that the "seeing" is unburdened by the presumptions familiarity, which is no less than the operations of language itself taken as foundational truth, as if what a scientist, the most analytic expression of plain talk, has to say has authority that cannot be gainsaid. Phenomenology says, not only can it be gainsaid, but it can be utterly undone in the face of phenomenological ontology. The slate can be wiped clean! This is the essence of religion, the wiping clean of all the clutter in simple perceptual awareness such that the world finally shows itself, and God is discovered with the consciuosness that beholds.

So "guidance and hosting" does make sense, to correct myself on this, because of this important distinction: science works dogmatically at first, meaning one has to memorize and master complex paradigms before one can move into matters less categorical, and the same holds for phenomenology, for thematically, the world does not hold written on its sleeve the understanding only philosophical inquiry can bring out (the world at the most basic level of analysis is both the most idstant in that no one even begins to suspect such a level even exists, yet the most proximal, for the pure phenomenon is the absolute clarity of the pure presence of all things and there is no "distance" at all between consciousness and presence), but phenomenology is so alien to common sense it is not, not will it ever be, available to most. So the matte of divinity has to be treated symbolically, or "analogically" as Karl Rahner puts it (he thinks the church itself is a sacrament, an analog to heaven). BUT THEN: why not just leave it to the church, a priest or minster and let the Bible (or whatever) do the talking? I think this lead to irrationality and it creates problems out of problems, that is, entirely contrived conceptions about the way the world is, and solutions that are built on this that, as we see in the church today, are bound up with a great deal of bad thinking.

The bridge is quite easy to conceive of, but to surmise what is at the other side of it requires a telescope. To step onto the bridge without knowing which direction to walk, or how to put one step in front of the other, leaves one wandering around in circles. The idea is that a guide is required. A guide who can provide you with a telescope and steer you in the right direction.

Again if the phenomenology is the be an alternative to the mystical path, then it must account for these questions. — Punshhh

It does. Phenomenology IS the mystical path, if one is so inclined. Others see it less so, but admit the idea is sound. Others don't read it. Husserl's students once found themselves turning to spirituality because the disciplined and sincere turn toward the phenomenality of the world is a shock to ordinary experience, and one needs to be shocked if one is going to try to understand the world at the basic level. The thing is, faith stops inquiry where inquiry should be just beginning, and one never gets to the real matters at all, but gets comfortable in faith, like Buddhist doing hatha yoga, which is nice, but complacent and spiritually inert.

I agree with what you say about unraveling our entanglements freeing ourselves from conditioning, reaching stillness etc. Although as I said before, I take issue with the idea that faith must become ecstatic. That one must prostrate one’s self, basically to break yourself. Although young aspirants will want to do this in the beginning, I did myself. As one becomes older and the new you evolves, there is the opportunity to calm down and root one’s self in a normal life and play a role in society and family. While retaining one’s insight achieved in one’s youth, coming to realise that the fiery stage is not a requirement, but rather an initiation, the cracking of a shell. A seed to germinate and once the tree is growing it lives and grows and integrates in and with the human world. — Punshhh

This is so much like a standard prescription for orthodoxy, which is looking to the historical affirmation, the spreading in time to a new foundation accepted as a socio-religious institution. This already exists. Calming down and rooting oneself in a normal life is, alas, the very opposite of where thought takes one if one follows through. Religion always seeks to get beyond itself to affirmation that is evidentially based, but this has been impossible because of the universally held notion that our finitude was prohibitive of exceeding its own delimitations, but this has always been just a dogma emphatically laid out by those who didn't understand the world because it takes work and sacrifice, the kind of thing you find only with monks, ascetics, those who climb mountains and stay there until they are brought to witness something, driven people who not only seek this novel "ecstasy", but insist on it---ecstatic from the original greek ékstasis, to stand outside of one's existence, apart from the social conditioning that binds one to culture and its language habits, what Kierkegaard called inherited sin in his Concept of Anxiety which takes up the old Genesis story of original sin and turns it into an analysis of metaphysical separation from God (taking a derisive attitude toward Luther and other dogmatic interpretations in the process). This ecstatic reorientation is the very essence of the "movement" toward divinity, for, as Meister Eckhart says again and again, the more we are here in this world of constructed values (one may care very much about General Motors, say, invests, works for, manages affairs for, and so on: but does GM really "exist"? Not really. It was conceived in a pragmatic desire, entirely abstract in the Real events of people's affairs. The world of familiarity is just this. Does biology exist?...), the farther out we are from divinity. For divinity is absolute Being that is constantly being denied in the participation of this world. Ask the question Wittgenstein refused to philosophize about because he feared inquiry would distort is nature, What is value, ethics? For ethics and value and aesthetics are, in the ecstatic perspective, meta value, meta ethics and meta aesthetics. All things that appear are always already metaphysics.

Put simply, our ethics IS God's ethics. For this world really is not finite at all, every chair, cloud and vacuum cleaner, every breath belongs to eternity.

Again we have immersion, “absorbed”, this is not necessary and could be quite harmful in the modern world. I suppose if one resides in a monastery where your needs are met, it is a suitable course of action. I have known many people who meditate over the years and beyond a certain point, I don’t think it does them much good. — Punshhh

Meditation is a struggle for depth by the radical

But note how boring this is. Not to offend, but really? What is the world? What is this tonnage of suffering and blisses that lays at our feet for the understanding to take up? What does it mean to exist as a person, to be thrown into the intensity of all this, to be a child screaming in a burning car? Is questioning and moving closer to a divine apprehension of the depth of what we are just about this absurd "closure" one gets in prayer. Meditation is hard because liberation is hard--a radical removal of the soul from the world INTO divinity (a term I prefer because it carries the gravitas of eternity).

There are distinctions between them though. I have encountered some Metaphysicians on this site and they tend to be of the view that the human intellect is to reach the goal of the realisation of the self, through the power of thought, or even logic. This differs from the other narratives in that they are of the view that this goal is reached with the guidance of a deity, spirit,or higher self.

This raises a number of issues, which leaves metaphysics out in the cold, unable to forge a connection with the unknown and leaving the human intellect on it’s own in reaching the goal.

The primary issue I find with this situation is that it is a fundamental view, or conviction, in the other schools, that the transfiguration of the self requires a revelation of realities far beyond* what the human intellect can achieve from it’s position in the world we find ourselves in. That from this limited predicament we are blind to the realities beyond, have no access to them. That it is required for them to be revealed to us.

Now I don’t deny that it may be possible for the intellect to bridge this divide given the appropriate circumstances. But I can’t see this happening in the near future, in such a primitive society(in terms of spiritual revelation). Or that there might be one, or two maverick genius minds who somehow achieve this goal through the power of thought alone. But I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet. — Punshhh

But to see such a bridge, one has to step into it. Metaphysics is reborn in thinkers like Jean Luc Marion. Alas, getting TO him, one has to go through Heidegger and Husserl. This is hard to do, I mean, this is a doctoral thesis. One could spend one's life reading and thinking about the ontological and phenomenological "divide".

Talk about "other realities" is exactly the kind of thinking that relegates metaphysics to the bin of absurdities. Where does any idea about the world at all find its descriptive possiblities? In what is already there, in the totality of meaning possibilities of the world one is thrown into. And what "reality" is beingtalked about if not that which is IN the givenness of the world? Talk about "other" realities impossibly remote to all that in which we find ourselves normally, and you have no basis for an evidential ground for understanding. (See the way the Catholic church has turned Heideggerian in its denial of the infinte distance that separates the self from God. A turn toward Meister Eckhart, whose sermons teeter on mysticism. See Karl Rahner, e.g.) This is what religious dogma is made of, and new age superstition. Don't get me wrong, I actually do believe religious people and spiritualists of various sorts are intuitively insightful, even profoundly so, greater than I can imagine. But what theysay about this lacks discipline. And what is this discipline? Phenomenology is essentially descriptive, and is as committed to this as any scientist committed to naturalism, but it doesn't look for quantitative categories to talk about relations, intensities, causes and a linear sense of time or a geometrical sense of space. One is rather brought to face a world that is "there" as the presupposed phenomenality that is the world PRIOR to quantification, and prior to the presumptions of knowing that constitute the everyday things "proximal and for the most part" (Heidegger's term, meaning familiar and readily "there" to understand something) accepted by all.

Did I say lacks discipline? Reading the Abhidhamma I am overwhelmed by the discipline, but this is an ancient Buddhist text that reads like a phenomenological analysis, another order of signification that discards mundane interests. It strikes me as I read through that it is essentially descriptive of consciousness and the complex ways it is entangled in the world, a veritable list of spiritual pathologies? Sort of. But int he end, all of this, Buddhists should be running miles away from, for the summom bonum of Buddhism is nirvana, and there is really nothing one can say about this "as such"; but then, one can say a great deal about what falls short of this, and hence this dense compendium.

This is essentially the way I look at phenomenology: it is an analytic of our entanglements in the world that is dismissive of nothing, least of all that which is in the bewildering features of consciousness, the "call" of transcendence that is structurally IN the world itself, for consciousness and the world cannot be separated, which is an abiding premise of this philosophy. The most conspicuous of all this is affectivity, pathos, the passionate modality of this "value" dimension (as Wittgenstein puts in his Tractatus), if you will, keeping in mind that when language gets a hold of this, it is deflationary and pragmatic, and passion becomes contextualized, the usual, available for conversation. The task that faces the phenomenologist is to undo this, and this undoes everything, puts distance between one and ordinary matters. Two worlds emerge and one lives a threshold existence to live at all. (I refer to schizophrenics as perhaps those closest to this threshold: of course, deeply disturbed, but then, this disruption IS with the world as we know it at the most basic level. What they "say" in their delusional ramblings and paranoia and hallucinations, screams pathology, yet it is also a radical disruption of the ordinary acceptance of things that is exactly the cause of, call it "spiritual delusion": the thoughtless engagement of habits and familiarity that bind one to everydayness. I have known such people, and they also possess an original intensity that is so taboo in society. We live in a Freudian cubicle of sorts, says Deleuze, that so neutralizes what we are, so trivializes what we are, and here we "forget" the depth of our existence.

So, to refer back to my original response, if there are "other" realities, they must be discovered in this reality, which is phenomenality. This mundane consciousness of fence posts, clouds and computers, is "always already" what it is called to be in the transcendental "other" that beckons. The task lies in the analysis that reinterprets this world, and this lies with language which, after all, is not simply a structure of thought that sits like a ontologically distinct stratum---but reaches deep within the relation with and in the world. Undoing the way language occludes, conceals, distorts, recasts all things into something reality is "not" (a "hyperreality"? See Baudrillard, though he was following Heidegger et al, and had no thoughts about anything transcendentally imposing on analysis; but to be clear, Heidegger is a threshold thinker).

I don’t agree that it is for the alienated, or the mentally unstable. Because they would become captured by the ego during the process. It is for well rounded people who play a full role in society and have the impulse to follow this route. — Punshhh

Well rounded? Okay. I am pretty well rounded. But then, I live two lives. The other is not well rounded at all, for there is nothing to round it out with save pure phenomenality, and this is a question AND a resolution in one. It has depth and meaning that will not be rounded, or contained; nor does it carry one into dizzying heights of irrationality. It is completely still, and the distance it creates is what I am, a self discovery. I read Michel Henry to look deeper, and of course, the Abhidhamma: Take a look here (lengthy but worth it, I think):

Having thus gained a correct view of the real nature
of his self, freed from the false notion of an identical substance of mind and matter, he attempts to investigate the cause of this “Ego-personality”. He realises that everything worldly, himself not excluded, is conditioned by causes past or present, and that this existence is due to past ignorance (avijjà), craving (taõhà), attachment (upàdàna), Kamma, and physical food (àhàra) of the present life. On
account of these five causes this personality has arisen and as the past activities have conditioned the present, so the present will condition the future. Meditating thus, he transcends all doubts with regard to the past, present, and future (Kankhàvitaraõavisuddhi). Thereupon he contemplates that all conditioned things are transient (Anicca), subject to suffering (Dukkha), and devoid of an immortal soul (Anattà). Wherever he turns his eyes, he sees nought but these three characteristics standing out in bold relief. He realises that life is a mere flowing, a continuous undivided movement. Neither in a celestial plane nor on earth does he find any genuine happiness, for every form of pleasure is only a prelude to pain. What is transient is therefore subject to suffering and where change and sor85 row prevail there cannot be a permanent ego. As he is thus absorbed in meditation, a day comes when, to his surprise, he witnesses an aura emanating from his body (Obhàsa). He experiences an unprecedented pleasure, happiness, and quietude. He becomes even-minded and strenuous. His religious fervour increases, and mindfulness becomes perfect, and Insight extraordinarily keen

Not that there are no questions about this, but it is essentially a step into metaphysics. Not an abstract and assailable idea at all. Yes, assailable descriptively, but the fault lies in language, not in insight.

Each school will invariably say this about their preferred method. — Punshhh

Until al schools are in abeyance. This is the point of phenomenology. Husserl begins Cartesian Meditations intent to find,

a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim the decision that alone can start me on the course of a philosophical development I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge.

This inevitably brings me to the next question of when one reaches this point of a clear ground and is proficient in the practice of astonishment and constitution. What happens next? Where does the phenomenologist go from there? — Punshhh

Straight to a radical realization of the self. Nothing that has ever been observed is done so independently of the act of observing, i.e., the perceptual act has always been an integral part of its object, making an object an event, and not some stand alone thing. The world AS world is, if you will, always already saturated with consciousness. Phenomenology turns science on its head, and it really depends on who you read. Michel Henry, JeanLuc Marion, Emanuel Levinas follow Husserl's Kantian idealism, and hold that consciousness is absolute, and this kind of thinking is hard to follow, frankly, if one is not immersed in the ideas and the jargon. Heidegger's language often rules this thinking, so Being and Time is essential.

Not that faith has no place, but rather that faith assumes the impossibility of grasping the infinite in a finite existence. This idea is prohibitive of metaphysics, and in the philosophers mentioned here, metaphysics is brought to life. At the center of this is Husserl's epoche: the reductive move from a world cluttered with contingent thinking, to one of the "pure" phenomenon, which is the hidden world "behind" normal experience. See Husserl's Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Idea of Phenomenology, and, well , the rest.

In the end, it depends on how intuitive the individual is. One really has to be already quite alienated to be motivated to do all that insane reading of dense philosophy that talks about things entirely foreign to common sense (consider that those you call mentally unstable and perhaps not suitable for your religious education may be the ones most disposed to understand it). This is metaphysics, the essence of religion.

This is a concern and any novice should enroll in an established school, so as to follow a long established and tested ideology. But here we are discussing this as people who already have an understanding of these things and are just exchanging thoughts about it. — Punshhh

Already have an understanding of what things? Again, if it is a matter of meditation classes, serious ones, insisting on freedom from the dynamics of the social self (Rorty says science is essentially social), and if all one adds is the term divinity, then I really don't have much to oppose. But if "things" are discussed, acknowledged, rejected, understood in their relation to the world, to familiarity, and if there is a perceived alteration in of the way awareness perceives its environment and its objects, its space and time, then this can be very rigorously done, in a helpful way, not distracting.

Few can meditate all day long. If leisure time permits, read phenomenology.

Christian ascetics are some of the most strict practitioners, however there are alternative teachings and practice which are not so stark. Many mystics live a “normal” life. I don’t agree with what you write in this passage; — Punshhh

So Kierkegaard says. His knight of faith can be a seller at a market. He thinks like this because he thinks like you do: faith is a profound surrender, and the intellect is no better than dogmatic belief. I don't agree or disagree with him on this. The approach to divinity is an alienation from the world, but read Paul, "I live and yet do not live - Christ lives in me." But to ask, what IS this about? is the proper question of philosophy. I hold that spirituality IS discovered IN a foundational analytic of our existence. In other words, one can see what Paul is talking about by putting down the demands of faith qua faith, that vacancy of thought in a "pure" "yielding to" (Kierkegaard called this nothing, the nothing one encounters when the question is put forth, for PRIOR to any intimation of divinity, one faces a world in primordial wonder, which is stolen away by culture, what you call "the normal life". Keep in mind, this world really is something to be overcome, not lived comfortably IN. The love one finds in normal matters issue from "deep" within, and the whole point is this profound discovery, which is an inherent resistance interest in "the world", is to move toward this, call it a divine primordiality. Kierkegaard may have believed that existential faith was possible for all, as do I, but he was principally concerned with the way religion had become a culture of religion---Christendom. He was a kind of medievalist, admiring the simplicity of a mind unhindered by thought and conventional extravagance, something he himself could not acquire with great success;

But here I try to be very careful. Consider what divinity IS. Take yourself to a sunset, and observe. See how, at first, the experience is mundane and tame as a kitten. No foreign issues arise, and there you are, perhaps distracted by some outside interest; but your mission is to attend to the sunset as it IS, in the fullness of its presence, and, as Walt Whitman once put it, put all schools in abeyance, so you release yourself from the multitude of whatever's and put the present encounter to the forefront and all things that would otherwise possess you, fall away, and as they do, there is something that displaces all that mundane certainty, which is the "presence" of presence, and you see what is before you as if for the first time, but it is not "as if" at all, but really IS the first time, and you realize that you have been living mostly in memory and history (Heidegger's dasein in Being and Time. See especially in Division Two, section 64 and onward) and have been a prisoner of Time itself, are now somewhere entirely Other, and you never really knew "where" you were at all, because you were living a life of distracting affairs. And now as the sun lowers into the horizon, you understand what it was like for the ancient mind to think the sun to be a God, because the world is now saturated with a beauty so profound (the desideratum exceeds the desire, as Levinas says in Totality and Infinity) that one has to step beyond the boundaries of finitude to bring it to language.

Now take this sublime presence, and ask a powerful question: what is suffering? And ask it in the same way, free of the presumption that hold sway in normal events, and discover that this, too, now is momentous, a staggering assault on our existence. This, too, is divinity, and now one understands the cross, redemption, and divine consummation. This is the core of religion, and God, and all churchy fetishes.

Again, I’m not denying this, but rather saying that this intellectual enquiry is not fundamental to the practice. In a real sense it doesn’t matter what God, or Cosmogony one follows (within reason), one takes one’s pick of the schools or religions available. Also there is not a requirement for the existence, or nature of God to be established. Truth is another matter, but can be accommodated through humility and a focus on the simple path to divinity within the self. — Punshhh

The distinction between one God and another can be a trivial distinction, but as to truth, one does want to be deceived, deluded, wrong minded about what is accepted. God is perhaps a term that is first to go, for it carries connotative values that affect the openness of acceptance. It is not as if there is nothing to say, and the saying wants to be aligned with what is there.

Again, if you don't want to ask any questions because what you are doing is a "doing" not an understanding, and there you are, like a radical Buddhist, buried in seclusion, and the whole idea is to shut up and stop manufacturing distracting engagements, then fine, perhaps enlightenment and liberation will be yours. But if you do want to understand what is going on, and this will be an essentially descriptive matter, then you will want to look into phenomenology, which gives one the means to do this.

Yes, however this is often a calling, an insatiable need to find out, a sense of the divine. Belief doesn’t necessarily come before these other motivating factors. But yes for the novice it is advisable to join an established school, or broaden one’s reading as wide as possible. To go out into the world to live a rounded life within a community to ground the self. Although for some people these things all come naturally, intuitively. It is also not advisable for people with childhood trauma, psychological issues etc. — Punshhh

Claims about divine sense I don't take issue with. But what one says about this, I do. What IS an intimation of the divine? You don't think there is a language that can talk about this? But there is. It's not what you think, though. Talking about such things is talk about the presuppositions of ordinary affairs. God is not abstract and remote, as I am guessing you agree, but is IN the world of lived experience; ignored absurd to talk about, but there to be discussed.

We may be talking of different understandings of faith. For me I would substitute the word belief for faith here. Belief is more about the narrative one has developed and is an intellectual development. Whereas faith is not necessarily associated with any particular narrative, but is more a feeling, emotion, conviction. — Punshhh

I don't think you can separate belief from conviction and feeling, especially conviction, which is synonymous to belief. Anyway, if faith has no object, nothing to have faith IN, then it must be
entirely OPEN. No ideology, no thesis. Just episodic engagement, and I give this to you. But it does align with serious meditation, without the Mahayana thinking. But there is a good deal of what comes from Eastern disciplines that is not ideological at all. The Prajnaparamita, e.g., is striking, and inspired and right, if one's thinks carefully. There are places in the Abbhidamma that are not exhaustingly detailed focus on spiritual categories. These and other work because they are phenomenological, that is, they are part of discovery that can only occur when the "the world" is suspended.

It is a phrase I have coined, there is no peer reviewed scientific establishment. However all the schools that I have looked into have a teaching and practice which amounts to the same thing. To put it as simply as I can. It is the process of the alignment of the conscious self with the divine self and by inference the divine. The result being that one lives a religious, or spiritual life guided by the divine. Which crucially involves the process of the transfiguration of the self.

The reason I keep emphasising this is that in these schools the focus is on developments and changes within the self. Rather like the unfurling of the petals of a flower, this process is already developed, or growing within us and is simply being facilitated in this unfurling. — Punshhh

Sounds like what Buddhists talk abou: as you say, teaching and practice are the same thing. Meister Eckhart is a lot like this. Reading his sermons is an extraordinary experience, if one is so disposed. But the East and the West come together philosophically, that is, phenomenologically, in Husserl's reduction. Call it jnana yoga, the way thought can undo itself, undo the intense relationship between everydayness and freedom. Divinity is a matter of "seeing" and not just passively receiving, I would argue with some emphasis.

I am agreeing with the idea of spiritual growth, though that term 'spiritual', as well as all other familiar terms, carries baggage of multiple contexts and usage, habits of thought already in place. The desire to be rid of old vocabularies is based on an attempt to deliver experience from the consensus that defines normal living. hence the difficulty of phenomenology.

. Or another way of describing this is that if one accepts that there is a divinity within one’s being, then the intellect/personality/ego is required to accommodate this and reach an interactive orientation (communion) with that divinity. Thus allowing that divinity to progressively play a greater role in the life of the person.

This is what I call the science of orientation*, this is a process of adapting aspects of self to become in alignment with that divinity. Rather like an astrolabe where the dials are turned, aligned with observations in the world to take an accurate reading.

These things can be done absent the intellect through prayer, or meditation. So in a very real sense faith and belief are not the product of thinking but rather prayer, or communion. Although the intellect can play a role for thinkers in this process. So yes philosophy is a useful practice for those who have an intellectual inquiry. — Punshhh

If you like. But what is this "science of orientation"? The moment you start explaining this, you begin a kind of intellectualizing, for things have to make sense, and they don't belong to everyday accounts, but somehow stand outside of these, yet everydayness is not separated, and if you don't talk about this kind of thing, you could get things wrong interpretatively and you could be missing important contributions to your understanding of what you are doing.

Of course, if you are going for the truly radical, sequestering yourself from all mundane assumptions, retiring to a meditation mat for a program of self annihilation because intimations of divinity are so clear and compelling, then I can hardly complain. I actually believe in such things, and I know people who have made this move to close off entanglements. And see what Meister Eckhart says about attachments:

You should know that true detachment is nothing else but mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honor, shame, or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. This immovable detachment brings a man
into the greatest likeness to God. For the reason why God is God is because of His immovable
detachment, and from this detachment He has His purity, His simplicity, and His immutability.
Therefore, if a man is to be like God, as far as a creature can have likeness with God, this must
come from detachment. This draws a man into purity, and from purity into simplicity, and from
simplicity into immutability, and these things make a likeness between God and that man; and
this likeness must occur through grace, for grace draws a man away from all temporal things and
purges him of all that is transient. You must know, too, that to be empty of all creatures is to be
full of God, and to be full of all creatures is to be empty of God. You should also know that God
has stood in this unmoved detachment from all eternity

When he speaks of temporal things, there is nothing that survives. Language does not survive, for it is in the "text" (Derrida; read 'context') that the most basic assumptions, those to be expurgated, hold "the world" together. Anyway, it's a big move.

I'd say it is about setting aside big claims and just looking at what shows up in human experience, for instance feelings of awe, moral responsibility, love, the numinous, meaning. The “defensible core” is the part of that experience that still cuts through and remains with us even if we don’t assume God is a 'real' being. Meaning that God isn’t seen as a thing out there, but more like a deep sense of meaning that arrives through experience and gives shape to how we understand life. — Tom Storm

As I see it, you lean either in or out. If you are in, then philosophy really has no place, save the entertainment value of marginal thinking, and you join clubs, go to weddings and funerals, take the family out to dinner now and then, and so on. That is IN, and it is a stand alone, finite totality, accessible and filled with affirmations and restrictions that constitute an evolving dialectic that is free and available to inquiry, like a dictionary is there, available to define the world.

Or if you're like me, you are out, then none of this is very interesting, for it all rests on a foundation of indeterminacy. People like me live in the light of this indeterminacy. For those that are IN, the world "sticks" to the understanding as an indissoluble bond. These are engaged people, so confident that everything is what it IS, because doing something is done best in full immersion, and foundational doubt rarely touches this world. Foundational doubt is the absolute "out" of such engagement. Go down this path, this phenomenological reduction that removes all familiarity, and you end up either like Sartre's Roquentin, weird and disturbed, or like Emerson, who, standing in a "bare common," cold and cloudy, testifies

The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then
foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,–master
or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of
uncontained and immortal beauty

Or, with me, a bit of both, decidedly leaning toward Emerson. I think this is in the vicinity of the "deep sense of meaning" you speak of.

Quite, but not just the questions, also posture, practice, direction, communion.

Faith is a broad brush phrase in this kind of discussion and needs to be teased out.

Religious faith is an inevitable consequence of one’s approach to, or questioning of our origin, creation, purpose. If one is to make any progress beyond, “I/we don’t know”. Science and philosophy can’t help us. Other than in describing the world and how it works and helping us to order and refine our thoughts.

There is faith in God, faith in redemption, faith in society and human interaction. Faith in oneself, faith in truth. Faith as a tool used in mysticism, or by the ascetic. — Punshhh

One could argue: posture, practice, direction, communion are all questions: what posture, practice, etc., should be done, accepted, believed? This gives epistemology the privileged place among the rest, because prior to anything that is accepted as true and important, there is the question of knowing this to be the case. Then we have the problem of evidence, right? I mean, before one goes about being directed, one has to have a well grounded belief for doing so. And the temptation to ignore this just throws the matter into the air; believing without justification moves toward faith (even Kierkegaard's faith is fraught with issues), which begs a lot of questions.

Faith in what? If there are no epistemic rules to faith, then faith is arbitrary, and this leads to a lot of very stupid thinking with awful consequences. That is the practical argument against religious faith. The other is that if there is something deeply important about our existence, faith will inhibit discovery: faith is inherently dogmatic (though reading Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety takes this to task. K is a complicated thinker, and his ideas about faith require an entirely different kind of discussion).

So I'm not a fan of faith. All that you call "faith in..." I say is a call for inquiry. OTOH, I realize that not everyone has the "leisure" time or inclination for this, and that so many face intractable miseries and to these good people, I yield. I speak here only of the "conversation humanity is having with itself" as Rorty put it, which is a push toward authenticity or sincerity or truth.

Philosophy certainly can help "direct" thought. It does depend on what one reads, however. Reading exclusively Nietzsche or anglo american analytic philosophy, which is driven by positivism and naturalism and which is altogether contemptuous of metaphysics, is not going to open thought to responsible inquiry. It is just as dogmatic as faith tends to be.

But then there is Husserl, and the neoHusserlian strain of thought that is very active today. This is where things get very interesting. Imagine metaphysics brought INTO immanence, such that the finitude that wants to draw a line between what can and cannot be spoken finds within itself the eternity to which it stands in opposition.

This is extremely well written and interesting and I think I agree. — Tom Storm

I agree there is something there, yes. What is" the move to reduce God to its defensible core" all about, do you think? What defensible core?

Agreed. So I guess I don’t understand the point you’re making. If you already knew that noumena are only concepts, and given understanding’s propensity to run away with itself, and reason’s obligation to correct the rampage….what more is there? — Mww

The point here is that noumena is not merely an empty concept. Kant was wrong. The next stop is Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics? There are no divisions between the given world and that which it represents. The world we see and acknowledge every day is not analytically reducible to representation. It IS the world and this represents nothing, but is a stand alone manifestation of what is "there". Any "transcendence" that arises issues from immanence.

This is where Husserl's epoche takes one, to the transcendence of the given. My issues with Kant are post Kantian. See, e.g., Max Scheler's Formalism and Nonformalism in Value (something like that) or Hildebrandt's Ethics. See the critical post Kantian literature. Soon I'll start on Fichte, though only because Michel Henry is forcing me to, because reading his Essence of Manifestation insists. Kant only can be understood in light of the substantial response to Kant.

Nice talking to you! :ok:

The problem is in part discovering necessary connections between different contents. — RussellA

You might want to read the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason for a close look at the way Kant thinks. It has to be understood that whatever one can say about objective time presupposes subjective time. The former is always already the latter, at a more basic level of analysis. Not unlike, on the one hand, observing an object fall to the ground, and on the other, giving a quantitative equation in physics for such a thing. Does this mean the object no longer falls? Of course not, but the account by the physicist is taken to be integral to this and more foundational. The phenomenologist's Time does not say normal talk about time is wrong; it just says there is a more foundational account, something that goes all the way down to the essential givenness of the world, and thus is presupposed even by physics.

However, this is a different problem to the metaphysical problem as to how a duration can exist in an instant. — RussellA

This is an issue that phenomenologists take seriously, as to analytic philosophers. Stanley Fish wrote "Is There a Text in this Class, the essential idea of which is the ambiguity of the term 'text': is it a book? A concept assumed? This paper weight holds down paper, but it can be a weapon, a doorstop. Language is throughout, like this, and to try and pin it down is futile: everything is context, or as Derrida put it, there is nothing outside the text. So yes, duration, instant, have only "regional" meanings, and so in one context the instant's analysis is ignored, this, the "vulgar" (Heidegger) everydayness of the term's usage; in another, Derrida's post modern analysis of language, 'instant' becomes variable, without any final context (final vocabulary, as Rorty put it). Quine said the same thing, essentially, in his Indeterminacy of Translation. And Heidegger, who is by my thinking that greatest philosopher, resolved this ambiguity in hermeneutics. His analysis of Time in Being and Time is just an extraordinary read.

Anyway, in the everyday sense of the terms, things are taken differently in different contexts, but Heidegger does ontology, which is meant to be the analytic context where things are understood in their "equiprimordiality" He holds that there is no finality is language's taking up the world, but this does not mean there is no, if you will, equiprimordial ontological analysis, that is, where inquiry leads to the foundational issues, where empirical science cannot go, because it cares nothing for this.

One asks how subjective duration relates to objective instant.

Perhaps in order to answer this question, we should take on board Husserl's concept of phenomenological reduction. We should attempt a meditative approach, fully grounded in the present, absent of any preconceptions from our past and absent of any implications about our future. — RussellA

Well, this is exactly how to go, asking just that question. The hard part is to affirm the very difficult, yet inexorable, premise that the latter, the objective instant, presupposes the former, the subjective duration. Then the world is turned upside down as one encounters Kant's Copernican Revolution.

I'm not a philosopher, and I don't have anxieties or burning questions about truth or reality. Metaphysics doesn't particularly capture my imagination. I'm content. I've read enough (and about) Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, not to mention some Evan Thompson and Dan Zahavi, to have a sense of the discourse. But I'm mainly here to understand what others believe and why. Hence my interest in more sophisticated accounts of theism. — Tom Storm

The more sophisticated accounts of theism ask questions that have nothing to do with theism. Here is a question I think is foundational for religion: Why are we born to suffer and die? Not meant to be an analytic challenge, but an existential one. One pulls away from theology and philosophy altogether, and asks from a radically simple mentality, "to begin in absolute poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge" as Husserl put it.

But doesn't that mean that it is in the present where all things temporal (recollections, implications, the "now") intersect or settle? — RussellA

Depends on what you mean by 'present'. As a meaningful concept, it is only an pragmatic modality, meaning when we think of the essence of the present, what it IS, past, present and future are discovered first, and these are found in the everydayness of affairs, where the world is divided up into a second ago, right now, and a second from now, say. But this is the way things go when we are talking in a rough and ready way about normal things, like when things have to be done, come before and after, and on and on. Look closer, and you find a rather simple analysis discovers serious structural problems very quickly. This is has been around a very long time; see Augustine's confessions chapter 11 where he says of the present, " Whatsoever of it hath flown away, is past; whatsoever remaineth, is to come." Impossible to make sense of the present as a stand alone concept, because it doesn't stand alone, but is bound to past and future analytically. The moment a moment arrives, it is both past and future in that moment.

But if you mean the present to be an experiential clarity in which lived and deeply rooted habits and familiarities that spontaneously rise in every perception, turn all things into the "potentialities of possibilities" established in the totality of the "having been" (Heidegger. He calls this "the they" and holds that this is what we are, mostly. Our "thrownness" is discovered only when one is already entirely IN a language and culture), fall away, to reveal pure givenness of the world (Husserl, Jean Luc Marion, Michel Henry, et al, say various things along these lines), then this analysis of time and the ecstatic unity of these three modalities (as Heidegger puts it. Obviously, the things I have been talking about are derivative of continental philosophy) has to yield, for now the whole matter is in the hands of this phenomenological givenness, and the world is seen "as if for the first time". Time as a pragmatic imposition on the world (what time is it? You're late! It should arrive early. Come here, now!) loses meaning.

Heidegger was no mystic, but Husserl and neo Husserlians lean this way. It is what happens when one takes the present and attempts to "observe" the bare presence of things. This Husserl argues is achievable in a phenomenological reduction. See his "Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology".

What makes you think fuzzy is a bad place? I don't read much philosophy, regardless of the country. But if you're advocating for continental philsophy over analytic, sure. I have no issues with this. — Tom Storm

Not to be a nooge, but how do you know if you have issues or not with continental philosophy if you "don't read much philosophy"?

Isn't this a fancy way of saying that we created the idea of God to manage our anxiety? — Tom Storm

No. And yes. What do you mean by anxiety? See, this is where things go stupidly fuzzy. And if one is dead set on not reading anything written in Germany or France during the early to mid twentieth century, things will stay that way.

It is not that the present is a dimension of time: the present alone exists. Rather, synthesis constitutes time as a living present, and the past and the future as dimensions of this present” — Number2018

Well said. And yes, very intriguing. The question is, does this make any difference in one's (genitive) "objective" time? That is, Husserl's reduction takes one to the radical subjective end, where one faces an inexorable givenness (reading now Jean Luc Marion's Reduction and Givenness), and once one has pushed this "method" to its limits a very different world appears, that of givenness "as such". Heidegger famously doesn't buy it, but others, neo Husserlians, take it as momentous. This analysis of time, Bergson (haven't read), Deleuze, Husserl (The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time) , does invite a violation, if you will, of objective familiarity, such that time as sequential events yields to the more basic analysis.

For man, unlike God, recollection and implication can only exist in the present, can only exist in the "now".

If man can only exist in the present, in the "now", yet can think about recollections from the past and can think about implications concerning the future, then these recollections of the past and implications concerning the future must also exist in the present, in the "now".

You say "your now is always already in the past and future". Perhaps, however, it is more the case that "your past and future is always in your now"? — RussellA

Let's leave God out of it. It can be such a distraction and the same issues that turn up here also turn up there, trying to explain God and, what, divine temporality?? What good is this if the temorpality itself is not made ontologically clear? Keeping in mind that God is first a term that occurs to us, and thus, whatever can be said of it, goes through the structure of our time. Beyond this, just bad metaphysics.

'Perhaps' is an invitation to speculation. This is really has no place here. It is an apriori argument, that is, it deals with the way time can work given its own nature or essence.

But yes, you nearly have it here: "these recollections of the past and implications concerning the future must also exist in the present, in the "now"," but for one important matter: The now cannot be understood as a place where all things temporal intersect or settle. There is no now apart from the not yet and the having been. Conceived like this one becomes either a mystic or an abstractionist. If one turns to the eternal now as a kind of nirvana, then one is just being loose with descriptive language, and I suppose one is forgiven for this, seeing here the now is not a theoretical term looking to be cleearly understood, but rather a place holder for something sublime and alien to common sense. That is, 'now' is a term borrowed from everyday language, and in grasping for expression, one does what one can.

But the abstraction of the now is really not tolerable. Putting aside the way our time words "work" we are of course bound to contests of usage and this deals exclusively with linear time that is so familiar. But a phenomenological analysis of time, time conceived for what it IS apart from the free talk about various affairs, is analytic: One cannot conceive of any of time's modalities apart from the others. Even in a profound mystical state in which time seems to vanish, such a state can only be understood AT ALL as an anticipatory event, I would argue, for no anticipation, no agency to "be there" to be in a mystical state.

Agency is almost always overlooked in analysis, whether one is in the anglo american tradition or the continental condition; most poignantly in ethics and aesthetics and religion.

Hart's account of God is interesting to me and comes from a vast tradition we tend to ignore in the secular community. What does it really mean when he writes:

God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever. Or, to borrow the language of Augustine, God is not only superior summo meo—beyond my utmost heights—but also interior intimo meo—more inward to me than my inmost depths. — Tom Storm

All I'm really trying to do here is generate more interesting discussions about God. — Tom Storm

Meister Eckhart prayed to God to be rid of God. Looking at several of the posts here, I see little evidence of being rid of God. Even Nietzsche was full of God in his busy explicit mocking denials. So forget about God, the tiresome concept filled with the long history of busy imaginations, even sincere thinkers like Augustine, and ask, what is the world such that God ever came into conversation at all? Thereby reducing God to its essential elements that cannot be gainsaid. God is a metaphysical concept, so the matter turns to this metaphysics, and since the idea is to "start anew" from a position of radical ignorance (putting aside all the theology and excesses of thinking of God as Eckhart would have us do), what is there in the world that makes metaphysics a meaningful term, and one that responds to a finite deficit that insists on being filled? Insists not as a thesis wanting speculative closure, but an existential (referring simply to our existence) closure.

Interesting question. I was thinking about the question whether religion is a force for good. My answer is that there are lots of other similar questions. But also lots of expertise and good and bad practice to learn from. One problem is that something may count as a good thing for believers but not for non-believers. Attracting larger congregations would be an example. Some other things might count as a good thing for one side and actually a bad thing for the other side. The multiplicity of critieria creastes another problem because any overall judgement must be complex and balanced. (It's hard enough with a good car or a good house, but this is a whole different level).
The really tricky problem is the idea of researching God. Of course, it is not hard to see what researching Zeus (or Rhea) would be. There are the stories, the accounts of the relevant practices and so forth. But it's a different thing when you come to God, (or Allah, etc.). A non-believer will follow the same methods as for the research off Zeus. But, for a non-believer, who is looking to develop a relationship with God that is at least akin to a relationship with another person, so it involves a whole different dimension - not merely knowing what the non-believer knows, but learning to take part in the practices - especially the liturgical practices - and taking part in them, not to mention various disciplines designed to train (or re-train) oneself for the new life.
Does that help? — Ludwig V

But most of what is thought about God is a lot of medieval drivel, so that much can be dismissed summarily. The question really is about, after the reduction, the move to reduce God to its defensible core ---minus the endless omni this and that, and Christendom, and the Halls of Valhalla, and so on--- what is it that cannot not be removed because it constitutes something real in the world that religions were responding to? The imagination has been busy through the millennia, and I don't think we want to take such things seriously, regardless of how seriously they are taken by so many. It is not a consensus that that we are looking for. It is an evidential ground for acceptance, and since God is not an empirical concept but a metaphysical one, one is going to have to look elsewhere than microscopes and telescopes.

Meister Eckhart prayed to God to be rid of God. I think it begins here, with a purifying of the question (that piety of thought) so one can be rid of the presuppositions of the familiar, the way when one "thinks" of God, one is already in possession assumptions that determine inquiry. It is, as with the Buddhists and the Hindus and Meister Eckhart and Dionysius the Areopogite and other spiritualists and mystics, an apophatic method: delivering thought, well, from itself. then realizing you had all the questions wrong. Not the answers, but the questions.

And what is a question, but an openness to truth, and what is truth, but a revealing, a disclosure (not some logical function in the truth table of anglo american philosophy). The Greeks had it right with their term alethea. One has to withdraw from the clutter of implicit assumptions (Heidegger's gelassenheit. See his Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking) to ALLOW the world to be what it is so one can witness this. Otherwise, it is simply the same old tired pointless thinking, repeating itself.

If my "now" can never be in the past and can never be in the future, does this not mean that my "now" is a distinct boundary between my past and my future? — RussellA

Rather, your now always already IS the past and future. The past, of course, is not a place or something that can be visited awaiting recollection that "takes one" there. The past IS the recollection itself, and recollections are present events, but as I recall yesterday's event, say, I am actively anticipating what this recollection will be as-it-is-recalled; that is, as one recalls one is doing so in the anticipatory structure of those past events being recreated. So recollection is the ecstatic unity of the recalled, being recalled in the forward looking of the present event, an event that is continuously on the threshold of anticipating what comes next. As i am sitting here, I look up and note the time from the clock on the wall. How is it that I implicitly know everything about time and clocks and the conventions of telling time? I recall this, tacitly, from a living memory in the immediacy of the moment. But this moment also has this forward looking dimension, forprior to looking at the clock, I anticipated what it all would be like. In a very meaningful way, the "looking" was already done! It is repetition! (See Kierkegaard's book of this name). Thus the recollection, the not-yet of the future, and the present actuality are an all-in-one event.

Even when one seems to be clear of recollection, attending explicitly to the presence of things, there is "behind" this intention a foundation of tacit recollection that gives the present its stability, its fixity. This is, in simple terms, familiarity. So as the meditation takes one to a certain detachment from all that is there "behind" the sitting quietly, from familiarity itself, this familiarity is MOST stubborn. It is a lifetime of education and conditioning that one is trying to "still". Serious meditation is a matter of giving up life as one knows it, literally! The "now" that is achieved is most radical. It is another now altogether. See the way Levinas and other post Husserlians (like Michel Henry) are talking about this "extreme phenomenology". They are closer to Meister Eckhart's "On Detachment":

Perfect detachment
is not concerned about being above or below any creature; it does not wish to be below or above,
it would stand on its own, loving none and hating none, and seeks neither equality nor inequality
with any creature, nor this nor that: it wants merely to be.

Of course, Eckhart holds that God and one's own divinity appears when this space of detachment opens and yields. To his credit, he does not dogmatically tell us what this "is".

You write that the three modalities of time, the past, the present and the future, are really one, and are to be understood within metaphysics, about the world yet outside the world.

I suggested that my subjective time only exists in my present.
But this subjective time only exists for me in my "now", meaning that my subjective time is an instantaneous thing that requires no objective time at all. — RussellA

Yes, but when you speak of 'now' you are simply localizing subjective time, and the concept remains abstract. Analysis shows that what we call 'now' is really an ecstatic relation between temporal categories and there "really" is no boundary at all. Time is a pragmatic language imposition that is essentially social (Rorty), that is, talk about events before, after, until, prior, next week and all the rest are FIRST ways of taking up the world that "works" and as such are entirely contingent, as all are taken up as and in language. Our existence is essentially historical (our historicity, as Heidegger calls it) and so, even this analytic of time sketched out above (it is, of course, derived from a course of thought, starting with Augustine's Confessions, then others: Brentano, Husserl, finally, Heidegger. that put forth here is from his Being and Time, Division 2, starting at section 65 or so) because language is historical.

But when you say, your subjective time is instantaneous and requires no objective time, I DO think you are on to something because I am convinced since language and its pragmatics, its historical nature, which is culture and all of its institutions (everything you can "say") is THE contingency that produces the linear and sequential "sense" of time, is, as the Hindus say, the binding illusion, maya (heh, heh--Kierkegaard called this inherited sin in his Concept of Anxiety. You see his idea: we are far more interested in our own affairs than we are about the existential crisis of separation from God. Tillich will call this a matter of ultimate concern), then this, as you call it, subjective 'now' is a radical liberation.

Consider what serious meditation is really about: the cessation of thought, of language, of the "attachments" that create and bind our desires, and the grip it has on defining the world.

Well, of course. What else? It seems to me that any serious attempt to answer it, will have to include emprical data, as well. — Ludwig V

When one researches something, one has to have an issue in mind. What is the issue regarding researching God?

How exactly does a person connect an objective past to an objective present if not by a memory that exists in the objective present? — RussellA

The objective present you speak of is complicated, not simple.

What this is, is hard to say because language itself it performed in sequential thinking, I mean, to think at all has its superficial analysis always already IN objective time, as when I note how 'in' "follows" 'already' in the preceding phrase. But this does not at all imply that such sequential thinking is primordial (any more that "things fall downward" exhausts the basic analysis of gravity). All one has to do is take a closer look at the apriority of time: What is it to engage the past? To recall itself is an event in the present act of recalling, and one cannot even conceive of the past qua past, as an independent event or body of possibilities or some stand alone condition. No, the past is only the past IN the recollection that is performed in the present; but then, this leaves the present in question: can the present be regarded as some "stand alone" supposition? One has to examine the present's apriori structure: In order for the present to be more than just some abstract concept lifted from ordinary time-talk, it must be understood in terms of its actuality: to recall is to recall something, and this something can only be of the past (keeping in mind that the intent here is to be "descriptive" of the apriori structure of time, putting speculation on hold), and the past is the totality of events of the having-been (to borrow a phrase). So the present as such cannot be understood apart from the past--the past is analytically IN the present, meaning it is nonsense to speak of the present as some fleeting movement forward that carries nothing at all but itself. The present is inherently historical. The future: In the event that a future is imagined, conceived, understood, etc., it is anticipated. All events are future looking, even as I lift this coffee cup, the familiarity of coffee cups immediately takes control, and this belongs to the past. the future is literally nothing without the past, not can it be conceived apart from the present act that anticipates it by drawing upon the past's totality of possibilities. Call it the "not yet" of any given conscious moment.

This kind of thinking leads here: The three modalities of time are really one. One cannot isolate any one modality and speak of it as such, for this analytically carries along with it the other two. Everyday time, and Einstein's space time, and all that physics can say about time, presuppose this analysis.

It is also what can properly be called metaphysics, simply because this apriority is not witnessable empirically, quantitatively. It is "about" the world", yet it is apriori! It is what I call good metaphysics, not the nonsense we associate with medieval theology. Analytically responsible metaphysics. It belongs to phenomenology.

The fundamental mistake is to treat these questions - the existence of God, whether religion is a Force for Good - as straightforward empirical beliefs with straightforward empirical answers. I don't think that the question of the existence of God is an empirical belief in any ordinary sense. There's some room for philosophy there. Whether religion is a Force for Good does look like an empirical question. But it is a complex question requiring a good deal of analysis before any empirical data can be brought to bear on it. There's already a huge amount of research on this question. If there's space for philosophy there, It needs to take that work into account. — Ludwig V

It is an interesting thing to say. I wonder how you think one should deal with this "complex question". Research?

Have a good trip. — Mww

Thanks! It was very good, putting aside the covid I had for a week. I don't think when I die I would like to cough myself to death, as so many of those that came before us did. Hard to imagine the tonnage of suffering history holds, and hard to fathom why this is given such little attention in philosophy; this, THE most salient feature of our existence. Just perverse, if you ask me, which is why I have qualified high regard for Kant; I don't think he at all understood ethics in its nature. Deontology begs the question of the final ground for prima facie moral obligation in ethics, this question: why bother at all?

Having exposed the, dare I say, grotesque!!!, categorical error, it follows from the fact that all knowledge, and antecedently all a priori principles by which empirical knowledge is possible, resides in me, the certainty an object of whatever name cannot move itself but must be moved by something else, which is a representation of one such a priori principle, must also reside in me, and not in that object to which the principle merely applies. — Mww

That object is the sensory intuitions and concept unity. You can't speak of the object that is outside of this unity. The time/space of the object is what "resides in you" and this is ALL a representation. There is no object in the normal way science and everydayness says there is. So when you say "and not in the object to which the principle merely applies" I am sure this is not what Kant's "idealism" is about. The object IS sensory intuition conjoined with a concept in the apriori intuitions of space and time.

Oh, I’m pretty sure he thinks, and is trying desperately to impress upon the rest of us, “simply out there” indicates “simply not in here”. I didn’t mention space, only referring to that which must be “….something external to me, to which I must look upon myself as being related…”, and that by means of the logic intrinsic to my mental affairs.

The thing out there IS your mental affairs.
— Astrophel

Oh dear. The thing out there is nothing but the appearance to, the effect on, the occassion for, my mental affairs, but is not them, “….for, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd.…” — Mww

No, no. First, this "must be" is only because he wants separate phenomena from that which it represents, not from any analytic necessity. But you seem to think Kant is allowing something like "nature" which you referred to earlier, some objective substratum, but this is not how it is. It is entirely a negative concept as he is referring to a transcendental object, which is just

the concept of a noumenon. It is not
indeed in any way positive, and is not a determinate knowledge of anything, but signifies only the thought of something in general, in which I abstract from everything that belongs to
the form of sensible intuition.

In other words, he is not talking about a thing in any way determined by some even vaguely physical standards. It is entirely determined transcendentally. Read on and see the way he qualifies this "object" (and it is very obvious that his thinking is highly suspect right at the outset, for, after all, what is an 'object' by Kant's own system? It is a concept that is a synthesis, and can ONLY apply, vis a vis a world of things, to empirical objects). He says,

it is still an open question whether the notion of
a noumenon be not a mere form of a
concept, and whether, A 253
when this separation has been made, any object whatsoever
is left."

You see, the whole idea is a fiction.Something has to be there to make for the unity of the sensible object before one, but maybe not. The noumenal is only a concept. Further:

The object to which I relate appearance in general is
the transcendental object, that is, the completely indeterminate
thought of something in general. This cannot be entitled the noumenon
for I know nothing of what it is in
itself, and have no concept of it save as merely the object of
a sensible intuition in general, and so as being one and the
same for all appearances..I cannot think it through any category ;
for a category is valid [only] for empirical intuition, as
bringing it under a concept of object in general. A pure use of
the category is indeed possible [logically], that is, without contradiction;
but it has no objective validity, since the category
is not then being applied to any intuition so as to impart to it
the unity of an object. For the category is a mere function
of thought, through which no object is given to me, and by
which I merely think that which may be given in intuition.

Cannot think it through any category?? But what is the term 'object'? It is a categorically structured concept. You see how deep in the woods he is. Where do you find thinking like this, thinking that annihilates concepts? You find it in the Dialectic under Transcendental Illusion. The question is, why is the concept of noumena allowed to survive at all? Why is it not dismissed in a paralogism?

Since when is ungracious to suggest the same as ungracious to critique? As long as we’ve been here we’ve both been critiquing the Critique, but only one of us suggests a flaw in the memory of its author. Without knowing the totality of what he knew, what could possibly be said about what he forgot? — Mww

A flaw? I think it depends. He doesn't seem to realize that the transcendental use of the categories is impossible even as he says they are impossible. He wants to say it is possible and the door is open, but you can tell in the way he goes on page after page in Noumena and Phenomena that he only grudgingly talks about it. I mean, take a good look at these disclaimers, one after the other; the only thing he does not admit is that since logic cannot be an analytic means of access into its own nature, therefore all this talk about noumena is just nonsense. The analytic of noumena IS, after all, a construction of thought, and his whole point is that there are RULES to thoughtful meaning making, and very rigorous ones.

That is the flaw. He must affirm more than he is willing to do, for the Dialectic goes through great pains to nullify groundless metaphysics, and this should render noumena nonsense, which is he says it is, only in terms that leave a door open that should be closed. BUT: in my thinking, this by no means closes the door on transcendental thinking; it only redefines it, even redeems it. This notion of thing in itself is not nonsense at all, but must be determined, for its meaning, in a deeper analytic of what is given in "appearance" for noumena in is, in his language, discovered in "representations," obviously, since there are no "discoveries" of noumena; it just a general concept entirely negative in nature--what is noumenal is not of sensible intuitions, nor is it analytically determined. It is JUST an empty concept.

He doesn't see, in other words, that what is noumenal is truly discovered in phenomena, and there is only one conclusion to this: they are same. The phenomenon is noumenal and the noumenon is phenomenal. The tree IS over there and it IS both accessible and not accessible, that is, transcendental. This term 'transcendental' refers to the openness of the conceptual delimitations of the world's concepts, that is, ALL concepts are open. We call it a tree, but this calling, this taking that over there "as" the particle of language 'tree' does not exhaust the meaning possiblities of what stands before me. Kant's noumenal talk puts the transcendence of the tree-out-of-meaning, again, due to Kant's insistence about the limits of meaning making, which is the real "flaw" of his thinking (what you get when a radical rationalist takes up philosophy).

People like Kant are intuitively limited. Logically brilliant, capable of extraordinary control of thought, but they just don't get things they cannot "get".

The world is not inherently moral/aesthetic, so why should being in the world be inherently moral/aesthetic. — RussellA

Well, that is a big issue. I hold that the world is most emphatically inherently moral. Where Kant argued from the world to pure reason's transcendental nature, I argue from value to pure value's transcedental nature. Trouble with Kant is that the formal exposition of judgment is entirely empty of content, a reductive analysis to nothing at all, for what is form qua form? What is, say, modus ponens sans the p's and q's that make for its demonstration? Nothing.

But the same metaphysical provocation exists for ethics, that is, the question as to its ground, and the reductive attempt to isolate this ground. What is ethics? leads inquiry to metaethical arguments, where Kant's were metalogical. Metaethical questions ask about the nature or essence of ethics, and here we discover value, or, the bonum and the malum, and here were not abstractly penetrating abstractions in logic, but existential actualities that constitute the meaning of our existence.

Note how Kant moves to rationality to explain duty, a good will, and the infamous categorical imperative. How he could do this rests solely with, in terms of motivation, an absence of affectivity in his own hyper rational mentality. He was a sociopath, but the good kind.

Yes, it is not immediately obvious who is right. — RussellA

If you are interested, you might find Michel Henry's phenomenology interesting. See this cup on the table. In the immediacy of the apprehension, there is no intentionality that intrudes into the interface. There is no interface, only the phenomenological unity, which is a transcendental primordiality. Phenomenology leads to one place, existential transcendence, and the most salient feature here is the meta ethical and the meta aesthetic, evidenced in the value dimension of everydayness, the briuses and abrasions, the tragedies and the ecstasies. A place Kant simply did not have the experiential constitution to acknowledge.

As to who is right, the question then goes to agency, and this, as Wayfarer pointed out, cannot be observed. One can, however, do as Heidegger did, which practice gelassenheit, a kind of meditative thinking in which one yields as one thinks, rather than imposing on the world what one already thinks. A kind of meditation that allows the world to "speak".

It is possible just to be happy without being happy about something, so why is it not possible to have a thought without having a thought about something? — RussellA

Being happy is a state, but a thought is always the world taken AS something. The word 'happy' is a reference, while being happy is not.

This cannot be the case, as this would lead into an infinite regression, which we know is not the case. — RussellA

You mean if talk about Kant's categories is just representational talk about representations, then that, too, is representational talk, and so forth. But it is a fabricated regression, willfully produced. Like saying one can think a thought, then think a thought about that thought, etc; or a chicken comes from an egg which comes form a chicken, etc.; and there is certainly regression here, but it is harmless. If to think about the categories is itself an application of the categories (which it is. Kant, of course, was well aware) simply because to think at all is categorical (which is the point) then the universal quantification, "all thought is categorical" (that is, is transcendentally structured apriori) is the end to the regression.

That is why it is transcendental. — RussellA

That is why God, the soul and freedom are dialectical errors. Kant's doesn't think his deduction is an error, but that it has a necessary noumenal correlate.

I do get confused by Kant's position on this, though. I would have to spend time with the Critique to work through this. But presently, I don't see how there is a way out if this. The pure categories are just as in error as those taboo metaphysical ideas of the Transcendental Dialectic.

But we do! So it must be possible. — RussellA

It certainly is possible, but it is possible only within the very language possiblities that presuppose the categories. This is the matter. It is assuming in the conclusion something that has to be demonstrated. Kant's conclusion is that there is a transcendental ground for all logic but what is this transcendental ground? It is transcendental, so it cannot stand for anything that is inferentially derived from what is not transcendental.

Language cannot stand as its own metalanguage.

Kant may be a Representationalist, but not everything can be reduced to a representation. Is his space and time a representation? Are his Categories representations?

In the CPR B275 he writes that his perception of time is only possible because of it is not being represented. — RussellA

But one has to step back from it all. There is no concept that is not representational, and thus, all talk about what is non representational is always already represntational. Kant knew this. One cannot speak of the apriori intuition of space and be free the hold the categories have on experience and meaning. One "understands" the Transcendental Aesthetic, but what is it to understand? This is inherently bound to the synthetic function of the concept of 'space' when it is deployed in discussion. This is the upshot of Kantian thinking: There is NOTHING non representational available to human understanding. We stand only in appearance, and the noumenal reality is impossibe to even conceive (though the MUST be something?? Can this even be said? Witt said no).

As regards the Categories, for example, in the quantity of unity, there is one blue object. In the quantity of plurality, some objects are blue. In the quantity of totality, all the objects are blue. A Category is needed for us to cognize that within a phenomena there is one blue object. Within the phenomena of shapes and colours is a representation of one blue object. The Category can synthesise a manifold of experiences that represent one blue object, but the Category itself cannot be a representation, otherwise there would be no solid ground for our cognitions. If the Category was a representation, what is it representing? — RussellA

I guess the above is saying that a 'category', in our delimited world, is a representation of a representation, or a representation of what representations are, an appearing thesis of the appearing of phenomena all tightly bound within appearances. To speak AT ALL about anything, this can never penetrate beyond what is merely given, and you can see why Kant is considered the destroyer of religion: Just reducible to an extravagance ofo thought whereby ideas are constructed out of the thin air of concepts without intuitions.

As Wittgenstein needs certain hinge propositions, Kant also needs a ground. In order to represent, representation needs a ground that is itself not a representation, and for Kant this ground is space, time and the Categories. — RussellA

Of course. But how does one speak of such a ground in the very structure of ground itself?; that which is in need of being grounded cannot be offered as the essential ground itself, and this is what you get when you write the Critique of Pure Reason.