I'm going to have to reread this section several times to understand exactly what information you intend for me to possess. I haven't spent enough time reading Wittgenstein, so his communication style which is often adopted is very difficult for me. I do intend on rereading and editing this bit, but any clarifications or simplifications that could be made even tentatively would aid in my understanding of your position on the matter. I believe you are saying that ethical matters are often matters of reality even though they are subject to entanglement with less well grounded notions. — Cheshire

you may want to read his short Lecture on Ethics, which is I think available online. Then the Tractatus. He typically would refuse to talk about ethical foundations because he was convinced it was nonsense to do so, and this was because language and logic are simply not able to speak about it, for value is there, like qualia, like a pure phenomenon, a presence, and there is nothing one can say, because, reading the Tractatus, there is nothing observable about the "Good". The ethical Good is likely the weirdest thing that can be understood: Just ask yourself as you apply the lighted match to your finger, What IS it that makes this pain Bad?? It is not like a fact of the world, though there are many factuall things to say about it. After all facts have been exhaustively accounted for (see the Lecture on ethics' Big Book of omniscience) there is something unaccounted, which is the badness of the pain. We don't really observe the pain's badness, yet it is by parsecs that most salient feature of the event.
This Good Wittgenstein called divinity. Unspeakable, though; and the implications of the Good issuing from the "fabric of the world" are staggering. The world IS ethical, more so than any fact.

The idea that value and that suffering is a type of assault on value is becoming significant to my current working model. If this isn't the case then I'll have to rethink quite a bit to account for the error. — Cheshire

Not that suffering is an assault on value. Rather, suffering a simply a general notion that refers to kinds of value: I value not having double pneumonia. Why? Because it is a painful affair. Whatever model you have in mind regarding moral objectivity, this idea of objectivity is meaningful weighed against whatever subjectivity is, and so you have to look to both. Subjectivity in ethical theory attempts show that there is nothing in ethical prepositions that is like unproblematic cases of objectivity, like the density of iron being greater than that of mica, or the moon being closer to Earth than the sun. What makes these objective statements? Their truth is verifiable consistently by competent observers in a system of thought and experience. The scientific method, where verification or falsification rest with assumptions about the world and its facts or states of affairs. Note that science does not care for philosophical questions regarding the validity of these assumptions. Ask Neil Degrasse Tyson where the object called the sun gets its verification as an object at all, and he will simple dismiss such a thing. But it is here that ethics has its most salient presence, that is, at the level of inquiry beneath where science has its interests, and here is where phenomenology asserts itself: the level of presence as such, and all "naturalistic" knowledge is suspended and attention is put firmly upon the "given" only. Value as the palpable encounter with pain or pleasure "observed" as phenomena and not as interpretatively processed meaning reveals something Cartesian, that is, undoubtable, absolute.

Once here, the matter turns toward the nature of presence, rather than constructed propositions. This is where things get very interesting.

The observation that harm came to a store of value. It does seem to suggest that we can act on the world in a way that carries some objective element apart from the variance that arises. And that an act can be judged apart from the measure of suffering entailed. The paintings did not suffer. Which isolates a major common thread in known moral theories. The scientific approach asks if there is a better test or way to realize more informative results. You say it's "coercive", but I'm not sure in which direction you mean. — Cheshire

An act can be judged apart from the measure of suffering involved, but I certainly don't think this is an ethical judgment. A pragmatic judgment works like this, the kind that ignores suffering for some higher end, that is, utility. But even here in this contingent world of utility, attention must come to rest on actual value as the point of it all, whatever one has in mind.
I think it is absurd to think about things having value at all apart from what is attributed to them in a conscious act.
As to the scientist, well, all science begins with what is there, at hand. A geologist first has the object to be analyzed, then there is the classificatory work, techniques for measurement are called in, more classificatory work, etc., but it all begins with observation. So: observe an ethical case and give it its classificatory due: judgment is there, contradiction in principles, the rational end of assessing matters; then there is the actuality: the phenomenon of some pain or pleasure, some experience that feels good or bad in a palpable way, not discursively arrived at, but considered as an intuitive apprehension of the world.
the former rational end is itself ethically arbitrary. As Hume put it, reason would just as soon eradicate humankind altogether, for it is just an empty vessel. The ethical nature of ethics comes from the world. Forget about inner and outer conditions, for here we are looking exclusively at the phenomenon of suffering and joy and it doesn't matter if it is a brain "doing" this. It is there, period, like a typhoon is there, or a stone or this cup on the table. It's "thereness" is not at issue and it is not a thoughtful construct or an interpretatively fluid event. Its is absolute, its presence. AND, it carries by virtue of its own nature the the entire weight of the ethical import of the matter at hand. It doesn't matter if it is a trivial matter or one deeply important, the decisive presence of palpable value make ethics what it is foundationally.
Coercive because one is forced to acknowledge pain and pleasure for what they are. Of course, again, once this distributed in the world of entanglements, that are ethically arbitrary, then judgment gets confused, but our understanding of how value is coercive comes through in cases where entanglements do not obscure occlude: radical affairs, like having someone put a lighted match to your finger. The good sceintist asks, what IS this? as a phenomenon, as a phenomenologically reduced event (see Hsserl's epoche). It classification is not IN the interpretative constructs we could bring to bear. It is outside these. this is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about value, for as concepts, ethical ideas are nonsense as they do not tell what things ARE.

I agree with the implications. There would technically never be a case of doing the right thing when no one is watching and instant karma might have some basis. — Cheshire

Instant karma? Someone watching? These are metaphysical I cannot support because I don't understand where they get their basis for belief. I try to deal only with what appear there, before me, in my midst, and what this means. Pain and suffering, pleasure and joy: these are very real, more real, I would argue, than any ontological theory that attempts to reduce what is real to something familiar, like a physicist's theory. In fact, this latter has no basis at all at the level of basic questions, while aesthetic/ethical value events taken phenomenologically are absolutes (though calling them absolutes places them squarely in language and then we have to deal with Derrida).
If, as I claim, all ethical matters are grounded in the Real, issuing from the fabric of the universe (as Moses' tablets issued from God's hand), then our ethical acts are absolutely coercive. Alas, given the embeddedness of ethics in ethically arbitrary conditions, our acts will never be perfectly right, whatever that means. But we are bound, as Mill put it, to do no harm and to pursue the good of others, notwithstanding the difficulty in conceiving what this is.

No. Moral realism, for it to be consequent moral realism, needs to be held a priori, in an axiomatic manner. The moment one ventures into finding justifications, one has left the zone of certainty. — baker

Justification here in intrinsic to the value affair. It is non contingently determined and apriori, but the apriority is not logical, but is apodictic all the same. It is, to use Hegel's vocabulary, borrowed by Sartre, where essence and existence are the same, beyond inquiry, meaning to ask where the foundational prima facie authority comes from in the injunction not to make a turn on the rack or apply a flame to living flesh is to make an appeal to the nature of the pain itself. Of course, it CAN be spoken, conceptualized, contextualized to no end, but this brings conditions of contingency that are ethically arbitrary, as justifying the rack in the deterrence of criminal behavior.

The idea was to establish objective morality. If the answers are different, then morality is not from the act but rather a subjective notion of the observer. The same willful act of destruction of the same object should in theory produce the same moral judgement. Or not. An attempt at an inquiry. — Cheshire

No, this "same moral judgment" is not requited at all, and indeed, such an agreement between is never a real agreement (this is a Quine/Derrida position). All that needs to be demonstrated is that there is a noncontingent part of the essential ethical affair. Just this. You're not going to get people to agree on the radically diverging and different entanglements ! These are impossible to pin down and are, in themselves, ethically arbitrary "facts" of a particular case. Such facts are massively entangled in unique particularities of each person, each case, each culture or community. This lack of agreement is inevitable and it is foolish to think otherwise. However, what is agreed upon is the phenomenological analysis: put aside all factual entanglements and the residual value is not disputed, is cognitively coercive.

It is not about judgments' differences at all. it is rather that disagreements arise out of ethically arbitrary conditions, like the fact that I borrowed the ax, I feel the obligation to return it and this conflicts with my suspicion that were I to do so it could lead to a terrible crime. One can ask further into such an affair, get more facts, find where justification for belief is grounded or not, examine the many, many possible relevant facts, psychological or otherwise, and it is HERE where disagreement emerges: in the indistinctness of the way the case is to interpreted. But logically beneath this, there is the assumption that the crime itself would be BAD, and it would be bad because there is some value at risk, in play, to be won or lost, and it is this value that is beyond inquiry.

I don't really disagree. Rather I think yours is incomplete. Lacking is an account of judgment. The nervous system may itself recoil, but it recoils from the experience itself. And even if judgment judges an experience, that alone doesn't qualify future action.
It's as if you had discovered reaction. But ethics is about choices of action. How do you bridge the two? — tim wood

It is not a theory of judgment, though there would be no ethical judgment without ethics, and there is no ethics without value experiences. Moral realism simply says that there is in the heart of ethics something that is not constructed out of language, something that is not exhaustively accounted for the in meanings that history has brought forth which we find ourselves always already IN when we raise a question at all. IF it can be established that there is in the essence of ethics that which is not conceptually produced, as ideas being concepts are, but is first there, prior to the logicality, and to the taking up the world AS an eidetic phenomenon, something that is done by the world rather than constructed INTO the world, then we have a single basis for the claim of moral realism. Of course again, if moral realism, in the qualified way I defend it, is true, then our moral judgments, all of them, are qualifiedly "real", or absolute. This does not at all mean that judgments are no longer relative; it simply means that when a relative judgment, like seeing an elongated neck in certain tribal conditions in Thailand as Good, is made, it is foundationally part and parcel of the real itself, an absolute, if you will (though this is a sticky wicket, for when we actually SAY this, we are certainly bound to language's contingency as the saying is a construct. The Real is assumed to be Other than this; assumed to be an Other than what language can say.).

"Insofar as Da-sein temporalizes itself with regard to its being it is the world... The world is neither objectively present nor at hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality.. If no Da-sein exists, no world is 'there' either." Heidegger, 1927 — Gregory

It is a powerful position, but, speaking of Heidegger, is it defensible?: Is there no grounding for dasein that is not dasein? That is, in t he phenomenological landscape of my Being, there is the reduction that allows for H's phenomenological ontology. The question is, What do we find in the world after the reduction has done its job entirely? Is there no residual "presence" (Derrida called it the transcendental signifier)?
I think phenomenological reduction leads to the impossible, while the impossible is "embedded" in the world. To use Heidegger's critical words against Husserl: An examination of a reduced world reveals that we all "walk on water"; that the foundation of Being is metaphysics that literally paradoxically manifest, literally manifest, and even mysteriously and palpably manifest.

1. Is it Morally wrong to destroy a beautiful painting?
2. What if no one would have ever seen it?
3. What if you painted it? — Cheshire

Well......if no one has ever seen it, there is no beauty. We observers are not passive receivers of some beauty that is "out there". What, did you actually think this to be the case? Not only does beauty vanish in an unobserved world (an impossible thing to even imagine, really), but reason and meaning vanishes as well.

Pain & suffering, their antipodes, joy & happiness, are the core elements of some moral theories. They constitute the grounds, I now realize, for the feeling/thought that something's wrong! (with the world) - either the mere fact that there's suffering or the disproportionate amount of suffering prompts us to feel/think that way. It ought to be different - this single sentence encapsulates the moral universe! — TheMadFool

Not that these are merely core elements of some theories. These are essential elements to any possible ethical theory. No such elements, then no ethics. The moral realism here arises out of the nature of the ethical condition itself; it is self realizing, and not a derivative of some other purpose or point. It is presupposed by all purposes one can imagine. Good at this level of analysis is Good simpliciter. A bad is bad simpliciter. The pain from the spear issues as a generative foundation for ethical possibility.

I don't mind agreeing that folks don't want to be stabbed in the kidney with a spear. How does that then arise to anything ethical? — tim wood

Well, what makes something ethical at all? It is the possibility of hedonic consequences (hedonic here making no distinction between, say, music and macaroni, the former being perhaps ethereal, sublime, while the latter appetitive. Good is good). Look, no hedonic effect, no ethics. It doesn't have to as dramatic as a spear in the kidney; it can be anything, really, an interest, a vague sensitivity, whatever. This is the engine that drives ethics: that which is at stake, at risk, in the balance which someone (some animal?) cares about.
So all attention goes to this PRIOR to any analysis of, say, competing obligations, puzzling conditions, etc. Prior because this is a METAethical analysis, an attempt to determine what the infamous good is, and well as the bad.

All I have to say about metaethics, something that's close to my heart, is the feeling, ,something's wrong! - nature, life, people are like this but they should be like that! You get the idea. — TheMadFool

The issue, then, goes to what it is that runs the argument, "it shouldn't be like that." Why not? The answer then goes to an experience that is perceived in some way to be uncomfortable, distasteful, horrible, and the rest. Here, we have arrived: no need to argue about whether this can be universalized. It already is, for we should not ask if the matter is relativized to one, single agency of suffering, just wht the matter IS upon analysis. We are not here concerned with how one should behave as a matter of rule and principle, for such things are entangled with morally arbitrary conditions, facts.

We are only concerned with a phenomenological analysis of the pain there, at hand, occurrent. What IS that? is the question. It is not constructed, like a concept that fits ONTO the world; it IS the world doing, if you will, this to me: this thirst, hunger, this misery, joy, thrill, adn so on.

It's not possible to justify moral realism while being a consequent moral realist. — baker

Enigmatic thing to say. Actions have consequences and the argument here goes to an analysis of that which is at stake in the consequence. Therein, in the anticipated gratification or affliction, lies the real.

Perhaps the intersection of concrete and abstract. You are attuning yourself to hear the concrete. Which is impossible because neither concrete nor abstract exist purely in themselves but must be somehow a mixture.

We both see the same tree - or so we're persuaded. But never ever do we perceive the same tree. Only in the abstract and by agreement can we come to that conclusion. Even pain, it would seem, requires an I to say, "I hurt."

But there seems no reasonable argument against the proposition that it's the same tree we're both admiring, on which we agree. And so it seems there are equally well-founded ethical imperatives. But they would seem to require at least that same level agreement. Thus never anything quite pure in itself, and subject to those who will not or cannot agree. The argument can go on from here. — tim wood

I would not defend the idea according to the way you frame it. It is not a matter of concreteness versus abstractness. In every ethical affair there is in the balance some object of care. An emotional state, a deprivation or gratification of some kind, something measured on the hedonic scales such that "hedonic" simply refers to some valuation of something. Getting caught up in the object characterization of what feeling good or bad is not the point.
Then, as to agreement, there is no issue made of it here, that is, the power to infer that others experience what we do. The assumption is in place that we do sufficiently well enough that we can talk about an affair with the confidence that we are talking about roughly the same thing; a spear in the kidney, for example. Painful. Of course, it is clear that we have altogether private experiences, I argue, given that there is simply no way at all that one can be privy to another's world as one is aware of one's own. Not possible (unless you think we are "connected" spiritually??) Our agreement rests with the way language works so well in our correspondences given the assumption that things are roughly the same, with obvious differences (e.g., Einstein and I may agree on our arthritis symptoms, but I cannot "know" his world of mathematical and intuitive genius).
No, here the issue lies with whether language's independence from its objects makes it so the no matter what we say about trees and clouds and anything else, we can never leave the "play" of vocabulary. The big crisis of deconstruction is about this inability of language to make any essential connection with what is NOT language. My position is that in ethics, there is an injunction to do or not to do that precedes language: that spear in my kidney tells me, "this hurts. Don't bring this into the world." You see, the suffering itself makes this injunction, though language gets carried away interpretatively. I "say" it hurts, I put this into propositional form and my words carry no import beyond the signifiers, the words, spoken or written. And if this were something value-neutral (if there is such a thing) like the color red, then I would be in Derrida's world that never apprehends the "present". Ethical matters ARE immediate in their value-at-stake as the value is immediately and absolutely intuited.

If you are going to relativize to individual historical agencies then the hedonism

As you can see, this is a translation of a descriptive declarative sentence structure that is describing the way reality is in an objective way, into a descriptive declarative sentence structure that is describing the way reality is perceived and evaluated in a subjective way. It is nonetheless a factual statement about the psychological states of the individual subject the statement is indexed to. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

But is this not merely dismissive of the evaluative dimension? As if it presented no qualitatively distinct feature?

The problem is whether or not the grammatical subject of the statement accurately represents the philosophical subject that is indexed to grammatical predicate. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Isn't the same true for "the grass is green"? The moment you lift a predicative finger you are already "misrepresenting" the actuality for predication is not "out there" in the grass nor in the moral agent. But once you think like this, you "relativize" all predication to a language event, and the philosophical subject is always already (to borrow a term) a grammatical subject.
This is why I claim the only way to deal with metaethics is phenomenologically. Then the grammatical or, eidetic subject (putting aside transcendental egos and the like), is deemed part of the existential actuality of the philosophical subject.

This is because the philosophical subject does not maintain fixed physiological or psychological states between phenomenological frames of reference which means that the identity of the philosophical subject must necessarily change between phenomenological frames of reference over the philosophical subjects composite history. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Of course. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'. Phenomenological frames of reference are dynamic temporal unities, but then, this makes drawing boundaries arbitrary: what is the measure of a unity in a moral regard for something? I already alluded to this earlier in my calling the world unpinnable. But it seems to be a real problem: You hold that metaethical actualities are found in the determinate moment of thought, feeling, attitude, this is not sustainable in any definite way. Right now in my occurrent frame of dispositions to make moral judgments, I don't think I should return an ax I borrowed to its owner because he is having a mental collapse. But this occurrent state is conflicted, unresolved, and my judgment is fluctuating. This is a metaethical foundation of the ethical good?

I'm not sure that it is possible to do so on this logic. I am afraid that such is not a requisite capability and that the truth may be that we cannot. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Pain? So morality is reducible to a hedonistic unit representing negative utility? But, pain is also subjective. Some people associate the same stimuli that others report as pain, but as pleasure. Think of the masochist. Pain seems to be just as arbitrary and mind-dependent as any other psychological state. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

You have arrived at what I would call the radically qualified locus of ethical, or any, judgment. But where is the "ought" in this account? I mean, talk about attitudes and beliefs obviously does not simply bear upon but constitute ethical judgment, granted, but this is not foundational for it lacks the elusive ethical oughts and shoulds, apparently assuming that these have no reality to consider, and that a person's dispositions to have a moral regard for some possibility exhausts the ontology of ethics.

But what of value? That is, in an occurrent ethical disposition toward X, how is this a distinctly ethical affair? A passionate regard for doing or not doing something needs its counterpart in the object of what is being decided, and this goes to the thousand natural shocks the flesh and the mind is heir to, as well as its various and sundry blisses, interests, fascinations and so forth. The "real time" ouches and thrills, from the searing pains to the glorious love affairs: without these, no ethics, without that-which-is-the-object-of-my-desire, no desire, no caring. Not hedonics, but meta-hedonics, as once an affair is stripped of its incidentals, there remains the (awkwardly put) ethical "badness" of a finger exposed to flame; a non natural quality unaccounted for once the mereological parts you underscore are suspended, analytically set aside, that is.

Some people care a lot. If you don't, then I don't understand where you're coming from. I may be misunderstanding you entirely. — fishfry

The question is what is real about religion, rather than what is just some cultural inheritance, constructed, invented, like Christmas or Hanukkah. What people care about is not the point because mostly you will find instantiations of something more basic. We have our institutions and we pretend they are real, but Genera Motors is not real, nor is the seat of the presidency. What I mean by real is primordial, originary: something there antecedent to these things that gave rise to their existence. We form governments to organize our social and economic affairs, you could say. But even here one can ask, What are economic affairs? and then more basic questions would follow. Relgion has this underpinning and if we are to answer the question about religious belief we first have to understand it at the level of basic questions.

Yes ok. Not following your point though. I acknowledge the power of religious and spiritual belief in the history of humanity. That doesn't prove God exists, only that religious belief does. God is neither and answer nor not an answer to the question of suffering. — fishfry

But when we say 'God' is this religious concept really just reducible to the metaphysical concept churches and their theologies invented? Omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence? The creator of all things, who conceives, designs, thinks, anticipates, intends, etc. just like we do? Or is that just a bunch of hooey? I think the latter. People pretty much put this all together as a kind of best guess, or a defense mechanism, or an attempt to hold power (as Foucault would have it). I dismiss this as just bad metaphysics and move on.
Suffering is at the foundation of the essence of religion; it is a foundational cause that figures into the human situation that compels us to behold the world and ask questions. We are thrown into this world to suffer. Why? Once we become a bit savvy about the matter, we allow our cultural heritage to be silent and allow the world to speak plainly, and the world tells us that the aesthetic, ethical dimension of our existence demands resolution and consummation. Of course, you can disagree with this, but it IS where meaningful talk about God begins.

Ok. I said I'm agnostic, and you call that position vacuous. I don't understand your reasoning. How could I know or not know if God exists? — fishfry

What does the question even mean if God has not been properly explored as a meaningful term? Are you agnostic about a historical contrivance?

I'm agnostic on the entire matter. I don't understand why you find this position vacuous. Am I compelled to choose a side between the Pope and Richard Dawkins? The Pope seems like a nicer guy, I'll give him that. — fishfry

Richard Dawkins is a scientist. He is not concerned about philosophy, regardless of what he or others might say, for he does not deal in basic questions. Basic questions are those that are presupposed by science.

You could substitute a house cat if you prefer. Cats most definitely have sophisticated mental states. They have dreams, for one thing. That I assume must indicate a fairly high order of mentation.

I knew my reference to Darwin was a mistake. And I immediately qualified it by saying I have some interest in and perhaps sympathy for the position of the Darwin skeptics. I name-checked a couple. No use, the rhetorical damage was done.

I wrote an entire post explaining my position that since Newton combined great science with deep belief in God, that I found no contradiction in doing science and then saying, "It's amazing that God created all these interesting natural laws, as well as the world." I'm perfectly ok with that.

I would ask you to go back and re-read what I actually wrote, and don't be triggered by the word Darwin. Be honest with me. Would a hard-core scientism type name-drop Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer? The fact that I know who they are should tell you that I have a more open mind and broader interests than you think I do. — fishfry

But Meyer is a scientist/philosopher and talk about intelligent design and the like is talk about science. But then, no matter, for it is not science, the scientific method that is, that is in question, and that would be impossble (for to think at all is a performance of just this method), but what is being singled out for "observation". Writing up a proof for the existence of God based on observations of the complexity and functions of affairs in the natural world is not going to yield a proof of God, for ideas like designer and creator are non essential features, do not belong to the essence, if you will, of the idea of God.
One has to be clear at the outset what it is that one is trying to confirm, and it is certainly not God the creator. This is not what an proper analytic of God gives us.

Take God like any other object for analysis and look to its parts. and here we find a vast body of historical, scriptural, mythical narratives. We also find metaphysics. The former are incidental, I would say simply. Maybe Jesus rose from the dead, maybe not, but who cares. Such things come to us so embedded in naivete, suspicious motives that we can put aside "scripture" altogether. But then what IS there in this idea of God that is grounded in the actualities we encounter in the world? This goes to the metaphysics. Specifically, metaethics. Why are born to suffer and die? Then, what IS suffering, and bliss and pleasure and pain and so on? There are no answers to these questions, yet they go to foundational issues of meaning, importance, value: the question about God is a metaethical question, and the grounding is direct, in the world, palpable; it's in the falling in love and listening to music, being speared in the kidney; in the pleasure/pain, joy/suffering dimension of our existence.

Agnosticism and atheism is a reticence to affirm an anthropomorphic deity, the latter being an outright denial, but I think such a position is vacuous simply because the reticence and denying is obvious, like denying the moon is really a goddess named Luna. What one really is trying to affirm is an irreducible moral foundation to our world, that is, affirming a redemption and deliverance from suffering and a consummation of happiness. How is this affirmed? That takes more further discussion.

All of which must be relativized to a specific attitude of a specific subject within a specific spatiotemporal configuration who has a specific history of conscious and subconscious experiences, and so on. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

So you relativize ethical good and bad, right and wrong, not to individual tastes, attitudes, moods, and general dispositions, but to a multitude of "selves" within the composite historical ethical agency. I suppose this is the logical consequence of taking Mackie's view. I mean, if objective ethics in the fabric-of-the-world sense he speaks of is out the window, then there are no standards at all can hold any ethical judgment accountable apart from those actualities that produce judgment that are causally immediate, that is, unmediated. Is it ethically defensible for Raskolnikov to murder the old lady? Of course, but then, which Raskolnikov are we referring to, for prior to his poverty he was just a starry eyed student who has not yet been so darkly driven. How many of him are there? And it is not diachronically determined, but synchronically as well, for the at any given time, Raskolniknov is a composite of dispositions the compete for relevance and application.

How does one ever make a determination as to what an ethical agency is when the concept is so fleeting and disjointed? It seems you pin the metaethical question, what is the nature of ethical goodness and badness? on unpinnable actualities.

I don't understand this objection. What exactly do you mean by "refuse to reckon with"? I consider stimulus events such as objects or events that elicit a sensory response when a detectable change to the energy in the surrounding environment is registered by the senses. A stimulus triggers our nervous system whenever sufficient changes in the environmental energy is detected. These changes in the environmental energy act as information inputs insofar as they affect the level of voltage across the cell membrane of the neuron. This is called a change in the membrane potential of a neuron.

The membrane potential of a neuron is the difference in electrical charge between the inside and the outside of a neuron. This difference in electrical charge is due to the unequal distribution of ions between the inside and outside of the membrane. Ions are atoms that have lost or gained electrons and as a result either have a negative or positive charge.

A few of the ions that play an important role in the membrane potential of a neuron are positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chloride ions which are more prevalent on the outside of the cellular membrane when the neuron is at rest. Also while at rest, there are positively charged potassium ions and many other negatively charged ions prevalent on the inside of the cellular membrane. At rest, the inside of the cellular membrane is mostly negative with the outside of the membrane mostly positive.

The inside membrane potential is regulated by a protein mechanism, which disproportionately influences which ions travel through ion channels. It uses energy to pump positively charged sodium ions out of the cell and pump negatively charged potassium ions into the cell. For every two sodium ions pumped out of the cell, three potassium ions are pumped into the cell which is how the inside of the cellular membrane maintains its overall negative charge.

An action potential is a momentary reversal of membrane potential which is the basis for electrical signaling in neurons. A stimulus event causes an influx of positive ions to enter the inside of the cell and once a threshold is passed, a sudden, fast, transitory and propagating change of the resting membrane occurs in the form of a nervous impulse. These impulses carry information in the form of a sensation to which we attach meanings to. These meanings are in constant fluctuation as well and can even develop enough differences over time to change the overall patterns of our perceptions.

The thing is, the energy of a stimulus event can be measured and reproduced so to enable us to test how a subject will respond to the same stimulus energy. And, what all the data points to is that while a physical stimulus event can be measured in such trials with a constant variable of energy, the subjects neuropsychological response and subsequent sensory perceptions and associated attitudes, on the other hand, will vary. It then seems likely that no source will produce the same response from us and that our experiences at the most fundamental level are arbitrary. If a stimulus event is held objectively constant, whatever information stored in such energy becomes distorted as it processes within the receiving subject. It seems as if the lighted match transmits a regularity of data which is uniquely processed into meaningful information through it's integration in the contexts of a complex system of dynamic neuropsychological structures tethering the mereology of individual conscious experiences that we identify as ourselves. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No. I mean to take the lighted match event phenomenologically. In fact, all of your above begs phenomenological questions. Certainly not that it is wrong, but it does not go to basic questions. At any rate: observe the scorching flesh as an empirical scientist would observe a slab of rock, studying it for its parts and their classifications. All you bring out is there, but then once this is exhausted, there is the pain, that is, pain simplicter. This is the metaethical "real" that is the material foundation for ethical attitudes and judgment. This is irreducible. (Not that the language used to talk about it is irreducible, but the injunction not to apply a flame to a living finger is. Wittgenstein would have agreed. He would just refuse to talk about it.)

it is necessary to realize that linguistic expressions are but signals that semantically refer to a unique frame of reference to an experienced event in the absolute context in which it was experienced as it occurred. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I can respond to your thoughts if you give me an account of what "absolute context" means.

Now I also take your point that you believe that we are the highest level of intelligence below God. "The crown of creation." That unlike the caterpillar, we have no level above us. — fishfry

You use the caterpillar as a model for us? And these references to Darwin pin you to the very mundane scientism you deny. Caterpillars do not give us an analysis of the structures of thought and experience. Do you really think you can infer from an insect's world to ours? And why bother? We only rely on analogies when we have no actual conditions to examine, and in our case you have the actual conditions our existence to observe. Evolution will tell you nothing of the qualitative events that may or may not confirm foundations of religion.
This talk about levels above or below is just general speculation. Ask rather: what IS there in framework of experience that gives rise to religious ideas that is not part of the incidental features of our making?

Did you read my caterpillar story? Caterpillar on a leaf on a branch on a tree in a forest knows what to eat and what wants to eat it. It knows night from day, when to sleep, when to forage. It knows in its DNA that it will someday transform into a butterfly. It has an ontology. But it can't know about the tree, the forest, the earth, the solar system, the quarks and gluons, and so forth. By analogy that's the situation we're in. We may well not be at the top of the intelligence scale. Gotta go finish eating my leaf now. — fishfry

The point is missed. The very conditions of your accepting the actual terms of your limitations, all this talk about caterpillars and inherent boundaries of knowing, is itself imposed by the standards of normalcy you internalized when you were a child. Were it otherwise, and the lines drawn were not so rigorously established, perhaps in a world open to greater possibilities, you would be able to see terms like god, spirituality, redemption, divinity and the like actually have an existential underpinning that is simply structurally ignored in a science oriented world like ours. Remember, empirical science, I gather from your thinking, rules not just what you believe, but what you will not believe.
This doesn't make popular ideas of theism believable, but it does change the conversation, from, say, Jesus' ascension to heaven to talk about metaethics and human interiority.

Finally, I do not have the arrogance or self-importance to imagine that I could ever be personally possessed of the answer — fishfry

But where did that imposition of a limitation come from? I would suggest that you and everyone else is endowed with a suppressed intuitive ability to engage the world at a much deeper level, and it is the philosophy of our age, the positivism, the privileging of science and technology, the disillusionment with public religions, and so on, that create the line you think is uncrossable.

I am a militant agnostic. It's unknown. It's unknowable*. What's for lunch? — Joe Mirsky

But "it" is not a thing without parts, that is, it bears analysis. The trouble with agnosticism is it resignation the foundational issues as being impenetrable, as if language simply runs out in the exhaustive account of a popular religion. No. This is just the beginning. God? Jesus being the truth, the light and the way? Salvation? Redemption? these kinds of questions go to the implicit substance of religion, the actualities that are there, in the giveness of the world which constitute what the religion is really about.
Religious metaphysics is not about invented problems. It is about problems inherent in everyday life, but are unspoken, even taboo.

I appreciate critical feedback so long as arguments are provided. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

As I see it, your "index" of references constitutes an endless search of grounding, any proposition that can be conceived being duly contextually contingent upon other conditions, and those still deferring to others. Such is the plight of coherence theory: an endless stream of inquiry and deference (and difference?). And correspondence's indefensible claim about some foundation is no more than a metaphysical vacuity.

But all this is undone by the absolute that lies embedded in the world, and this is metavalue. Our entanglements in our affairs are complex, but value as such is unassailable, not defeasible in any conceivable way. It may be morally defensible to torture based on some utilitarian justification, but this would be a contingent justification, and does not touch the "giveness" of the experience of being tortured. No context can touch this.

I do not know what the pain of a lighted match on my finger IS, and language cannot give this to me. this is why Wittgenstein turned his chair to the wall when ethical discussions turned to foundational talk. A don't really agree with this "passing over in silence" about such things, though. Levinas puts ethics as first philosophy, freely acknowledging the metaphysics ethics presents.

All moral subjectivists refuse to reckon with that lighted match.

You treat an emotion quantitatively, as if it were a principle of stability or instability that is either sufficient or isn't. But then, an emotion is only incidentally stabilizing or otherwise. Taken qualitatively, an emotion is simply as it appears to be and its "mystery" is unanalyzable, irreducible. Granted, emotions are like beliefs, where in the latter doubt always moves towards belief, wants to be settled, so here, there is this drive for emotional stability. But the interesting questions is, what is the nature of this toward which we are inclined? Simply THAT we are so inclined is vacuous.
Then the matter turns to love and hate and pride and regret and so on. Mechanical interpretations of these is where evolutionary theory seems go, and it is right, but only as far as its concepts can grasp the matter. the most interesting thing about emotions, however, is their actuality, their concrete realization. What is this?

As N said, every philosophy is a kind of specious autobiography. That might also not apply in all cases, but from one existentialist to another, it appears particularly suitable. — ernest meyer

But then, it may be that one biography exceeds another here as it does in all regards. I may not be able to do math like Quine could, but I don't think Quine had an inkling as to what K was talking about, nor an inkling as to what Meister Eckhart was talking about. Some are tone deaf while others receive the aesthetic of music naturally; but then, when one does acknowledge this aesthetic, is it merely a localized "perspective"?
Is mathematics speciously biographical? Of course not.

“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.” — Joshs

The key term here would be that of semantic unity, which, too, is under erasure. I think Caputo thinks that since Derrida thinks the apophatic nature of the trace cancels even itself and conceptualization is out the window, any and all thinking is under erasure, when the erasure is complete, there is an existential residuum which is the basis for positing God: the noncontingent Good, the Bad. I say what the erasure cannot touch is metavalue, which of course, is a concept, but the signified in this case "speaks" aconceptually: a lighted match on one's finger is very different from a "being appeared to redly". What remains after analysis has exhausted the event of the former is, again, an existential residuum
The present, according to Kierkegaard is certainly not some radical sliver of time that escapes erasure, but an infinitely overarching actuality that subsumes time; and this is logically unassailable, for it is founded on faith. This is the absurd in Kierkegaard. It does not endorse silliness, as has been claimed by some, because it is based (somehow, loosely) on the reasoning above.
Still thinking......

Honestly, perhaps it cannot be defined. But does it help you to know that the Vedic Mystics already knew that the Earth's diameter on the equator is 8000 miles. Long before it could be measured. — TaySan

Well, it's an interesting fact, but no it doesn't help. "I don't know" does fall short of the mark for discussion. Tell me more.

One element that has not been mentioned as yet in this discussion of The Concept of Anxiety is how the "single individual" is the one who has to face the prospect of the "eternal." The limit to psychology often mentioned in the book is directly related to the "inward reserve" needed to be the one who can make a choice.

The "generational" inheritance of sin described at the beginning is related to a model of the good parent who helps their child deal with this element. The book is a manual of religious education along with whatever else it may be. — Valentinus

The single individual? Pls elaborate, if you would. How is it related to model of the good parent? And, inward reserve?

“Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.” — Antony Nickles

That stair can be a very strange place, depending on the individual. Some experience a powerful alienation from all things and familiarity itself is lost. One has a sense of being two selves, the daily rote self, and then, this uncanny presence which cannot identify any longer with this. This is played out in phenomenology as a central theme, and it is considered a structural feature of our existence.
Obviously, there is philosophical opposition to this. I can only conclude that we are all put together differently for reasons impossible to fathom.

"Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls?" — Antony Nickles

He really nailed it. But the confidant (in Repetition) who was so confused by his affections and what to do, this hardly makes the case, does it? It is the "impossible" cases that drive one to top of a mountain raising a fist to oblivion in hopeless outrage, cases like pneumonic bubonic plague and the like. Language nullifies such things, everything, really, which is part of its job, to reduce the world to a manageable totality. We are not aware that this is happening, of course, but common speech reduces that world to its level. But then, to follow Emerson, walking along a bare common, "glad to the brink of fear" we see there are two sides of this. The Manichean way was to give horror and delight equal place, and there is some truth in this, but this is a quantitative equality. Qualitatively, the differences are stark and clear.
The point being that K doesn't quite penetrate to the heart the "metaethical" discussion of this outrage.

The past simply continuing into the future, the abstraction of our self from this moment "annihilates the concept" as K says. The word is dead, and we are quiet (our life is, desperately). But there is an instant which makes all things new; when time is full (of possibilities Wittgenstein might say). We may need to be adverse to expectation (Emerson), convert our interest in our concepts, atone for the unspoken, redeem our judgments--to give them new life and power over our present deliberation. It is we, at this moment, that are responsible, now, before we define our life with our culture, our expression, our action. When duty calls us, we must answer for our current state, beyond our (past) knowledge, or suffer the sin of that lost chance. If we are to say our original sin was the creation of the past--our desire for certain knowledge of it--then our Eden is the sight of the sun at the top of Nietzsche's ladder, at noonday as Emerson says. — Antony Nickles

That is nicely put. Keeping in mind that people don't live an abstraction, and there is a "fullness" in getting married, raising a family, even going shopping, and K's thought is that these things are not to be abandoned, but "sin" is doing all this, taking the world AS all of this, with no foundation in the" eternal", and what is this? This has to be played out in its cash value, for we are not dealing with a "sliver of time" between past and future, but an encompassing presence of God (not to put too fine a point on it), and then the question goes to what is "given": what is there about being glad to the brink of fear, or being tortured horribly? These are the kinds of questions that loom large, for we are no longer on familiar ground as our world is cast in high relief upon eternity, that is, what language has so tamed is now unleashed and its true nature becomes clear: These are not localized affairs, as empirical science would have it, for we have made a "qualitative" movement beyond the "naturalistic attitude" (Husserl's term) and the boundaries that would otherwise localize them are undone.
But then, this also de-localizes the qualitative natures of (ethical) good and evil, and "ontic" presence is now ontological (these kind of language I lift from Heidegger. Ontic refers to our lived lives in everydayness while ontological refers to the structure of Being. But we are not in Heidegger's world here; we are in Kierkegaard's, or, at least hovering around this). So the conclusion seems irresistible: The Good really is the Good in an absolute moral way. Moral realism is the much derided term in modern philosophy. But now the question progresses further, how is this to be understood? In utility? In a rational good will (Kant's deontology)? Both of these beg the question, what is all the fuss about? Reason is an empty vessel and utility is measuring magnitudes and qualities of the Good, but what is the Good?
My point in all this is to get to this one point, around which I claim all philosophy tends, implicitly The good and the bad, in the ethical/aesthetic sense, are intuitive actualities: taste that chicken cordon bleu, falling in love and be enraptured by all things (for to be in love is to love all things in one's gaze indiscriminately; Walt Whitman's poetry is founded on this idea, his "tallying the world"), the pneumonic plague, i.e., palpable meaning is an actuality not confined to the boundaries of finitude.

And so is the "eternal present" ever-present? or, if it is, is it that we are only at times aware of it, or have the opportunity to rise to the occasion of it? Not that we may not be brought up at any time by society for our action or inaction, but are we to be held to the grindstone by ourselves at all times (as if every second was subject to sin, our grief endless)?

This leads me to also comment on your question: "Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL?" We could say the past is outside of our self: knowledge, language, culture. And the future is the implications and consequences and judgments from that past. Our default aspect to the present is unrecognized consent, complicity, blindness, inattention, alienation. We fail to shake off our lethargy (or apathy) when our moment arrives. That is to say, the past and the future are ALL that exist; before we are thrust (drawn) into the present to face our eternal, if yet unconnected, unlived, self (Emerson speaks of a "next" self). — Antony Nickles

Emerson, the three I's: I, eye, aye! Reading his famous Nature is always inspiring, and philosophers don't take him seriously because he is kind of a crank romantic idealist. But then, so am I, though I think in different terms. Nietzsche really liked him because he was an iconoclast, rejecting dogmatism and orthodoxy, inviting us to be a "transparent eyeball" which I take as the dramatic reductive move to Kierkegaard's eternal present. I think if you walk with Emerson in the woods and leave behind the interpreted world, the past and the future disappear. Now, this gets us to the big issue in phenomenology, which is, even though you are not explicitly thinking of anything at all, there is still "the world" there before you, and you know it, and what allows this comfort of knowing is the past, or rather, it is the past to future event, and it is argued that there is no "in between" for this is just impossible: to grasp what the present could BE would require a medium outside the past to future, but this would be to posit something beyond the conditions of positing itself, beyond language, and language is the understanding's structure. This eternal present is after all, only as good as sense can be made out of it. Eternal??
Of course, this is the kind of argument that stands in way of positing anything that is not discursive in the positing, and K is doing just this. But is he? As I see it, the present is not constrained by the past into future at all, and K's framing of the idea holds the key that at once allows the present to sustain positioning the past and the future within this. We cannot, as he says, forget that we exist. Existence IS the present, he is arguing; to Be is to be now, and this makes the past a now actuality. And history is a now actuality, to recall is to recall now. To anticipate is to anticipate now. All roads' analyses lead to the present, and, as K says, not positing this, not realizing this, is our distance for God, God being the actual, inevitable existential embodiment of the Good; after all, we have admitted above that the Good we realize in the everyday affairs we have is no longer localized. The question about the Good that remains is the hierarchy of the Good, which is the basis from K going after concupiscence.

I meant flow as in 'the trend' — TaySan

That doesn't help. If you don't side with the atheists, the believers, or anyone else you mentioned, the "trend" certainly isn't going to be a step up. What trend? What is it that everybody is thinking in this trend that you find so important?

Why is the eternal present God, rather than God-sin as the inseparable poles of every present? — Joshs

Why is this not God-sin? But this begs the question, what is God?

As for sin, speaking for K, I would say, first, there is no "every moment" as this quantifies the present. (He does speak of "the instant" but this is what makes K so frustrating, because he does reconcile apparent contradictions, but one has to read the full context of what he says to see this). All there IS, is the present, and for us, the temporal world contained therein. Sin is knowing, positing, spirit, which as I understand it is an existential qualitative movement out of daily affairs (culture, our "inherited sin") and into a kind of "pure" present, and I think of this purity as not unlike what Kant did with reason: In our entangled affairs, as we live through them, we recognize nothing of the structures of reason in judgment and thought, but turn toward these, in analysis, one comes to see at a higher order. Only here, the higher order is existential, non discursive; the "movement" is nondiscursive, though getting there is--obviously, one has to think.
As to how God and why it is privileged over God-sin, K would say things like, through God lies redemption, making for the fullness of time, but the fullness of time being the instant as the eternal, as the Bible says. But I leave K (who has been accused of endorsing silliness) here. For such fullness, I turn to the Buddhists and the actuality of intimated "ultimate reality" as the Abhidhamma puts it. Ultimate reality is only meaningful in the intuited way it is apprehended, and here, one has to put aside or "suspend" critical judgment that pounces on such a thing. This is why philosophers like Levinas speak so cryptically about "the ideatum that exceeds the idea" and others are intent on whittling down time to the present to some primordial intimation, but end up talking around it, not about it, for this is the best that can be done.
After all, what is falling in love, phenomenologically, looking at the "thing itself"'; and what is pain, in the same manner? This is not a matter for thought's adumbrations; it is transformational, cannot be spoken, yet they are the principle features of Being Here, that is, all these terms subsume. Talk about God is talk about value, and this ushers in a discussion about metaethcs, metavalue.

Something I wrote on Caputo;
“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.” — Joshs

I'll have to look through Caputo for this. Off hand, this "for an instant, semantic unity, nameable as God, love...." is an instant outside of the apophatic annihilation of all such instants. Such terms, in the reductive attempt, are the last to go. But then, it may very well be that, if K is right, the closer one gets to "eternity" the more philosophy falls away, and one can be a butcher, an accountant, but live AS these in the eternal present. Like Abraham.
It does not in the end come down to time, or any analysis of anything. Philosophy is really a search for value, which is what God is about: a consummation of this search.

Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. — 3017amen

It occurred to me that I really didn't address this: Heraclitus 's world of flux, one has to ask, why is this exclusive of affirming the present? WE are the ones who look at the stream on time as a logical succession, but the term "stream" belies this, for it possesses no boundaries at all. The law of the excluded middle is a positivist's way of misapprehending the world entirely.

Sure, no worries Constance. K makes the point of both phenomena occurring from within the human condition, hence is emphasis on dread. (Logically, it breaks the rules of excluded middle.) Our existence is such that without However, it seems when discussing that which is present, the question becomes how big is that sliver of present(?). — 3017amen

Note that the ideas I set forth here is not exclusively an attempt at weaving textual agreement, which is what academics hold so dear. I explore, appropriate freely.

The impossible present. Heidegger accused Husserl of trying to walk on water in his impossible affirmations of "things themselves" but that really is the way this idea works: The way to make this plausible is first to remove the standard concept of time from our imagination, for this is a quantitative abstraction. And the law of the excluded middle only has application here where the past and the present are mutually exclusive. This logical attempt to bring the world to heel is exactly what K opposed, but on the other hand, I think he does not violate it at all since a quantitative temporal order is not existential, but pragmatic, I would call it reified pragmatics, the measurements we impose on the world, then take them AS the world.
This being "without past and present, cognition could not exist the way it does" is, K is telling us, the wrong way to look at this. There is only ONE actuality, and this is the eternal present (which IS eternity; See Wittgenstein, a big fan of K. He draws on K in his Tractatus), and we live in this and only this, but we do it AS we live in a temporal world, making the temporal world and all of our ordered thinking and engagement mere constituents of the eternal now. This is, I claim, exactly what the Buddhists are talking about when they say one does not achieve Buddhahood, but only realizes that one, to borrow from Heidegger, always, already IS this. For K, to "posit spirit" is to posit sin, for in this positing one realizes that what we call time is possessed by the eternal present, which is God, the soul.

Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. However, in theory, Einstein said it was possible, out there... . — 3017amen

Tricky. Realizing the eternal present subsumes time is to become aware of sin. Early on in K's Concept of Anxiety, he refers to the child and her wonderment and free adventurous spirit as being indicative of this radical movement, prior to which there is no sin. I am moving toward the realization that the idea that "no time is impossible," is wrong minded. Of course, we can talk like this vis a vis past, present and future, but "positing the spirit" is to pull away from normal discourse, not just in thought, but existentially, and indeed from all that creates separation from God: culture. Hereditary sin is to live in devotion to culture, to live, as Tillich put it, as if the institutions we created were our ultimate concern.

Einstein theorized an a world prior to positing spirit, what Husserl called the naturalistic attitude. Certainly nothing wrong with this, but it is pre-sin. (Btw, the term 'sin' here is not, as K tells us, the Lutheran concept of the foulest deed imaginable, but a kind of Augustinian absence of God. This is my take on K).

Too, in the aforementioned Platonian sense, we get to play with eternity from time to time. Whether it's through the phenomenal humanistic experiences that we engage in, or from experimenting with mathematical entities... — 3017amen

The sense you refer to, I can't say I remember. But K is critical of the Greeks, here and especially in Repetition. The idea of Platonic recollection in Meno makes the past rule the present, to put it one way. Repetition is to live in the eternal present such that the past is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.

The reason concepts of time were at issue around 1859 is that Darwin published Origin of Species that year, in turn based on a geological concept of time - that proposed a hugely ancient origin of the earth and lifeforms fossilized in rock layers. — counterpunch

No. K was responding to Hegel. At any rate, K died in 1855. Aristotle is behind this. See 3017amen's:
https://youtu.be/vh-IW9Y1htA

Actually Kierk argued the opposite here in this short read: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/18/kierkegaard-concept-of-anxiety-time/ — 3017amen

Excellent link. This is from The Concept of Anxiety, a seminal work. As you read through this text you find Sartre, here, Heidegger there.
I wasn't being very careful. In a sense, K argues that past and future do not exist, because the only way they do exist is in the present. We live in time, I would argue, such that past and future are subsumed under the present, or, rather, such that our experience of the past moving into the future is a reality in the giveness of the presence. The past is a dimension of our worldly giveness, and once spirit is posited and we leave the aesthetic moment to moment existence behind, we come to see that even when the past and the future stand before us, there is really only a true ontology of the eternal present.

He is devilishly difficult to get right, for me, at any rate, because he is so playful. Playful geniuses are hard to read because their thinking is so idiosyncratic.

Well christendom, the new testament has given the revelation that God or Allah is love. But since most of humanity cannot accept this simple fact I choose to say God is a mystery.
Because philosophers want to discuss God and love. And worshippers want to idolize God and love.
And atheists want to deny God and love. And politicians want to regulate God and love. And artists want to paint God and love. I just go with the flow — TaySan

I don't know what that means until I know what you think the flow is.

The past is just a measurement taken from “now” to as far back as one wants to go and the future is a measurement forward. However, life itself, does not exist in the past or future, but only in the “now”. — Present awareness

Well then, you sound like a Kierkegaardian. the trick is to become a knight of faith, which is to live in the present and embrace the past and the future in this lived present. I think Buddhists do this, or try to; I mean, if you meditate effectively, you find, on the one hand, you are still you and your constructed personality is still there informing you of the world and its details, but on the other, the past and the future anticipations the past imposes are all realized in the present, and you live both in the eternal present and in the world of daily affairs. You could be a butcher, an accountant, and no one would know that you have mastered the world and live in God's grace.
K thought this was beyond his abilities.

But I’ll leave it there until I have looked more into Husserl in particular. — Possibility

Okay. I would genuinely like to know. Some of Husserl is very accessible, like Cartesian Meditations and others. Ideas get rather technical, but it is here I think you can see how phenomenology works. I haven't read Logical Investigations. On my list.

Ok. I think it's more than that, Constance. Time is the structure of co-existence, and I've sketched that. My response deliberately calls mere "experience" into question which you don't seem willing to consider. Look what idealism – yes, (proto)existentialism is idealism-in-action – has done to the secular West in the last century or so as it's dovetailed into "doing me" "my truth" "not real until I experience it" consumerism. "The leap of faith" is now nothing but the faith in leaping. Is Kierkegaard 'subjective time' remotely relevant today? I could be way off-base but I don't think so. — 180 Proof

But cultural relevance hardly matters here, and more than it would matter for quantum physics. Alas, if people take idealism seriously, something might happen, a loss of confidence in the the objective claims of science, or, an excessive concern about the self. In the end, a loss of Christian faith may be responsible for a degradation in human values. So is this a reason to argue for Jesus?
Not is it relevant? Rather, is it true?
But then, idealism NEVER has had this kind of power. The closest I can think of is in the 50's when beatniks actually tried to read Heidegger, sat around in cafes like Dharma Bums questioning existence.
And I certainly do not think consumerism can be tied to idealism, as if consumers could even begin to fathom the Copernican Revolution of Kant. But if you care to sketch out how you think this is the case, I would like to hear it.