Perhaps I misunderstood. 'Prior' is the usual jargon. Then prior to what? My claim is that the analysis of X cannot be prior to X, where X is something in the world as experienced, in this case, a reflection in thought on actions and a judgement thereon, aka 'ethics'. — unenlightened

Thoughts on actions and judgments: A judgment, as with, Raskolnikov is guilty of murder! But what is there in murder that makes this judgment ethical at all? Murder is "something in the world," as you call it; yet as it stands it is underdetermined for a discussion that the OP begins with Hamlet's "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Really? Putting aside Hamlet's ruse, it is a question of the ground of ethics. Good and bad actions beg just this question: What does it mean for something to be good or bad that is non question begging.

Calling an action good doesn't settle the matte as to what it is for something to be good.

Consider the proposition, "Falsehood is better than truth."
If it were true, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
If it were false, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
'Therefore, 'truth is better than falsehood' is the only tenable moral position on truth. — unenlightened

You mean truth as a logical function in a sentence. Do you think ethics hangs by such a thing?

What difference does it make? — frank

If ethics is grounded outside of ethical problem solving and thinking that issues from sources of variability, that is, different cultures, subcultures where ethical problems actually brew into issues, then what could this be? I am arguing that it is not a principle at all, nor does it emerge out of a matrix of problem solving. It is the ground of ethics, what makes ethics possible---what it IS.
Look at the matter apophatically: What is NOT in the ethicality of the prima facie prohibition not apply thumbscrews to my neighbor? It is the incidentals, the entanglements. The facts that my neighbor is a serial killer who perhaps deserves it, that I have some religious convictions that call for it, or that my neighbor knows something that needs to be tortured out of her, and so on. And these entanglement have their underpinnings in more entanglements : facts about upbringing, abiding beliefs and conditions that are part of my culture, and there really is no end to this. These are dismissed because they have no inherent ethicality about them. There is nothing in a promise, a stated duty, an honor driven mission, and so on, that is inherently ethical. They all beg the question: what good is this? Even a clearly contingent sense of good, like calling something a good couch or bad knife, begs this same question: what good is a soft cushion or a well functioning recliner? The term 'good' is like the copula 'is': it is everywhere, saturates stated affairs. 'Is' leads to more inquiry about what it IS that is a response to the question of what something IS. The good/bad lie with mere interest, caring, curiosity, wonder, seeking, desiring, and on and on. See Dewey's Art As Experience for a rather mundane but clear talk about this.

So, this was just to be clear as to what is on the table. The difference? No objective values and torturing my neighbor ha no status at all in the most basic analysis. The opposite of this is that it does have status foundationally. How this plays out is not given; not yet. Perhaps in some future Hegelian frame (think of Slavoj Zizek) of discovery this will become "unhidden," (as Heidegger put it). But what is acknowledged is the gravitas of our existence and our actions and experiences. This is the difference.

Good is saving and improving lives. Evil is deliberate harm and the murder of sentient beings. How do you define good and evil? — Truth Seeker

I wait until the argument settles. What good is saving lives? Saving a life is one thing--there, you saved me from injury, but there is nothing in the term "saving" that has any ethicality to it. I can save this cup of coffee from being tossed down the drain. And life? what is it about life that makes it part of a moral conversation?

The brain not only uses clues coming from without but also uses clues from within, such as memory and experience in expectation of what is a cup. — PoeticUniverse

True. But memory all the more puts distance between oneself as an epistemic agency, and the object, for what stands before one is now not only causally distant, if you will, but being a memory object, is compromised by memory in what it IS. In other words, I see the cup, but if memory crowds the perception, what actually unfolds before me is no longer the cup but a qualified memory perception of a cup. The cupness never was the object, but memory informing me that "that" there is acknowledged AS a cup.
The problem of getting to that which is before me in a knowledge claim has to do with an analysis of what "getting to" is all about. How is the "distance" between me and the cup closed so my thoughts about the cup are really about that over there called a cup?

Thanks for your insightful comments! One of the books I've been studying the last couple of years is Thinking Being, Eric Perl. It helped me understand the sense in which metaphysics could be a living realisation, not the static religious dogma it has become. I've read parts of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, but I'm not completely on board with his analysis. I think the flaw that he detects is that of 'objectification' - that philosophy errs in trying to arrive at an objective description of metaphysics, when its entire veracity rests on it being a state of lived realisation. (This is the subject of Perl's introductory chapter in the above book.) — Wayfarer

The lived realization you talk about refers to Husserl's epoche. There are phenomenologists who take this reduction all the way down, apophatically, if you will, to an ontological revelation. I have always thought the quintessential phenomenologist to be the Buddhist, keeping in mind though that even the competent and committed meditator has to pass through, that is, undo and outright violate, the interpretative structures of understanding that have taken a lifetime to build, and while one may stand on an extraordinary threshold, the decisive move forward has to deal with these structures that always already make affirmation: the tree is still a tree, the clock a clock---the doldrums of ordinary experience that are the very temporal foundations of our being. This is Heidegger's dasein, Kierkegaard's hereditary "sin", the totality that is me-in-the-world. Heidegger takes one to water, so to speak, but does affirm the validity of drinking. To really do this, I am convinced one has to leave standard relations with the world behind, a monumental task. Psychologists will call this disassociation, a pathology. Radical insight is a radical existence in which it is the psychologist is now seen as dissociated, alienated. I don't read the Christian Bible much--read it once in a course called The Bible as Literature--but I do recall Jesus saying one must hate pretty much everyone to be a true devotee. Now, 'hate' is a problematic translation from the Aramaic, but even a tame reading tells us to set aside everyone (and everything), put them out of mind, dismiss them from thought and feeling. (Incidentally, I do read now and again, Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief, which Wittgenstein use to carry around wherever he went. Tolstoy was no fool.)

Anyway, it is like two very different worlds that are radically opposed, yet a unity, what Michel Henry calls ontological monism: in the being of beings, beings fall away, meaning one no longer sees a tree there, a fence post beside the tree, the sky above, and so on, for all of these categories of thought yield to what is "stable and absolute" and this can only be acknowledged in the phenomenological reduction: not simply a concept, but a consummatory experience.

Thanks for Eric Perl. I will give him a read.

I wonder if it might be more precise to describe values as having a pre-linguistic dimension (in experience, emotion, embodied life), but that they only become social, reflective, and enduring through language. Morality then is social relations with language. Our entire discourse would vanish without language. — Tom Storm

No, I claim. I mean, yes, if language were absent then discourse would be absent, but the core matter of ethics remains hidden in the same way, say, time/space was hidden prior to theoretical "discovery". Language brings physics to light, but prior to this, Einstein's concept was a possibility latent in the potentiality of language and existence. So ethics, prior to the language that made ethical discourse possible, was hidden (lethea) or unmanifested in the world. Concepts like good and evil do not exist prior to language, yet in the revelation of thought, they become manifest, but what is it that is being brought forth? Something that was already there, yet unseen. In this way of thinking, ethical discovery is like scientific discovery. Copernicus was right, but not simply because this language won over Ptolemaic language, but because actualities in the world insisted (though what those actualities ARE is indeterminate). We conceive of prehistoric savagery, when we think about it as we would, say, of starvation and disease in our own time. Part of language's function is to dismiss the actualities of this savagery so we can live comfortably in a savage world. Of course, we all know this--- like not thinking of the slaughter house that produces Mcdonald's hamburgers.

But with ethics, things are much stranger than science can ever be, and much more important: we want to say the sun never revolved around the earth, ever, but the conditions for discussing such things cannot reach into the world where the true foundation for talk about the movements of celestial bodies is made manifest. If this were possible, all science would stop on this matter, for an absolute would have finally been found. But why isnp't this possible? Because science is not about absolutes; it is about contingencies. The scientific method is a future looking construction of the conditionally structured sentence, "If...then...", that is, repeatable results are always grounded in finitude, and there is nothing in reason's logic to apodictically guarantee things will continue in this way (Sartre's notion of radical contingency is about just this: the world's behavior is not logically constrained). But ethics has a completely different ground: Good and Evil, without argument, the strangest thing in all of existence, though this is hard to acknowledge. Take two states of affairs, one ethical/aesthetic (Wittgenstein conflates the two), the other factual only, like the sun rising in the east or facts about the order of numbers; just a plain fact. what is the difference? What makes an ethical state of affairs ethical? Good and Evil, and here, unlike in science, the extralinguistic reference is itself (is such a thing even possible?) qualitatively makes the difference, evidenced by pain and pleasure.

Whatever prelinguistic or 'transcendent' origin ethics might have, we cannot demonstrate it, nor can we access it. And, as you say, we are limited to using language. I wonder if it is safe to leave it behind, as it is difficult to see what use this frame has beyond engaging in abstract speculation or intellectual exercises. Unless you add God (which you seek to avoid) which might provide us with a putative foundation or grounding for it all and this also comes with a 'to do' list. (Not that this frame is convincing to me either.)

My question to you is this: how do we talk about ethics as a society? Setting aside the abstruse, speculative material of academia or in a forum like this, what can we say (as per the OP) that is accessible and useful at a societal level about right and wrong? — Tom Storm

The reason why this is so important, I believe, is what you are asking about.
To talk like this, it is assumed that at the societal level, one has to leave talk about the foundation of ethics and get down and dirty, so to speak, in the affairs themselves of conflicting points of view, weighing utility, conceiving consequences and benefits and looking within to one's feelings and thoughts. But consider the above where I pointed out that if science were to reach into the true foundation or ground of some issue, that issue would cease to be an issue, for science would simply stop there. It would be "done". But science cannot be about absolutes because there is nothing in the discovery that cannot be second guessed and this is true because, at its most basic level, it is a language construction and ALL that language produces can be second guessed--this is the nature of contingency itself: One spoken thing has its meaning only in context. One would have to reach out of contextuality itself to posit an absolute, and this is absurd.

But that sprained ankle you have because someone tripped you up hurts terribly, and this hurting is the ground for the standing ethical prohibition not to do this, so all eyes are on the hurting, and pain is not a proposition, an attitude, a feeling about the pain nor a thinking of any kind. It is rather a stand alone "prelinguistic" that is entirely acontextual. Ethics "stops" here, as does ethical nihilism. The importance in everyday affairs? Like asking about the importance of science having a stopping place. Makes quantum indeterminacy look like child's play. Of course, ethics doesn't get that kind of press. Affirming the objectivity of ethics would be like stone tablets from Sinai, but without to commandments, without the irrational dreariness of religion. One would have to follow through on this. I attempt this with my own Essence of Religion paper.

Normally, traditions that build on Plato—Boethius, the Golden Age Islamic thinkers, many of the Patristics, the Scholastics, etc.—also posit a sort of "knowing by becoming" here. Praxis is essential (e.g., contemplation, ascetic labors, etc.). But within these schools it isn't "knowing the good" that comes first, but knowing what essentially precludes knowing and consistently willing the good, which is being divided against oneself and controlled by one's passions and lower appetites, rather than the rational appetite for goodness or truth as such. Hence, ethics here beings from a sort of "meta" position, from looking at what must be the case for any ethical life regardless of what goodness and justice turn out to be. Indeed, much of what Plato puts out there would seem to hold even if "good" just means "what I myself will prefer." It applies to anyone not embracing full nihilism, in that being ruled over by one's appetites and passions will only lead to good outcomes by accident (and we know from experience that it will often result in disaster). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yet all of this remains discursive, merely. Such is philosophy, and the assumption is that this is the best one can do: postulate from a position that is at a distance from reality which is philosophy's impossible desideratum. As long as this scholarly need to publish continues to dominate thinking (and really, what is a philosopher do to if not speak endlessly about what someone said vis a vis someone else?), doors are closed. And philosophy is reduced to entertainment, and in modern anaoytic thought, not even serious entertainment--for what is philosophy without a primordial metaphysics? Nothing. Even Kant, with his absolute ceiling on meaningful thought, is an attempt bring the house down on philosophy by simply drawing a line between representation and something that is not representation, not realizing, and this is an important insight for me, that to draw such a line can only be done if both sides of the line are intelligible (as the early Wittgenstein observed), and so the radically other of this both remains and yet is lost to sense making, for metaphysics will not be dismissed in a wave of spurious rigor, nor can it be reduced to nonsense (contra positivism) because the radicality of the other is IN the phenomenality of what is given.

This is just a glance at something I think intrudes dramatically upon the story of the metaphysics of the good you sketch out above. The good is a term so burdened by such thinking that one forgets Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that there was in his thinking a failure to acknowledge that one actually exists. Metaphysics can do this, that is, impose, say, some Christian idea about faith and the church and how platonism can provide a model for the world and divinity, and how thinking leads to more rationalizing, and soon, one is burning heretics and believing god to be some kind of embodiment of superlatives. I argue all of this fails to understand religion, ethics and its good and evil.

To really deal with ethics, one must, as Walt Whitman put it, have all schools in abeyance, even the schools that inform inquiry. The good and the bad of ethics stands outside of thought entirely, though philosophy brings thought to realize this. Such is the paradox of metaethics. The prima facie injunction against bludgeoning one's neighbor is grounded in an actuality not bound to the finitude of the totality onto-ethicality. It issues from, if you will, eternity. (Levinas has much to say on this).

I would imagine that suffering and happiness were experienced before language, so there’s that.

I would think also that morality comes from our interactions with the world and other creatures, not just language. But given you wrote of relativism “is all that is left” it sounds like you’re not comfortable with it. I think we’ve had this conversation before. — Tom Storm

Yes, it is a philosophical obsession of mine, ethics. I think most philosophy is an abstraction, as is science and the pragmatic os dialy living; an abstraction in that all knowledge is categorical, as when one says light is really a spectrum of wavelengths: light, wavelengths, spectrum, etc., these are categorical ideas that subsist in hierarchies of subsumption, and they are abstracted from the whole of the givenness of the world. Derrida wrote The White Mythology, and in it he takes a very close look at Anatole France's Garden of Epicurus, near the end, in a conversation between Polyphilos and Ariste in which the claim is made that metaphysics is like a faded coin that has been tossed about in its wear and tear for years, and barely preserves the original images. This is a metaphor for the way metaphysics came into being: "at first" there was a natural language, long ago, that was clear and right in the way it spoke about the world, a primordial language----God's logos? Is there such a thing? Not as absurd as it sounds, I think, because when analysis attempts to look at language, it is essentially looking at itself, which is impossible since the metalanguage is the same as the object language, and all you will ever get is reflections of the metalanguage, or more strings of metalinguistic thinking; think of logic trying to get to the ground of what logic is. One then is stopped hard in the tracks of inquiry, suddenly, if you will, lest one simply go on reeling off more of the "same" that can never penetrate into the desideratum: the true ground-language that springs into existence with every thought. One can only stand there and observe the threshold of one's acceptance (see Fink's Sixth Meditation if you like) in the act of thinking, and the question of the ground is pushed into metaphysics. Put 'God' aside, for it is nothign but trouble, but metaphysics is there, right at the tip of one's tongue as she speaks, thinks, feels, wonders, and so on.

Anyway, off track a bit, but OTOH, not really: Derrida's idea (as best as I have gotten so far. He WANTS to be puzzling so you don't glide through reading) is to question this metaphor: the assumption is that metaphysics is born out of the wear and tear of language through the ages, a process that corrupts what was once clear and right: a borrowing of the essential meanings originally given, to construct dizzying heights abstract thought, and that process is inherently metaphorical, the making of novel meanings by contextual interchange of language. There was a time when things were much simpler, but once language moved into the extravagant mode of excessive creation, and things were moved from their grounding into where that had no business

Derrida uses this little dialogue if France's to illustrate a point: Once one inquires about the true foundation of language and tries to conceive of something that once was, one comes face to face with the very language that is supposed to be corrupted and out of which the very notion of corruption issues for itself. As I see it, it is like the evolutionary science: If our current horizon of possible conceiving at all issues from an evolved mentality, then any attempt to "look back" and draw up theories about how this mentality evolved is going to meet with its own evolved categories of thought. A kind of scientific Hegelianism: we are currently IN a modality of possiblities that is delimited, and anything that is produced therein cannot exceed its own delimitation.

Which bring me to ethics: To speak at all is to work within such a delimitation, and there is no way out of this....except through Kierkegaard (and his ilk): We actually exist, and this is existence is not simply about how our evolving language possiblities can speak what it is; rather, existence is palpable, real, hic et nunc, and its reality is striking, overwhelming, and this is where ethics finds its ground, this ahistorical real, not in the historicity of the what-can-be-said, which is where philosophy performs its eternal aporetic advance to nihilism. Philosophy is already done, but philosophers mostly just keep wheels spinning. Ethics is about, foundationally, value-in-being, and value lies outside of language, notwithstanding that I am speaking just this.

Albert defined good and evil. Veganism is good because it saves and improves lives. Vegans value all sentient lives - not just human lives. — Truth Seeker

But sentience as such possesses nothing of ethical possibility. And something being alive is equally without an ethical dimension. How do you define good and evil? What does it mean to say something is evil? It can't be because it gives rise to something else, some purpose or use value, because these beg the question about the nature of evil itself. This, I argue, is where the question leads thought. Not to what is called evil, but what evil is itself, its nature, its essential meaning. If one wants to understand ethics, one has to understand what ethics IS.

How can there be? How can ethics be discussed before there are ethics? First the fall into knowledge, and the birth of shame, then the questioning and discussion. It's always the same with philosophy, it wants to start at the beginning but cannot, it always starts in the middle and in a muddle.

Ethics are grounded in the questioning of life, in the second guessing of behaviour, in the thought that things might have been different, and might have been better.

A path is made by walking on it; ethics are made by questioning our actions. — unenlightened

Before, not in the temporal sense, but in the logical presuppositional sense: Ask the question, What is ethics? and you uncover the analytic of ethics, like a geologist opens a rock or a mineral looking for its contents. What is sought is an analytic of ethics, a determination as to what makes an ethical case ethical at all. Prior to the "case" is the condition laid out in the world to which ethic reasoning is a response, something IN the world that ethical issues are "about". This goes to the essence of ethics: value. What is value?

I have been watching an explanation of Spinoza and I like all is God. For me, telepathy means there is an energy that is different from our other forms of communication, which are all physical. If there is another energy other than physical energy, that makes life after death possible, doesn't it? — Athena

There is, you know, an inroad into telepathy that perhaps you haven't thought of. It is a philosophical inroad, not from empirical science. It begins with a question: How does an object, event, person, etc., make its way into my mind such that my thoughts about this are indeed about it? The light shines on my cup, some parts of the spectrum are absorbed others reflected, those that are reflected make their way to the eye, through the lens, back to the rods and cones in the back of the eye where they are converted into neuronal stimuli via the optic nerve brings them into the brain turning them into mental events and seeing is complete, roughly speaking. But note: all of these physical relations are causal, and causality has nothign epistemic it; that is, in any model you can imagine of a causal sequence, there is nothing of cause that survives in the effect. light reflects off the cup, but reflected light is nothing at all like a cup, aso according to this physicalist thinking, the system of relations that deliver an object to the brain are completely absent of the object. And this applies to any and all thinking about causal sequences.

So if the good scientist is going explain knowledge, she fails before she even begins, because science's bottom line is causality, and causality simply does not deliver knowledge. BUT: it is plain as day that I do know this cup is here, on the table, just as I know the sky is clear, the trees green, and so on. Clearly I DO reach beyond the horizon of what a physical brain can do, so how is this possible?

Simple: perception is not localized in a brain. To think like this leads to madness (See the argument Hillary Putnam has with Richard Rorty, where the latter insists that Putnam never really has seen his wife, for causally grounded knowledge is impossible. His wife is rather acknowledged and conceived in localized propositions and brain events). It must be the case, in order to explain knowledge relations, that perception itself epistemically "extends" to its objects, beyond the delimitations of the physical.

It is the only way for knowledge to be possible: the perceptual interface with an object must be such that the object is allowed to intimate its appearance in the interface, and thus perception cannot be conceived as impossibly distant from the object. Put simply, the cup is both over there AND intimating its existence to me. This aligns with telepathy in that it is knowledge at a distance, if you will. What makes telepathy so repugnant to most people is that it violates the locality of the brain: how can one enter into another's thoughts and experiences? But it should be evident that this locality leads to a disastrous epistemology, and cannot be right. Once it is abandoned, one has entered into a post, post modern grounding of our existence. To observe at all is to be already IN the locality of the object as well as IN the locality of one's self.

Now, when thinking about God and the question or meaning of such existence, I see it as being fairly fluid in human conception, but as the potential, or force, underlying all manifest existent forms in the universe, and possibly beyond. — Jack Cummins

It does lead thought to a very strange affirmation about the world, these basic questions. The Tao famously tells us to refrain from speaking, as does the Buddhist's censure when insight is taken up in thought by the clueless neophyte. It is argued that the real trouble lies in the way language is taken for a means to to truth, which it generally is, of course, but what is most often not understood is that while language speaks amidst a world, the speaking and all of that out there that constitutes the presence of a world have to first be understood as very different things. As Rorty put it, truth is a function of propositions, and there are no propositions "over there" on that hill or wherever. The proposition is here, in this utterance, and the hill over there. This is a strong position, Rorty's: a complete discontinuity in a naturalistic, causally determined world, between all things.

I don't mean to go this way here, but it does relate to the matter of God: when we speak of God at all, can we ever hit, however "fluidly" or obliquely, the target of divinity's Being? Or does language inevitably take that divinity and impose a concept, a description, a definition on it, thereby bringing God to heel in a finite system of thought? So the only way to be free is unhinge language and thought from God. This is what meditation is essentially about, I argue, and what the Hindu concept of maya is about: the illusion lies in the everydayness of language habits. Kierkegaard said as much in the Concept of Anxiety: when we engage in the world, and we give our thougths and feelings to all the things language articulates, the various cultural institutions in our daily lives, we thereby turn away from God (unless one has mastered the terms of the knight of faith, which K himself confesses he cannot do, who can do both).

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.” – Albert Schweitzer, “Civilization and Ethics”, 1949. — Truth Seeker

Okay, and it is not that I disagree with Schweitzer, but there is philosophy unsaid in these words, and this is where thought has to go. Reverence for life. but reverence is a way one comports oneself toward a thing, and reverence toward life is too vague to serve as way to say what this is. Of course, I know what he means: human life but what is it about human life that makes it something to be revered? A principle? But philosophy has lots of principles laid out through the centuries, notably, principles of utility and deontological principles like Kant's notion of duty. But they are all question begging as to what it is that makes ethics what it IS. A principle as such has nothing ethical about it, and calling it an ethical principle presupposes and understanding of what ethicality IS. Life cannot be foundational here, because there is nothing in the idea of living, living as such, that makes ethics what it is. How does one define living in thsi context? Breathing, heart beating, liver cleansing blood, and the rest? How does this generate ethical obligation? Or is it the sensate dimension of experience? I mean, what in life makes a person an ethical agency at all?

I don't see how it could be. If ethics is the study of ends, of what is sought, then it seems clear that some ends are not sought merely as a matter of convention. People do not seek happiness and avoid suffering as a sort of convention. That it is, at least ceteris paribus, bad to be blinded, to have one's hand cut off, to suffer brain injury, etc. does not seem to be a matter of convention. Convention itself is only coherent if it springs from a sort of goal-directedness that already presupposes value, else there would be no reason to follow conventions.

As to discoveries, surely some moral insights are discovered. Newton famously drank mercury because he thought it was good for him. Yet today, knowing what we know about the effects of mercury ingestion on the body, we can say that, all else equal, it is bad for people to have mercury slipped into their food and drink. This is knowledge of value that must be discovered though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To say ethics is the study of ends presupposes the value of an end. This is where the basic philosophical question leads one. One states an end, a purpose to one's actions, and no matter what this is, there is another question latent and ignored: What good is this? But now the issues hangs on this idea of the good, which resists inquiry. Or does it?

This very discussion is the foundation, and the discussion develops with our abilities to act, and knowledge of consequences. — unenlightened

But prior to this, there is the discussion of what ethics IS. Actions, granted, do not have to proceed with with perfect clarity on about the ontology of ethical standards since actions are embedded in a culture and its ways thinking and valuing. But philosophically, metaethics is basic: the OP asks about whether ethics is all just in the thinking, and beyond this it is all open, with no intruding standard from outside of the norms of one's society. If the answer to this is in the affirmative, then ethics is lost to nihilism.

But to understand why idealism is important, we need to be clear about what prompted its emergence in the early modern period, and what about it remains relevant. That is what I hope this brief essay has introduced. — Wayfarer

Simple, almost, to answer, but it does seem to be, as Heidegger said, the most remote from common sense, yet the most intimate in the midst of our being in the world. The reason why phenomenology persists is because it must, and it must because of the primordiality of phenomenality: It is impossible to observe anything but phenomena. And this deserves a dramatic, Period!

The reason why this is not understood is because it is embedded in some of the most difficult thinking there is; it goes beyond Kant into a labyrinth of neologistic language that most cannot or will not deal with. For me, to read Husserl throws the matter of our existence into a powerful indeterminacy that follows on the heels his neo Kantianism and leads to Heideggerian hermeneutics, and now all that is solid melts into air, philosophically. Hence the need for neologisms: for metaphysics was so burdened by centuries of bad thinking, and this thinking is embedded in language, and so the only way to remove this onto-theological core of metaphysics was to change the language of metaphysics, and bring ontology down from the heights of otherworldliness (Nietzsche partly inspired this, of course) into the finitude of actuality.

Anyway, what prompted its emergence is found in Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the Greeks, Hegel, etc., and what THIS is all about is, even prior to Husserl, the reduction-to-metaphysics discovered in an authentic analytic of what stands right before one's waking eyes. Note that this is just what Kant did to "discover" pure reason (those scare quotes are important): reduce ordinary experience to its logical structure, a structure that is there IN the foundational analysis of experience, and therefore not metaphysics at all---though we all know it really is THE most divisive metaphysics. One does not have to talk about noumena to see this: pure form Cannot be witnessed, only deduced. Deduced to what conclusion? Of course, the metaphysics of reason. Clearly, a big issue; one that divided philosophy in two. But while pure form cannot be witnessed and is hopelessly lost in mere groundless postulation (What is a ground regarding something that cannot be witnessed??), the world as it appears is no postulation at all. The appearance of appearing is as apodictically, well, appearing, as modus ponens. THIS is why phenomenology will not go away. It is certain, not merely likely, that when analytic philosophy learns to drop empirical science from its assumptions, anglo american thinking will turn to the phenomenon: the ONLY thing one has ever "observed" or can ever observe.

In the two scenarios which you describe it is possible that there is no difference. So, it may be that the idea of an afterlife, which often is associated with the idea of God plays a major factor. Personally, I am inclined to think that the question of life after death matters more than the existence of God. I admit that I have spent more time wondering about the various possibilities of life after death. That is because if one doesn't continue in any form what is the significance of God in relation to one's own personal identity. It becomes rather abstract and more about being known in 'the mind of God'. — Jack Cummins

I appreciate your interest in this, for it weighs on my mind as well. But thoughts here get so bound up in extraneous and historical content that has no business in this matter of God. Before moving forward, onw has to ask what God IS first, and then a great deal of what troubles this issue simply vanishes. So what do you think God IS?

Although I can't prove anything beyond that, and the discussion is purely philosophical beyond that point, I think that any assertion of morality should not violate this core tenant. — Philosophim

I wonder if you could say what this core idea is.

If anybody has any ethical questions, they can just ask me. — frank

The ethical question I have is THE ethical question: What is the ground of ethics? This is the be taken as Kant took up reason (though, not to even come near endorsing his absurd rationalism on this issue). Kant's method of reduction is what I have in mind: First isolate the desideratum from incidentals. Do you think ethics has a reductive residuum that survives the suspension of incidentals (or accidentals, if you prefer)?

So the foundation of most moral systems seems to be preventing harm and promoting wellbeing. — Tom Storm

Which begs the question: is this foundation discovered in the mere thinking, or is there something timeless and absolute in the presuppositions of an ethical problem? The problem itself is, of course, messy, as the OP notes, but does this make ethics itself reducible to the thinking only, that is, ethics being the kind of thing that is made and conventional only, and not discovered. If ethics is essentially discoverable, then this implies something outside of thought , addressed by thought to determine how to understand it. But if ethics is entirely made in the matrix of language dealing with the world, "made up" if you will, then this is end of there being a true independent ground for ethics, and a radical relativism is all that is left.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2, "Hamlet".

Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right (e.g. it is right to save and improve lives) and something is wrong (e.g. theft, fraud, rape, robbery, enslaving, torture and murder are wrong)? Is there any way to know for sure what is right and what is wrong? Different countries have different laws. Even the same country has different laws at different times. How do we decide what should be legal and what should be illegal? — Truth Seeker

Right and wrong just a matter of thinking something to be so? Sounds absurd. The prima facie obligation not to bludgeon my neighbor certainly has to be thought out, given the circumstances, but the conditions that make right and wrong ethical in the first place are PRIOR to this thinking out, viz., suffering being bludgeoned causes. Suffering is not thinking. This pretty much covers the true ground of ethics. It is the non ethical entanglements that give rise to indeterminacy in ethics, not the nature of ethics itself. Hamlet was famously caught in such indeterminacy.

You are perhaps a qualified Heideggerian. NOT that he thinks language occludes our real being, he is not like this at all, but he does argue that subjectivity is a concept that needs to be removed from the analysis of our existence. I am listening to Herbert Dreyfus lecture on youtube, "Hubert Dreyfus - Heidegger's Being and Time (Part 1)" and at 26:30 or so you will find things like Marilu Ponty's "empty heads turned toward the world" in the rejection, the radical rejection, of subjectivity. Sometimes things are put just so and make the point so poignantly. I, of course, disagree. I think when you get to that rarified "space" of a phenomenologically reduced world and thought is free of the clutter or habituated assumptions, THERE you discover the transcendental self. Husserl was too bound to the analysis of experience. But the real telos of the reduction takes one beyond this. But keeping with what analysis shows: so there you are, an empty head turned toward the world, but the center of this is the illumination and the ecstasy (nirvana). Heidegger and Marilu Ponty were too much fixated on description and analysis that they could never simply put this down, as the Buddhist does. It is unthinkable for someone like Heidegger NOT to think, in other words. This is why Husserl could not move forward: too much the philosopher.

Well, if they say so. But that does not make God a moral foundation. The reason for that is the very diverse range of religions with different teachings. Most religions give teachings that contradict the teachings of others. There are even contradictions within a single religion. Not all religions are the same and all of them could not be possibly true. So even if accept the premise that God is the moral foundation then we still face a problem: Which religion is true? — MoK

If you approach religion like that, you will find no solution to the question at all. Ask, why doesn't science have this problem? Well, it does, but we don't notice because variances are these historical events that happen within a world that is assumed to be stable because of the way science is able to quantify consistently. You've seen one DNA molecule, you've seen them all, and every time you see it, it's the same. Science has changed over the centuries because new models arise our of enhanced ways of perceiving the world that bring about unseen ways to quantify. But results in each historical paradigmatic setting (Kuhn) are always consistent. No consistency, no science.

Finding what is consistent in religion makes a move from all of the religious culture, to an exclusion of all of this (all the sermons and symbols and singing) to find what is there essentially, not unlike the way science excludes the messiness of our affairs to do just this (Kant did this with reason); you cannot do astronomy if you're thinking about astrology! The next part of this argument deals with value and ethics. Religion has its foundation in the pure valuative dimension of our normal everydayness. This can be discussed if you are interested.

Well, if they say so. But that does not make God a moral foundation. The reason for that is the very diverse range of religions with different teachings. Most religions give teachings that contradict the teachings of others. There are even contradictions within a single religion. Not all religions are the same and all of them could not be possibly true. So even if accept the premise that God is the moral foundation then we still face a problem: Which religion is true? — MoK

If you approach religion like that, you will find no solution to the question at all. Ask, why doesn't science have this problem? It is the consistency of results: put nitroglycerin in the same experimental context, the results will be the same. If you treat religion like a culture, like you seem to be doing, then all you get is cultural differences, but if you look for the essence of religion to see if there is something just as unwavering, and you look "through" the narratives, the churchy fetishes, the bad metaphysics, and so forth, to what survives after all of these contingencies are suspended, and you find the metaethical indeterminacy of our existence. This is what religion is all about.

Very long story short: a determinate ethics is simple to understand. We see it in our laws, rules, principles, explicit or implicit, and so on. The ethical normativity of our existence. Indeterminacy is what we run into when we ask for basic rationality on which these are founded: why pay taxes? Because we need money to run a society. What is the point of that? See contract theory: it's better than the state of nature; much better, because people are safer from harm. What is wrong with harm? Errrr, What do you mean? This is an indeterminacy that runs through all of our affairs, hidden beneath the veneer of conversation. The prima facie moral call not to cause harm really has NO justification beyond it being stand alone bad, which is weird for anyone who likes explanations.

But take those ethical complaints that intrinsically deal with harm, and there you are stricken with plague or burning to death in a car somewhere, and there are no laws to protect you, no authority to redress the wrongs, that is, the intrinsic wrong of it being there AT ALL. Take the broad context of our ethical issues in the world, and see that ultimately, no redress is forthcoming at the foundational level! THIS is where religion has its essence, why, that is, societies "came up with" religion, and why religion is in all cultures. We are all "thrown into" a world of unredeemed suffering and unconsummated desire. This is the essence of religion: to bring these to their completion.

[

Why have you forsaken me?" He became sin for us. Our transgressions, all of them, died with him on the cross; God the Father, turns His face away from evil (sin). — Ray Liikanen

What transgressions? Not to say that we are all so perfect, but the issue goes to responsibility: the behavior, the thought,these can be transgressive, meaning they bring into the world an alienation from our true nature which is a "spark" of the divine (without putting too fine a point on it), toward all of the cultural affairs that draw us away from this. Original sin, K held, was, for us (not Adam, whose situation is quite different, though it has to be kept in mind that K was not giving credence to a myth. He uses this myth to explain "original sin" which is, by all accounts, just weird and senseless. He criticizes Luther's generally held position that we, somehow have committed the most egregious offense to God imaginable, and so on) the sin of the "race" which means it is the historical generation of a very bloated and distracting culture, filled with what you could call worldly fetishes: the institutions, the personality identities, the endless "idle talk" and in general the bringing the eternal down to be absorbed into the finite in those churchy settings, thereby losing original religious insight which is subjective and not public at all.
But though one can find fault with this alienation, the transgression lies with the condition, and are not "ours" because we were merely thrown into a world into which this occurs. I think this is important to understand, because Christianity seems fixated on the individual's accountability in the usual sense of being accountable, as with the many rules of society; but to take this model and apply it to religious sin is absurd, for the context in which responsibility rise up are metaphysical.

I agree. Pain requires nerves. That organism with nerves is the agent of the pain. But the suffering we construct to displace pain, is all in the constructing and projecting of the Mind without agency. — ENOAH

No, no; that's not what I mean by disembodied. This is the phenomenologist's world and all bets are off re. physicality and its many sciences. The fact that nerves deliver signals to the brain belongs to a region of thinking that presupposes phenomenology, as all sciences do. Many ways to approach this but imagine Derrida is right, and he is, I say, and language is something that never can be even conceived as ontologically/epistemologically associated with the intended object of trees and clouds and nerve fibers and so on. Language you could say stands disembodied from the world of these nameless actualities. In everyday dealings, we treat them as one, you know, pass the salt and the bus being late, things like this make no discernment ontologically, and the epistemology is bound up with normal affairs.

Prior to the science there is the "immediate" givenness of the world. Here we see suffering and delight in their reduced givenness, which has no causal explanations linked to it. It is a stand alone giveness, this pain, that bliss. We think of them in the usual contexts when we are in them, as when I take a sip from this cup. But pull away from engagement and ontology makes its appearance, via the question. Derrida's trace is supposed to bring us to this very strange precipice where our encultured resources are suspended (the final suspension) and we face a "pure" world, your world, free of the distortions of language, andI have always agreed with you; and disagreed. I think this intimation of pure being you talk about is a very meaningful part of what it is to stand on this precipice. But I take issue with your (and Heidegger's) turn away from subjectivity (agency). Two things are behind this: One is the requirement that human dasein (meaning just our existence of thought, relations, feelings, "comportment," and what we generally refer to as experience) is a language construct (the house of Being), and the other hs to do with agency and value, what I mean when I talk about a disembodied agency: agency is experience, and experience is always a subjective (agential) and centered phenomenon. One cannot talk about experience belonging to no one, or about a pain that belongs to no one any more than one can talk about gravity without mass, say. the pain of this sprained ankle cannot be "hanging around," if you will, in space somewhere. The same with having a thought or a feeling. These issue from experience and cannot be conceived apart from it.

I do not. I think about the self and human so called dasein (I'm not sure why that concept is treated as a given) as NO THING — ENOAH

Yes, quite right.

that you not only have no false gods before you but you reject also the one true God; and remain as an innocent babe--someone deserving of no condemnation for there is nothing in you deserving of judgment. This is why I assume my default position: what exactly do you mean by religion? Define it, or remain silent, else you enter a world of perhaps potentially meaningful dialogue, but much more likely, only meaninglessness masquerading as wisdom. — Ray Liikanen

This sounds like Kierkegaard in his Concept of Anxiety. See what he says:

Innocence is ignorance. In innocence the human being is not characterized as spirit but is psychically characterized in immediate unity with its natural condition. Spirit is dreaming in the human being. This view fully accords with that of the Bible which, by denying that the human being in its innocence has knowledge of the difference between good and evil,* condemns all Catholicism’s fantasies concerning [Adam’s] merit.15 In this state there is peace and repose, but at the same time there is something else, something that is not dissension and strife, for there is nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that at the same time it is anxiety. Dreaming, spirit projects its own actuality, yet this actuality is nothing, but innocence always sees this nothing outside itself. Anxiety is an attribute of the dreaming spirit and belongs as such to psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other [mit Andet]16 is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is a nothing hinted at. Spirit’s actuality appears constantly as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it reaches out for it, and is a nothing that can only bring unease. More it cannot do as long as it merely appears.

Of course, he has his own way of treating these terms, but pretty much, when you talk about an innocent babe deserving of no condemnation, you are aligned with the simple but profound insight that if a person never looks up, so to speak, from the stream of psychological events in her head, and never takes on the burden of the anxiety this imposes, a person cannot be guilty, but nor can a person make any progress toward .....God, or better, call it liberation and enlightenment (from the East. I find their metaphysics more explicit and useful than the vagaries of "faith"). Two things Jesus said that always ring true: forgive them for they know not what they do, and God, have you forsaken me? True not because they agree with the Bible, but because the Bible agrees with them. We are forsaken in this finitude of suffering (and delights, let's not forget. the OP is about this as well), and we are absolutely clueless as to why.

But then, there ARE clues. This is a theo-philosophical matter.

Explain what? Your "bad metaphysics" post speaks for itself. — 180 Proof

Oh. Thanks for clearing that up.

Ok, my apology. I read your OP a couple of times and now I know what you are arguing about. To me, the essence of religion is not about ethics at all but about spiritual and mystical experiences. Although there are religions with a set of commands, what we ought to do and what we ought not to do, but to my understanding there is no religion that provides reasons why an act, good or evil, is right or wrong. Therefore, religion is not about ethics. — MoK

But of course religion "provides reasons why an act, good or evil, is right or wrong." Religion tells us that God is moral foundation of such "reasons".

But I would respond to the idea of religion being about spiritual and mystical experiences. Not that it is not about these, but that mysticism itself does not stand apart from our ordinary affairs: what is mystical lies with understanding that ordinary affairs themselves are entirely indeterminate at the basic level of assumptions, which undermines all knowledge claims, something altogether ignored as we are so absorbed in the usual matters. Just to say, that one should keep such the "mystical" within the bounds of what is IN the world vis a vis our existence, in order to keep the very idea available. If you read mystics like Meister Eckhart or pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite you find intimations that never really leave the perceptual event, but rather ackowledge something always already IN what is observed normally. A long discussion in this.

Why do I claim religion is all about ethics? You saw the point in the OP: Religion is metaphysics, specifically metaethics. Metaethics is inquiry about the essence of ethics, as is the question, what IS the good? It is a question for ontology, for the good and the bad in ethics, prior to discussions about the should's and shouldn'ts, rights and wrongs, refer to the actual affairs in the world that make ethics even possible. The basic idea lies here: what if ethics possessed in its essence something as apodictic as logic? I claim it does. Beneath the entanglements of our ethical lives, there is something that makes these matters' ethicality even possible. This is value, a category identified in Wittgenstein's Tractatus which he says is unspeakable, as it is IN the world and not merely in states of affairs. (It helps to read this brief if enigmatic book.)

Again, what if ethics possessed at its core something apodictic? If so, religious issues would be instantly resolved! No, I'm serious.

Glad to see that you agree that the pain is not bad for all agents. — MoK

I take pain and pleasure to be bad and good analytically. If one is enjoying X, then, heh, heh, one isn't in pain. Period. If something is standardly called pain, but is nonstandardly received as pleasure, I ask, why should standards hold up against reality? And I keep in mind that so much that we call painful or distasteful are conditioned pov's. I remember finding cigarette smoking so awful it made me sick. Then I was addicted for 16 years. The lack of objectivity in the goods and bads of the world was never due to their not being anything objective about the good or the bad. It was always about the variance in was brought the good and the bad into existence. Flames scorching living flesh? Hmmm, like I said, this one is tough to imagine being enjoyable. But who cares. It really isn't the point. If one is miserable then one is miserable.

Your accusation of "bad metaphysics" is clearly a projection and non sequitur. — 180 Proof

Oh. Really? Explain.

Well, ime, metaphysics – making sense in the most general way of the whole of reality – is conceptual (i.e. presuppositional > descriptive), not theoretical (i.e. propositoonal > explanatory). Besides, metaphysics does not entail the 'false hopes' which are the basis and motivators of religion. — 180 Proof

It certainly does depend on what is meant by metaphysics. Here I refer to metaphysics in the way of "bad metaphysics" which rises out of groundless speculation, I mean, literally speculation that has no ground, as with talk about the nature of God often goes, following through on a supposition that is itself its own presupposition. God is a definitional concept that is the genesis of a great deal of bad metaphysics simply because it is NOT its own presupposition, but is a contingent and constructed concept, something "of parts" that defers to other concepts for its meaning. At any rate, when you talk about overpromising and underdelivering, you implicitly say that delivering and promising make sense in this context. Making sense requires justification, so where does the justification come from? Unless one is able to show that such a thing is demonstrable in the "observable" (belongs in double inverted commas for a good reason) world, either directly or through apriori argument, one will have to resort to what can be neither observed nor inferred from what is observed. The very definition of bad metaphysics.

As to false hopes: one needs to go into this: false hopes about what? Religion does not deal in contingent matters, so it is not about false hopes of any particular (read accidental) issue, the particulars of any of a multitude of ethical problems one can have. So the hope in quiestion here has is analytically reduced something more fundamental, which is discovered IN the very structure of our existence. This is value.

All Christian sects preach that every person has an "eternal soul" (i.e. "I AM" = EGO sum (re: "imago dei")) that will be either "saved" or "damned", no? Iirc from my Jesuitical education, each follower of Christ seeks only the "eternal salvation" of his "eternal soul" ... in the world to come". Augustinian / Kierkeegardian subjectivity (i.e. "leap of faith") metaphysically screams "ME ME ME". :pray: — 180 Proof

Yeah, I know, and it is a fair point to make. But then, it is the "world denied" that made Nietzsche so incensed. If one reads Kierkegaard, especially in The Concept of Anxiety, Sickness Unto Death and, well, everywhere, really, he comes down very hard on the affections we have for this world; indeed, it is his Attack on Christendom that plays this out in concerns about the fallen state of "Christendom" which to him is just the very embodiment of sin. Buddhism and Hinduism are very explicit about this: the world is suffering, an illusion (maya) and we must be delivered from our affections bound therein. These affection are, literally, the indulgences of the ego.

Humans' denial of death via myths / symbols of 'immortality' (e.g. scapegoating, redemption / propitiation sacrifice, martyrdom, "teleological suspension of the ethical", etc) as I've pointed out on this thread ... — 180 Proof

Yes, you pointed it out, but you haven't argued through the OP. So many argue a case about religion as if religion were no more than the sum of bad metaphysics. This is a straw person argument, instantly assailable. It doesn't address religion in its essence. Most of what you cite above are ideas that that are badly defined or have no place in a foundational analysis at all.

I wrote this piece of nonsense:" Its overpromising and underdelivering is itself for into metaphysics, i.e., beyond verification and falsification." Should have written this: overpromising and underdelivering is itself metaphysics, that is, beyond verification and falsification.

Well, that is quite the opposite of what you stated regarding religion. To you: "But religions are about a dogmatic authority, and so the analytic of good and bad has no place.". — MoK

No. What is defended and discussed here is an analytic of religion, not religion as it is taken up in regular affairs. Read the OP.

God is a term that issues from the basic religious situation. It belongs to a basket of terms that create issues rather than resolve them. Say God is the greatest possible being, then I will give a hundred ways to entangle this into an entirely contrived issue generating concept. Wittgenstein was right: leave such things alone for, putting is simply, lack of grounding in the world. In other words, the world shows itself to us and our job in philosophy is to say what is there at the most basic level.

But you don't give the idea its due: take someone's masochism regards beatings as somehow delightful. The pain of the beatings is no longer, therefore bad, or another way to go would be to say that what is bad in the pain is entangled with something that makes if good (a fetish's very definition) and familiarity makes for a settled matter, psychologically. On this point I don't care about the variability of the way we experience the world. All that matters is the value in play when value is entangled (it almost always is). It can be clear as a bell, as when the flame is put beneath the palm of my hand--hard to fetishize this one. Not impossible, but then...well, I hard to even imagine. I can imagine Thích Quảng Đức did; he was the Buddhist monk who set himself ablaze in protest. But this is a different matter as he had trained himself to ignore the pain, not enjoy it. But the source of enjoyment is just not at issue. What is at issue is the nature of pain when one is feeling pain. Just that. You have a fetish such that burns and beatings are a good time, then I do not classify your beatings as painful, but delightful.

This story (myth) is not "salvation" because, in fact, one's "suffering" (i.e. frustrations, fears, pains, losses, traumas, dysfunctions) ceases only with one's death. The world's oldest confidence game ritually over-promises and under-delivers: false hope. Besides, most historical religions preach that every person has an 'eternal soul' – imo, there isn't any notion that's more of an ego-fetish than this. — 180 Proof

Its overpromising and underdelivering is itself for into metaphysics, i.e., beyond verification and falsification.

Christian metaphysics is not at all egoic, but precisely the opposite: it is in the denial of the ego and its personality and attachments (fetish or otherwise. Freud thought that the entire structure of a culture was something of a fetish of sublimated libido). Kierkegaard called this hereditary sin.

If you re looking for what is essentially religious about our existence, it begins with the OP. Why waste time on the silliness of historical popular religion? These self implode right at the outset of inquiry.

But religions are about a dogmatic authority, and so the analytic of good and bad has no place. As for a description, this is what observation does. So what is there to observe? Just the arbitrary command (which may be a good idea or not. The point is that the determination about its goodness or badness is not based on justification and merit).
— Constance
What is your religion and why did you choose it?

Pain is apodictically "bad".
— Constance
Not to a masochist. — MoK

I am of the school that says if something hasn't been through the analytic grinder, then it is not worthy of belief. I no more take religion in any popular sense seriously at all. Such a thing is no longer a a living possibility.

If a masochist likes X, then X isn't pain to the masochist. I take this as both analytically true as well as experientially.

I completely agree with you. That is where both religion, and, with respect, much philosophy, east and west, has gone astray. That is the exact point. Fetishization of the Subject, causes our awareness to focus on that illusion as a thing which suffers and ought not to. I'm wondering whether (like so many things which history corrupts) the essence of religion (to remind/warn against etc. this fetishizing of the ego) has been "lost." — ENOAH

A thing which suffers? Nobody argues this. Heidegger interpreted Descartes to make the point that dasein is not what he called a mode of desein's being called "presence at hand" but this isn't where the interesting phenomenology takes the issue. Post modern thinking on the theological side of all this takes one to transcendence. On this lies at the end of the ontological question of agency. Put it like this: Kant was all in on this absurd metaphysical affirmation based on the transcendence discovered in the analysis of judgment. You go deep enough into questioning the structure of actual thought and judgment and you discover apodicticity beyond the reach of experience. Such is where transcendence takes one for Kant--to an utterly vacuous world of absolute existence that has no ground at all in lived experience.

Kant is to metaphysics what Hobbes is to political philosophy in that he opened a door that he himself could not pass through. The Critique had to be critiqued! Michel Henry and his ilk (recall that you liked this thinker earlier) come along and say, look, if you are looking for something absolute about our existence, you are simply mad to bring all attention to a complete abstraction of and from, well, our existence. The critique of the critique is simple: you want something that abides through all logically possible objection (like Descartes' doubt that inspired Husserl's reduction), just (my example) put you hand in boiling water or over a lighted match. Ask now, what IS that? This question is not ever even touched by analytic philosophy (take a quick look at the metaethical nihilism that runs through the thinking among those posting here. Ask this question of them and they will either not respond or ignore what you ask move elsewhere. Imagine THE most salient feature of our existence and a philosophy that is entirely afraid to even approach it.

At any rate, if you think about the self, human dasein, as a thing, you are deep in scientific reductive territory.

To try simply, borrowing (not necessarily endorsing) an Abrahamic metaphor, so called "God" cares only about the living(ness) of "his" "creation" i.e., organic; and not the becoming, knowledge, that "he" actually warned humans against. Out of the latter, we invented a universe of our own, unreal, and not "precious" to "God." Now, yes, I am being "poetic" and do not necessarily hold to "God," and "precious." My point is, we have been clinging to knowledge at the direct expense of living. Living is not in our constructions, but in our being. The whole false spirit/body duality, is a direct result of that clinging. — ENOAH

There is a lot in this. I won't wag a critical finger in your direction, but I should ask questions. For example, Does the Bible have any prima facie authority at all on matters of philosophy? What does creation have to do with it and what is the connection between creation and the idea of the organic? Is the old Testament really talking about a biological category? God does not fit comfortably into a discussion of basic questions because it generates its own questions, which is a sign of bad metaphysics; questions about God's greatness and the omni-this-and-that are grounded in the very thing you are trying to avoid, which is the excesses of knowledge claims which need to be eliminated in order to see the matter clearly. This is what Husserl's reduction does, or can do, though one does not have to agree with everything he says. This is why phenomenology really is the "science" of phenomenology: it studies the apriori structure of perception and its content as open, because the reduction is open: it takes inquiry closer to what is presupposed by everydayness.

As to that false spirit/body duality, I find this objectionable in the way this is taken historically, which is as an ontological duality (something Heidegger strongly objected to. Ontology for him is
equiprimorial" meaning not about some singularity of existence, like Descartes' res cogitans or res extensa). But this is not to say there are no differences in the way the world shows itself. Certainly, if you think, as Husserl did, that an object is constituted by the contribution made by perception, then the question goes to the perceiver, as with Kant and cognition. But just a rationalist. Rational primordiality certainly does not describe the world (for one thing, it does not have Derrida available to deconstruct it. Ask, what is reason? and deconstruction takes you to the countless contexts in which it is found. It is "scattered" if you will. Hermeneutics can do this, Derrida shows (see Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. Caputo is a post modern....errrr, hard to say what he is. He is a post modern philosopher of affirmation) that is, remove a meaning from its "place" in some absolute hierarchy of the way the world is. I am reading, or trying to read, Derrida's latter work (Incidentally, I have thousands of pdf files. You are welcome to them all if you can tell me a way they can be sent that costs nothing to me and does not involve handing out my email address. Huge files. Many gbs) and clearly, one has to be able to have a sense of irony to grasp this (Rorty names his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity --in which there is an entire chapter on Derrida): irony is a principle feature of language in its ability to generate difference), for he is being deliberately ironic, because he is trying to make the impossible point about the "trace" being a generative feature of language, while actually speaking (writing)! Which is why, like Wittgenstein, the whole conversation is under erasure. Witt is really saying something very close to Derrida

But I was trying to say that duality certainly does have its place as long as ontology is not about something like Descartes' had in mind. Though this is slippery, for in phenomenology, what you could call categorical ontology is certainly okay. I mean, we can talk about differences among phenomena, and group these as science might talk taxonomically about things, but when the Occam's razor of the reduction bracketing cuts deeper and deeper until one is left facing "being as such" then where justified true belief have its place? This is really what is behind my objection to your defense of the unsayble and unthinkable and this extends to the early Wittgenstein: obviously we can think what cannot be thought! For without thought we are as infants.

Knowledge at the expense of direct living: Slippery again: My quarrel with popular religion is that since it possesses a great lack of justification for its beliefs, it is arbitrary, and being arbitrary and authoritative is a very bad combination. Philosophy is essentially religious in that it is the objective analysis of our world at the basic level of inquiry and this leads to acknowledging foundational indeterminacy which is the essence of religion. All roads lead to this foundational discussion.

The question is, is it possible for an idea or an experience or a disclosure of any kind to be both what it is, yet occurring to "no one" ? Not about occurring in some locality, which is trivially true (Locality?), but experience of any kind requires it to be an experience to, or of someone. There is no such thing as an unmoored experience.
— Constance

Is this the "tree falls in a forest" conundrum? I say it makes a sound. To humans only, the question matters, because of the illusion of separation between sound and perceiver/object and subject/cause and effect. EDIT: experience, by the way, I hold to be restricted to humans. So that is why "there is no such thing as an unmoored experience;" there is no real such thing as "experience" period. — ENOAH

No, it is not about what we mean by sound. It is about whether one can make sense of an experience of, say, terrible pain without agency. I think this is an important question. I say a "disembodied" pain is impossible, and to speak of such a thing shows only a possibility of words, i.e., one can SAY this, sure. But it is not unlike talking about causes and effects: one cannot imagine a causeless effect. Can't explain this, but it is just primoridially true, if you like (Edith Stein uses this term a lot). So with a pain, or pleasure of some kind, this is impossible without agency of some kind. Who knows, perhaps atman is the Brahman and you and I are one, making agency this grand eternal singularity. Could be.

To my knowledge, no religion describes good, evil, right, and wrong. It just gives a set of commands: what we ought to do (considered as good) and what we ought not to do (considered as evil). — MoK

But religions are about a dogmatic authority, and so the analytic of good and bad has no place. As for a description, this is what observation does. So what is there to observe? Just the arbitrary command (which may be a good idea or not. The point is that the determination about its goodness or badness is not based on justification and merit).

What I intend here is to think about ethics as a phenomenon: take any ethical matter and ask, what makes for its ethicality? The essence of ethics. Ask about the essence of common ideas and you get definitional content that is contingent, that is, whatever is said defers to other content. Ask what a teacher is, say, and other words come flooding in about teachers, what they do, the qualities they have, and ask about what these are and more definitional qualities ensue; and this simply never ends. Contingency yields no necessities, just dependencies. No language is stand alone.

There are two problems here even if we accept that ethics is apodictic: (1) Which religion is the correct one? and (2) What is the reason for religion being the only reliable source when it comes to ethics?

(1) is important since there are conflicts in many religions and even there are conflicts within a single religion. (2) What if someone comes up with an apodictic idea regarding ethics such as each human has all rights when it comes to his or her life but she or he does not have any right when it comes to the life of others unless both individuals agree on terms and conditions? — MoK

One cannot "come up with" an apodictic idea. If you were to look into the nature of logic, everywhere you look you would find apodicticity (or apriority, or necessity). One big tautology. I am saying the same is true for ethics (and hence, religion). The analogy goes like this: Logic is not about the many logical problem solving affairs we engage in, for these are entangled with things that have nothing to do with logic, referring to all the complications of our intertwined lives. Logic in itself is about the apriori principles of reasoning. Ethics stands in the world in a similar way. The ethics of my obligation to pay a debt or refrain from harming others, and so forth, is not about the facts of the cases. A fact just sits there: The soup is 35 degrees F. But put this in an ethical setting, as with my promise to someone to heat the soup well above one hundred degrees, and this fact is now ethically in play. The details are variable (it could have been a stew, or the desire to make it cooler, not warmer, and so on), but no detail has an ethical dimension to it.

So what is this apodicticity of ethical matters about? Value. Ask, what is it for something to be apodictic? It is for that thing's contradiction to be impossible to imagine, as with causality, say: one cannot imagine an object self-moving. Value refers us to the world, not reason, and specifically to the value in play, as with the satisfaction hot soup brings or the peace that comes with the confidence that promises will be kept. Ethics is ALWAYS about some value in play. No value in play, and ethics simply vanishes.

So finally, what is it about value as such that is apodictic? One must look to the world, for here lies value; it is IN the pains and delights of our existence. Long story short lies in an example: The injunction not bury a knife's blade into one's neighbor's back rests entirely with the horrible pain this brings. One may want to talk about principles of ethics, but these just beg the the question. Pain cannot be second guessed. Pain is apodictically "bad".

Of course, the statement here is not complete.

I cannot see how that could be true. Religion does not tell us what good, evil, right, and wrong are. Does it? — MoK

Well, it tries to. But the point here is that when we are trying to understand something in the world, we look to a description of how that thing appears. So we "observe" religion much as we would, say, the law, or geology or anything we want to understand. I am saying religion is what we encounter when ethics meets metaphysics. So what is ethics and what is metaphysics? In ethics, there turns up something apodictic, which is really not the way philosophers prefer to think about ethics, because apodicticity is irreducible. I.e., nothing to talk about.
So what to do now? What if ethics were apodictic? I am claiming it is.

Yes. I'm good with that. I only refer to trace relationship as a courtesy, the final convenient fiction, imagined as "taking place" just as human existence leaves being and engages time, just as mind's perception displaces sensation with signifiers of the latter, and we lose our point of return. There is no trace because the gap between mind and being is untraceable. We cannot be being through the mediation of time; even the ego is of time and has no place in a True reduction beyond mind. — ENOAH

But when you say untraceable, I find room for issue. It is a simple thing, yet troubling. It goes again to agency. Whatever is outside of the states of affairs of possible discourse, is revealed to "someone" that is not merely a construct. It is impossible for there to be disclosure without "real" agency. This I take to be axiomatic. And this goes double for value intense experience. Frankly, I had never really seen this clearly until now. The question is, is it possible for an idea or an experience or a disclosure of any kind to be both what it is, yet occurring to "no one" ? Not about occurring in some locality, which is trivially true (Locality?), but experience of any kind requires it to be an experience to, or of someone. There is no such thing as an unmoored experience.

Consider also: A babe in arms has no constructed agency, no historical self, neither personal nor cultural, yet her suffering and delight must have agency. Dogs and cats, pigs and goats alike. What makes an animal a moral agency? The capacity to suffer and have delight

This does not make the "untraceable" less than what it "is". Strange how this works: Being is not an abstraction, nor is it derived from anything. One has to stick to how if is disclosed, not simply that it is disclosed.

If the former is sound, that shouldn't matter. — ENOAH

That is an interesting thing to say. The soundness of deconstruction must refer to the method. To me, it is the logical completion of Husserl's epoche, which is what the contemporary French phenomenologists like Henry say. One brackets and brackets until language confronts itself, the final frontier, one could say, and what remains is to cease thinking altogether, the final emancipation from the constraints of language; not unlike the Buddhist, no? Takes practice, but this is likely philosophy's telos. Deconstruction takes one to annihilation of our existence, the encultured agency of meanings. This is the only "soundness" that survives the method, but to return to the above, this cannot be the end of agency itself. Such a thing is not conceivable.

I get it entirely. But with respect, I am not using Organic from the perspective of a scientist and in my humble opinion, while I should employ the right terminology as best I can etc., in this case, being an unconventional viewpoint, there is no "better" word to describe the human qua being, than organic. And I sense the word is slightly offensive because of the implications for spirit which we have been so conditioned to favor. My rejection of spirit is not scientific, on the contrary, it is profoundly "religious" in the way you have been in my opinion properly referring. — ENOAH

Spirit is a term loaded. I prefer "tout autre".It is, after all, only negatively conceived, though it depends on the individual as to what actually survives the phenomenological reduction, which I think deconstruction to be the end game of.

Still a bit mystified by "organic," though.