The metaethical discussion about why a person might find something morally interesting isn't that relevant to the thread. The thread assumes S has a moral outlook, and acts can be permissible but they wouldn't want to do them. — AmadeusD

not my original intention, but then you did say, "Yep. Morals are emotional positions and nought else, on my view." Which I couldn't help wondering about. It's not a defensible position.

If I'm understanding you, I think its redundant question. We are 'ethical' about many things, but this is also a function of our position on what is morally interested. — AmadeusD

If I have a moral regard for something, some issue about acquiring something, preventing something, and so on, I have an interest in that thing. Not so much what the thing is, but simply that one cares about it. This caring has to be in place in order for ethics to be part of an issue. No ones cares, no ethics. It is this caring I am interested in. Why does one care about a thing? It must have value for that person. So again, no value, no ethics. So what is value?

Yep. Morals are emotional positions and nought else, on my view. Its a good idea to discuss them, and form groups of affinity. Some would very much enjoy seeing a woman 'engage' with her dog on a bus. It may be their optimal fantasy, in fact. — AmadeusD

So the ethical prohibition against torture is all about my emotional regard for torture, the empathy, compassion and so forth that step forward when such a thing is witnessed, and the laws we have about this are grounded in this same thing, only collectively. Let's say this is true. But is this only what ethics is about, or is there that which we are ethical ABOUT that is also in ethics?

without moral sanction or legal repercussion. In most human cultures, no such prohibition applies to other species, which are considered legitimate prey. Many cultures have permitted or do still permit some unfavoured members of their own society to be treated that way. — Vera Mont

Well, herein lies the rub: You seem to be saying that the world of animals and their lack of ethical principles provides the substratum for the analysis of our world's ethics. This has to be shown, not assumed.

And "every legal code ever devised" really says nothing about the generational ground of ethics. I mean, even if they all DID say explicitly that social institutions AS institutions exhausted ethical meaning, that wouldn't make it true. (Of course, among these legal codes are the biblical ones, and they certainly thought quite the opposite.)

If you profess faith in a supreme being, you are required to believe there is. — Vera Mont

A supreme being would be question begging, for one has to first show what it is about ethical matters that would even warrant such a thing.

Beyond.... to where? — Vera Mont

For this, one need only look at a given ethical situation and discover its essence. I don't think this is a very demanding analysis. Begin with strong examples because they are the clearest: take the moral obligation not to bludgeon, burn, rip and tear, or otherwise offend and afflict another's living body, assuming all things commonly in place in average conditions (the living body in question is not hypesthetic, e.g.). Is this morally exhaustively conceived in the social institutions that would express the prohibition? Or is there more to it than this set of rules, laws, sentiments toward, and so forth, that the put forward this prohibition?

One doesn't. One separates the mores and laws that make sense according to one's own judgment from those that are outmoded or counterproductive. Beyond socially imposed limitations, there is no "law of the jungle" or "natural law". — Vera Mont

Not unless they're handed down from heaven. — Vera Mont

So ethics really has no foundation at all? "Outmoded" and "counterproductive" confer nothing beyond utility of ethics. But principles of utility have an "end" or telos. I mean for every practical measure, there is purpose, but if this purpose has no end in itself, then it either moves on for its justificatory basis to other assumptions, and these on to others, and there really is no end to this, or one simply has to stop inquiry at some point and declare there to be no grounding "in actuality" for ethics. Ethics thus just stands exclusively in the social construction. Both of these are the case, perhaps, but the trouble is, not so much heaven, a term of dubious meaning, but grounding real meanings apart from their mere cultural sources. The ethical violation of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov lies beyond breaking a society's rules, don't you think?

Yes. Alcoholism. — fdrake

Closeted alcoholism, perhaps. But who lives like this? Some, yes. Off they go, then. But most bring their issues into this public arena, and this is where ethics gets its irritating ambiguity, for there is she is, my daughter, and there he is, an Adonis, looking so cool drinking and smoking, and she learns this from him, and so his right to drink publicly undoes my right to raise my daughter as I see fit.

One way to look at it is, it is a matter of positive and negative rights: One's positive right to drink publicly intrudes as a negative right on my part to live absent of this. Almost no one lives in a vacuum. I hold that a free society is very strong in the direction of positive rights as a default tendency.

Everything to do with morality and ethics is good or bad only because "we say so". — Vera Mont

But how does one separate what is "merely" said from what has a grounding apart from the mere saying? The mere saying includes attitudes, historically based beliefs, enculturated taboos, cultural institutions that contain moral precepts, and so on. One grows up and then, once there, in the midst, if you will, of one's own culture, only then can step back and question, and here, one can ask if it is all just this collective sentiment, or is there something about the essence of what it is to be ethical that is for basic than this.
Ethics gets interesting when we move into the uncertain territories of underlying assumptions. Laws, rules, norms, principles are at best, prime facie compelling. Is there anything in ethics that is more than this?

The moral good and bad is supposed to transcend all differences of social context. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is a loaded statement. If true, then one would have to identify something that is good or bad "outside" of social contexts, but how is this possible since the good and bad are essentially social, conceived only in societies and about social circumstances. Can one "reduce" ethics to something not "social" in its nature?

Is there anything wrong with eating the flesh of a member of one's own species? Some tribes considered it a homage to the departed relative to retain some portion of their being; some paid their slain enemies a compliment by partaking of their might, or to communicate with the gods or to demonstrate their power over another group. There is some mystery (and pay-walls) over how cannibalism actually become a taboo. But you still wouldn't want to be the guy that ate his neighbour. — Vera Mont

But if his neighbor was okay with it, and this has happened, then part of the immorality of this vanishes, for certainly consent is mitigating. All we are left with now is mere sentiment we all share, and this is difficult to make into a meaningful basis for a taboo like the one that exists. The question is, is cannibalism, or incest, or any of a number of victimless immoralities, only "bad" because "we" say so? Arguments like this apply to contemporary issues like same sex relations and the indeterminacy of sexual practices and identity. One looks at the direction, the "slippery slope," of this: Today same sex marriage, tomorrow

Mid: This is my view of morality, and we're lucky that only humans are sentient enough to be considered moral agents. This means most people's morality will align on my account, even if they have different moral frameworks for arriving at the "yes/no" portion of whether to act.
Long: Ah, well. There are millions. Millions of things make me uncomfortable, and I'd rather not be the kind of person who did them because that would be, on my account, shameful or embarrassing. These extend to no one else, even in cases that would effect someone else, attitudinally speaking. I don't want to be that person, regardless of who is effected — AmadeusD

But it really doesn't get interesting until one brings up the hard cases that challenge our collective comfort. I recall a philosophy class in ethics that began with an article called On the Bus, or something similar, and it brought the reader through a process of increasing discomfort by describing scenes of increasing physical intimacy between a woman and her dog sitting across from you on a bus.

You know your moral intuitions are being directly assaulted when they start erupting in protest. The final scene I would rank as "unmentionable". It is a fascinating analysis, nevertheless: One the one hand, I am simply as liberal minded as a person can be, which means if this woman takes her behavior int he confines of her own home, then I cannot see the basis for moral concern, notwithstanding my physical revulsion. I am actually pretty proud I can think like this. Who am I to judge others? How about men with boys, fairly common, I have read, among certain of our ancestors. THAT is a tough case!

BUT: On the bus???? In front of everyone, this raises an entirely different question. My ethics is pretty simple: do no harm. Of course, this is an entangled mess in practical situations. The woman is doing no harm at all considered in itself what she does. But then, neither am I if I shout horrible epithets all by myself at the wall. Context is everything. In public, violations take on a different set of standards.

The question is, in my mind, IF an act is not morally objectionable as a private act, then what does this say about the public judgment that it IS objectionable? Isn't the latter rendered vacuous, no better than the same the personal "feelings" of revulsion that I suspend when trying to be objective and fair and nonjudgmental?

The Taoist practices I try to work at don't frame the quiet as substance or emptiness but as what happens when the chatter stops. My brief encounters with it have changed my expectations. There is a timing to reactions that shape events. I have no idea why. It is like a point of leverage to lighten the energy needed to move something. — Paine

There is an uncanny space that opens up when the chatter stops for some people. While for others, most, it is simply the same old perceptual encounter with the world. This space deserves analysis, the rigorous kind that discovers the structure of consciousness itself.

On Zhuangzi. Consider this passage:

......whether you point to a little stalk or a great pillar, a leper or the beautiful Hsi-shih, things ribald and shady or things grotesque and strange, the Way makes them all into one. Their dividedness is their completeness; their complete­ness is their impairment. No thing is either complete or impaired, but all are made into one again. Only the man of far­ reaching vision knows how to make them into one. So he has no use [for categories], but relegates all to the constant. The constant is the useful; the useful is the passable; the passable is the successful; and with success, all is accomplished. He relies upon this alone, relies upon it and does not know he is doing so. This is called the Way.

The point of this is to show how language makes issues out of thin air, dividing the world (categorical thinking) that is an original pragmatic singularity. Human discontentment lies with this false sense of a world divided. Further on, the matter is spelled out in clarity:

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T'ai is tiny

There is in this, something definitive and is, of course, not definitive at all: Definitive because the final wisdom clears the playing field, and yet not definitive because the act of doing this is itself categorical since all language and meaning is categorical: words divide the world.

Jacques Derrida, that annoying French deconstructionist that is so difficult to read, is intentionally annoying. He wants the reader to see, in his own way, this Taoist point in his analysis of the "difference and deference" of the structure of language and the basic idea is that language not only does not tell us "about" a world in any foundationally determinate way, but does not divide the world with its categories. The world is entirely "outside" of this, yet to say this at all obviously is an exercise in language.

So my interest in this "space" can be approached here. It is where one's existence and the existence of the world is realized by "the person of far reaching vision" is released from the grip of language. But what is THIS about? There is a LOT to "say" about this, paradoxically. Or is it a paradox? For language and its "distance" from the the palpable, pragmatic (the "constant" is "useful" says Chuangtzu) world are themselves IN this world and allow us to realized this very thesis. The tao is conceived in language! How does this work? Language itself, and its categories, must also be of the tao, not apart from it, perhaps it most essential feature. To reject categorical thinking occurs in categorical thinking.

Thought is not to be simply suspended. My thoughts say language is the greatest expression of our existence. It is "useful" to have a more penetrating view.

You believe goal of physicists' "T.O.E." is to explain "everything"? that it's not just physics but some final (super-natural) metaphysics? I thought the aim was to produce a testable unification of the fundamental forces of nature – to demonstrate they are aspects or modalities of one another – that's formulated into a G.U.T. (which would include QG). What does "everything" have to do with it? That's not physics. How is it even possible to test a purported explanation for "everything"? — 180 Proof

You at the very least begin with the groundwork of scientific inquiry. This has nothing to do with what science says.

Is there something the matter with my prose style? Am I being obscure? — Wayfarer

No, no. Sorry about that. I did forget previous things mentioned.

So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much. — Paine

I think this taboo on speaking is overplayed, and yet, not played enough. One can speak anything, its just that there has to be a shared experience. You could report to me that you had an excellent meditation or insight, and all crude meanings vanished revealing something profound and beautiful . Words like profound and beautiful are common, as in, that was a profound chess move, but in the context of Eastern enlightenment, we think of something else because this region of thought is contextualized with a greater sense of the mystery of existence. Even as I use terms 'mystery' and 'existence' I take your thoughts and sense of things INTO a world of orientation that makes sense. This is the point: talking like this doesn't degrade the essence of this weird, marginal way to encounter the world.

When we use language, we almost always are talking about mundane things, and it is this that has to be put aside. Brings the whole matter into familiar contexts where it doesn't belong.

The clearest statement of this form of barbarism is Daniel Dennett. But I've been arguing against philosophical or scientific materialism here since day one so it's not news to me. — Wayfarer

But I can't imagine Dennett arguing the way Henry does. I read his, or read through it, Consciousness Explained. Dennett It does a good job of showing me what I am up against. I know this thinking, we all do, just not as well as he does. We grew up with it, this common sense that assumes science is basic. Our familiarity is called public education. This is why phenomenology is so hard: such thinking as Dennett's has to be "read out of" like a child reads of other lands and discovers there is so much more out there. But I haven't read Dennett on barbarism, and likely will not, even though he may have interesting things to say.

It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist, for no one made a stronger case for the kind of thing Henry argues for: the more appearing, the more being. What is being? It is affective-ontology. What if I asked what nirvana is? We would still have as an implicit premise that it is just an emotion that issues from material being, but has no being of its own. This is the hard part, this freeing being from implicit materialism (always there, trivializing existence) for this is a thesis that makes experience derivative. But meditation and its apophatic "method," that is, the method of negating common sense which is our everyday world, turns this entirely on its head. Nirvana (affectivity) IS Being, it is the essence of being, not derivative of anything. Affectivity is the ontological foundation. The materialist assumption is constructed OUT of this, just as all of our thoughts and ideas.

At any rate, I get rather up on my high horse when Dennett comes mind.

This resonates strongly with Krishnamurti, who's books I read ardently in my twenties. One of them is called 'The Ending of Time' and it's a theme that's always present in his talks. He says that the observer IS the past, that freedom from thought is 'freedom from the known'. A few weeks back, I enrolled in an online seminar run out of Ojai, which was to run over the next two years, comprising recordings of his talks and an online discussion group. But I cancelled my enrollment, for the same reason I stopped reading his books decades ago. I felt that I understand what he's saying, but I can't find my way into it. He would say, meditation is never the effort to meditate. I've got a quote from him on my homepage 'It is the truth that liberates you, not your effort to be free'. But all I know of meditation is the attempt to meditate (which incidentally I stopped making four years ago.) — Wayfarer

There are other yogas. Jnana yoga is also very effective if it cuts through the mass of presuppositions that rule our thinking in a default way. As I see it, the strongest pillar of dogmatic insistence is physicalism. You might not agree, but I argue, once one sees that any of the varieties physicalism or materialism and their counterpart, idealism, is simply the worst and most inhibiting metaphysics that we all carry around with us, and it is carried with an implicit unbreakable faith. It is a reduction to dust, as Michel Henry says.

Consciousness conceives first, is ontologically first in any conception. You might want to give Henry a listen on youtube at Michel Henry By Steven Delay. One has to put aside the Christian orientation. It really doesn't matter. But he is worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From an article on 'emptiness' in Buddhism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something like that.

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

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

You know, be careful!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

as its annihilation is likely impossible. — ENOAH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have I misunderstood? Intruded? — ENOAH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A real test of one's sincerity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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