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.

Given that we are granting evolution occurred, (I presume you mean biological evolution) I'm not seeing much reason to privelege philosophical consideration especially. There is a large and growing amount of scientific investigation into matters of great relevance to epistemology, language, aesthetics, and ethics. Can you make a case for why the philosophy to which you are referring is more important to understand than the growing body of scientific understanding? — wonderer1

It is a long story. If science does not and cannot explain knowledge AT ALL, then all of its knowledge claims rest within the claims as claims only. This is just the way it is throughout analytical thinking, isn't it? A person tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask what the sun is, and not only is there no answer, but the very possibility of an answer is problematic, then the proposition that moonlight is reflected sunlight light becomes very thrown into doubt while the search for what a "sun" could possiblity be moves forward.

Okay, so we know what the sun is. But consider: A scientist tells me moonlight is reflected sunlight, and I ask, how do you know anything about anything? Not just suns and moons, but anything at all. The scientist brushes this off, but note: she has no answer. I mean, in the language of the science she is so familiar with, there simply IS no answer to this.

This is why philosophical thinking is "privileged": It is thinking about the forgotten indeterminacies of our existence. No one questions science when it does its job. But scientific metaphysics, materialism or physicalism and the variations thereof, fail almost instantly at the mention.

Of course, you can say such indeterminacies are of no consequence. First, the consequence is, up front, not the point. The point is all knowledge claims rest on indeterminacies. This has to be made clear. Second, to see whether there is significance to this kind of inquiry, one has to realize that this indeterminacy: it's you. And me and everyone else. Philosophy takes one away from objective certainties (or, it should) of science, and into the extraordinary world of the self. After all, a perception of the world is not a mirror image. The observer is part and parcel of the event that produces the facts of the world.

I read somewhere that quantum physics is trying to make a similar claim. But this has been around since Kant.

So actually, he is one of the most notable philosophers of music, raising it to some of the highest levels of his metaphysical system/sotieology. That is to say, in his view, if the problem of suffering is our "Will", then, one way for a brief respite from it is aesthetic contemplation. The artistic genius and to a lesser extent, the observer, they are seeing the very Ideas themselves (pace Plato but not exactly), through their aesthetic lens. Whereas images and other mediums are more stationary, representing the ideas, music solely, has represents the Wills very flowing nature, being even more abstracted from the already abstract nature of art and aesthetics. — schopenhauer1

I wonder what you think about Schopenhauer's ethics? I don't think I will read The World as Representation just because I don't have the time and I'm reading other things. But looking here and there, I come to conclude that he doesn't understand ethics. Misery more existentially emphatic than bliss? He fails to see that our preference for the good over the bad, founded on the good as an absolute good and the bad an absolute bad. Our preferences are entangled in wants and needs as Schopenhauer says they are, but a further examination of the nature of a want or need reveals a ground of presuppositional significance he didn't see.

Apodictically good is different from contingently good, the latter being a good couch or a good knife, the former, good itself. As with apodictic logicality, the latter cannot be anything other than what it is. Just as modus ponens will not be contradicted, so the good of being in love and the bad of having your kidney speared cannot be other than what they are. This is the point in the OP.

You know Schopenhauer better than I. Perhaps you can see a way out of this?

Noticed I overstepped with this: "The issue of evidence simply loses it meaning here." Should say it is here that the problematic begins. To say being is uncovered, and this does carry the weight of foundational being and not simply a construct, in radical proximity of appearance refers to something uncovered that is not derivative. But the discussion this opens is not settled.

Beyond is whatever evolution gets to in the future; quantum fields are the root before in the past. — PoeticUniverse

Before you get to quantum physics, you have to ask more basic questions, those of philosophy. What is knowledge? What is language? What is aesthetics and ethics? To affirm quantum physics or evolution is, of course, not questioned at all. It's just that there are quesitons that underlie science's assumptions that have their own analyses.

Self itself. — 180 Proof

I don't remember the context in which this was said.

Hmmm I would say maybe anything we can’t know? — John McMannis

Look at it like Rorty did, and he was a qualified naturalist: See out there among the trees, there are no propositions. And here, at my end, there are no trees. What does a knowledge claim do, LEAP over there for content? No. Correspondence theory falls apart almost instantly because one can never get out of the knowledge we have of trees to the things over there. To affirm such a thing would require some third medium through which connectivity is established; but then, this third medium itself would need its own nexus of epistemic connectivity; ad infintitum.

I should quickly add that it is not being argued that knowledge claim never reach their object. Quite the opposite: they clearly do. When I see a tree, it is out there, I am here, it is not me, etc. All registered with acceptance. The question is, how is this possible? This is where we have to turn to phenomenology. What we "see" is an event, a me-seeing-tree event. What else?

So, Schopenhauer has a theory of Will whereby it operates in the negative. That is to say, for him, satisfaction is the freedom from pain, not the attainment of a good. He has a deprivationalist view whereby, wants and needs are the given, and satisfaction is simply a temporary stasis that is achieved when goals are achieved/consumed/partaken in. The suffering is that we are dissatisfied, and thus his quote:

The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
— Schopenhauer- Studies in Pessimism/ The Vanity of Existence — schopenhauer1

Fascinating. I trust he is being truthful, and there is only one way to explain his position: He truly did not understand happiness, love, music; of course, music of great bravado is the exception, as is love in the broadest sense, as in the love of boxing or extreme sports, and happiness can be about just about anything. But something profound and positively important, I mean, he could no more understand this than a quadriplegic could understand the joys of gymnastics. Feeling genuinely good as a general sense of well being, was simply absent from his existence. (Note the striking difference between Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein: the latter, very passionate, threw himself on the war's front just to face death, and thoughts of Beethoven and Brahms were the ground for his infamous statements about nonsense: not wanting philosophical nonsense to undo the depth of experience.) This was very likely true about Nietzsche, who suffered all of his life and spend his time, free or otherwise, actually being an ubermensch in his day to day affairs.

A strange irony. Likely that some of the greatest composers are among the least able to aesthetically acknowledge music. Explains Schoenberg and Webern.

It is a question of endowment. That is, why philosophical questions remain unanswerable. We "answer" from what we know, and we "know" very different things as we are made of, if you will, different things.

And I agree with that. But I consider that pain must be seen as part of a significant whole. In this sense pain is not only the sensation but the memory, the value, its interpretation, its representation, and so on. This, I believe, reveals to us an element of absence (non-presence, Husserlian non-evidence) in its ethical consideration. Hence, I cannot give primacy to my pain with respect to the pain of the other person. The value of presence and of the evidence of experience in phenomenology is surpassed by the value of absence in order to be able to pose the ethics of pain. — JuanZu

But it is not about the ethics of pain, nor is it about the significant whole. This is not an argument about ethics any more than Kant's Critique is about logic and logically solving cognitive puzzles. It is an apriori argument: What is there in an ethical matter such that in order to be ethical at all, this is an essential part to it being what it is. This is value, a structural feature of our existence, always already in our existence (Heidegger's care comes to mind, but he had little interest in ethics. Curious).What is value? "The good"? One thing is clear, remove value from the world, and ethics simply vanishes. It doesn't vanish incidentally, as when one removes the umbrella from above one's head, protection from the rain vanishes; it vanishes essentially: ethics becomes an impossibility.

I agree that Husserl's transcendental Ego is not exactly the same as the Cartesian Cogito. However the epokhe saves an Ego. Husserl's analyses of the temporality of that Ego in my opinion are irrefutable. The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration, moments that are more intense than others, sometimes it passes, and sometimes it returns. It is impossible to detach pain from the temporality composed of "here and now" and therefore with the relationship with other "here and now" that are not present. Is this not the experience of the other? Another person who has experiences in relation to me is another "here and now" that I do not perceive. The pain of another person is given in a here and now that I do not perceive and is not an experience of mine. — JuanZu

Very much appreciate this passage here, "The temporality according to which this Ego is given refers to the constituent absence of the Ego since pain is also given as duration." Would you tell me where this comes from in the "Phenomenology of the internal consciousness of time"? I have it here but I can't find it.

You have to ask the question, where does the reduction really take one? "What IS it? It is the Cartesian method of doubt that understands one thing Descartes did not: A disembodied cogito makes no sense at all, and really is no more than an abstraction from actuality, which is a fully endowed experience. The reduction takes one the presuppositional foundation of experience, and so the world of familiar nomenclature falls away, yielding to the pure phenomena that stands before one. Husserl laid the basics outm but it is with the neoHusserlians like Michel Henry, I am arguing, that the reduction finds its true center: “So much appearing, so much being.” The issue of evidence simply loses it meaning here. I can take issue with anything that is constituted theoretically. Even if the world of meaningful utterances is essentially pragmatic, and theoretical accounts "come after" this foundation of pragmatic "knowledge" one is still a theoretical setting simply saying this. This, I take it, is what the problem of evidence is essentially about. What is being defended here is the notion that language in its "openness" discovers existential actuality, and this discovery is inherently valuative. What would dasein be without care? It would be a dictionary-self, altogether exhausted analytically by what language can say and the "potentiality of possibilities" found therein.

As to agency and experiencing the entire affective dimension of existence, I hold that the affectivity of discovered "in the world" cannot exist without it. Affectivity cannot exist without agency, or, it is absurd to imagine suffering disentangled from the one who suffers. Just as it is absurd to imagine an analysis of time contradicting the primordiality of suffering, simply because suffering as a pure phenomenon stands outside of analysis. Heidegger said he did not believe in a single primordiality. I am arguing he was wrong about this: value in the world is this. Consider Jean Luc Marion on this: the reduction is utterly primordial as it yields/discovers primordiality itself. Thus, "the Kantian insistence that there are pure ideas in play in the analytic is dismissed because there is no analysis in this disclosure. One stands before givenness and all discursivity is in abeyance. This is not an argument. It is a revelation."

That is why I am not "Levinasanian". The condition for there to be a pain or suffering of another person is that the value of the experience, the presence and the present of that experience is to be transcended by an absence. In this case the experience of the other that I do not perceive and that is given to me as absent. But in the end this absence is constitutive, even of the ethical consideration of myself and of the inscription of pain in a process of signification. The process of signification is like language: it functions with signs. And it is characteristic of a sign to function in different contexts. In this case pain is a sign, it can have existence in me or in another person, different organisms, different contexts, transcending the value of presence "here and now". It is the most common story of meaning: When we read a book we relive what a person thought in the "here and now" and captured it in ink (or in some data), but that "here and now" is completely absent at the moment when I read the book written by another person: I am another "here and now" also absent for the writer. But the meaning of the book "survives" transcends the experience and the evidence (Husserl's evidence) of both the reader and the writer. — JuanZu

The absence is constitutive OF the process of signification. The claim here is that his temporally conceived process of signification belongs to an analytic that is committed to "things themselves" and the nonderivative of their presence. The reduction takes inquiry closer and closer to this and the disclosure becomes more foundational. It is supposed to do this, not wander around in speculation. When you find yourself radically at odds, not with the familiar word and its assumptions, but with this second order of phenomenological awareness, you know something is very wrong your thinking. Consider for that moment as you stand before, say, a black plague victim and all the horrors, you proceed to explain that agency itself is negated by a proper analysis of the temporal construct of engagement, and so suffering is analytically without agency... so all is well.

Frankly, I don't think you think like this. I think you are testing the thesis. I have no problem with this. I'll read more deeply into Husserl's Time, see if I can give you a more technical response.

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic structure of consciousness. It is not designed to disclose certainty in the specific content of what appears to consciousness. On the contrary, every particular content given in consciousness ( such as a sensation of pain) is contingent and relative. — Joshs

But I was referring specifically to the apophatic nature of the reduction. Michel Henry argues how this negative "method" takes philosophy to the purity of engagement and he means it takes one to an undeniable simplicity. As does Caputo.

But regarding his endless references to absolute consciousness, it seems clear that Husserl was talking like a foundationalist. On the other hand, there is this paper by Bence Peter Marosan, Levels of the Absolute in Husserl which argues along the lines you mention. I tend toward Henry, Marion, et al.

For Heidegger, the transcendence of Being refers to the fact that the subject is out beyond itself in being in the world. It understands itself by coming back to itself from its future. When we take something ‘as’ something, we are projectively understanding from out of this future. — Joshs

Right. I surely can't speak for everyone, but for me, the hardest thing about reading Heidegger is that through his long discussions, everything is derivative of time, that is, has its most primordial discussion in time. Human dasein is time.

When Derrida says there is nothing outside the text, he means nothing outside context. Context for him is not a frame that encloses a meaning within it, but a displacing , transcending futurity that is imminent to the structure of understanding something as something, a break within the heart of what would otherwise be constituted as intrinsically ‘pure’ value , sense, meaning, ipseity. — Joshs

The fault lies in the analysis that would compromise the singularity of valuing which is most vividly revealed in intense examples. "Pure" value lies outside understanding as something, notwithstanding that it is discovered

Nothing outside the text: certainly not enclosed meanings, any more than a context itself can be truly closed. But "displacing, transcending futurity," this I haven't encountered on Derrida. I'll have to look see.

..."these are.." not what I wrote. I never proof read. Bad habit.

This seems the foundation for Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion and thus the foundation of his ethics: — schopenhauer1

I take this to be VERY important questioning:

The attainment of a goal or desire, Schopenhauer continues, results in satisfaction, whereas the frustration of such attainment results in suffering. Since existence is marked by want or deficiency, and since satisfaction of this want is unsustainable, existence is characterized by suffering.

Frustration is not what results in suffering, nor is want or deficiency. There, of course, are examples of suffering, but suffering itself "stands as its own presupposition," requiring no wordy accounting, and again, not that wordy accountings are wrong, they just miss the point: The bad experience (not a bad couch or a having a bad day) finds what makes it bad in the pureness of badness itself. One is inclined to take issue with this "ontology of the bad"? I can see why (but some of those who take strongest issue with this are so happily inclined to talk about something like material substance independent of the agency's perceptual contribution, and idea of the absolute worst kind of metaphysics; after all, such a thing has never even been witnessed, nor is it witnessable), for the "good" and the "bad" of ethics is occluded by contrived philosophical issues.

I am saying, if you want to know what the basis is for the injunction not to bludgeon your neighbor with a hammer, the basis for the laws against doing this, all one has to do is bludgeon oneself, and the authority of the injunction not to do it rests solely with what it feels like to be bludgeoned. It is not a deficit nor the frustration of being bludgeoned (whatever that is), but the "presence" of this value-in-the-world we call bad. Likely due to Schopenhauer's exposure to Buddhism which, as you likely know, puts the onus on the idea of attachments, but this too begs the same question: what is wrong with attachments? Such inquiry always comes down to the foundational pure phenomenon of value.

I claim that there is indeed a process of interpretation. As I said, suffering does not occur in the absolute singularity that you claim. And this is demonstrated in the exercise of the recognition of pain. What is the link between pain and memory? If pain were not part of a process of signification, we could not even say that memory, insofar as it has as its object of memory, is somehow related to pain. In this sense, what is it that memory brings out of pain? Meaning. Pain cannot be thought of without its inscription in a process of signification being already given at the very moment of its existence. That would be to make pain something absolute, but so absolute (absence of relation) that neither thought (nor memory) could relate to it. — JuanZu

A curious position to take indeed. Even if I were to grant that the experience of pain was memory contingent, this would not, nor can anything, undo or diminish the manifestation of the pain qua pain. I don't at all think what you are saying is right about how pain becomes manifest AS pain, for, on the one hand, it is like the temporal forward looking occasion of encountering my cat, an occasion which possesses the habit of familiarity, hence recollection, in the recognition, making recognition possible. This is Heidegger's "taking something AS" in dasein's possibilities. I take "that there" AS a cat and when he says the whole world of possible objects is like this, I think he is right, but only to the extent that what appears is reducible to a reduction to "taking as," the nature of hermeneutics.

While it is true that pain is contextually defined in different ways: in this context it is an opportunity to show strength of endurance, in another there is a Hippocratic oath taken to see pain as a pathology, and so on. THIS is what is meant by hermeneutical taking something as: "regions" of possibility are "desevered" when one enters a doctor's office or someone's kitchen (see his section on Space in B&T). But for this to hold, and hold disingenuously, one would have to observe that the pain witnessed in the palm of your hand as you hold a lighted match beneath it, is entirely contextually constituted.

Look I mean, you can SAY this is the case, but such a thing would be patently absurd.

This even occurs at the level of presence that you point out: Husserl's understanding of temporality. It is not convenient here to recall Husserl's analyses of temporality. Husserl refers us to a differentiated structure of the moment in which something presents itself to the cogito, and this moment is related to the traces that are retained (retention, protention) in this moment (such as the moment of pain). Thus the aforementioned presence of the experience is inscribed in a chain of signification. That to which I have constantly referred. It is not an absolute, and its meaning is not given from itself. Language, therefore, is not a mere accident that survives the experience, but a possibility that is given by essence insofar as the experience is imbricated and inscribed in the signification. — JuanZu

Husserl's is not a Cartesian cogito. It is a transcendental ego that stands in an intentional relationship with its object, and these relationships are not simply knowledge relationships, but include liking, disliking, anticipating, dreading, and so forth. But no matter. Note that that which is inscribed in a chain of signification is merely an "adumbration" of the experience. I recall that I sprained my ankle, but that recollection does not relive the pain of the sprain. The pain itself is transcendentally occurrent, meaning it issues from a "now" that is not discovered in the retention.

I claim that this transcendent reality of which you speak when you speak of pain belongs to what Heidegger calls Western ontotheology. And this is so insofar as you have referred to the absolute, to purity, and to authority about something like pain. That reference to purity, to the absolute, and to the presence of pain is the classical element of the unconditioned and that whose meaning and being is given from itself. — JuanZu

Yes. Though, along with Nietzsche, most of this tradition is declared off the table. One has to be very careful approaching this, and Derrida comes to mind, along with the so called "French theological turn" of Michel Henry, Levinas and others. Husserl's reduction is an apophatic method of disclosure. Heidegger later (Discourse on Thinking) softens a bit, referring to gelassenheit, meditative thinking that is a kind of yielding to a world to discover it, but here one can still construe this to be no more than allowing the Totality of language and culture to play out without the imposition of presumed knowing. Our words are, after all, "open" interpretatively.

But yes, I am saying that value-in-Being is just as you say, but value as such is utterly transcendental, and the word is contextually bound.

But how do we make this compatible with ethics? Such an absolute makes impossible the recognition necessary for empathy and understanding of the pain of others. More ethical than "I suffer" is "the other suffers". And the suffering of the other is not my experience! Ethics at this point must challenge and transcend the value of presence and experience, just as memory and language do, and just as the process of signification in which pain is inscribed invites us to think. — JuanZu

This is confusing to me. Levinas said the opposite. One's own suffering translates into a knowledge of suffering that there is a metaethical grounding to one's compassion. The Other's suffering has always been understood empathetically, which places the nature of understanding always with the self. Transcending one's self begins with self knowledge: I see another suffering, and "it hurts; it hurts and I know it." This is the foundation of empathy.

"We use language to talk about language". In this sense, language becomes the space of essentiality. It is what Heidegger pointed out when naming language as "the house of being". That is why I point out this exteriorization of language, even of language on itself. We give ourselves in language, not so much by language but by the transcendentality of language that is even at the level of the cogito. And I would go further, to the level of perception and sensibility: memory. When you say that pain is something mine and mine alone, you are already carrying out a re-appropriation: there is no pain without duration. So the repetition already takes place even at the level of sensibility. That is why we can remember a pain, because its meaning as pain transcends it and makes it possible (as duration or repetition). It is almost like the movement of a language, full of signs and signs of signs. Pain is also a sign. — JuanZu

The space of essentiality if you think like Heidegger. Husserl was an absolutist who thought that there is a true actuality in the eidetic presence, a "pure" phenomenon and Heidegger thought he was trying to walk on water. For me, I think callinglanguage the house of being can only made sense if you take being to be an ontological analytic, such that meaning at the level of basic questions lies in the combinatory possibilities of what can be said in the "potentialities" of what lies in a finite culture (Kierkegaard called this the "sin' of the race). See Heidegger's lecture on ontotheology and his " Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition." In the old Christian or Cartesian or Platonic sense of metaphysics there is this substantival view being, like Descartes' cogito, a thinking substance, this substratum of perceived affairs that underlies all (for us, res cogitans, for the world, res extensa). For Heidegger, this is simply out the window, making all that IS reduced to what language can construe something to BE.

Husserl is obviously not a substantivalist. But he does, to use Heidegger's language, defend the idea of a singular primordial Being discovered in the reduction. What is before me, my cat, is not a cat at the basic level. It IS pure presence. I mention all of this just to get here: I think Husserl is right! And Heidegger wrong on this single point. Heidegger is probably to most helpful philosopher I have ever read because, for one thing, he helped me articulate why I think Husserl is right. Being and Time gave rise to an entire culture of philosophical responses, among them are the post Heideggerian neo Husserlians, whom I read.

I believe you are right about the way language constitutes the Being of what can be said. But not the Being of what cannot be said. When language is deployed to speak the world it encounters the impossible, that is, what is "exterior to itself. A toothache's ache is not a thesis. I put most emphasis on the value dimension of our existence which is so emphatically underscored in the existential declaration of what it is. This I hold to be evident beyond question: screaming agony, say, as the most poignant example, is NOT an interpretative phenomenon in the purity of its presence. Heidegger is notoriously not an ethicist, and I think the reason he was able to reduce religion to ontotheology (see his THE ONTO-THEO-LOGICAL CONSTITUTION OF METAPHYSICS) is because he could not see this monumental point. There is no constituting interpretative language for value qua value (the essence of ethics and religion). Of course, when I speak of the pain, I am committed to the content of my time, culture and language, but value experience, when cleared of entanglements, is absolute. "The Good," I often mention Wittgenstein as saying, "is what I call divinity." This from a philosopher who took Occams' Razor to the radical exclusion of all metaphysics. He is not Heidegger, but they certainly align in their insistence that nothing may be said about the unspeakable. Heidegger speaks "around" the unspeakable in the section Care as the Being of Dasein, which is a fascinating discussion. But I part ways with him here, using the terms you raise: The exteriority of metaethics is "pure" metaphysics, not his ontotheology. Ethics is absolute at the level of basic questions.

The thing is that it is not universalization in the strict sense. It is transcendence, and singularity begins with transcendence (as has been said above about pain qua singularity) and signification. Hence we can establish an ethics about pain because if it were so absolutely singular it would be impossible to remember, or even to be aware of it. Religion, according to my reasoning, is a case of reappropriation of the field of transcendentality. It is something that still establishes universal maxims that must be followed by humans. God according to tradition is a cogito, but his condition of possibility (transcendence) exceeds the cogito. — JuanZu

If you confine the world's apprehension to the delimitations of language, then you will end up in Heidegger's thesis. But here, I invite you to take Husserl seriously, that is, Michel Henry, a post Husserlian (along with Levinas, Marion, Nancy, et al): terminate thought and allow yourself to participate in the vivid sensation of being here. The trouble with Heidegger is that he, while running a very different course of arguing, finds himself sharing the same end game as analytic philosophers, which is the attempt to address the living experience of our dasein in terms of language and its "potentiality of possibilities." This essentially is a reduction to dust, says Michel Henry (Barbarism). But the epoche of Husserl leads us out of this and into an affirmation that cannot be affirmed in the contingencies of language. Hermeneutics throws a broad blanket of contingency over all meaning. Yet when the reduction (epoche) is taken all the way to the direct interface with the world, contingencies dissolve yielding to revelation, seeing that we actually exist, as Kierkegaard put it.

I cannot see that pain being an absolute would make it impossible to remember. This is true of, say, in the way I am able to acknowledge an environment of equipment, as Heidegger put it: I walk into a classroom, familiar with all I see, and these are ready to hand, the desks, the lectern, and the rest. And each moment is a recollection/anticipation unity, and all is, as Husserl put it, predelineated in time. To know is to always already know PRIOR to encounter, and this is "desevered" (see his section on "Space") when encountering classrooms, etc. But pain as such is not recalled IN the painful moment. The knowledge desevered when reviewing what happened, how intense it was, how familiar and in what ways, all of this IS an experience of interpretative nature, true; but while IN the pain, one is not recalling pain, one is not desevering pain to recall what it is. Its BEING, I want to remind Heidegger, is stark evidence of the actuality that lies "outside" language.

Here, I do not care if I am caught in the middle of interpretative necessity (after all, saying something is outside language is itself an occasion pf language) which have no limit in subsuming phenomena, and the "purity" of the pain. The screaming pain of this sprained ankle IS absolutely authoritative, and this sense of absolute IS aligned with the traditional sense of ontology, which Heidegger wants to ignore.

As to universal maxims being followed by humans, we take no issue with this. But the analytic of ethics/aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same thing, and I agree) reveals a transcendental Reality that has nothing to do with the Kantian/Heideggerian ontotheology.

And God is, I argue, certainly NOT a cogito. This is a rationalistic perversion invented by logicians.

I think the essence of religion is belief in something beyond yourself and what you can see. — John McMannis

I take this in the affirmative. I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology.

I would not confine language and all the mediatedness in which we are involved as a simple medium that divides two poles so easily: man and the world. My view is that the medium is more than what can be confined in a cogito, in a self, or in man. Language for example is not a mere medium for thought but a possibility of it which reveals to us -perhaps even better- the very nature of thought itself, or rather, something essential to thought which does not allow itself to be secluded in thought and which slips into language as a necessary possibility of thought. — JuanZu

As to language revealing to us the nature of thought, there is that problem that language cannot tell us what language essentially is because to say what it is presupposes language. Wittgenstein said this about logic. It would require a perspective removed from language, but this too would find its analysis question begging and would also require yet another pov, ad infinitum.

But on the other hand, language is inherently open. It confines or limits content in no way, even regarding its own nature, meaning when I ask what language is I get answers, as with symbolic logic and semiotics, but ask what these are and there are more answers, but these, too, are questions deferring to others, and so on (Hermeneutics). But there is in all, when one tires of running through a dictionary, this a truly basic question ALSO conceived in language, and this is the question of existence itself which inquires about everything's being. One can now say language has discovered its own existence! The question is now the true "piety of thought." To stop everything and notice that inquiry leads one to self revelation goes to the point you make about language revealing its own nature. Analytic philosophers tend to close shop at this point. This is what happens when you put questions of our existence in the hands of logicians! You might as well ask a mathematician to get such clueless understanding.

Yes, I do have an ax to grind with the empty spinning of wheels in analytic philosophy.

For example, if we take an affirmation such as "I am" supposed for thought, it never presents itself in a pure singularity but in a repetition (Kant said that the I accompanies all our representations) in which its meaning implies the possibility of repetition. Thus the "I am", or the "I think", makes sense on condition of my own absence and disappearance. Hence man can speak of the I am as something that even makes sense in language, in writing, etc. According to this, if thought did not "begin" as repetition, it would not be possible to write "I am" in a book and for another person to understand it when reading it. — JuanZu

This is why the whole matter has to be reconceived, just as you say. The universal cannot grasp the singularity, but only itself, and this is undone by Derrida who argues it does not even do this, and one feels a kind of thud as one hits the bottom of the rabbit hole. The question ends there, for it has turned on itself as one's curiosity faces a world, perhaps for the first time, as an uncanny presence. Important to see, I am saying, that once in this "no man's land" it is thought that got you there. Thought is the way "in" as well as the way "out" (in and out, two particles of language. But why should language be set apart from the very uncanniness it brings one to? There is an epiphany in this: ALL is indeterminate, or transcendental, if you like.

This I argue is the foundation of religion.

Perhaps this is what Husserl was referring to when he spoke of the original intersubjectivity at the level of the cogito. But do we see the passage from one to the other? So language is not an accident of thought, nor something that is simply recruited into a cogito, it becomes a necessary possibility of intersubjectivity. And why not beyond? All this indicates that there is an element of exteriority in our interiority. Derrida said that the outside is the inside. Ultimately I agree with him: the separation between subjectivity and the world cannot be maintained so clearly. Not if it is analyzed from the point of view of the whole framework of exteriorization that implants us in the world and does not allow for a radical gap as has been thought since Descartes. — JuanZu

Does Husserl span the distance with the nexus of intentionality between thought/knowledge and object? Thereby establishing an epistemic intimacy with and in eidetic essences? What a question, I struggle with this. Note that I am not a professional philosopher and I read and write posts for interest's sake. Anyway, it is THE struggle to have. There is my cat, lamp, a tree, and here am I, and I know they are there. How? As it stands, the cat is transcendental, an "over there" that is entirely other than me. You mention language to be a "necessary possibility of intersubjectivity" but while language brings this to light, I mean the whole affair is "thought" to a conclusion or an insight, but then, the terms of actual engagement is something other than this. There is Kierkegaard's "collision" with actuality, and the realization that, as you mention with Derrida, all lines drawn are lines of contextuality, not actuality, and such lines are an imposition, and actuality is only JUST "coming into view," there on the cusp or in the residua of the "trace" (that leads us to water but cannot make us drink, so to speak) that is both there and not there. Under erasure as written.

As to the "original intersubjectivity" and Descartes's cogito, Descartes provides the basis for method of phenomenologizing, the phenomenological reduction, which looks to the intimacy of apprehending, and finds that the pure phenomenon is absolutely intimately bound to the consciousness that beholds it. Consciousness is always "of" its object and the Cartesian cogito is just an abstraction from the actual interface. Descartes pinned the real on res cogitans, but this makes no sense, some disembodied thinking thing; thinking is NEVER disembodied. And since the object (broadly construed) is part of the essence of consciousness, unlike Descartes' Deus ex Machina, the object becomes indubitable as well. Thus, the event is indubitable, but it is not science's object at all. It is the phenomenon that is absolute. I think this is where you come in. The phenomenon has no parts. The sun does not emit light nor do planets revolve around it. Nor do dogs bark, or even make a sound. The world of phenomena is a very strange place, no inside or outside for all contexts are suspended. It is the world presupposed by the familiar, entirely ignored by science. It takes the reduction to discover this "world".

I argue that once one has gotten to this point, religion becomes much more clear. For we generally live in a body of assumptions that do not survive the reduction the reduction: a kind of apophatic approach, a "neti neti" as they say in the East: not this, not this.... (See John Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida).

Religion is at the heart of this matter. Our evaluations from the origin contemplate its repetition (something that is valid for other men). The divinity that man thinks is perhaps an act of recognition of the exteriority of our valuations. In the sense that my evaluations escape from me (just like the I am of which we spoke above). The error of religion in general is perhaps not to consider that repetition and exteriority escape subjectivity. Thus, we still make the presentation of our evaluations too subjective. The divinity, as will, thinking being, etc., is the cogito trying to reappropriate that which exceeds it. — JuanZu

This sounds very Hegelian, and I would respond, in a qualified way, recalling Kierkegaard's response where he says Hegel has forgotten that we exist (something I would apply to the entire field of analytic philosophy). Subjectivity is more than the error of universality in the "sense" of one's "I". Jab a knife under my ribs and the pain is exclusively me and mine. It is not a cogito at all that experiences this. The transcendental ego, I argue, IS existence, made evident by the actual singularity of experience.

Divinity? I follow Witt from his Value and Culture: divinity is what I call the Good (or the inverse. It matters not).

I have read much. I don't take it seriously. Neither do the vast, vast majority of academics and students I've interacted with through Philosophy education.

Weirdly, this response is the kind of outlandish, comedic set of assumptions that has most trained philosophers rejecting continental philosophy as fart-sniffing. I tend to agree.
Pretending you understand Heidegger is not exactly a good thing. — AmadeusD

Yes, but all of these "most trained" philosophers are trained in analytic philosophy. Those who have actually read serious philosophy see this kind of thing as a waste of time, a trivializing of philosophical questions. It is primarily due to a lack of French, German and Greek and a realization that to study continental philosophy one has to have studied these language, at least somewhat, as well. Americans are the absolute worst: the best way to avoid this language prerequisite is simply to deny the thematic content that requires it. Now they have slipped into an intense and well stated vacuum of inquiry.

Fart-sniffing? This is rather juvenile. Anything interesting to say?

My point is that cognitive architecture comes first, not some inescapable reality standing outside all narrative. — hypericin

Not first, but, as Heidegger put it, equiprimordially. He simply is agreeing with you, saying the moment something is apprehended at all, it is always already IN a context of thinking, and since thinking is complicated, a thing that crosses one's mind is complicated. A "feast of thought" he calls it, the working through an idea.

But one has to ask, when the thumb screws are applied, is this really equiprimordially received? Is it discursively concluded? Of course not. In fact, it is given most purely, this vivid pain. The What is it? question is going to have to include the recognition that the knowledge of this pain is very different from that of, say, a bank teller: a bank teller interfaces with bank customers dealing with their money matters. What is money? Money is a name for the medium used in the exchange of goods. What are goods? In this context, things bought and sold, and so on. Easy. Now value/ethics: What is ethics? a term that designates issues of good and bad behavior. What is good? Two kinds of good/bad: Contingent goods are things like good shoes and good weather. Absolute good/bad refers to things like thumb screws and falling in love. Value qua value. What is this?

Now we have reached religion's essence, so I argue. It is open for discussion. Pain IS outside all narrative, yet it is conceived inside a narrative. One has to look into the nature of a narrative to understand this. It is a language construct, so what is language? Language possesses the possibility for truth as alethea, in which truth is conceived as "openness". ALL of our words are open, that is indeterminate.

I think that I agree with Witggenstein on this matter. There is no confrontation. Spirituality is the solution for a problem that rationality cannot solve.

Anybody trying to determine rationally if God exists or not, is wasting his time. The correct question is: Does faith in God give you spiritual satisfaction? If yes, then you are one of the lucky ones, blessed with the ability to stave off the absurdity of meaninglessness. If not, then you are unlucky because you will almost surely fail to find a satisfying alternative. — Tarskian

I would agree that it is a waste of time ONLY if one has not asked about the nature of God in the first place. What sense is there in talking about God if you haven't at all understood what the term means?
The same goes for spirituality.

What is God apart from the atheist's strawman arguments of a bearded old man in a cloud? One has to first observe the world and find the basis for the metaphysics that makes God a meaningful idea at all. The dismissal of reasonable talk is careless. You are right to side with Wittgenstein's passion to preserve the dignity of divinity. But wrong, I argue, to think one cannot bring clarity to what we mean by this term.

Free of all the omni's, free of the anthropomorphic assumption of God the creator (especially the Thomist view of creation ex nihilo. Truly the worst metaphysics imaginable to posit something literally unimaginable). These are entirely superfluous and groundless, and Occam's Razor, again, I argue, cuts them loose from thought.

God in really grounded in two essential indeterminacies of our existence. One is consummation and the other redemption. These are very discussable.

In my opinion, rationality is a tool and spirituality is another one. If your only tool is a hammer, then the entire world will start looking like a nail.

We know very well that rationality cannot deal with the question about the meaning of life. It would be the same as asking a computer why he exists. Humans can answer that question. The computer cannot, at least not rationally. The computer would have to ask us, because only humans know the answer to that question.

Concerning the meaning of life, we would only be able to rationally answer the question, if we had created it. So, since we didn't, we can try to ask the one who did. That is not a rational endeavor but a spiritual one. — Tarskian

The idea here is that when you when you talk about the meaning of life and basic questions, you have to look to the most basic understanding of what is there before you, just as a scientist might say about what science does, though keeping in mind that a scientist is never free of the presuppositions of her field and the "purity" of observation is nothing pure at all, but, to think like Kuhn, is packed with the paradigmatic assumptions of "normal" science. (See Karl Popper, not that I read much of him, but the essential idea of the hypothetical deductive method rings true with the pragmatists, and I think they are often right.). Since philosophy is a "regressive" discipline, meaning it moves back to the most basic questions assumed in popular thinking, it becomes a search for foundational ways to talk about the world. So how does one do this?

The scientific method comes to mind, which is the hypothetical deductive method, which says, simply put, that when you approach the object of your inquiry, you are always already IN an interpretative setting. This is what it means to ask a question at all. One is not free and open to receive what is there, but is equipped with ideas already in place, in search, if you will, for an anomaly.

Religion, too, has its paradigms in etiological stories and metaphysical narratives, but these are not scientifically conceived at all. This is where the interest in an objective account begins. One has to put aside a lot, most, probably, because religion through the ages has occluded the responsible thinking concealed in the actual metaphysics of our existence. Rationality not being able to "deal" with the meaning of life is simply an assumption grounded in badly conceived religious epistemology, the impossible "distance" between me and ultimate issues, treating the absolute as a land far, far away. This has to be, well, at least put aside so that one can take the time to be free to understand what really is in-the-world at the basic level.

Science (above) is burdened by its own paradigms and popular religion is burdened by bad metaphysics. But religion IS metaphysics, so how can one proceed in analysis? Close down knowledge claims altogether so one is no longer possessed by science and popular religion and what is revealed? It is the world of presuppositions ignored by science. Knowledge of rock strata and shifting star spectrums presupposes the basic epistemology of receiving the world in a knowledge claim at all. If this epistemic relation is not defined, the ALL of science's claims have to be reconstrued at the basic level. Simply put, the astronomer tells me the chemical composition of Jupiter's great eye, but the philosopher asks, how is it that the very presence of Jupiter is even possible in this knowledge claim?

See, this is where science ends. It has no epistemology, just assumptions. It is not reason that falls short, but simply the unquestioned assumptions! Epistemology/ontology (same thing) is one of the cornerstones of religion's essence for it reveals, objectively and not in the "absurdity of faith" as Kierkegaard put it, but clear for all to see, the foundational indeterminacy of our existence.

But by far religion's essence lies with value. The indeterminacy of value experiences, meaning the question, What is value? is open. Again, reason does not fail one. The givenness of what is there, rather, is not fully reasoned through, and when reason faces the "place" where paradigms "run out" it is fully within reason that this occurs.

More on value if you like.

I knew there was a reason Continental philosophy isn't taken seriously... — AmadeusD

.....isn't taken seriously by those who have never read it. To those who have read it, it is taken very seriously. But Wikipedia is not reading.

Fair point. I'm not sure that I've ready philosophy in the spirit of "love [ing it] with all of my heart soul and might." There might be something to that; but the "arrival" will have to reach beyond the reaches if reason if it is to be ultimate. — ENOAH

Well, if ever you get the impulse put to heart and soul forward, be aware that anglo american thinking is very different from the metaphysics of continental philosophy. The former enjoy puzzles, little more. Clever about arguments, but regarding the world, they, as Kierkegaard said of Hegel, simply have forgotten that they actually exist.

I see. I haven't been clear enough about tge relative absurdity of seeking what is unattainable to the Seeker. I say a solution is drop the Seeker and look at being (for a second). You seem to say drop the seeking, and focus the seekers attention on what is good. I agree, but consider yours to be the next step. This is how I see tge metaphysical as necessarily preceding the ethical. Step one: know you are not the projections; albeit inextricably entangled. Step two: focus on making the projections good (as in morally/as in without tge ego) — ENOAH

Dropping the seeker. Explicit seeking, yes. But the question is not about what is encountered only. It is about what has to be the case given what is encountered. An extrapolation.

But first, what is actually witnessed. The following I think you will agree with. Suffering is, again, poignant and makes the case most visible. So I am now in my phenomenological analytic, and not that of biology, medicine, chemistry, and the rest of the "natural" sciences. Such a position is unique, even sui generis, for to observe phenomena qua phenomena, one has to engage in the method of the reduction. Like I said, it is a bit of a no man's land, a radical forgetting, if you will. Imagine what is was like for the ancient mind to behold the sun with such a dearth of presuppositions about the world that it was possible to think it a God. Put aside the modern prejudice that comes with its "grand narrative" of knowing; you've heard this term before, no doubt. It is Lyotard's referring to the postmodern collapse of metaphysics. Science, too, is a grand narrative, more obfuscating and intrusive than the church ever was in its explicit denial of metaphysics. We are all trained k through 12 and beyond in this. This entire education has to be ignored. This is why I think the Buddhists are very advanced phenomenologists, for all they do is sit quietly, but not "doing nothing". Rather, they are annihilating the world's knowledge structure, and this is just what the reduction does, if allowed to do so.

So what is actually witnessed as the "pure" phenomenon really does need a liberation from everydayness. Can one observe the sun (errr, without burning a retina) or a tree altogether without habit and familiarity at all? See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety where he investigates Christianity's original sin. "Habit" of the race, he calls this impediment of culture and he condemns the displacement of faith by all of the many institutions that had become so privileged. Free of the tedious recollection, beholding it only in repetition. A Kierkegaardian book on this called Repetition: to participate in the world not as the way it is possessed by prior knowledge, but as it is first done, first encountered, free of this. The idea in Repetition is an attempt to explain just this above, to receive the world not as a backward looking event, allowing memory to dominate and determine, but as a first encounter, in each encounter, a first, forward looking with the anticipation free of encumbering presuppositions. This is phenomenology's mystical perspective (notwithstanding Heidegger, who nevertheless gives this kind of thing a wealth of conceptual facilitation), this uncanny discovery of the now, in which one looks around, and is lost as the habits of perception do not spontaneously seize the moment.

Now we can think of suffering. Its "thereness" released from interpretation. What is witnessed is now without identity save its own, but note the event is proximal in some way. It is not over there, but "here"; but where is here? The here is me, and the concept of mine pins the suffering to me. When the attempt is made to severe suffering altogether from proximity, there is a misrepresentation of what is witnessed. Recall the old Cartesian cogito and Henry (and Husserl's) complaint. What is there is witnessed to be there, and, as I have argued, the more the object is loosened from the relation, and becomes disembodied "thereness" it drifts into nothingness. Can suffering exist without agency? Without anyone experiencing the suffering? This I take to have a negative answer.

But it IS a very, very good question, I think. That such an idea is impossible (I am affirming) has serious implications. It is not like the quale red, say. Agency and "being appeared to redly" does not have nearly thislogical insistence (or the logic of the intuition of agency and suffering being inseparable). Can the color red appear sans agency? Hmmm. If there is no value in the experience of the "being appeared to redly" (thought this is just an abstraction) that is, if there is no caring, no vital intimacy or even interest, boredom, then we could very well dismiss Husserl's Transego. But value; this is altogether different. One might call it an argument for the soul, the "seeker" who is the non seeking existing agency that is the center of affectivity.

I'm too unclear. Yes. Of course thought is unavoidable and the necessary pre-step in my aforesaid steps one and two. I assume that because I participate, it is obvious that I recognize one cannot avoid this pre-step. I accept H and H executed admirable presteps. — ENOAH

They are giants. Worth reading if you just want to see if you can keep up. With Heidegger, it is Being and Time in one hand and Greek terms he uses to rethink philosophy in the other.

This and only this, I think is where we may diverge. Yes, child "understands" nothing without language. But since all judgement, including those flowing out of that fact exist only in language, "language" adjudges understanding to have ontological(?) epistemelogical(?) metaphysical(?)--Truth--priority over what that hypothetical child receives from so called God. It's not "meaning" another species of "language". And yes, I cannot identify or label for you what that receipt from God is without language. Duh (not you, all of us). I can only receive it. My theory (already ultimately false as I repeat it) is that the Child receives Life from God. But because (completely hypothetical) Adam chose knowledge over life, we are always in need of redemption--not because God withdrew Its Gift--but because our fixation on wanting to understand it, obstructing us from just being it. — ENOAH

There is a lot in this. Putting aside Adam, I do see the idea. All I can say is that language itself is just as alien and impossible to pin. It opens possiblities. The uncanniness of the world is revealed as what is not language, but this is done in the openness of language. More on this if you like.

We were not built to live without spirituality. That is why it is so universal across the globe and throughout history. — Tarskian

I lean to saying yes to this. But "spirituality" is in need of a proper "deconstruction" and by this I only mean that when you start looking into the term and its possibilities, you discover more clearly where the issues lie. Spirituality is an intellectual and existential struggle, or, it should be. When one pulls one's head out of the sand and asks the big questions that inspired the ancient stories, the difficulty lies in "the void" as you put it, the indeterminacy of all our affairs. What actually happens when you confront this? For most, very little. meaning one either retreats beneath sand of old stories and rituals or one just rejects the sense of the confrontation, like Wittgenstein. But note, he was by no means an atheist. He placed Kierkegaard in the highest regard, but argued that this cannot be argued or spoken of because there is nothing in the grid of states of affairs that is "value". Positivists are bad Wittgensteinians because they took nonsense to mean without meaning, which is just the opposite of what he was about. For Witt, value meaning in ethics and aesthetics was TOO important to be trivialized by philosophers .Anyway, very few take the third alternative, which is to try to understand religion at its foundation. An analysis of spirituality, if you will. Two questions: what is value? and what is knowledge/ontology (same thing, I argue)?

This is what is being attempted here.

Religion is how this symbolic space is colonized in different cultural arenas. It apparently cannot be left empty, it has to be filled in one way or another. Everything has meaning in religion, because religions fully fill the symbolic space.

So your question, what is the true meaning of religion, is itself an expression of the basic religious impulse to fill the symbolic space. In this case, the space behind "religion".

And this is why science is a competitor to religion. Not because the mechanistic accounts of how things work differ. But because it offers a parallel, and empirically grounded, vision of what explaining the meaning of things looks like. The tree isn't just the tree we see. It is the vast scientific story that explains it. — hypericin

On the other hand, the science that discusses a tree is not just filling space, not just a lot of empty fictional narrative. Religion, too, taken seriously, is not this. Of course, there is a great deal of fiction in the "grand narratives" of metaphysics, but just as, say, when the tree is put into a more rigorous context of discussion, its more frivolous narratives are dropped, so with religion, we seek to drop the frivolous and discover what it is "really" about.

It can ALL be called a story, certainly. Geology is a story about the earth, astronomy one about the stars, and so forth. But a view like this divests the engagement of any objective verisimilitude at all. But then, as Kierkegaard said about bible stories, fictions no more fictional than modern claims of discovery. This is what happens when you either, as Kierkegaard put it, think of thought and reality as a collision of entirely unlike natures, or, like Heidegger, think all truth is an historical construct. Truth is made, not discovered, said Rorty.

I actually think all of this is right, or close to being right. Fascinating idea, really. Reading Paul Ricoeur, I find the idea that we mostly live a narrative compelling, and if you want to talk about it, fine. But for the matter here concerning religion: For this argument, the claim is one can stand outside narrative. Doing this, one no longer stands among the familiar notions that clutter living, the everydayness, the "idle talk" (Heidegger), and the mindless "narrative" of one's affairs that mostly defines who we are. Long story on this, but again, religion: Stand apart from the familiar naivite of daily events, and witness the phenomena that lies "beneath" such things. Now you can observe the presuppositional grounding of the world, phenomena. What one finds here is not narrative, but stark presence, even obscenely vivid and real beyond ordinary apprehensions. This is "life" says Michel Henry (his own use of the term).

I argue that one can discover the nature of religion here, in the nature of human affectivity. Affectivity is the existential value Wittgenstein was talking about when he said "The Good? this is what I call divinity."

If you are looking for the godhead, than ask that fateful question, only take it very seriously: how does anything out there get into a knowledge claim? Not that it does not get into a knoweledge claim, for clearly it does. But how is this possible? It is crazy to go after this, but once you see that the epistemic relation between you and the lamp on your desk is epistemically impossible in all the familiar models, you have to then go to some other model. Phenomenology only can see this.

they are not elucidating on any ultimate Truth about so called Eternity, or how the Universe/Reality/Godhead (if you wish), function, but only on how the human mind constructs and projects.
The former, is utterly not propositional, not knowledge in any form. It can only be accessed by the being in its being: thought is a distraction. Mind has displaced truth with make-belief. — ENOAH

I do continue to disagree with this.

To get to Universe/Reality/Godhead, you have to work through phenomenology. There is a letter to someone, can't remember who, in which Husserl relates that many of his students found in phenomenology a sound basis for religious understanding. Surprised him a bit. The way I see it is this: I don't read Heidegger to understand Heidegger, nor Husserl to understand Husserl. Rather, I read them to understand the world. But they are only as helpful as I am eager to understand. A person has to be REALLY eager to read this philosophy. One has to be already looking rather emphatically for Universe/Reality/Godhead to discover how phenomenology can facilitate discovery; or, one has be just be really interested in existential puzzles. Rorty straddled the fence and came up with very helpful thoughts for me. But he had no core religious interests. Dropped philosophy altogether at the end, taught literature, convinced there was nothing more to say in philosophy. But this was because he was through and through an academic, and had no, well, intimations of anything else. When he said there are no truths beyond propositional truths (truth is something a proposition has, and there are no propositions out there in the trees and rocks) he was following Dewey's naturalism.

Husserl does talk about the universe, reality, not so much the godhead. I talk about this kind of thing, though the talk is "threshold" talk. The reduction takes people like me to the threshold of finitude. The reduction facilitates this, inspires it, clarifies it, gives vague but strong curiosity a contextual setting for thoughts to make sense. Kant helps and Heidegger helps massively, and so does Dionysius the Areopogite and Meister Eckhart. And Derrida, and ALL of them. This is mystical phenomenology, where no self respecting anglo american philosopher will step foot.

Truth: I defend one truth, really, which is that what is sought here is not truth. One seeks the Good. We are not trying to discover what IS qua IS; this is patently absurd and it gives us his "equirpimordaility". for Heidegger, an historical ontology of structural features clear to inquiry. But, I argue, there really is a primordial singularity, and this is value, the Good, what the entire universe/reality/godhead is "about". What is the the Good? This is existential, by which I mean one has to look away from discursivity, and toward existence. Stop thinking, in other words. Husserl's epoche, all the way down the rabbit hole, leads no where but here, the cessation of thought in order for the world to "speak" at the basic level.

Of course, this is close to what you have been saying, but you do continue to say "thought is a distraction" and I can't abide by this. It is a distraction if you are trying experience something that is itself expressly not thinking. If you are trying to learn how to ride a bike, you don't talk your way through this. But once done, and you get it, the understanding is there, and always has been there. Try to imagine what it would be like to know how to ride a bike, but when asked to explain, absolutely nothing came to mind. What, no feet applying pressure to pedals in a circular thrust connected to a series of gears, etc.? Yes, a child might find herself like this, but a child has very limited understanding. A child may have God attending every moment of life as an infinite grounding of meaning, but the child will understand nothing. Language does this. Thought does this. Affective cognition; this is what we are, and the two are one. The Good, or God, is not itself the thought of the Good, but through thought one acknowledges and understands. Through thought, thought recognizes its own finitude. What is thought really? This question is transcendental. You were impressed by the Fink passage. earlier. He is saying the the entire ground of world acceptance is open and the epoche allows us to stand in the openness of the world.

I do suspect you harbor still a deep physicalist ontology, as we all do. This has to be, well, cured. Kant is the cure. He is not, certainly, right about everything. But if you have the curiosity that will sustain through several hundred pages of rather dense thinking, then you will come out the other end a very changed philosopher.

What I'm saying is, no one can say them. — ENOAH

Yes and no. To say "no one can say them" tells us first that the not being able to say is already said in the utterance itself. One can say X cannot be said, but for this to make sense, X has to be brought into a context of saying. Nothing but paradox. X can be said, but is not in the saying itself, what is said. Same goes for my cat. X is always already in need of a context to disambiguate. This in no way intrudes or undoes what it IS, but it raises the issue of where and how thought allows this to happen. For Husserl, and post Husserlians like Henry, the proof is in the pudding. Once the world is divested of all language has to say in all of its reigning mundanity, the world beneath, the hidden primordiality of the world becomes more evident. The reduction takes one INTO the world and reveals the things that are suppressed by familiarity. And one can see the foundational religiosity that modernity has preplaced.

Not sure re "pragmatics" but I generally relate to the Pierce quote. Anyway, why for me apodictic does appear in degrees, and what I mean by "sprouted same field," is also related to my referencing organic feeling. While laws of logic seem apodictic, you'll note some Moral Laws also come close (which is your objection, "comes close" is thus not apodictic). Think of both as ultimately a belief (I believe it absurd or un-do-able to believe "I am a married bachelor"/ I believe it "absurd" un-do-able to believe "I'm going to kill my only child"). Neither actually has anything to do with a pre-existing attribute/state/law/tendency/desire of any all encompassing reality governing the universe or my body. Both are paths stored in memory as "language" to trigger functionally fitting responses. These triggers are so well entrenched in the feedback loop from language to feelings, that they promptly "release" whatever organic feeling it is which inspires a powerful confidence in the animal which would cause it to without hesitation act. Powerful trigger in the form of language is apodictic. Most people would also "with the fervor of apodiction" never eat shit. It is the same mechanism but not so obviously organic, buried in signifiers. — ENOAH

Consider what happens when you try to imagine an object moving itself. This is buried in signifiers? What is meant by buried? Does it mean that there is an indeterminacy of the "trace" in talking about anything? But this is addressed: the trace is the interpretative value that inhibits any sort of direct apprehension of things in the world. But now, take the lighted match and apply it to your finger. Are you thereby distanced from the terrible pain because the language that stabilizes your understanding of what is occurring cannot be shown to be correspondingly linked to it? The notion is absurd. Clearly, the world is this overwhelmingly vivid and its existence cannot be doubted for a moment at this level of inquiry. What can be doubted is the interpretation of the world, and so the pain you experience: What is it? is an interpretative issue, save one thing, and this is the OP. Now consider an object self moving: it is impossible. Surely we can talk about certainty and the feeling of moving toward doubt and how the need for fixity asserts itself, but you find yourself in Hume's world, where Kant points out that there is difference between the mere concatenation of two events that happen with such frequency that they are mistaken for an embedded law, and events that happen by necessity.

One way to go is Quine's in his Two Dogmas paper: He doesn't argue against necessity, but against analyticity: two terms that differ have different senses (the morning star and the evening star) even though they may have the same object. I'd have to read it again. But it is an interesting point, and perhaps in line with your thoughts. And if there is an impact on the thesis of the OP, it would be a favorable one, for religion has its essence in metaethics and metaaesthetics, and these are powered by value-in-the-world. Value's apodicticity is IN existence, not form, and the existence of suffering and delight is even less effected by considerations of language and trace. That punch to kidney is far more actual and indubitable in its consequences than the principle of negation. Not more; it is absolute. There is no more or less here.

Yes! And irrationality does work for some. Those suffering delusions (obviously, doesnt work for the rest of Mind but its "working" for that mind and we need not get intonthe reasons*); those inspired by a teleology requiring the suspension of rationality (e.g. a parent acts against reason to lift a car off a trapped child; romantic love; an individual is willing to temporarily suspend even reason in pursuit truth etc). Our minds with well tread paths to the Subject, reject any ideas--like such radical relativity--but a Phenomenological Reduction might reveal that "if it works" is what is at the root of every belief held by every mind. — ENOAH

I couldn't agree more. Same goes for Husserl. There is one exception, which is posited several times above. It has to be kept in mind that we are dealing with phenomena, not the familiar world. In the phenomenal world, planets do not revolve around the sun nor does UPS deliver boxes. All of this is suspended. The phenomenal world is an extraordinary "place" and Kant is a good way to look into it at first. It is a very odd world, and if you have a kind of well passion to find out about what can be said about existence and the godhead, then you will be taking a step into a kind of no man's land. A far greater intimacy with the world than most can even imagine.

This sounds like something I need to understand better. If you don't mind clarifying when you can. — ENOAH

It is just that there is no analysis to something truly primordial (Heidegger aside). That pain CANNOT be refuted or argued about or divested of its essence, which in our hermeneutical setting we call bad. The pain can made ambiguous in familiar ways (torturing someone into telling you where the bomb is located, and the like) and it can be strangely transmuted in weird associations, like masochistic fetishes, but that just changes what is clearly pain ul to what is now complexly painful, and this is the world. Not what this is about. If there are no transmuting conditions that would compromise the pain's being bad, then...... Not hard to imagine, screaming children in burning cars and the like are exemplary. The fact that you can reconstrue pain says nothing about its nature. This is the point.

Same as above. I mean, what makes a stab in the kidney "bad"? — ENOAH

Exactly! Do an exhaustive analysis of the factual contents of the kidney-in-pain event. Compare to a non-value fact, like the earth having more mass than a river rock or the DNA molecule having genetic material. Any non value fact is presumably exhaustible by an empirical analysis. Even an apriori analysis, if you like. But what happens with the analysis of the kidney? You will find, and this is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about it, something "else". You are invited to question this, but this is not well received in modern philosophy. Just because it is massively mysterious. What is the Good? The love, the happiness and bliss and pleasures, and the horrors and terrible suffering; what IS this dimension of our existence?

Am I far from where you are going? This one has puzzled me. — ENOAH

One has to disengage explanations. This is what the reduction is all about. Look as if one were a scientist looking for objectivity in one's observation. Do you find the "non natural" property, as G E Moore put it (Principia)?

The essence of religion consists in giving a face and a will to the universalizing influence that is exerted upon us and upon which we are deployed. It is the law with a face and a will. Hence that face and will can become anthropomorphic (God). The question is why do we give a divine face and will to the unfolding of the law? The essence of religion, it seems to me, lies in the answer to the question of why we give face, will and divinity to the quasi-universalizing (it would be better to say Exteriorizing) unfolding of our valuations. — JuanZu

In a very serious way, everything around us is already anthropomorphized, but to see this, one might have to go through Kant. But the basic idea is that when I perceive anything, that which is perceived is an event and a synthesis. Seeing a tree is to "see" my perceptual contribution to the event of seeing the tree. A tree IS the thought, feelings, intuitions, and so on as well as "that over there". Epistemology and ontology come together, two sides, if you will, of the same thing.

I have no idea what something is outside of this synthetic being I witness, and it is just bad metaphysics to even think such a thing. "The world is mystical," wrote Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. But whether it is "states of affairs" or language games, clearly metaphysics like this is foolish.

So here we are, in a world saturated with "the human," always already anthropomorphized when we catch a bus or study geological.

But how? I think H² aimed for pure being, but, to put it plainly, couldn't detach the ego. Makes perfect sense, reason, like it's particular, logic, and its universal, the rest of grammar, necessarily includes subject and predicate. Even in the first modern phenomenological reduction, there it necessarily was, I think. No your body doesn't think; your mind constructs extremely fitting signifier structures, and projects them. Descartes remained in the projection; aimed for the body, but, just as is being done here, fell short.

Why do we all fall short? Any intellectual effort is necessarily short of Truth. Intellectual pursuits are projected constructions. From what I have gathered, I can detail the mechanics less complexly than Dasein and all of its--though H2 may deny it--categories. But we're all just making and believing what fits various malleable criteria, triggers.

Again, H might have realized but fell short due to his locus in History, that the only access to being is by a non intellectual path, one involving the being, the Body, not in pursuit of being, but having returned its aware-ing to its being. Philosophy needs to have the courage to admit a more functional truth, even if it proposes a practice which is virtually impossible. But it cannot. So we turn to religion. . . — ENOAH

There is too much in this to take on. You know Heidegger was arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and his views are comprehensive. I can only give sketchy ideas where hundreds of pages are written. Heidegger explicitly rejects "pure being" as a descriptive term for dasein, human existence, that is. He doesn't use terms familiar terms like ego or consiousness (the German equivalent). H wants to start a new discussion with new terms in play, mostly Greek ones, going back to Parmenides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Plato, because, like Nietzsche, among other things, the intervening thought he thought distorted philosophy. Purity is replaced by "equiprimordiality". The purest you can possibly get is hermeneutics, which is the opposite of purity: The most basic things one can say about our existence is complicated, not simple and pure. Descartes was simple and pure with his cogito: a thinking substance here, and res extensa there. This is the kind of thing Heidegger argued against very early on in Being and Time. For both Husserl and Heidegger, the reduction takes one to the foundation of thought and Being. Husserl thought it took one to single primordiality, pure phenomena. For Heidegger, and he is qualifiedly right about this, this is a fool's errand.

So he does not share you idea of Truth. There is no such thing as this impossible finality. The world is foundationally open and indeterminate. Truth is made, not discovered, Rorty says, partly influenced by Heidegger (mostly Dewey), philosophy, as you put it, has "the courage to admit a more functional truth." Pragmatists hold the same (Peirce, James, Dewey; though Peirce goes a bit too far with his "long run inquiry"). A very strong position most can't get behind. My position is he right, and the only exception in Being-in-the-world is value-in-the-world. Not that what we say about value by calling it "the Good" itself "speaks" what it is. Rather, in value experiences, value speaks "through" knowledge claims from sources unseen, and its "language" is ethics. This is, I say, exactly what religion attempts to do in its essence.

I do get confused on some of your positions. See, I want to agree with "Any intellectual effort is necessarily short of Truth" but the line between what an intellectual effort is saying and what this "truth" is needs to be made clear. There are complications. Is truth propositional truth? Or is there a dimension of "truth" that is non propositional, and I think you agree with the latter. But again, see where this goes: You "agree" with the latter? You mean a proposition that states the latter? And when you "think" about your position, the understanding you have certainly can be of something that is not language, like being burned or put to the rack, but the what is it? question, well, language is all over this! Language tells us X is not language. The only way to make this work is to think of language, not in propositional "distance" from the world, but part of that which language is not.

Apodictic only applies within the field in which both ethics and logic sprouted. Both are "apodictic" in varying degrees. First, you use "coercive/insist" I like that. Both, when, following a dialectic, present(v) to the aware-ing being in ready-to-project form, autonomously trigger a feeling which in turn triggers a further dialectic, and so on. I know I'm vague. I'll illustrate. — ENOAH

Okay, but there are no varying degrees of apodicticity. This is the nature of an "absolute". When you mention a "feeling" I am intrigued. See what Pierce says here:

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid......The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry,

See how he recasts cognitive statements in terms of feelings and struggles, something more basic in the analysis. Language to Peirce has been conceived in this Cartesian tradition of res cogitans, a thinking subject and this is just wrong. His analysis is pragmatic, a "doing" such that doubt spurs one toward belief, a stasis of comfort and settledness, a cessation of struggle. Heidegger is similar in his "ready to hand" mode of dasein's being.

Anyway, I wonder if this is what you have in mind when you talk about the "field in which both ethics and logic sprouted." Pragmatics. I think this is right, myself, but the view here goes further than this, deeper into the presuppositions

To simplify. In logic, take a statement like, "I do not exist." It triggers a habitually well tread path to whatever that bodily feeling for so called rejection is; and the next structure presents a temporary settlement which resolves the so called contradiction. Bad e.g.? So be it, hopefully you see where I'm going. Logic readily triggers feelings for immediate belief [i.e. in what the particular rule of ligic presents]. I'm not saying we're brainwashed. I'm saying there are settlements which are so functional, they lay potent triggers. — ENOAH

And by this apodicticity of logic is like Peirce's Fixation of Belief, above; this "temporary settlement which resolves the so called contradiction." This wants to demystify language, and certainty is just a feeling of fixity that is, perhaps, hard wired, but no more. There are no eternal truths for Peirce, though he does not hesitate to say, if irrationality actually "works" for someone, he really has no ground for arguing the point, for after all, there simply is NO foundational Truth. What is true is what works!

But I'll stop you where you say "bad, e.g.?" It is not feelings of belief, nor the rote meanings in things, nor the settled functions that we respond with. It is the qualitative presence of the pain of having your kidney speared. The world "does" this and it is impossible to interpret what is bad about it out of what it is.

In ethics, the dialectics are much broader, the paths not so well tread to the specific feelings to settle at belief. "Don't exaggerate your gas expense on your taxes" triggers certain feelings (so called uneasy for e.g., but we cannot label them) which trigger a broader and vague range of potential settlements, leaving an opening for a slowed down and projected dialectic. "Don't kill your partner" a much more clear path to the feeling which promptly and narrowly settles the dialectic. Like a rule of logic. — ENOAH

Ethical problem solving is not the issue here. Metaethics is. A rule of ethics is an embedded phenomenon. But ask, what makes an ethical rule what it is? It "ethicality" issues from where, at the most basic level? It is not the feeling that something is wrong or right, nor is it about belief, though one does believe. It is not an epistemic issue about how beliefs are fixed. It is the simplest of all inquiries into the "pure" phenomenological presence of what makes something "bad" in the ethical/aesthetic sense (Witt conflates the two).

You can go ahead and link them philosophically if that fits. E.g. that ethics is logical even. I don't know. — ENOAH

The idea is simpler than you suggest. A person loves Ravel, and goes to a concert and experiences aesthetic bliss. The question here is, what does this value-fact of the bliss experience yield to analysis? Just this. The prescribing Ravel, the belief that Ravel should be as a rule listened to by others, and so forth, all presuppose this most basic analysis.

This is the way it has to be to approach something like the essence of religion and ethics. There is no claim the ethics is logical. The matter turns of apodicticity, not logical apodicticity, but that which is AS coercive as logic. What is it for something to be apodictic? It is such that one cannot even imagine something that is apodictically true, to be false. Like imagining an object moving itself. The Good of bliss is tautological, and one cannot even imagine bliss nothing being good. It is impossible.

The argument of the OP turns on just this. Note that logic's apodicticity is vacuous; while value is just the opposite of this: value is the essence of something being important at all.

Through the evolution of these structures, logic, and ethics, they generally function in these ways. That's as far as I can say. When projected; our bodies readily respond. — ENOAH

It doesn't matter how the body responds. All that matters is the apriori analysis of a value event. Only this.

Apodictic need not be something sourced in some pre-Historic Reality or Truth; it could just be a function of Mind going about its business in potent ways. In nature there would be no concern about existence nor I. And there would be nearly no moment where one would kill one's partner.

There must be an agent for human existence, yes, because Mind has evolved the Narrative form as most prosperous, and so predicates must have subjects. But what is really taking place is that well practiced code is triggering our Being to feel in ways which trigger action, or choice, emotion, or ideas; all just more code. No longer is the human animal aware-ing the drive only to mate, bond with and preserve partner, never-mind the odd growl; it is triggered by thoughts of justice, passion, revenge. No longer is the being aware-ing living; it is triggered by ideas of a self, a special place moving in existence, rather than just existing; and obsessions ensue.

But. Yes. Ethics is like Logic that way. Both can have immediate and positive effects upon feelings and actions. If that's apodictic. — ENOAH

Evolution is off the table, as is any science that may have an opinion. Evolution simply presupposes the existence of value. this is about the apriori analysis of value. The mating, the bonding and the anthropology all are off the table. One has to approach value as Kant approached logic and reason: it lies here and now in midst of the analytic, ahistorical, aempirical, qualitatively contained in what is there before your waking eyes and what has to be the case given what is there. Nothing else. Heidegger's historicity is suspended.

But images structured for just such a purpose flood the aware-ing and displays ontological pain-ing with, and I won't even illustrate with the obvious few, but there may be hundreds triggering feelings, coloring the pain-ing with the making known of experience. — ENOAH

Far simpler than this. Put a lighted match to your finger and observe like a good "scientist". What do you witness? Wittgenstein saw that there was something there too profound to be taken up into the deflationary ways of philosophy.

Everyone may agree that one plus one equals two but in ethics, for whatever reason, people's values don't always align. — praxis

But this analysis is not about judgments people make and where they disagree. It is about the existential ground of ethics. A metaethical argument: what IS the Good? What IS the bad? of value in experience? This is what makes ethics possible and our differences have no bearing on this. We are hardwired closely the same, but softwired often very differently. I love a rainy night, another hates such things, so the case in which I am deprived of experiencing one makes for a greater ethicality than would apply to this other. But the question here is, what does it mean to "love" something AT ALL? To feel good. or miserable, pleasure or pain, etc.

If the Agent as TransEgo is the "purest" form of human being why can't the Agent experience "itself" without "intimations"? Why? Because there is no Agent; there is only intimations. And, not beyond, but behind or before those intimations, there is Real Being, no attributes nor expressions, just the present participle pure and simple. — ENOAH

The most curious thing I can think of. Where Husserl, and everyone for that matter, goes wrong, and this lies with ethics: even Heidegger with is Being as Care: there is this paper on Heidegger and "the ethics of care" which spells out pretty well how he really doesn't have the dimension of ethicality in his thesis. Care is all me and mine, and being with others (mitsein) the same. All thing fall with the domain of ME, and this ME is not transcendental, not Husserl's transego; it is just the description of the structure of the ontology of dasein. It goes back to Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, which, long, long story short, says see how all that I acknowledge AT ALL belongs to an egoic center. The particulars fall way in Kant's "reduction" basic logical forms, but there is IN the analysis of this structure, the structure of me and mine. This scent of flowers from the hallway is MY scent, and no one else's, and the same goes for the thoughts in my head, the feelings I have, and so on. The whole enterprise is MY world.

When you deny agency, you are not acknowledging this basic feature of our existence. This is not to say there IS a transego at all. It is simply that IN the horizon of observable phenomena, one discovers this identity of all that is there. There is this paper by Haugeland mentioned by the Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus, I may have mentioned before, that tries to make dasein into an institutional entity only. See Dreyfus' Being in the World for his refutation.

Why do I disagree with you? This is a central question, for the entire idea here rests solely on the "phenomenon" of value-in-the-world. It is an argument:

The question is, what if ethics were as apodictic as logic? Clearly, logic is absolutely coercive to the understanding, but it is also only vacuously coercive. Who cares if logical form insists? It carries no authority about anything, only itself. But what is it about logic that is absolute? No one can say, and we can only obey, for one cannot get "behind" the intuition of logic. It stands as its own authority. It is both absolutely coercive and stands as its own authority. Is ethics like this?

Yes, very much. Without going into the rigor of a formal argument, just look at the basics. First, ethics has as its core, real pain and pleasure, not to put too find a point on it, and this is pervasive in our existence, making everything we experience a ethical possibility; why just stealing my time, say, has ethical consequences. Time is valuable simply because the experiential content of unit of time is inherently valuative in human experience. From the vaguely interested to extreme sports, and from mild boredom to having your liver vivisected without anesthetic, there is this "real time" good and bad in play, lost, like logic gets lost, in the matters one is attending to---but this is a reduction down to a discovery of what is structural and unnoticed in everydayness. Keep in mind that value-as-such does not exist, nor does logic, nor does it not exist. These are analytic terms about our existence, an imposition on the entangled givenness of the world. They do, however, reveal a dimension of our existence. The problem is that both logic and value is understood in the contingencies of language and, as Heidegger rightly said, language is a historical system of understanding, hermeneutical, that is, interpretative in nature, so when we go after anything, we are always already IN a language context.

But this is where things get truly interesting. I cannot claim that logic is an absolute because the very term absolute is bound up in the merely contextual possibilities a language can provide. But there is this very real insistence of knowing an object cannot move itself, say, and while I have to suspend the acknowledged system of symbolic logic (and Kant's categories. The world of tautologies and contradictions), this insistence is not itself of this system, that is, it is not a discursively grounded "truth" that things cannot move themselves (though it is through discursivity that we discover it). So we are witnessing something "impossible" in the logically coercive "intuition". Logic is mystical, as is value. Logic says nothing about the world, where value says a great deal. It says that all of our ethical and aesthetic affairs issue from Being as a single primordiality. In the world's entanglements with "states of affairs" this primordiality goes unseen, even by Heidegger.

But all of this rests with this primordial simplicity: Put a lighted match under your finger and observe. Ask, ontologically, what IS this? Nothing of this event is more salient than the ethical bad or the existential bad of the experience. Most philosophical arguments want to toy with the language of ethical judgments we make (see John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Obviously, I both disagree and agree with this notion. Language "invents" the means of construing the world, but ethics finds its authority in something PRIOR to discovery.

The former is supposed to be free of ethical principles, values, or goals. — praxis

A principle in normative ethics is contrasted with ordinary pragmatic normativity, as with where one should turn the faucet knob clockwise for the water to flow, and the like. Someone like Dewey might take issue with this, but this really is not the point. All normativity is pragmatic. Anyway, pragmatics is contingent on what needs to be done, but ethics has a noncontingent property, which is what this idea is about. And if it's a matter of contingency, the factual content can be exhaustively accounted for in the mere facts that are there. The "fact" is, my shoe is untied. Examine the evidence empirically, do an analysis of the apriority of the proposition's structure if you like, even deconstruct the terms in play (attend to the "differance" in the meaning generative interdependence of words), and in the end this fact will have been exhaustively analyzed. Literally nothing left to say. This is Wittgenstein's "state of affairs," finite, delimited and exhaustible. There certainly will be more to say in some future and unseen context of meanings; perhaps physic's string theory will be a more elaborate and well founded idea, or the Higgs boson particle will be found to have other properties. Kuhn's paradigms of scientific revolutions will continue to be challenged, but in these challenges, what will ensue is yet another delimited finitude of meaning. This is the point: there is nothing "absolute" to be discovered in a "state of affairs". (If you read any Heidegger, this is his "totality" that defines the "potentiality of possibilities" in a given culture).

But what could something "absolute" even mean? The best we can imagine lies with logic and apodicticity. Modus ponens will not be contradicted. This is formal requirement and it cannot even be imagined to do so. One CAN make claims about the historicity of language settings and say, after all, 'logic' is just a term that belongs to a language and language itself is contingent, and the "truth" language produces is "made" not discovered, (see Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, e.g.); but the intuition (another word) "behind" the logical insistence, this is absolute. Like trying to imagine an object moving itself, impossible.

Regarding value, here is a question: what do you think about the idea of ethics having the same apodicticity as logic?

To say that value is an absolute, and that it’s IN existence, that it’s exactly what God in its essence IS, is completely meaningless to me. If it has meaning I don’t see why you couldn’t express that meaning. — praxis

I am aware. I don't think it is dialectically unachievable. It just takes the right leading questions and a willingness to follow through.

Question: there are facts of the world, mere facts, like those found in everydayness and science. It is a fact that baseball is a game and that moths are attracted to light, and on and on. An infinite number. Putting aside the many issues about facts, how they align with the world, the nature of the knowledge relationship between a fact knowing agency and that which facts are "about" and so on, and bringing attention solely to "value facts," the kind of thing Wittgenstein insisted there was no such thing as (putting aside his complaint and allowing facts to include the value that attends the "mere" factuality. I think his definition of a fact in the Tractatus is arbitrarily narrow). All facts are value facts, simply because a fact is apprehended in a value constituting system, perception; but this we put aside as well. Later but not now, for the value facts I want to look closely at are those facts that exhibit the strongest presence of the value, simply to make the case poignant and clear.

So the first step is to recognize that value facts are qualitatively distinct from, call them, natural facts or plain facts or "states of affairs". An explicit value fact would be something expressed in the proposition, "This sprained ankle is killing me," or " I'm in love," or, "This Hagen Dazs is so good!" The first question is this: what is the difference between natural facts (as Husserl called them) and value facts?