One thing I would like to run by you. I looked into the Kierkegaard text you mentioned on anxiety, which actually does complement those essays I mentioned from Weber and Durkheim about the anxiety of modernity. So, a thought that occurs to me, is that perhaps eliminative materialism, and other forms of materialism, which deny free will, are actually motivated by that anxiety. This is because if you deny free will, and the agency of the individual, then the whole anxiety of modernity, the 'fear of freedom' that Erich Fromm wrote about, is solved by that. You don't have fear of freedom, because you're not, and can't be, free. Problem solved! What do you think? — Wayfarer

First, the logic is all wrong, and it actually has a name, which is affirming the consequent. We don't first theorize about freedom, then concerns, worries, fear, issue from the mere assumption. Phenomenology is descriptive, not some self fulfilling prophesy. It begins with anxiety, that is, were ARE anxious, concerned in our everyday lives. Second, materialism in this reasoning would be ad hoc: not backed by its own merits as a sound theory, but just posited for the sole purpose of refuting freedom.

Third, and perhaps most important, and certainly the most difficult, is that what Kierkegaard and his ilk have in mind is not a description of social changes creating circumstances that are anxiety producing, but a structural feature of consciousness itself, as consciousness, that is what makes anxiety possible at all. Read into the third chapter, and we will have found that K is putting Time at the center of this possibility, that is in time the past, an established body of experiences, makes claims on the future, and if we simply go along with things and never question, second guess, interfere with events, then we never are able to sin (sin and its exposition IS the point of the book). What is sin? Sin occurs when we "posit" spirit, and this means we step back from our worldly existence and exercise freedom from the regular stream of events (as animals do, as things are, predictable) that would otherwise claim us. What K is talking about here is really a very simple matter: the stopping of one's affairs altogether, then, in the wake of this, realizing that you are not simply a thing, but are free to make choices. THEN, once this distance between you and rote behavior is achieved, you stand in sin, because in this affirmation, you realize that you are really a soul, and your essence belongs to God. I think K is close to Augustine on this: sin is the absence of God.
Or something like that. Those that follow, Husserl (not so much, really), Heidegger, Sartre, et al, don't take God as an essential part of it, but K's analysis of time and freedom and the anxiety of facing an unmade future is central to existentialism.

No, you're like someone who reads only a few entries from a language dictionary but claims to be proficient in the language. — baker

No, it's not like that. You want to think of it as an historical phenomenon. To me, it is much more interesting than that. Parsecs more interesting.

If all paths would lead to the top of the proverbial mountain, then everyone would already be enlightened and all your efforts are redundant. — baker

But Buddhism gets it right. All others are trying to get where this goes, but they don't know it. The question is, what is the means of accounting for this, describing it, explaining what enlightenment is in experiential descriptive contexts. Phenomenology. Why? Because it rigorously dismisses assumptions about the way things are explained outside of the immediacy of what is simply there, the bulk of explanatory distractions.

"Without contraries there no progression" sic William Blake — Gregory

Dewey said the same in Art as Experience". Those of us who live without struggle are, I would hazard, the least substantive people there are.

I don't share your confidence in finding a unifying viewpoint amongst these different thinkers regarding the experience of consciousness.
For what it's worth, here is Sartre's statement in the Transcendence of the Ego:

We may therefore formulate our thesis: transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines our existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement, but a new existence. There is something distressing for each of us, to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. At this level man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself, of being surprised by riches which are always unexpected. And once more it is an unconscious from which he demands an account of this surpassing of the me by consciousness. Indeed, the me can do nothing to this spontaneity, for will is an object which constitutes itself for and by this spontaneity. The will directs itself upon states, upon emotions, or upon things, but it never turns back upon consciousness.
— Sartre, translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick — Valentinus

But is this not already unified as a structure of thinking distinctly phenomenological? The devil is in the details, of course, but to turn away fromt he naturalistic attitude, away from the science that popularizes its ideas through technology, toward the basis of experience that is logically antecedent to science: phenomena.
Ex nihilo? Such talk! Now that's metaphysics, there with God creating out of nothing. The mind cannot even conceive of such a thing, and in fact, makes it a point to tell us it is apodictically impossible. Existential freedom has to do with choice and possibilities, but as to what is more fundamental than choice, which is the principle of sufficient cause, it says nothing of. But absolute freedom issuing from our por soi essence is nonsense, and they say he posits this simply because he wanted to hold French Nazi collaborators accountable.
To say experience is generated ex nihilo is no way to remedy an unseen cause. Granted, the generative source (keeping in mind that it is not a brain, for this leads to circular argument, for it is a brain that conceives this brain. Only a third perspective could actually say what the generative source is, and this is nonsense, says Wittgenstein) is transcendental, but that doesn't mean it is "out of nothing".

The thing is: You're not doing your homework. I'm tired of referring you to suttas for the questions you ask. There are Buddhist answers to the questions you ask about Buddhism. But you ignore them. Forget them. Apparently, don't even think of looking to the suttas for them.

It's as if you actually aspire to keep yourself ignorant of Buddhism, so that you can keep making up your own parallel Buddhism and your own definitions of terms. — baker

Just as Kierkegaard ignored much in Christian dogma, and was a better Christian than all of them, it could be argued. It depends on what it is you think is the essence of the matter at hand. When I say if Buddha were at the time of his phenomenological epiphany exposed to contemporary phenomenology, he would affirm it, welcome it, consider it as a penetrating thought, you ignore this. Or if God's grace were explained phenomenologically to Jesus he would have tossed it into the sermon of the mount. I think this true. For phenomenology provides the genuine foundation to understanding human existence. It takes what is essentially important in all religions, spiritual practices, and provides an explanatory basis. I claim that if you follow Husserl's reduction to its logical end, you end up with what is essentially important about Buddhism: Liberation and enlightenment. Who cares about the other things/ They are incidental to this.
You disagree but do you really know what it is I am talking about? All religions, all cultural institutions, language, indeed, the entire human endeavor is really describable at the level of phenomenological ontology. The Four Noble Truths begs questions, and phenomenology has the only responses, for only here are basic questions at their most basic.

Heidegger worked in the early 20's under Husserl, along with Edith Stein. Edith thought this philosophy led straight to God and apparently sided to Kierkegaard about the reason\faith divide. Heidegger left that group an atheist, having turned his scholastic training against the movement of the ever quibbling "schoolmen" (Protestant and Catholic) and forged into territory that has yet to be fully explored. His relationship with other cultures was typically German (of its time), yet the self-called "schoolmen" of traditional China had pondered questions that latter concerned him marvelway before he was born. The Japanese took the idea of "being and nothing" in many interesting directions too, more abstractly than the Chinese. What Heidegger added to the conversation among cultures was an emphasis on time, although Hegel ("Self-Consciousness" chapter of PoS and middle section of Philosophy of Nature) and Bergson had paved the way. Heidegger in fact did give to credit to his fellow German by ending B&T on Hegel, although I never remember him talking about Bergson — Gregory

The question is why Stein goes one way, Heidegger another? What makes for the timeless indecision of philosophy is not the issues being so vague, but the vagaries of people's experiences. Some people are simply intuitively wired for existential affirmation of religion.

Yes, of course. The very name of phenomenology — a word invented by Husserl to describe his approach to philosophy — is based of the Kantian idea that only phenomena are accessible to us. — Olivier5

But the point is he does go on without self effacing disclaimers, even though Kant's "Copernican Revolution" thesis hovers over everything he did. Of course he was allowed to do this because his handling of things was done as an independent synthesis of Kant and others. Heidegger is the same, though Husserl hovers close by at times. Husserl's natural attitude obviously played a role in the das man of B&T, as well as the idea of authenticity, but then, where did Husserl get it? Of course, he read Kierkegaard and others. Time? Clearly Kant's Deduction is behind this, but no mention of Kant in the exposition of Time's adumbrations of memory in the Ideas I.( Elsewhere? I haven't read of it.)
People want to diminish Heidegger, but it can't be done. In Heidegger, the human reality lives and dies and cares and is presented in the fullness of our Being in the world. But he does not affirm the transcendental ego, as Husserl did, and it is here, at this juncture this ego makes no "appearance" that interesting phenomenology lies.

What I found most interesting in The Transcendence of the Ego by Sartre is the argument that Kant meant the "ego" could be assigned to any action at any time but that the experience comes from another source. — Valentinus

Not visiting the text right now, I think what is meant is that the transcendental unity of apperception is a functional center of all experience as it produces pure synthetic form. It is an essentially rational agency that is, of course, transcendental. Thus all judgment issues form this. Experience is also intuitive, and sensory intuitions have there source in something completely other. Noumenal "reality" has two fronts, the TUA is us, the other is not. Husserl called it hyletic. Reading Patrick Whitehead: "Hyletic phenomenology allows for ontological reversibility and recognizes the “unhuman” elements in things."

Sartre and many others were big fans of H. To my knowledge it's only Merleau Ponty who saw H. more as an usurper than as a heir to Husserl. — Olivier5

But there is The transcendence of the Ego by Sartre in which he takes issue with Husserl's generative ego, very busy as the fountain of experience. Sartre thought this compromised the unseen, which he infamously called nothingness.
Haven't read Mereau Ponty. He is on my list, along with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Sure, but my question was: does Heidegger pays his debt to Husserl in B&T? — Olivier5

Did Husserl pay his debt to Kant? Kierkegaard to Hegel? Kant to Aristotle? Heidegger to Kierkegaard? But then, no, he didn't. In the end, after Freiberg, the Heidegger's reached out to the Husserl's, and the latter told the former to go F*** themselves. It was because Heidegger sided with the Nazis, even for a brief time.
As to theory, reading Husserl's Ideas is nothing like B&T at all. Both are extraordinary.

Sartre and many others were big fans of H. To my knowledge it's only Merleau Ponty who saw H. more as an usurper than as a heir to Husserl. — Olivier5

By H you mean Heidegger. Heidegger did not pull B&T out of a hat. It is the phenomenology that Husserl gave him, and they do agree a lot. But Husserl did not encompass the whole human dasein, and if you read Heidegger's thoughts on space, time, hermeneutics, moods, das man, the Greeks, freedom, authenticity, instrumentality, ready to hand, presence at hand, and so on, you see how original he is.
Of course, I certainly haven't read all of either, so I can't speak authoritatively, only based on what I've read. But it was surprising to read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. There was Sartre there, Husserl here, Heidegger there, I mean this guy really laid the foundation for all of this.

Here in California christians are up in arms, saying "the Bible is under attack". They think their religion trumps safety over the current virus and they go crazy if you tell them that Jesus is not God. I told one crowd to " recall Jesus" instead of the governor. Ye they don't like me sometimes — Gregory

But consider that you put the whole matter in the arena of people with a vested interest in the status quo, whether they are simply believers or institutional fixtures, they all, all that are included in your comments, without an intellectual conscience in place well enough to think philosophically about religion. So yes, most Christians lack, well, the capacity for sound argumentation. Kierkegaard is famous for exactly this. See his Attack on Christendom. Thre is a reason he is called the father of Existentialism.
One doesn't have to be a moron or a predator to be a Christian, I suppose is the point.

Most of the saints in the Church were great sinners. They are said to be better than others because of the grace and merit Jesus gave them. Which is my main problem with Christianity: they think they are "Jesus" — Gregory

But this is just the dark side of Christianity, the only thing Nietzsche thought about. There is another side altogether.

I think Augustine was such a big sinner that he had to posit the idea of taking on Jesus's merits in order to feel clean again. I think he went to hell, if there is such a place. I don't know enough about Kierkegaard to say more than I've already had. I appreciate his influence on Heidegger — Gregory

His Confessions do sound suspiciously confessional in the extreme. I mean, confessions are commensurate with the deeds done, and he was way over the top. Popular Christianity is a huge guilt trip, especially when it comes to original sin the way Luther talks about it (see this in the Smallcald articles) as the monstrous act we all share in.
But on the other hand, and this would be Heidegger's response as well, since that time we have become trivialized by our instrumental mentality that issues from the dominance of technology. The world is now a "standing reserve" rather than a dynamic for meaning making in human life. this is why Heidegger championed poetry as a kind of crucible where our dasein creates value. German romanticism has a long history, and the essential idea is that the arts are redeeming. But the arts, I should add, are not complete.

I don't have a view that solves differences. But the difference between Lacan and Foucault strikes me as a sharp disagreement about what is happening. We live our experiences and the mirror we view them through is significant. The right thing to do is is incumbent upon understanding what is happening correctly.
Easier said than done. — Valentinus

I don't think analyses of systems of implicit power in social institutions is helpful here, and I don't know much about Lacan. But getting understanding of the "right" view is not therefore impossible because it is not easy. why do we disagree so much? Why was Quine so adamantly against Derrida? Why is there such a wide schism between continental and analytic philosophy? It is because, I claim, of the way we constituted intuitively, and the way theory clouds reasoning and experience. I read Being and Time and I knew he was right, instantly. I also knew Wittgenstein was right about his Kantian claims about the delimitations of understanding. These were platforms to build on, but foundationally, right. And Husserl's epoche, I knew instantly he understood something deeply important, the same thing Buddha knew, only the latter knew it so much better.
Others look upon the epoche and all the post Husserlian work (especially by the French) as just the 'seduction of language". But the proof is in the pudding?

I like to talk to all kinds of thinkers, but some schools of thought i dont like to read. What could eventually resolve Kierkegaard's anxiety if God is a fiction? He did not want to go to reason, it was a path too arduous with its anxiety for him. Hegel's dialectic comes to an end while continuing forever. I do not know what Kierkegaard's final conclusion was. He is too Augustinian for me — Gregory

But this begs the question. God? What does Kierkegaard say about God apart from the religious dogma? And what does he say about religious dogma? You really have to comes to grip with the profound differences between rationalism and existentialism.
Augustine is revered by the church for many reasons, and he does provide interesting philosophy here and there, as with sin: the absence of God, essentially. Not a complete argument, but Kierkegaard saw this as true. See his analysis of sin and the "positing of spirit" but do so as he does, with no scriptural references as all. Nor with any of the church's metaphysics, but rather with an explicit denial of this: the book's full title is, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. It is an existential analysis of experience, making Time, history, culture, finitude and infinitude, and most of all, the real palpable stuff of what human being are, their heartaches and joys as central to understanding what Christianity really is all about.
How is anxiety possible at all? How does the mundane affairs of our anxious and concerned spell out in a phenomenological ontology? This is where Kierkegaard puts his timeless stamp on things.

Incomplete how? Because it's a short paragraph from a glossary? Every term in that paragraph has numerous references in the suttas and in the commentaries, which have further references in suttas and commentaries.

The incompleteness is in your approach to the matter. — baker

But here we speak of philosophy. We make inquiries, describe, contextualize, and not to make the unspeakable speakable, but to explain what it is all about at the level of basic questions. Just that!

Why look outside of Buddhism for things to help one understand Buddhism? — baker

Because this is what language does. It is inherently interpretative. Calling something ultimate reality is seriously incomplete. Language is, as I see it, a yoga, and there is nothing new here. But consider, when ideas were first put forth, they were ideas, a way of disclosure as to what things are. Such ways are malleable, open. Life is suffering, e.g. What is suffering? You can dismiss this question, but there IS an answer to it, a metaphenomenological answer. And this stands to elucidate concepts like enlightenment.

paṭicca-samuppāda
Dependent co-arising; dependent origination. A map showing the way the aggregates (khandha) and sense media (āyatana) interact with ignorance (avijjā) and craving (taṇhā) to bring about stress and suffering (dukkha). As the interactions are complex, there are several versions of paṭicca-samuppāda given in the suttas. In the most common one, the map starts with ignorance. In another common one, the map starts with the interrelation between name (nāma) and form (rūpa) on the one hand, and sensory consciousness (viññāṇa) on the other. [MORE: SN 12.2, DN 15 ] — baker

It is not to say this wrong at all. But it is incomplete, and ANY philosophy that can help complete it is valid regarding what Buddhism is.

But the problem is, rather, and I don't know how to say this to you nicely, is that you lack respect for the Buddha. Yet you nevertheless keep referring to him. You are determined that you already know what enlightenment is and isn't, and anyone who doesn't match those ideas of yours, is, per you, wrong or insufficient.
I wonder why you look to the Buddha, if you clearly have no intention to take his words seriously. — baker

Don't worry about being nice, you do just fine.
But you know where I am going with this: When Buddha had is his significant enlightening moment (moments, period, whatever), was he following the four noble truths? Did he read this somewhere, follow the methods laid down after the fact? Of course not. The four noble truths is not an ontological dogma. It is an observation and a method. I am interested in how to describe the enlightenment experience in the context of Husserl's epoche. This is actually being done. If Buddha had read Husserl and others, he would have said, why yes! Of course!

Intimidated by what? And you are seeking out "abstract writers"??

He used Hegelian dialectics in his own reasoning to confound Hegel. His complaint with Hegel goes to the very foundation of existential philosophy. What is real is existence, and this is experienced as a single subject. Kierkegaard presented a phenomenology of alienation that saw rationalists like Kant and Hegel privileging an abstraction, as if the universal of a concept AS a concept could encompass palpable existence. You have to read Philosophical Crumbs and Repetition, among other things to see how this complaint plays out, especially in ethics.
But the real reason why K is so important is that he proclaimed the true reality we face lies in the interiority of experience, in the "passionate engagement" of actuality. This yearns for consummation and redemption beyond dogma of mere ideas. We are made of the dramatic stuff of a lived existence, and Kierkegaard thought this is a place where the finite meets the infinite at the level of ontology, the "meta" level of analysis of existence. Of course, he was, as Heidegger called him, a religious writer, and explicitly so, but his philosophy is not like this at all. In fact, in The Concept of Anxiety, he argues largely outside religious references.
Then there is Hegel who, like a good rationalist, put the onus of religious understanding on reason. I'm with Kierkegaard, in my own way: what is reason? It has no content as such, but is the mere form of judgment, and always takes its meaning from the content delivered by actuality. Saying that the real is rational is not entirely wrong, but only if we keep this in mind: reason is an abstraction ONLY because it is taken (abstracted) from existence to be observed analytically, and the same goes for all such inquiries. Originally they are part of an ineffible whole, ineffable because one cannot stand apart from it to say what it is; one is always , already In it the moment inquiry even begins. "Actuality" is the same. Originally it is an integral part, not separable at all. We do the separating when we think about it. Talk about reason and actuality as separate is like talking about heat and molecular activity separately (both scientifically conceived terms, here).
In the context of Kierkegaard's position, rationalists simply ignore actuality.

Many of the thinkers you have been referring to have presented themselves as resisting an error of one kind or another. Along with the version that is being put forth as the truth is an explanation where others have gone wrong. Discourse may require the continuing lack of of answers on some level. — Valentinus

What error? Don't be shy, what are you talking about?

It was mentioned above about how Kierkegaard felt about Hegel, and it common knowledge that he called on spiritual beings to save him from anxiety — Gregory

There is nothing of a textual reference in this. Why is it that Kierkegaard opposed Hegel?

What the "ego" may seen to be in these different psychologies that you refer to is not self explanatory from my point of view. Noting the limits in each theory makes me less inclined to state what is true for everybody than to see the works collectively pointing to one thing. — Valentinus

What limits?

That is fine, and not what my disagreement is about. My point is about the idea that he "attributes to the Germans a special task" via the German language. Which strikes me as nationalo-centric.

To illustrate my disagreement, IF language is an integral part of the construction of Being, in my interpretation of this sentence, it would imply that a human being speaking several languages is a more complete being than one who speaks only one language. But this is not the conclusion Heidegger draws. Rather for him, who to my knowledge spoke only German, perhaps with a smattering of greek, learning another language such as English or French would have been closer to a compromission with lower forms of thought than those possible in German. There is a striking parallel with the idea that racial diversity is a problem rather than an asset.

His philosophy, his world-view, was consistent with nazism, which he adhered to voluntarily. The Dasein is Hitler-compatible. THAT is the problem. — Olivier5

Yeah, that is annoying. But I don't know why he makes this claim about German and Greek so I just leave it alone. On the other hand, how is it that he can make claims about other languages' deficit in meaning possibilities if such a thing can only be understood by native speakers, and he is NOT a native speaker of French or English or Swahili anything else? After all, the difference he must have in mind must be nuanced, what only a native speaker could know.
Oh well.

One aspect of this all game -- and a reason why I think his Spiegel interview remark about French philosophers speaking German was a kind of joke but a telling one -- is that a great deal of 19th century German philosophy can be seen as a response to 18th century French philosophy, the time when Voltaire was advising Frederick the Great in Prussia. Followed by the revolution and napoleonic empire which swept over Prussia. By the 1950s though, the relation was reversed and many French philosophers spoke of Dasein, Umwelt and Gestalt... Here too I see a parallel between Hitler's revenge after the humiliation of WW1. — Olivier5

I suppose. But Being and Time carries none of this resentment itself. Was it in the background? You know, it is speculated that B&T does open this door, after all, dasein is an historical construct, so this invites a competition between cultures and their languages. But I still say, who cares. His phenomenology is an extraordinary reinterpretation the world. Powerful and compelling. F*** the rest of it.

One of the qualities Kierkegaard exhibited in The Concept of Anxiety is that the "self" who loves or not is always represented as a result of a process geared toward completing a certain end. The possibility of being an agent is presented in contrast to that.

The prospect of selecting between "competing" desires is interrupted by another dimension where the options are not easily laid side by side. — Valentinus

That really is the issue. I think of it in terms of Heraclitus and Parmenides: the ego that is conversing here with you is memory that seizes the present, and this is a constant process, this generative and generated self. But there is that mysterious present, isn't there? This is not an abstraction, not a Zenoistic contrived play with time and space. The Kierkegaardian analysis has two fronts that I see. One is the remembrance that we actually exist, and existence is not an idea, and Hegel thereby misrepresents what it is to be a person, for we are apart from the conceptual agreement that circulates and steals our identity. The other is the paradox of sin: We are only sinful when we posit spirit, for in this positing we see our alienation from the eternal. His Knight of Faith is one (beyond what K is capable of) who can make this qualitative movement into faith, and be here, in the world, a baker, a butcher, but reside with God as well. As I understand it, this is understood in a temporal analysis of our existence. A long story having to do with historical sin and culture and the turning away from our primordial relationship with God.

So how does one even conceive of the soul and God? As I see it, apophatically. the soul is this ineffable essence that is our eternal reality, and is revealed only as the sin of our obsessions (our historical/cultural fixations) yields to the eternal present, and this present (which Wittgenstein takes seriously) is the true eternity.

I look at what meditation is, and I find precisely this analysis. Turn off the imposition of culture and its temptations and engagements, i.e., turn off thought and affections, and time vanishes. The eternal present.

Hey thanks, I found that Der Spiegel interview you refer to. Obviously a very important cultural artifact. I’ve never read Being and Time, although many decades ago, I was friends with someone in whom it triggered an intense cathartic realisation, and I formed the view that it is probably an important book. On the other hand, like a lot of people, I have been put off by Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism and the suggestion that his philosophy leans towards fascism. I think about reading it, but I haven’t taken the time yet. — Wayfarer

Everybody is put off by that. But I think, if it were discovered that Louis Pasteur were, say, a child molester, would we simply stop taking vaccines? Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and to bypass him is to miss something essential to understanding the world.

I gloomily suspect that this is true, but I have no inkling if it is being done. If any of Heidegger’s successors are doing that, I’d like to know, but I suspect not. I am familiar with the anecdote of Heidegger being caught reading from D T Suzuki and saying ‘if I understand this man aright, this is what I’ve been trying to say all along’. But I take his point that we can’t assimilate Zen Buddhism tout courte. We - westerners - have created the cultural predicament which we suffer from, and we have to find a way out of it on those terms. I think that’s what he’s saying. — Wayfarer

The gloomy part is in the way culture has yielded to technological attitudes, and the world becomes more and more like "standing reserve", enframing, I think he called it, which amounts to, in my thinking, a complaint similar to Kierkegaard's regarding Christendom: what is meaningful and originary is lost, so we are alienated in the world, no longer "at home" because our lives are now made out of utility concerns and is not responsive to this primordial part of what we are (alienation from God, said Kierkegaard. And for him, it was this cultural fascination that was the essence of sin). See how the Marxist's frame this in terms of class exploitation and alienating capital. Nietzsche went after Christian resentment against the greatness of certain men, and this resentment became a metaphysical institution. Everyone has their terms of alienation, but all seek redemption somewhere in the body of thought they inherit. I tout the Buddhist approach because it is a method (as is Husserl's epoche, I should add) of liberation from all structures of thinking. Husserl and Heidegger laid a foundation for discussing what this is about.
As to Heidegger's successors, well, that would be what I am reading now. Right now, I am reading Being and Time again, critical works on this by Michel Henry, Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditaion, I go back to Kierkegaard often to remind me that Christianity doesn't have to be so nitwitted, and as well, I read Meister Eckhart, Buber, Levinas, Caputo (see his Radical Hermeneutics!), I review Kant sometimes, never read Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit but I've been meaning to, Marion (On Givenness which extends the thinking of Husserl, as does Fink. I am fascinated by the idea of presence. Reading Heidegger put the framework of being human as Time, but it was Kierkegaard who inspired this: his Concept of Anxiety is a bit hard to read, but if you stick with it, it reveals the basis of existentialist thinking, and you can see why Heidegger goes back to the Greek, where Being was a central issue, that is, being and becoming, Parmenides and Heraclitus. Derrida. Can't say I understand him well, and I don't have the patience to read Grammatology, but I have read Differance and others, and I think he puts the nail in the coffin of analytic philosophy.
Why do I find all of this so important? Because of hermeneutics, for one thing. This makes the system open. Open to what? Truth? What is truth? This lies in a description of the world as it is, and this is phenomenology: dismissing the natural attitude, making a qualitative move to enlightenment. to move forward from here, onw has to inquire and read.

SPIEGEL: You attribute to the Germans a special task?

Heidegger: Yes, in the sense explained in the dialogues with Hölderlin.

SPIEGEL: Do you believe that Germans have a special qualification for this conversion?

Heidegger: I am thinking of the special inner kinship between the German language and the language of the Greeks and their thought. This is something that the French confirm for me again and again today. When they begin to think, they speak German. They assure [me] that they do not succeed with their own language.

Gee, I bet the French just loved that. :blush:

Sorry for the digression. — Wayfarer

It does sound like a weird thing to say. I think it is as I commented above, Heidegger believed enlightenment is forged out of language, and there is some primordial way to disclose the world and erase its alienation that is the brass ring of philosophy. He had a lot of confidence in the Greeks, used their original terms a lot. I don't know, maybe he was right about something here.

I read in some edition to the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Tibetan monks, in their day, and now, as well, I think, for this is not a publishable affair, anyway, they would discuss their "subterranean" experiences in language that is very exclusive, esoteric. I wonder....

This guy was so naïve, so simplistic sometimes... It really makes one wonder about the lack of street wisdom of some overly theoretical philosophers, who don't have much patience for empirical facts, nor any awareness of their own cultural biases apparently. Also there is this "manifest destiny" of the German volk here, as the "thinking volk"... Ja ja. My grandfather really liked their metaphysics in the camps. — Olivier5

You have to see that Heidegger believed that language is an integral part of the construction of Being, and so, when you examine works of philosophy, literature, poetry, rhetoric, and then, even in the hard sciences (think Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions), you are FIRST looking at language possibilities, meanings as that which can be brought to bear on any novel affair. I don't speak German or ancient Greek, but who knows, Heidegger could have a point. I leave it up to the philosogists. As to Heidegger's bout with Nazism in the 30's , it is universally agreed that it was despicable.

But then, he know nothing at all about what they were doing in the camps. But then again, he never properly condemned all of this afterwards. So, do what Hubert Dreyfus did: take what is there and just put aside the rest as irrelevant to the philosophy, which was absolutely amazing.

Naive is the last term I can imagine that would apply to Heidegger. On the other hand, at the time there was this infatuation with volkism, wasn't there? Himmler and the rest took it seriously, that there were ancient divisions between the pure races that were corrupted by "foul practices". I don't think he bought into this at all, but he did buy into the spirit of a German rebirth which he thought the Nazis could pull off. But then, they went sideways.

The consequent moral realist has suspended all self-doubt and anything that could induce it. — baker

But the proof is in the pudding, a conversation about doubt, moral realism and the rest. Otherwise, it is just a generic complaint. Do you think the Buddha in his phenomenological prime, had doubts?

These are deep problems, I'm not proposing any solution. But I think what has to be worked out is, if enlightenment and liberation are the goals, what do they mean? Christianity doesn't often utilise that kind of terminology, especially Protestant Christianity, which casts everything in the light of sin and redemption, rather than ignorance and enlightenment. That's a shadow to the whole enterprise and whatever philosophical proposal is made to address these issues has to navigate these treachorous seas! — Wayfarer

But I do propose a solution. It lies with phenomenology. And Wittgenstein. And Husserl. and others. The point is not that any one has put their finger precisely where it needs to be, but that once the Husserlian epoche is is understood, one can finally see where philosophy is supposed to go. the reason there continues to be so much controversy is not that philosophical understanding has yet to achieve this monumental task, but that people are all put together so differently/ If you ask me, the Buddha had it right, and that was long ago, but he didn't have the theoretical tools to talk about it, to provide a phenomenological exposition on the actual descriptive features of enlightenment. As I said, such things are notoriously unsayable, but what is sayable are the contextual features, and phenomenology shows just this. But still, it does depend literally on how a person is put together to acknowledge this. Not all can, and this I affirm from discussions and reading. Not all are math wizards, nor artistic geniuses, or acrobatically inclined and so on. This is just the way it goes, and it is the fundamental reason why what I will call existential aptitude is not universal: it is not like the ability to understand the basics of logic or experiential intuitions, what every person simply knows. It takes a talent, if you like. Don't really care how this sounds, but I am convinced this is just the way it is.
Sin, redemption? See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety.
As far as I]'m concerned, philosophy is done, already reached its end, and in theory, this would be Derrida. But Derrida is just pointing to something that remains a complete mystery, and I think he was a remarkable thinking person, but likely too smart to see that it was the intellectualizing that finally had to be dropped. It's fun to be brilliant, but to put it in Buddha's language, it does encourage attachment.
I'm am done with navigating: Calm the breath, suspend thought and its moods, attitudes, affect, and just put it all down, and here is where one stands close to something really profound, which is the eternal present, a Kierkegaardian idea that found its full expression in Heidegger, who sought passionately for a new grounding in human existence, and thought perhaps the answer could lie with....Buddhism. (see his famous Spiegel interview). Of course, the Buddhists have been light years ahead of everyone for a very long time, but they were never good at telling people why. Not that I've read.

But there is a response to your rhetorical question: we care about what reality is, because, in Aristotle's phrase, 'we seek to know'. The desire to know, to understand, to make sense out of existence, is surely a deep drive. — Wayfarer

Case in point: why does one seek to know? Seeking is not a logical move, it is a passionate one. One cares, wants, desires, as you say, but these are not "reality" terms. Not ontological categorical terms. I am saying that every act ever committed by anyone is performative question begged when the purpose is made known, for the purpose is bound to motivation, desire and the rest. None of this? Then there is no substantive meaning to what is done. WE bring meaning into the world of facts, ways Wittgenstein. Every utterance, thought, moment of experience may have its own end and content, explicitly stated, but underpinning this the quest for meaning, the foundation of all things.

This is suggesting of the idea of 'higher self' or 'higher consciousness'. You find that in Fichte, who distinguished the finite or empirical ego from the pure or infinite ego. The activity of this "pure ego" can be discovered by a "higher intuition". It is also reminiscent of Schelling's 'intellectual intuition' or Jacques Maritain's 'intuition of being'. (Dermot Moran says that the German idealists retained some fragments of the 'doctrine of illumination' which had othewise died out in Western philosophy during the preceeding centuries; Maritain, of course, was a Catholic philosopher.) — Wayfarer

But you will have to deal with objections that come in later. If there is to be a true phenomenological description of what unfolds before us, the "no show" of this higher consciousness, and here just think apophatically, so that when the inventory of what is "there" is all there is to be accounted for, cognitive, eidetic, structural, and so on, never shows up. This is why meaningful talk about this is usually cast int he negative. As Kant reasoned, by extrapolating from what IS apparent in experience, to what has to be the case in order for this to be. Reason, is there, and it presents itself in the forms of judgments we make in a regular way. But where does this come from? Even if you are a Kantian about the "soul" and its rational functions, you realize that when we look upon these functions, you're perspective is circular for to affirm the rational form of judgment occurs IN judgment. There is no third perspective that is removed fromt he very condition you are trying to affirm. Can the eye "see" the eye, so to speak? This is what Wittgenstein was very clear on. Transcendental reality cannot be conceived, for the understanding can only understand itself, and to speak of a "beyond" of this is nonsense.
But on the other hand, ASSUME that our power of reason is an absolute, say, a "function" of the mind of God, and assume that when a function of the mind of God, through the agency of a person, a transcendental Unity of Apperception, if you like, conceives itself, this is an absolute conception, for what else can the mind of God produce? That is, God's judgment cannot beg questions.
But this is a very tough row to hoe. Here is where Wittgenstein comes in, for in order for a concept to make any sense at all, its opposite has to be conceivable, and the opposite of thought and its logic is not conceivable.
But then, how do account for these apodictic intuitions? they are at best, representations of something we cannot conceive. But it is my view that while we cannot conceive of the nature of logic (btw, Kant didn't call logic an intuition, but only a discursive function. But how do these discursive maneuvers work? Well, intuitively. What else?), we certainly can talk around it, look closely at how our conception of logic and other intuitions are engendered, get in proximity to the generative source. This is what Eugen Fink does in his Sixth Meditation. He follows Kant (or the Kantian Fichte) through to further reaches: the "enworlding" of the world.

I'm receptive to the idea; I think the term 'transcendental ego' is a plausible synonym for the 'higher self'. But it's hardly respectable in current philosophical circles; you will find it in Rudolf Steiner or theosophy but not in existentialism or phenomenology where it will usually be rejected as occult and or new age. — Wayfarer

No, theosophy is off the table in respectable philosophy, and I think there is good reason for this; but then, it is not WHAT is said, but the intuitions behind saying. The disagreement is in the justification for positing something, and this always goes badly extravagant metaphysics, systems of unseen ontologies.
What circles are you talking about? Phenomenology? No. The issue of a transcendentla ego in phenomenology goes back at least to Kant (Plotinus and Christian metaphysics, and lots more, of course) in serious contemporary philosophy, but this is sin continental philosophy, where Kant never died an untimely death. He was never refuted, only ignored. there is Kant, then the three H's, Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger, and everyone else in the system of this thinking. Check out, for example, The Transcendedntal Ego by Sartre, his refutation of Husserl on the nature of the ego.

If you read Vedanta, the ego is precisely what has to be 'slayed' by the aspirant (chela) so as to awaken to the Self (see The Teachings of Ramana Maharishi). There is a parallel in New Testament in that the disciple is urged to 'lose his life for My sake', where Adam is the personification of ego and Jesus the higher consciousness. Buddhism rejects the idea of 'higher self', or any self, altogether, although arguably the Buddha Nature teachings can be mapped against it (with strict caveats). — Wayfarer

I don't read much Eastern metaphysics, because it's metaphysics. That goes for explicit Christianity as well. But I am willing to read "around" these thoughts. Kierkegaard, Otto, Buber, then Husserl, and oward, these articulate the matter very well, better than their popular counterparts.

In my view, the problem of ethics is in the constitution of modernity itself. 'Being modern', apart from being born at a particular moment in history, is also a distinctive and novel form of consciousness, based on a new conception of what it means to be an individual. This article about Max Weber casts some light: — Wayfarer

I don't really agree with this kind of thinking, on either side. Reason is not cold and calculating; it's not anything at all! Just the form of judgment. And the humanistic dimension of our existence is better handled by Levinas. But most if not all really miss the boat on ethics. The business of philosophy is to get as far into basic assuptions as possible, and this means ethics has to be revealed for its "parts". It has parts, and is not irreducible. What is MEANING?? This is the question. Not Frege's "sense" but meaning, like this lance in my kidney, or my love of Ravel. Value is the center of philosophical concern. It is first philosophy. Ask, what is the Good? This is where an inquiry into human existence begins. NOT what is reality? This begs the question: why do you care what reality is? It is a performative QBing, this asking the question is motivated, concerned, there os a mood, an affect that makes it all important.

And also this one on Emile Durkheim — Wayfarer

I do get this. But I want to take the matter where philosophy goes, and not stop where issues are so entangled.

I noticed, when studying Buddhism, that one of the supreme virtues of the Buddha was yathābhūtaṃ, 'to see things as they truly are'. It was simply assumed that this was one of the attributes of the Buddha's omniscience. Whereas in techno-culture, 'how things truly are' is devoid of value, meaningless, as 'what truly is' are the elemental particles or forces of physics, within which the individual has emerged due to fortuitous circumstances.

Food for thought, that's all. — Wayfarer

A feast, really. Read the Abhidhamma and there is talk about confronting ultimate reality. The trouble is, there is no real explanatory concepts that reveals what this is. Like ethics, it cannot be spoken, but one CAN speak around it, of it, and phenomenology offers the vessel for just this. Heidegger's language of Being, dasein, hermeneutics, time, space, authenticity and so forth opens doors. Husserl, too. Kierkegaard, and Levinas, and there are so many who present the case, provide a contextual framework for serious discussions about what enlightenment and liberation really are.

That would be ego, and conditioned thought, and discursive reasoning, in my reading. — Wayfarer

But this ego is a slippery discussion. If it is taken to mean the assertive self, with confidence and even aggression behind it, as if in competition, then the ego is, by my lights, something objectionable, in need of a good critical censure. But if the ego is beyond this, an agency that is "other-worldly" then the best we can do is construct arguments and descriptions that are in the field of where this transcendence leaves the mundane. It's like ethics: we don't know what it IS, but we do know how we experience it and talk about it, and these can be objects of analysis. Ethics is an injunction to do or not to do something, and this is grounded in the "givenness" of experience, ande THIS is not reducible, or, if it is reducible, it is so in the language that constructs the idea that can be talked about, NOT in the injunction and its palpable counterpart: the OUCH! experience.
We can talk around it, about it, how it fits, is contextualized; we just can't interpretatively nail it down like I can nail down what a bank teller is or an igneous rock.

Are you still representing Kant here? I don’t see why this should necessarily follow from "[Intuition's] foundation is unknowable." Let’s take my Jesus example above (which I don’t believe in, but which I think is a coherent story – not empirically true, but not a story that violates logic). Jesus may not know where his intuitions came from, and may never know (in which case they are unknowable to him or perhaps to any human being); nevertheless, God put those intuitions in him; so they are not just a construct, and not contingent. — Acyutananda

Is knowledge an intuition? I know my cup has coffee without looking. Memory, of course. But memory simply "comes" to you. And how do you know you can rely on memory? Memory tells us about events in the past with a great deal of accuracy. So we have this system which is essentially pragmatic: memory works, it's consistent, and why is consistency preferable? Because it works.
It is a strange business to be like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and intentionally make great pains to spit in the face of reason and logic (using reason to do so, of course), but frankly, I lean toward your position when all is said and done, for it is not reason the underground man objected to; not really. Reason has no content. It is an empty vessel that neither denies God nor affirms foundational meaning. What the objection is really about is the presumptions of knowing that true conclusions follow from true premises, and here is what is true....Such confidence is ridiculous. A great book: Shestov's All Things Are Possible, in which he shows us how this confidence is groundless. We "know" nothing of the foundation of all things, yet meaning, not Frege's' "sense" of what ideas have, but affect, moods, joys and tragedies, these are the things at the center of the human condition, not clarity is what is true.
The significance of our intuitions lies not with reason, the empty vessel, but with the meaning it carries: the Good! And the Bad! What does it mean that I "enjoy" this danish with coffee? Or love Van Gogh and Ravel? What does it mean to be happy? Or to suffer terribly? These are the things humanity is about, and they simply are "there" and are complete mysteries. Intuitions.

Quite right.

I really should add that I am by no means a master of any of this. I simply read with understanding, and I usually do passably well. I read Heidegger for the first time about four years ago. Had to know, so I read Being and Time. Simple as that.
Astounding thing to wrap your mind around.

Philosophy isn't religion, nor is it art, or so I think. We shouldn't look to philosophy or philosophers for any deep insights into life or the world or ourselves, because philosophy can only be expressed through language, and there are limitations on the power of language to explain. Philosophy is supposed to explain, not evoke or inspire. When we look to philosophy as we look to religion or art, we read into it and the language used by philosophers far more than that language can reasonably be construed to mean. — Ciceronianus the White

But i do take issue with this. I think philosophy is THE religion. It's the people who are either inclined or disinclined to see it this way that makes the difference. I think ancient thought and its mysteries are important not because they are right, but because stand apart from systems of understanding which trivialize what it is to be human. Philosophy can reinstate something lost, only do so intelligently. And this is being done now, and has been for a long time, but few notice because, simply put, people are put together very differently.
Philosophy and deep and inspiring? How about Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety? Or Levinas's Totality and Infinity? There really are many, but they are embedded. Kierkegaard is very off putting in his idiomatic style and his endless references. Levinas is impossible, at first, but then you ease into his language.
I mean, it isn't a welcome thought, but the best stuff, and it does get really good, is hard as hell to get familiar with.
Like Kant.

This much of your post seems to be in almost complete agreement with me. The only difference between us seems to be your "as close . . . that I can imagine." Why not just say "This is a genuine/correct intuition," as I do?

Could not your "there is no answer. . . . apprehended" be paraphrased “The correctness of this geometric principle/proposition cannot ultimately be proved by any discursive argument. Its correctness ultimately rests on intuition, Such intuitions are intuitions that almost everyone has, and they are correct intuitions" – ?

"we are 'shown' things through intuition, but intuition is not that which is shown."

Can you refer me to where Kant says this? Anyway, I agree.

"[Intuition's] foundation is unknowable." — Acyutananda

As to Kant, his transcendental idealism is all about representation. When an idea is put in place, and its logic on tact, this structures our world, but then there is the problem of noumena. This impossible "otherness" of all of our thoughts and experience applies to sensible intuitions as well as the transcendental ego of apperception. I would have to go over this again, read the Deduction and, well, the whole thing, but Kant's analysis takes us to the point where explanations run and even sensible talk runs out, which is why he was so reluctant to talk about noumena. It is unspeakable.

Wittgenstein made it a point to disarm knowledge of its power to penetrate the world absolutely. His argument, among others, was this: for a concept to be sensible, its opposite has to be conceivable. So to talk about something beyond thought, beyond logic, is not even conceivable. When we are faced with the question, what is logic? we really don't have even a possible response, for to have this would require something that is not logical to describe it, lest the question is begged. So while we are irrevocably IN logic, we cannot say what it is.
The "what" of what is shown is impossible to understand. One can only use logic, and observe its structure "through logic itself". All explanations are, after all, propositional.
Take a look at Rorty. Is logic really foundational? Or is it something else? How about pragmatics? I was once an infant child, a world of "blooming and buzzing". How did I come to know the world? Language was modeled, its sounds filled the air and associated with objects, experiences. Thus, IF I say a word in context C, THEN I get lots of smiles and encouragement. This conditional is foundational to language and the experience of the world. The logic of the conditional issues from this pragmatic engagement that is a basic condition to survival and reproduction, an evolutionist would argue, and the conditional is really a pragmatic function of problem solving. The scientific method is this, not a formal condition of ultimate reality, and it is science that ruled the child's acquisition of language skills. The brain evolved to be an instrument of conditional resoning because interface with the environment was essentially conditional.
Time is foundational for logic is executed in time, so it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Dewey called this end consummatory. Logic is essentially a pragmatic, a useful instrument.

Do I buy this? Yes and no. Always has to be kept in mind to conceive of anything, it is done through logic, so a pragmatic theory of logic, presupposes logic in its theorizing, for this talk about pragmatics is logical talk. This makes logic antecedent to pragmatism, doesn't it? But then, the argument itself that places logic as antecedent is itself cast in logic. So where does this lead us?

It leaves us with best guess when it comes to anything.

for it certainly isn’t Kantian — Mww

You said this. I just want to know what you mean.

But there is no “problem of one’s whole being” as something outside of heedful circumspective relationality with one’s world for Heidegger , or a ‘whole being’ outside of noetic-noematic activity for Husserl. This only becomes a problem when you create an artificial “distance between the intending agent and the world qua world”. Only then does it appear that you “stand apart from all possibilities”, rather than always BEING IN particular possibilities. — Joshs

I take this issue the way Jean Luc Marion does: Husserl's reduction is incomplete, but it has a trajectory, which is toward givenness, and givenness issues forth in a negative correlation to reduction: the more one dismisses presuppositions that, to use Levinas' term, keep the moment pinned to the "same" that is, the totality of knowledge claims, the more what is given simply, or purely, is manifest.
Yes, I'm afraid I do believe there is something transcendental about our being here. Wittgenstein insisted such things are nonsense, but then, he wrote, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics." This, in 1929, the same year of his Lecture on Ethics, in which put ethics in the nonsense bin. What was he talking about? It was the "presence" of ethics as an absolute. He knew it all rested with ethics and aesthetics, and he was right, AND wrong: one could not speak what ethics is, what value is, but one can speak in its vicinity. this is what Marion does. And Eugen Fink and Michel Henry.

Ok. Just wondering from whom this philosophy originated, for it certainly isn’t Kantian, in which perception does not construct anything at all. And you mentioned the CPR, so.....just connecting possible dots here. — Mww

Tell me how in Kant the perceptual act does not construct anything at all.

What does perception construct? — Mww

What doesn't it construct? I mean, the moment you say what this could be, there is a trace to a perceptual event that has to be there, the absence of which would make for nonsense. Then, how does perception construct an owl, e.g.? Do you really think when a perceptual system vacates the presence of the owl, the owl is still there?