My central interest since college has been the relationship between affectivity, feeling, mood and emotional on the one hand, and cognition, intentionality and understanding on the other. My view is that the two phenomena are utterly inseparable, that there is no expereince that is without affective valence and quality. I would argue that the sense of a world for Wittgenstein, as use context, is that way in which the word matters to us , its significance and relevance. That is an affective feature. There are no facts without relevance, there is no relevance without value, so understanding a fact is already an affective process. — Joshs

I don't see how this can be disagreed with. Experience is not a thing of discreet parts; rather, parts are in the analysis. There is no pure reason and there is no sublime affectivity qua affectivity as some kind of stand alone features of existence. But a question like, what is experience? has to have in its answer something about affectivity and its features, and one feature I find impossibly there is that affect cannot be "defeated" as to what it is by contextual changes. It is what it is regardless of context. And even if this pain can be recast as pleasure (in the mind of a masochist, say) it is not that pain is pleasure, or that pain is therefore made ambiguous, but that it is no longer pain.

BUT: An utterance places pain in context, that is, when I think about pain, I am already in a system of predelineated understandings, and so, what is said is bound to contingency, bound to a foundational deconstruction (as I am calling it. I don't have the vocabulary quite ready to hand) that denies all "stand alone" claims (call them "Platonic" claims). And so, the utterance "pain is bad" is just as contingent as "snow is white". The point I would make is the injunction not to do X is grounded in existence in a way that cannot be spoken, but is "mysteriously authoritative." I think Wittgenstein would agree.

I see that the color red, e.g., is there, but is "speechless" apart from its contextual placement possibilities. Affect "speaks" an inaudible and uninscribable "language" of existence.

Curious to hear your thoughts or rebuttables concerning this overall idea. — javra

My thoughts are a work in progress. In play is the indefeasibility of affectivity (this being a general term for a classification of existentials like pleasure, joy, bliss, happiness, disgust, hatred, revulsion, misery, and on and on. I take facts to be Wittgesntein's facts: sailboats are sailing in the distance, or an ox is stronger than a chihuahua. There is nothing of affectivity in all of these. Facts are accidental, that is, they could have been otherwise and there is nothing that makes them necessary. This is on edge of talk about possible worlds, worlds of logical necessity, or worlds of causal boundaries. I take Wittgenstein to be talking about logically conceivable worlds, and in them, there is no affectivity. You could say there is the fact that I am unhappy or ecstatic, but, and here is the rub, as a fact, there is no "good" in happiness., and there is no "bad" in misery. This opens the discussion for an extraordinary exposition the nature of ethics and aesthetics. How is it that I cannot assail the integrity of the, well, "value of value" that is the good of enjoyment the bad of a toothache, in any conceivable arrangements of context? In all possible worlds of factuality, what is good in this analysis of the good has no place at all. And this is because affectivity of goodness is an absolute. It does not issue from a factual matrix, that is, talk about this kind of thing is beyond the deferential possibilities of any context driven ontology.

I have to work this idea out, though I have another life beyond reading and thinking philosophy and likely will never do this entirely. But you see the intuition (heh, if there is such a thing) of this is bound up with this "discovery" (again, is there such a thing? Rorty says truth is made not discovered. Oh my!) of what is in an ethical analysis: There is something, some "invisible X" that cannot be reduced to contextual inter-deferentiality (I made that term up. It seems to be okay), I mean, produced out of "difference" of the meanings of ideas. Ethics and aesthetics are, and the limb I am going out on here is a long and slim one, utterly metaphysical in their very mysterious analysis of foundational ...errr, properties. They issue forth an injunction: Don't do this; Do this.

Of course, ethical injunctions are language constructs, and the same that is true for facts of the world are true here, that is, there is nothing of affect in an injunction, and injunctions are NOT indefeasible. ut this is not about ethics. This is about an abstraction form ethics that reveals an absolute.

Derrida is maddening to read (for me) but when one catches on (such as I have) , one sees how massively interesting he is, especially vis a vis Wittgenstein's Ethics and Tractatus. I mean, this is literally life changing, if, though, one is that caught up in the enterprise if finding out what it is to be a human being at the level of basic questions.

Singularity doesn’t step out of plurality, but the other way around. There is no such thing as a centered structure. A play of signifiers is a differential structure with no center.

“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)

This system of differences must be thought as a temporal process rather than a simultaneous whole. The system unfolds itself from one singular to the next. Each singular is determinate ( even though it never repeats itself) but not decidable , since it borrows from another element in order to be what it is. It is a double structure. You are right to at there is no determinability in the sense of an ability to retrieve and hold onto an exact same entity or meaning. Determinability for Derrida at the level of social structures is a relative stability of thematic meaning. — Joshs

I was thinking of an ontological indeterminacy. I mean, if I deconstruct my cat, and the arbitrariness of the signifier cannot be made non arbitrary independently of a context, then the context is the ontological foundation for what my cat is. But beyond this, there is nowhere to go. It is blind metaphysics to think that there can be conceived something beyond context.

This doesn't just annihilate metaphysics, it places annihilated metaphysics in the language construction itself, if I may put it that way. I mean to say, the utterance qua utterance is entirely foreign to the actuality that is in the palpable "fabric of things" and I talk like this notwithstanding Heidegger's claim that objects in the world are "of a piece" with the language used to conceive of them.

You won't agree, I suspect, but I claim there is something irreducible to this actuality. I am not convinced our understanding is locked within a totality of the Same. Yes, I suppose this is walking on water talk.

Needless to add, this subject matter - as complex and convoluted as it can get - is to me very intimately associated with ethics and intrinsic value in general. — javra

That is where it ends up, I think. Happiness, unhappiness and everything you can think of that fit into these (which is everything in experience, for even the plainest most uneventful conditions are saturated with affect. Boredom, perhaps, but that changes nothing) is the existential presupposition for ethics. I cannot even imagine ethics with without some pain or pleasure, or mood, or interest, even, in play, at risk. One cannot, yet, have a moral relation with AI, a dog or cat or squirrel, yes.

But you know, we cannot speak of happiness analytically (Wittgenstein would not), which is a very peculiar thing. We can talk about what makes a person happy or un, but happiness simpliciter is hands off. Can we call this an intrinsic good (or bad)?

What Levinas misses is that this radical other isn’t something to be found beyond being, it is within the structure of being itself. Intention always intends beyond itself, but this is. or the ‘Good’ any more or less than it is the opposite of the good.

“By making the origin of language, meaning, and difference the relation to the infinitely other, Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions in his philosophical discourse. But the true name of this inclination of thought to the Other, of this resigned acceptance of incoherent incoherence inspired by a truth more profound than the "logic" of philosophical discourse, transcendental horizons of language, is empiricism. The profundity of the empiricist intention must be recognized beneath the naivete of certain of its historical expressions. It is the dream of a purely heterological thought at its source. A pure thought of pure difference. Empiricism is its philosophical name, its metaphysical pretention or modesty.”(Derrida) — Joshs

I have Violence and Metaphysics here. Let me read it and se if I understand it.

I only have a rough idea of non-locality wherein physics everything is said to be connected --or entangled. This thing, this non-locality makes sense only if you consider life in general as being plastic relative to the physical world, then the world plastic relative to the greater cosmos--- which works for me. By your definition then, does non-locality infer all things of an evolutionary nature, follow in its development in the wake of a greater reality. Whether that be the slowly-changing earth or the ever changing cosmos? Indeed, if everything is connected, locality or non-locality makes little sense. — boagie

Before talk about evolution, let's talk about the structure of a perceptual act, the apperceptive nature of the encounter, the analysis of the knowledge relationship between the observer and the world. Phenomenology is a foundational paradigm shift in understanding what it is to be a human being, not to sound too high and mighty, but that really is what it is. Locality and no locality are redefined. How so? Go online and read about Heidegger and his phenomenological exposition on space and time. Space first. This will give you entirely different questions to ask.

I strictly mean technical culpability; else phrased, responsibility for wrongdoing for which adequate amends has not been given. As in being innocent rather than guilty of a crime. When I mentioned that newly birthed infants are birthed perfectly innocent, I intended that they're birthed perfectly free of culpability. Various peoples' perspectives differ on this, but that's my take. Still, for the spiritual/religious: karma may have brought us into this world, else the sins of our ancestors or some such, but - even when entertaining such perspectives - once here, we start off with a blank-slate of culpability. The same applies for our being existentially "thrown into the world", if this happens to be one's perspective.

As far as "guilt as a working ethical concept" the aspiration to be ethical to me in large part translates into the aspiration to be as free as possible of non-amended wrongdoings, i.e. to be as free as possible from wrongdoings and to remedy as best one can those wrongs one is guilty/culpable of. — javra

But you see, I wonder if sense can be made at all out of guilt. What makes a person guilty? We are always led to decisions made that cause some pain to someone. Then, what is a decision? A very sticky wicket. I cannot find that pure accountability; accountability is always bound to a system of established moral thinking. And then there are those pesky motivational issues. The very best freedom to decide can be lies in the standing apart from all this and assuming a perspective tha t is not conditioned, qualified, and this is not a nonsense idea. You get in the car,, key in hand, insert it into the ignition and it won't start. Up until that point, the process was entirely inexplicit, automatic, rote and independent of any meaningful idea of freedom. And let's say you were stealing the car: at what point in the historical events that led up to the failed ignition were your actions truly free? Wasn't it all just one seamless progression and freedom never really entered into it at all? Am I "freely" typing these words, or am I altogether ignoring typing so I can put ideas out there, and when I put ideas out there, is this not the same kind of automatic engagement?

Ever read Beckett's "Molloy". An interesting part where the dying Molloy Malone tries to grasp the moment of his being passing into oblivion, but there are only words, it is seems as if it is the WORDS that are passing, not Molloy, or was Molloy's identity only constructed of words in the first place? If one is guilty, WHO is the guilty party? There is no small amount of madness in this trying to observe one's self, and then in the observation finding only the observational structure itself. Molloy: "I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me . . ."

Anyway, a bit off point, but interesting, and it illustrates just how hard it is to find the guilty agency.

Or maybe I should ask (to be honest, in a semi-rhetorical fashion): Why should wisdom be considered a good by a so-called "lover of wisdom"? For example, is it supposed to hold some instrumental value, such as that of allowing one far greater manipulative control over others for the sake of increased capital; else, are all the understandings that it reputedly entails supposed to hold some intrinsic value that forsakes eudemonia (i.e., being of good spirit/daemon; hence, of a healthy and flourishing mind)? — javra

I think you've put your finger on it: The whole point is happiness, isn't it? Is it really, as Mill put it, better to be a philosopher dissatisfied than a pig satisfied? There is a bit of cultural condescension in this, I would think, but the idea is important. I think we would have to consider if there is anything such as profound wisdom that carries an affectivity. Emanuel Levinas speaks of the desideratum than exceeds the desire, and the ideatum that exceeds the idea. He is referring not to an intellectual apprehension, but something intuitive, a relation with the radically otherness of the world that beckons beyond to eternity.

Something of burning bush thinking in this, as if there is in the great beyond that intrudes into our finitude and in its grandeur trivializes all else. Buddhists and Hindus talk like this.

Struggling to wrap my head around this, how does non- locality figure into the processing of subject and object on an individual level? I understand that there is no separation between the world and consciousness, for to take away either, then the other ceases to be. Bare with me, perhaps I need read the thread more closely. — boagie

Can't say I follow, Boagie. Can you elaborate?

Innocence for me is defined by blamelessness. Ignorance is instead defined by lack of understanding (maybe we might both agree that knowledge does not entail understanding, though to understand is to know that which is understood; as one example, to know what someone said without understanding what the person said). Yes, as infants we’re birthed with both and loose both over time.

I however strongly question that a return to innocence, if at all possible, necessitates a forgetting of the understandings gained.

Hence the possibility of returning to innocence with a more awakened awareness than that first held in such state – rather than a going back to sleep.

Of course, all this is contingent on whether one believes that innocence, in the strict sense of blamelessness, can be regained once lost. — javra

Innocence and guilt make no sense to me at all. I think when we refer to a child's innocence, we are really referring to her purity and uncluttered experiences. Free of guilt, yes, but what is guilt as a working ethical concept (not as, say, a psychological concept, about feelings of remorse, resentment, etc.)? The kind of freedom to make this meaningful is impossible. When one stands on the precipice of future events, and chooses, this cannot be done ex nihilo. Contextual possibilities are finite and unique to that one. How is he responsible for, say, not living in a world that provides a conscience? If I were not given a conscience, what would I do?
At any rate, this forgetting of the understandings gained: Quite an idea. This, it might be argued, requires faith. There must be something that overrides the knowledge of our, if you will, thrownness into a knowledge of the world's miseries. Faith that all is redeemed in the end, somehow. That is why we have concepts of God: an ethical finality for the Good.
I would agree with you if only it is allowed a metaphysics that redeems. Otherwise, it seems disingenuous.

“I do not believe I have ever spoken of "indeterminacy," whether in regard to "meaning" or anything else. Undecidability is something else again. While referring to what I have said above and elsewhere, I want to recall that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive-syntactical or rhetorical-but also political, ethical, etc.). They are pragmatically determined.The analyses that I have devoted to undecidability concern just these determinations and these definitions, not at all some vague "indeterminacy." I say "undecidability" rather than "indeterminacy" because I am interested more in relations of force, in differences of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized through a decision of writing (in the broad sense I give to this word, which also includes political action and experience in general). There would be no indecision or double bind were it not between determined (semantic, ethical, political) poles, which are upon occasion terribly necessary and always irreplaceably Singular. Which is to say that from the point of view of semantics, but also of ethics and politics, "deconstruction" should never lead either to relativism or to any sort of indeterminism.”( Limited, Inc) — Joshs

But doesn't the "difference" make indeterminate any spoken utterance at the level of the most basic analysis? I do see that undecidability is preferred if there is a purpose that contextualizes, or "totalizes" (I think that is a Heideggerian term, borrowed by Levinas) such that terms can be set and played against each other. But beneath this, there is indeterminacy, beneath all undecidability, there is indeterminacy in the full sense of the term: what is singular in thought and expression is not singular in its essential structure. Singularity "steps out" of plurality of regionalized signifiers.

In other words, I don't mean that in the middle of deciding whether to go to market today I should get lost in the failure to decide what to do. My thinking, under construction, is that our affairs are pragmatic, our relations with the world are pragmatic, and pragmatism says nothing at all about foundational ontology of the Cartesian kind, some kind of substance. So, I suppose I am agreeing that decidability is a bottom line concept. But I also think that material substance is not just a stand in term for nothing at all, and I don't think that, res cogitans and res extensa are complete nonsense. Something in the hiddeness of the world intimates itself in the Husserlian reduction. It is the Buddhist's bliss (affectivity) which is this sublime ontology that is not discursive in its discovery, but intuitive.

Philosophers, I have observed, do not like this term, intuition, and I almost wince to use it.

I think Michel Henry is coming from an older Kantian influenced religious tradition, and a s a result he is neither in a position to effectively understand Heidegger nor Husserl. What he does is try to turn Heidegger into Kierkegaard, and I see Heidegger as having moved quite a distance beyond the latter. — Joshs

I'll take your word for that, though I think it is more that he doesn't really care what a defensible account would be at all. He is more interested moving on to something else entirely. In this paper, "The Power of Revelation of Affectivity According to Heidegger" I haven't really understood it yet, but It seems clear thus far that he has a phenomenological interpretation for Christianity which is Kierkegaardian (I didn't see that he was trying to make Heidegger into Kierkegaard, but rather criticizing Heidegger for defiling the affectivity with mundane meaning): affectivity (existential anxiety) is a momentous, transcendental structure of our existence. He wants to make revelatory anxiety a threshold to God.

By the way, when I mentioned "young at heart" I had in mind that this ought to be part and parcel of eudemonia: etymologically, being in "good spirit(s)" (or more literally, of a "good daemon"), which I can only see entailing having a light heart rather than a heavy one - again, despite all the sh*t one undergoes. Maybe this gets wound up with having/gaining a relatively clear conscience despite the hardships and loses and mistakes. There's no questioning that life happens and along with it the bad that jades, which deprives us of yesteryear's more vivid abilities to experience beauty or love, even a sense of wonder. For me, though, wisdom - the type philosophers were once upon a time reputed to pursue - ought be something like the song "Return to Innocence" in theme. Not a return to the ignorances of youth (never found the two equivalent), but to the affects that accompany unjaded souls. Now get reminded of Nietzsche parable of the camel, turned predator fighting the monster of thou shalts and shalt nots, then, at last, turned into a newly birthed babe in the same world as before.

Wisdom as a generative, even regenerative, grounding of such sort, that I'll go for. Intrinsic value to the max. Sounds like something worth attaining, at any rate. Next issue: how does one find it — javra

We want to have our cake and eat it, too. But these militate against each other, don't they. The more you return to innocence, the more you have to forget. One one knows solidly the tonnage of suffering of the world, and has the requisite compassion (some do not, clearly) there is no turning back, pulling the covers over the head and going back to sleep.
Remember, if I may, that miserable suffering is also an intrinsic value. Nietzsche certainly did have to take control because his physical life was a living hell, so much so that he could get behind it in his thinking.
Here is an odd but provocative idea: suffering and joy, the two dimensions of our ethical/aesthetic world. Do these not tell us by their own natures that only one of these is "intrinsically" desirable? I tend to think suffering is an instruction: Don't do that! And it is not culture of principles telling us this. Kierkegaard was perhaps right: principles are limited formulations, superseded by something so mysterious we had to invent religion.

Have a read of this abstract. The essay used to be online, but now is part of the volume from which this is excerpted; by Norman Fischer. — Wayfarer

How close this is to Heidegger's problem. Our pragmatism gets us out of trouble and scrapes in the world, but then it creates a false sense of existence, treating the world as "standing reserve". Our ready to hand existence is a great asset, yet can occlude primordial meaning.

It gets a bit complicated for me, though. While animals are, let's say their status as moral, affective agencies, is unquestionable, and I base this simply on their exposure to the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, heard tell of; their capacity for depth and, call it, intimations of profound things experience is capable of, seems limited. Consider the infant, blissful, but agency is missing. Who is blissful? Animals have limited agency, and I leave this term to debate. But would only add that there is a moment in symbolic, pragmatic dealings with the world, where a schism forms between ordinary affairs and reflection, which is, I hazard to say, what existentialism is all about, this break with continuity. What issues out of this is, granted, well, arguably, nothing but trouble. On the other, it seems to be a precipice where we encounter the impossible. Pulling away from spontaneous blisses of infancy (animal-being?) may be seen as opening to something far more primordial, perhaps absolute.

Ain't it? It's like being in love. Once there, you don't want to talk about it because talk takes, if you will, the ready-to-hand out of the whole affair. But then, being IN something so completely makes one wonder if one hasn't yielded to the unconsciousness of being IN it, and thereby failing to be open to its generational grounding. I want to be a 'teenager in love" but it's just that I don't want to be a teenager, unaware, blind, driven rather than driving. — Astrophel

Did I say generational?? I meant 'generative'.

Hey, if the pinnacle of wisdom isn't about being young at heart, in spite of all the suffering and such, then I don't want it. Said emotionally, rationally, both. — javra

Yeah, quite so. But am I...myself, if I am not aware at some second order of thinking? Odd to ask such a thing. I look back at childhood, see the fluid nature of events, and the smallest of things were glorious. Gone now is the glory of spontaneous existence. Kierkegaard (try not to be put off by the biblical obsession. He wasn't at all naive) called this a sinless condition, or, pre-sin, and the adventurous fantasies were common. He thought, with Wordsworth, that growing up and becoming encultured (inherited sin, not original sin) was inherently sinful, and he simply was referring to the unquestioned engagement of one's affairs. It is only after one steps away that one can be sinful, for then one recognizes her own relation to eternity and the groundlessness of everydayness. The "distance" between what one is and what one can understand what one is becomes apparent. This is an existential crisis I don't want to be left out of.
Do we want to be like children? Yes and No, is the only answer I can accept.

There is a saying you will find in mystical literature of various cultures, ‘the good that has no opposite’. This is distinguished from what is normally considered ‘good’ as that is always conditional, i.e. what is good is what is not bad, a good outcome, pleasure as distinct from pain, gain as distinct from loss, and so on. In an instrumental or utilitarian view, then morality is about ‘maximising’ these goods, but logically speaking, they’re dependent on their opposites in order to exist. Whereas the ‘good that has no opposite’ is outside those kinds of reference frames. — Wayfarer

Isn't this the obvious truth? When I am IN a good experience, a really good one, I am not aware of anything else. Its "dependence" only comes into play when engagement is compromised.
Tried to access your music but it wouldn't play. Any suggestions?

I find this statement beautiful. — javra

Ain't it? It's like being in love. Once there, you don't want to talk about it because talk takes, if you will, the ready-to-hand out of the whole affair. But then, being IN something so completely makes one wonder if one hasn't yielded to the unconsciousness of being IN it, and thereby failing to be open to its generational grounding. I want to be a 'teenager in love" but it's just that I don't want to be a teenager, unaware, blind, driven rather than driving.

I wrote a paper comparing Varela and Thompsons’s approach to meditation to phenomenology. It’s titled A Phenomenological Critique of Mindfulness. You might find it interesting. — Joshs

I read it. A fascinating engagement, but then, I can't give a technical response since that would take a lot of rereading of texts and putting things together, and it is a technical paper. I am actually doing just this, but it is a process.

Tentatively, though, some thoughts: you know, the claim made by Varela and Thompson that Nagarjuna was not elaborating on the Abhidamma, but was simply elucidating is questionable. This early text is considered the closest to the Buddha's original thought, and when it speaks of "ultimate reality" it is meant to be revelatory, not analytical. It is in the analysis that arguments rise up. Derrida comes to mind: The moment you think at all, you have a muddled or diffused event, and this "unstructured" way of designation is simply the "structure" of the way utterances work. Completely indeterminate when discussion turns to questions at the most basic level because determinacy itself is simply indeterminate. To speak at all is inherently deconstructive. So all this talk by Nagarjuna is perhaps right for simply dealing with metaphysical insistences, for, as Varela and Thompson say, "as one becomes mindful of one’s own experience, one realizes the power of the urge to grasp after foundations". But this grasping is a flaw to be overcome, not indulged. One can say just this of the entire enterprise called philosophy and I think a Buddhist is bound to this. After all, there is only one bottom line to all this, and it is not cognitive. It is affective.
Reading Michel Henry on Heidegger, I find, "The essence of revelation peculiar to affectivity and taking place in it is completely lost to Heidegger, confused by him with the essence of the ontological understanding of Being to which it nevertheless remains heterogeneous both in its structure and in its phenomenality." I think this is right. It is close to Kierkegaard's insistence that when rational systems approach actuality, it is a train wreck, and Heidegger's ontology is, after all, a readable, rational presentation.
But you're thesis that in calling upon Nagarjuna to work out groundlessness contra Husserl et all, who insist groundlessness of this kind is untenable seems right, though I continue to work out the details.
As always, thanks for this.

Since deterministic systems have to adhere to the Principle of Least Action and humans consistently violate this principle, is this free will? — Agent Smith

This thought experiment here is ill conceived because causality is NOT derived from physics. It is presupposed by physics. The principle of least action is just a variant of the principle of sufficient cause, which is apodictic.

If you want to go after freedom, you have to look at how the things work: long story short, we live most of our lives unfree, that is, bound to the processes of living that are part of our existence's structure: the working, cooking, driving, making plans, and so on--these are not "freely" done. They are done without any second order of thought at all, robotically, if you will, automatically, no more free than my finger hitting the right key while typing. Invisibly done, as an act of instinct: it occurs independently of a free will, even if there is such a thing.
But stop typing, because there is a disfunction, and now you have to attend to this, and now you are "free" of the automatic process. Now pull back from the entire living process of rote activities, allow none to possess your attention. Now you are in a rare state of mind, open, and when a thought does occur, you dismiss it, for thoughts are agencies of control.
You are free, are you not?

Doing so is no easy task. But I’ll just say that if intrinsic value is a non-contingent end-in-itself this to me strongly connotes concepts of an ultimate reality. Brahman as an eastern, Hindu notion of this; the One as a western Neo-platonic notion. The underlying idea pivoting around the supposition that all sentient beings are, for lack of a better phrasing, fragmented emanations of this ultimate reality which is not contingent and is an end-in-itself. Thereby making each sentient being endowed with that which is not contingent and an end-in-itself, i.e. with intrinsic value, relative to itself. — javra

The hard part is to ground intrinsicness. Language itself, the defining and contextualizing, gives whatever it takes up a form that can be controlled, totalized, if you will, into familiar categories. Speaking qua speaking puts things in familiar contexts; it is inherently contextualizing, which is why philosophers have so much resistance to something like "qualia". If we could talk about qualia, then that would be talk about ultimate reality.
Not much you can say about Brahman, is there. The atman is Brahman is pretty empty, but then, there is the bliss of this realization that is qualitatively different from qualia, the "being appeared to redly" kind of thing. This bliss is not just a good time. It is deeply profound in a way that is alien to everydayness. This is where concepts like ultimate reality (you find this in the Abhidhamma) get interesting: it is an intuitive experience, not found in our language because it is not normalized for sharing. It would be different if we were all Tibetan monks, who, I have read, talked readily about this kind of thing. Ultimate here is the big impossibility of Wittgenstein, who told us that our world is structured such that certain concepts are just nonsense. this kind of thinking stopped philosophers from moving beyond the commonplace thinking of science and culture. Witt was no mystic.
Anyway, as I see it, if you are looking for ways to talk about ultimacy, you have to go "to the things themselves" and here, you have to discover the "Otherness" of the world. In my thought, this begins with Husserl. See his Ideas I, and prior (or contemporaneously) the last books of Logical Investigations which I am just reading now for the first time. Husserl gets very intimate with the intuitive disclosure of the world and gives the whole affair ground breaking language. One cannot SAY the world, but one can approach it, negatively (apophatically) go into it. Husserl's phenomenological reduction is like this: a method, not unlike meditation!

Yes, it has to be. How would you isolate the variable intrinsic value otherwise? — Agent Smith

Oh. I get the point. Intrinsic value is useless, it has no utility, not good for something else.....I was a bit slow on this. I thought you had no use for the idea itself.

For anything at all. We don't need to specify what exactly something is useful for; that something can be used (Wittgenstein & meaning of life) is all that matters. — Agent Smith

No, no. I mean, you say intrinsic value is useless. Yet the notion of instrumentality implies something that is not useless, something that is for what is not instrumental. Otherwise, you end up with a system instrumentality that has no designated value.
Wittgenstein put value up front, but insisted we couldn't talk about this, even though he talked about it. Its the "ladder" explanation.

1. Intrinsic value only [useless] :sad:
2. Instrumental value only [useful] :smile:
3. Intrinsic + Instrumental value [useless + useful] :chin: — Agent Smith

Useful instrumentality begs the question: instrumental for what? This will no doubt point to something else that bears the same question, until something that is not questionable is reached.

One must remember that nothing in the world has meaning in and of itself, but only in relation to a conscious subject. Another way of clarifying might be to say that the physical world is utterly meaningless. It only gains meaning when biological consciousness bestows meaning upon it. So, your struggle is right on the money. Intrinsic value is necessarily a value to biological consciousness, it may well be a property of an object, but it can only have value if consciousness determines it so. — boagie

But you have to see that conscious subject ARE the world. There is nothing localized about a person at the broadly conceived totality. I am what the world does under certain conditions and this physical existence just the form of something eternal. So, when consciousness "bestows meaning" upon a thing, this act has only apparent boundaries of locality. But the concept of locality altogether disappears in the broadest conception of things.

To my mind the answer is: that for which anything is instrumental. More precisely: each and every first-person subject itself relative to itself in nonreflective manners (“nonreflective” here meaning: intrinsic value doesn’t pertain to the thoughts one thinks of oneself - for these are instrumental - but to oneself as, in part, thinker of such thoughts).

Given that each sentient being holds intrinsic value relative to itself, it can then be possible for some sentient beings to find other sentient beings’ personal intrinsic value to be of intrinsic value to their own selves: we address such tendencies by terms such as “compassion”, “love”, and so forth. Their suffering becomes our suffering just as their joys become our joys.

This to the effect that if one’s compassion for some other is strictly instrumental then it cannot be genuine compassion. For example, if you hold compassion for another strictly so as to be praised by the general public so as to get a promotion at work, you in fact don’t genuinely care for the other. But to the extent that you do genuinely care for the other, their being - replete with its intrinsic value relative to itself - will become intrinsically valuable to you.

When we don’t (intrinsically) value the intrinsic value of another, they at best become only instrumentally valuable to us. And this is where they get used.

If all this holds, then by shear fact that subjective beings occur in the world, so too occurs intrinsic value. If any one of us doesn’t find anyone else to be intrinsically valuable, the individual will nevertheless be intrinsically valuable to him/herself. — javra

I think you are close, or, closer than anyone I have come across. But you don't quite say what intrinsic value IS. The having it as something on the value end of a desire, that is, in the valuing agency herself, is of course right, but how does the having such a value make that value an intrinsic value? What makes it intrinsic? Being non contingent. This means among all the things one can say to contextualize the value, once these are suspended, there still remains what is independent of all this. Once it is linked to a contingency, like ice cream or skiing, then you find difference, you find indeterminacy. Intrinsic value can't be something that is relativized to a particular person's tastes, for if, say, skiing were an intrinsic value, it would be a value for all. Intrinsic values are not variable.
The trick is to reconcile the vagaries of subjectivity with the requirements of intrinsic value.

How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology. — Joshs

I'd have to read about it. I found The Embodied Mind, revised edition: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Varela, Thompson and Rosch. Is this a good source?

How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology.

Husserl characterizes the physical thing in terms of a particular stratum of intentional constitution:

Now once the" sense-thing" is itself constituted, and so is, founded with it, the real-causal thing at the level of genuine experience, sense experience, then a new constitution of a higher level results in regard to the relativity of this "thing" with respect to the Corporeality constituted in a similar fashion. It is this relativity which demands the constitution of a physicalistic thing manifesting itself in the intuitively given thing. But in this
relativity the geometrical determinations and the specifically "sensuous qualities" play quite different roles (both taken, in their own constitutive sphere, as "themselves, " as optimal). The geometrical determinations pertain to the physicalistic Object
itself; what is geometrical belongs to physicalistic nature in itself. But this is not true of the sensuous qualities, which thoroughly belong in the sphere of the appearances of nature.

“ "Physicalistic nature," to which we have now advanced,
presents itself in the following way in accord with our
expositions: the thing itself in itself consists of a continuously or discretely filled space in states of motion, states which are called energy forms. That which fills space lends itself to certain groups of differential equations and corresponds to certain fundamental laws of physics. But there are no sense qualities here. And that means there are no qualities here whatever. For
the quality of what fills space is sense quality.”(Ideas II) — Joshs

Reading The Embodied Mind. I'll get back to you when I have something to say. BTW, thanks for Varela, Thompson and Rosch.

↪Astrophel I don't see a problem for those who believe consciousness is physical in the fact that the physical events are experienced.

My own view is that 'physical' and 'mental' are mutually incommensurable bases of explanation. I don't see any reason to posit a transcendent "realm". — Janus

First, calling something physical, material, is, in itself, simply vacuous. When scientists and everyday talk refer to some material object, it is just a general term that has no content at all because it is not a particular thing and hence has no properties, so it has no predicative possibilities. Kites and balloons are red, but material substance cannot be. It is just a stand in term for the unseen substratum of all things.
So when a scientist insists the thoughts in our heads are really just a form of material substance, she is really just talking out of her hat, as if there were some meaning to the term. There isn't: there is no ontology of material substance. You can try Descartes' wax metaphor, but, as Wittgenstein tells us, metaphors have to have a referent on both sides. I say my friend is a real tiger when angered, there is my friend, and there is the borrowed tiger qualities. In Descartes' wax example, the wax has the alternative states, solid and liquid. But to say these must have the abiding material existence "behind" this is to have a one sided metaphor, for the other, the "existence" is not there to be observed so that the metaphor can be complete. Nonsense is the result.

Metal fares no better, for if material is nonsense (not saying the term has no application at all. But as stand alone ontology, it is nonsense), then the mental loses its meaning, for what is an ontology of the mental if there is no physical for contrast? It is an up without a down.

so if you want to call it all physical, then you are not referring to some ontological substrate of al things; rather, you are contextualizing ontology to what scientists say and think. And on the other side, there is idealism, and this meets the same fate: calling everything idea is an exclusive contextualization if, well, brain events or the like.

This is why the term phenomenon is superior, for it does not refer to some invisible substrate. It is simply what is present, there in the world before you. Transcendental realms just fall away, though it is not as if the term 'transcendental' has no meaning.

Second, assume the world is Dennett's, and this is the assumption of the empirical scientist, and these guys don't really do ontology, so they feel very comfortable talking about physical this and material that. IN the scientist's world of assumptions, how is it that anything out there gets in my brain thing? This is a very clear question, and the answer should be easy: Here is my brain, there is my lamp, I know it is there on the desk. Now, how does this work, this knowledge relationship? Or better: how is that something like a brain that is about as opaque an object as one can imagine, "receive" the object, and think of this as transparency being a 10 and opacity being a 0, the former a kind of mirror representation, the latter, absolute opacity, like a rock or a fence post.

The point should be clear, very clear: something as opaque as a brain, a three and a half pound grey mass, should have no intimation at all regarding that lamp. Zero. Consider: all one has ever experienced is experience, therefore material substance is NECESSARLY a mental phenomenon, for in order for it to what is "out there" to be other than a mental phenomenon, we would have to first leave mental phenomenal experience to affirm this physical Other, and this is nonsense. Recall Wittgenstein and logic: we can never get at logic's generative source because it would take logic to conceive it, encounter it, at all. Same here.

So this last paragraph is what happens when we take Dennett's side. It all falls apart at the level of basic questions. Dennett gets away with this because he rejects basic questions. He really isn't a philosopher at all. Just, and I am reading his Consciousness Explained as I write, a kind of con man; no seriously: he belittles his opposition; note the language he uses. His is a rhetorical argument working throughout, and his common sense approach is just that: common.

I don't see that consciousness being presupposed, as it might be said to be by all human discourse, would be a problem for Dennett, since he doesn't deny its existence. — Janus

As I see it: If conscious events are reducible to physical events (Dennett), and physical events are only accessible in conscious observations, then physicality becomes a question begged. Only a phenomenon can be "behind" a phenomenon. Hence hermeneutics.

I think philosophies have been bracketing conventional
assumptions for centuries. The idea isnt to pretend that you dont know what you know, but to abstract away from it, to leave it in the background, not attend to it. — Joshs

This runs into Derrida: in even the simplest utterance, the most primordial, the meaning issues what is not uttered. There is no "true" affirmation at all, just this web of signification that has an emergent singularity. And this itself would go under erasure (like Wittgenstein "erasing" his own Tractatus).

The only way to take Husserl seriously is to actually perform this method of reduction, which means standing there confronting the this house, this tree, and, well, not-thinking. When Sartre's Roquentin in Nausea does this reduction he has...errrr, visions of the superfluity of existence. But forget about Sartre's hellish imagination. I think when a perceptual event is consciously set apart from all the assumptions that would otherwise claim it, in time, because this method takes practice, there is something transformational in this, as if one is brought to the threshold of a revelation, but no further. Going further one would have to meditate, which is, the ultimate reductive act.


Dennett, by contrast, thinks, rather smugly, that the enlightening transformation involves disillusionment in favor of a rigorous common sense, and he is irredeemably dogmatic on this.

And please, no gratuitous, unargued Dennett bashing. — Janus

I would ask Dennett and his ilk Rorty's question: how does anything out there get in here? Of course, the "in here' part is the brain, and Dennett thinks the brain is simply this organ, like a liver or a kidney, that produces consciousness, but answer Rorty's question and you end up with the very troublesome conclusion that consciousness is PRESUPPOSED by talk about brains.
This is where Dennett's thinking turns tail and runs.

What's pre-understood? If I catch your drift, you seem to be saying something to the effect that we already comprehend/know the world; all that's needed is to become conscious/aware of it. If it's remembering then we're in rationalist territory (innate ideas). :chin: Fascinating! — Agent Smith

No, no; not that at all.

It's a long, long story. And it is far more fascinating than I could possibly say here. But if you take a given perceptual event of any kind at all, you have to ask questions about how the event itself is constructed is constructed AS an event, just like a scientist would observe a blade of grass or a star spectrum. It is always description first, then the impressive mathematizing and all the, call it paradigmatic work, begins. Phenomenology treats things before us AS things before us, and gives a descriptive account. A thing is in time, e.g., and time is past, present and future, and the agency that witnesses the event is also in time, but this is not quite right already because we are using a scientist's model of things: this object, this agency, this event arenot so much in IN time--- they ARE time, that is, time is an essential feature of their Being. This past, present and future is part of the analysis of the object itself, so when we ask what is it? IT is a past, present and future. Then this analysis turns to time. In our encounter with the object, how is time presented? Here there is history, and just think about Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions, how the present theories about the object are built our of the past, not transcending the past, constructed from the ages of thought, and on a personal level, constructed out of your own persona' history, your time in school and daily familiarities.

That which stands before you is an amalgam, and phenomenology is not interested in all the knowledge claims of all the disciplines that give us the historical dimension of an object; it is interested in the "how is stands here as it IS now. Its Being is historical, but then, this is arguable. Time is far more general, for it qualifies the Being of all possible worlds and everything inaginable. Their must be a more primordial analysis of time.
And so on more hundreds and hundreds of pages. This is, roughly in the extreme, and introduction to what Being and TIme by Heidegger is about. Husserl is before him underlies it, as do Kierkegaard, Hegel, Kant and so on.
Trouble with Dennett and his ilk is they are scientists, and they do not think out of this box. The thinking here really requires a different set of values of inquiry. You have to want to know what it is that is presupposed by science. This is Heidegger and Husserl et al. This is philosophy.

Right, so you obviously believe Dennett did not understand traditional phenomenology. I'm inclined to agree, insofar as Dennett claims that it consists in mere introspection; which is what I take Zahavi to be arguing.

So, the question that follows is as to what else phenomenology consists in (because it seems that introspection is definitely part of it). Off the top of my head seems to consist in extending the kind of synthetic a priori thinking that began with Descartes and was improved by Kant into more corporeal areas of inquiry. — Janus

I think Dennett cannot make that dramatic move away from a scientist's model of the way the world is put together. He cannot prioritize meaning over material substance, is one way to put it. Heidegger asks, what is the very first thing we encounter in the world? It is meaning, not material substance, and by this, as we see in Being and Time, it is not conceptual meaning, but, and I find him aligned with dewey here, the whole ball of wax: affect, caring/concern, being with others, ready to hand "spatial" relations and so on. This is, no, CAN BE, the kind of analysis you get if you allow the phenomenon to take center stage. A lot of post Heideggarians these days.

I think you have to put Kant's synthetic apriori judgments aside for Heidegger. Heidegger does not live and think in the same world. Phenomena are not representations. They are the only basis for ontology we have, and the entirety of what IS, is analyzed very differently. Being and Time takes Descartes' res extensa and res cogitans (I think I have that right) as one big presence-at-hand error error, failing to understand the fundamental ontological ready-to-hand relations.

As I think of Heidegger, I see that it is impossible to fit him in Dennett's (and the analytic pov) simple thinking. Heidegger is kind of sui generis, even though when you read him, you find the whole history of philosophy throughout.

For me, I don't have a pro's detailed understanding, but I like to read Heidegger more than Husserl because the former really takes one on a trip, like an intellectual's adventure, a radically new way to conceive the world. But Husserl's epoche has this undeniable intuitive, revelatory dimension. Consider his Four Principles of Phenomenology:

so much appearance, so much being”
“that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”
“zu den Sachen selbst!”: To the things themselves!
“so much reduction, so much givenness.”

This where my interests lie now.

I never thought of Descartes in terms of synthetic priori judgments, and I don't really understand how this would work. How does this go?

Whaddaya mean? — Agent Smith

I mean when we make statements about the world, the first place basic inquiry begins is the beginning: the language event that produces meaning that is presupposed in the utterance. THE phenomenological insight is that what is there sitting before waiting for analysis already possesses the terms for analytic work, and these terms are not magically hooked up with their referents: they are pre-understood in the language of an evolved knowledge base. So, the geologist isn't looking at "properties" exhibited by the object that are stand alone; their "standing" is a composite of what the understanding brings to the occasion.
This is the kind of thing Dennett and his ilk do not want to talk about. But there is a whole history of philosophy that does talk about this, right up to the present time.

Dennett levels this criticism at phenomenology in Consciousness Explained and proposes that, because of this subjective nature of phenomenology, which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with, it should be thought of as "autophenomenology", and as a supposed corrective he proposes a discipline he names "heterophenomenology", which is the "third person" recording, analysis and critique of the reports of others about what they take to be the nature of their consciousness. He says that this is not a new discipline but is in fact just Cognitive Science. The other dimension of this investigation is brain imaging to look for neural correlates with what people report is going on in their minds. — Janus

Keep in mind that Dennett does not believe that his assumptions about science's knowledge claims are absolutes, but that, following Russell, he thinks science is simply the only wheel that rolls. And it does roll so well! Thus you get outrageous utterances like "which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with." he really isn't even trying to understand phenomenology, and I doubt he has read much, or any. He reads scientific journals, I imagine exclusively. Heidegger? I think not.
People like this are simply out of their depths. They don't see that phenomenology is not at all in conflict with scientific perspectives; it's just that science is altogether something OTHER than philosophy. Dennett doesn''t seem to want to look closely at this because he's too busy reading other things, and also, I think, because it does take a certain capacity to freely pull away from the paradigms of science and move to a higher order of thinking, which he doesn't have. Training forbids.
So this philosophically myopic thinker really doesn't understand anything about phenomenology. He thinks it's like studying qualia, and if you ever take a little time to read Being and Time, you would see this is Heidegger (as well as the post modern thinking that followed him) says nothing at all like this. Husserl was a bit like this (Heidegger said he was "walking on water).

Anyway, never listen to a scientist turned philosopher. All they produce is dogmatic reassurances that everything is okay and we really DO understand the world. They are a silly bunch.

I don't think I said that. Was it implied? — Agent Smith

You said:The takeaway: There's something nonchemical about biology and there's something nophysics about chemistry, so on and so forth.
Phenomenology is indeterminate on the issue of foundational knowledge claims, and for most, the only foundation one can defend is hermeneutics, and this applies across the board, even to the itself, which is hard for many to grasp. There really is no way out: Language itself is inherently indeterminate.

The takeaway: There's something nonchemical about biology and there's something nophysics about chemistry, so on and so forth. — Agent Smith

Of course, there is something "non phenomenological" about phenomenology, which is really why phenomenology rules the day at the presuppositional level of analysis: In the presence of things qua presence, the lack of foundational discovery undermines knowledge claims of all kinds, and here lies the most profound revelation of our being human.

While it may be true that being poor in the country is less stressful than the city, at least it sounds intuitive true, you still sight the virtues of being poor. Listen to the hyper wealthy talk casually about poverty, and you will find exactly that kind of dismissiveness. Jeff Bezos and his ilk are especially flippant about what is in fact a living nightmare, being poor that is.
However, putting aside how this kind of thinking plays into the hands of a wealthy person's rationalization, my happiest days were when I was, well, free of the bondage of possessions. — Constance

Half right Constance. It is a myth that the rural poor are happier. In a world where entertainment does not run cheap, the only ones happy and poor are monks and nuns.

Were you raised in poverty? Are you poor now? Do you have family or old friends who are poor? Many of the rural poor are more content and less stressed than the suburban & urban 'working poor' or 'lower middle-class'. — 180 Proof

That is a wonderful rationalization for the perversions of capitalize. Next thing you'll be telling me is that Jeff Bezos actually deserves a quadrillion dollars, making sure the the most wretched in society are not spoiled by health care and education.

I have been reading Daniel C Dennet on the concept of qualia. He speaks of
'how philosophers have tied themselves into such knots over qualia. They started where anyone with anyone would start: with their strongest and clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature on qualia exists _ they haven't had an alternative vision to leap to, and so, they get dragged back into the paradoxical prison. That is why the literature on qualia qualia gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement'.

I see the issues of metaphysics and how this is bound up with human perception as extremely difficult aspects of philosophy. The issue of what is regarded as 'qualia' seems important. However, it may be that such an area is a complex area rather than straightforward, so I raise it as an area for philosophical exploration and questioning.I wonder about the whole nature of phenomenology as part of perception, but, at the same time, questions about the nature of reality may need to take on board ideas within empirical scientific disciplines and aspects of the power of reason. It is within this context which I raise the question of the idea of 'qualia', with a view to how that may stand in relation to metaphysics, and the limitations of the human mind in understanding reality, philosophically and from a scientific approach. In this thread, I am asking to what extent is the concept useful or not? Does the idea of qualia fuzz and blur the whole area of explaining life and the debate between materialism and idealism? — Jack Cummins

The reason why philosophers have muddled the whole affair is that they refuse to acknowledge the ontological primacy of caring and its "objects". Qualia are, as Dennett, I think dismissively, puts it "pure phenomena", but what is IN phenomena? It is not the bare recognition of some "appeared to redly" kind of thing. This is awfully naïve, an abstraction from experience. But affect: the interest, desire, love, hate, fear and all the rest are always of-a-piece with qualia and it is here the apprehension of the being qua being of a thing, if you will, is discovered. The existence qua existence (not mincing words here) of this lamp on the table is IN the bare features once the cognitive dimensions are analytically removed. In other words, do a reduction to the pure sensory features in the empirical presentation, and while you may find the conceptual structure never to be reduced, the "bare" witnessing in the conceptual scheme can be pure, I claim, and here, qualia's identity is understood: in affect, existence "speaks".