For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. — Ciceronianus the White

I'll let Wallace Stevens have the final world on this. Only to add that the final two lines is the consummation of all that went before, for how can nothing behold anything, and poeticize it? You may find this odd, but this "nothing" is at the very heart of existential thought. It is the essence of our freedom.

If you don't even understand the relevance of virtuous behavior for epistemic purposes, then I'm not sure what to tell you. — baker

Hmmm, I think language is essentially a pragmatic epistemology, true, and by this I mean pragmatics in the literal sense: a term is an inherent proposition, and all such things are in time, performative events. The question is, what practical good is there in virtuous behavior regarding liberation and enlightenment? And here it is the eight fold path: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. Well, there are a hundred ways I can think of to direct a person to a disciplined life, but the bottom line is not the virtuous behavior, is it? This would be simply dogmatic governing of living. The point is not this. It is liberation. How this is achieved is not a singular path, though all paths are of the same nature, which is a turning away from the many engagements towards a rather mystical unity. That term mystical is mine, and is one reason I don't care to ask the Buddha if it is authorized: when one turns away from everydayness, one takes normal standards of interpreting the world away as well. One is no longer anywhere, and this is the marvel of it all, beholding the world no longer as the world, not as anything. My claim is that this is a profound experience, rapturous and outside the currents of thought that hold powerful sway over our collective understanding of what the world is.
One can rightly say, there is only one virtue, and that is achieving the extraordinary state of mind, not to put too fine a point on it, achieved by the Buddha.

Anyway, I've been engaging in some discussions of Buddhism in an effort to find closure to my involvement with Buddhism. But it's only in these discussions lately that I've come to realize that even though early Buddhism seemed so natural to me (and still does), I'm beginning to see just how foreign early Buddhism is to many other people ... I've gravely underestimated that for some 20 years. — baker

If the Buddha was an extraordinary phenomenologist (your linked essay) then why not just do what phenomenologists do with Buddhism in the world and forget what is natural or foreign? Think philosophically about meditation, liberation and enlightenment. The world he lived in long ago was the same sun rising and setting of today, and those extraordinary people aggrandized by time were just like you and me, and for Buddha, he had none of his own teachings to guide him, but synthesized for himself what he deemed right out of the existing culture, one at that time when becoming a sadhu was the be all and end all.

So, let's do just that. Wittgenstein was wise to recommend silence. Silence saves us from trying to say in words what can't be described in words, but can only be asserted or named as something. Or Nothing? Is Nothing something which can be shown, at least, even to such as me? Perhaps I'll know the Nothing only when and if I'm suspended in dread. But then, how will I know when I'm suspended in dread, or what dread is for that matter? Will I know it when I'm suspended in it? — Ciceronianus the White

Pass over in silence. OR, just read Heidegger, and put aside his flirtation with monsters. Husserl, too. Then Kierkegaard is behind them, and Kant behind him, with Hegel, who is a whole new dimension of weird, that gets less weird the more you read in the field. What can I say, one say I picked up Heidegger determined to understand him, and the world of phenomenology opened up in time. Now I can't stay away. Reading Caputo on Derrida and radical hermeneutics, and the French post Heideggerians, very religious, since Husserl opened religion to Kierkegaard, and in all this there is actual insight I never remotely thought possible.
I often say to other in such a conversation, you are what you read. Never well received, because it is tantamount to telling others to read what I want them to read. But one has, once they get into a lived life, already "read" his or her way into things. If you have the patience for Jerry Fodor (didn't you say you read him?), Dewey and others, why not pick up a copy of Husserl's IDEAS I? For dread, Kierkegaard's "Concept of Anxiety" which you will certainly find off putting for its religious leaning, but then, it is really not religious at all if you continue reading.
As to knowing it once you are suspended in it....perhaps.

The secular Buddhist movement tries to separate what they see as retreivable from Buddhism from what they see as the 'metaphysical trappings'. They might say that re-birth was not really part of Early Buddhism, it was imported into the tradition from external sources. That is what the article that baker linked to was written in response to. — Wayfarer

To me, rebirth is a metaphysical idea, only to be approached by first observing the world. I mean, this is how metaphysics has any reasonable standing at all. Otherwise, one might as well be talking about cherubs and demons and Platonic forms. Wittgenstein (and Kant, et al) claimed that even when one gets down to extrapolating from the observed to "that which must be the case given the observed" there is no room for sensible thought. I think this is wrong, but it largely issues from the kind of thinking that sees no possibility in non discursive intuitive experiences that have something other than logical "content". Intuition is a four letter word in philosophy. But meditation, I claim, brings one to some extraordinary intimation that actually realizes what Kierkegaard, as well as Wittgenstein, called the eternal present, what I consider to be the most profound philosophical encounter possible. But this: I am not interested in early Buddhism any more than Kierkegaard is interested in Christendom. I look to its essential features, and by essential I mean what is conducive to liberation and enlightenment, the brass ring of all Eastern philosophy.
I am trying to accommodate baker, but he wants Buddhism to stay in the comfort of the 650 BCE's. This is an extraordinary time, granted, and but there was a deficit in interpretative language to explain it. IT being meditation and the place of realization deep in the interior of the self. Everything else is incidental, historically important, of course, but Hinayana, Mahayana, Hinduism and its Vedanta and the intellectual/cultural practices, the metaphysics that is part of this, the synthesis of Taoism and Buddhism, Korean Won Buddhism, Japanese Zen, and on and on are mostly about contexts of contingency, grounding things so we can talk about them, get university degrees in this talk. But meditation has nothing to do with history, and the Buddha would agree with me. The eight fold path has one purpose, that it can contribute liberation and enlightenment. It is a method. Consider if I were to discover a means to God's grace, and it were actuallytrue, literally-- Christ himself would yield. I think were the Buddha equipped with phenomenological philosophy, he would yield to this, because it is an extension in language of what occurs in meditation. He would then tell us quite emphatically that the moment one even begins the conversation, with which he just agreed, one has fallen away form the whole point. Sounds a LOT like Wittgenstein who speaks about what he insists will cannot be spoken.

It's not a question of interpretation, but of the background of Buddha's teaching, which assumes the reality of saṃsāra, the eternal round of re-birth. So it's a soteriological doctrine, in academic language. Kant, and the others, did not assume that background, although Kant did have something to say about God, freedom and immortality, and those soteriological concerns are present in a greater or lesser degree in the others you mention (not all of whom I have read, but I believe Levinas was a religious philosopher.) — Wayfarer

When I say interpretation was not the Buddha's forte, I simply mean he, the "extraordinary phenomenologist" as the paper called him, was the embodiment of exactly where philosophy needs to go. Derrida put the nail in the coffin of Western philosophy, but the nail was really always already there. An attack on language is an attack on what can be said vis a vis the world, telling us clearly that it is time philosophy went silent, as language was cluttering thought, interfering, misleading, confusing. Language is the "final attachment" to use a Buddhist's terms, for once one can control appetites and affectivity, then there remains familiarity, memory and what Husserl called predelineation: the eidetic hold language has on the present (though he didn't think it an issue). Here is where phenomenology is useful, for so many get to the point where taming attachments does not make for the final movement, for the attachment is implicit, unseen, IN the simple apprehension of the world AS world. How to make the move to the "eternal present" is a fascinating matter. I somewhat challenge the idea that the Buddha understood this, and that all that could be said and realized about meditation and liberation and enlightenment. Blasphemy, of course. I lean more toward Hinduism.

Belief in re-birth in any form is tacitly forbidden in Western discourse (save for in some of the underground movements like gnosticism, hermeticism and so on.) But it seems to me, remove that background from Buddhism, and it loses its overall rationale. — Wayfarer

Yes, analytic philosophy is not able to take metaphysics at all seriously, not as some sort of philosophical foundation. Wittgenstein is in part responsible for exactly the thinking posted in the OP here: a ban on what is not clear. Thus you have a hundred years or so of analytic thinking trying its best to make philosophical concepts conform to existing standards of clarity, which is largely what science says. Has gone nowhere.

As I see it, there is only one basis for belief in reincarnation, and that is the metaethical argument that I have tried make clear several times here and there. Put briefly, the world is ethically impossible without something like reincarnation and samsara. It is a complex argument, but it is a metaphysical one that moves from the world to what must be the case given the way the world is, adn the world demands an explanatory extension where observation cannot go. Pretty simple, really: Why, are we born to suffer and die? is a question that haunts us. The question then goes to suffering and I have put this forth earlier elsewhere more than once. If you like, because it IS after all THE issue of the world and the self, we can discuss this.

Again, I beg to differ. All scientific propositions are falsifiable, but mathematical and logical ones are not falsifiable — god must be atheist

Now there is an issue. Not falsifiable, but then are logical propositions really propositions at all? they have the form of a proposition, but exhibit only form. All logical propositions are simply tautologically true, says Wittgenstein. But on the other hand, and I will review this if you want to take issue, Quine's Two Dogmas attempts to show that analyticity never holds up, for terms are never really the same. All bachelors are male is supposed to be analytically true, but what does one do about the "sense" the terms? Also consider, and this one is especially compelling: a proposition is a temporal event, thus although, say, modus ponens, is logically valid, in the space of time it is uttered, the P, of "if P then Q" will not be identical to the P of the next premise, for their actuality is found in two different temporal events. this applies even to "P is P" for there is really no true sameness in identity. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'.
Finally, when what is the foundation for logic? Intuition. What is this, that is, what is "behind" logic that gives logic its justification? In order to see this, we would need another standard of assessment, which would in turn need another such standard. Logic, says Wittgenstein, is transcendental. It "shows" but does not explain itself for the generative source is outside logic, which is nonsense, of course. The point I would make is this: where is the warrant for excepting logic as self justifying? Granted, we are not in a postiion to choose, but nor are we in a position to justify.

When you say "All things that can be said can be said with clarity" then you make a proposition which is falsifiable. I falsified the current one in question in my argument (won't bore you by repeating it). If you don't want to make it falsifiable, you have to make it into a squeaky-clean, logically unassailable statement, whereby you state your necessary assumptions to be present to make the proposition true. If you don't say the assumptions, the reader is not obliged to assume the same things as the author. — god must be atheist

You sound like Derrida. Keep in mind this: that even while Derrida insisted that there the "trace" always seized upon meaning rendering all communication indeterminate (interlocutors all different in the interpretative grounds for receiving others' utterances), he still had pragmatic success in his works and in everyday speaking and listening.

Alas, I really don't understand what you mean. The world is a world in which we commit acts, necessarily, because we're part of the world. It isn't a world in which we don't commit them, as we commit an act whenever we interact with the rest of the world; we do so every moment we're alive. The judgments we make are necessarily human, like all else we do resulting from our interaction with other parts of the world. We can't take ourselves out of the world to consider as if we were outside it, nor do I know of any reason why we should want to do so, but that seems to be what you imagine can be done. How do you imagine a human would "simply report" what the world is if not as would any human embedded in and formed by the rest of the world? — Ciceronianus the White

I would stop you at "the world is the world". The question is, I surmise, about "fun and gloom and gangrene and Haagen das" and the claim I made: "the value dimension of experience can be identified context free AS a direct intimation of the world."

Just as a reminder, I am responding to your claim about a "hyperbolically negative attitude toward life." My response is not about taking "ourselves out of the world to consider as if we were outside it" at all. Rather, I want to look directly at the world. Talk about what may or may not be or should or shouldn't be "other" than this cannot proceed until the world is observed in earnest, like an empirical scientist who wants to classify something and has to first observe its properties.
But here, we are doing empirical science, but phenomenological "science" (Husserl) which deals with the structures of experience. There is logic, e.g., a term for the very structure of thought itself, and is there, antecedent to doing any empirical work. There is pragmatics, which attempts ground logic in end-looking problem solving (I think this right). And there is value, and this is where my attention is. Analysis proceeds from experience itself, and there is the convicted 15 year old dancer in the moonlight to be burned alive (horrific examples are the most poignant). I am very simply asking, what IS this horror, pain and the rest. I find G E Moore's answer (Principia Ethica) the only one viable: the experience of pain is a non natural property, sui generis, irreducible, as Kierkegaard would put it, its own presupposition.
Everything else follows on this.
To give this some perspective, consider the term "good". There are two kinds, contingent and absolute (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, very short and to the point, online: http://sackett.net/WittgensteinEthics.pdf). Contingencies are very common: that is a good couch. Why? It is wide enough, comfortable ,and so on. W says absolutes are nonsense, and it is important to know that he is talking about the philosophical examination of ethics that looks for a foundation. Impossible, God's world. He writes, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This matter goes to the girl's actual suffering, the "badness" of it. On the stake as the flames scorch the flesh, this is not a simple fact of the world, like my shoe being untied or alluvial weathering. We are "out" of the factual, for there is in the simple analysis this sui generis, non natural "presence".

See here for the answer: The Truth of Rebirth And Why it Matters for Buddhist Practice. — baker

I read it, or significant parts of it. first, I did like, and frankly, already understood, that, "The Buddha was a radical phenomenologist in that he dealt with experience on its own terms." Meditation is the ultimate phenomenological reduction, more radical than Husserl imagined, and in fact, the consummation of his epoche. Radical because, while Kierkegaard talks about the eternal present and Derrida performs the ultimate in apophatic thinking, that is, he annihilates any and all foundational possibilities in knowledge claims, meditation takes these claims to actuality. all phenomenologists have as the centerpiece of philosophy, Time. Our existence is an event, and all that we encounter is an event. My couch is an event. So, when I come across ideas like those in "The Truth of Rebirth...." I first look for something that has the explanatory depth of Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Nancy, Marion, Derrida, et all, and find it absent. This is not to say at all that the Buddha didn't have it right, but it is to say that interpretation was not his forte.
Yes, of course, blasphemy, but interpretation is thought, not prereflecitve experience. As a child I can tell you in all candor that the world was perfect at times. intimations of immortality, as Wordsworth put it-- "trailing clouds of glory," that was childhood, without exaggeration. But as I grew up, this was forgotten, and at the time, I had no ability to articulate it. I think the Buddha was clear as a bell as to the experience of liberation, but the interpretative language available failed him.

I don't know what happens in that event, because what you describe is some new-agey meditation mishamash that has nothing to do with Buddhism. — baker

Sounds like you are saying meditation is not sitting quietly and doing nothing. This is Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki speaking. If you take issue with it, then pray tell.

Well, as long as those self-declared "Buddhists" are also New Agers or practitioners of corporate mindfulness (that's a term, look it up). — baker

You have an ax to grind with new age people. But really, it should be with ideas, not resentment over offences to the purity of the Buddha's words. This latter is more like a cult, like being hung up on Jesus' words, as the Bible tells us. This is not the point. The point is to understand and have the explanatory resources, not to recall, but to reason out.

Buddhism has a virtue epistemology. It supposes that in order to know the truth, one needs to practice a sufficient measure of virtue. The trio sila, samādhi, and pañña is central: moral conduct, concentration (meditation), and wisdom. These are the three fundamental categories of training. One has to train in all three, simultaneously and progressively. One cannot have one without the other. — baker

Moral conduct? Is this a discipline or is this a moral thesis? Wisdom? Again, pray tell. Meditation? You need to see that when you talk about meditation, you take your meditative states and put them unders review. So what meditation IS, is an interpretative matter. The meditative act itself I take as clear and nonesoteric. The esoterica comes in the interpretation.

In contrast, the popular mindfulness movement is trying to force the issue by focusing primarily or solely on the concentration/meditation, but generally avoiding the Buddhist prescription of the necessity of moral behavior, which is captured for lay people in the first five precepts.
Some philosophers are trying to force the issue by focusing on the wisdom component, and, again, neglecting morality and the actual practice of meditation. — baker

The moral element: how is it that this is in any way conducive to freeing the mind? I mean, it can help because it is discipline, and the point is to discipline oneself out of attachments. The whole effort is toward liberation, I could say with confidence. You can say, and perhaps rightly, that it is not Buddhism even if liberation is achieved, but not through the specified techniques. But then, it would be a technical distinction.

Assumptions are never knowledge. At best they carry a possibility of getting it wrong. You can't tell me that an instance of a falsification of a theory, which falsification does not contravene any of the hypotheses of theory, is an invalid falsification. — god must be atheist

Assumptions are assumed knowledge. No one is saying some proposition is not falsifiable. All are. One has to consider that nature of a verification, for in the justification, there is nothing that can ever serve as an absolute, and Wittgenstein says as much. The concept of an absolute is nonsense. But we nevertheless get on with things, like discussions about what can be said within the delimitations of logic.

Dewey wrote of something he called "the philosophical fallacy" because he thought it so pervasive in philosophical thinking. Very simply put, he thought this was neglect of context. I think the use of concepts such as dread, anxiety, suffering and so on as appearing in the existentialist's lexicon, applied to describe (and perforce condemn) the entire world, is an impressive example of neglect of context. Neglect of context in using and applying concepts and making judgments and claims based on them is unreasonable and potentially dangerous. — Ciceronianus the White

On the other hand, dread is pointedly not concept, which is the point. Nor is fun and gloom and gangrene and Haagen das; I mean of course everything is a concept when it is spoken, but it is the actuality itself that is context free. But this is the point being made here: Contexts are conceptual. So when I say I want to look plainly at the world and simply report what it is, I am suspending, or "neglecting" contexts intentionally. this would be of no avail if I were thinking of the color yellow or the timbre of a certain tone, but the value dimension of experience can be identified context free AS a direct intimation of the world. The language, of course, is always in the middle, joined at the hip, as it were, with actuality, but this does not mean we cannot apprehend the, say, screaming pain as it is. Wittgenstein admits this, and calls it transcendence, mystical, impossible and nonsense, because he knows one cannot "speak" the pain. Logic contains delimitations on what can be said, and what cannot be said is where the value, the importance, the aesthetic/ethical meaning is. He will call this divinity.

The "room" you refer to is unimaginably vast. To claim that room is indefensible because of the act of a particular person (instead of making the altogether obvious and unobjectionable claim that the act is indefensible as is the person committing the act) is similar to claiming that the world is evil because of a sin committed by a single person, the claim we find in the doctrine of Original Sin--perhaps the most glaring example of neglect of context we've managed in our history. The concepts of "evil" and "sin" applied so broadly and thoughtlessly have been used for various purposes since St. Augustine came up with the notion, none of them laudable, or so I think. — Ciceronianus the White

But it goes to a more fundamental level than this: before a person commits an act, the world is there as the place to commits acts. What kind of world is this? Look around, but do so phenomenologically look around, apart from the many contexts that would make a knowledge claim, but directly at the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon of pain has "presence".

I'm not sure of what is going on hereabouts... I am certain of the itch on my left foot; confirmation does not come into it. Talk of an interior divides the self from the world; a false dichotomy. In your reply to Ciceronianus the White you spoke of values having no foundation; the itch in my foot, together with the other certainties with which we are each surrounded, are that foundation. — Banno

This is not as easy as it seems. The itch is there, as an unquestioned immediacy. But then it is one thing acknowledge the itch spontaneously, and another to recognize, identify, report about, understand what it IS. Dogs and cats have itches, but they don't "understand" what an itch is. We do, but this understanding is what is at issue, because, while the intimacy with the tactile feeling is unmistakable, more so than talk about plate tectonics or evolution, say, since it is not it itself discursive at all, to observe and understand, this is conceptual.

All the more reason not to read Heidegger. I'm not a fan of his as a philosopher, and especially not a fan of him as a person, as I've gently hinted in this forum now and then. But let's pass over that in silence. The path you describe is a path I can't follow, nor do I want to follow it, though I read all the Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky I could find in my distant youth.

From time to time I wonder when and why this hyperbolically negative attitude toward life and the world arose among and came to be expressed by intellectuals. We can't know all that was thought and believed by people in the past, but as far as I'm aware it doesn't appear until the 19th and 20th centuries, and seems to be peculiarly European. This view that living is a terrible thing and therefore requires explanation doesn't seem to have been held by ancient thinkers of the pagan West. The view that living, and the world, are terrible things became prominent with the rise of Christianity. No matter how nasty the world is, though, Christianity promised salvation and a vaguely defined happy and holy life beyond the world provided one is appropriately Christian. I speculate that as European thinkers lost their faith, they could think of nothing similar to replace it, and so succumbed to despair or sought refuge in alternatives that appear to foster melancholy, or a manic kind of romantic mysticism (leading some to be fascists or Nazis). — Ciceronianus the White

Dostoyevsky was not happy about the world, or about anything as far as I can tell. Probably permanently emotionally damaged when then put him in front of a firing squad, pulled the triggers on blanks just to teach him a lesson.
Hyperbolic? The question doesn't rest with "ancient thinkers" or the Christian promise of salvation. It is simply a descriptive statement. Think of the world as a "place" like a room. In this place things occur. Some die horribly, some not. The number is not really to the point, for the argument is not quantitative, but qualitative; really, all it takes is one actual case. What does one think of such a room where people are tortured? The rack, thumb screws? I am simply saying this is the "place" where we actually are. Of course, one can just dismiss this and get on with things. But complacency does provide what we are looking for, which is an honest assessment of the world when we ask, what IS it?
Heidegger, it is generally understood, was despicable in his nazi cooperation. Didn't last long, but he never denounced the nazis properly, and went along with them while Jews were being persecuted. Nobody lets him off the hook. Too bad his philosophy was so extraordinary. I see you do not agree, but one can't argue against his thinking based on what kind of person he was, and this is an infamous fallacy.
You're right about the European romanticism: Himmler and others were inspired by Madam Blavatsky and a movement called Volkism that held beliefs about aryan ancestry, interracial perversions that led to lower races and so on. Ghastly thing! It could be that Heidegger held some of this in his belief that culture needed to be reborn. But he was disappointed to find the same perverse modernism in the Third Reich.
But really, none of this is what I am on about. For me, I want to honestly describe the world. Then, further thoughts may be warranted. I think the presence of suffering makes the world indefensible, and in need of a metaphysical counterpart to "redeem'" it. I find this need as coercive as even the principle of sufficient cause.

Because he did not point this assumption out. He can't assume we will assume the same thing he is assuming. That is not kosher in philosophy. — god must be atheist

Well, there is the subject matter one discusses and the structure of discussion itself. You have to separate the two. If I am, for example, going to explain the electronics of cell phone, and I am explaining this on a cell phone, then it is assumed that the cell phone functions sufficiently well to satisfy the explanatory requirement. W is explaining and deploying logic all at once, but this assumption is implicitly in place. He is not arguing that this assumption is in jeopardy, only describing the logical limitations that prevent certain other kinds of explanations, those that include irrational concepts.

Whoo, boy. This is the most watered-down description of all the utterances of any philosopher ever in existence.

This I say with the ASSUMPTION that philosophers don't say illogical things. If it is illogical to a listener, it is because the listener does not base his logic on superstitious beliefs while the speaker does, or the listener does not suffer from the same mental illness as the speaker or else vice versa for both conditions. — god must be atheist

These would be kinds of assumptions implicitly in place, yes. I don't see why this is an issue. It DOES sound close to what Willard Quine talked about in his indeterminacy of translation. In fact, if you haven't read this, and this kind of thing is your concern, it is right up your alley.

Eh ...?
No, one most certainly doesn't need to read Heidegger for that. Oh dear. — baker

Being and Time is the pinnacle work on existential thinking. Maybe Sartre is to one's liking (can't imagine), or just Husserl, but Heidegger really drew it out. One really should read Kierkegaard so as to see the depth. Not that he held the one true view, for such a thing is always receding in the horizon of thought, but his ontology opens the way to greater understanding.

A meditating person may discover unity beneath it all, a calm in which particulars vanish into pervasive
overarching nowhere, at no time, and I know such a thing is right and true, not to put too fine a point on it, but I claim that behind this state, or this "stateless state" is yet a foundational barrier thick with beliefs and most of all, simple familiarity that is still in place implicitly. I have read stories of Zen masters running amok, shouting at trees, and I thought, they must be close.
Existential thought can clarify this, and undo familiarity, for it is this very undoing, perhaps you've noticed, that is its very essence. I think that infamous "existential dread" is a precursor to liberation.

I would think that everyone thinks so, at least intuitively. It's not like people actually confuse words for reality.
Confusion emerges when people say things they don't mean, or when the parties involved have irreconcilably different understandings of the matter at hand -- and this in plain terms, not in some fancy, abstract sense.
"Yes, I told you that loved you, but that doesn't mean I want to be with you, so bugger off." — baker

Not that they confuse them, the there is a movement toward unity, and you are probably familiar the attempts to pull away from dualism toward some kind of unity, whether it is material substance or, as with Heidegger, the unity of the phenomenon of idea and actuality. So the discontinuities understood are really unities at the most basic level, then the former can be reduced to the latter.

Yes. That's why a line "drawn" in the air isn't a meaningful demarcation. — baker

Well, for me it does get more complicated, as I have said elsewhere. Remember, W DOES draw that line, thoughunder erasure (very Derrida). We do not live in a world where the term "transcendence" is existential nonsense, rather, we see as we "see' eternity. Now, is eternity unspeakable? One has to ignore the infinite timeline or spatial extension. Wittgenstein read Kierkegaard and they are the same on this: eternity is the present released from time, and this is where I rest my case regarding meditation. For what is meditation if not the annihilation of the standards of measurement? Call it transcendental meditation, but wait, Paramahansa Yogananda already did this. Not that I believe all the wild tales of his autobiography, though. Or, the metaphysics of meditation.

Wittgenstein never went here, nor did he ever entertain any thoughts about intimations outside the boundaries language and logic. But it has to be said that I am really not AT ALL entertaining such ideas: everything that can be thought is rigorously bound to the rules of logic. Meditation is more an existential discovery in what is disclosed when one turns off explicit experience making.

I'm not sure I understand what he meant here ... He may be saying something that is strongly influenced by Christian and anti-Christian thought. Metaphysics have such a bad reputation ... and I'm not sure I can redeem it in one forum post. — baker

As I read him (and certainly I am no Wittgenstein scholar; this should go without saying throughout. I've read the Tractatus, several papers on it, and sat and thought) he is simply looking at the way meaningful utterances are made. In order for a term to be meaningful one has to be able to conceive its opposite, or of its nonexistence. Existence makes no sense as a philosophical concept because one cannot even imagine non-existence. 'In' makes no sense without "out". 'Outside" makes no sense without "inside". This makes "meta" anything nonsense. Now, W did encourage religion, its rituals and faith, and divinity. I think he understood that the ethical/aesthetic dimension of human existence required this, but we could never talk about these things philosophically.

Still, language is good enough. It serves a purpose. — baker

Yes, it "works". But we are faced with reality, too. The loathing I have for the taste of ammonia, e.g., is not language. Yellow is not language. The question I am posing here is how is it that we understand the actuality AS actuality. This is Sartre's radical contingency notion: the world "overflows" the boundaries of language. It confronts us as an alien presence, for what is familiar, comfortable, identifiable, and the rest is made so by language: words are not labels; they are deep in the construct of the world we live in, when we say, pass the salt, and my, what a fine day! we are participating in a narrative that sits like a superstructure on top of this very alien reality. See his Nausea.

Existential thinking is supposed to be an unsettling experience.

"You're an intruder, you don't belong here" is an assumption that seems to be tacitly held in so much of our culturally specific discourse.
This assumption could be inherited from Christianity, or from European classism, or from reductive materialism, or a combination thereof. Be that as it may, it's a culturally specific discourse that is making us alien to our own lived experience. — baker

If this were about Christian dogma and metaphysics, I would agree, as if original sin set the stage for our alienation from God. I find it off putting to think like this, and so did Kierkegaard; in fact, K spent his entire life trying to liberate Christianity from this kind of thing.
Phenomenology is a "descriptive" science, as Husserl would say, of what is there when we take the apple on the table and analyze it for its essential features as a phenomenon present before us. And prior to its being deployed in empirical science. Kierkegaard started this, revolting against the rationalism popular in his time. It is not "culturally specific discourse" any more than physics is. We are only "not at home" because analysis shows us this divide. W of course, understood this, but again insisted we could not speak of it.

There is an important difference here, though: the early Buddhist samvega narrative and the existential anxiety narrative are different.

The narrative of existential anxiety is conceived within a framework of one lifetime.
The early Buddhist one is conceived of in the framework of rebirth.

The person who conceives of life in the framework of one lifetime experiences the threat of loss of everything that is meaningful and dear to him as unique, ultimate, and fatal.

The person who conceives of life in the framework of many lifetimes experiences the threat of loss of everything that is meaningful and dear to him as serial, cyclical: they get it and then they lose it, and then they get it again, and lose it again, and so on.

That's how such a person sees those things as inherently unsatisfactory, whereas the person who thinks in terms of one lifetime, doesn't.

This is how the existential anxiety of a Western secular existentialist is qualitatively different from the existential anxiety as experienced by a rebirthist. — baker

Remember, I am explicitly trying to think outside of the historical belief systems of Buddhism. I only want to know what meditation is at the level of basic assumptions. I mean, what really happens in this event in which one sits, ceases thinking, wanting, anticipating, and does this rigorously over time? Buddhists famously want the purity of the event to be untainted by presuppositions, and I see the value of this. But what is it that you see as opposition to the philosophy of what this is about?

It's as if one sort warrant to conclude that since the cat is projected onto "out there", there is no cat.

Yet there is a cat. We should be at pains to avoid the illusion of idealism as much as of realism. — Banno

I have never read anyone that think there is nothing there, outside of our experiences. But what it is, if one withdraws all that the perceiver contributes in the perceptual act, and tries then to "say" what it is, there is nothing to say. It is no longer a cat, nor is it not a cat. It is nonsense. Cannot be conceived.
But this nonsense is transcendental. We cannot conceive it, yet we are not at liberty to dismiss it, for IT is an imposing part of the "presence" of the world. My thought on this are rather out there.

One is debarred from talking about what is beyond language, yet "out there" talks about it. The argument divides the world into what is out there and what is in here. Ciceronianus the White has a similar discomfort. — Banno

Take the matter one step further: granted, out there beyond the horizon, I mean, straight idealism is not tenable. One has to keep in mind, however, how radical Wittgenstein's point is: IT is utterly unthinkable. Even the designation "it" is not possible, and when W calls logic transcendental, he tells us he is speaking nonsense just to inform us as to what we cannot say! But, the term 'transcendence' applies, and I think most critically applies, to our own interior. I cannot confirm the Being of objects that are not me, but my own interior: nothing could be more intimate or unmediated. Yet, when we conceive of this interior, it is done through language and logic, so it is just as remote is the out there thing (a nonsense term) I call a cat. Language "stands in" (as Derrida put it) for the world. But within, I AM this, and the implication is that if I shut down the interpreting apparatus of thought, and stop the process of presumed knowing, then I can encounter my own transcendence. this is why I think meditation is a very big deal; not the Buddhists, but the Hindus have it right!
Of course, to confirm something like this, one would have to spend a lot of time "deep diving" into one's interior.

There is always a cat; there is nothing to speak of that one might "project' onto. That this is learned - "conditioned a body of conditioning memories" - does not render it somehow false. — Banno

Right, and this is Heidegger's view. The idea and the actuality are "of a piece". Phenomenology takes eidetic structures are an integral part of the phenomenon. I find myself in agreement, save for two things: one is the above regarding the transcendental ego and the meditative method of its "discovery". The other is about ethics. Long story, but what I know about ethics, is hermeneutical, and I cannot conceive of the actual pain and pleasures (and eveything else) simpliciter, however, when the presence of a pain or pleasure is in me, it is not a neutral fact, but has a nature that is noninterpretative, and this is its metaethical dimension. Extreme examples are clearest: we shouldn't torture others. Why? Because it hurts. What is "wrong" with that? The justification turns to the pain itself, and is not deferred to something else. This, I say, knowing full well it is nonsense, an absolute, but one that is, while nonsense in the "saying" not nonsense in the injunction not to do it.

Value, in my view, presents an absolute injunction to do or not to do X. Of course, such injunctions are mixed with entanglements in the world. Oh well.

The difficulty I have with much of this is its de facto assumption of the world as something apart from us. I think that conception is embedded in any claim of being thrown into the world without choice, as if we're from one place and have come unwilling into another. I think it's also assumed whenever we speak of the world being suspended for our viewing and understanding, and perhaps most clearly when we complain of alienation. — Ciceronianus the White

It is not the from one world to another idea that we are being invited to consider. There are no metaphysical claims about here and there. Heidegger sees it like this: you are born and you receive an education, and you become this education, and once you have been duly assimilated into a culture with its language and history, and then, there is your private history that ends up becoming a repository for future possibilities, the plot and character development, if you will, of the narrative you will write into existence. But the rub: this is the way of everyday living, and everyone lives this life of unfolding affairs with implicit trust and unquestioned confidence, and one is entirely absorbed in the grand narrative. Then one opens a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time, and begins to question, and if s/he is lucky, or unlucky, there is an epiphanic moment of startling awareness that there is a discontinuity in our questioning self and the world that is there to meet questions at the basic level. All, and I mean ALL questions that issue from any object of inquiry leads inevitably to nothingness, or eternity, as Kierkegaard would put it. This is not an abstract idea, but a part of the reality we live in: a very big deal for existentialists! The world is not a concept to be tested, as Dennett or Quine would see it. It is a living experience, so this failure to find foundational understanding of anything at all goes to values: having a family, a job, a life of worries and delights, and so on, all of this has no "value" foundationally. Most are not disturbed by this, that is, until they start reading Heidegger. The question, he writes, is the piety of thought. Questions, poignant philosophical ones reveal our authentic nature.

Part of what attracts me to both Pragmatism and Stoicism is their acknowledgement that we're parts of the world. Once we come to that realization (which some may think too humbling) much of what's been called philosophy, i.e. the propagation of dualism, dissolves. In Stoicism, the acknowledgement we're part of Nature has a spiritual aspect, divinity being immanent. — Ciceronianus the White

For me, it is the question, "why are we born to suffer and die?" I don't get it. Out of the blue, there you are, and the world of which we are "part" begins a campaign of torture against you. So they throw a girl into a cell to be burned alive for illicit midnight lanterns and dancing. I take a close look at this, not as a historical event, nor as an evolutionary success story (pain and pleasure serve survival), but as the existential crisis of first magnitude. Such a thing cannot dismissed simply because we got lucky. This "place" this reality is a torture chamber. Put a match to your finger and ask the Real question: what IS that?
I don't recommend being morbidly transfixed by evil in the world. But one thing is clear to me: Language, whether pragmatic or otherwise, neutralizes the world, makes the specific actualities into general concepts that are passed around AS IF thought were reality so we can pass over the horrors of the world in mild distain, rather than being shocked and driven to crisis, which is the only genuine response. this is not invoking some other reality, not dualism posited or groundless metaphysics. It is simply observation.

In his later work, Wittgenstein abandoned the idea of logical form and with it the notion of ineffable truths. The difference between science and philosophy, he now believed, is between two distinct forms of understanding: the theoretical and the non-theoretical. Scientific understanding is given through the construction and testing of hypotheses and theories; philosophical understanding, on the other hand, is resolutely non-theoretical. What we are after in philosophy is “the understanding that consists in seeing connections.” — Ray Monk

This is a very good statement, and is the core of my complaint. "seeing connections" has been the bane of analytic philosophy. The conditions of verifiability are strictly enforced, so what is taken as true and verifiable, like, "I am holding up my right hand" is, becomes the standard for philosophical work, and this has gone nowhere. They reduce philosophy to scientific speculation. Phenomenology has no issue with science at all, only the presumption that it should be the foundation of philosophy. But, on the other hand, there is nothing that is not theoretical, because by "theory" I mean hermeneutics. Long Story there.

I agree that Wittgenstein never crossed paths with Buddhism but there are clear parallels. I would characterise the similiarity in terms of reaching the same point by different means. Actually there's another paper I mentioned previously, that I think you might have also missed, Epoche and Śūnyatā: Scepticism East and West, by Jay Garfield. It opens with a quote from the Tractatus and discusses Wittgenstein in places. It casts a lot of light on what philosophical scepticism really means (and what it doesn't mean, i.e. that nobody knows anything.) — Wayfarer

Reading Epoche and Śūnyatā: Scepticism East and West now. I'll get back to you. I did notice one his references to Dick Garner. I actually knew this person. Small world.

If I understand this aright, it seems contradictory. It's agreeing that the world is always, already interpreted and yet saying that it does not relate to what is seen... — Banno

There is a contradiction, hence the counterintuitive nature of the claim: if everything that can be brought to mind and made sense of is conditioned a body of conditioning memories, then the present, my cat on the sofa right here before me, is not just a conditioned event, but, in the understanding of it, nothing but conditioning, for it's not as if the cat thing "out there" projects its "catness" which is directly intimated (Plato is near by with his "having a share" of the forms as the nature of the object) to me. I am projecting catness on to that "Other, out there" in my conceptual schemes, my language and logic and education.

"To the understanding" is a crucial part of this. Wittgenstein knew, as we all do, that there is something there that is not what I project, and this is simply unspeakable. Here is the essence of the point: how is it that what I "know" is "more" than the conceptual and the conditioned? Analytic philosophy calls this qualia, but terms should be put aside, especially that one, because it connotatively trivializes the issue (discussion on this if you like). How do we know such things if knowledge is exhaustively eidetic? The answer is that it is not exhaustively eidetic. Knowledge possess a residuum after all that is idea is suspended, and this is, I claim, Absolute Being. The difference in the claim here from the Kant, the Heidegger and others is that I hold that in meditation, we can reacquire this that has been lost to us through the modern tendencies that turn people into utilities, into "its" rather than "thous" as Buber put it. Meditation has this restorative metaphysics.

The "transcendental ego" merely names, without explaining...

SO again phenomenology seems to me to be claiming to say what cannot be said... what ought be passed over in silence, to avoid talking nonsense. — Banno

Just to say, phenomenology is a wide field of different positions. It has been speculated that Wittgenstein was a phenomenologist.
You cannot speak of it, and yet you can, sort of. My thought is that Wittgenstein leaves no room for this very weird acknowledgement of Being, weird because it is intimated by the presence of things. this is best illustrated by ethics. The essence of ethics lies with, I say, the palpable existence of pain and suffering (and everything that fits therein) but, W say this impossible essence cannot be spoken, the "good" of being in love., e.g. Right, but, and this is a very big point with me, the good does present the injunction to do that is received as an absolute.
It is a sticky wicket, but if not sticky, than philosophically unworthy. All such wickets are sticky.

..but of course, this is nonsense. Recognition requires the "all of this" that was suspended; SO phenomenology must fail. Phenomenology is not meditation. In so far as phenomenology tries to say how things are, it cannot succeed. — Banno

It is an interesting issue, and not without its counterintuitiveness. One does have to, well, follow along and put aside certain normal assumptions. Start with Husserl's reduction, and not to go into its detail, for in Ideas there is a lot of this. The matter here is simple: Attending to the phenomena themselves, as he puts it, is a method that fist requires one to understand that the present moment is composite as it is a "predelineated" aggregate of one has gone before. This is not the counterintuitive part, but just obvious (and Kant derivative; just take a look at the latter's transcendental deduction to see where this comes from) because when we think, conceive, understand, it is not the "pure present" that informs us, but a personal history of language acquisition, enculturation, and so on. This, I take it, is the basis of your objection, as it is well thought out in Heidegger, who thinks Husserl is trying to "walk on water" as well as, from my recent reading of John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. The complaint is rather well known. The pure present is, and this is very much the centerpiece of postmodern thought, impossible, senseless, nonsense. To speak it is a performative contradiction to the "purity" of the apprehension! As I understand it, this is very close to Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
Husserl, it should be remembered, held this: suspending "naturalistic attitude" and this is all the knowledge claims that rush to define, all the presuppositions that fill the sciences, leaves the residual "predicatively formed eidetic affair/actuality", so it is NOT intended to be an complete eidetic suspension at all; quite the contrary, Husserl took the present to be imbued with ideas. His reduction was meant to acknowledge the singularity of the eidetic and the actual, a perceptual moment being "of a piece" in concept and "hyle" (again, Kant hovering close by). I trust this is acceptable without much fuss. Makes perfect sense to me. What is this phenomenon before me? It is a composite of idea and hyle, of-a-piece.
Now the counterintuitive part: There is a lot written about this, and I think it holds great importance to understanding meditation. In meditation, you night say the whole lot of it, Heidegger's desein and then some, is "suspended". The production of hyle and eidetic content lose their generative source, altogether. This is the goal, a kind of suicide with a pulse. So, first consider that in the apprehension of objects we are not having an eidetic experience. There is the Other, Husserl's hyle, the actuality that is before me in the cat on the rug and the sun in my eyes, and we take these in and understand them not exclusively in the conceptua' mode. We take them in palpably. My claim is that this needs accdounting for. We may not be able to "say" palpable pure presence, but its "presence" is undeniable. From whence comes this? It is the transcendental ego. Meditation reveals this in the sustained presence, in the fact that the self never vanishes, never is truly reduced to nothingness.

Quite the opposite: Nirvana is evidence for this ego's ontology.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world. If I widen my linguistic abilities, I will be able to talk about things that previously seemed ineffable. — baker

I completely agree with this. But there is a certain inevitability. There is the nature of language itself which is inherently mediatory, standing "between" actualities like the feeling of happiness or dread, or deliciousness or disgust; I am referring to the actuality of these events that are qualitatively distinct from the thoughts we have of them. We call a thing by its name and its concept subsumes all particulars, but this is NOT the feeling of being abandoned by a a loved one, e.g. We don't "know" what this is, but in the calling it something, we reduce it to a manageable form that can be discussed and fit into pragmatic contexts. The point is, and this is straight out of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, reason and actuality, understanding and the "real" events of the world are ontologically different. (Heidegger and Heideggerians will take issue on this, I should note).

What is fascinating to me, off the charts fascinating,is that we can "understand" this, making, as Wittgenstein put it, for ( I know this is rather esoteric; apologies) the "other side" of the requirement for posting something. Consider when he says, "in order to draw a limit of thought, we should have the limits of both sides thinkable." THIS is his line: Metaphysical "talk" is talk about something the "other side" of which is completely unknown; no, not unknown, but just nonsense, because such an "other side", is not conceivable, for in the conceiving, one deploys "this side's" language, logic, ideas, and so forth.
So, one cannot "say" the color yellow. And this makes references to the color AS color impossible. Why I say this is so fascinating is this: It is my palpable, intuitive grasp that there is someting "other" there that is not language that affirms my own metaphysical Being, for the intuitive grasp of the thing, or the color, or the pain or bliss, does not issue from the thing out there, but from me. The nonconceptual Being of the world is my own Being affirmed in the relationship.
I am aware this likely sounds far flung, but this is the way it is, and I am quite willing to defend it.

/.../ Samvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It's a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex range — at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings we've all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I don't know of a single English term that adequately covers all three.

The term sought for here is Existential Anxiety. Again, and especially the reference to childhood, see Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, this above plays into existential thought in a central way, not merely a sideline issue. It is THE issue, for this deathbed realization is a withdrawal from from the grand "narrative" we all live in, going work, raising a family, outings with friends, all "blindly" priveleged and hermeneutically sealed. Phenomenology is about the method of suspending all of this so that the world "itself" can be recognized. Of course, a very big issue for continental philosophers,

I'd like you to be more careful/specific when using the word "Buddhism". I'm not sure you appreciate the vast and unbridgeable differences between some Buddhist schools. — baker

I know you would like thinking more controlled in this way. Tell you what, I'll call what I do with Buddhist thinking, "philosophical Buddhism". Just thought of it, and it seems there should be no objections. I mean, you can certainly disagree with claims I make and argue about, but not that I have coopted Buddhism.

Okay, then let me look more closely.

He did not say this. He said, "what we can say can be said clearly". Big difference.

But he is wrong. You can say things that can't be said clearly. A clear example of it is talking to a blind man about colours. The speaker can say it; to the listener it will never be clear.

It is clear to the speaker though. Is that sufficient to say that W was wright? No, because he did not identify the respect in which the said thing was clear: to the speaker, or to the listener.

Bad, bad, mistake by Wittgenstein. Apparently he was not very clear when he said what he wanted to say. — god must be atheist

Why do you object to my saying that the issue you raise lies with the assumptions Wittgenstein is accepting about communicative conditions required for making a point? When you say the blind man is part of the communication, this is true. But, for examples, we have to assume our audience speaks the language, has the intellect, is within hearing distance, and so forth, as so when I talk to a blind man about color it is my assumption about the term 'color' being received properly that is off. But W is not talking about making things of everydayness, of empirical discourse. He is arguing against claims in philosophy that are logically not possible, therefore nonsense.

And I think Wittgenstein's intent here is very similar to the Buddhist intent; that the 'silence of the Buddha' in response to the question was exactly comparable to Wittgenstein's 'that of which we cannot speak'. (And there's another, delightfully-named 'Honeyball Sutta', which I think would also be close in meaning to Wittgenstein, but I'll leave it there for now.) — Wayfarer

Don't know how I missed this. To me, this is right where I think it all goes.
I've read it and many others like it. The Prajnaparamita makes extraordinary negative claims that can be baffling. For Wittgenstein, we know that he thought he could put an end to overextended philosophical thinking, making empirical science the best we could hope for in making sense of the world. He never did, as far as I have read, cozy up to Eastern religio-philosophy. Heidegger, Schopenhauer (haven't read all of his The World as Will and Representation. Likely never will) did go there, though.

But the ladder: It seems to me there is a fascinating line of thought in this: if there is a speed limit to what can be said in philosophy, where metaphysics brings things to a screeching halt, AND, if the human condition is apodictically (a good word. Means necessary, but not referring to logic only) bound to its metaphysics (I mean our world is not exhaustively finite, for once all finitude is accounted for, the "Otherness" of the world, its actuality, remains), then the implication is that we live IN metaphysics, and this is a special point to make: finitude is coextensive with eternity, co existent; physics with coextensive with metaphysics. They are one and the same! What can one do? for the implication is clear: meditation takes off where language and logic end, and Wittgenstein tells us that this end, this limit, is structurally built into experience.
I am convinced that meditation's purpose is to realize this not as a proposition, but as a liberation from the finitude imposed by existential/interpretative engagement, attachment, as the Buddhists put it. Attachment is not only our explicit indulgences, it is conceptual, the looking up in the morning and seeing the time and having this knowing of time and things everywhere "as we are taught they are" step into perception, as Heidegger would say, always, already there, immediate.

I don't take the above to be simply speculative.

In truth, I've read some Kant and some Heidegger and some Sartre; my old copy of Being and Nothingness is probably somewhere in my house with other old books. Some of this rings a bell, but is not of great concern to me. — Ciceronianus the White

Heidegger's Being and Time is the seminal work. If I had kept reading analytic philosophy I would not have left it. It was accidental that I came across Rorty, who referred me to Heidegger and Derrida. The bell is for me a kind of revelation.

I'm almost hesitant to admit it given the popularity and vulgarization of Stoicism these days, but I accept as wise the Stoic view (roughly stated) that we shouldn't allow matters outside our control to disturb us, and our concern should be mastering what's in our control, and we should strive to act accordingly. Accepting that, what rings a bell as you say doesn't have visceral significance to me--it isn't something which drives me to despair or distraction, nor do I feel a need to explain or understand philosophically why we're here if that means discovering the hidden meaning and purpose of our existence. It isn't clear to me we can do so by thinking, no matter how hard we try. — Ciceronianus the White

Well, if one day you decide to look into it: Heidegger had high hopes for Buddhism, thought that it could discover a new language of deep intimacy with something primordial within that has been lost through ages of bad thinking. In fact, if someone were genuinely interested in what the "existence" part of existentialism is, I would say, read Husserl's Ideas and meditate. It is not about explaining things as one would explain a combustion engine. It is a "method" which Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction (epoche), not unlike meditation, if you think about it. His Cartesian Meditations is accessible and interesting, but his Ideas is more rigorous. In his private letters he writes that many who follow his method come to understand religion better.

According to Dewey, we only think when we encounter problems; we're reflective when we encounter circumstances which we seek to control or change. Otherwise, we conduct ourselves largely by impulse and habit. James said, as I recall, that for the most part the world, to us, is a kind of blooming, buzzing confusion which takes focus only when we feel the need to pay attention to it. We feel pain and though pain itself isn't a problem solving event, reducing or eliminating it is. What is it about pain that we must otherwise understand or think about? Why, as a general matter, we should feel it? Theology has a ready answer via Original Sin--but why is this a philosophical concern? — Ciceronianus the White

This is the shortcoming of pragmatism, and Wittgenstein knows this when he lauds action, for ethics will not be explained, but it does make its appearance, "shows" itself, and I think this is exactly where he was on this, in all of its absoluteness, which we cannot discuss, in the injunction not to do , or to do something. It is what John Caputo calls the "weakness of God" (my interpretation of Caputo, at any rate). We can clearly see that, say, being burned alive is far more than a factual affair, something that fits neatly and exhaustively in a theory like evolution or some other set of contingencies. Something irreducible in the givenness of the pain. This is what W had in mind when he prohibited talk on ethics: the metaethical "badness". Something central to all my philosophical thinking. Can't explain it, but the injunction is clear, the clearest thing I can imagine. Straight from God (W did affirm divinity, not to put too fine a point on it).
Metaethics is foundational for an exposition on what it means to be a person and it was Wittgenstein who showed me this.

You claimed in several places that you don't understand my arguments and you disagree with my references. So that's that, we can' t argue if you are incapable of comprehending what I say.

The word nincompoop you understood. — god must be atheist

I don't know what you're talking about. Put a proposition on the table, give it some support, and I will respond.

I am not sure if this is W's assumption or your addition to the set of assumptions you imbue W's points in order to deflect criticism. I admit I never read W. But you have. So have you seen this assumption written anywhere, by him, or do you think it is left to the reader to assume that this assumption exists? This is an important point. Has the meaning in the quote ever been expressed by W, or is it the reader who assumes this assumption exists? — god must be atheist

Okay, but first, what do you think? It seems like you want to bring inquiry into the assumptions of communication possibilities, as if before W can speak to us about what is or is not "speakable" he must first confirm the conditions for speaking at all are met. Is this where you are?

Answer: in my example, he places the clarity of speech and understanding on the speaker, not on the listener. Once he places the onus of clarity of understanding on the listener, W's claim is falsified. Or can be falsified under certain circumstances. Therefore he arbitrarily places the onus of understanding the clear communication on the speaker, not on the listener. This is an arbitrary placement. — god must be atheist

An interesting answer. Should have read it before the above. Of course, the same onus is on you as you write to me in this post. Since I don't know where you are going with this I will just lay out what I think is an answer: First, I have not read all of Wittgenstein and never will. I just don't aspire to this. But I do know he has a position on private languages and intersubjective verification. But putting aside what he might say, it sound lie you're asking, what IS that standard of verifiability that makes speech and communication possible? Quine and Derrida tell me absolute verification is a myth. I think we live in private interpretative worlds, and to me, at the most basic level, you are a "theory" to me, a very, very effective theory, but the language that is deployed when address you is both public (in theory) and private (yet another theory). The point is, this world of mine subsumes others and there "otherness" with a baseline for all being hermeneutics. Even my references to myself are hermeneutical. The thought that thinks the thought, observes it, questions it, is a great, great mystery to me. Frankly, it is THE mystery. But even as I entertain this AS a mystery, I am still bound to hermeneutical delimitations.

For me, when inquiry bottoms out, I am left with what is NOT interpretation, and the study of the "space" where actuality meets language, where the generative beginning of meaning and phenomena meets itself is where philosophy needs to be. Wittgenstein seems to be unaware of this, but then, he never read Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation or Jean luc Marion's On Being Given.

(And aside from your bringing up another issue, which I can only think you do because you want to obscrue the issue I had brought up. this interpretation of yours can not at all be inferred from W's quote. There is a common domain between your interpretation and W's claim, but one does not flow from the other, and one does not encompass the other. You are freely winging it, making wild claims that are not valid. I, however, do not wish to continue this new vein of discussion, because I first wish to close the discussion between you and me by coming to a common understanding, before opening up another discussion.) — god must be atheist

Opening such a discussion is entirely welcome. Not winging anything, as I know. And not at all aware of wild claims.

I have to admit one more thing: I think Wittgenstein's models are false, his insights are wrong, and his claims are not true. It is a hype that got him into reverence by many thinkers, but any thought I've heard others attribute to him has holes, large, huge, gaping holes in logic or in reasoning. It is only blind faith in his intellect that makes people bow to him and try to explain everything he has said in terms that makes sense; while in reality he is a nincompoop, a come-hither idiot of philosophy. — god must be atheist

An odd thing to say given that, as you say, you haven't read W. Calling him a nincompoop is will get you nowhere. The proof is in the arguing. The only question I have is, what have you read that makes you think so and why?

I did try to draw a parallel between Wittgenstein’s apophatic silence, and Buddhism, in an earlier post - I’m curious as to why this elicited no comment from you. — Wayfarer

Sorry. I don't know where you said this. What did you say?

As a description of a state of affairs, though, "The Nothing" does nothing for me. It doesn't communicate or express dread in any sense. In fact, it seems preposterous. On the other hand, I can understand what "dread" and "alienation" mean without much effort, and I can even understand, more or less, what is intended by "suspended in dread" as I think it can work, though clumsily, as a metaphor. A poet wields metaphor much more adroitly, though. I don't think anything is gained by resorting to such terminology when normal words suffice. — Ciceronianus the White

And you've read Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and the rest, and understand their analyses of the structure of experience, but none of this rings a bell? I have thought about this often. I can't explain it but can only say people are different in the, if you will, unnamed regions of the self. Very different. Heidegger introduced (derivatively) the idea of human dasein, which is a social, intersubjective network of language and shared institutions (see John Haugeland's take), but in order to see his Kierkegaardian "leap" is to step out of this and put question to the whole thing, even language itself. To me it is a consummation of what I have always intuited. On the other side of the Atlantic, there is analytic rigor and commitment to Wittgenstein's "clarity". I read Dennett's essay on qualia a while ago and there is was, competent, well thought out and actually helpful, but dramatically missing the point, to me. The point is to understand more deeply the actuality that is at its core meaningful. Dennett thinks of qualia as a nonsense term, and he is right! But I know this term by another name: presence, and the philosophy of presence goes back to Husserl, Fink, then Kierkegaard (and Hegel, whom I have little interest in).
There is no agreement on this in Continental philosophy, which makes it an issue. But the point is, I guess, that the concept is played out, essentially the same idea, of very different ways and the existentialists, and postexistentialists take it to its analytical end. Same goes with Quine's Radical Translation. He despised Derrida, but his conclusion seems in the same ball park.

Then again, if I want to understand what dread is, or I'm seeking a strong description of dread, I don't think I'd ask a philosopher. I'd more likely ask a psychologist or an artist. I think, with Wittgenstein I suppose, that certain things must be shown to be understood or evoked. There are some things philosophers aren't good at, and when philosophers aren't good they're very bad. As Cicero said, "There's nothing so absurd that some philosopher hasn't already said it." — Ciceronianus the White

It's a good point. Dread has always been a poor concept to describe the "feeling" of that penetrating understanding that we are thrown into a world, not of digital realities, but actuality, where reason is undone. To me, this is an extraordinary thing, but the dread of it issues from the, I dare call it, objective need for redemption. Redemption is a moral term, and the world is morally impossible as it stands before us. This is not a psychological matter, an emotional deficit or deformity on my part: it is at the very core of our actuality. In my view, that likely appears extreme you, this ethical matter, which wittgenstein calls nonsense to talk about at this level, is first philosophy.

Cicero had never read Levinas.

I think Rorty misunderstands Dewey in certain respects as do other neo-pragmatics, treating him as a kind of postmodern figure before postmodernism, and am more aligned to such as Susan Haack and Sydney Hook when it comes to interpreting him. Larry Hickman does a good job in his analysis of Dewey, particularly when it comes to his views on technology. I think the difficulty people have with his views on ethics arises from the fact that he's more concerned with developing an effective and intelligent method on which to make ethical judgments (any judgment, really) than determining what's inherently good and bad and acting accordingly. But when it comes to "everydayness" (if I understand what you mean by that) Dewey was there, and so was James, long before Heidegger. — Ciceronianus the White

I think you're right about that, and I wonder if Heidegger read Dewey. I've read some, but never studied really, and it is from Dewey I get the clearest picture of knowledge: pragmatic, end looking; a concept is reducible to the pragmatic engagement that produced it, like infantile matching sounds to events, people, things. This makes knowledge into an event, and this is Heidegger. Time is a pragmatic event that puts the past "consummations" (a Dewey term) into effect to solve occurrent problems.

But my thoughts are that this goes deeper, begs questions, because this spear in my kidney and the excruciating pain is not a problem solving event. My interpretative stand certainly is, but the ontology of the pain is simply given, qualia, presence. This Kierkegaard laid out long ago.

The unspoken becomes the subject of discussion in religion and theology, and immediate it becomes ridiculous. Not just for proposing absurdities such as "something a greater than which cannot be conceived" or the Holy Trinity, but in insisting on what we ought to do each Sunday. — Banno

I read that he was like Willard Quine, very religious, but firm in the belief that philosophy had no say in the matter. Quine, a great philosophical mind, was a Catholic, of all things. But Wittgenstein did break the rule occasionally, writing, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."
Of course, he would have to disown this as nonsense. I am sure he had no inkling as to what could be said that hovered contextually close to the taboo on language. I mean, if he can say, "the good lies outside the space of facts" I think this opens the field to a wide variety of proximate thinking and since I am a fan of Husserl through Derrida, I think, I wonder how out of bounds he would think they are. Then Levinas, if you have read anything by him, is something of an architectonic master of the proximate around the unspeakable. Yet analytic philosophers, following W's lead, shut off all such thinking as
a "seduction of language".

The unspoken becomes the subject of discussion in the philosophy lecture and immediately it becomes ridiculous. "I think therefore I am", Transcendental Idealism, absolute idealism... But to their credit philosophers are less incline to genuflect. — Banno

I subscribe to things you are dismissing. I don't mind at all arguing about it. My idea of a good time.

In the first war Wittgenstein volunteered as a forward observer, spending long nights in the freezing cold, in the most dangerous activity he could find. He said he never felt so alive.

In the second war he voluntarily left the shelter of Cambridge to work as a hospital orderly.

There's an anecdote that while he was visiting neighbours, the wife of his host asked what he would like for refreshment. Her husband chastised her, saying "Don't ask; just do" Wittgenstein applauded, saying this was the whole of ethics caught in a phrase.

What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence, but not in inaction.

Meaning as use; meaning as doing. — Banno

And I say there is a lot that can be said about metaethics, the value of value, as he put it. not so much in volume, but rather in enlightened thought.

The divide between past and future is intrinsic to our being. The attitude of dread, not so much.

Sometimes there is joy in that divide.

Alienation, dread, anxiety - these are the obsessions of urban European academics. There's more to it. — Banno

Way more! It takes a commitment to literature, frankly. Not an easy thing to do, especially with analytic philosophy dominating so in the US and GB. I won't begin to defend it, for it would be useless. But I will say it begins with wonder, a primordial wonder. The wonder turns to shocking revelation that there is no foundation to our existence, and nihilism asserts itself. Nihilism is very disturbing only if one thinks about it. Ethical nihilism is, by my thinking, impossible. Call this dread: the meeting of deep suffering and no foundational redemptive recourse.
The joy? Absolutely! This, I think, is what Buddhism is about.

I gave you an example where it is only valid if you place the reference arbitrarily to one respect; but in a different respect, where you can place the reference also arbitrarily to, the statement gets rendered to be invalid — god must be atheist

Hmmmm If I take your meaning, you say that addressing another with talk about colors requires a certain assumption about the interlocutor, which is, for one thing, that s/he is not blind. So you're implying that Wittgenstein needs to be clear about the assumptions in place regarding conditions of clarity: one can speak with perfect clarity, but if it is only clear on one side of the conversation, then clarity is lost.

If this is not your point, let me know.

Of course, W does assume something about basic conditions of making ideas clear, but these are assumption always already in place in all conversations, and to account for them all to be understood, one would spend an eternity explaining contexts of explanatory possibility. The other also needs to be competent in t he language spoken, within hearing distance, capable of reasoning well enough, and so on.

How his assumptions about an interlocutor are arbitrary you would have to tell me.

You came back with an incomprehensible quote to that. Please say what you want to say CLEARLY. If you don't, you are not living up to W's point, which you are trying to prove is true; you give a real life, living, perfect example of the opposite. — god must be atheist

Maybe Wittgenstein can make the point best:

.......for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

He is telling us that our world is structured BY logic. If you think, you think propositionally, a conditional statement like, "if it rains, then you should bring an umbrella" is commonplace, but it has a logical structure that has nothing to do with rain, the wet stuff. It is a form of thought WE bring into the world, impose on the world, construct facts out of. Stray from logic and you stray from sense making.
So consider the above. Even to imagine the unthinkable IS ITSELF unthinkable, to say X is unthinkable is to already give X thought. W looks closely as to how this works across the board, how we talk in philosophy about the world (can you imagine what is NOT the world?), reality, meta-anything. He thinks if we just reign in extravagant language that is senseless on a rock bottom logical level, we can be free of centuries of bad thinking.

We're done here. Either, you're not intellectually capable of understanding what I'm saying, or you are making absolutely zero effort to understand, or are deliberately misunderstanding. I don't care which. The consequence is the same. There's no point continuing the discussion. — counterpunch

Read some philosophy you twit!

So when they refer to words as being nonsense, or meaningless, I think they refer specifically to words as used by philosophers in writing philosophy. Carnap, for example, thought that Heidegger's almost occult references to "The Nothing" which only encounter when "suspended in dread" were nonsense as philosophical statements, as are other metaphysical statements, and could not be treated as descriptions of state of affairs, but could be conceived as expressions of attitude towards living; or perhaps as theology, or perhaps as a kind of poetry or artistic in some sense, in which case they wouldn't be nonsense. — Ciceronianus the White

Which is not how Heidegger intended it to be taken, and I consider this kind of thing to be exactly at issue here. Heidegger is leaning on Kierkegaard (as was Sartre and then the whole tradition of phenomenological ontology), and this is not intended to be poetic (merely) nor merely in the abstract of presupposition, though this is how is works logically, I mean, time is conceived apriori as a structure of foundational experience (all along keeping in mind that even such terms central to the analysis are hermeneutically derived, not metaphysically posited). Rather it is a phenomenological description that highlights alienation, that is the palpable experience of dread or anxiety that marks the division of freedom between past and future. (This "fleeting nothingness" I have read is taken up by Wittgenstein as well, though I can't remember where I read it.) At any rate, this matter IS meant to be "treated as descriptions of "state of affairs". I see it like this: Many talk about what cannot be spoken clearly, but their talk is not meant to be poetic, but a provisional description, and hermeneuticsthematically removes the brakes from logical standards of acceptability.[/b] Everything is indeterminate at the level of basic questions. Derrida will later take this to its logical end, nullifying all knowledge claims (at this level).

Strictly drawn lines are for anal retentive analytic types who wrap their garbage in well tied bow knots.

When it comes to "reconstruction" of philosophy, which it seems many thought was necessary in the 20th century, I personally honor the efforts of Wittgenstein, Carnap, Ryle, Austin and others, but ultimately prefer those of Dewey. He argued against the dualisms and metaphysical presuppositions which had been enshrined in philosophy, but also felt that distinctions such as fact/value and is/ought were inappropriate. Ethical statements were not meaningless, though efforts to arrive at asummum bonum to guide conduct were misguided. Ethical judgments could be made reasonably, could be made better, just as practical value judgments could, by the application of intelligent method (which he called "inquiry" generally). He didn't come to the conclusion philosophy was futile, but thought its focus shouldn't be on the traditional "problems of philosophy" and should instead be on "the problems of men. — Ciceronianus the White

There is an article by Simon Critchley that criticizes Rorty for trying to straddle the fence on ethics, as if strong liberal views were compatible with a pragmatist conception of knowledge. One can be led an affirmation of the values in play, the literature, the fine thinking about nuanced human dilemmas, and the like, but pragmatism cannot make one drink. It is Dostoevsky's Ivan all over again. This issue will not budge without some metaphysical presence in the assumptions.
Rorty thought Dewey was among the top three most important philosophers of the 20th century. He knew better than I, but he did give me my views on our everydayness Heidegger's ready to hand. And it was Dewey's Art and Experience that helped me understand this. Pain little attention to Ryle and the rest. I have always found, with the exception of Quine, analytic writing to be wrong minded.

Sorry Wayfarer. I'll butt out. I'm not making any progress with Constance anyhow. The more rational and specific I get, the more emotionally esoteric she becomes. I'd best quit before she starts speaking Aramaic and sending me innards in the post! — counterpunch

Do I detect a hint of sexism in this? Or perhaps this is an irrational feminine suspicion.

I'm speaking in scientific terms of religion as an evolutionary, political and sociological phenomenon. God knows what you're doing! — counterpunch

Evolution and politics? This has not entered philosophical thinking. What I am doing looking into the existential basis of religion, on this point. It is simply a matter misplaced analysis: talk about teleology and watches and caveman curiosity is outside discussion about what the enduring nature of religion is. Curiosity and invention are always there, but here it is a question of what is there that inspires this.

I just suggested that the concept of a Creator God may be responsible for the "creative explosion" that is, the development of a truly human mode of thought; abstract conceptualisation, and forward facing strategies for survival. That's in addition to God's role as objective authority for multitribal social law. To show the concept any more regard I'd have a join a negro spiritual choir! — counterpunch

Well, that's a far cry from not knowing anything at all as you said earlier. But if you wish to see the point made here, you will have to at least acknowledge that negro spiritual and its basis. Yes, people get together, sing about their troubles all the time, and there is no need for a review of black history. I am saying, if can put aside for a moment the presumptions of knowing, the matter of God and religion are grounded deeper than this. Religion certainly does come to us embedded in the culture, but it is the underpinnings of culture that philosophy deals with, and the underpinnings of our affairs in general, scientific or otherwise. Look at the negro spiritual song, the hymn of abandonment and deliverance. Abandoned from what, delivered to what? It is not the world of mere curiosities, but a condition that haunts our existence: the "why are we born to suffer and die" question which places the matter in metaphysics for philosophy.
Not to get too far afield from the original idea: Wittgenstein draws a line between what can and cannot be said given logical constraints and sense making. Religion is a case in point.

You realise I suppose that you're asking a modern man; stood on the shoulders of giants who invented modern medicine, anti-biotics, indoor plumbing and electric lights - by thinking in scientific terms, to imagine the suffering of someone who lacked those things, in order to show your need for God in suffering and moral absence? Just in case you don't see it, it's wildly ironic. — counterpunch

You have to see that being good at making things work is entirely different from religious concerns. A pragmatist, of course, puts all knowledge affairs in pragmatic interpretation, but they, like Wittgenstein, know full well that the "other side" of an interpretation is transcendence.. No one, e.g., can "speak" the color yellow. And it is here that the focus is. No one gives damn about the qualia yellow, but ethics, metaethics, the "qualia" of ethical matters which is the horror, the wretchedness, the suffering, as such: these are metaphysical issues that scream for redemption.

Look, you have to look at this from the angle of a metaethical concern: It is not about what science can say about such things, it is about what cannot be said. The "presence" of suffering, like the color yellow, cannot be said. People who cry out to God are not simply "curious"; I mean, are you serious?

My purpose is to employ the gifts bequeathed to me by the struggles of previous generations, to secure the future for subsequent generations - by knowing what's true, and acting morally on the basis of what's true. When humankind gets there, we'll get there - wherever there is. I don't pretend to know things I don't know, but I do think there's a clear path to follow! — counterpunch

And right you are! But such gifts are the product of analysis and competent thought, and this follows issues as they are presented. There may be a future to make, but to do this well in a field of inquiry it needs proper analysis. The future of religion, if you like, is at stake here. Superficial analysis will not do to liberate human thinking from its primitive past. Philosophy needs to go where the issue is and make sense out of it so as to dispel the myths and foolishness, for philosophy is our future's new religion. Existential philosophy can provide the explanatory basis for the human religious condition at the level of basic assumptions.

Of course, one would have to read this to know what it is about. Science journals will not help you.

Morality is fundamentally a sense, fostered in the human animal by evolution in the context of the hunter-gatherer tribe. Chimpanzees have morality of sorts; they groom each other and share food, and remember who reciprocates, and withhold such favours accordingly. Moral behaviour was an advantage to the individual within the tribe, and to the tribe composed of moral individuals. It's only when hunter-gatherer tribes joined together - they needed God as an objective authority for moral law. The idea that man in a state of nature was an amoral, self serving individualist; Nietzsche's ubermensch - fooled by the weak, is false. Man could not have survived were that so. He already had a very well honed evolutionary moral sense when the need arose to make that innate moral sense explicit. That's religion. It has politics at its core. — counterpunch

The barn door this misses is, I will admit, not that obvious to someone who simply has ready to hand facts. One is being asked to look more deeply, and yes, there is such a thing.

Yes, religion IS politics. But to call this is core begs the question: what is the core of politics? Politics is a system power struggles. Power to do what? Control society, it people, culture, economics and wealth and so on. Such questions as these inevitably end up as value questions. The why's of anything rest with ethics, then metaethics: people seek some kind of joy, satisfaction, thrill, elation, bliss, consummation of desire, and so on. THAT is why people do what they do, putting the incidentals aside.

What these are is unspeakable, which is Wittgenstein's point. The world "shows " us this, but this will not be contained in language.

He did not say this. He said, "what we can say can be said clearly". Big difference. — god must be atheist

Mine was an inference. I wrote,

He says what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. Of course, what we can talk about is therefore only what can be said clearly.

the first of which is from Pears/McGuinness. So, if P can be said at all, it can be said clearly. Of course, he knows people speak nonsense, so he is referring to logically responsible speech, not simply what can be iterated. Thus, when I refer to "what we can talk about" the reference is W's" what can be said in full logic compliance.

But he is wrong. You can say things that can't be said clearly. A clear example of it is talking to a blind man about colours. The speaker can say it; to the listener it will never be clear.

It is clear to the speaker though. Is that sufficient to say that W was wright? No, because he did not identify the respect in which the said thing was clear: to the speaker, or to the listener.

Bad, bad, mistake by Wittgenstein. Apparently he was not very clear when he said what he wanted to say. — god must be atheist

Alas, Wittgenstein was not that stupid to make such an obvious mistake. Here, the matter is about how an analysis of logic and the world play out.

Wittgenstein isn't saying we can't ask such questions, nor is he saying we can't "speak" of them. Obviously we can and do. I think he's saying, though, that to the extent those questions are raised, asked and addressed they're better addressed by such as poets and artists and those inspired religious/spiritual among us than by philosophers. I agree with him up to a point, as I think such questions unless addressed by such non-philosophers are answered as simply as I answered them, to the extent they admit of any answer. Beyond such answers, we enter the realm of speculation, imagination and feeling, even art. — Ciceronianus the White

But he goes further than this. He says such questions are nonsense. Absolutes, world, existence, being--these are nonsense terms, philosophically. And consider his Lecture on Ethics: ethical propositions possess an absolute and talk about the nature of ethics is nonsense. Not to say you can't be a utilitarian or think about how to conceive of ethical choices, but one cannot talk about what it is, because ethics centers on the something that is not factual, which is value. W thought the world simply has this division where meaningful terms stop being meaningful. Kant said the same in his Transcendental Dialectics and W is just following through.
I think the late 20th C postmodern writers like Levinas show us we can talk, as you say, around things, but Levinas' language (see Totality and Infinity) indulges where W tells us never to go. You're right, I think, about poetry and art, but even in literature the experiences laid bare in dramatic narrative are ambiguous, indirect, they "show" us (and Wittgenstein talked about what can be shown and what can be said, like logic and ethics) the threshold where we raise our bootless cries to heaven, but leave the ethical messiness up to us to make sense of. Philosophy can distill this into clearer thinking.
To see where W's division does damage, just look at the wasteland of analytic philosophy. They adopt his positivism, simply assuming where questions loom large.

This could involve going beyond feeling sorry for ourselves in facing the horrific or the absurd, and also, not thinking that some divine power is going to offer magical solutions.I — Jack Cummins

Such is the impossibility of the world. Simon Critchley wrote a disturbing book called Little..Less..Almost Nothing. In it he reviews the way philosophy has handled our nihilistic philosophical position, for philosophy is nihilating by nature, inherently atheistic in its true form, for nothing really survives critique at the basic level. He nails it: suffering is something we have to deal with and we can, BUT, what we cannot deal with is the pointless suffering, as if the mystical eternal Being of all things just tortures us, for nothing. This we can't handle. I think if we say we can handle this, we are just kidding ourselves. I claim unredeemed horrible suffering is impossible, just like the logic that says two colors cannot be in the same space, or that sound must be of a certain pitch
Wittgenstein was deeply religious, but it wasn't scriptural of historical. He simply knew the world could not be ethically explained. I think this is obviously right, but however, we can build language around this. Literature is usually what does this, creating narratives that display the human condition, allowing us to see, assimilate, discuss and grow wiser (one reason Rorty left philosophy to tech literature in his later years). Philosophy can do this more succinctly, that is, it can take that indirect narrative approach and distill it into its essentials. It is being done now by the French phenomenologists.

So back to our caveman, he's observing the grass grow, the animals eat the grass, the lions eat the animals, and it all fits together rather well. He plucks fruit from the trees that seems placed there just for him and so on. It's not at all inconceivable that he would ask - who made all this? And naturally, he would arrive at the idea of a Creator God, and that is the origin of the concept. It may even be that realisation of this concept drove the creative explosion. — counterpunch

Yes but the creator God is not just an incidental conjuring of an idle mind. Religion and all of its unquestioned domination throughout history cannot be conceived by such a trivial accounting. Religion is the metaphysics of human suffering and joy. Alas, metaphysics is not something one can discuss since it is more about absence where presence is needed: we are quite literally thrown into suffering, death, horror, and love, music, and the many blisses we can discover. You have to look to the need for this world to have its suffering redeemed and its blisses consummated. This is religion in a nutshell at the level of basic questions.

It's because I don't know, and I admit what I am and am not able to know. I don't believe God exists anymore than I believe God doesn't exist. I don't know. I'm okay with it, and apparently, so is God! — counterpunch

Then you haven't encountered God philosophically, and it is clear you have little regard for the idea. But imagine yourself in medieval Europe during the plague, and there you are with children whose extremities have turned black with gangrene, vomiting blood and bile, and you the same, and there is only wretchedness, and just when you think the worst is behind you, someone knocks over a oil lamp, the place catches fire and you are burned alive.
Now, this is not to talk as Nietzsche did about the mentality of the weak slave rising in numbers against the naturally gifted ubermensches of the world, though there is something to this. Nor does it look to explanations in mundane things like etymological story telling. It is something more primordial: the world as it is given to us is not stand alone ethically. There is something intrinsically wrong with woman above's situation that has no remedy in this world. Put aside silly ideas about anthropomorphic deities and look to the moral absence of the world.

Organisms evolve in relation to reality, and must be correct to reality at every level - the physiological level, that is the structure of their DNA, their cells, their bodies. The behavioural level - move away from danger, toward food, ingest energy, excrete waste, breed, etc. And for human beings - we also need to be correct on the intellectual level, and therein lies the purpose that follows from our nature - that we exist to know reality, and in knowing reality, secure our continued existence. I don't pretend to know what our existence is all about, but if there is a reason, we will find it - and do so by moving toward truth and away from ignorance and falsehood. — counterpunch

Sure, but your confidence that "we will find it out" : How does one imagine what the answer would be? Religion, at its core, is an ethical matter, and ethical deficiency. Science, talk about DNA and the rest, has no recourse at all to discover ethical resolutions because science is factual, and ethics is not. E.g., evolution is a good, defensible theory, I think, but saying pain is conducive to reproduction and survival hardly explain the reality of pain, that is, pain the phenomenon. Science never talks about this and Wittgenstein somewhat rightly placed off limits to discussion altogether. Only religion can deal with this. But religion has so much that is absurd.

I think philosophy should be allowed to take over where science and religion have failed, putting Wittgenstein's taboo aside.

I am inclined to think that the beauty of philosophy lies within the knots. We may find our meaning in their unraveling and perhaps life would not be so worthwhile otherwise. — Jack Cummins

I think you are right about that, more than right, actually. Beauty? Absolutely. Love, joy, bliss and so on, I am convinced these, if you will, resonate through eternity. We are eternity, and I don't mean this is in a flowery poetic sense. I mean, our finitude is coextensive of infinity.
Alas, there is the horror, the impossible suffering. The "knot" is this human dramatic unfolding with these intensities in play. Of course, religion has been a long played out Deus ex Machina. The question that haunts us is, is there such a thing in some unimaginable form, aka, metaphysical redemption?

What? Like... how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? I wasn't addressing that question. I was addressing the question I addressed - and it's you who are being dismissive. Religion is a poor reflection of reality; created by our ancestors for political purposes. Science is a much clearer reflection of reality. In face of the climate and ecological crisis, it's time to move on. — counterpunch

Yes, but read more closely. It is not this that is at issue. It is what underlies popular religious ideas that we are looking into. The past is full of foolishness about everything, but the proper analytic inquiry into what a thing is what we want. Take the notion of God: Why would people invent such a thing? What role does it play in describing the world? Once we dispense with all the "people features" we find there is the foundational alienation, that is, "OPEN" questions as to the meaning of our being, why people experience happiness and suffering, what eternity is and how this enters into base line thinking s to the structures of a self; and so on. Of course, such things, as is true for all thinking, need to be contextualized in a body of other thinking, that is, theory, otherwise, it is altogether alien.

This body of thought is phenomenology.

I'm not atheistic. I've said repeatedly, I don't know if God exists or not. Science does not know if God exists or not. Raising atheism is a straw man argument. — counterpunch

But you do talk like one, argue like one, reducing religion to anthropomorphic terms. Conspicuously missing from your remarks are those that would NOT make you an atheist. So tell me a-atheist, what is it that constrains your thinking from being an atheist?

I don't put the subject at the centre. I'm an objectivist. Human beings need to learn their place, as subject to forces much greater than they; not least the relationship between truth and causality. If we are not intellectually correct to reality we will be rendered extinct as a matter of cause and effect. — counterpunch

Extinct? But this is a practical concern, and being objective about practical matters certainly ranks high on my list of priorities. But the question here is one that is more simply descriptive. What IS there in the world that underlies all the fuss of all the ages about our Being here, in this reality? The fact that it IS a fuss, that there is some monumental unfinished business in the enterprise to explain the world tht remains after science exhaustively does its thing.