Or cut off your hand if it causes you to sin. Of course all of that can be interpreted in a non-literal sense, but it seems to be saying everything else is secondary to your calling. — Marchesk

What is "calling"?

You're not actually interpreting that literally, right?

(Y)

Luke 9:59-60: He said to another man, "Follow me." But he replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God." — Marchesk

Yes, I know the scripture. I was making a joke about your literal interpretation.

Another way to frame your Golden Rule question is to ask what would you want to happen if you're the victim? Or what would you want to happen to your neighbor who was victimized? — Marchesk

Agreed.

Jesus never went into detail about how the Golden Rule should or should not be applied in every situation. — Marchesk

Right, that's a key aspect of rabbinical teaching; asking questions was more important than providing answers.

What if everyone let the dead bury themselves? — Marchesk

You mean the walking dead, or what?

I might endeavor to treat my neighbor as myself, but when he kills another neighbor, I want justice to be served. — Marchesk

So meaning that if you committed murder, you would want justice served to yourself, right?

Yet because there’s no basic meaning to life, this meaning is basically meaningless. — javra

Classic.

So do you tend to ascribe this metaphysical aspect of being outside individual selves? Inside? Both? — javra

Which aspect? The "value beyond value", or something else?

Although, I’ve yet to come to terms with the notion of “meaningless meaning”, a notion which I take to be common staple within nihilisms … which, because of this, so far don’t make sense to me. — javra

Grateful someone agrees.

I'm not familiar with a nihilistic "meaningless meaning". What is that?

I’d like to remind that laconic, as I so far understand it, is also Spartan (such as in the movie 300): i.e. courageously to the point. — javra

Haha. I'll take that as a compliment. Philosophy shouldn't be without courage anyway.

it is the metaphysically ontic aspects of the first-person point-of-view within which the “value beyond [human conceptualization of] value” resides. — javra

So it's something within being? Or Being? I'm having trouble parsing through that.

My emphasis of the first-person point of view wasn't a counter argument but an intent to make the argument no simpler than as simple as it ought to be ... considering. At any rate, it wasn't an argument against what the OP concludes. — javra

That makes sense.

I read "Buddhism, Hinduism, and other spiritual worldviews are inherently materialistic and thus nihilistic". Still hoping this was a bad interpretation on my part. Eha, it likely was. — javra

No, I didn't mean that, so you're correct here. It may have been a misstep to equate my so called "self-contained" value system with materialism, but I still haven't parsed through that properly; there's still something there. Actually, it's very simple: any given religion (other than materialistic strains of Buddhism or Hinduism) posits a system (which includes value) which obtains beyond the physical. Now, zoom back in to every day life, and our every day human concept of value, the one which you rightly described as "a human construct that is not the core referent it tries to conceptualize", suddenly seems meaningless without a metaphysical referent. So, if someone were to insist that it doesn't require a metaphysical referent (which I think is implicit in economics, politics, capitalism, communism, etc), then their view, would, necessarily, regardless of whether they are conscious of it, be a materialistic, and thus a nihilistic view.

And given your latest reply, I’m now taking it that you hold disagreements with the human concept of value … — javra

As I'm re-reading, though, I do have to say that I thought I made this apparent; maybe not. I appreciate your patience either way.

And given your latest reply, I’m now taking it that you hold disagreements with the human concept of value … maybe due to the human concept of value itself being a human construct that is not the core referent it tries to conceptualize? Am I in the general ball park? — javra

Yes! I'm usually much more eloquent than this; actually, one of the reasons I started this thread was because I was having such a hard time articulating what the argument was. This OP was the third draft, and it was still not on the mark. Your summary there is workable, and the quote you site as the core aspect of the argument is also workable.

Isn't this a bit like your last thread? :)

Perhaps, the main reason is that to apply the golden rule, the person has to be already in some sense 'enlightened' or capable of self-love. After all, self-love is prior to treating another with kindness and empathy. Without self-love, then practicing good behavior or right conduct according to the golden rule is much harder to do. One is left with emulating the golden rule without self-love, a harder task to do in my mind. — Posty McPostface

As I mentioned in the other thread, I think that's pretty much it. The golden rule begins with "the other" ("love your neighbor"), because the emphasis of the rule is "the other"; the emphasis is to love the other. But the foundation of the rule is self-love. Why the rule doesn't begin with self-love, I don't know. Maybe we in the 21st century West have lost something, have lost an intrinsic self-love that was apparent and not worth focusing on during Jesus' time, or whatever other religion. Actually, it does seem to me that if we need to "learn" self-love, then that must be a symptom of self-consciousness, and I think there might be arguments to be made that our level of self-consciousness is higher, and more neurotic than it was in the past. Just some thoughts.

I recognize the terms were vague. By self-contained I meant this:

all attempts to qualify a measurement of value in regards to life will always be based on something else within life itself; life is valued from within life, which is like qualifying an argument from within the argument itself. — Noble Dust

So, to "value" life is to use a concept (value) which we apply to things other than human life. I think this might be the root, or a root of the objectification of human life; of oppression.

I recognize this was probably a poorly worded argument; I keep coming back to the fact that I want to do away with the concepts of "value" and "worth" in regards to human life (because they fall short of the mark), but language doesn't allow me to do this. But intuition does. The inconsistency of terms and the muddled descriptions are a result of this problem. I feel like there's a word missing in language to say what I'm trying to say about human life. "Value" and "worth" are paltry shadows of the concept I'm (unsuccessfully) trying to evoke here.

Based on; dependent on.

I'm familiar with all of that, but I'm asking why belief is the predicate of salvation.

Unless one wants to uphold materialism...then nihilism is by no means an entailed conclusion. Nihilism is a product of materialism. — javra

But a system of value that is self-contained is inherently materialistic, thus nihilistic.

this when addressed more metaphysically. Yet, soberly and without any intent to disparage, I in my lexicon would term this overall argument “laconic” — javra

So a metaphysical plain of inquiry is laconic in your view?

I say this because, in my view, the moment you address life you address a set of first-person point-of-views aware of other. — javra

Yes, I agree and hold that view as well; I'm consciously aware of that in my argument, although I didn't make it explicit; it was implicit in that I began with "self-worth" and then moved to "the value of human life", by which I meant life on a more general scale; reaching out form the self to look at life in general. See my comments to darth here:

call it yourself to get the deepest grasp of what I mean. Apply the concept to yourself. — Noble Dust

___

Value will always be relative to, minimally, one such fppov. For instance, if one deems one’s own life to have no value, the question then is “no value relative to whom”? One’s self (as a fppov that holds one’s own total life as the object of one’s momentary awareness), others one is surrounded by, the species at large, etc.? Different people are likely to provide different honest answers despite these people affirming the same proposition. Same can be said of egotistic evaluations of one’s own value. — javra

Yes, this is the whole point of my argument, essentially. All of those various ways to make a valuation about oneself are finite; when we do that, we're still measuring our value or worth; that measurement itself is the issue. That's why I'm looking for a metaphysical "value beyond value" that doesn't measure human value as such; of course the fppov will always measure itself finitely against a given set of measurements of value. I agree with you, but you're essentially just expanding my argument, but probably because I didn't express it well enough.

To me, there is no getting beyond self—and thereby beyond value of, firstly, individual lives one encounters (including one’s own) and, secondly, the abstraction of life in general (when it comes to us humans)—for as long as there is an ontic presence of fppovs. — javra

I tend to agree that there's no getting beyond self, in the sense that all philosophy begins with the self. But the issue I'm trying to highlight in regards to measuring the value of human life is that it's always self-contained if we can never truly get beyond the fppov; and if value is always self-contained in this way, then nihilism follows, because all attempts to qualify a measurement of value in regards to life will always be based on something else within life itself; life is valued from within life, which is like qualifying an argument from within the argument itself. For life to have value, it has to be metaphysically predicated on some valuation that is beyond the human concept of value.

So, in what I take to be states of overall health, it makes sense to me that one values one’s own total being (of body and mind) more when one does virtuous deeds than when one engages in vice (one might think of something extreme to make this general truism stand out better). And, furthermore, likewise does it make sense to me that one then finds value in a similar fashion for the individual lives of others—as unique persons or as individual cohorts—this, again, in respect to one’s own fppov. — javra

This is all well and good for living every day life, for "being-towards-death" as darth says, but it again just highlights my point about value being self-contained within life, and thus essentially meaningless.

Nevertheless, as concerns the abstraction of life in general and its ontic value, I fully agree that it is predicated on the very being of life, more particularly on the presence of human life from which values regarding this abstraction emerge, and not the other way around. As you say, “value must be predicated on (human) life, not life predicated on value.” — javra

I don't understand how you can agree here if 1) you consider the gist of my argument to be laconic and 2) your counter-argument is to emphasize the fppov, which is a given in my metaphysical argument for "value beyond value".

Thanks for your reply.

The "value" or "sanctity" of life does not come from it being intrinsically good, but from it being completely devoid of any positive value at all. — darthbarracuda

The concept of the sanctity of life comes from Christianity, historically. So, the concepts you're working with here have that lineage, which I think is always helpful to remember, whatever you may or may not infer from that.

But how does the value of life come from being devoid of any positive value at all? That doesn't make sense.

Every person's life is equally worthless, which helps explain why murder is wrong (because we do not have the right to interrupt the being of someone else, because we do not have any positive value for this right to be appropriate). — darthbarracuda

Worthlessness can't be the predicate of a "right to life"; again, I don't see how any of this follows. When you say "we do not have the right to interrupt the being of someone else", this suggests value, but then your qualifier for that sentence is "because we do not have any positive value for this right to be appropriate", which doesn't follow either. Rather, if we had no positive value to predicate this right upon, then murder would be acceptable. We consider murder wrong because we do place a value on human life, regardless of whether this value is properly justified.

It's ambiguous, what "life" actually means. — darthbarracuda

Yes, it is. In this OP I'm using "human life" colloquially. Call it an individual person, or better yet, call it yourself to get the deepest grasp of what I mean. Apply the concept to yourself.

Humans are beings which can invent all sorts of axiological and ethical paraphernalia to suit their ontic agendas, which typically involve some kind of aggression, manipulation or neglect of the Other. — darthbarracuda

Ethics are only "invented" behind the desks of professional philosophers, and perhaps dictators, I think. For the rest of us, ethics isn't something we invent; it's something we inherit culturally, something we experience, something we know intuitively, and something we reason about abstractly (the order there is deliberate).

Thus it is said that people "deserve" things like equality, liberty, freedom, etc (even if it comes at the cost of other people's equality, liberty, equality, etc). — darthbarracuda

Right, to "deserve" equality or liberty is to suggest that we are owed something; and from who? Ourselves? God? This is another indicator that human life itself generates equality and liberty; this is the only way for these concepts to be unconditional. So the "value beyond value" of human life that I'm describing is then made up of these unconditional, existentially generated concepts.

But to go beyond the ontic and into the ontological leads us to the structural aspects of life: banal suffering, decay, death and moral impediment, all inevitable and guaranteed within the temporal structure of life. Once we arrive in this dimension it is much harder to see how any of these values could ever seriously be appropriate for beings with this Being. — darthbarracuda

Why is it much harder to see how value makes sense in the light of suffering? You need to take that notion even deeper. Uncovering the suffering and banality underneath the concepts of value and equality and liberty is not the final step; you're being ontologically lazy if you stop there.

It's hard to see how a being-towards-death can seriously be given a positive value without the typical sleight-of-hand, the "obscurement" or "forgetfulness of Being" that leads to the exclusive valuation of intra-wordly, ontic beings and not Being. — darthbarracuda

But if this is the case, then hard nihilism necessarily follows. Another indicator that you need to take the ontology here deeper; either that or accept nihilism and the apparent ramifications that it has for your own life.

That is to say, when the moral paraphernalia of the intra-worldly is applied to the ontological it falls apart. — darthbarracuda

Yes, maybe it does, which I think also points to the need for a "value beyond value" if nihilism is not to be accepted.

I think of dogmatism as being unwilling or unable to question ones own positions; the inability to entertain other sources of knowledge than a given set of accepted sources, for instance. But that's probably more of a shade of the meaning of the word, but I'd argue it's probably the dominant one these days.

That definition is ok as a baseline, though. But what you're describing, searching after a system of philosophy, sounds to me more like subjectively searching for the objective, which I think is what we all do anyway, whether consciously or not. I think being conscious of the conditions of the search, as you seem to be, is valuable and will take you far. Actually, a simpler way of putting it is "the quest for truth", But that's too colloquial, right?...

Edit: anyway, there's nothing dogmatic about being on a quest for truth, as far as I can see.

. It seems to me that searching after a system doesn't have to make one a rigid fundamentalist who is unwilling to question his own beliefs. — anonymous66

Yeah I agree, and I don't think i suggested that. It looks like we're using "dogma" differently.

My impression is that love for one's self-has to come before being able to apply the golden rule in its true form or effectively. No? — Posty McPostface

Self-love has to come first; that's the whole crux of the golden rule. The aphorism "Love your neighbor as you love yourself" would have no meaning otherwise. Self-love isn't possessive love (eros: narcissism); it has to be charity, or agape, self-less self-love.

Belief that Christ is Devine and His sacrifice is enough to wash every sin away means you never have to feel guilty. — Steve

But why would salvation be predicated on belief?

Nihilism seems like less of a set of beliefs held by an individual (other than the occasional 20-something TPF newbie), and more of an ethos in our current milieu. Meaninglessness is a latent theme in consumerism at this point, at least in America, I think.

If you're talking about the general human condition in general (philosophers and TPF members included), I think some form of dogma tends to be at the root of our understanding and experience of the world. But the word dogma has negative connotations; I think irrational belief, rather, is at the root of all systems of thought, from nihilism to analytic philosophy, to existentialism, to Islamism. A truly rational system of thought would begin with a single root, "I exist", for instance, and then every branch of the system would perfectly follow from that, but no one is so perfectly rational as to be able to develop and maintain such a system. Such a system would actually be incomplete; it would be impossible to live within the world of experience and yet rationally construct such a system from within experience; the system would have to be constructed from outside experience (analysis), but analysis exists within experience. Or, imagine a truly rational system of thought as a straight vertical line, from existence at the bottom, to Truth (or whichever word you like) at the top. There's always a bend in the line somewhere, regardless of the person forming the system.

But dogmatism, as in being unwilling to even question one's own beliefs, is synonymous with fundamentalism; that's why I often argue that atheistic fundamentalism exists just as much as religious fundamentalism does. "Great" thinkers of all beliefs have been dogmatic. The problem with dogmatism is that it sits belief down within a specific cultural chair and refuses to let it move around the room of diverse experience, if you will.

Existentialism, to me, is the closest to a rigorous philosophy. It begins with "I exist", but rather than attempting to construct a truly rational system of belief from that perspective, it simply passively acknowledges the existential root, the starting point, and it integrates all aspects of experience into it's necessarily incomplete system, including rationality. Existentialism doesn't attempt to remove itself from the sea of experience; it acknowledges that the fish can't survive on the shore of pure rationality.

Relativism is just lazy epistemology.

belongs to and therefore social constructed and the experience itself emerges from this - — TimeLine

But the focus of mystic practice is exactly that; practice over theory, as Underhill sets out. Social constructs, as I understand them, are passive, and not active; not practical. A social construct is passed down within the social unconscious; mystic practice is the opposite of that.

But, to believe in those dreams as an actual reality that exists? — TimeLine

As an aside, I've had dreams that to this day feel more real to me than reality, in some ways.

Mystical experiences merely expose the depth of the individual' desperation for meaning and things like false pregnancies or hysteria are examples of how this desperation can manifest physiologically as though the mind is resisting an existential reality that is too much to bear. Loneliness really is our inability to articulate who we are and we try to find it in others, in religion, in society, new ageism etc, when all of it is in our own minds.

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― C.G. Jung

So-called 'mystical experiences' are a by-product stemming from a misunderstood unconscious self and mysticism is merely one such way of interpreting yourself and your place in the external world. But, when a person actually begins to believe in astrology, who actually thinks that there is accuracy in star signs, they are not well. — TimeLine

For clarity, how much of the mystics have you read?

*Feuerbach pays quite a bit of attention to this issue. The Incarnation is a symbol confession for him that (the hu-)man is the God or supreme value for (the hu-)man. — ff0

I don't know Feuerbach; "the incarnation" as in the incarnation described in the Bible, or something else?

Evelyn Underhill, arguably the most learned scholar on Christian mysticism, disagrees. She argues to some length that mystical experiences are unitive; She says that William James' "four marks" of mysticism aren't sufficient, and she lays out her own four instead:

"1. True mysticism is active and practical, not passive and theoretical. It is an organic life-process, a something which the whole self does; not something as to which its intellect holds an opinion.

2. Its aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual. It is in no way concerned with adding to, exploring, re-arranging, or improving anything in the visible universe. The mystic brushes aside that universe, even in its supernormal manifestations. Though he does not, as his enemies declare, neglect his duty to the many, his heart is always set upon the changeless One.

3. This One is for the mystic, not merely the Reality of all that is, but also a living and personal Object of Love; never an object of exploration. It draws his whole being homeward, but always under the guidance of the heart.

4. Living union with the One - which is the term of his adventure - is a definite state of form of enhanced life. It is obtained neither from an intellectual realization of its delights, nor from the most acute emotional longings. Though these must be present, they are not enough, It is arrived at by an arduous psychological and spiritual process - the so-called Mystic Way - entailing the compete remaking of character and the liberation of a new, or rather latent, form of consciousness; which imposes on the self the condition which is sometimes inaccurately called "ecstasy", but is better named the Unitive State." - Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill

No. It looks like you're missing the point of taking an intuitive approach. You seem to be assuming that only an analytical approach could warrant disagreement.

so I don't believe in the magical transformation which Eastern Orthodox Christians and Catholics are expected to believe in as a central tenet of their religion. — Sapientia

Interesting. So, as someone who is not a materialist, what is your criticism of transubstantiation?

Correct. Within the context of this thread, the destination would be "a view of the beauty of humanity which humans themselves cannot see, in the same way that humans see a certain beauty in birds which birds themselves cannot see."

Or rather, the destination (instead of route, in my reply). Sorry.

Almost. The route that your analysis leads to is not the same route that my intuition leads to.

What more do want to know, specifically, about my views? — Sapientia

Are they materialist?

I believe that almost everything is made out of a material called matter, including bread and wine. — Sapientia

What is not included in "almost"?

I can't imagine how you could have.

But, alternatively, do you really need me to clarify for you what materialism means? Come on, I'm the philosophical dilettante here, not you. As to the relevance of the criticism of materialism, revert back to Thorongil's OP for the context of materialism.

I made the claim because I was confident that you were from other discussions and claims that you've made. I'd rather hear you describe your views than assume them. If you're interested. But this is the shoutbox, after all. Common curtesy isn't really the norm...

Are you not?

'

He brought up the problem of transubstantiation within the context of materialism. Can you explain in detail your position, as a materialist?

That's no argument against the charges Thorongil has brought to you.

Thanks for your vacuous contributions! :-d