I do not deny the validity of the question posed by this thread: What is right and what is wrong and how do we know? You do not refute nor negate my answer, but keep on insisting that the question is the fundamental question of the study of ethics. If it could help I will stipulate: this question is the very fundamental question of the study of ethics. My argument is that, even after thousands of years of study, this study of ethics have not found an answer to this question - by proposing an answer that is apparently outside the ambit of the study of ethics - therefore, apparently, not to be considered. — Pieter R van Wyk

Well, Pieter, I cannot help but notice that your response makes no reference at all to the things I said. Errr, curious.

What do you mean by "God is a moral concept"? (or by "moral concept' itself?) — 180 Proof

Ask then, what is it for something to be moral? This takes the matter to moral actualities, and strong examples are the most poignant, so, a question: Does the prima facie moral prohibition on torturing others sustain in the case where utility favors torture? Of course, one has to look at the case itself, the manner of torture, the consequences and the nature of the outcome, the precedents for this kind of thing, the culpability of the tortured, and so on, but this very important discussion presupposes a philosophical issue that never really shows up here, which is the question of the nature of what is at stake. This is what you might call an armchair question, fit for philosophy only in the "leisure time" apart from pressing issues. What makes something moral? Not whether an action IS moral or not, but what it is, and for this we go into the issue of torturing, ask what is THERE that warrants the term's application. The term applies IFF there is value at stake. The issue of value takes one to an analysis, and an analysis is a reduction, a putting aside of of incidentals, the merely factual or merely states of affairs, and so what is a "mere" fact? Moonlight is reflected sunlight; this pen is smaller than a typical watermelon. One can see why the term 'mere' is used here, for facts as such carry no significance. They are not even trivial, for the menig of a fact lies entirely in the context of it use, and so the critical question emerges, set side by side, a moral proposition and a merely factual proposition both possess factual content, and when this content is removed the factual proposition vanishes, but the moral proposition does not. This residual survivor is the, in this case, the ethical bad: torture is painful and pain is bad.

Pain is, of course, a fact when it exists, but its facticity is exceeded by its existence, which simply means something that hurts is not a proposition in so far as there is hurting, not exhausted by the potentiality of propositional possibilities. As Rorty once put it, there are no propositions over there in those bushes. Of course, he was a qualified naturalist (a pragmatist, like Dewey, whose basic thinking is pragmatics, but who also affirmed the natural sciences to be, well, the only wheel that rolls. I do not buy this at all, but here his comment is useful).

Now, your question about God being a moral concept has some ground. Language possibilities constitute a finite totality of meanings (beingS? That is one way to speak of this) and the pain of being tortured stands apart from this, outside of this, and therefore outside of finitude itself, after all, finitude is determined by the determinateness of this very totality. The long account of this is very long indeed, and cannot be brought to light here. The short version is this: morality deals with that dimension of our existence where our pains and blisses are, and everything contained therein, and the language that speaks of this is finite, and this finitude of language is finitude itself, and what there is that is not language, the pains and blisses, belongs to eternity, if you can stand the term, which simply means it is NOT language. Pain is not language, exceeds the finitude of language's imposition of meanings and delimitations. It is, as John Mackie put it (in order to deny it), in the fabric of the world, issuing from Being as such, or from "the world" in the way early Wittgenstein meant this term in his Tractatus, as well as value, ethics, aesthetics. Pain, and this dimension of our existence, is transcendental, there before us, yet outside of categorical possiblities.

Thus, God is a term the essence of which is found here, in this radical indeterminacy of our value-existence. All things belongs to this indeterminacy, as well as to the conceptual determinacy brings understanding to its threshold, but ethics is sui generis because value is ontologically sui generis vis a vis all other analytics of Being. What is important in this absurdly brief account is that metaethics rests with metavalue. Our ethics is a metaethics at this level of inquiry. This is the ground for religion and its God, the real reason why people had to come up with all of those narratives about Jesus, Zeus, Odin, and the rest: they were "thrown into" moral indeterminacies that by their own nature reach out to remedy, to a meta-redemption and a meta-consummation, which is just what we are talking about when we say a person should or should do something in a given moral case, but the matter being contained within the finitude of language.

Please explain. — 180 Proof

God is obviously not an empirical concept. Of course, there are images of God, but these carry no weight. They are what I call bad metaphysics: in order for an image to be representative OF something else, this latter has to show up somehow, so if all one has is an image with no referent, it is like a metaphor with that which is metaphorized entirely absent, leaving it dangling, a borrowed feature that has no counterpart in an intended actuality. There are those who try to defend physicalism this way, arguing that while physicality itself cannot be witnessed, descriptive talk about physical things has a metaphorical application, meaning that that over there in its appearance possesses some of the descriptive content of the appearance. The argument here says such an ascription would that require the actual thing features are being ascribed be witnessed itself; otherwise, all you end up with is a quality abstracted with no where to go, so to speak. Plainly put, if I say someone's daughter was a lamb while in my care, well, there has to be an actual person to receive the metaphor, otherwise, it simply makes no sense.
Really, I care nothing at all for the way people actually believe. Ideas have to make prima facie sense at least to be considered. The point being that if one thinks God is just some composite of things found in ancient thinking, then philosophy doesn't waste its time with it. God might as well be the Easter bunny. I take the concept seriously because God is a term that belongs to religion, and religion, once divested of its metaphors, that is, all the descriptive vocabulary, possesses something that survives this "reductive" move, and this is metaphysics and ethics, or metaethics. Religion is essentially metaethics.

To argue this out requires enough interest to pursue it. That would be up to you.

Really? Meanings are mostly ambiguous. Thus, if we cannot agree to a meaning then any debate that follows must start with this disagreement else there would be no utility in the debate.

You try to explain a notion to me by giving examples of your understanding: a pen, a couch and a knife; to which you assign human notions: good, bad, virtue. These things (inanimate I understand to be called) does not have human notions: they may have utility for humans, they may be aesthetically pleasing (to a human), they may be used to conduct good or evil acts (again, by humans); but by themselves they cannot be good or evil, only inanimate. — Pieter R van Wyk

That about the knife, etc. was only to illustrate that there are two kinds of good and bad, the ethical and the contingent. Martin Buber wrote his I and Thou which is about this, when we treat each other as things, its instead of human agencies, roughly put. So I look at other people and think about their utility, their proper place and identity and how far they deviate, and when these standards are in place, the actual person is lost, yielding to categories of assessment found in everyday problem solving. The ethical is lost. But where lies the ethical? There is something in our agency that answers this question and my interests lie in trying to discover what this is. I am "called" a teacher, a spouse, a tax payer, and so on, but among these my ethical nature doesn't turn up. I only get more functions and analyses. AS a teacher, I am obliged in this way and that, and there are pending obligations and prohibitions, and so on, but these simply make me into a thing, an "it" as Buber put it. My agency, my existence, is reduced to some objective way of defining me. But objects have no ethical status. Ethical goods and bads refer specifically to what is essential to something being present in order for a issue to be ethical, some X, such that if X is missing, there can be no ethics, like thinking without logic. No logic, no thinking.

I do not find anything ethical in this example. Perhaps a test for cognitive ability (a litmus test for stupidity) or perhaps a test to see if the nerves in one's hand is still functional. As for "the ethical principle ..." I put it to you that this is absurd - it is exactly this principle that has been flaunted by: Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Truman, Mussolini, Tojo, Kai-shek ... in order to claim that their decisions were ethical. — Pieter R van Wyk

You don't find anything ethical because you are not looking at the question of an ethical foundation. Rather, you are looking only at the way ethics turns up in ethical problems. I am not addressing the issue of what to do, and where certain actions are wrong while others right This kind of inquiry leads only to a whirlwind of conflicting justifications. Take Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and ask, what is it that makes this at ALL important? You can talk about the waste of lives, and torturous ordeal with nuclear toxicity, and the depth of the horror, etc., but this still begs the essential question: Why are these at all "bad"? It seems obvious, but then this is philosophy, where such questions are actually asked rather than simply assumed to be well in hand. Philosophy is about the MOST basic questions, or it is about nothing at all. So the question is, what IS the "bad" and I think we all agree that we are then called to consider the pain, misery, suffering, and whatever words you can assign to it, but there is one more move of discovery" what makes misery bad?

If you are like most, you will find little interest in a question like this. It is a metaethical question that most cannot understand because its assumption is so perfectly clear, but because of this, the significance of the question goes unnoticed, and it is arguable the most important question there is in our existence, for if the ground of ethics does not lie in the way ethics is simply played out in our affairs, in promises, obligations, responsibilities, accountability, guilt, innocence, and the like, then it has to be found outside of these institutions in something more basic, and the word we have for this is value. What does it mean to value something? To care for it? For it to matter or be important? You do see this: if no one cared, valued the consequences of dropping the bomb, the the ethicality of Truman's decision would simply vanish. Caring and its value IS the foundational analytic of ethics. But what IS this?

The aftermath of Hiroshima has its ethical determination measured out in the collective suffering created, and what is collective is only as meaningful as the singularity, the individual, and this has no meaning apart from the actuality of sufferin itself: the pain of burned flesh pealing off, the endless vomiting, the loss of limb, of loved ones, and on and on: these are ground of what makes something ethical , and these stand above analysis, above language's ability to "speak" as it does so well with principles and narratives. These are the foundation of ethics, the metaethical foundation of our existence.

Why is this so important? A very difficult question. One has to first affirm that it is properly reasoned thesis. If not, then say why. But then the inference, which is not that easy to see: if ethics has its ground outside of language, the what IS this "outside"? In religion, God stands outside. God is really an anthropomorphic concept that is put in place through ancient narratives that has two functions: to redeem and to consummate our existence absolutely, in eternity, if you will. But what is eternity? What is redemption and consummation? These depend on how interested you are. Moving forward with a question like this requires conviction. It would help reading Heidegger's Being and Time, section 64 of the second division, and beyond....but then, that would be a bit much...so if you are interested....

Please, can you give me a salient example where a decision has been made on good or evil that is not based on political expediency. — Pieter R van Wyk

You can see that the philosophical question of the nature of ethics moves to issues that are presupposed by politics.

Yes, any talk of “God,” “the world,” or “the self” emerges from within language and culture, not from an Archimedean point outside them. But I think that is precisely why Hitchens’s critique retains philosophical force. His focus on moral consequences is not “idle talk”; it is an inquiry into how concepts shape lived reality. — Truth Seeker

This is where our views will part, not entirely, but significantly. You are not at ease with an archimedean point, but what would this even be? Metaphysics. Philosophy is essentially metaphysics, and ontology is where metaphysics occurs, though thee is a serious and fascinating dynamic of wht this is about. When I refer to idle talk, I am lifting directly from Heidegger---what can I say, you read enough of this kind of thing, and it becomes your own. This really is the intent of changing the philosopshical narrative: philosophy is VERY personal. Heidegger realizes that what IS, is through and in us first. Nothing comes to us outside of us, the human dasein. It has never been the case, nor can it be, that the world can be affirmed outside of what has been standardly called subjectivity. It is literally impossible to conceive of such a thing, which is why German idealism and its evolved phenomenology is the only genuine and sustainable pov. Idle talk is a technical term, referring to any and all thoughtful regions. He writes, " Idle talk is not used here in a disparaging sense. Terminologically, it means a positive phenomenon which constitutes the mode of being of understanding and interpretation of everyday dasein....It is language...cut off from the primary andn primordially genuine relations of being in the world." You can find in in section 35 of the first division of Being and Time, and the discussion here is of course intimately tied to everything else, so one has to read at least the entire section. The idea here is that idle talk is not idle at all, it can be very active and meaningful, but it is without ontological intention, without a "primordial understanding". You can argue about what Heidegger is referring to, and its boundaries, but for me, I draw the line differently from Heidegger, whose dasein is an historical finitude, and any idea of an archimedean point is going to be "equiprimoridal" only. In other words, he doesn't include an absolute consciousness in his ontology, and religion is "ontotheological" (perhaps think of Hegel without the metaphysics of Geist) and this is simply not where my thoughts settle, so Hitchens, I claim, stands outside of a "genuine" ontology, and this ontology is discovered in the analytic of dasein's ethical nature (which Heidegger gives no attention to that I have found). My comments about Hitchens and idle talk refer specifically to the failure of his critical perspective to make the vital move into real foundational philosophy.

Case in point: you refer to his handling of how concepts shape lived reality, but the discussion never touches upon what this lived reality IS, and so he remains within mundane conversation humanity is having with itself, so to speak, which is fine! if one doesn't want to think philosophically, or with philosophical depth. My only complaint on this would be that he simply encourages popular nihilism as a growing default of post modern culture.

You call God a fiction born of thrownness into finitude. Very well, but fictions that shape moral life still have measurable effects. Whether “God” is a phenomenological boundary-concept or an anthropomorphic myth, the question remains: What does belief in this fiction do to sentient beings? Does it cultivate compassion, or sanctify domination? That is not a superficial question; it is an existential one. — Truth Seeker

The thesis that we can have compassion without metaphysics, with the metaethical analysis I stand by, is familiar, and I agree that any attempt to impose a scripture based religious metaphysical ontology upon the world will likely end in dystopian tragedy. When you ask about what a belief will DO, this is a question of pragmatics, of utility, and I am not addressing this, and again, no more than a scientist asks such questions (putting aside the Oppenheimer dilemma). Not superficial in the consequences, but superficial in the analysis, and the latter is all I have in mind.

You say philosophy should proceed like a scientist suspending cultural assumptions. Yet even the phenomenological reduction cannot suspend the ethical field in which human beings suffer and act. “Value-in-being,” as you put it, is not discovered in neutral contemplation but in encounter - the face of the Other, to borrow from Levinas, not the mineral horizon of a geologist. — Truth Seeker

And Levinas (and Sartre, as well) is motivated by the war and its moral violations, but to talk about actions, philosophically, there has to first be a pursuit of being, and the this is supposed to make for a foundation for providing and evidential ground for talk about right and wrong actions. To me, Levinas is right, but the more basic question, one that I don't see turning up in Totality and Infinity, is about value as such. I find this in Scheler, in Von Hildebrandt, specifically, but in Levinas I believe it is assumed, but this is why I abide by Michel Henry and his Ontological Monism from his Essence of Manifestation, and this is an absorbing analysis that plays out Husserl's reduction to its very end, for this idea must be understood with a clarity that is hard to rise to, and it cannot be acknowledged unless serious time is spent. One has to be obsessed, I think. It is this, and I know I've said this before: One has never, nor can one ever, observe a world apart from dasein, or consciousness, if you like. It is a blatant absurdity, and so the question of what reality IS, must be about dasein, and this brings in an ontological status of our everyday lives that IS in equiprimordiality with everything else. This is the foundational monism, and there are no divisions in Being. The feelings, intuitions, doubts, anticipations, worries and fears, and on and on; the entire body of what we ARE is now in the foreground of "what IS". One has to pull away entirely from naturalistic thinking which wants to call all that one actually experiences derivative. It is exactly the opposite of this: The physical world is derived from the phenomenological givenness; it IS phenomenological givenness first, then "taken as" a physical world and all of its regional ontologies of science, practical matters, narrative incidentals, etc.

And so now, what is the most salient feature of what was formerly called subjectivity and now is the most privileged horizon of Reals? The value dimension of our existence.

Suspending cultural assumptions, incidentals of the particular way a culture creates its institutions, is just an analytic attempt to discover what is there that is NOT an institution. I hold that is such a thing.

When Hitchens challenges doctrines that justify eternal punishment or servitude, he is performing a kind of moral reduction: bracketing divine authority to see what remains of goodness once the threats are removed. That is philosophy doing its most basic work - clarifying the conditions of value and responsibility. — Truth Seeker

Well, every analysis that ever was is reductive, including looking for my shoes to go out. All else is absent but the shoes. It is an apophatic approach: not here, not there...Sartre builds a philosophy on this: Where is Pierre? I look all over the cafe, but he is NOT there and this NOT is my nothingness tha t is at the heart of my subjectivity; hence human freedom and hence accountability for those who aided the Germans during occupation. But I do want to emphasize that I don't think Hitchens is all wrong. I jist don't think he is thinking at the level of real philosophy which is more than just a critical view of popular beliefs. It is a foundational analysis of our existence (and hence of all things).

So yes, we can follow Husserl into the indeterminacy of consciousness, or Heidegger into the openness of Being; but we must also follow the child burned at the stake, or the slave whipped in God’s name, into the concreteness of suffering. Otherwise, “pathos” becomes an aesthetic posture rather than an ethical response. — Truth Seeker

I completely agree. But I want to know, what is ethics? It's essence, what makes something ethical at all? I am not interested in how badly this has been handled by people who are not very careful in their thinking, not unless the matter comes up in some conversation. Rather, I want to know what it is to the think very carefully about the nature of ethics, so these other entanglements can be conceived more deeply.

If the “greatness” woven into existence means anything, perhaps it is precisely this - that consciousness is capable of compassion even without metaphysical guarantees. That, too, is philosophy, and it is not nihilism. — Truth Seeker

Honestly, I really don't care if a person can be compassionate without metaphysics. I pursue what is there to understand what is there. Is there such a person? Of course, multitudes, but this has no bearing at all on the objective metaphysical analytic.

My apologies, I do try not to be condescending, contentious and obstinate, but apparently I am (just had a conversation with my friend to this effect). The problem I have is that I am not a philosopher (merely an engineer) and English is not my mother tongue (where I grew up the standing joke was that English is only spoken in self defence). The point I am trying to make is that words should be used carefully and concisely. Also, one must always ensure, especially during a debate (and when giving an instruction to a subordinate in a running steel plant) that both parties have the same understanding of the meaning of words used. — Pieter R van Wyk

Yes, shared meanings is always desirable, but then, if all meanings were shared, then there would be nothing to debate about, for debate insists of something that is not shared. I am afraid my thinking on this matter really is not going to be easily shared with you, and this is because the ideas here presented are most alien to common sense. Thinking about ethics and its ground takes one to thinking about metaphysics, and responsible thought here is hard to come by because most metaphysics is so badly conceived. The language, as you say, has to be carefully considered, but as far as concision, well, explanations have a lot of work to do.

"Attempting to define or study any ambiguous notion by describing it in terms of other ambiguous words; is inevitably doomed to ambiguity. Adding more and more ambiguous words to this effort will never change this result." — Pieter R van Wyk

But ambiguity is pervasive. If every word lacked ambiguity, you would be in logic, not the world, and even logic belongs to the language that speaks it.

"Politics:= A process used by humans to propose, contemplate, and implement Rules of Man in order to test their conformance to the Laws of Nature that best describe the purpose of any and all companies."

"Rules (of Man):= The time-variant interactions between systems, capable of abstraction, these systems use to create rules for themselves. The collection of all these rules then comprise the Rules of Man."

If I understand your answer correctly, it is ethics that provide a determination on what is right and what is wrong. Which, in my understanding, only transpose (I checked the meaning of this word with Prof. Google and it seems okey) the question from 'what is right and what is wrong' to 'what is ethical and what is not'. — Pieter R van Wyk

Okay. Ethics is about what is right and wrong in ethical situations. But we use these terms in situations that are not at all ethical, referring to good pens, bad couches, and we can call this contingent rights and wrongs, goods and bads: A sharp knife is a good knife only if the context of its application finds sharpness a virtue. A sharp knife used in Macbeth would be not be good. All language is like this, context dependent and ambiguity issues from the variable nature of meanings in alternative situations. Ethical rights and wrongs, goods and bads, are the same, contingent, relative to the way values come into play, as you said, but if it is true that ALL language is contingent, that is, it depends on the context to determine whether an action is right or wrong, depends on how a culture defines right and wrong, then how is it possible to ground ethics absolutely, as I claim?

Please share this firm ground with me, so that I may gain understanding. — Pieter R van Wyk

The firm ground must be something that is not articulated in the language of what is said; rather, it lies outside of this, so what lies outside language? Obviously, I cannot tell you. But I can tell you how to discover it for yourself, in fact, I already did: That lighted match you are holding under your hand and the pain it brings into existence is the essence of the ethical principle that tells us that one is prime facie prohibited from actions that make this happen, and this pain is itself what ethics is all about. No pain, no prohibition.

And this prohibition stands entirely outside of the language that declares it. It is not a paradox, but only an honest account of the way ethics can be understood. So when Stalin does his worst, what is being said here does not speak to the ethical entanglements of his time and the complications that are created by these. This is all very messy. But it does say that the meaning of our ethical issues has the gravitas of stone tablets written by God, only without the divine anthropomorphism.

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I agree that philosophy must go deeper than empirical refutations or moral outrage - but Hitchens’s value lies precisely in the moral dimension that many technical philosophers neglect. He exposes how certain conceptions of God license cruelty and submission, and that critique operates at the level of moral phenomenology, not mere empiricism. When he asks “What kind of being would demand eternal praise under threat of hell?”, he isn’t just being cynical - he’s inviting us to examine the psychological and ethical structure of the “God-concept” itself. — Truth Seeker

But no, he isn't, well, no more than George Carlin "examines" this. All you say here is exactly why I call him a pop philosopher. God comes into a culture bound up in assumptions, but essentially, most of what is in this concept is a fiction, a narrative taken up to contend with the overwhelming conditions of our existence, and this narrative is constructed out of a totality of a world we are "thrown" into, a totality that is finite, grounded in the historicity of language and culture. When Hitchens "analyzes" popular "churchy" ideas about God, he does so still within the analytical framework of those very ideas, still outside the essential questions, which are much harder to discover; in fact, the philosophy that leads to discovery actually discovers the openness of the world and its foundational indeterminacy, which is not a denial or a doubt or a derision, but a penetration.

But I will say again that my standards are pretty out there. In a word, Hitchens is just a bore. NOT that he is flat out wrong, but that he encourages a "cynical nihilism" which is the ability to gainsay at one's leisure sans the gravitas of what only deeper analysis can yield, and is therefore what I would call a casual nihilism, a reduction to idle talk about things that are the very antithesis of this mentality. God is, beneath the ready to hand dismissals, a profound concept, and this goes to a metaethical analysis of our existence, and this takes us into a very alien world: the at first presuppositionally acknowledged world in argument, then the intuitively acknowledged world of phenomenality: the phenomenality of this book, that tree, and then, this suffering, that delight. As Kierkegaard once put it, one has to realize that one actually exists, but we live in a culture that treats the human existence as derivative.

What you asked about the consummatory and redemptive modalities of religion (of God) earlier, you ask a question that is far, far flung from ordinary thought. One has to spend some serious time with Husserl's Ideas I and the famous, or infamous, phenomenological reduction.

You ask what is “natural” versus “supernatural.” I’d say that distinction loses meaning if “God” cannot be coherently defined or empirically differentiated from nature. Once the supernatural ceases to have observable consequences, we’re left only with human moral experience - which is precisely where Hitchens situates his inquiry: in compassion, honesty, and the freedom to question. — Truth Seeker

Take the term "supernatural" off the table, for it is just as steeped in a connotative opacity as God is, as religion is, as the soul is. So much comes to us in assumptions that make their way invisibly into common thinking, and by the time one can raise a question, the question itself conceived out of that which the question is about, and this becomes and exercise in circular thinking, and so it is the question that needs to be restructured to be more "about" the world, rather than about mere postulations and assumptions that have "gone without saying" for so long.

God as an anthropomorphism makes for the best kind of strawman thinking for atheists, because it ascribes to God thought, intention, desire, and so on. One conceives ot God the creator, then handily tears this concept to shreds based on the moral culpability of God. It is an entire faqbrication, and, to add, it matters not at all that most believe in God the creator, any more than it matters to physics what people believe: it is a study independent of what is popular, grounded evidentially. Can you imagine what physics would look like if it spent its time simply telling everyone how bad popular conceptions are? This is why I say someone like Hitchens has not even begun to make the move into serious thought.

"Observable consequences" simply begs perhaps the most pivotal question of all: What IS an observation? I will give this to you.

If “God” is a moral concept, then its worth must be judged by the moral outcomes it inspires. A concept that sanctifies fear, tribalism, or subservience fails on its own moral grounds. The greatness you mention may indeed be woven into the fabric of human existence - but perhaps what we call “God” is simply our evolving attempt to articulate that greatness in moral and existential terms. When the old metaphors harden into dogma, philosophy reopens the question. — Truth Seeker

If the moral outcome is inspired by concept constructed out of a fiction, then the outcome is going to be a fiction as well. Not sure why those fears and tribalism and ancient thinking enters into it. Again, one must think like a scientist: what is there, before you, in the horizon of analytic possibilities? All assumptions that are extrinsic to this are suspended. A geologist studying rocks and monerals found in a geologic setting is not a cultural anthropologist wondering about people and their motivations and beliefs and the idiosyncrasies of their religions. She has nothing but the given of the regional ontology of a particular science.

Philosophy is a science that deals with foundational determinacies and their indeterminate boundaries. God is a concept historically conceived at this boundary. One therefore has to look at the nature of where thought meets the world, and it is not thought that will prevail in this enterprise, not the logos, but the pathos, and not being and its beingS, but value-in-being.

Did you watch the above video? I agree with everything he said in the video. Please note that I am talking about the Biblical God.

Christopher Hitchens may not have been a professional philosopher, but I don’t think that diminishes the depth or value of his insights. What I find interesting about what he says about God is not technical philosophy but moral and existential clarity.

He challenges the assumption that belief in God automatically makes a person moral, and he exposes the moral contradictions in many religious doctrines - especially those that sanctify cruelty, fear, or submission. He asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: If God is good, why does he permit suffering? If morality depends on divine command, does that make genocide or slavery good if commanded by God?

Hitchens also reminds us that we can find meaning, awe, and compassion without invoking the supernatural. He combined reason, moral passion, and literary brilliance - showing that intellectual honesty and empathy can coexist.

So, while he wasn’t a technical philosopher, he was a moral and cultural critic who made philosophy accessible and urgent - which, to me, is just as important. — Truth Seeker

Yes, and I agree with a lot he says, but it is a lot of references to science and a failed theodicy, and a position like this is simply part of a denial-fest that post modern thinking ushers in. Atheism is just as bad as theism when the conversation is reduced to this level of understanding. His is an empirical discussion, and his common sense is riddled with superficial denials, and again, I agree, but it simply bears none of the signs of serious philosophical thought. His is a popular remedy for bad thinking, filled with derogation and pithy phrasing, the kind of thing that circulates lazily through idle minds that crave cynicism. It fails utterly to look closely at the idea of God.

Take meaning, awe, and compassion without without the supernatural: well, what IS the "natural"? God is certainly not a natural concept; it is a moral concept, and so, what is ethics? Where is the boundary between the natural and the supernatural? What happens when we ask the most basic questions? Compassion refers to the self, a comportment (a way of regarding) the world that issues from our own constitution: what happens when this constitution is allowed to be free of the "science" that keeps it contained in a localized domain of "subjectivity"? Ask what an object IS, and can it be shown that one actually observes a world that stands apart from t he asking itself?

I mean, the questions that brings philosophy into its own depths are profound, literally. OTOH, I probably should give Hitchens his due, given that the great religious narrative really does need to yield to philosophy, for philosophy is the conscience of religion, keeping the question (that piety of thought!) that undoes unjustified belief alive. The religious narrative has to go; but the greatness cannot be argued away. It is IN the fabric of our existence.

"... conditions, observations, constitutive, empirical, responsible, understanding, assuming, aboutness (a new one for me), relation, perceptual, analytical, thoughtful, apprehensive, simple, essential, explicit, emerging, definitive, phenomenal, conceived, interesting, reasonable, ..." — Pieter R van Wyk

Errr, yes, those terms are common in philosophy. I did hazard to think that they would be okay....in a philosophy club.

Please answer my question, a simple question: who or by what authority can such a decision be made?

then we could continue this conversation. — Pieter R van Wyk

Philosophy certainly is a conversation that breaks away from normal language, the everydayness of familiar talk, but then, so is physics. You seem to think there is nothing to say that common sense can't handle, but the very nature of taking matters down to the wire, so to speak, where the most basci assumptions are brought to light, requires precisely this thematic withdrawal from easy thinking. It really does depend on the reader, the inquirer: how much do you care about these issues? How much thinking are you willing to go through?

Simply put (and I apologize for thinking in paragraphs and not simple sentences): you want to know where the authority lies to make right moral judgments, and there are those who try to give answers to this, MIll, Bentham, Kant come to mind, but really, it is a historically recurring issue. But questions like this BEG other questions. (You know what this is, right? Not to be condescending, but you did explicitly declare a distrust of concepts, and this one is front and center. To beg the question is to assume something that hasn't been made clear as to its justification in whatever is being talked about.) So before I can even make sense of "by what authority" I have to understand what is being talked about. Ethics. So what IS ethics? You see this point? I am not at all saying that ethical thinking and its social and political contexts is free of the indeterminacies of decision making, but rather, I am saying such discussion rests more on inquiry into the nature of ethics itself, and I am further saying that once one looks more closely at this ground of ethics, there IS a discoverable foundation that does stand as an authority. It is just not the kind of authority that resolves complicated practical matters. Rather, it grounds ethics, in the way that logic grounds the reason found in everyday talk. You and I may argue, say, about politics, but this openness of the issues does not deny the very firm ground in the reasonable talk itself--conditional phrases, conjunctions and negations, and so on. Here, I am saying there is also a firm ground for ethicality itself that is not offended by this openness.

So I agree with your thinking that "the rules of man" are inescapably arbitrary, but I counter that this is not a penetrating analysis as it does not even touch upon the the essential issue, which is about the nature of ethics itself. The OP asks what ethics IS. This is where my response goes. Its nature, its essence.

Please tell me, by whom or by what authority can a decision be made that something is good and something else is evil? A scientist, a politician, perhaps a religious leader ... perhaps a philosopher? — Pieter R van Wyk

Of course, take a flame and hold it under your hand for a moment. Now you know the prima facie injunction against doing this to yourself or anyone else.

Please consider: :"The only thing we have is a perception of things, albeit physical, abstract or imaginary things. Through perception, we gain information, glean knowledge, construct abstract things and conjure imaginary things - even play politics."

If you want to speak of aboutness or giveness, you should provide a concise description of your perception of the meaning of these words. (The aboutness of aboutness :nerd: ) — Pieter R van Wyk

One can ignore the conditions of observation as conditions, as constitutive conditions, and empirical science routinely does this, and the claim here is certainly not that science gets it all wrong because it does not responsibly look at this constitutive ground; it simply means that science is not interested in philosophy. Philosophy attempts to understand matters at the most basic level of assumptions and questions, and it cannot ignore this. As to aboutness: calling this on my desk a pen is to claim a relation between the utterance, the thought, the apprehension here, and "that over there". This relation is the perceptual act and the analysis of this act is what I would call an analysis of simple and essential epistemic distance, and again, science and everyday affairs assumes this to be without issue, and aboutness never becones a theme of discussion. But make the move to understand this relation explicitly, and serious issues emerge instantly.

I am not assuming anything, I have given you, precisely, my perception of a "Law of Nature". If you do not agree with my definition you are welcome to give me your definition. Then we can discuss these definitions and perhaps glean some knowledge. — Pieter R van Wyk

Well, this "law of nature" is an assumption, as is whatever I say is the case. I think a law of nature is first a law, and a law is a rational generality, more or less rigorously conceived. There are no laws in that tree over there, if the standard of naturalism is used to understand it. "Laws of nature" is a loose way to refer to things in the world, and we all talk this way in casual familiarity; more accurately, laws are what we contribute to the event of acknowledging the tree, the planet, star, or what have you.

Yes, the Rules of Man. — Pieter R van Wyk

I don't doubt that there are such rules, but I do say that demarcation problem is not going to be resolved by demarcating a difference in the laws of nature and ethics. Nature's content is reduced to natural laws, while ethics' content is reducible to ethical laws, loosely speaking. Or do I miss your meaning here?

Yes, that is what I am saying. "The Laws of Nature have no morality, no honour nor any legal standing." Also, "Any decision on what is good and what is evil is made based on whatever is politically expedient ... It is therefore, determined simply by Rules of Man." — Pieter R van Wyk

By definition the laws of nature have no morality, for what is moral is not a phenomenon found in nature. Of course, calling these natural laws at all presents a question, for per the above, there are no laws IN nature, unless, that is, nature and reason can be conceived as a unity, which is my view. The interesting question arises: if nature's "laws" are the work of the way we take up nature and deal with it, what is it that morality deals with such that its laws have meaning at all? Certainly not clouds and planetary systems, but good and evil: what are these as such?

It is the law that describes the act; if it is a law of nature, it describes exactly that - a law of nature, describing an act of nature. If it is a Rule of Man, it is determined by the politics we conduct amongst ourselves. The conception (that which conceives it) is determined by evolution. Or emergence, if you prefer this word. — Pieter R van Wyk

But if something is called a law of nature, it is generally assumed that the law issues from observation of natural events, making physics the rigorous expression of what nature is and does. The assumption here is that observation yields the natural world in the first place such that it can serve as a ground for things observed, but this assumption doesn't ask the more basic question regarding how observation can do this. The question then is, how can observation be "about" its object given that aboutness is an epistemic requirement? What is there in an observation that makes the basic connection for this?

It is the politics we play, the Rules of Man that we contemplate, decide upon, accept, ignore, change, circumvent, ... that determine what is moral; for who, and when.

By the way - this provides a fundamental solution to the Demarcation Problem. How I Understand Things. The Logic of Understanding — Pieter R van Wyk

But is the nature of ethics itself simply a matter of rules? In science, there are rules, principles, but the "aboutness" of these rules has its content in the essential givenness of a world, the regularities of appearance and behavior, and when we look to what this is, we find essential content in the hardness of a rock or mineral or the spectral analysis of a star's light and the like. Are you saying that ethics has nothing of this essential content that constitutes its "aboutness"? Nothing that grounds ethics apart from rule making?

Is the logic of understanding: not clear on this, for accepting, ignoring, and the rest apply to reasoned arguments about the natural world as well as ethics. One does not stand before the rigors of science as if one were only to receive and obey; rather, one stands amidst standards of acceptance that are in play.

Law (of nature):= If the sum of mass, energy, and information is conserved over space-time for (more than one) pairs of interacting components; all the interactions that exist between these components can be described by a unique, specific law, a law of nature. The collection of all these laws then comprise the Laws of Nature. How I Understand Things. The Logic of Existence — Pieter R van Wyk

Would that be a law that abides independently of the act that conceives it?

You are quite correct that nature does not provide an answer to what is morally good or evil. That is all determined by political expedience. And that, is exactly my point! — Pieter R van Wyk

Political experience, or what includes this but is more inclusive and basic, social experience, determines the historical possibility for morality to appear as it does. Our ethics is derivative, and as it is taken up in novel ways, it establishes precedent for future legal narratives. But talk about the dynamics of moral evolvement doe snot address the issue of the nature of morality; it merely says ideas come and go, ignoring the question of ground, what makes something moral AT ALL.

There is no Law of Nature that provides a basis on which a determination about good or evil could be made. It is, therefore, determined simply by Rules of Man. — Pieter R van Wyk

But you say this apart from understanding what a law of nature is. I can call, say, gravity a "law" of nature, yet there is an analytic of gravity in physics that won't quit. So much for it being a law. All such laws bear the same scrutiny, their presuppositional ground being altogether ignored. Further, what is there about moral good and evil that would even suggest nature would provide an account as to what they are? There is nothing "natural" about this, nothing natural, yet unmistakable in its being in the comparison between states of affairs in the usual sense, facts of the world, and the moral problematic. What makes being thrown into one of Stalin's gulags a moral issue in its very possibility? This is the question. This ground of morality is not a fiction or an interpretation of "what to do" in a moral entanglement. It is PRIOR to the "rules of man" as you call it.

But Christopher Hitchens is a pop philosopher. What, I wonder, do you find interesting about what he has to say about God?

What stands out to me is that our experience is never just raw or untouched. Even when we say ‘I see a tree,’ what we see is already shaped by memory, language,, and what we’ve learned before. Heraclitus was right: we don’t step into the same river twice, and in the same way we don’t name it the same way twice either.

Maybe that’s the real wonder here — that in a world always changing, we can still speak about it and make sense of it. That sense of wonder, as Kierkegaard said, is where philosophy begins. — Alonsoaceves

On the other hand, when one puts the question to the world as to whether what stands before one really is all just a recollection in play, and not, as K put it to us, a repetition, one has to ask first, what is it that one stands before? in the sense that the analysis that is sought presupposes something else, something that sits there prior to the analytical process of discovery, something "there" that the explanatory work must deal with, and yet, when it looks to this very slippery substratum of what is there, the recollection is "there" as well, IN the event of what might seem as a true primordial disclosure. The recollection is omnipresent in all beingS: cats, clouds, trees, and anything you can bring to mind, for in the bringing it to mind at all, one bound to the understanding even in the spontaneity, and the question is, is there "something" lost in the recollection's hegemony, if you will? And this takes one out to an exercise of a very unique sort: the standing in the openness of existence, realizing that the moment is bound to recollection and its finitude (for recollection comes from a totality of remembered things), and allowing that wonder to possess the moment, rather than the "same" of what language and memory would commit the moment to. This is a critical turning point, because this, call it an existential alienation is not about the cloud or tree, but you; it is a discovery of your self, the beholding "stills" the cloud, but, and this is critical, we are not in Plato's wonderland of conceptual absolutes finding a "share" of the universal in the particular (or however you want to talk about that), but rather, the understanding is put in suspension. An idea as a rational category is part of the essence of what is remembered and what is being transcended (in this thought experiment), and this is not alienation at all; it is the very nature of the "same".

My experience is, if you do this kind of thinking enough, it will drive you a bit crazy, but philosophers are supposed to be eccentrics. It's not like being a banker or a plumber. Philosophy invites one to stand apart from the world, not integrate oneself in the commonplace more deeply. Heraclitus was right, but it has to be understood that terms like flux and change are themselves impositions that move to articluate andin the articulation create as well as discover. In pther words, Heraclitus's "flux" is ALSO a concept, and as such belongs to the very Parmenedian "being" it stands in contradistinction to.

Tell you what. I have some reading to do. I'll get back to you soon when I am free of this.

On the “wholly other”: I appreciate how you bring Derrida into the discussion, especially the way language can turn back on itself and fall “under erasure.” I think I see what you mean: that when language asks “what am I?” it exposes both its indispensability and its limits, and that this tension is where the notion of the wholly other arises. Still, I find myself asking: does this really preserve alterity, or does it risk reducing “otherness” to the play of language itself? If all otherness is mediated through our historical vocabularies, can the “wholly other” ever really exceed them? — Truth Seeker

Hold on a bit. I am reading Derrida's On the Name to give a better response to your question. Not helping, frankly. This particular series of odd writings is meant to demonstrate the bloated nature of language that is used so casually, telling us that our meanings are actually opaquely diffuse. At any rate, I try to follow Heidegger in the quote above where he calls the riddle of the art object a "feast for thought." Ontology requires one to stand in the openness of thought-in-the-world (by all means, put the book down and observe the world without the intrusion of knowledge assumptions) reach into meanings and try to deal with this threshold experience of meeting the world on the world's terms, that is, givenness, and this takes a constructive effort to play through down to the impossible simplicity of Being (following Henry, Marion, et al). Being is not an augmentative concept, like science is: science grows, weeding out failed paradigms, adding new ones. Phenomenlogical monism does not seek growth, but simplicity (and if one argues that science seeks the same, then I would say this is ONLY because science and phenomenology are part of a singular endeavor in the first place. Science just hasn't come to realize that any responsible conception of "the world" at the most basic level of inquiry is absurd without the contribution of the perception that "makes" the object what it is. When it does, it will look to phenomenology. There is no choice in this, really). Derrida "discovers" this impossible simplicity in the "trace".

On preserving alterity, it takes something of a revelation to understand this. The object palpably in front of you has to be reduced to its essence, not as the color yellow or a paper clip, where you pick it out of other things, discover differences and the name has its essence in this; but Being as such, which, like the way I have been treating good and bad, very difficult to discern. Take that burning flesh: yes, clearly it hurts, but what is BAD about this? See, this turns is out terribly indeterminate, and it is a struggle to talk about it, because there is no object, no "thereness"; the pain is clear as a bell, but the bad of the pain is...utterly elusive . One literally has to go after it to discover it, for it is cloaked in religion and science, and these do not take up the good and the bad thematically, ignore it completely. Religion takes on the gravitas, but is analytically irresponsible; science loses the whole matte to physicalism which is devoid of phenomologial actuality. Good and bad are lost in a sea of these region's "taking as" hegemonies that altogether exclude the question for a proper ground of what it means for something to hurt so bad, or delight so good. It takes the reduction to "see" it, the impossible "alterity" of it. The question of the wholly other is essentially a question of non formalist value, the living actuality of the pain of the burn. You question as to preserving the radical alterity of the wholly other is not going to find satisfaction until eyes are turned to this, and this pain, or this joy of requited love has to be delivered from the play of thought that would keep it hidden, as with talk about evolution and the way pain and pleasure are conducive to reproduction and survival, which is, of course, true, as I read about it. But begging the question about the nature of what is there.

We live in two worlds, within one. Making the move from the familiar to the phenomenological world brings all things into a new interpretative light, so novel in its nature, you probably have to be a little crazy to see it, crazy enough, at least, that you can experience the world fairly free of preconceptions, which means seeing a tree and also acknowledging that the Being of the tree remains a mystery IN the mundane acknowledging it to be a tree. This mystery is, I suspect, what you are looking for. I would like to paste here the entire section called Care as the Being of Dasein from Being and Time where Heidegger e3ssentially says when one becomes self conscious (essentially IN the reductive move to clear experience from knowledge assumptions, habit), in the act of reviewing what one IS, and exercising one's freedom to choose and create one's self (dasein), one stands apart from the historical totality, and enters into a structural unease, an anxiety, as to what one IS, for the tranquilizing effects of going along with everything with everyone else is suspended and one is left hanging, facing an unmade future, and here we find responsibility, alienation, a "calling" for a resoluteness in deciding to become something/someone. This is about as mystical as Heidegger gets. For Henry et al, this uncanniness becomes a very different matter. Henry is a Husserlian, and takes the idea of pure consciousness very seriously.

On agency, I appreciate your willingness to extend moral significance beyond the human - that if cats and canaries participate in value-as-such, then they are owed moral regard as agents of a kind. That resonates with contemporary debates about animal ethics, though your grounding in phenomenality is very different from utilitarian or rights-based accounts. I suppose my question here is: if all sentient beings are moral agents in this descriptive sense, what still distinguishes human responsibility? Is reflection just a matter of deepening what is already basic, or does it introduce something normatively unique that goes beyond affectivity? — Truth Seeker

What distinguishes human responsibility. But all responsibility belongs to us, not animals. Responsibility is a concept, and cats don't think. So this limits agency for cats, young children and madmen, whose capacity for thought is nonexistent, undeveloped, or compromised, respectively. Phenomenology, I argue, informs us that there is an absolute ground for responsibility, and it is argued that this makes our ethics important in the way old testament commandments did, but, of course, without any specific commandments. Again, how does one "see" this? Derrida's is a dissection of language showing how what is said is no one thing, but reverberates throughout all of language, but this keeps within a deconstructive analytic . The REAL move is existential. Phenomenology is a method, not simply a thesis.: you take what is before you and strip it of obvious meanings that otherwise would possess it in the spontaneous everydayness. What remains is the phenomenon, but what is stripped away remains implicilty IN the constitution of what is before you. It "always already" is IN it, and your job now is to exorcise this pervasive implicit world of habituated reality (which, I thknk I mentioned once, Kierkegaard calls inherited sin. Heidegger thougth Kierkegaard was just a "religious writer" but when you read Being and Time the themes laid out by K are clearly there).

Finally, I notice you say phenomenology doesn’t “solve” problems but reframes them. Do you see that as a strength - a way of keeping thought open to the world as event - or as a limitation compared to traditions that do aim for closure in metaphysical answers? — Truth Seeker

A strength! Why, it provides a feast for thought! There is a kind of closure, but it takes the discussion into the matter of religion. What is the essence of religion? I argue it is two fold, the meta-consummatory and the meta-redemptive. Talk about metaethics as I have been and a ground is laid, but from here on, we are in metaphysics, and the ground is a metaground. This is a challenging affair to go into. Only if you are interested. It rests with the insight that metaphysics is now released from "groundlessness" that is the default assumption of ontology, and we can now speak with measured confidence about this ground, this metaground. Religion is to be regarded as a "science" of phenomenological inquiry.

Still, I find myself asking: does this really preserve alterity, or does it risk reducing “otherness” to the play of language itself? If all otherness is mediated through our historical vocabularies, can the “wholly other” ever really exceed them? — Truth Seeker

Well, you're talking like Heidegger. And he struggles with finitude, even referring to Meister Eckhart )once only?), and Buddhism, in the Spiegel interview. Near death he asked for Carl Rahner, a Heideggerian Jesuit priest (true. moving away from Aquinas seems to be an accepted move in Catholic theology), and insisted he had never left the church. Rahner was, well, if you say so...

But, exceed? There are no divisions, so there is no exceeding, not in this "ontological monism" I've been talking about (which I think is right). Consider what we are dealing with that begins this strange and radical inquiry: the phenomenological reduction, or, epoche, of Husserl. You can read this and it's pretty accessible, in his Ideas I, where he attempts to clear the phenomenon of the bulk of thought that would otherwise claim a thing for itself.

Anyway, take a look at how Derrida talks about Levinas' "other" which is intimated in the actual face of suffering, what he calls a trial of theology and mysticism,

neither as a dogma, nor as a religion, nor as a morality. In the last analysis it never bases its authority on Hebraic theses or texts. It seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself...the other itself as what is most irreducibly other within it: Others. ...a recourse the reaches the point at which an exceeded philosophy cannot be brought into question. Truthfully, messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally: it is a question ofdesignating a space or a hollow within naked experience...not an opening among others.It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be enclosed witin no category or totality.

Messianic eschatology is going to be a serious analytic step beyond mere theology, just as is found inKierkegaard who does have Christianity solidly behind his thinking, yet brings this into an analytical domain of what Derrida refers to as naked experience above. Why does Levinas use these burdened religious terms that come straight from traditional metaphysics to talk about a phenomenological analysis of experience? It is because these terms preserve the religious meaning of the analysis, much like Kierkegaard did with original sin in his Concept of Anxiety, centering on dogmatic assumptions of Luther and others so as to make sense of "hereditary sin" in the, to borrow a Heideggerian term, "thrownness" of our existence. To me, this thrownness has a singular reductive telos, which is to the metavalue discovered in ethics and aesthetics.

So in answer to your question regarding this "wholly other," the objective ground for this is the radical indeterminacy of language, and hence, of our existence, and for this you have to, well, read yourself INTO it, as all things are always already "read into" in the meaningful encounter, and by this I refer to the totality of taking the world AS what language CAN SAY (can=possiblities) things are. In hermeneutical thinking, analysis always begins with assumptions, which have their meanings in their own analysis, and I think it safe to say that this is something like the heart of deconstruction. I have read deconstructionist thinking chasing meanings around like a child asking annoying questions about everything you say. This objective ground has an existential counterpart and if you ask someone like Levinas what this is, he might refer your to Meister Eckhart or pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite. But Levinasian hermeneutics would have you, not chasing your own tail or biting it like an ouroboros, but constructing language that brings the world into existence. When we spek here of existence, we are talking about the world that appears before us; there is nothing else to talk about. You are Truth Seeker, but what is truth? Certainly, we yield to Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason that talks about grounding a proposition in well delineated reasoning, but, and this comes straight from Heidegger, this is not where philosophy seeks to go, not the true ground. He writes,

The understanding [29] of being ('AOyoc; in a quite broad sense)b that guides and illuminates in advance all comportment toward beings is neither a grasping of
bein as such, nor is it a conceptual comprehending of what is thus grasped
(/..6yoc; in its narrowest sense = "ontological" concept). We therefore call
this understanding of being that has not yet been brought to a concept
a pre-ontological understanding, or ontological in the broader sense.

Preontological refers to what is there, right when philosophy opens its eyes upon the world to ask What IS it? and what we get is an already made world, a language, a culture, and these are constructed historically, and so before a philosopher even opens her mouth, there is this vast endowment in place that, if you will, opens it for her (going, fascinatingly, to agency again. Really, this is where Heidegger, Rorty and others do not see in the "essence of agency", that is, the "what it is" of agency as such. What is missed is the value dimension of existence and its insistence on an agent of experience that is commensurate with the pure manifestness of value, which is illustrated by putting your hand in boiling water. IT really does come down this "ground")

Essential for understanding is hermeneutics, the idea that we construct meanings, and these meanings are OPEN. See how this so conctrasts with something like positivism that is so committed to clarity (Rorty's problem is this absurd commitment to rigidity while he at the same time insist a radical openness of truth, inspired by Heidegger), language is open. See how Heidegger begins his Origin of the Work of Art:

What art is can be gathered from a comparative examination of actual art works.
But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on art
works if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the nature of art can no more be
arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics
of actual art works. For such a derivation, too, already has in view the characteristics
that must suffice to establish that what we take in advance to be an art work is one in
fact. But selecting works from among given objects, and deriving concepts from principles, are equally impossible here, and where these procedures are practiced they are a
self-deception. Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

This little passage should make clear the way he thinks in philosophy. One does not go into an analysis knowing the answer. The answer emerges in the play of thought. Heidegger here sounds like a child in a candy shop, as if he cannot wait to see where language will lead in this process of "disclosure" of what lies "hidden" in the potentiality of possibilities of the totality of meanings, ALL of which are open: open to each other (think metaphor, irony, literary devices and where these have their most potent application, poetry! The crucible where novel meanings come into existence) and open to Being.

Herein lies the ground for meaningful metaphysics, I would argue. There is no empirical object in ontology, but the openness of its being an object IS the object. This is hard to accept, of course, in standard and familiar ways of relating to the world. The object is an event! And an event is not a dogmatic closure, but "free", if you will, and everything is like this. This freedom of the object (and the subject that conceives it) is metaphysics. So when you read someone like Levinas or Jean Luc Marion and you find yourself in a jungle of the strangest concatenations thought one can imagine, it is due to the foundational indeterminacy of our existence taken up AS these dissertations, and here language can gather in a convergence of thought's possibilities to make/discover what it is,

To get a very good look at this, see his Being and Time section 64 and onward in Division 2. Time is the phenomenologist's bottom line.

And regarding agency: I see now that you’re trying to resist both Kant’s formal reduction and a purely human-centered notion of agency. If even my cat evidences agency in its participation in the value-dimension, then ethics extends beyond reflection into affectivity itself. That’s an intriguing move, but I wonder: if all sentient creatures are agents in this sense, does “ethics” lose its distinctively human task of reflection and responsibility, or does reflection simply become one way of deepening what is already basic to existence? — Truth Seeker

We are committed to one thing, which is a descriptive phenomenology, and this does not solve all problems. It opens problems and shows problems in an entirely different way. Deepens what is already basic to existence, yes, I would agree with this; as well as imposes upon our ordinary ethical thinking regarding animal rights, after all, if the measure of moral agency is this non-formal value-as-such, then cats and canaries are moral agents, meaning we cannot treat them as objects, we have to yield to them as we yield to other people, but not in all the subtle ways. We are a culture that is just coming to realize this, and it is caught up in an unwieldly equation of hamburgers and slaughter houses.

I think I see what you’re saying, that what looks like a “collapse” isn’t a collapse at all, but an opening. If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then the “other” is always already available through the recontextualizing power of language. A pen is what it is until language situates it otherwise, and in that sense the “wholly other” is not shut out but emerges as a possibility.

That helps me understand why you resist the charge of collapsing appearance and reality. You’re not erasing the difference but relocating it: the difference shows up within manifestness itself, in the shifting horizons of description and re-description. The danger, you’re suggesting, only comes if we try to freeze being into a final, closed definition.

Still, I wonder whether this move really preserves the “otherness” that Kant had in mind. If all otherness is mediated by our historically contingent vocabularies, does the idea of the wholly other end up being just another name for the openness of language? In that case, are we still talking about reality-in-itself, or have we turned it into a way of describing indeterminacy within phenomenality?

And on your last point about good and bad: I find it intriguing that you see them as “closed only in their manifestness.” Do you mean that values, unlike objects, resist infinite re-contextualization, that they present themselves with an authority that can’t be deferred in the same way? If so, is that where phenomenology keeps the ethical from collapsing into pure relativism? — Truth Seeker

I am impressed that you press on with understanding and abiding interest.

This notion of the wholly other is an enigma that is hard for me to bring to clarity mostly because I haven't read enough Derrida, and to talk meaningfully about what this philosopher said presupposes a lot. In order to grasp this idea, one hs to see clerly that something very unusual happens when language questions its own nature, asks, What am I? (interesting note: without what I would call substantive agency, the subject so systematically marginalized by philosophy, then the "Who am I?" question reduces to language inquiring about language. This actually works, I would say, ONLY if the substantive life of value engagement is absent from the equation. This, of course, is like talking about something entirely other than a human being. An abstraction). When this question is asked, it is seen how impossible the question really is because the question applies to the asking itself and is not going to be addressed with more language; or rather it IS and it IS NOT. This is the wonderland of deconstruction. It is language under erasure. Wittgenstein put the Tractatus "under erasure" in the book's closing thought.

But I’m still wrestling with the issue of co-constitution. If, as you say, “pain is its OWN importance,” then ethics is not something layered on top of ontology but already woven into it. Yet doesn’t that blur the line between description and normativity? Saying “pain is its own importance” feels stronger than “pain shows up as something important to us.” Do you mean to suggest that importance is ontologically basic, that value is part of the very fabric of reality? — Truth Seeker

Yes. There is nothing that is not in the fabric of reality; even error is an actuality, but not AS error, but simply as an existent. On blurring the line: The "taking AS" is basic to hermeneutics. Heidegger talk about this as a feature of the temporal structure of dasein (which I think of as the soul, without any primordial agency. I argue Heidegger didn't understand ethics, hence his notorious refusal to properly condemn the Nazis after the war), but simply put, when I take this cup and talk about it in some way, I am taking that-there AS a cup. It is in the "taking as" where errors can occur, taking the cup AS the wrong thing, a bowl, perhaps. Language IS a taking up the world AS something, and the issue of coconstitution centers on a couple of hard topics. One is, taking up the world AS trees, pianos, cups and saucers, etc., one is taking up itself as it is embedded IN this original object. The analytic of the object cannot be absent of this feature, and so the "blur" arises when normativity is given to us in complex entanglements out of which principles are made, and the descriptive analytic of the essence of normativity, which brings one to the same discussion of metaethics. I say, one shouldn't assault one's neighbor, but why not? Because it hurts, brings pain into the world. Again, absent this pain, ethical normativity simply vanishes, but the normativity is not reducible to this foundation; it is conceived always in prima facie entanglements, otherwise, the obligation issues exclusively from the primoridality of pain qua pain, and the "principle" that issues forth from this lies with a pure manifestness which is a-propositional. Pain is NOT an idea, a principle, but lies absolutely outside of the contingencies that such things are subject to. I always want to emphasize: good and bad are analytic terms. They are a "taking as" of the value-residuum discovered in the analysis in which ethicality itself is examined. Talk of the "absolute" of manifestation is also a taking as. There is nothing in these ideas that is not this, and to go beyond this is just bad metaphysics, metaphysics without a ground, the kind of thing found in a Kantian paralogism. BUT, and this is the "but" that is the issue at hand: the delimitations of the finitude of language come to a fateful threshold where thought encounters existence and realizes that there is radical and impossible difference that is not accountable in the play of words and meanings. Impossible because possibility is defined in terms of intelligibility (this is where Derrida takes metaphysics. See, e.g., The Metaphysics of Violence, which is about Levinas).

So whenever this impossible division is made a theme of discussion, everything is under erasure because it doesn't "make sense". Co constitution doesn't make sense as one side of the "co" construction lies outside intelligibility.

And on your point about agency: I find it intriguing that you see even your cat as a moral agent because it participates in the value-dimension of existence, even without conceptual reflection. That seems to broaden “agency” far beyond the Kantian framework. But does that mean every sentient creature participates in ethics simply by virtue of suffering and caring? If so, wouldn’t ethics then lose its distinctively human dimension of reflection and responsibility? — Truth Seeker

Agency is only as it is evidenced to be. Kant handily dismisses the subject, the "I am" based on the failure of hteir being an object. If there were an object, a self, there to be observed, like a toaster, then the self would be an empirical concept, and a representation only; but this "I am" is simply not there. But ethics is a very different ground from logic. Kant can imagine thought without substantive agency (agency reduced to the formal structure of judgment easily) easily.

more on this....

I also found your point about language important - that ontology requires articulation, and that language both makes the world manifest and at the same time gestures apophatically beyond itself. Still, I’m left with a tension: if language constitutes beings, do we have any grounds left for scientific realism? In other words, can we still say physics describes how the world is, or is it only another language-game, a historically contingent way of structuring manifestness? — Truth Seeker

I think talk about language games is deflationary. Hermeneutics is better.

I would no more go to an empirical scientist for insights into the nature of our being in the world than I would go to a geologist for violin lessons. Science is an abstraction from the original unity of phenomenality, a unity discovered only when subjectivity is allowed into ontology; and physics, the final word on empirical sciences, has nothing to do with this. All knowledge is hermeneutical, even the concept of phenomenology, but here, there is the jumping off place as language makes that extraordinary move to question itself! And in doing this, discovers its own agency, not in Descartes' cogito (our own personal Yahweh) but in the value dimension of our existence.

Consider: it was long held, and still is by some, that our essence lies with reason, you know, man is a rational animal, but reason is not at all indicative of agency. One can imagine thought without agency, hovering about, disembodied. It needs no egoic center, an AI that talks with perfect logicality, but really no one is at home, so to speak. No "soul" perhaps, if you can stand the way this term is burdened with religious connotation. I prefer Heidegger's dasein, but Heidegger doesn't understand metaethics; at any rate, his dasein is the closest thing to philosophical exposition of the human soul one will find anywhere. But value: try to conceive of value without agency. Impossible. Impossible to imagine suffering disembodied, out there being what it is but belonging to no one. Suffering insists on agency. If there is suffering, there must be someone suffering, and this includes animals. What kind of agency is this? Not Kantian Transcendental Unity of Apperception, which is an impossiblity grounded in an abstraction. Rather, it takes an agency that is commensurate with the givenness of the value dimension, which is in the manifestness of the suffering; that is, and this is where we encounter transcendence.

And finally, on the ethical dimension: I appreciate your insistence that value is not vacuous, that pain and joy are not abstractions but intrinsic to the manifestness of being. But if value is as foundational as you suggest, does that mean ethics is not derivative of ontology, but co-constitutive with it? That strikes me as both powerful and problematic - powerful because it restores seriousness to ethics, problematic because it blurs the line between descriptive ontology and normative claims.

Would you say phenomenology ultimately abolishes the metaphysical question, or only reframes it as a question of how manifestness discloses itself in experience, language, and value? — Truth Seeker

Framing and reframing: This is the historical evolvement, but in philosophy, there is the attempt to determine truth, and truth will have to be framed within a framework of existing possiblities. Ontology's biq question is: is there a framework of thought which gives light to a ground outside of framework as such? Here, such disclosure is built into phenomenality here and now.

Coconstitutve? Sticky. Phenomenology is essentially descriptive. I bring up agency to discuss the evidential basis for affirming our dasein IS a, if you will, soul, that we actually exist (as Kierkegaard put it) and by soul I refer to transcendence in immanence. Think of the way Kant's deduction gives us agency, but this transcendental agency is pure structure, pure form, and as a ground of agency just fails altogether because, well, this is just not what we ARE for it is dismissive of our actuality. Our essence lies with caring, with things mattering, being important, and momentous question of who and what we are is, What does it mean for something to be important, momentous? And of course, it is the radical end of this that leaps into the thought: What that terrible violence the world does to us all about? Why is that lighted match on your living flesh so seriously important? What is importance about, not contingently important, as with one thing being important for another, as in, This document is important for national security, and the like; but "importance as such", an analytic term, let's not forget, not to invoke some platonic form of importance, a mere reification of an analytic term. the phenomenological method brings this question to light with striking clarity: a firm dismissal of all that is not right there, in your midst as a "pure phenomenon": pain is its OWN importance,

But I wandered a bit. Coconstitution is one of the most elusive ideas. Plainly put, my cat IS a moral agency because he participates in the value dimension of existence, not because he belongs to the kingdom of ends as Kant thought, and certainly not because he can think about ontology. The essence of ethics is caring and its objective counterpart, the actual joys cared in and about, and caring has a veritable infinite range from mild amusement, dull interest, boredom to the heights of horror and bliss. Because my cat can't think ontolologically, it can't rise to a greater understanding of its existence into profound discovery. That word 'profound' needs further attention.

But the point would be that in the phenomenological disclosure, affectivity and the language that conceives it are one. This takes disclosure to be very important, bringing ethics to its teleology, which is tied to agency.

Just read what I wrote. Should read "thereof" not "thereby".

That makes sense of why you think phenomenology “drops representation” and allows the world simply to be what it is. But then I wonder: doesn’t this risk dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality entirely? If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then haven’t we just collapsed reality-in-itself into the structures of givenness, making it conceptually impossible to say what, if anything, could be “other” than appearance? — Truth Seeker

Is there a collapse in the openness of being? If God were to appear before me in all her splendor, and then to you in the same way, we could then talk about it, but to do so would take the current vocabulary as a basis for novel descriptions. The "otherness" of God would require articulation, and, unless God said otherwise, this articulation would be finite, historical, which is just fine, because this language never was a dogma of possibilities. Possibilities are wide open. This pen is what it is until recontextualized in a non pen environment, then the pen's essence becomes other than the pen and its familiarity. This other in this current analysis is "wholly other" and this is possible because the language of beingS is itself entirely open. This emerges as the foundation of indeterminacy that is our existence.

If I were to try an say what the is IS for everything, and this were some closed concept, utterly noncontingent, then THAT would collapse upon itself. But here, the definition defers to this Other, and the only closededness found is in the good and bad, which is terms are of course contingent. These are not God's commandments. But as wholly other, they are closed only in their manifestness.

But here’s where I still feel some tension. If noumena are reinterpreted as “the mystery of appearance,” are we actually dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality, or are we simply redescribing it in a way that keeps philosophy “within the field” of what is given? In other words: does phenomenology abolish the metaphysical question, or only defer it? — Truth Seeker

And again you touch upon the pulse of this problem. What is the nature of the divide in our existence? If one is committed to the final authority of pure manifestness--just what is there in the whole of the givenness of being-in-the-world, then we have to observe boundaries, and try to bring these into ontology, that is, explaining what these ARE. And this manifestness is phenomenological singularity, just as logic was for Kant's deduction to pure reason. When he talked about a thing and its analytic possiblities, he was committed the logicality of the whole which subsumed science, ethics, art, (which I haven't read much of, I mean his third Critique) "the world", only Kant was a rationalist and only interested in a logical formalism, essentially skipping the world's palpable existence with dismissive terms like 'sensible intuitions' and 'matter' and 'first stimulus'. With Kant, we have one recourse for everything he says: it is all representation, even "the work Critique of Pure Reason" has this representational ontology; there are no "pure forms" for this is just an analytic term for transcendence. Again, the turn toward phenomenology qualifiedly drops this representation and allows the world to be what it IS with no compromised status. The feel of the keys as I type ARE the noumenality Kant put out of touch, as it were.

So the distinction between appearance and reality occurs within this essential manifestness, and so now, what is the nature otf the division in, not just our existence, but in being as such? Your question has its answer here: Ontology requires language. This is paramount, for thinking has to deal with the thinking that articulates the problem in the first place, and of course, there is Kant again with analysis of thought qua thought, but Kant was essentially dealing with an abstraction. Here we take the entirety of being-in-the-world (the familiar sound of this, of course, comes from Heidegger), and we realize that logic and the principle of sufficient reason (from Liebniz, as I read Heidegger Ground of Reason) have a deeper ground, which is ontology; the "laying out in words" is going to be IN the nature of the most basic analysis of being.

Language is what gives Being difference, and language is a LOT more than just mere signifiers in predications of everydayness, as Kant showed us. Language structures, "brings being to" (Heidegger) existence, and a thing being a thing is not so much a discovery as it is a making (though this making is IN the unity of Being, and so a line is not going to be drawn so easily at this level of analysis. Kant tried to draw a line between noumena and phenomena, but really it is a line drawn UPON noumena, delimiting noumena, which is nonsense), or better, it is a making IN a discovery (alethea, unhiddenness, more Heidegger) for being is a unity, 'making' is a term issuing forth in this unity and has its ground, its essential manifestness, in the unity where all distinctions fall away, and so the apparent paradox: distinction within being, aka, no distinctions, it's a kind of nothingness to the understanding (See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety). So the foundational ontology has no divisions--being as pure manifestation IS ITSELF an ontological concept. You see: this is Kant's noumena IN the fabric of phenomena. Only conceptually will one discover anything, and yet this "discovery" is grounded IN the groundlessness of being which "stands as its own presupposition" or is manifestness itself, and terms like this arising nowithstanding the division inherent in the language conceives them.

The objection comes fast on the heels of all this talk. There is no purity in manifestness, because the concept is haunted by the contingency of the language that speaks it, and the historicity which engendered this language. And this is right. To speak of a foundational unity called Being is terrible question begging, and this objection it perfectly right: being, that is being-as-such, is vacuous. That is until the matter of ethics and aesthetics come into play. Early on, I claimed that ethics is really metaethics in the ontology of ethics, the asking "what IS ethics?"

The division sought for at the outset is this separation: the ontological necessity of articulating so something can even "come up" at all against the fullness of being there. In the everydayness of being, we discover/make a world of beingS. There were no cats or dogs prior to the language that brought them into existence. There was "something" but then, imagine what a cat or a dog IS TO a cat or a dog. There is no articulation there; there are sniffs and aversions, but these are not sniffs and aversions at all TO a dog. There is no language to articulate being into beingS. Language makes the world come into manifestness, yet it is also what provides for the analytic of the revelation of what is not language, and it does this apophatically. As I read Derrida, (I am struggling a bit through Derrida's Metaphysics of Violence, which is a critique of Levinas' Totality and Infinity, along wiht other things, like White Mythology. He is thick with interplay, but he does grow on you, and his thought becomes less enigmatic the more you read), it becomes apparent that being and manifestness, which I have been trying to make out as the "ground of all grounds" is a kind of "wholly other" in discovery, and the wholly other made manifest IS value, or metavalue, the value of value, the second order of analytic language that stands apart from
the first, in which the transcendental essence of value is made apparent.

This is square one. Metaethics refers us to the world, the tout autre, of manifestness itself, and this manifestness is NOT vacuous at all. It is non formal value (Scheler arguing against Kant); it is importance as such (Von Hildebrandt); the "value of value" that early Witgenstein told us was nonsense because it is nonsense to speak it (..thereby one must be silent), because, plainly put, the pain in my ankle is not language, not a vacuous concept like primordial being as such, but note, this "as such" never was value-free. Such talk is like a Kantian abstraction. The wholeness of manifestation is inherently OF what we call by the analytic terms, good and bad.

That is a lot to take in. My current fascination is Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion. Still working on this philosophy and will be for some time. As I mentioned to Tom Storm, the point of all this is to restore the sound and the fury of our existence to ontology, that is, to basic analytic of the world that philosophy has so stupidly ignored in anglo american thinking.

On your comment re. emergence......

But here’s what I’m struggling with: if everything reduces to the playing field of experience, how do we avoid collapsing into a kind of idealism? You say it’s not “all in the head,” but once we deny any perspective outside experience, what secures the distinction between the cup itself and my experience of the cup? Isn’t there a risk that “ontological foundations” become just redescriptions of phenomenology? — Truth Seeker

This is difficult, have you read Kant? Not because it is such a complex argument (though it is this when you read it), but because one needs personally to make a phenomenologically qualified Kantian Copernican Revolution. You see out there, in the field, the sun descending into the horizon: this is not going to be gainsaid at all with Kant. His transcendental idealism does not tell you that you are not really seeing a sunset, but only that this sunset is a representation. You're seeing a representation OF.....then Kant rather loses it. Now take the Kantian idea that space and time are only intuitions of the structure of experience and allow that nothing in the familiarity and habits of behavior and culture changes when you start talking about things being representations. Nothing. The world remains the world as it was prior to that annoying class you took on Kant. What Kant did was divide "the world" into appearances and reality, but the evidential ground for doing this must lie in the representation, otherwise it would be entirely impossible to think like this, and thus the move to posit the apriori necessity of pure reason can be found to be grounded in phenomenality. And hence, where is the need to argue for some impossible transcendental reality when the evidence for this lies here in phenomenality? So what is "pure" about phenomenality?

Givenness, The pure being there. The "otherness" of Kant's impossible reality (noumena) is immanent, IN the fabric of phenomenality, so to speak. Givenness is simply what appears, and now all eyes are on the appearing of the appearance. The deep mystery of noumena is now the mystery of appearance and philosophy is bound to a purely descriptive account of what this is. And metaphysics is now a threshold concept, where we give analysis to such enigmatic terms like being as such, vis a vis beingS, and epistemic "distance" and phenomenological space and time, and so on. Just like Kant, the world remains the world as we encounter it, but it is not "idea" or representation of anything. It IS what is.

This can be maddening to understand. An object is what it is, but at the level of ontology, it is a threshold event. The substantival view of the world at this level is absent. In place of this view there is openness, a standing on the brink of an unmade future, hence, freedom is found in the descriptive phenomenolgy. The problem of ethics: the value dimension of our existence is allowed to BE what it is, not reduced to a derivative of something else. This is the merit of phenomenology, the true positivism, as Husserl said, for the physicalist's material substrate is at least as bad as Kant's noumena: impossible to speak of and a hindrance to philosophical discovery. There is nothing "verifiable of falsifiable" about this concept. The phenomenon is verifiability itself!

Also, I’m not sure I fully grasp your critique of emergence. You suggest that calling subjective experience an “emergent property” is incoherent, because everything we can talk about is an emergent property. But doesn’t that simply mean “emergence” is a relational notion? Temperature emerges from molecules, but molecules emerge from atoms, and so on. If experience emerges from brain states, why isn’t that just one more layer in the same explanatory pattern, rather than a category mistake?

In other words, does your view amount to saying: experience is foundational, and any talk of emergence must be subordinated to that? If so, what does that mean for scientific realism? Can we still say that physics tells us something true about the world, or only that it gives us a useful way of describing how experiences hang together? — Truth Seeker

If you mean to say that emerging properties issue forth from the emerging properties, and really, there is no underlying finality from which all things emerge, that itself not an emerging anything, then we would be aligned, but the question as to this underlying finality would remain open. All we build upon in a category of knowledge can be said to be derivative within this category, and the category itself
intra-derivative in a system of thinking in general; consider the way Thomas Kuhn thinks of science and its paradigmatic evolvement. Truth as paradigmatic truth. All, you could say, equi-derivative. How does emergence occur? How about metaphorically? Meaning, discovery of a new paradigm that causes a revolution in science, is a borrowing from language from existing paradigms, a construct giving emergence to a new construct. For the ontological ground has to be where meanings come from that give forth possiblities, and these possibilities are already IN the established language, but again, borrowed from their paradigms to create a new paradigm. See how quantum physics reaches into standard physics to conceive of the quantum anomaly , and grounds it concept of indeterminacy out of this determinacy.

Useful? Clearly. But do emerging concepts reach "beyond" anything, or is it rather that any "beyond" is simply a metaphorical extension into alien contexts?

Just a couple things about Rorty. One is, on the matter of hermeneutics, the reason why he thought Hedegger was among the three most important philosophers of the 20th century is because of his commitment to finitude and hermeneutics and the strong presence of pragmatism in his concept of ready to hand. Plainly put, the concept of hermeneutics is itself hermeneutically positioned, not absolutely.You could call it an equiprimoridal pragmatism in which the idea of something being absolute is just nonsense. Language defers to other language, period; and truth is a pragmatic function (qualifiedly contra Heidegger's truth as alethea, which I don't think Rorty gives much thought to) grounded in the forward looking structure of dealing with things. There is no way out of this because there is no "out" (I have been meaning to read Gadamer for more depth on this) outside of the when and why and how you mean something and how this acknowledged by others. It is not closed because all that is within one's potentiality of possibilities is open: truth is made, not discovered, however, what is made is discovered IN a general context of a culture's existence, and this sits firmly in place, like a scientific paradigm is, as Kuhn tells us, a fixity until anomaly intrudes inexorably. Nothing like "anything goes" for Rorty or Heidegger, or the physicist. Culture has historical paradigms, as does the physicist.

The other is, following Dewey, Rorty is a naturalist, though a pragmatist first. He follows this naturalism down to its core. There was a standing argument he had with Hilary Putnam regarding whether or not Putman actually beheld his wife when she was present, with Rorty insisting that one could never exceed the delimitations of a brain and its physical systems. It is an uncompromising physicalism such that one no more "knows" the existence of another than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail. I mean, if one is going to be a thoroughgoing naturalist, one has to accept this, right? Make the physicist to look closely at the implications of a scientific ontology, and this is what you get.

Does this make you a mystic of some stripe? What is the role of philosophy in this space? Is there not a danger of lapsing into endless, unanswerable, abstruse theorizing? — Tom Storm

No, no. There is only the idea that an agency replete with all that extraordinary sound and fury of what we are doesn't really signify nothing. Look at it like this: that line of perceptual access to the world I mentioned is a line that dominates in general thinking, implicitly, the analytic of what it is know the world, and it localizes our subjectivity, confines it like an object is confined to its space. But while we allow talk about causal sequences to rule relations between objects, when the matter turns to epistemic relations, it is a categorical error because causal sequences don't produce the "aboutness" of things when we talk about them. I think this is a revelation, but only if you stare at it long enough to drive you out of complacency, a complacency that is almost what you could call hard wired into common sense.

Keeping in mind that we are talking about ethics: Once it is realized that this radical separation between objects and perception is a categorical error, there is a need for a new category such that this "aboutness" can actually be about something. Otherwise, the object remains hopelessly "distant" and by this term I don't mean physically distant, for this just affirms what is shown to fail; it is rather the distance that undoes the essential unity of the perceptual event. The way to restore unity is to drop distance. It is a useful term for handling physical affairs in the world, but complete wrong for discussing the ground presupposed by these affairs, for this ground has to be inclusive of the subjectivity that is doing the handling, and this is us, looking, understanding, anticipating, caring, desiring, affirming, and so on.

And now the gates of subjectivity are wide open, and these firmly marginalized features of the self, you know, the sound and the fury, flood into ontology. The entire conceptual apparatus that figures into the modern default thinking of a science's metaphysics called physicalism now is conceived in its "primordial unity" with, well, the magnificence of being human. The world is now magnificent. Odd to say, perhaps, but keep in mind the cost of modernity, the age of scientific reason: a repressive concept.

You are looking for simplicity (as am I, really), and the above I don't think is some jargony talk about phenomenology. To me, it is a momentous move: the world out there is, at a more basic level of analysis, not "out there" at all; it is immanent. The stone over there is in its "overthereness" right "here" because the perceptual act is "right here", and "I" am omnipresent in this world. The book IS the affirmation, the play against what is not a book, the "what the book will do", the idea of its continuity in the structure of its temporality: a subjective/objective unity, if you will.

So ethics. But first, what do you think? Because ethics is going to be about this extraordinary unity.

I'm more a positive nihilist. A sad nihilist is trying, but failing to accept life on its terms. — frank

A vestige of science's physicalism, which kills the soul. Defining the world according to empirical discovery (which usually carries with it a philosophy of foundational physicalism) is such bad thinking. Hard to imagine taking it seriously.

But if you take Kierkegaard seriously, then there is a follow through that brings much of his thought to a greater fruition. Heidegger has a lot of Kierkegaard in his ideas, though he doesn't like to admit it (See Caputo on this in his Radical Hermeneutics). All 20th century phenomenology follows through on K in one way or another in this dialectic between eternity and finitude. Human Existence and Transcednence comes to mind (Jean Wahl) and Levinas' Totality and Infinity. The best I have read of K on this is The Concept of Anxiety where he discisses the notion of original sin, dismisses standard biblical and theological thinking, and brings the discussion into a historical context (from Hegel, who K famously said had forgotten that we exist): original sin is hereditary sin, inherited through the ages as a kind of deep enculturation where God is lost to distraction in culture's institutions and "habits". K thought that just being in this world is sinful. He thought we stand in alienation from God because we are more interested in all the things around us, so it's not Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Luther inspired, essentially), but distraction and attachment (Meister Eckhart wrote about attachment. I don't recall any specific reference, but it is hard to imagine k wasn't influenced by his sermons which were very much here-and-now theology).
I think I will read Jean Wahl for a couple of days. He started a lot of later Kierkegaardian thinking.

I beleive that complex ideas can be put simply. — Tom Storm

Okay, but it is a series of simple ideas. Put complexly, Kant asks, How are synthetic apriori judgments possible? The simple version is this is so obvious it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing. I am sure you're heard pf it: How does anything out there in the world get into perceptual reception?

The answer s obvious, at first. One simply sees the object, sees the receiving physical equipment and draws a line from the former and to and into the latter. Trouble is, once that line lays its first mark, the object is already lost. So consider this to be the first simplicity, that is simple perception. IT is to be taken only as it is. It is not just a challenge to ontological physicalism, but an overturning of this. When you take physicalist thinking out of the context of science's paradigms, and allow this to become the default thinking for philosophy, all is lost. Even thought itself is lost in the reduction.

I have passages if that memorized. One of my favorites. — frank

You are full of surprises Frank. I took you for a cynic, a nihilist.

Yep. But isn't satisfaction is fleeting? Pain endures, the pain of guilt, the pain of regret, the pain of resentment, the pain of longing for forgiveness.

Once the pain is gone, the mind wanders to find the next problem to solve. Pure, eternal satisfaction is the end of all quests. It's the end of the life of the mind.

Life is pain, satisfaction is death. More Schopenhauer. — frank

Well, for some it is like this, for other not. For most, it's in between somewhere. But Schopenhauer never knew how well science and entertainment could ameliorate the human condition. When he wrote, I think he was right. Imagine a world with no antibiotics, no dentistry, festering infections everywhere. Living for most was a filthy mess by our standards.

As to emotional pain, I think you are spot on: the delivery from physical suffering allows interpersonal relations to thrive, and these are now a strong imposition on one's intellect and feelings. We are more neurotic than ever before.

Pure eternal satisfaction the end of the life of the mind? I don't know; is it? If this satisfaction is not acceptable, then it is hardly satisfaction. What is a "pure" satisfaction, anyway? Being in love: Nothing matters but just this, and familiar differences yield to this singularity of being in love. You look at the clock and you are in love. Six inches off the ground, walking on air. Is this the end of life of the mind? Pretty much, IN the episodic moment when your heart soars. Yes. And all questions in abeyance. Is it satisfaction? By definition. Hard to see the complaint. Like complaining about heaven. And then, who says there is nothing to think about, ponder, rise up to? The life of the mind may well be flourishing, but just very happy in everything it does.

See Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling.

Physical things (neurons, molecules) provide the substrate.

Subjective experiences are emergent properties of those physical interactions.

Calling experiences ‘not things’ doesn’t necessarily make them non-physical - it may just mean they belong to a different level of description. The same way 'temperature' isn’t a molecule but arises from molecular motion.

I’m curious how you see it: do you think subjective experiences point to something beyond the physical, or are they just a different way of talking about physical processes? — Truth Seeker

There certainly IS a causal connection between brain states and states of mind. Only a fool would think otherwise. But here is the rub: In the identity of a state of mind or anything else, there is the perceptual act that is the foundation of its existence. Can one talk about molecular dynamics without talking? If "talking" were entirely unproblematic, then talking would be simply a nonissue. But talking, thinking, explaining, understanding, believing, and the rest are foundational questions presupposed and ignored by science's phyiscalism. Ask a brain scientist how a brain receives its object, and the entire edifice of science collapses. This is because brain talk is not foundational, and what is foundational cannot be simply bypassed. This is experience itself. An object cannot be understood apart from experience. It certainly seems as if that cup is separate from me, but this separation is an event IN the perception of the cup.
Science occurs IN the playing field of experience; experience does not occur in empirical science. There is "nowhere" else. Not idealism, not some "reduction to the mental," but rather a reduction to what is there at the basic level of analysis. This book is not an idea or a mental image. It is a book, over there, next to the candle; but the ontology of the book is a reduction to the most basic descriptive concepts. A brain occurs IN this playing field; what it is outside of this playing field is nonsense. Apodictic nonsense, for again, one cannot even imagine such an outside, and to do so is what can be called bad metaphysics, like talk about God having omnipotence and the like. So the Grand Canyon view is not "all in your head"; it is rather that experience itself is radically other than what it is taken to be generally. The "over there" of a peak, is an "over there" of my perception. They are one: the perception-of-the-peak IS the peak.

Calling subjective experiences emerging properties? For this to be true, there would have to be something that is not an emerging property. How is this to be posited? Where does one go to discover this? There is no where else to go other than other emerging properties. Physicality is only discoverable in emerging properties; again, unless you can explain how something non emerging can be acknowledged: Try it: there is a lighted room in which this green rug sits, and I am made aware of its existence because a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum reflects off the rug while others are absorbed, and the former traverses the space between my eyes and the rug, into the vitreous humor and to the back of the eye where it encounters rods and comes for color and intensity, and then further processing .....But wait: the moment light leaves the rug, it leaves the rug behind. And when light is translated into mental events, even the light is left behind. And touch and hearing are just as bad. There is absolutely nothing epistemic about causality

No one doubts brains receive ligth waves, and all of the above actually happens. This is never disputed. But it is not philosophy. It is not about ontological foundations.

Sounds like you are saying that thoughts, objects, and values like good and bad exist in some way and are experienced directly rather than defined by concepts. Our awareness brings their existence into focus, and in encountering them, we face the raw “as-suchness” of being inseparable from our role as perceivers and then we can turn this into discourse. In other words, there's a prior to language and our conceptual framing. Which I believe we’ve talked about before.

I guess that’s fine as far as it goes (and if that’s what you mean), but I’m not sure what it gives us when we talk about morality. We have no choice but to rely on language, shared values, and agreements. No one can access anything prior to these, this notion of 'prior' seems just as inaccessible as Kant’s noumena. So how is this formulation of use to us?

In your response, are you able to help me out and express your ideas briefly and simply? Philosophy isn’t my area, and complicated language is hard to understand. — Tom Storm

Hard for both of us! I don't know if there is a simple way. I've never read anything by these philosophers that could be remotely called simple. But I am thinking about it.....

So my lingering question is: if God is this eternal ethical injunction, does God do anything beyond obliging us? Or is it really up to us alone to respond, and the word ‘God’ is simply a way of naming the ultimacy of the demand? — Truth Seeker

(I should say before reading: It is thinking that has its roots in post, post modern thought, particularly the French neo Husserlian philosophers, and by this, consider that post modern thought is generally negative, nihilative. Here the apophatic thinking that annihilates affirmation, is the discovery of a positive ground. It is pretty alien to common sense).

God does things, but this analytic here, on the ground of God, doesn't do anything. I'm not saying there is a God, or that there isn't; I'm just not talking about that.

The eternal ethical injunction is essentially utilitarian, you know, do no harm, do good, b ut of course, there is no prescription as to how to determine what to do. The injunction itself is useless, you might say, because good and bad are entangled in purposes and uses and everythign else. They are just analytic terms pointing out that when one looks closely ethical/aesthetic issues, and one asks basic questions, there is an analytic residuum once the problem's incidental details are put aside, something elusive to inquiry. It takes philosophy to see it. There is no Benthamian arrangements of what is better than what, nor any idea of maximizing happiness: these concepts are hopelessly bound to complexities of our affairs that can't be quantified (though!: the question, is Ravel's Mother Goose Suite aesthetically superior to "vulgar" rock and roll? is a tempting one) or sorted out in ambiguous problem structures.

God is simply a naming of the ultimacy of the demand? Yes. But what is this ultimacy about? The finality of all this is profound, in my thinking, but steps over the line, brings one to face the line, the threshold of the meaningful ground of our existence. Ethics has its ground in the world, but by "the world" we refer not only to value in ethics and aesthetics, but the whole presence-qua-presence of all things--this is what both is and is not language. Tricky. That which is not language, this being happy, or miserable, in some way or other, is clearly not language, and the same can be said of "pure presence" of anything! Consider: I am thinking there is a tree in my living room, and there is no tree there, so I am wrong, but thinking it is there, as I think it, exists undeniably. How can this be acknowldged? If one is IN a particular region of thought and relevance, the terms of what is true of false are one thing according to this region. It could have been talk about the Korean stock market or whether these shoes are suitable for hiking, contexts vary. But pull back from any particular context, to the beholding of the whole of Being, and all falsehoods become something else, being as such, and since there is no context for there to be judgment one way or another, judgment falls away, and there is simply presence. This presence is absolute Being, and there is nothing it is not. What is not true IS, it exists as Being-that-is-not true, after all, my thought about the tree was in reality, a thought, an event; it was not nothing at all, yet there is no identity, no accounting for what it "is".

Presence has no definition, save when we bring it to language and call it presence, and now we have stepped into ontology: the attempt to bring presence to light, and "to light" here means talking about it. In the example above, the lighted match on live skin, in order to move out of any particular "vulgar" (Heidegger gave us this word) language setting, talk found in biology, evolution, anthropology, politics, the law, etc., analysis went after the phenomenon of pain itself, and in this discovered the metaethical ground of ethics, that is, what ethics really IS. Here, I am affirming that everything "really is", as all difference is taken away, for differences are between this being and that being, but difference itself IS spoken, thought, understood; it IS. There are no differences in the radical simplicity of "being there" (contra Heidegger). This pulling back is out of finitude, and into metaphysics proper. And metaphysics is now immanence itself, manifestation itself. Pure givenness of a world.

Now we step over the line: the world IS metaphysics, all of it, from the most insignificant to the overwhelming. Our ethics in the normal affairs we face are now metaethics. This movement is a movement away from all social/cultural institutions, and all that remains is the phenomenon itself, and this is a reduction to the interiority of subjectivity, I argue. A person has her entire life been working within the boundaries of a culture, but culture is a historical construct, and analysis has stepped beyond this, again, vulgarity (vis a vis philosophy, that is). All things lose their identity in this "place" of pure phenomenality where one sees the world as if for the first time. All affairs are decontextualized, and ethics boils down to a movement toward value affirmation.

What is meta-redemption? Suffering is redeemed in undisclosed meta-theodicy. This can only be understood if one makes suffering into a pure phenomenon: the burn of the match on your finger is completely decontextualized. You are Being, not A being, referring to your name, occupation, familial standing, and so on, for all of this is off the table. Your agency qua agency simpliciter is simply "thrown into" suffering as if ex nihilo, and so its features, that of the suffering itself, belong to Being unqualifiedly, and suffering is inherently what should not BE, but generally taken in mundane contexts, this is absorbed into conversation, and few look beyond into this "forgotten" foundational analysis. The "should not" of suffering as such issues from Being itself, and therefore is inherently auto-redemptive.

I said engine of emotion. For that, you need emotional wounds. That's what morality is all about. — frank

Yes, or more generally speaking, deficit. Emotional wounds are deficits, a lack; something is missing, and guilt over what is not that one desires should be, and condemnation is the same-- a person is deemed not good enough and this moves to resentment, Nietzsche's favorite term as he describes Christian motivation against those who are better endowed in the world. One big inferiority complex, an emotional wound bringing greatness to its knees (says Nietzsche).

But then, while the drive of emotional wounds is essentially negative, they are nothing without a desire toward something. The basic ethical structure is a polarity between one thing and another. You stole my muffin which was delicious and I want it back, and I resent your taking it because it was precious to me and now that precious value is absent and you are the cause. In this polarity, we have, I argue, the Real structure of ethics.

I think guilt and condemnation are the central engine of emotion in human life. — frank

These are negative. What about wonder, happiness, love, hagen dazs, Debussy,

Humans and all the other living things are physical things. We are all made of molecules. Our subjective experiences are produced by the physical activities of our brains. — Truth Seeker

But a thought is not a thing, nor is an anticipation, a memory, a sensory intuition, a pain or pleasure; caring is not a thing. These constitute our existence.

Can you expand on this? Wouldn’t it be the case that all thoughts are IN the world - whether those about ethics or those about Harry Potter? — Tom Storm

(Sorry about the following, which is quite out there....and I am tempted to erase....but then...)

Or those about anything one can think of. But what does it mean to say the thought exists and not what the thought is about? It means it exists in so far as anything exists, not by virtue of its familiar accepted meaning in a shared understanding, but entirely apart from this, not unlike there being two maps, one completely wrong, the other right, but both are still maps, so the greater generality subsumes the two, but here, this generality is existence as such, and so this generality has nothing under which it is subsumed and this makes it an absolute: something that "is" but with no features at all, nothing to negate it, nothing to set it in contrast to.

But this makes the concept 'existence' vacuous, for meaningful concepts are one's that have something beyond them to say what they are, like a definition or an essence. Existence as such has nothing of this. It is nothing: Being as such is the same as nothing at all. But is this where the we are taken? Definitions are conceptual, as in saying what a banker is or a hammer, or anything. When we say existence has no features, we are simpy saying that language in the saying of the word 'existence' has reached something that is not language, and cannot be spoken, and yet is ineluctably affirmed. and this for the very simple, but important reason, that existence as a philosophical term, is outside the totality of what language can say. This is why early Wittgenstein said talk about "the world" was transcendental. Only the ability to defer to something else makes an intelligible meaning possible, and "the world" is stand alone, defers to nothing at all. Definitionless.

But what of this nothing? Take my refrigerator, remove, as a method discovering the "nothing" of being, everything that can be said, and language itself removed, yet the frig remains, but it is no longer a refrigerator at all. In my thinking, this is the discovery of metaphysics and central to a lot of very important philosophy: you find on the one hand that nothing has changed at all, for the presence of the frig is just as it was, only occurrent thought is absent. But this is because it being a refrigerator was not a singularity, but a network of identity that holds it, and everything else, in place. Language is systemic, and no thing stands alone, and ignoring it being a frig does nothing. On the other hand, it has to be affirmed that "that there" is beyond what can be said, merely, for IT is not just the sum total of what can be said; I'm not looking at a bunch of words over there. There is something about its being there as such which language cannot say because the question about it does not refer us to other language, but to something clearly not language at all: its being (or existence, if you like. For now, distinctions here don't matter).

You say, all thoughts are in the world, fiction, ethics, and I add, everything else. When "Harry Potter" is taken up in the general way, he is a fiction, but all fictions exist in the actuality of the thought, imagined or otherwise, the feeling, the anticipation, the presence of these as presence; when this "general way" is suspended, it is no longer Harry Potter, but an actuality, and existent as such, and now the same analysis is encountered. What does it mean for something to exist...at all? One teeters on the brink of nonsense, or an important affirmation, and I think the latter. So here, I'll just be plain: I think the existence of the thought, the frig, or anything else, seen, imagined, felt, and so on, qua existence, is one's existence projected on to "it" in the actual perceptual, cognitive, pragmatic, affective event. Acknowledging the existence of the frig, I am the nothing, which is absolute being, and I refer here to real existence in the strong sense, and when I think of Harry Potter, my existence is the presence of the presence of Potter-the-thought.

Then ethics: The good and the bad are just as invisible as being itself, and by invisible I refer to the above: they're entirely outside of the conceptual grasp that calls it good and bad (yet, again see the above, made manifest by the calling. All concepts bring existence {being} into being; they reveal the world that lies otherwise hidden), yet the living presence is striking, not at all like my frig, and for this I leave the matter up to your own ability to imagine how powerful the good and bad can be. But because we are "observing" the good and the bad not in the general way, the way Harry Potter is conceived as imaginary, but rather the way he is seen existing qua existing, these concepts are relieved of their mundanity, and are acknowledged as such, so that screaming pain in my sprained ankle is now reduced to its "as such" existence and stands outside of the contingencies of language, that is, the ability to bring ideas forth to gainsay what is said about this are suspended. This "as such"ness issues from me, when I encounter this pain. I am the ground of ethics, and the nothingness of my agency is value-in-being of my being as such, manifest in ethics/aesthetics.

This is my (derivative, of course) metaphysics of ethics.

I guess what I'm curious about is what motivates you to look for a moral foundation. Once you have the foundation, then what? What will be different? — frank

Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole thing would be deeply meaningful. Physical death would still be imminent, pending, inexorable. But then, a human being never was a physical thing...was it?

I'm sorry, but I don't see how your post addresses the dilemma I pointed out. I am aware of how these thinkers frame truth. I pointed out why I think it contradicts itself. Your answer seems to be: "everything contradicts itself?" I just don't think that's true. Lots of philosophy avoids refuting itself in this sort of way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be something like this. And in the situation where sign posts and sides of roads are taken for what they are unproblematically, agreement is enough: I see it, you see it, it's there by the road, and no issues emerge. But let's say I was being metaphorical, and I meant the sign post to be an augur of future events and the road meant to be the road of progressive living events. Or perhaps I was being ironic, referring to some blunder I made about sign posts earlier. The point is, for every meaning we can assign, we can imagine alternative ways the language can be taken, and in being taken differenly, the question of what it IS, has no final context, if you will, as if God were to declare once and for all that sign posts are just "this and only this". This "in and out" of identity undermines any thought of determinacy in what is being said. In the sentence, "There is a sign post by the road," I am now not referring to any actual sign post at all, but it is just the object language to my metalinguistic talk about the variability of language.
I am saying ALL language is like this. If contradictions are the gainsaying of what something IS, then contradictions are always already implicitly in the margins of whatever is said. They too, rise and fall, come and go. This is why nothing is sacrosanct, for the moment it is said,

At any rate, isn't the sort of defense you are giving simply absolutizing a particular metaphysics of language and philosophy of science? That is, "there is no absolute context, regardless of the context, practices, or beliefs," (which is, or course, itself an absolute, gnostic claim, and one that seems to contradict itself). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not absolutizing. Rather, Hermeneuticizing. Contradictions are confined to where they turn up.

They are just saying essentially two things: One, whatever is affirmed is spoken, written, gestured or otherwise affirmed in language. So it is a philosophically responsibility to give language analysis for the way meaning is handled. And two, the assumption that the world is received in some kind of mirror of nature of perception is, IF this assumption is grounded in naturalism or physicalism, demonstrably false. Brain's are not mirrors. But if this assumption is grounded in the phenomenon, the simple givenness of the what appears, then the "distance" between the perceiver and the perceived is already closed, and epistemology becomes a very different problem.

I can think of plenty of philosophers who would contradict some of those claims. So in virtue of what is this sort of take presumably "true" and the others false? Why are the "sociology all the way down," folks right about science, but the traditional realists and hard-nosed physicalists wrong? If truth is just about what is dominant in a culture, it would seem that realism still rules the roost amongst scientists and the general public, so wouldn't that make it "true?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

True in science, yes. But this truth is irrelevant in dry cleaning of knitting of bowling. A physicist can give a rigorous analysis using equations and specific language involved of knitting, perhaps, but this would require moving into another framework discussion. They are all right, and they are allowed to be: language never was some truth alignment between things and language that had nothing to do with the way the object is perceived, conceived, structured in the subjective setting that observes, cares, anticipates, assimilates, synthesizes, and on and on. Science works presuppositionally with this more fundamental ground, but it puts aside, say, the subjective temporal structure of the event in which an object's existence is acknowledged. This kind of analysis is presupposed by Einstein's spacetime.

There is no way around it that I can see: One cannot pry loose the object from perception. Such a thing could only occur if the object could be apprehended outside of experience, and this is among the least intelligible things I can think of. The only thing a person has ever witnessed is the phenomenon.

I don't think that's an accurate description. Truth in the Western tradition is "the mind's adequacy to being," or "thought's grasp of being." That's as true across scholasticism as it is for Platonism, and the Indian philosophy I am familiar with is not that different in this regard. The idea that truth requires something like "stepping outside of experience" is largely a modern one, one that I don't even think came into its own until the early analytic period (and honestly, it's more of a caricature if expressed in those stark terms).

That's a theme in post-modern arguments though. The argument often looks something like:

A or B
Not-A
Therefore B — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is not an either/or. Empirical science sits perfectly intact along side phenomenology.

And it doesn't matter when such a thing arose. It is simply there, before inquiry: how does one affirm the existence of something apart from the subjectivity that receives it? It simply asks if sense can be made of such a thing.

I appreciate the clarification, but it seems to me your reply doesn’t really answer the questions I raised. If “God” is simply another name for “the inescapability of ethics” or “the ground of value,” then my challenge about extinction, predation, and mass suffering still stands.

Because if God = metaethics, then this God is not protecting anyone, not reducing harm, not preventing injustice, and not promoting well-being. It seems indistinguishable from saying “ethics exists,” which is true, but doesn’t explain why harm, cruelty, and death dominate so much of life on Earth.

So I’m left wondering: does calling the ethical dimension “God” actually add anything beyond rebranding metaethics? And if so, what work is the word “God” doing that “ethics” or “value” cannot? Also, no dictionary defines the word "God" the way you have defined it. I don't think your definition is correct. — Truth Seeker

Well, if you are left wondering now, I think at the end of reading this, wonder will yield to either contempt or more wonder. It really depends on the kind of thinker you are.

Dictionaries give general accounts. They don't analyze. Here we want to go deeper. Religions of the world personify metaphysics, and have for millennia, and this kind of thing is grist for the mill for those who think religion is without meaning--atheists take naive theism and argue for nihilism. But religion and its God is essentially not this facile depiction conceived by overwrought ancient minds.

Protecting, reducing harm, and the like: what is this if not a redemptive concept that delivers us from suffering? See how Christians go on about redemption, but they drag this concept through dogma of theology. Christ the redeemer', and we are all guilty of sin, "original" or otherwise and it is sin we need to be redeemed of, and we have to have faith and God's grace comes to us through the church or through "the blood of Christ" ---and this kind of talk becomes saturated with irresponsible thinking, and by irresponsible I mean without evidential grounding. Such grounding requires observing before believing and what is it that religion is such that it can be observed? It is not an empirical science so it is not about empirical categories. It is apriori. Philosophy is an apriori study of the structure of our existence, and this goes to the presuppositional ground of what is observed in the everyday way. And HERE, I am arguing, one discovers the metaethical foundation of religion. Our existence is inherently meta-redemptive.

Religion is essentially about redemption and consummation. Your "extinction, predation, and mass suffering" is front and center. Now this line of thinking gets a bit weird. It has to be acknowledged that the world is far more alien to common sense that ever imagined IN common sense. I probably can't make things like this sound reasonable in a post. When it is realized that the world is given to us in a perceptual act, then all empirical concepts melt into air, for the perceptual act releases thoughts, feelings, anticipations, memories, resolutions and really, the entirety of what is human, INTO the object, and the object is no longer "objective" in the standard way science thinks. The object is now flooded with subjective content, and this gives all that we ARE, which has been sorely exluded from the scientific metaphysics that is the default disposition of most people these days, an ontological status in the world. Now this cup IS the anticipation prior to encountering, the memory and classifcation of cups, the feelings, the interest, the use value and purpose, the mood, and so on. The cup is now an event!

And what hs this todo with ethics and religion? The suffering you refer to above is released from empirical science and can now stand alone as what it IS, which is not empirical at all. It is decontextualized and can be seen purely, outside o f the interpretative matrix of everydayness. Suffering is no longer the deflated concept idle talk. Take a lighted match and apply it to the palm of your hand. Now you know the nature of the prima facie ethical injunction not to do this (to yourself or others). This is its essence, and this suffering is a stand alone phenomenon, outside of theory, social rules, reason; and this means the prima facie injunction, the "should not", too, stands outside these categorical reductions to the ordinary. If you can stand it, "the world" issues this injunction. And this the essence of God: An injunction to do and not to do bound to eternity (the world, after all, is not a round mass circling the sun, of course. It is Being).

If ethics issues from Being itself, there lies here the question of redemption: Thrown into a life of misery, but what does it mean for this misery to be, as I call it, meta-redeemed? A further inquiry for this.