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

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

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

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

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

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

Cicero had never read Levinas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaning as use; meaning as doing. — Banno

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

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

Sometimes there is joy in that divide.

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

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

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

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

If this is not your point, let me know.

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

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

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

Maybe Wittgenstein can make the point best:

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

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

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

Read some philosophy you twit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mine was an inference. I wrote,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This body of thought is phenomenology.

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

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

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

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

Religion is the politics of our ancestors - made necessary when hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form multi-tribal social groups. Hunter gatherer tribes were hierarchies dominated by an alpha male - and it's very difficult for two such hierarchies to coexist. Any dispute over food or sex inevitably splits the social group into its tribal structures of authority. They needed an objective authority for laws that applied equally to everyone, to maintain a stable cohesive social structure. God is the supreme alpha male; and objective authority for law and order. Now, like I said, I don't know if God exists, but I do know religion is the politics of primitive peoples. — counterpunch

Can you imagine thinking of religion without that god notion ruling thought? To me, most atheistic reasoning is straw person arguing: The man in a cloud thinking is demonstrably absurd; therefore, religion is bunk. One has to ask the religious questions behind the myths and anthropological interpretations. There are things, fascinating things entirely unregarded in this dismissive pov.

The point of explaining this to you is to suggest that the actual areas that are not open to me, philosophising on the basis of a scientific understanding of reality, are much less than you might imagine. You would like to construe science as some myopically focused experimental discipline - but science seeks to establish laws that are universally true of reality. Your imagination, by comparison is dwarfed - by the sheer size, and complexity of the universe. You worship the book and despise the creation. You have the milky way - and instead put up fairy lights! — counterpunch

Hehe, heh; I don't know if I take your meaning entirely, but I like your prestation. I have the highest regard for science, especially when I sit in the dentist's chair. The trouble with what you say is that it reveals none of the "Copernican Revolution" of Kant. Not that I am a Kantian, at all, but he was the father of phenomenology (before Husserl) and I take this to be the final frontier of philosophy.

Science simply has to know its place, which is not philosophy. Philosophy, I claim, should inquire into the presuppositions of science and the "everydayness" of our existence. It is essentially descriptive of the world, but at the level of basic questions which goes to the structures of experience.

In other words, to put it succinctly, I am an idealist, not to put too fine a point on it. I think to examine the world philosophically, one has to look to the foundation of thought and experience is presupposed in all we do and say. This brings meaning to the foreground and establishes an entirely independent field of study, which is phenomenology.

The problem is that you can only speak clearly about first-order logic. Most of the propositions of the same "Tractatus" are meaningless applying that own criteria. — Miguel Hernández

Dividing logic into first and second order is, I think, what gives rise to all the troubled thinking. There is no meta-logic logic. Logic cannot think itself. Does that apply to the ethics? Yes, and I take W as denying, not ethical talk, but any attempt to talk about ethical talk. This would be the "second order" you speak of and I have always thought he was dead right about this. BUT: there are ways think that get closer to this line that separates sense from nonsense, and even broaches the divide. Take Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Of Michel Henri's critique of Heidegger.

If one has the feeling that one is talking about a topic in a blind-men-and-an-elephant manner, then one is, clearly, not talking clearly. It doesn't matter what the topic is, although the blind-men-and-an-elephant manner seems to be more common when talking about philosophical, religious, or spiritual topics. — baker

It's a metaphor, and such things make for unclear ideas. But there is something important here, I realize. It is not that W is wrong, but that analytic philosophy took its cue that it had to be rigorously devoted to clarity, not considering that one can take the principle of clarity into thematic zones that are stubborn to its rigor. This is existential thought! Reading Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and others is an exercise in making difficult dimensions of our existence "clear".

But, what is worth thinking about is the right to remain silent in certain areas where feel we are going to tie ourselves in knots, or be met with such opposition. Here, we may be talking about silence not due to lack of knowing but the unspeakable, which could be that which no one wishes to hear.But, perhaps that is another matter entirely. — Jack Cummins

But what if, as I see it, the truth lies in those knots? And the reason metaphysics has been such a bad model is because it created more knots than it undid? And lastly, what is silence? Is it simply turning one's chair to the wall and ignoring the possibilities? The irony of it is that Wittgenstein admired Kierkegaard, who also insisted that there was this impossible unknown, and both were very religious, but the latter turned radically away from privileging science and reason, and made faith into, not a metaphysics, but a new kind of philosophy. An extraordinary achievement.

But the unspeakable: There are ways to speak meaningfully "around" the unspeakable. In fact, Wittgenstein was doing just this with his infamous disclaimer that the Tractatus was just itself a bunch of nonsense, which had to be discarded after reading (Title should have been, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Burn After Reading) But for him, it was a line clearly drawn. That was just wrong. The line is just a beginning of real religion, I claim.

Yes, I agree with that. It's not that I never mention God, but I know I don't know if God exists. I know I don't know where the universe came from, or what it's expanding into. I know I don't know how life began or what happens after we die. But I am quite well versed on a middle ground scientific understanding of reality, and taking in physics, chemistry and evolutionary biology - have found much wisdom and real hope follows from thinking in those terms. I can speak meaningfully about morality and religion, politics and economics - as evolutionary developments, and as sociological and political phenomena. All that is lost to me is speculative; that which, even if interesting, is bound to be inconclusive. — counterpunch

The trick, if you don't mind me saying, is to take "inconclusiveness" and give it its due, which is in regions of thought that demand a division, like when you sit before that petri dish doing genetic research. But step away from such definitive contexts of work, and into the broad, nay, infinite landscape of the human reality, into the powerful world of an impossible ontology, and you encounter all "if ands or buts" science routinely ignores. One does this because being a person is NOT AT ALL like a petri dish. Pull away a bit more and you are in religion's domain, and it is here, I claim, we find religion's resting place. Existential religion (I'm going to call it) is our "home".

Sounds like you're ready to take a few years off, design your sister's house, punch some grade school children in the face, and then come back and write an entire book trying to figure out why you got sucked into thinking language only worked one way with a single standard, where you'd have to field questions from your old self and imagine examples of what we would say under which circumstances to be able to see all the places langauge reaches in our lives, and why we would want to ignore all that. — Antony Nickles

That single standard pretty much sums up the success of analytic philosophy. And yeah, the "old" self is the everydayness (thinking of Heidegger here) that should be the foundation for discovery. And here, it is just massively interesting because meaning is paramount once again! Finally one can ask about this bewildering place we are "thrown" into and we can have that Kierkegaardian outrage in Repetition:
Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls?

And finally, religion is not just some medieval foolishness, but is grounded actuality (putting aside the foolishness that is there, that is). Why the %^%%$$^ are we born to suffer and die? becomes a philosophical theme!

Yes, some deep meditators are supposed to be able to shut-out physical pain while they retreat into an inner world of their own — Gnomon

Well, Thich Quang Duc would be the definitive case in point. After all, being burned alive ON PURPOSE has got to be a whole other universe of superhuman feats. Makes Houdini look like mere dabbler. I put a lighted match to my finger in a microsecond it's too much to bear.

He was not in this world when he lit the match.

Well, "going crazy" (psychotic) might be one way to escape from awareness of the psychic sufferings of reality. But, I don't recommend it. Also, I suppose that some cynics might consider prematurely reaching Nirvana (quenching the flame) via meditation to be a form of "mental suicide". In a more literal sense, the self-immolating monk apparently committed suicide, while meditating, but without actually quenching the flames. Yet, again, I don't recommend it. :sad: — Gnomon

I wonder, "where" do you think Thich Quang Duc was when he set himself ablaze? I think the event tells us something about the relationship between the self, the "deep agency" of the self, that can remove itself from sense perception completely. If a person can do this, then it makes for an argument that gives unqualified independence to this self, if you will, within the self, if he can put this kind of distance between suffering and his own meditating self, where does this place any identifying features at all of the if one say say, apophatically, well, this is not the self?

Meditation, like everything else, is a circle game. You end up back where you started with a new perspective. One of the last things to let go of is the thought that somehow you are "different." It is said that when the historical Buddha reached the apogee of enlightenment, he said, "I have achieved absolutely nothing," meaning that it was only his ability to quiet his mind that had changed. — synthesis

You see, I disagree with this, at least the way it is stated. I won't bring a lot of names into it, but keep it close to simple sense making. Being in love: what IS this? And what is horrible torture? The dimensions of our existence go deep into the extremes. Meditation does not take one away from this into a neutral pain free existence, rather, purifies this struggle down to an essential, palpable joy. Buddhists talk about emptiness, but I have always taken this to mean empty of rigorous interpretative tendencies of being a person in the world. As far as the nature of experience, there was a fullness, a completeness. What one achieves is an absolute nothing in thought and belief, in the distractions that would pull you this way and that, but not in the content: a uniform bliss that issues from one's "Buddha nature" which is always there, always has been, but cluttered with and occluded by engagements, the source of our misery and our foolishness" these are empty for all we can say is thereby conditioned by language and language takes us into the very world of differences we are trying to escape.

And to me, there is no question, meditation IS an escape, it is THE escape; it is death with a pulse.

Near death experiencers are fascinating to me. Never used to be, but lately they are coming out of the closet. And the first thing I notice is that these guys are NOT lying or deluded. Few take them to be philosophically within the bounds of credulity, but they're wrong. I think they have a lot to tell us about meditation, the goal of which is unqualified happiness.

"Burn the Buddha" is the phrase many use to sum-up the situation. The paradox of Buddhism (the religion) is that what makes it so inviting creates massive attachment for most of its followers. The Buddha understood that very few would intuitively, "get it," and created The Path. — synthesis

Burn the Buddha. Meister Eckhart infamously prayed to God to be rid of God. I think he understood attachment in the way you describe. Attachment at the basic level is conceptual and affective, these are joined. One way to look at it: philosophy in its truest form is deconstruction: tearing down the illusions that we know the world. Meditation, on the other hand, and this has to be looked at closely, is the pursuit of affect: we meditate to pursue, not conceptual or propositional wisdom, but a higher, more profound experience or affect, that is, emotion. I know, Buddhists don't talk like this, like Christians talk about God's love, but they are living in the same world and it is just the terminology that is different. Love is just happiness, joy, bliss; and meditation seeks this, off the charts!

I was drawn to Zen because it gets down to the heart of the matter. There is only one lesson in Zen, meditate. Everything there is to get you will derive from your practice. The words are simply pointing the way. You would be amazed at how many people who have been students for many, many years refuse to understand (more that they simply cannot give up critical thought for even a moment). — synthesis

Philosophy is purely pragmatic: just to point the way, as you say, and I think this is right. Jnana yoga is the way of deconstruction, and it does work, but is limited. It can open a door. The most effective philosophy is apophatic, for once one goes through a review of all the assaults on common sense philosophy presents, one is led to see that the world is utterly transcendental, and this can be revelatory. Alas, most philosophers are transfixed by their own cleverness, which is, frankly, fun, if you're good at it. But it goes nowhere.

I wish I was adept in philosophy so I could carry on an intelligent conversation with you but it has been so many years ago and its importance has waned. I am a follower of the Tang Dynasty Chan masters (as are many) and Huang Po is perhaps my favorite master of the "shit or get off the pot" style of teaching. I completely fell into line when I read his words...

"Open your mouth and you have already lost it."

I believe the true liberation in Zen (for me) was the realization that not only can you put down the burden of having to figure everything out, but there is nothing to figure out. It's all right there if only you can open your eyes and still your mind. — synthesis

I have always taken Zen to be where one goes if one is absolutely committed, I mean, solidly on the road to "understanding" at the most basic level. What one witnesses in this path must require extraordinary discipline but what one "sees" must be just extraordinary. Not, I would say, a "nothing" but a living in the pure present. I can only imagine. I have had intimations, which is why I have so much respect for it. There is in this something that far surpasses all other things.

That brings us to the question of whether there is an objective source 'out there' that maps into our consciousness. — EnPassant

Here is a rather "weird" piece of reasoning. But then, the world IS weird:

In the traditional sense of "out there" there is nothing but repetitious finitude. I seriously think, and this is pushing it for most, that the objective source is "in here". I look out into a starry night and I know that eternity is somehow there but then, intuitively an entirely impossible concept. What IS the delimitation of finitude? I think it obvious: it is a brain, of specified dimension in weight and volume and density. I think I am looking at the "place" where the gray matter simply ends when I put my wonder and curiosity to the matter of eternity. A physical border? But then, if it is the brain that "makes" this border, the brain itself cannot be "in" this made finitude any more than a painting can be in a painting (yes, it could but this would beg the question, where is this painting, in another painting? I mean, you can ask this forever until you get to the Real place which is not a painting at all). The brain must be outside the border it creates, in eternity. And since it is outside, all that is inside the brain is in this outside, and this means that our experiences are eternal and the foundation for all we experience lies here.

One way to look at Wittgenstein's claim that our values and logic have their generative source "elsewhere".

One of the issues many meditators deal with is the divide you accurately describe above, that is, existing in the relative (intellectual) when in the world of knowing and human interaction, and The Absolute (or thereabouts) when one is in meditation. As you may be aware, the goal of any structured meditation is to hone your practice to the point where you bring it into everyday life, so eventually the divide narrows. — synthesis

If you bring it into everyday life, then you will live in a different world. And very, very few will understand you.
Meditation makes you into something of a cult of one, for even those who share your interests remain outside. And it is not selfishness, as some might suspect. Just the opposite.

Very interesting. I'll have to give that some thought as it's been a while since I've delved too much into that sort of thing. What I did get out of my readings many years ago was that simplicity is truth, and Simplicity is Truth. The simpler ideas become, the closer to the truth they get, because it is the process of intellectualization that drives them (anything knowable) further and further into obscurity. Peel back layer after layer of meaning, and there is the truth at its core...the quiet mind. — synthesis

I wish I could do this better. But in my favor, I am a bit of a natural. Buddhists talk about detachment and I have always known exactly what they meant. The quiet mind is an openness to the world. I can't say I know how this works with great clarity, but as I see it, to look out into things the sense of "I" is an opaque interpretation and the hardest part of meditation is to undo the self that is "quiet" for we think we know what it is to be quiet but don't. The self, relaxed and controlled, is still tacitly interpreting the world; this is what it means to "know" (Reminds me of Dionysus the Areopagite's Cloud of Knowing. Christian mystics, like Eckhart, were not far from this matter here. One does have to put aside all the Christian metaphysics, same as with Kierkegaard).

I think Derrida is the final philosopher. He deconstructs the self in essence telling us such an idea is constructed like everything else. Constructed in time (time: a concept also constructed, which is the basic idea of hermeneutics). Caputo (See his "The Weakness of God) claims this is where negative theology leads (the East has its "neti, neti" method; the West calls this apophatic theology). I have read that Zen looks at the "space between moments" to identify liberation. They are all talking about the same world, the same encounter, from Husserl to Hinduism.

I am by no means adept in any of this, but I do know what it is like touch on that immaculate clarity and freedom. I take all of this seriously because I naturally inclined to do so. It is like a calling. Much work to do. Worth every moment.

I came to Zen after a very intensive five year philosophical journey that rendered me completely spent (intellectually).

My introductory (Zen) readings suggested two ideas that I have found prescient, the first being that if you are seriously going down this path, you will do it alone, the other being complementary, "To get everything, you must first give everything up."

It's been over three decades now and I can tell you that both have been true for me. If it is the truth you seek, prepare to go it alone. There are very few people who have the energy/will to delve deeply into the philosophical, and almost nobody willing do the same in the non-intellectual. — synthesis

Yes, that makes perfect sense to me.

The world is a language and cultural construct. When one is with others, structures of language and culture are engaged, reinforcing the reality these create. Pulling away from others is like annihilating the world as we know it, the one of distinct values and conversational possibilities that fill time and interests.

Interesting to consider Derrida, obliquely, that is: to step into a moment in time is to be in a compromised reality, for what makes the mundane event, whatever it is, mundane, is the familiarity, the recollections. It wasn't always like this. When we were very young the world was not so thick with knowledge and experience. But at any rate, to observe a lived moment and to know how the actual encounter is instantly seized upon by recollection, what is clear is that the sense of reality is genuinely compromised by a reified past that clutches on the presence of what is there. And its hold is so strong that for most there is never the slightest clue that the language and concerns the past creates are conditioning the present at all. It all is just one big seamless reality. Meditation is an annihilation of this body of presuppositions that are always already there, IN all of our daily affairs, implicitly.

It gets interesting when the acknowledging of this makes its way into the actual perceptual event and one begins to realize that harbored within one's interior has always been something primordial. Kierkegaard calls this the eternal present. He never meditated of course, but knew how far he was from actually realizing this himself, endlessly self deprecating.

It seems to me that there are many kinds of time. The most obvious is physical time. Another is mental time. Also mathematical time. Mathematics IS time of we define time as the relationship between objects in 'space'. There can be mathematical objects in abstract spaces. Logic is also time. Any order is time of one kind or another. — EnPassant

But all of these issue from the origin, which is an agency of human consciousness. All hard sciences, all logical propositions, all that can be said at all! issues first from the agency of experience. Is that air you're breathing? For by the time a breathe makes it into conscious awareness it is a processed event through, to put it in physicalist terms, a 100 billion neuron brain thing.

Physical time is a physical object just like a chair or table except it has an extra dimension. If physical objects disappear so will physical time. An analogy would be an oak tree and the molecules that make it. If the molecules that make it dissolve into atoms, the oak tree will evaporate and disappear. — EnPassant

But to add: that oak tree dis present not out there in some remoteness from experience, but in experience itself, and experience is generated from one moment to the next. Experience is Heraclitus' stream that one cannot step into twice, or even once (Porphyry). time is not "out there" but in here, experience. Einstein knew this very well having read Kant when he was 13 or so.

t's my supicion, well-founded or not (you be the judge), that the entire story of ethics and the self, rides on the simpler notion of causality. An event takes place and instincitvely we seek a cause. This desire to pin down a cause transforms into an ethical dimension while the cause itself is rendered by the mind into a self. — TheMadFool

There may be something in this. But it ignores the essence of ethics: pain and pleasure, suffering and bliss. This may fit into a causal matrix in our general affairs, but they are not mere causal events, reducible to the principle of sufficient cause. I mean, that screaming pain from a spear in your kidney, how can causality explain this? It is, after all, that pain which is the essence of the ethical prohibition NOT to inflict it on others, or yourself. All ethics has this feature: no pain, pleasure (of some kind or another) at stake, then no ethics!

Perhaps we have a self but it isn't much if it is not in a relationship to something. The ever changing river is the relationship between us and the world. That seems to be what the self is. — EnPassant

Perhaps, but then, there is Husserl and Derrida and those in between and the idea that eternity is not some infinite succession of moments, but rather the absence of time, and time is what is produced when memory surges forward with its history of events, language, culture and so forth, into an unmade future. This stream of future making events IS time; and we are not in time, but we, our personality, predilections to act, think and feel, ARE time. This is Heraclitus' world.

But what of the self? This fleeting being constantly in flight into the future caught in a temporal dynamic? This is where actuality is, in this fleeting process' center. The eternal present, as Kierkegaard thought of it.
This might sound far fetched, that is, until one takes up meditation, the act of annihilating time. There is something to the strong claims made by Hindus and many Buddhists (Mahayana) that say, in the deepest meditative states, something qualitatively distinct steps forward that is more real, so much so it makes eveydayness look pale by comparison.

Being that I can find no evidence that we can have access to reality on any level, the key becomes gaining the skills to "go with the flow" as best as is possible and I have found meditation to be (by far) the best method for myself. — synthesis

A nice practical approach. But if one wants to go into it more deeply, it takes sacrifice. I mean, time reading phenomenology, or meditating two hours a day. Both, I think. But honestly? This entails giving up "the world"! weird to say, but that is what happens when you go into such matters with real, say, genuine intent, for then, the thinking, the meditative revelatory experiences, all pull one to a different gravity other than popular themes. As I see it, few can do this, give up the world. Intellectuals take to the lectern, meditators usually just want to find peace, but to really close down the institutions that fill one's head as a member of society, this is a different course of life. Takes motivation.

It seems to me that the self - or a large part of it - is our relationship with the world. It is ever changing - you can't step into the same river twice... — EnPassant

Is there nothing at all that IS the river?

If you want to begin to understand the origin of NOW have you considered Plotinus' idea of the ONE? — Nikolas

Sure, I've read the Enneads, or, enough of them here and there through time, and I understand pretty well the essential thinking. It is written about in different ways by Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists, Kierkegaard, Jaspers (the Encompassing---no doubt he had read Plotinus), Levinas, et al. Interesting to read broadly on this issue because other fill in the gaps, open lines of inquiry that one didn't know were there. And in doing this, my view is, there is a conscious assault on the conditioned experiences that hold our minds, souls, selves, whatever. Eckhart wished to be rid of "God" but really it is the firmly based experiential grounding acquired through a lifetime that needs to be exorcized.
The real question is, after one has reviewed the matter and observed the crisis of the understanding when it comes to God and the everydayness of living and thinking, how is liberation achieved? The One is bound to the many, if you want to talk like this, and the many is a perversion of this if taken as foundational. See Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling, e.g.You know, they are all talking about the same thing.

I claim we live in transcendence, for all things are a presence that is irreducible. This is not a popular idea, though.
— Constance

What do you mean by this? — synthesis

The issue hangs on consciousness having this underpinning that is not available to thought, which is I think clearly true. BUT: the actual generative source for experience can never be observed, for it would require consciousness to do this, and consciousness is supposed to be the object of our inquiry, and cannot be the means, for that would be question begging of the worst kind. So as far as underpinnings, all experience, consciousness, the self, and the like are grounded not in something observable waiting for a more powerful microscope, but in "something" entirely off the map: unobservable, yet the necessity for positing it does not thereby reduce to nonsense. Transcendence is simply there, always already there , discoverable perhaps only in the, if you will, experience of experience, which is a loose way to talk about self consciousness: the standing apart from affairs, observing that you observe, or think or feel, and this kind of thinking takes the matter even further away from familiar thinking.

I think for all us soul searchers the relentless seeking for answers has prevented us all to look at 'what is' and claim 'there must be more to this than "what is"'. This notion will always have those who seek beyond and believe there is always more.
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything. — Peter Paapaa

This "what is" has a philosophical history that is not altogether antagonistic to, if you will, reclaiming something deep and primordial about being a self. But it takes some serious reading. I am reading the French post Heideggerians who take the moment of inquiry that sets one apart from mundane thinking very seriously. See Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, and others. Fink's Sixth Meditation hs always been a favorite, but one needs Kant and Husserl for clarity, I think.

This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning. — Nikolas

Attention of the heart? You mean emotional attention, to regard the world in a loving way. Self questioning leads to this? I think it requires a certain kind of self questioning. The question opens up possibilities and violates familiar thinking. What happens in self questioning, the "Who am I, really? and Why do we suffer? and so forth? It sounds like you think the question at the basic level presents something, but you cannot yet call it a soul, I don't think. You first have to be more descriptive: what is it one's encounters in inquiry that warrants positing the soul? Here one has dropped standard thinking altogether and entered a relatively alien world, relative, that is, to our everydayness.

Can you confirm such a thing, and explain it keeping faithful to what the world actually presents itsel;f as Being? This is where things get philosophical. Eckhart, remember, wrote of how he prayed to God to be rid of God. He wanted to be free of this everydayness that a lifetime of conditioning imposed on his thoughts and feelings, and, especially, his baseline intuitions.

Have you ever been in love? Can you TELL me what that is about?

There are things which are simply beyond the reach of our intellect (pretty much everything :). To me, to be forced to live in a world defined by our critical thinking alone truly defines what my mentor used to tell me repeatedly, "Man makes his own Hell on this Earth." — synthesis

Of course, you're right. I only add that what is spoken is brought into understanding. I can talk about being in love, explain the physiology of it, throw in adjectives and metaphors, and so on, but these just dance around what is in itself, entirely beyond the saying. All things are like this, as you say, not just love, or intense emptions, but everything: my dog and cat, the clouds in the sky, the cup on my desk, and so on.
I claim we live in transcendence, for all things are a presence that is irreducible. This is not a popular idea, though.

Value is not ineffable any more than the ‘objective ‘ is transcendentally true. Moore was a Kantian, still caught up in a subject-object , feeling-thinking split. Value cannot in any shape or form be separated from that which would supposedly be understandable or existent independently of it. The same is true of the relation between affectivity and intentional meaning, which is what we’re really talking about here anyway. Heidegger realized precisely this, which is why he didn’t think of ‘value’ as mysterious in some way that cognition or perception is not. Value is befindlichkeit, how we find ourselves in the world, how things have pragmatic meaning and significance for us. — Joshs

I think it is right to say things are, as I take Heidegger to claim, of a piece: concepts, pragmatics, value, meaning (Dewey said the same); and it is not my intention to take metavalue as some kind of impossible ontology apart from all entanglements (which would the worst kind of dualism I suppose). I put matters of drawing ontological lines between things in suspension, but would like to take an analytical look at experience just to see what is there, plainly. Take a lighted match, apply it to the finger, and observe, apart from all presuppositions that would make a claim to it (which of course would remind one of Husserl, or perhaps of analytic philosophers' concept of qualia, or see Dennett's rather stark use of 'phenomenon' in his paper on qualia, and so on).

I mean, what is it As pain, and I care not at all how hermeneutically entangled it is otherwise, or whether belongs to a temporally structured event in which existence is predelineated, preconceptualized, or whether knowledge is inherently pragmatic. All off the board. It is the screaming pain I wish understand for what it is. I find this: When I break Wittgenstein's maxim to "pass over in silence" the whole affair, I find language that does not speak what value is any more than it can speak the color yellow as yellow. But there is one thing that does issue from the pain, and that is an injunction not to inflict this on to others nor myself. It is an injunction that is not contingent, as if "the world" were speaking, as if it were written on tablets by God.

I suspect this, contradicting myself from earlier, is the only Real ontology.

What you can learn, takes place before your critical thinking mind engages. Once it kicks-in, it alters reality into your personal reality which is simply incapable of figuring out much of anything. After all, how long would it take you to figure out the forth root 35467.94324 to the tenth place in your head? Compare that to the non-thinking mind that can process an infinite amount of information each moment. — synthesis

The "non thinking mind"? And what is this if not a thought in your head about something you observe. Note that every time you take up something about consciousness, you do so IN consciousness: "non-thinking" is a unit of language you learned, and when your understanding turns to identifying this, it turns where? to more language.
Did you think this was about the mysterious processes that underlie language and thought? TELL me what they are, emphasis on "telling". The point is, at best, observations show that actuality is not a language event, but such things are "empty" to the understanding if the attempt is made to conceive of them outside of language. The understanding is a "bundled" affair in which thought and sense intuition come together, as a piece, if you will. You may, as I see it, posit that there such things apart from what thought can say, speculate, analyze and so forth, and I think this right, but then you will be on the threshold of metaphysics, and would referring to affairs beyond what can be witnessed.