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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I'm more a positive nihilist. A sad nihilist is trying, but failing to accept life on its terms. — frank
I beleive that complex ideas can be put simply. — Tom Storm
I have passages if that memorized. One of my favorites. — frank
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
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
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
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
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).I said engine of emotion. For that, you need emotional wounds. That's what morality is all about. — frank
I think guilt and condemnation are the central engine of emotion in human life. — frank
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about things—wrong about what is truly "useful"—seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful. — Count Timothy von Icarus
1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?
Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.
Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.
If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus
2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.
It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1). — Count Timothy von Icarus
3. It seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation.
I will allow though that the force of 3 is probably significantly lessened if the second horn of 1 can somehow be overcome, or if we grab the first horn of the dilemma in 1. But if we grab the first horn, we seem to be either contradicting ourselves or defaulting on the claim that truth is always posterior to current practices and beliefs.
Like I said, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the analytic "view-from nowhere," "objectivity approaches truth at the limit" schema that this sort of view emerged to correct. Yet this solution seems to me to have even greater difficulties. More broadly, I think the impetus for such a view stems from failing to reject some of the bad epistemic axioms of empiricism, and from a particular metaphysics of language and the reality/appearance distinction that I would reject, but that's a whole different can of worms.
I suppose a final option is to refuse to grab the dilemma by the horns and to simply be gored by it, allowing that the theory is both true and false, and that it itself implies contradictions, and so this is no worry. But I think that's exactly the sort of thing that is generally meant by "anything goes relativism." — Count Timothy von Icarus
If God is ethics, as you claim, why are at least 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth already extinct? Why do non-vegans cause pain and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms and 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year? Why do humans cause harm and death to other humans? Why do living things have to consume other living things to live? Why didn't the God, who is allegedly ethics, prevent all harm, injustice, and death and make all living things forever happy? I posit that God, if it is real, is the source of all evil. — Truth Seeker
Typical apologist's strawman. — 180 Proof
Is it? — frank
No, I don't see this either. — Philosophim
Ok. I say you forgive by the grace of God because I don't know any other way to explain it. You can't do it by your own power. I don't believe in God. — frank
Only on a particularly deflationary view of "science." At any rate, those who embrace such a view, and who stick to a "hard" empiricism and naturalism also often tend towards denying causality. But in such contexts, consciousness itself, reference, intentionality, etc. are every bit as "queer" as "evaluative judgement."
Might I suggest though that this is an unhelpful starting point for framing a metaphysics of goodness, given that camp largely tends to deny goodness, or else to put forth some sort of reductive, mechanistic view of it as reducible to "brain states?" I mean, your earlier point about kerosene (or presumably also one's own beloved, or anything else) being reducible to empirical data seems to already have assumed an answer about ethics. Yet it can hardly be one that it is "good" to affirm. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So I would put it this way: suffering and well-being are not just contingencies of language, but the shared, universal ground of our moral experience. Whether one interprets that as divine or not, I think we agree it is where ethics takes its root. — Truth Seeker
How so? — frank
In my view, recognizing suffering as fundamental doesn’t point us to the divine, but to the very real ground of our shared experiences, such as pain, pleasure, fear, love, hate, grief, sadness, rage, happiness, compassion and so on. — Truth Seeker
I think there are advantages to occasionally looking at the world through an amoral lens. Judgment and understanding stand in opposition. The more you judge something or someone, the less you understand, because once the judgement is made (that was evil!), there's no reason to look further. Understanding requires putting judgment on the shelf. For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations. — frank
So, the consciousness implements our reality and its experiencing, through qualia-appearances; it is the messenger - whose message seems to be existence and being. Even though it is movie-like, its happenings are identical to what would go on if all events were what we would call 'real': if there is no qualia gas in the qualia car, then the qualia car won't quaila run.
An implementation difference that makes no difference to the message itself is truly no difference, but is still of interest to those who want to know the mechanics of our reality. — PoeticUniverse
If you're truly interested in the discussion, please check out the argument in addition to the definitions to see why this ends up being a fundamental. As well, it would probably be better if you post there to not distract from this person's post, as well as have easy quoting access to the argument and responses. — Philosophim
Sure, but is it good or evil? Or neither? It's the intellect's job to answer that. You can't go wrong spending a little time with analytic philosophy, especially if your mind has a tendency to take flight like a bird. AP is slow and humble. — frank