False. Plenty are colour realists and believe the colour red exists outside the qualia Red. We are having this exact discussion elsewhere.

It would help if you didn't erroneously decide that Continental Philosophy is worthwhile, and Analytical not, if you're going to take up analytical discussions. The Continentals have nothing but disdain for taking thinking seriously. — AmadeusD

State your case.

To try to clarify, I offer the example of the moon. If I ask you where the moon exists you might simply point to it, if I were in a position to see your finger. It's not quite that simple though, right? You require an internal model of the world and the moon in order to point your finger at it. If that model didn't exist then you couldn't locate the moon. You would have no concept of 'moon' to begin with. Without an internal model that included the sky, earth, moon, etc. I don't know what you would see if you were looking towards the moon. The existence of the moon is dependent on our internal model of the world that we continually develop throughout life. Is goodness also dependent on our internal model of the world, even though unlike the moon we can't point to it with our index finger? Pain and pleasure are transmitted to the central nervous system in the same manner as all our senses. Where does pleasure exist? Point to where it feels good. — praxis

First, everything is a concept for us. One could argue that this is true for ducks and goats, but it would be a matter of defining what we mean by concept. I think it is arguable that once a goat spends some time on the farm, anticipatory features of the goat's epistemic relation with its environment would emerge, and while this is not symbolic conceptualizing, it could be a proto-conceptualizing, having an internal time structure that conforms to ours, and concepts are inherently temporal: When I observe the moon, as you say, I come into the perceptual event with a "predelineated" ability to encounter the moon as the moon, and not as a star or a cloud. Memory structures the occasion structures the concept, as does anticipation, for the moment the memory emerges, the perceptual identity of a particular environment fills an unmade future. And this is a stream of consciousness, as James put it. A unity of past and future, only analytically divided.

But what about the present? By many's thinking, such a thing is simply not possible, that is, some magic presence (Derrida's "metaphysics of presence," as if standing before an object, language could reach beyond itself and align with what is not in the "trace" of language) that announces itself, and I think this really is right: there is nothing beyond the text, meaning, to behold and understand is to be IN a contextual environment.

This, I take to be your position, or close to it. It has been argued that qualia, the presence that has an independence from the interpretative function of language, is immune to this temporal critique. Most reject this.

What is being argued here, however, is that there really is one thing that is immune, and this is a qualified immunity: value-in-being. Value qualia, is a good term. Value qualia refers to something that is not in any way or form, language. Tout autre. Think about the qualia of the color, that is, the being-appeared-to redly. We know this is not a language perception, this red-qua-red, and no one will gainsay this. But there is nothing IN the red-qua-red that "speaks," so to speak. It nature remains entirely alien to language, yet the understanding can only think of red conceptually. The concept exhausts the meaning.

Value qualia is very different. Think of Wittgenstein's insistence that value is transcendental. He means that in the scorched flesh, the sublimity of love, etc., meaning actually issues from the non linguistic end of the qualia! What is the difference between a fact, a state of affairs, and a "value fact"? There is a distance between the two that is, well, impossible. Love "speaks" the good. It speaks the bad: the hand in boiling water (just do it and observe, like a good scientist). Value facts (call them) issue forth the voice of reality! Wittgenstein knew this. That horrible pain carries the moral authority of a God.

I'm trying to understand how "the good" is fundamentally different than words and concepts. I can't see how "the good" isn't conceptual in nature. — praxis

Now you have me confused. Put it this way: If we lived in a world in which no one cared about anything, is ethics possible?

I don't think that's correct, the honorific name 'Buddha' means 'one who knows'. And according to Buddhist dogma, what is known is 'the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the path to the end of suffering'. To be enlightened is to be liberated from the morass of suffering that is entailed in saṃsāric existence. I'm not saying you should believe it, but that is what Buddhists themselves would say. In Platonic terms, there's definitely a 'noetic' element to Nirvāṇa, insight into a truth. — Wayfarer

It is an interesting issue. I think it comes down to agency, not so much the knowledge claim about value. To be in a profound meditative state is not to be talking about being in a profound meditative state. The latter is a social event, the former is not. The same could be said about spraining my ankle or being in love.

So what IS the most salient feature of Buddhism, Hinduism, or simply meditation going very well? This goes to liberation and enlightenment. But enlightenment about what? Is it a discursive process that leads to a conclusion-- inherently discursive just as waking in the morning and "knowing" everythign around me has this discursivity abiding throughout: ask me what anything is at this moment, and you find logical structures and implicit understanding everywhere, linked in logical implications. There is a lamp, and lamps do not belong outside in the garden, and if you saw your lamp outside in the garden you would be very curious. And so on. In other words, just to be IN a language environment, anywhere at all, that is, you have this "noetic" dimension implicitly in play such that simple perception turns on demand into a logically structured knowledge claim. I want to say that when meditation goes very well, say, if you are called to explain your experience, you can, even though this is a difficult thing to talk about. You could reach for metaphors, talk about intensities, familiar experiences, emotions, how one thing yields to another, another vanishes altogether, the process of advancing, and so on. This descriptive conversation is the noetic element you speak of, and I agree with the honorific name, the one who knows.

But this kind of analysis also belongs to anything at all. It is a matter of what the Buddha knows. This is the enlightenment. My way of understanding this lies with seeing my lamp out in the garden where it doesn't belong at all. The lamp is suddenly off the grid of anticipated events, and I have a question (the piety of thought!), but with lamps, I retreat into the familiar: WHO put it there? Am I seeing this right? Perhaps a practical joke? Or someone needed light during the night in the garden? All very mundane, and soon the question will be closed. But enlightenment, this is very different, isn't it? One stands in an openness of a termination of anticipated possibilities, and all the question remains OPEN. One is now no longer possessed by rote and practiced affairs that run their course, and in this language, the machine that generates ready to hand responses to questions, is explicitly dismissed. I call meditation the open question that stays open.

So what does the Buddha know? It is a non standard knowledge claim. Consider: I sit and stare at this lamp, but deliver the event from interpretative imposition altogether, I mean, I shut up and shut down anything that would claim it. THIS, I want to emphasize, is a most extraordinary experience, but I can't really speak for others. For me, the lamp undergoes an uncanny transformation as the particularity recedes, but it is not the universal (Platonic) that is discovered with some enhanced clarity, for this universal was, it can be argued, exactly the problem: Mundane affairs are "about" universals, and their inherent knowledge claims never really "touch" the palpable existence before one. So the universal and the particular race through our understanding joined at the hip, so to speak, in simple perceptual encounters, and this is what "taking the world "as" is about (though there is a lot more to say on this). Anyway, it is not the universal that is discovered in this uncanny transformation, nor is it the "real" object before me. Neither of these. It is, to borrow from some very interesting French post modern philosophers, the radical other, the "tout autre": unspeakable "presence" of the givenness of the world. Buddhists and Hindus strive to live in this "place," putting aside all of the historical and analytical metaphysics, something I very much try to do. The only authority lies with the sublime apprehension itself. Thought and its language is pragmatic as it is an inherent part of the method of discovery, AND, and this goes to my original concern, thought and language constitute a dimension of agency that cannot be brushed aside. The lamp, the object before me, loses its identity as it yields to the openness of meditation (the question. Or am I wrong to talk like this? Interesting, this idea of the openness of the question and the openness of meditation are the same), and the meditator also loses her identity as all implicit knowledge claims fade, yet what of the historical self, the person one is. What is it that displaces this personal history that is behind the "I" of my meditative perceptual self?

Long story short, I think this is where liberation finds its meaning. One always already is the Buddha, it is said. But this is NOT a noetic acknowledgement. It is tout autre.

I agree it seems a preposterous notion, but I believe there's a sense in all the cosmic religions that existence is inherently imperfect and bound to entail suffering. In Christianity, that is represented in the Fall and the original sin. In Buddhism, it is represented by beginningless ignorance in which living beings are ensnared. The first link in the chain of dependent origination in Buddhism is ignorance. Liberation from ignorance is also liberation from being reborn due to karma (although in Mahāyāna doctrine, enlightened beings may be voluntarily born out of compassion.)

Alongside the 'doctrine of evil as privation' there's also the kind of theodicy explained by John Hick in his Evil and the God of Love. Hick argues that suffering plays a crucial role in the development of moral and spiritual virtues. According to Hick, humans are not created as perfect beings but rather as morally immature creatures with the potential to grow into morally and spiritually mature individuals. Suffering and challenges are necessary conditions for this growth, as they provide opportunities for individuals to develop virtues such as courage, compassion, and patience. Hick also says that for love and goodness to be genuine, they must be freely chosen. Suffering is a consequence of the freedom that God grants humans. This freedom allows for the possibility of both good and evil actions. Without the possibility of suffering, free will would be meaningless, and humans would be automatons, incapable of genuine love and moral choice.

The reason this all seems alien to modern culture, is that today's culture tends to normalise the human condition, by putting the individual self at the fulcrum. But then, that's the essence of a secular age, the only redresses being political, social and technological. — Wayfarer

I want to agree, and I do, but only in a qualified way because I am predisposed to doubt grand ideas that tell me what is really going on, for these exceed to limits of defensible thinking. But yes, it is not an unreasonable speculation to say, as Dewey put it, without problems to solve, we would never grow. The question would never occur. Why this is the case is impossible to say, like asking why about screaming children in burning cars.

I see you have chosen to do nothing but slide further into ad hominem(and this time, it's outright racist). I am, again, not surprised. Please don't be surprised when you're treated the way you behave. — AmadeusD

Just say something interesting, AmadeusD.

self-involved, preening narratives
— AmadeusD
- this is the form of the majority of Continental Philosophy, on my view - again, a direct response to the obvious nonsense you've written;
5. This is my 'social media'. I would avoid ridiculous ad hominems like this, particularly when you are dead wrong;
6. I am neither American, nor live in America.

Please avoid devolving into comments about me rather than my comments. I have stuck to commentary on your comments. I'll do so again: — AmadeusD

Hard to respond nicely. The bottom line is this: you really don't demonstrate any knowledge of the issues. Yet you have opinions. This is a very bad situation.

No offense intended to Americans, really. Just pretentious people and the hobgoblins of their little minds...... unless, that is, you actually have something to say about metaethics.

Where? — praxis

Not sure I understand the question. A place? How about the delight my cat felt as it tortured its mouse last night?

Are you claiming that “the good” exists in “the world” separate from minds (words and concepts)? — praxis

Yes.

This is a non sequitur for the ages. I did warn about this - continental philosophy is rhetoric only. That's why teenage boys are still finding Satre interesting. We all go through a death on the way adulthood - pretending these self-involved, preening narratives are somehow extrapolable is a serious mistake, and probably a good portion of why this type of 'philosophy' is both derided readily, and defending vehemently. But this is like defending Christianity because it pulled you thruogh your divorce. Arbitrary. — AmadeusD

Please take notice, AmadeusD, That after reading your post, twice, I find nothing at all that is responsive to the idea you quote. Do read this thing you wrote, and ask: Did you address, or even mention, the claim made in the quote to target for criticism? What does Sartre have to do with it? Self involved, preening narratives?? These are just words thrown.

You do sound like someone who posts on social media a lot. Ah America, the vast land of the mostly unread!

There’s a host of concepts involved in “the moral prohibition against doing this [putting someone’s hand in a pot of boiling water] to others” that is far removed from the experience of that pain. I must not be following rightly. — praxis

But try understand that ALL of this "host of concepts" presuppose something that is not a concept at all. This is a reference to existence, not a category of existence. Were nothing at all to happen when one immersed a hand into boiling water, then the entire ethical conceptual possibility would simply evaporate. The entire explanatory analytic of "the good" would simply have no meaning at all unless the move is made to this that is outside the explanation.

The concepts in play in a discussion of the concept good withdraw entirely from this existential dimension, simply because there is nothing to say (as Wittgenstein was keen to point out) here. To speak at all one is referred to the many ways the good can be intelligently, if superficially, analyzed as a concept of ambiguous meanings and contexts. I refer you to RM Hare's discussion of functional words where he notes how a term like good finds it meaning to refer to very different things, like good knives or good tennis players. One could say good refers to efficiency, but then efficiency refers us back to the efficient for what? question, and a vast relativism steps in throwing the whole matter regarding the good into usage, or Wittgenstein's "family resemblances". There are many more ways to talk about this, but they all seek to talk, and this is the real issue. Philosophy gets bored with simplicity, especially the entire edifice of anglo american philosophy which is founded on boredom. Which is why Moore''s non natural property has been so disparaged: it is like saying the good is like the color yellow: a mere observable property, not non naturally observable.

The idea defended in the OP is both MOST boring and MOST fascinating. For an tried and true intellectual, hell bent on filling space with dialectic, it's the former. But if one is interested in the world and not just the way words work, then the latter. The former is an attempt to turn philosophy into a meaning game. This is what you get when you hand matters over to a logician (like Russell). Completely vacuous. But fun to puzzle about.

'the good that has no opposite'. It is distinguished from the our conventional sense of what is good, which is defined in opposition to, and so in association with, the bad. — Wayfarer

Accomplished Buddhists report that the sense of well being we have in the familiar world is actually, even at its best, spoiled by concerns and anxieties unseen (Freud said the same thing but that is another story). So this conventional sense is conceived out of a false limitation placed on what the good can be since our existence is corrupted by an anxiety that runs through everything. Consider that nirvana is not really a knowledge claim (enlightenment), but a value claim (liberation). Philosophers in the west are stuck on epistemic truth, but our existence is about "value truth,' that is at the heart of knowing. A discovery that can certainly be propositionally expressed, but this is incidental, and this is a difficult claim because agency is so bound to language. Truth as propositional soundness begs the question, what is the world that aligns with propositions? Things never go anywhere like this. Truth as revelation? Well, what is revealed? This brings inquiry back to the starting place.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Because "something" is driven toward an absolute aesthetic affirmation.

The 'doctrine of evil' that flows from that is 'evil as privation of the Good', which is associated with Augustine, but similes of which can be found in Advaita. This is that evil has no real existence, it is real in the sense that shadows and holes are real, as an absence or lack of knowing the true good. Redemption consists in coming to awareness of the true good, which is concealed or obscured by ignorance (in Advaita) or the original sin (in Augustine.) — Wayfarer

The only way I can confirm such an idea evil is a privation would be to ignore the direct evidence of suffering. But is this reasonable? I do think it right that ordinary lived life is a privation of certain possibilities, among which are positively extraordinary and important in ways impossible to assimilate into familiar assumptions. In a sublime affirmation, there is an understanding of what is real that is outside of the familiar altogether, and this could be the justification for an ontological claim of evil having no real existence. I mean, if Thich quang dong (the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who self immolated) was simply not available for the pain his body was reporting, and he was "elsewhere" and this elsewhere was entirely without painful possibilities, I don't see any room for denying this. But to move from this to a thesis that pain doesn't exist would have to be inclusive of the existence of pain prior to "not being available" and this seems patently false.

Like putting aside the concepts of good and bad, right? — praxis

On order to take metaethics seriously, one has to look, not to the concept, the understanding's counterpart to the living actuality, but to just this actuality. The proof for this lies in the pudding: putting one's hand of a pot of boiling water, for example: NOW you know the REAL ground for the moral prohibition against doing this to others.

I don't know what you are getting at here. You are discussing redemption, and then this looks to be about the notion of "inherent good and bad" or so it seems. — schopenhauer1

I think you have it. Redemption is a fairy tale, as is consummation of faith, unless there is an absolute decree making it so. What would this be? Traditionally, God. But what is God once the traditions and bad metaphysics are removed? I am arguing that the surviving metaphysical residua of a God reduction down its essence is metaethics. Metaethics, in the continental sense (not the analytic vacuity) refers to "the good" and "the bad" and we all know how these are played out in the metaphysical Christian fiction, but this reduces to, simply, the good and the bad as absolutes. Now, what is an absolute? If something is apodictic, it is an absolute, is the claim. Can't even imagine, say, an object moving itself, as its own cause. This is not logically possible. One can argue about the apodicticity of logic, and I am willing to do so if you like, but for now the idea here hinges on this: in logic we have apodictic truth (again, Derrida aside. But then, you will find Derrida's position VERY interesting here, though). If this apodicticity were a feature of ethics, then ethics would be just like God's decree. After all, what is the basis for the absolute authority of God? In popular religion, it is pure dogmatics, but what does the dogmatic position say? It says one cannot even imagine a greater authority that could gainsay God. The greatest possible being is Anselm's idea. I.e., apodicticity. Cannot be gainsaid on pain of a contradiction. I am arguing that the good and the bad cannot be gainsaid, just like logic.

So, your question about redemption: What is redeemed? Suffering. What is the necessity of the redemption of suffering that makes it apriorii necessary, like logic? The apodicticity of "the bad". In logic we have the conditional form, the affirmation, the negation, the disjunction and so on. There are rules to their concatenation, expressed in symbolic logic. In ethics there are two "rules" which have to do with the good and the bad. There is here NO toleration for evil. One has to observe this "logic of ethics" which is primordial just as one observes the logic of modus ponens. The "form" of ethics, if you will, is the good and the bad. Just as a contradiction in logic formally upends an argument (the reductio ad absurdum), so in the "argument" of our ethical lives is upended by evil.

Which is a way to say, the evil must be redeemed by necessity.

Keep in mind here the simplicity of this. Logic itself is simple in its basic rules (Kant's categories). But for ethics, we are NOT directed toward an argument and logical form. We are directed toward the world, existence, the real. This has always been the jurisdiction of God: an absolute grounding of our ethics. But God, divested of the usual anthropomorphic features and all the absurd narratives, reduced to its essence, remains, as does the authority it possesses.

Neither good nor bad, or both good and bad. I don't think it matters which way it's conceptually considered. — praxis

It is about putting conceptual considerations aside. This is the point. Suffering as such is not a concept.

Truth is in present being; not in the I's comings and goings — ENOAH

Just to add: This turn from the "comings and goings" to "present being" is not a turn away from language. One has to incorporate language into the revelation of presence to be on meaningful ground. This turn is away from prereflective engagement, prior to the question of being that throws everything off course. The matter of ontology only rises up if the ontology of everyday affairs is thrown into question. The question abides throughout, for the question is the very openness you stand in as you stand before "presence". Apophatic philosophy is the philosophy of negation, negating, that is, the autonomy or free flow of conscious matters, and stopping them quite vigorously, if you are a serious Buddhist. But that "space" that opens up to the Buddhist is the same space of the epoche's deconstructive movement toward the impossible affirmation, that is, your "presence"; as John Caputo puts it, "The voice of “negative theology”—one of them, for it has several—is deeply, resoundingly affirmative. Oui, oui."

You think I go too far in abstracting from the contextual because I abstract from the abstracter in the end; I think you do not go far enough because you leave the abstracter in place; you do so because the result is absurd otherwise. A compromise? At least admit the abstracter is a necessary fiction, because ultimately the abstractions are done in its name and for its sake. — ENOAH

Abstractor? But consider that it is just the opposite in the case above: It is not the abstraction of thought and the imposition of an interpretative identity called an ego or a transcendental ego. The basis of the idea presented here is not the abstract idea of a self. When you observe a value event (the very substance of ethical concern) you observe something altogether "tout autre" from what language can do (keeping in mind that all along as I defend the notion that there is nothing abstract about language, I have been trying make clear that when we turn to something "tout autre" like this, we are committed to a language setting that makes this possible. I have been saying that when we encounter anything, it is affirmed in language, notwithstanding it being entirely OTHER than language. This is the paradox of deconstruction.

These conversations about deconstruction and theology are very weird, but it is Derrida that takes the argument to this very place I have been trying to hammer out: me and my language standing before a world that is not language, telling me this is a tree and that is a computer, but entirely mute when these are delivered from their explicit knowledge claim (recall Kierkegaard's riposte to Hegel's rationalism: Hegel has simply forgotten that we exist!. This is essentially what his infamous absurdity turns on). I use the term tout autre because Derrida does, and this wholly other is, I am confident, what you have in mind, here and there, in your thinking.

Language is NOT abstract. Rather, abstraction is conceived IN language. And it depends on what one means by the term. Often it is meant to refer to something that is just an idea, and ideas are not like furniture or fence posts. Here, it is intended that ideas do not exist. You insist that the self argued about here is like this, a fiction conceived in nonreal ideas, and there is a lot about this I agree with (you might say I "half" agree with this) but it is not the language that is unreal, but the ideas conceived IN language that are in error. If I say the moon is made of cream cheese, I am wrong.

Just to repeat the essential point: I do not argue an abstract transcendental ego. I argue that caring and its value dimension, because it is entirely other than language (perhaps joined at the hip, as Heidegger would have it) affirms the transego's "existence" exactly because it lies outside of language.

But it’s not in the least bit a contingency. Pain is good. Pain, like pleasure, moves life to homeostasis. — praxis

Because it moves life to homeostasis? This is the very meaning of contingency here: Pain is good IN the context of moving life to homeostasis. Remove the contextual contributions to meaning making, then all you have is the pain, the pain as such. pain simplciter, pain that stands as its own presupposition, therefore presupposing nothing for its existence.

Homeostasis? What "good" is this? It encourages survival and reproduction? What good is this? Eventually, after you've put enough of questions like this forward, you find that you are chasing language around. You have to make that fateful move out of language and into actuality. There is the pain now free of contextual presumption. What IS this? This is the question. It does not issue from established thinking about evolution, biochemistry, or anything at all. It is about something that issues from the givenness of the world, "outside" of language (yet, concurrent with language, in us).

Observe how well it cauterizes a wound, proving its value, expressing its goodness. — praxis

This kind of thinking is inevitable. One has to make the move from the way contingencies create multiple contexts of engagement. When we observe suffering in our regular affairs, this is what we witness. The argument is here apriori: Just as we see logic played out in such affairs, and abstract from these to conceive of the purity of symbolic logic (or Kant/Aristotle categories), so here we abstract from all of the contextual variations in which we find the good, bad, should, shouldn't, right, wrong of ethics, and inquire about the nature of what is in what is observed.

Truth is in present being; not in the I's comings and goings — ENOAH

As an old prof used to tell me, you're not going to get that tart to your dessert plate. Hard to argue this because it has this uncanny quality in the meditation on trying to release value from agency. To me, it is a fascinating intuition. I simply cannot even imagine suffering (or bliss or some simple pleasure or irritation. The magnitude of the value experience is the the issue, but the most intense are the most vivid and telling) apart from agency. This is what, to use a term I use repeatedly, picked up from Edith Stein, Husserl and Heidegger, primordial: It is apriori true that suffering cannot exist apart from agency.

As I see it, philosophy's job is criticism at the basic level, so of course one can ask why, find no explanatory basis and then proceed to deny this. I CAN argue this position, I believe, but the strongest justification for this apriori claim lies in this intuitive affirmation. What is not being discussed here is the language construct, the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception as he calls it, that sythesizes the world into general terms. This is the "I" that has its stamp on each thing perceived, and while this is right, I think, and wherever my attention goes, it encounters the me and mine of what is witnessed, the me and mine here, and this is critical, is, entirely unlike Kant, existential, palpable, the very core of meaningful engagement.

If I were to argue the case, it would in the direction of affirming the local nature of an experience and hence the horizon of value events, showing that it is not a disembodied object, floating among the debris of the journeywork of stars. Next, the matter would turn to the quality of what is in play and how it presents entirely novel relationships with the world. And so on.

But just to give emphasis: the argument would inevitably find the inextricable bond between agent and value. Value issues from us; we bring it into the world.

Here, I see some agreement with scientific metaphysics, in particular on how this is manifested in the debate of determinism and freedom. That said, in your very first post you said:

"My thinking is this: Religion rises out of the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. This simply means that we are thrown into a world of ethical issues that, in the most basic analysis, are not resolvable. Yet they insist on resolution with the same apodicticity as logical coercivity. Meaning, just as one cannot but agree with something like modus ponens or the principle of identity in terms of the pure logicality of their intuitive insistence, so one cannot resist the moral insistence of moral redemption."

This smells of the odor of "determinism" from my humble nose. How does "freedom" and "logical coercively" exist where I can continue to feel human and not like the Mac I am typing on. — Richard B

Not really about freedom, but about a value ontology, or value-in-being. The nature of religion tells us nothing about freedom and determinism, for the analysis of ethics is not concerned with whether one is free to do what one should; this is a practical matter, one that has accountability written in the law of the land in order to make it appear that responsibility is real. Rather, the question is, what IS ethics in its nature? Yes, this creates an account of the origin of responsibility, obligation, guilt, and so forth, what it is that makes an ethical obligation meaningful, but to say one is obligated to do something begs the more basic question asked here, which deals with an analysis of what makes an ethical issue tick, so to speak. What makes something ethical at all?

Religion essentially is about this metaethical question dealing with the nature of ethics, as it is an expression of the indeterminacy of the good and bad of our affairs that demands closure or completeness. consider the rather mundane but nevertheness, profound question, Why are we born to suffer and die? It is a question that takes inquiry face to face with suffering: what is this? I claim it is an absolute. Wittgenstein knew this. He just refused to talk about it because he thought language and philosophical analysis had no place here. I beg to differ. We can talk about this in rigorous argument.

If I may step back into meta mode for a moment, I would like to point out that in the OP you promise to provide metaphysical satisfaction to the world, and despite my sincere attempts to feel this satisfaction I keep ending up in a thicket of obfuscating weeds and a Mick Jagger tune playing in my head.

It appears to be an empty promise. — praxis

Now, asking if knowledge claims are possible is not a lot of obfuscating weeds. And Mick Jagger is confusing.

A long story short, ask, what does it mean for something to be apodictic? It means the kind of certainty such that it is impossible to be gainsaid. Logic is like this. Value is like this, too: Unlike logic, the "proof" of ethics' apodicticity lies in the actuality, not in the formal and vacuous structure of judgment. Put your hand beneath an open flame and observe. Now, anything can be made the object of a verbal dispute, but the purity of the ethical "bad" that stands as the existential injunction not to bring this into the world constitutes the purity of the injunction itself. In other words, we are not measuring utility nor are we looking at the "good will" driven by duty. Rather, the suffering is a "stand alone" basis for the ethics that would center around such a thing. Like logic and its modus ponens, we are "shown" and are coerced into acceptance that one "should not" bring this into the world, and this will not be gainsaid! This latter is the key, the nature of apodicticity, that it is impossible to deny or argue such a thing. One can argue about the language that gives the injunction conversation and understanding, but the injunction itself is absolute.

Absolutes in dealing with ethics is something reserved for God and faith, generally. But religion is, at its core, just this: the metaethical insistence on the redemption of suffering and the consummation of happiness. Since ethics is at the basic level, apodictically insistent, we are coerced into accepting this redemptive and consummatory feature of our existence. A but like saying, apophatically reduce something like the bible, down to its essence, and you find the only residual religious content here, in the simple analytic of ethics.

I have to say your position is a bit of a mystery. It seems you have a particular disdain for science, or dare I say jealousy of its status in modern life. Yet you are a bit annoyed of Wittgenstein's rather egalitarian attitude that religious needs no rationale foundation from philosophy or science, that it can stand on its own to freely be engaged in what matter a group of human so choose. — Richard B

I am a bit annoyed when lines like this are drawn. Things you cannot say and things you can. The finitude of science and everydayness, and the impossibility of metaphysics. Knowledge and faith.

One has to be aware than when we speak of the world, our categories are an imposition and the best we can do at the outset is describe it such that this imposition is reduced and the world is seen most primordially (a term lifted from Heidegger and Edith Stein to talk about something at the most basic level of identity). Wittgenstein's work draws lines at this level. As I see it, ethics and religion are metaphysically available for exposition. One has to look closely at ethics (and aesthetics) and ask, what are ethical injunctions "made of"? It is a phenomenological reductive look at the anatomy of an ethical problem.

It is not the egalitarianism that bothers me at all. It is that all religion popularly conceived moves one into a world of fantasy and bad metaphysics. It is (speaking here with a healthy respect for Eastern religio-philosophical "methods" and thinking) possible to make real progress in understanding the "meta-world" we actually live in.

Not disdain for science. Disdain for scientific metaphysics: talk about material substance, naturalism or physicalism, as if these were primordial concepts.

I know you know what I mean. Can we skip the tedious part and get to your point? — praxis

Errr, not really. Tell you what, jump to the chase, skipping all the tedious parts, and just tell me how a knowledge claim is possible, then I can make the point. But note one important condition: there is nothing epistemic about causality. I mean, nothing at all. So if you are going to go through a process of external events, saying portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are absorbed by an object while others are reflected and these enter the eye, through the lens then to the optic nerve, and so on, and the like, just forget it. Such an explanation is lost the moment it begins.

This is not to say we do not perceive the world. Not at all. We obviously do. But by all familiar accounts, this is impossible.

One has to think about this; its simplicity is astounding. Keeps me up at night, really.

There may have been other means of detection before probes were sent to Saturn, I don't know. In any case, the cat at your feet and the ice rings of Saturn are both known to the human mind in the form of sensory patterns. These patterns match our internal model of cat and ice rings. How is this relevant? — praxis

Transcendence: that cat or any thing you might imagine is a transcendental object unless you can tell me how it is that that, whatever it is, gets into an actual knowledge claim. Sensory patterns? You mean my cat is sensory patterns?

Ancient minds didn't contrive transcendence, right? — praxis

Transcendence? How about let's start with the epistemic relation I have with this cat at my feet. Tell me how it is I know that there is a cat there in the same way, say, a scientist knows Saturn's rings are made of ice and dust.

I have here a book, Wittgenstein and the Metaphysic of Grace by Terrance W Klein. I'll get back to you if I discover an insight into how his thinking accommodates or yields to or condemns religious practices and belief.

The priesthood is an institution, not the religion? — praxis

A religious institution. What is an institution? Something instituted as an integral part of a culture. A formal way to say, regarding religious tradition, that ancient minds, most sincerely, made it up.

But isn't there something deficient about Wittgenstein's apodictic religion? After all, he was claimed as the emblem of the vociferously anti-religious Vienna Circle, and even if they were wrong in so doing, they were a highly intelligent group of individualis who found support for their views in his texts. On this forum, the last lines of the Tractatus are most often used as a kind of firewall against discussion of anything deemed religious. His religiosity can be discerned only with difficulty. As i understand it, his acolyte Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband both became committed Catholics. Were they prepared to make explicit what was only implicit in Wittgenstein's texts (I understand he was buried with Catholic funeral rites, but that this caused some disquiet amongst many of his associates.) — Wayfarer

One's sees the same in Quine: "there’s mystery at the bottom of every question ultimately." When the priority is science and clarity at the level of basic questions, one finds Quine's indeterminacy staring back at you, and there is the abiding Kantian making way for faith through a kind of apophatic method of seeing where thought has its limitations. I have always had contempt for this kind of thinking, and I don't think Wittgenstein is right to dismiss ethics and value from meaningful philosophy, which I think addresses your thoughts. Analytic philosophers, at least in Quine's time, really did have that "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem" style of Fideism, and Witt has been said to be just like this. Here is a passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion by John Cottingham:

.....for fides, like its Greek counterpart pistis, always connotes a stronger
volitional component than simple assent— some further element of trust and
commitment. As one moves towards extreme forms of fideism, such as that of Søren
Kierkegaard, the volitional element becomes stronger. ‘Faith does not need proof,’
asserted Kierkegaard, ‘indeed it must regard proof as its enemy’ (Kierkegaard 1941
[1846], p. 31).. And in a famous passage he observed: ‘Christianity is spirit, spirit is
inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essential passion."

He adored Kierkegaard. A family of suicides, Wittgenstein himself living on the edge. The more you objectify something, the more it loses its primordiality and philosophy kills religious primordiality if one takes it like Simon Critchley does where he says, philosophy begins in disappointment! BUT: what is disappointment? It is the question. The question, the "piety of thought: Intrudes into this primordiality and undoes the beliefs that are there, but only to bring one back with a more ponderous and justified interpretative pov. This is what Witt didn't see, both he and Kierkegaard. Certainly philosophy can cheapen the meaning of religion, but religion stays interpretatively naive without it. And interpretation is what allows us to make progress in understanding, an apophatic process delivering the bare givenness of the world, the latter being the positive foundation of religion (contra the indeterminacy, which is the entirely negative).

There is an ancient tradition of aphophaticism in Christianity, the acknowledgement of the deficiencies of speech and reason to reach out to the divine. But that tradition was still sacramental and sacerdotal, much was embodied in and conveyed by the liturgy, the rites and rituals, even the architecture. All of which was driven by the awareness of the imperfection of ordinary human nature, a.k.a. the fallen state. Only an exceptionally perceptive reader might be able to glean that from reading Wittgenstein. — Wayfarer

Well, it depends on what you are reading, He doesn't talk like a religious person at all in his serious writing (recall Kierkegaard's serious writing is a lot like this), but in the implications of wht he says, and in the letters and conversations and various other places, he makes it clear (again, the copy of Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief that he nearly memorized comes to mind) that he was a spiritual person, indeed, but philosophy just should mind its own business in this. As he says in Culture and Value, the good is what he calls divinity. I believe he tags this with, "that about sums it up." He won't talk about it, but I have read a few papers on his religious thinking, and that is as far as I will go, because I am far less interested in getting Wittgenstein right than I am in understanding the world and our existence. Wittgenstein I find very helpful in this.

I was simply making the throwaway point that just because someone contemplates transcendence or the priesthood does not in itself mean much. — Tom Storm

Yes, I gathered as much. The priesthood is an institution, transcendence in the context of religion is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. To contemplate the former is just mundane as I see it. A love of those churchy fetishes or some Freudian or Humean retreat from reality. The latter is an entirely different. This latter is Wittgenstein. Russell called him a mystic.

So did Stalin. (the latter actually made it to the seminary but was booted out) — Tom Storm

Heh, heh, why Tom Storm, what are you suggesting? That Wittgenstein's spirituality was just as stuipidly conceived and corruptible by power...as Joseph Stalin??

, I don't buy, unfortunately for us all. — schopenhauer1

THIS is what the OP is about. There are things you that belong to opinion and things that are certain, putting aside the aporia that questions can heap upon a statement like this can bring up. What if ethics were grounded in the same apodicticity found in logic? Then opinion would yield to certainty.

Religion makes this claim about ethics when it talks about God. Here, we eliminate such fictions, and abide by only what is in the world and the presence of what is before inquiry. An apriori analysis of ethics shows, I argue, and fortunately for us all, that the redemptive and consummatory features of religion actually issue from existence itself with the apodicticity equal to that of logic. That is, one cannot even imagine the bad being good and the good being bad, taken as pure expressions: the meta-good and the meta-bad.

4. Fourth, Wittgenstein did not see any value in intellectual proofs of God's existence or theological formulations in general. For Wittgenstein, religion was about changing one life, amending one ways, and helping others. Faith without works is dead as St James would say. Malcolm sees the same kind of thinking when Wittgenstein says "it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language game (OC 204.)"

Based on Malcolm's reading, I am not so sure if Wittgenstein would go so far in claiming anything transcendental. He did not believe we needed to explain religion with anything transcendental; that the world was a wonder and a miracle itself; that we need to look at ourselves in mirror and change our lives and help others, and not submit to the temptation to overly intellectualize religion.

But I would agree with you that for him it does permeate our lives and is woven in the very fabric of reality. As he says in Culture and Value:

"Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the 'existence of this being', but e.g. suffering of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, - life can force this concept on us." — Richard B

I have Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Grace by Terrance W Klein which gives a similar account.

So Wittgenstein was, call it deeply spiritual (fair to say about a person who all but memorized Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, adored Kierkegaard, in fact, the latter's "dark nights of inwardness" is something Wittgenstein's suicidal personality related to) and had contempt for philosophy that tried to impose itself on this sacred dimension of our existence, which is why there is precious little coming from him about religion. "The whole project of ‘philosophical theology’, he once remarked, struck him as ‘indecent’ (Drury, 1984, p. 90)." I am trying to show that something can be said, and it is not the violation of belief doubt brings, which is so easy, but rather, an affirmation. If ethics is about, as he says in Lecture on Ethics, an absolute, then lets take a look at what an "unspeakable" absolute is and speak about it.

What if ethics and aesthetics were apodictic in nature? Like logic, universal and necessary? This is what Wittgenstein is suggesting. The good is what I call divinity, he writes in Value and Culture.

Then what of the "the bad"? The OP puts this idea to the test. Wittgenstein is a moral absolutist or a moral realist. This can be discussed in an examination of the essence of religion.

Isn't the problem here that later Witt had a different approach and framed morality in the context of language games? My understanding is that latter Wittgenstein holds that morality is not transcendent but is rather a product of contingent human practices. But I am no Witt expert. I think Joshs might come closest. — Tom Storm

There are two Wittgensteins: The one found as a kind of demigod for analytic philosophy because he drew a line, and as I have read, this line remains in place throughout his thinking, between the sayable, whether it be described as a logical layout of states of affairs vis a vis the world or language games, and the unsayabled, the the latter was by far the most important. You know, he once confessed a desire to becoming a priest.

Joshs' thoughts are always welcome.

You’d have to actually include something pertaining to religion to complete that linkage. Ethics is not religion. Ethics tied to a deity or cosmic supernatural principle is, for example. But I would argue that ethics tied to the supernatural entity isn’t religion per se, but the relation of the supernatural to the world, and ethics is usually entailed in that with religious worldviews. — schopenhauer1

One has to understand ethics as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus. See also the Lecture on Ethics and his Culture and Value. Apparently this is hard to see, as is made clear by all of the Wittgenstein fans at this forum, who entirely fail to understand this basic point: ethics and value are transcendental. See what he says:

The sense of the world must lie out
side the world. In the world everything
is as it is, and everything happens as i
does happen: in it no value exists—and if
it did exist, it would have no value
If there is any value that does have
value, it must lie outside the whole sphere
of what happens and is the case. For all
that happens and is the case is accidental
What makes it non-accidental cannot
lie within the world, since if it did it would
itself be accidental
It must lie outside the world
So too it is impossible for there to be
propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that
is higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be put
into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the
same.)

You can take issue with a lot that is here, especially about his definition of a proposition, but this about value and ethics is something he did not abandon later on. His point is really about the ethical good and bad, what Moore called "non natural properties": A simply matter, really, but painfully hard for those hell bent on discursive clarity. They don't like spooky "intuitions" but then, when you experience some or other caring and its concomitant good or bad, you can see clear as a bell that this is not simply a state of affairs, as Witt put is. It is a fact that the flame scorching my skin hurts like the devil, but what one cannot "see" is that it is bad, bad, that is, in the ethical sense and not in the contingent sense of a bad sofa or a bad day for golf. This bad: direct and unmediated presence, this is what Wittgenstein says one cannot be put into words. "Sense" he says above, lies outside the world (states of affairs)and all sense is value intrinsic.

You can see why Witt's positivist friends could never understand what he was talking about. He was a deeply religious philosopher as he realized that this dimension of value in our existence is utterly transcendental and yet permeated our existence. It is not about an afterlife, or some divine plan or punishment. It is there IN the fabric of what we are.

So put it in more mundane terms: religion has two aspects, redemptive (a word full of religious connotative meaning which I despise) and consummatory; and these align with, respectively, the ethical or as I call it, the primordial, bad and the good. The former is the suffering of existence, the four horsemen of the apocalypse come to mind, but then, such a thing is a distraction. Better to bring vividly to mind the actual feeling of starving or stricken by plague. Ironic that this, the most salient feature of our existence, is shunned by professional philosophers. Schopenhauer, you know better than I, certainly DID understand this. What he appears not to understand (and I welcome being disabused) is that the wretchedness of our existence is inherently redemptive! That is the "logic" if you will, of suffering requires apriori, redemption. THIS is a tough premise to embrace. I will get no sympathy from anyone in this forum, for it is an "intuitive" matter. One simply has to look to the most wretched of wretched affairs, and realize as stand alone "non natural properties" they demand redemption.

I will get even less sympathy for the idea that the good (what Witt called divinity) is inherently consummatory. Tougher, yet. It cannot be argued, just as Witt would never brings such explanatory indignity to his beloved Beethoven or Brahms. Or being in love. Such things reach out beyond themselves to some unfathomable height that is deeply profound. Again, one does not argue such a thing. Like, say, a lighted match placed under your finger: one observes and acknowledges its nature. With such observations, one has entered into the primodiality of religion.

The Essence of religion is a god or gods that tests its victims/players, and if his players fail they will be cursed with disease, disaster, and death and punished even in an afterworld for some of them. We can see this as far back as Enkidu and Odysseus. If it’s not a deity that’s causing torment to its victims/players it’s an impersonal force like karma or Tao.


In other words, the essence of religion is a tormenter getting off on testing his creations and punishing them for their “misdeeds”. Gnosticism in that sense, if not taken seriously, would have been a proper satire. — schopenhauer1

The trouble I have with this is the metaphysics. You take a narrative, or allude to several narratives, and say things that only toy with the theme of religion. Imagine a geologist or an astronomer taking this perspective! Unthinkable.

But what if you were a scientist committed to observation? All narratives fall away, and this includes those that have interesting things to say like Taoism and Hinduism. These presuppose the most basic questions about religion, those about foundational ontology: the What is it? question of ethics. This is the metaethical question of the good and the bad, the should and the shouldn't, the right and the wrong, that must be approached descriptively. One looks at the world clinically, if you will, at the stark presence of what lies before the waking eye (whether there really is a "stark presence" is of course a real issue, but not here, or, not yet, at least). What is the analysis of an ethical matter? Analysis takes things apart and examines, so we need to take ethics apart, so to speak. E.g., we know S knows where the bomb is located that will bring horror to thousands. May we torture S to find out? Here we stop. Putting aside the arguments of utility contra deontology, why is this an issue at all??? This is the analytic question we begin with: the ontology of ethics.

Here we discover what Wittgenstein referred to as value. I mean, it is not because he used this word, but because the word is simply the proper classification of things in the world that are ethical. All ethical matter hinge on this essential presence: the caring about things and the ouches and yums of their actuality of experience. A geologist may observe the crystal structure of quartz; for religion we look at the se actualities of experience. We look to caring and that which is IN the direct observation of caring. What we discover is the nature of ethical/aesthetic good and bad. This is the foundation of religion.

I say that the being we are all after (whether wittingly or not), the being beyond the trans-ego (and there has to be one since the trans-ego is the final reduction but is nevertheless a reduction--implying it is the final remnant of that being reduced) is the organic natural body in its aware-ing unobstructed/Unmediated by language. Even the trans-ego Iis knowable, hence requires language, the medium of knowing.
The natural aware-ing body is aware of the language, ego, etc., but does not "move/act/function" in that medium/world. It is experienced unmediated, directly. — ENOAH

Well sure. But as I agree with this, I also have been trying present the idea that the analytic language used to describe how this works has to be more broadly conceived. Language is not prohibitive for the experience "unmediated" and direct. It in fact makes it possible. This is not to your liking, but one has to authentically conceive of the way one can know anything at all. One has to rethink altogether the nature of language. It is not an external artificial imposition, but an imposition that emerges from within the core of experience itself. One cannot speak the nature of language, and it is just as "unmediated" as anything else. But most importantly, language qua language does not interfere. It makes the openness of the unmediated possible. Heidegger has to notion of geworfenheit, or "thrownness," as when you are there minding your own business, when the lecture on Hegel or Kant you attended leaps to mind for no reason at all and it dawns on you that your/our existence really is a powerful mystery underneath all the ready-made knowledge claims. Now you enter into a radically different mode of existence, which is reflective or meditative thinking. Here you encounter the unmediated.

Far better than Kant or Hegel would be the Abbhidamma. "The East" as a theo-philosophical achievement begins where neoHusserlians (the French theologians like Jean Luc Marion and Levinas) leave off, so guarded they are against claims of mystical overreach, that they could never make that mind boggling move to become a sadhu! To actually walk away from everything and retreat into

I have been pushing two ideas to talk about religion, and both are simple, the kind of thing analaytic philosophy despises. The first is that knowledge is impossible without radically redefining consciousness away from standard assumptions about the primacy of physicalism. I cannot make you see this. One simply has to beat this matter into submission: The brain is in no way at all a mirror of nature and causality has nothing epistemic about it. All I can do is put this on the table. It is entirely up to you to go over this again and again until it becomes obvious, because it is simply obvious. It is the second most fascinating thing about our existence, and it sits there clear as a bell. More than quantum physics can ever be--listen to, read about, quantum physics and you find physicists just puzzled, embarrassed, stymied, clueless; well, this is nothing compared to the consequences of this foundational epistemic problematic.

So what do analytic epistemologists talk about? They ignore it. Because the issue is so simple, there is nothing to talk about unless one turns to idealism, and they most emphatically will not do this because of what is now two hundred years of Kantian philosophy, turned "continental" phenomenology, and an analytic complexity so demanding and counterintuitive they have just had it. They want science, as Russell said, to be the guiding light, and hang the fundamental stupidity the whole thing rests on. See this wonderful book by Robert Hanna: THE FATE OF ANALYSIS Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash Heap of History. In the terms you use, analytic philosophy puts an end to the idea of a world" experienced unmediated, directly."

Anyway, this ax that I have to grind with this failing institution called analytic philosophy concerning epistemology is razor sharp, a regular Occam's razor that cuts out an entire century of mostly pointless anglo american philosophy. The second idea: I said epistemology is the second most fascinating thing. The most fascinating deals with value, and I have labored this to death. It as well is painfully simple. What is the nature of an ethical injunction not to do something? No value, no ethics. So what is value? Just observe the spear in your kidney or the happy nostalgia of childhood. This is the unmediated world you refer to. Thus: the essence of ethics is discovered not in the endless analytic of ethical language (analytic philosophers' cleverness lies here. A great book that illustrates this is John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong), but in the world! This IS the thesis of the OP. The essence of religion lies in the unmediated givenness of value-in-the-world. Value comes to us, says Wittgenstein, in a way, from another world. It has no place in this one, this world of states of affairs. There is a wonderful lecture on Wittgenstein on Youtube titled "Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Great War and the Unsayable" you would be interested in.

Untiringly, the answer I have found, the body, a real organic being, not unlike many other animals, is beyond oneself. But not beyond, where we are looking; turns out, it's what never went anywhere. It's "oneself" which is "beyond" a factor only in the make-believe; but it necessarily pretends to be out there and within. — ENOAH

I am a little puzzled. Perhaps elaborate, if you would.

What I have said before is also said of value. How could pain be thought of in a being like us, exempt from its valuation? It is not possible insofar as we are beings who react to suffering and pain according to positive and negative valuations, but in the response (be it by judgment or action) the sign already functions. How could the response not be related to pain and suffering? how could it not have effects on our constitution? Pain and suffering transcends to the extent that it is sign and resonates through our being. Its effects transcend its first moment, they are located in the memory, in the judgment, in the representation, in the response. Here pain and suffering is not the simple cause that can be distinguished from its effects, pain and suffering is its effects beyond the abstraction of a first and absolute moment. — JuanZu

First, it is not positive and negative valuations nor what can be "thought of" that ceases upon thought at the outset. This is where you have your issue: you think Husserl's analysis of time has privilege over the actualities most poignantly there, in our midst. In this you are mistaken. Certainly we are trying to think about pain and time, but the question will always need to yield according to phenomenological priority, and the way we think must follow upon the way the world is phenomenologically appears, or is "given". Jean Luc Marion's "Reduction and Givenness" posits a fourth principle of phenomenology: “so much reduction, so much givenness.” Time is an analytic; pain is not. Time is ontologically equiprimordial, which simply means it begs questions that are implicit in the concept; pain is ontologically primordial: reduced to its essential presence, it has NO analytic.

See the OP: the effort to discover the essence of religion takes us away from the discursive Kantian transcendental move of "what has to be the case given what is the case," into pure immanence.

You find it in Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal time, when he speaks of the three phases that constitute the temporality of consciousness: Retention, perception and protention. This temporality is presented in the epokhé, in which the difference of the "nows" constitutes the living present. But it is necessary to note the difference of the "nows", and how a present-now is immediately past, and gives way to a future-now. In both cases the absence is related and constitutes the living present. In our case, the living present of pain and suffering. — JuanZu

But this is a disingenuous argument as it blatantly ignores the nature of what lies before one. Affective consciousness is logically prior to the talk about the three phases of time. The latter is discursive, while affective consciousness is foundational. Keep in mind, we are well aware of the problems of concerning making ideas clear, but then, this is the problematic of affirming in metaphysics, the affirmation of what stands outside of language IN the inside of language. In language, we discover that we exist (in the pre Heideggerian sense of existence. The kind of thing Nietzsche decried so emphatically), and the valuative dimension of this existence is is exterior of language.

I have said earlier that it really does rest on where the epoche takes one, and I mean, if you follow the principle of exclusion, you realize that you are practicing the method of apophatic theology. And all that is left, the residuum of the reduction, is something that cannot be reduced, for it stands as its own presupposition. This is value-in-the-world.

It is the opposite. When you act in the face of another person's pain, that pain is not present to you. I claim that helping there is an act that transcends the central element of phenomenology (perception and evidence in the living present). You do not have the evidence that the other is suffering (the phenomenological evidence), but you still help the other person. This is what our act of compassion and empathy consists of: The evidence that I am an other for another. The evidence that I am not the only one and that non-presence is so "originary" is something that occurs in my most "isolated and solitary" moment in the reduction of reductions, in the transcendental reduction. It is necessary to be sufficiently other to help and assist in pain and suffering. One must embrace the possible absence of pain and suffering (the pain and suffering of the other is absent in me). — JuanZu

The problem of this reasoning lies with your "absence". The originary evidence is yours, and it is unmitigated and nondiscursive. The evidence for the ethical obligation is discursive, argues Levinas, but I think the matter has to be taken to the pure givenness of pathos. Pathos is discovered IN the appearing, and pathos itself is primordial and stands as a presuppositionaless evidential basis for ethics. Conversation is entangled, mediated, derivative. Pathos is direct regard for the Other that has an ontological status of an absolute.

Put time's analysis aside: There before one is the Other's wretched condition laid our before one. Of course, the argument that the Other is a moral priority, and the discussion of something that is NOT primordial to us weighs in for judgment, taking the Other's existence in third person references. This discussion constructs a dialog, putting fact against fact, comparing priorities, and so forth. I argue that the reduction removes this discursive matter from our sight, in order to discover the pure empathic response (noting that this is absent in some: the real cause of our political troubles).

Of course, pure empathy does not give one an answer in an entangled world. Nor does logic give us all the reasons for doing and justifying. Empathy is primordial. This is the point. To "feel for" the misery of others is not an argument, but reflects the foundational unity of ethical agencies.

Thanks for the response.

This is a pretty good illustration of my point about myopic philosophizing without being scientifically informed. I'll bow out now. — wonderer1

Myopic philosophizing? Without being scientifically informed?? What are you talking about?

I think you fail to grasp Schopenhauer. Good is not positive because it is temporary. Much like Heraclitus, he sees the flux of existence and sees this as proof that satisfaction is unstable and unattainable. Want is the hallmark of lack. Something we don’t have now. We would not lack for anything if we were whole and not unstable. Instead our very existence as individual beings is inherently intertwined with lacking.

Good and bad in the hedonistic sense..being embarrassed feels bad. Winning a game feels good, is not quite what he’s getting at. — schopenhauer1

I do see what he is getting at. It is not that he says what he says I take issue with. It is what he says. He fails to see the nature of value in ethics and aesthetics. This is a metaethical claim that the ethical and aesthetic matters we all encounter have an actual metaphysical foundation. Kant's deduction from the evidence found in the analysis of the structure of judgment justified the positing of pure forms of reason. You certainly can argue about this, but the point is about method: He made a logical move from what is "seen" to what is unseen. An extrapolation. Here this is done with value.

I am saying that Schopenhauer, based on what I have read, does not see this. First, if you are going to take misery seriously, as he apparently does, then you have to take the entire range of value matters just as seriously. One seeks to escape pain, but why? The logic of pain possesses the logic of relief, and relief is "good" feeling, without question. But simply in terms of the face value of good and bad experiences, these dimensions of value are clear and "equiprimordial" (using Heidegger's term), from thumb screws to Hagen Dazs: the bad and good of ethics has its existential grounding here and nowhere else, an entire horizon of actual possibilities.

Second, I am arguing that this field of equiprimordiality of value (good and bad ontologically on the same order of significance) possesses the "impossible" dimension of an absolute. Simply put, ask, What would it mean for an ethical matter to have the same apodicticity found in logic? It would be a metaphysical revelation. I am saying value and its ethics and aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same and I agree) stand as an evidential basis for an existential apodicticity.

Only religion has been allowed to think like this, and its thinking has been so cluttered with fictional narratives and churchy fetishes (I like to call them) that this has obfuscated the true nature of religion, which lies in the metavalue affirmation of the good and bad.