Who needs goalposts anyway?

Ethics is not equivalent to spinoffs and extrapolations from/of Heiddy's thought. — creativesoul

The matter here is not about goalposts, though. This is the trouble with not reading closely. This is a descriptive argument. It is not about making things fair or just.
:cool: Have a nice, day creativesoul. I find your conversation....too vacant.

They don't get to choose so it makes no sense whatsoever to say otherwise... — creativesoul

No, no, my good friend. You are being invited to think a bit. When you raise your awareness to philosophical thought, you find you are always already (a Heidy term) IN a culture, a language, a "potentiality of possiblities" (Heidy yet again). In this, you have been making decisions all your life. But I cannot, for example, decide how to dress for a formal dinner in Indonesia.

That's not true. — creativesoul

Hmmm. Cryptically succinct.

Bullshit.

The narrative in question was all narrative. — creativesoul

No, you are mistaken.

And a nervy thing to say entirely without warrant. When I say religion has to be delivered from traditional narratives, it is simply to say that popular religions are constructed out of a lot of assumptions that are unsustainable on face value. Religion generally calls upon faith rather than justified belief. The idea here is that faith has driven religion into absurd reasoning. This can be overcome by phenomenological analysis.

As if all religion is existentially dependent upon a fairly recent philosophical practice we've named metaphysics? — creativesoul

No. Metaethics is discovered IN the analysis of mundane ethics. Ethics has its grounding in the value dimension of our existence. This is an apriori argument about the structure of experience. It has nothing to do with how recently the argument and the language came into being.

Assertion, not argument. — creativesoul

True. I am referring the argument at hand, though. Here is what I wrote in response to Janus just now:

Janus wrote:

For me 'God' signifies nothing beyond the highest feelings and principles that humans aspire to. Unconditional love, unwavering steadfastness, indomitable bravery and so on.

I responded:

Perhaps there is something to this, in fact, I would say there is, but this still remains distant from the affirmation of divinity. It is the same kind of thinking that gave rise to those pesky "omni this and that" that engendered so much empty metaphysical theology. In order for the "highest feelings" to be liberated from finitude, so to speak, feelings have to examined for "properties" that can do this. I recall Moore's analysis of ethics and "the Good" in which he called this a non natural property. Curious the way this goes, for it requires an examination of the finite and accessible occasion of the good. That is, an ethical or aesthetic example. What makes this apple's taste "good" to me? But first, because it is good to me, it becomes a possible object of some ethical problematic. If it were not in any way good to me, and this may include my concern for others for whom the apple is good, then there can be no basis for an ethical complaint regarding it. The point is, it is this mysterious goodness that is among the various other properties, the sweetness, the texture, the complex taste features, etc., that makes the apple ethically viable.
But back to the good. Why mysterious? And why did Wittgenstein call value transcendental? To me, this is a fascinating question, for note as one enjoys the apple, and all of the empirical predications are analytically exhausted, there is this residual good. What IS it? One cannot observe it, and this raises eyebrows as to whether is "exists" at all. It is invisible, as odd as this may sound. But take a stronger example, much stronger, like falling in love and being ecstatic or your "unconditional love." Here the residual good (as I will call it) still cannot be empirically identified (it is not, after all, an empirical property) yet "it" dominates entirely the analysis of this love (or happiness. Love is happiness with an attachment).
Think of the other dimension of ethics and aesthetics, the Bad. Not observable, yet apply the thumb screws and the bad is now this overwhelming presence.
There is a reason Wittgenstein in his great book of facts has nothing of ethics in it (see his Lecture on Ethics). The good and the bad are transcendental, but one more thing has to be made clear: The good and the bad are apodictic, or apriori, if you like: universal and necessary in what they are; non contingent.

How do you know without knowing what "the basic level" includes? — creativesoul

One discovers the basic level through inquiry. Heidy found there to be no single primordiality (as with the Christian God), but rather, a complex ontology of equiprimordiality, and if the matter were about language, then I would agree. But religion is not grounded in this.

Nah. It did not begin by thinking about thinking practices as subject matters in their own right. — creativesoul

But metaphysics is not about thinking practices. These are hermeneutic. No, religion is about the dimension of our existence called value. Religion is about metavalue, metaethics, metaaesthetics. This is what Heidegger did not understand.

Jump over the burden much? — creativesoul

No, jumping To the burden, and bypassing the endless parade of descriptions of God that are entirely fabricated. God the creator? But where did this come from and why is a theistic view committed to this? To be the creator now puts the burden on this concept of God to be accountable for everything, and you end up with impossible contradictions and, say, theodicies to explain them All along, the entire issue was that God as a concept had never been thoroughly purged of invention. God is omnipotent, omniscient, the greatest possible being?
You perhaps see how the posts that try to talk about God are all bound up in fiction. God has to be reduced to its essential meaning before one can talk about why one should believe in God. Prior to this is the worst kind of naivete. I mean, a metaphysical entity? And one has not examined at all what metaphysics is.

What "behind" means to you, good sir, determines what you mean to say, what you mean by what you say, as well as what I take you to mean after such usage had begun. — creativesoul

Heh, heh, no, creativesoul. I don't mean behind the refrigerator. I referred to metaphysics. This is about the lack of fixity our ideas have at the basic level. Ideas' meanings are derived from the contexts in which they are found. But contexts are determinative or finite. "The world" possesses in its meaning "that which is not contextual" I am arguing. It certainly possesses interpretative values of language, but it is the "fleshy feels" and the palpable engagements that stand outside of the way context confers meaning. This is the metaphysical ground of ethics, where ethics, and therefore religion, acquires its foundation.

The assertion "Philosophy wants to know what things are at the most basic level of inquiry" is attributing wants to things that are incapable of forming/having them. I'd charge anthropomorphism; however, humans are not the only creatures capable of wanting things. — creativesoul

It is rather a simple statement referring to the telos of philosophy: if there is a question begged, then inquiry will follow. Philosophy begins where specific inquiries in specific fields end. Physics does not ask what a force is. Philosophy does. Science does not ask about the nature of knowledge relations. Philosophy does.
"Attributing wants to things"? A bit left fieldish.

Philosophy is something that is practiced. Practices are not the sort of things that 'want to know' anything. Practitioners are.

The quote above is self-defeating. It cannot be put into practice. What would 'the most basic level of inquiry' even look like in complete absence of narrative account. I mean, honoring the suggestion neglects the fact that it quite simply cannot be done. There goes the only means/method available to us for seeking such knowledge. — creativesoul

The narrative account in question refers to the religious narrative that is the stuff that sermons are made out of, and all the bad metaphysics. Not about narrative as such.

The most basic level of inquiry deals with epistemology and ontology.

can think of a few different sensible uses of that term. It may indicate situations when/where one's spatiotemporal location is drastically changed as a result of being hurtled through the air, against their will/choosing/wishes. It may refer to all the different subjective particular circumstances during the adoption of one's initial/first worldview. It may refer to the fact that no one chooses the socioeconomic circumstances they are born into. — creativesoul

Thrownness (geworfenheit) a term that refers, plainly put, to the condition of our being in a world always already endowed with the terms of meaningful possibilities. One sees this in moments of reflective thought in which it becomes clear that one has been "thrown" into a world of entanglements where one is a teacher, a lawyer, a wife or husband,has a language,or any of what Heidegger called "factical" identities. We move through life never questioning these engagements in a culture, and as a result, we never realize our "true" nature.
You are close when you say "It may refer to the fact that no one chooses the socioeconomic circumstances they are born into." Right. But when one does choose, she is already IN a lifestyle, a language, a body of meaningful institutions. This is one's throwness.

Yup. Thousands upon thousands of pages. The introduction story in On The Way To Language is some of Heiddy's best work. Too bad he wasn't around enough individual's to grasp the full meaning underlying "that which goes unspoken". He was thrown into a different world. — creativesoul

The full meaning of that which is unspoken? Pray, continue.

Keep in mind that when it comes to metaphysics, I do not share Heidegger's commitment to finitude in his Ontotheology Constitution of Metaphysics (and in Being and Time's Care as the Being of Dasein, and elsewhere). In fact, I reject this way to ground metaphysics. Which brings me to what I call "value-in Being, the Being of Value.

As to "that which is unspoken" Heidegger is notorious for dismissing ethics and value (value, in the way Wittgenstein refuses to talk about it). Here, both Kierkegaard and Heidegger fail to discover (at least analytically) the most salient feature of what we are. It is our existence's value dimension. Discussable.

If you're attempting to equate ethics with "being thrown into disease, and countless miseries, as well as the joys, blisses, and the countless delights" then I'll have to walk. That makes no sense whatsoever. — creativesoul

Just ask, what IS ethics? This is not to ask Kant's question, or MIll's, but it is a question of ontology; not what should one do, but what is the very nature of the ethical and therefore religious imposition. So if you take no interest in such a thing, then you probably should, as you say, walk.

But keep in mind that this is not a study in Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger provides the language tools for presenting ideas. Throwness is a VERY useful term for ethics regardless of whether he talked like this. He didn't because he didn't care about ethics and value, which is appalling. Husserl didn't talk like this either, yet you will find a great deal of neo Husserlian thinking in the French Theological turn, so called; there is Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, Levinas, and others, all who take the Husserlian reduction down to the wire. Henry is magnificent. His complaint against Heidegger rests with his (derived from Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety) notion of the angst one experiences when the "nothing" of encountering being as such appears. Henry's point is that if one is going to give this angst an ontological status (not merely ontic) then he has to allow for the entire range of affectivity, for anxiety is a mode of affectivity. And HERE is where the issue of the logicality of atheism begins. Theism has to be delivered from religious narrative (recall how Lyotard famously referred to the post modern move past "grand narratives" of religion, and reason, as in the "age of Reason") in order find what is there that was not constructed by creative medieval minds.

One cannot understand the "logic" of atheism if one doesn't understand what theism is. Theism has to be purged of incidentals.

And I say, Language that constructs it. This is exactly where we diverge. I am not convinced logic is a "whatever" (attribute, principle, truth?) in Nature; only in Mind. But I remain radically open to any convincing out there. In here, I'm admittedly settled. — ENOAH

Now you are talking like Heidegger. And Rorty who, in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, says it outright: The world is not discovered; it is made. I said earlier that I agree, and I have agreed all along, and I think if you find yourself at this crossroad, you have made an important step toward really understanding our "being here". It is foundationally hermeneutic, or dialectically evolving. I brought up Zizek. He holds in his Hegelian views that our current perspective-in-zeitgeist is like a software program in which one cannot see the mountains in a setting because it is simply not there in the one's and zeros, in the possibilities of the program, so from our pov, there are no mountains and it is absurd to speak as if there are. A wonderful way to talk about the absence of what we cannot even imagine, but is in the currently transcendental possibilities.

But discovery, this must occur within the possibilities of this zeitgeist. Kierkegaard spent a lot of ink on Hegel. Hegel, he says, simply forgot one thing: that we exist! THIS is where Henry comes in and the essence of religion becomes clear, for while I can see how powerful this idea of the hermeneutic delimitations of thought and understanding is, I am IN a world that is in NO way interpretatively distant. But one instantly leaps on this assumption: interpretative distance pervades everything. There is nothing that "survives," as "in itself" for when the mind turns to say what a thing is, there is no thing itself in the saying. The thing itself itself belongs to this finitude of language and culture. But this is well understood, already, and yet there is in the reduction (and one has to look at Husserl's Ideas, or Cartesian Meditations, or The Idea of Phenomenology to see how important this "epoche" is to the neo Husserlians that challenge scope of hermeneutical prohibition) the presence or givenness of the world.

Now one can see why this reduction is used to give religion its meaning that was lost in the modernist critique. Once one sees that the presence of the world CANNOT be "presence" for the moment it is spoken in this context, it is "under erasure" (Derrida) it vanishes in its authority as meaningful language. And this is where we stand in the world as enlightened beings, very aware that our language cannot possess the "givenness" of the world, yet there it stands before one, the world of beingS, the chairs and tables and interests and things and moods and anything that is "said" being now "under erasure".

If this makes sense to you, then you are parsecs ahead of this zeitgeist we live in, as was and is Gautama Siddhartha. It is a matter of understanding in the rarest sense, in the occurrent seeing and being here, that we are not "here" at all.

Then you'd say the same of the Self, it is coercive as he'll. Yet I doubt it's occurrence in the universe anywhere outside of the evolution/emergence of mind, as History, structured by Language. — ENOAH

No, the "self" is, in the context of talking about selves, entirely grounded in language's contextualities. But in the revelation that follows the "under erasure" above, things becomes manifest that were not before. The self, too, is revealed by language, but it is IN language that the delimitations (above) are "discovered" for one has to admit that anything that steps before one to be understood, is "revealed" to language. BUT, and this is the hard part, there is a counterpart to this revelation that has no name. You see the point here: one cannot be rid of language, for to even try is an attempt in language. And so, it is in language that we "discover" what is not language. Language has already evolved to this radical manifestation of confronting the tout autre of language. Here, history is no longer an interpretative obstruction, nor does it inform understanding.

I agree. And I clarify, logic, its function in human existence (history/mind) is undeniable. I say so what if it is part of the constructed? We must adhere to it to function. Then why deny its universality, pre-language, etc? Because it helps when navigating through the ocean of how things really are, to know you are on a ship. Abandon it? No way. Know what it is. Which again is how religion saves us even from logic. It shows us the ocean from the ship, though we are compelled, or at least best to remain aboard. — ENOAH

The whole point of bringing logic into the discussion is simply provide an unproblematic model for what certainty is. No more than this. The reason I do this is due to the way people, philosophers, treat ethics as something that is as variable as belief systems, as customs and "taste". Nietzsche tore away from this, but his ethics was a purely naturalistic one, a "blood and guts" ethics of the gladiatorial (which he praised). N did not understand ethics due to his abhorrence of metaphysics and he thought Christian world hating other worldly divine judgment and condemnation simply had to go. And he was partially right, but he just didn't understand what ethics was. Ethics is the metaphysics, the metaethics, of this world. This is the claim here.

I agree with every word, and yet here's how I think we still differ. For me our real self, is not a self, reacts to feelings, sensations, drives. Among those drives is bonding, a drive so powerful which at any level of analysis reveals how not individual our organic so called self is. That real self is caring. But as for pragmatic, Historically/Temporally structured, perpetually becoming, you describe; like logic, that "Self" me/I, is just another mechanism constructed by History as a fit way to move that temporal narrative becoming along. It works to have a mechanism within the system of signifiers, to signify the body it is occupying and affecting. — ENOAH

And I say you are wise to talk like this. For me (I don't like the condescension of preaching or even advising) the next step is a very strange one. There is no history. There never has been. Give the self a brief analysis: I am now, in the reduced moment, that is, in the nunc stans, the here and now. something of analytic possiblities AS an occurrent phenomenon. I perceive the world around me, and I recall, as I see all that informs me about the world, my education, and this education defines the possibilities of meaning making. I cannot tell you about the the grammatical nuances of Swahili, but I do know about English.

But looking more closely, we see that In the actual event, the past is never discovered (in this analysis); rather, the past is part of an anticipatory dynamic of what could be. Even when one explcitly recalls, the recollection itself is a "not yet" of becoming the next moment. My recollection, in the process itself of recalling, anticipates what will come to be in the next moment of the thought, the utterance, the experience. And the past is analytically absorbed into this singular dynamic of recalling and anticipating. This is what we ARE, constantly on the precipice of an unmade future. It is never settled into some primordial ontology, but never stops being a projection of possibilities into a future. So the past entirely loses it identity AS the past. The most fundamental analysis annihilates common sense time. The present? This is our freedom to choose, but then ALL meanings get lost in this analysis of time.

Consider: a curious question ask, what is the past? One has never witnessed the past; it is always the past IN the present in which it is acknowledged. It is literally impossible to witness the past.

Unless I am misunderstanding the use "Ethics" in some specific way, with Ethics, it is the binary feeling pleasant/not pleasant; there is the coercivity in the intuition regardless of the aporia of the language.

But, let me put it in my terms. At the organic root of ethics, as in all things, is thd binary feeling, or the on not on of bliss. But the construction of ethics is, also like everything else, a dialectical process of competing constructions. The most functional is projected into our world/history. — ENOAH

Why not allow the world to be what it is? There is nothing in the pain of a sprained ankle that is dialectical. One is not comparing nor is the event historical in any way. It has a "thereness" that transcends analysis. This is an important idea. Ethics may be a construct, the the "raw material" if you will of ethics is anything but.

I'd say the pain of the sprained ankle is one "event", immediate, present and organic. The ethics is constructed seemingly
immediately, but nevertheless constructed. — ENOAH

But then, drop that tag, "but nevertheless constructed." Why is this there? The construction issues from the entanglements of value in play. These are incidental. That I owe the bank money, and in order to maintain the confidence in its institutions a society requires debts to be paid, yet I live in poverty and there has been such an absence of justice in my background, I feel well justified in avoiding this obligation, and so on; all this is dismissed in the reduced analysis, for we want to know what the essence of ethics is, not the many "states of affairs" we find ourselves in.

The pain screams out from the living present. What is IS is worn on its sleeve, so to speak. It is the world "speaking" the ethics of not bringing this into existence.

I would view logic as apodictic in accordance with its own terms. Perhaps a priori, insofar as I would define a priori: a "truth" settled upon and input foundationally and universally, more or less. But not pre-existent nor always present; like a posteriori and phenomena, mediated (constructed and projected). I would not view logic as universally and necessarily true outside of its own construction. I would not impose our logic upon Nature, for e.g. If/when we [superficially] observe logic in nature, we are superimposing it. — ENOAH

I have to lean Kantian on this one, but only lean: The apodicticity shouldn't be denied what it is: one cannot, say, even imagine an object being its own cause, to move all by itself, that is. Nor can one imagine logic's tautological principles being any less authoritative than they are. This apriority of the logic of causality is, notwithstanding the contingency of the language that discovers it, itself an absolute. This is saying: no, I really do not know what logic is because, per Wittgenstein, logic is only shown but its nature cannot be known, and: language itself is not apriori. It is as you say historical. But even though I cannot clear the interpretative language dimension of knowing of all doubt (to speak like Descartes), the intuition (whatever that is) is emphatic and and clear as a bell, and it is this coercivity, of logic, not the hermeneutic aporia, that is the absolute. I think to question this collapses into an empty skepticism.

But to call it an absolute is itself bound to interpretative indeterminacy. One simply cannot help this. One CAN doubt anything, true, but to doubt logic as it appears is disingenuous. I would without hazard say, the "intuition" of causality is absolutely inviolable.

Not clear about a posteriori and phenomena. As to nature and logic, I think it important to note that a person is not nature. Nor is it right to argue that that one fits into the natural scheme of things. A person is a self, and a self is a very different kind of being from a tree or a coconut. Our self is a living and breathing, caring, pragmatic, historical temporally structured existence that anticipates a future in a perpetual "not yet".

I know this sounds weird, and I have to say I don't understand it perfectly well, but the more I read the papers on phenomenology, the closer I get. It is best to simply allow oneself to observe and think: there is logic. What IS this? See how it is played out in symbolic logic. The insight the OP and all that follows is trying to show is that this "intuition" of logic is simply inviolable. But because logic is only about the form of thought and not the content, it is only trivially inviolable. Logic QUA logic is vacuous. But now let's look at ethics and we see it is not the form, nor the random opinion, the cultural orientation, the relativity of values, and the like. Here, we move to the essence of ethics/religion, into what all these have to make them what they are. And this requires an analysis of an ethical matter. We find the essence of ethics is value, and so it is with religion. What is value? This has been discussed.

As for ethics, same exact paragraph as above, mutatis mutandis. — ENOAH

Which means you would count value as not something as universally and necessarily true outside of its own construction. But what is its construction? With logic, there is the coercivity in the intuition regardless of the aporia of the language, and this has to acknowledged for what it is. But in ethics, it is the pain of this sprained ankle. Now, what IS "its own construction"? Are you saying that the sprain is entirely a localized affair, there in the ankle, and no where else? I suspect this to be the case.

The trouble is, again, that the view here is phenomenological: There are NO physical locality boundaries, and each being IS Being qua Being. You may find this odd, but this really is the implicit physicalism that pervades science and naturlistic thinking. All is metaphysics, I argue. This sprained ankle is as profound as it gets. Why? Because the pain that is physically localized, is phenomenologically without locality, for it is subsumed under Being as such.

From Upanisads to Analects to Sutras, Gospels, Torah and Prophets, Koran, and I would speculate much more, beyond the mythological, legalistic, and ritualistic, there is the consistent thread: surrender your ego (Mind's constructions/projections) to the Universal (God/Nature). That consistent thread, I say, is the essence.. — ENOAH

I believe you are saying that that consistent thread is value-in-the-world. Note that all you mention is essentially constituted by ethicality, for there is in all this the essential normativity that aligns with ethics. All of these metaphysical systems "insist" on compliance, like logic insists. The argument lies in the observation that value experiences, the ones celebrated in those religions, like logic, cannot be imagined to be other than what they are. Value in ethics and religion is noncontigent, in other words, and apodictic

Look at it like this, say, as is generally assumed, that the Hindu Brahman, the Buddhist Nirvana, the Christian heaven and so on, are not realizable for the confirmation of religious belief. And all there is in the world that would make for our existence's foundational meaning for one in good intellectual conscience lies in the everydayness of things (which is science. We are all scientists in our everydayness). Pretty much the assumption of modern thinking, and philosophy certainly assumes this to be the case, for the most part. This argument takes this assumption and says the religious, metaphysical affirmation one seeks, is IN the very everydayness itself. It is demonstrable world for atheists, agnostics, logicians like Russell and Frege, in the analytic of living and breathing.

What the hell! Yes. I thought Hegel had built that idea, yes. Mind is History. It moves through, not just language qua language, but a multiferous system of signifiers, operating in accordance with its own evolved laws mechanics dynamics. Logic for instance, a "grammar". As is ethics — ENOAH

Slavoj Zizek would agree. And I think this right. By this thinking, when one observes an object, the object and the observation are one! One spiritually evolving divinity. BUT: one has to put history down explicitly, suspend all of those "historically" derived knowledge claims that implicitly and immediately take hold of the object (the emotion, the attitude, the idea) and allow oneself to to understand that the language and its interpretational possibilities is clearly NOT this sprained ankle's misery. To speak about the misery, within all a particular historical framework's "potentiality of possibilities" is radically OTHER than the misery itself. This is Kierkegaard (Concept of Anxiety) and his complaint against Hegel. This is a long issue.

Yeah well, the logical precedent happens to be manifest historically since the topic concerns a concrete, social institution and not a mere abstraction. — 180 Proof

But the point is that it being a concrete social institution is exactly what one has to put aside to understand the essence of religion.

What "argument"? There is no "argument", just speculative observations which are either informed by anthropology, history, psychology, etc or they are not. — 180 Proof

No. Read the OP. There are actual claims there. You should read it, understand what it says and say something like, look, here you say this, but this is assailable on grounds X and Y.

No we don't because Witty isn't the topic of this thread as per the OP. Folks shift the goal posts when they are confused by the obscurity of what they think they are talking about. As far as I'm concerned, Witty is a non sequitur you've introduced that further obscures the issue. — 180 Proof

Don't be naïve. Witty is at the very center of the OP. I can't help you if you don't do this, read the OP with a mind to understanding and without the default dismissal, that is. Just read it.

Constance, religion long preceeds (by scores of millennia) philosophical reflections such as ethics and that's where its "essence" (foundation) lies – in facticity (e.g. exigency), not ideality (i.e. effable ineffability). — 180 Proof

It precedes reflections about ethics logically; historically. who cares. This is an apriori argument.

But you have to ask why he took that position. You think the OP is obscure, but I am saying the issue is obscure, the OP is clear. But it does take a penetrating analysis. What is it about ethics that Witt said was beyond the pale of what language can say? It is the Good (and of course, the Bad)! What in Culture and value he calls divinity. One has to ask, why would he say this?

Thus, the failing (obscurity) of the OP. — 180 Proof

Look, it's Wittgenstein's claim about ethics, the world and value in the Tractatus. It is Witt you don't understand. It was so obscure for Witt that he refused to talk about it, yet he admits that it is precisely that which cannot be spoken that is the important part of the work.

The OP says nothing about mortality. This has no place here. Now the caring about mortality, this is quite different.

Radical contingency, this is a Sartrean term as I remember. But Roquentin was haunted by the world's "otherness" vis a vis the familiar rational categories. I find this there, at the threshold of the infamous angst of Kierkegaard and later Heidegger. An important move, but not the matter here discussed. Here we look at metaethics and metavalue.

And what "structural ... death of a thousand cuts" have I ignored? — 180 Proof

Well, fear of the world is obvious and the need to flee is just crystal clear. But what IS it that one has to flee from that is in and of the world? This has to be analyzed objectively as one would analyze anything; what one seeks must be isolated from the incidentals that surround it.

What you seem to be ignoring is just this analysis.

Could caring instead, or also, be the most immanent, most intimate expression of the one who is being religious (or just being)? The place where instead of finding the essence of religion, you find the one being religious. By caring for something, one brings that transcendent thing (the “world”) into one’s immanent care. Still maybe mystical, but a mystery buried inside instead of beyond. — Fire Ologist

In my thoughts, there is no separation of the caring person and the essence of religion. Religion is nothing conceived as some independent objective state of affairs. Just as with value and reason, WE bring religion into existence and it is because of us, these agencies of ethicality, if you will, who care about things and indulge and refrain, loathe and rejoice, love and hate, and on and on, that religion makes any sense at all.

But religion is always treated as if it were no more that the stories it tells and the bad metaphysics of God the creator, and the rest. I am arguing that religion has a demonstrable metaphysics, which is evidenced in the presence of value itself. I am arguing that the vagaries religious expression obscure the real essence of religion: Real metaphysics, the kind of thing philosophers do not talk about because there is nothing discoverable in the talking, and this is because language always already possesses the world.

"The world" is mystical (not Heidegger's world; but then, he does take one to the threshold and gives it thought and analysis, and is VERY helpful for quasi-mystics like me), as is ethics and value, and when I say world I don't mean that "place" science does its business. It is the phenomenological presence of the world, a "purity" discovered in the reflexivity of thought IN the encounter with value experiences, which is all experience because value permeates experience.

The argument here is that caring and its value essence IS religion's essence. One has to look at the Good, a very old philosophical idea; referring to happiness (the summum bonum) and pleasure and all the sundry "attachments" (as the Buddhists put it) and ask, what is the ontology of this Good in this caring? The question goes directly to the CARER. It is all about this agency of aesthetic and ethical possibilities. The "being" of the Good of this bouillabaisse or that love interest. Christians say God is love. The inverse is much better, Love is God. Just drop the agency of God altogether, and stick with the "there" of the world.

How is value the essence of religion and metaphysics? Simple: value is apodictic or apriori or universal and necessary, AS logic. This is the argument is a very small nutshell.

2. Although you might reject metaphysical dualism, you are yet "framed" by what I've found to be the dominating narrative in western thought, which is that the "spirit" is the locus of reason and morality etc, while the "flesh" the locus of gluttony and desire; or,
3. You mean to say, "religious" liberation--presumably tied in with the divine, must transcend both mind and body. — ENOAH

So I did read all, and there are many things I am aligned with, but now I just want to say that all of the terms in play here as well as in religious contexts everywhere do not present a case that makes what is to basic inquiry clear, and this is what is needed to show that religion has important foundational meaning. What is spirit, metaphysics, morality, the divine, transcendence, the body? These may seem self evident, but if that were true, there would be no issue. The reason I cannot make all of these issues go away is that all of my thinking is grounded in phenomenology, and this is not a popular approach. So when I go into ethics and its metaethics, most in this forum think about this with a very active residual physicalism. This physicalism has to be dropped outright, explcitly, but this cannot be done. One has to "read: their way out of it to get to the impossible simplicity you and I agree about. I think you are right int he things you say, but it has to be brought to an even more penetrating analysis in order to show the world that religion is the THE profound center of our existence, not this or that religion, but religion in its essence. How does one talk about tis outside of the outrageous volumes of Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Levinas, Henry, and so on? See, these guys are right, not in all things everywhere, but in the basic thesis of phenomenology, and Husserl's epoche is at the center of this. This "reduction" is the objective way to talk about metaphysics, and therefore metaethics and therefore religion, or meta-religion.

I am arguing that the world is inherently religious as it shows itself in everyday living, and this is because everyday living is grounded in ethical indeterminacy. Not Turtles all the way down, but metavalue, and it stops right there. At metavalue, the Right and the Good, the wrong and the Bad, at root, stand as their own presuppositions, that is, they are stand alone in what they are. When you approve of this notion of non propositional truth, I don't think you mean it cannot be propositionally expressed, for anything can, but rather that this truth is an existential absolute, not a logical one, so just like modus ponens, we cannot imagine the contrary being true: one cannot even imagine the existential Good of, say, bliss, love, ecstasy, being Bad, or not being Good in any way, even if something most clearly Good, like MY hagen Dazs experience is put into some comparison of utility (as is found wiht arguments about utilitarianism. See How Bentham tries to quantify values is disparate kinds), not because they are logically opposed, but because the Good's existence as Good is as sound as a logical construction.

Once this is seen as clearly as I think it can be, then it becomes clear that the metavalue Good IS our manifest divinity, entangled as it is in attractions, compulsions, desires, appetites, and on and on, and this permeates one's existence from the petty likes to the deeply profound. What is spirituality? I say it is what is discovered in the revelation of sublime awareness. What is sublime? Now that IS an interesting question. Value of the sublime experience, whatever it is, is not going to be "explained"; It IS the world, and presence qua presence cannot be spoken. It is an order of value and we have terms like holiness, sacredness, that attend the word divinity, and there is the Christian's "God is love" and love is so ethereal, but the quality of these cannot be argued. One simply has to actually BE in love to know.

But the reasoning in this argument shows, I believe, that one encounters divinity even if one is not really attuned to those religious passions. Divinity lies in the universal caring about the world, for caring itself is transcendental, mystical, as Wittgenstein would say.

But as for the manifestations of one manifestation of Being, tge human being, and its projections, these are constructed out of fleeting and empty representations stored in the organisms memory. They have created amazing and horrible things with real effect upon Being, but they, in themselves are empty images that come and go in shapes and forms, moved by desire, building meaning in Narrative forms.

These, taxes and the flower, perceived as "flower", are imposition thinking and have "removed" us from the reality we naturally share with tge earth and other creatures. — ENOAH

I know what you are saying. You would find in Husserl and Heidegger a way of talking about this that would greatly make the idea more clear and meaningful. When one takes up their "method" of liberating oneself from the language and culture that seems to have a mind of its own, one is headed for some extraordinary exposure to what underlies normal life. It is not really natural at all, I would say. It is entirely unnatural. It is a removal from what is natural as well as from whatever distorting contribution the "tranquilization in unauthentic being of endlessly being busy makes. Heidegger talks like this, but I am taking him a radical step forward: When a person wakes up and looks around and asks questions like, What does it mean to exist? and Why are we born to suffer and die? the degree to which this carries one outside of being-in-a-culture and being conditioned to experience the world in a language, and in social institutions, depends on how well one can turn the tables on this lifetime of education and enculturation. Go all the way, like the Gautama Siddhartha, and one is simply not in this world anymore; yet, nor is one out of it.
You will never find a philosopher 'round these parts speaking well of such a thing, for philosophers are professional academics more interested in arguments then they are interested in the world. Only continental philosophers take this radical move seriously.

And because philosophy too is imposition thinking, religion, in essence, is a means to return, if ever so intermittently and briefly, to tge reality of Being. That is, the essence of religion is to awaken from the fiction in pursuit of the truth. — ENOAH

I'm not going to take issue with what you say here. I think along the same lines. Only to add one thing: when you say the essence of religion is to awaken from the fiction in pursuit of the truth, there is a method to doing this. Call it a kind of jnana yoga. It is Husserl's phenomenological reduction. It is not merely a turning away from bad thinking about metaphysics, but a reduction of the world to its essence, you might say. The essential givenness of the world. For me, the habits of thinking have to become undone in order to finally "see the world" in the pure way you take so seriously. Not natural, but the world free of active world-making assumptions. You might find Fink's Sixth Meditation very worthy, in which he says early on:

Having overcome world naivete' we stand now in a new naivete, a transcendental naivete'. It consists in our unfolding and explicating transcendental life only in the presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit] in which it is given us by the reduction, without entering by analysis into the "inner horizon" of this life, into the performances of constitution

Fink makes the radical move. The reduction is a reference to Husserl's Ideas 1, and Husserl was Fink's mentor. All of the French post -Husserlians I read (like Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, et al) attempt to follow through on elucidating this new naivete. One will become a mystic if one pursues this: common sense becomes more alien, and something else moves in and takes its place, not to be spoken simply due to a lack of shared experience. Of course, Husserl was no mystic. But the basic principles of phenomenology will, if one is predisposed, replace assumptions with questions, and questions are an "openness" rather than a fixity. This goes to your pursuit of the truth, doesn't it? Truth is openness where there once was rigid affirmation. Heidegger said something close to this. Truth is an unhiddenness of a that occurs in the way language creates meaning, but one has to yield to what is there, give up the attempt to close meaning off from possibilities. Hegel probably inspired this. Gelassenheit, a yielding that opens insight.

It doesn't really matter much to me, but it happened again. I clicked "post" and it didn't post. I thought I had missed link with the cursor so a clicked again.

I don't think that I really understand how to follow up your question.
We could start by asking whether logic is as apodictic as it is thought to be. — Ludwig V

Your question was why does this analysis of ethics and religion "end up in the same place." I want say that if ethics were just as coercive (meaning one really has no choice to accept constructions in symbolic logic) and absolute (though logic itself is understood in language, and language cannot be said to be apodictic; I mean, when we ask what language is, we don't get truth tables and theorems. We get history and evolving meanings) as logic, then everything would change. Plainly put, our ethics, so familiar and complicated, would be grounded in Being itself. In Being, this qualitative play of good and bad that is our existence is risen to a new order of significance, one traditionally reserved for religion.

I don't think that I really understand how to follow up your question.
We could start by asking whether logic is as apodictic as it is thought to be. — Ludwig V

Your question was why does this analysis of ethics and religion "end up in the same place." I want say that if ethics were just as coercive (meaning one really has no choice to accept constructions in symbolic logic) and absolute (though logic itself is understood in language, and language cannot be said to be apodictic; I mean, when we ask what language is, we don't get truth tables and theorems. We get history and evolving meanings) as logic, then everything would change. Plainly put, our ethics, so familiar and complicated, would be grounded in Being itself. In Being, this qualitative play of good and bad that is our existence is risen to a new order of significance, one traditionally reserved for religion.

Quite so. But I'm intrigued that you go through a huge process and end up in the same place that I'm in. Pain is part of life. So what is at stake here? — Ludwig V

You know, since this really just nails it, I will attend exclusively to this. Rather simple, really, but this is what philosophy is looking for but never finds because it has given up on simplicity. Intellectuals are lost if there is nothing to say. It is a philosopher's job to elaborate.

What if ethics were as apodictic, that is certain, as logic? I will simply hand this question to you to see what you think.

Already muddled.

You talk about where you think religion comes from — but not about what it is. That would be helpful before discussing where it “rises out of.” What is doing the rising, exactly? — Mikie

It is not to be treated outside of the manner in which it appears. Of course, things are at first muddled prior to a clarification of terms and their meanigns. The OP is not a dissertation. It is an introduction to a theme. The clarification comes in a discussion about what these terms mean. I said, religion rises out of ethical indeterminacy, so what is this indeterminacy and what is the relation between ethical indeterminacy and religion?
That which is "doing the rising" lies with the analysis of ethics and epistemology/ontology. The latter can wait, but ethics and its value-in-the-world, this is what makes religion what it is. I was talking to Jussi Tenila (above) and I referred to Melville's Ahab and I said, " Melville was very aware of the ethical contradictions of our existence at the basic level. Torn off legs just shouldn't BE." This is not about the ethical normativity found in the contexts of familiar affairs in which there are identifiable parties involved. The prima facie ethical prohibition against assaulting one another is generally determined by the particular case and the terms of justification. But "do no harm" IS a well grounded at the outset, prior to the details. Why? Because it hurts. It hurts, and we know it, a philosopher once put it. Pain itself is that which originally generates the obligation, not this pain or that, and no mention yet made of the element of "taste" and its variability nor the relativity of predilection. Just pain as pain, pain simpliciter.

Religion is amorphous, so it’s worth stating what you think it means before discussing your ideas about its origins or essence. — Mikie

I did state that it is the radical ethical indeterminacy of our existence. You are having trouble because this doesn't mean much or anything to you, and this likely due to the very idea of metaethics to be unfamiliar. Ask, why does Wittgenstein in the Tractatus refuse to discuss ethics?

For my part, I see little difference between religion and philosophy— both ask very universal, difficult, extra-ordinary questions about existence. That being said, your proposition seems a little out of left field. — Mikie

I agree with what you say about religion and philosophy, but there are many who would not. All philosophical questions are essentially questions of religion. As I say, a hard sell. One has to go into the argument. It begins, I am claiming, with Ahab, who loses his leg to a whale. The whale is a big stupid animal that simply lashes out and can do no better when provoked, and one's moral outrage really has no object regarding the offending party. Thus Ahab rages against what is "behind" the whale, existence itself that produces whales, and black holes, and fence posts, and everything! This is a big move. There is a name for this everything, which is Being. Being itself. It has no features for it is not A being, so all that can be talked about and predicated about using the copula "is" as in it IS a rainy day and the flower IS red, and so on, is the incidental expression of the Being of the whale, the tiger and the tax audit that puts you in jail.

So the ethical is all about, if not these extreme examples (severed legs are dramatic and it makes the point so well), then what I call value-in-being. One could follow the way Kant treated reason in his discovery of "pure reason" only here we deal with value, or "pure value" which is the good and bad of the aches and pains as well as the thrills and joys of human existence.

This is the way the argument begins.

I've taken up enough of your time, and appreciate it. I'd say quickly this. Those desires, Icecream, a walk in the deer park, love even, are "spiritual" because they are constructed (mind). — ENOAH

Then a parting thought. Philosophy has one end, and this is the truth at the most basic level. Truth is an epistemic term, and the reality that is "known" is a matter for ontology, the "what is existence at the most basic level?" kind of thing. I argue that these are really one, and this is a tough thesis to defend out of the context of continental reasoning. It offends common sense to say that when one observes something, the observational act itself is part and parcel of the thing being observed. Anglo American philosophy has forgotten this Kantian legacy.

But anyway, the question then is, what is the most basic level? Here I follow the post Husserlians, like Jean Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean Luc Nancy, Emanual Levinas, all French, but they have really driven thought to the actuality of religion through Husserl's reduction. So if you are looking for things to read that do just this, that analyze existence down to its essential (philosophical) ontology, then there is this continental undertaking. Begins with Kant, of course, and his Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps you already know about this kind of thing. Just taking a moment to recommend all this as a way to finally get, not closure, but "openness" to the world. In a letter written by Maurice Blanchot talking about Levinas' influence, he says, "philosophy was life itself. . .passion renewing itself continually and suddenly in an explosion of new and enigmatic thoughts." Not the stale old arguments, but this extraordinary encounter with the world. One has forgotten that it is an exhilaration, as Emily Dickinson put it, just to be here. The essential message of Kierkegaard's Repetition.

There are two issues with this. First, the framework that I have learnt is not bounded, in the sense that it has infinite possiblities within it. Second, it is not a fixed framework, but is subject to change and development - Derrida is acutely aware of this, isn't he? So I ask the question, what tells us that we are "bound" to a particular framework? Awareness of history, perhaps, and/or awareness of change. Perhaps we should think of our historical framework as a starting-point, rather than a prison. — Ludwig V

But this is the real hard question. Being in a prison implies one is not free, so the question then is, what is the nature of freedom? And you likely know that Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and so on, including Kant and his rationalism, all have something to say about freedom. Freedom is temporally conceived and the ontology of time has a long history, but the basic analysis is this (which I imagine most have come across in their reading. I think it is essentially right): In the analytic philosophy I have read, there is a refusal to even glance at Kant and the temporal foundation of our existence, and this makes for a serious deficit in philosophical thinking, In the direct perceptual encounter with an object, whether it be a thing, a feeling, a memory, something imagined, it doesn't matter, anything at all, I do not actually witness what is before my eyes, so to speak. The witnessing is bound up with recollection, so I see a lamp and there is IN this an implicit attending of all I know about lamps, their contexts of what, where, how, when about lamps. But this is sooo fascinatingly sticky, because I also face a future that is unmade, and this occurs, this facing, In the recollection, so the recalling and the anticipating are one. There really is no past of future. These are a singularity and past, present and future are just practical and analytical terms, and merely "traces," says Derrida, " of "difference and deference," who puts even this singularity to rest. You know how Derrida completely flattens language's presumptive grasp of "the world". Context replaces ontology.

But anyway, on freedom, as I observe this lamp, I AM this temporal dynamic of recollection and anticipation, though these are not worn on the sleeve of the perceptual awareness, which is just more or less, there is a lamp. So what. But what happens when you put the lamp in question? Not mundane questions like, what's wrong with the lamp? or, Who moved the lamp? But rather, the kind of question that removes one from all presumption? The Being of the lamp? Not the lamp as A being, but just its being there, not AS a lamp at all. This requires the (Heraclitean) determinative flow of the past into the future (ver fallen, the "they", the "idle talk." See Heidegger's Care as the Being of Dasein, chapter six of the first division. No, I am no scholar of Heidegger. I just read Heidegger). And now one stands in awareness not of this or that, but of one's own existence, which IS the flow, and one steps out of the tranquilized "they" of ordinary affairs, and is free to choose among the "potentiality of possibilities" the they has to offer. One can construct a self deliberately.

So freedom is always there as it is our nature, our existence, to stand in this openness of possibilities, but this is forgotten. See what Heidegger says:

temptation, tranquillizing, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement)—characterize the specific kind of Being which belongs to falling. This ‘movement’ of Dasein in its own Being, we call its “downward plunge” [Absturz]. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness.

One's true ontology is freedom. What binds us is our fallenness into, as Kierkegaard put it, the "habits" of (inherited) race. Heidegger got this from Kierkegaard, in part, this idea of this "historical framework (culture, in a word) as a prison, as you said. For K, it is found in the analytic of original sin (The Concept of Anxiety).

I can, and do, acknowledge my cat on the sofa and acknowledge also that I do not know - am not aware of - everything that the cat is. Some things may be beyond any possibility of knowing, such as knowing (i.e. experiencing) the lived world of the cat (because I could not be the cat without ceasing to be me, a human being). There is surely, no harm, in admitting my limitations while at the same time acknowledging the cat is "really" there, and on the sofa. — Ludwig V

But this unknowing is inherent in the known, not like some scientific paradigm waiting for an anomaly to be addressed (as Kuhn would put it), but as something in the structure of our existence. This freedom is a dynamic obligation to create one's own existence, and this causes anxiety, but anxiety that is not about this or that tiger or disease, but about nothing, I mean, this nothing is the indeterminacy of our existence, and you know what this is, the freedom right now to jump off a cliff or to give to charity. To live is to choose! when one lives like this--right on the threshold of the unmade future. We "fall" out of this responsibility by forgetting that we are free and we immerse ourselves in a job, a role to play, an identity.

When we fall like this, we are simply unaware, tranquilized, as H put it. To be authentically aware introduces us to ourselves' true nature, which is freedom:

When in falling we flee into the “at-home” of publicness, we flee in the face of the “not-at-home”; that is, we flee in the face of the uncanniness which lies in Dasein—in Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been delivered over to itself in its Being. This uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is a threat to its everyday lostness in the “they”, though not explicitly.

Perhaps you see what H is getting at. Just going along, day by day, is a bit like being a thing, for a thing doesn't have choices. To face one's freedom is uncanny, and anxious, and we retreat in the routine of living. This uncanniness of our existence is there, right now, in the lamp encounter. A glace at the lamp and it is just there. But when allow the question of my existence to interpose itself between me and the immediate acknowledgement, now the lamp is not what it was in this complacency. It stands in the temporality of possibilities, for it is received in the recollection/anticipation of my temporality, in the freedom of acknowledging it from OUTSIDE of the stream of consciousness. H doesn't talk about this "outside" as a religious "suprasensible place" of metaphysics (the place Nietzsche railed against).

But I tend this way. Long story.

But, yes, the world resists us and obtrudes on us - however much we may try to control it or ignore it. That's how reality becomes real for us as we exist in our framework - and, of course, how our framework has to stretch and adapt to accommodate it. The limitations we posited at the beginning do not exist. — Ludwig V

I can make things unduly difficult because, to be honest, when you read as much of this stuff as I have, you begin to sound like they do when you write, and they are way, way out there.Why is there a very defensible law against breaking one another's knee caps? Because it hurts. I mean, primordially this there logically prior to the prohibition, meaning no hurt, no justification for the prohibition. But can one "speak" pain?

Pain is OF the world, not of our laws that deal with pain. Pain is this primordiality, a givenness of our existence, and will not be spoken. Our ethics and therefore our religion is grounded in just this.

Yes, very good! I agree. Whereas Ishmael, i propose, recognizes the same ”difference/distance” but remains a pure spectator, not succumbing to the frustration of existing in a world filled with nonsense and absurdities like leg amputating whales. He remains a mindful, even meditative (like when he stands on top of the mast on lookout and just watches the sea) witness. Maybe that is the teaching that Melville ment to give us. He lived in a very dynamic age with many upheveals and changes occuring. Maybe he meant to show us two ways to react to the absurdity of life. — Jussi Tennilä

Yes. And Queequeg, calm, adept, spiritually attuned, unquestioning (unlike Ahab who had been to the university, where he no doubt studied philosophy, just like crazy Hamlet at Wittenberg, where Luther nailed his 95 theses in protest. It is a mentality of protest that thought produces) primitive, who, like Stubb, sits comfortably in who he is. A novel so rich in interpretation.

Melville was very aware of the ethical contradictions of our existence at the basic level. Torn off legs just shouldn't BE. The world wears its ethical normativity on its sleeve, and the prohibition of tearing one another to shreds is in the outrageous pain of it. We see this ethicality everywhere, in the givenness of the world, made ambiguous by distracted thinking (to put it succinctly). Faith in God must occur in the struggle to understand, not in the complacency of dogma , nor in the recklessness of rage. The top of the mast is a place to witness and think. Quite right: "mindful, even meditative."

I think there is no disagreement here. My calling it a "difference" is simply one level of abstraction removed from "distance" as distance implies difference.
As to what particular questions arise, that is also downstream from the fundamental realisation of the distinction between the self and the other. Which, I suppose, was the original question of this post - what is religion about in its core. — Jussi Tennilä

I think of Ahab and the whale for this "distance": Note that Ahab did not chase down the whale to get revenge against the mindless brute. It was what was "behind" the whale, and this really does go the the OP. The world's horrors an joys come to us in the usual ways, the lions and tigers and bears, and the falling in love, ice cream, and roller coaster rides. But the most uncanny question of all, entirely ignored, which is, what is all this doing here AT ALL? Ahab struck out at the world that produced leg amputating whales, in an ethical outrage toward the impossible source of his affliction: God. Even if there were no God, there would still be the very justified ethical outrage. The OP is saying God was never there in the first place; this is just a bit of bad metaphysics invented by ancient minds. But the conditions of our existence that PUT God there remain and we stand before Being as such (if you will) with fist clenched toward the world, just like Ahab. And the same goes for the love, bliss, joy, and the rest. Not a fist, but a yearning.

If I am understanding correctly, here is how this kind of "truth" can be said to be about...pure color or sound: because "we" are talking about the sensing (of) the organic (human, but not necessarily) being as it is sensing, presently and in "truth," and "free" of the displacing projections/imposition thinking. — ENOAH

I think you are in the middle of it. If I understand your use of the terms "displacing projections/imposition" you refer to the way language "displaces" non linguistic intuitions. There is a lot that has been said about this. Kant's "intuitions with concepts are blind; concepts without intuitions are empty" remains very strong as a kind of prototype denial that any sense at all can be made of what there is in the world in its bare "givenness". But you heard Colon Conners speak about Henry: we have turned away from life, and gone into the world and become dust and ash, and it is not just Galilean science (from his "Barbarism") but the collective mentality of "right" thinking that we all have that allows us to participate in a culture. The everydayness of mundane existence. Phenomenologists all argue like this, one way or another.

The trick about phenomenology lies with Husserl's reduction, or epoche. He opens his "Ideas" like this:

Pure Phenomenology, to which we are here seeking the way, whose unique position in regard to all other sciences we wish to make clear, and to set forth as the most fundamental region of philosophy, is an essentially new science, which in virtue of its own governing peculiarity lies far removed from our ordinary thinking, and has not until our own day therefore shown an impulse to develop. It calls itself a science of “phenomena”.

I bring this up only to introduce the "method" of restoring what has been lost in the inflated and unwieldy production of knowledge claims science and culture have produced in the modern age. The epoche asks the philosopher to suspend the most common thinking that we naturally settle into in daily living, and reduce the world to its pure phenomena. This term "pure" is of course at issue here. can one actually have a "pure" perceptual encounter with the world such that what is there is received perceptually as it is. The analytics would add to this "as it is independently of the contribution of the perceiver, and this obviously creates a problem in epistemology, for S know P is nonsense if there is no essential "knowing" relation in place, and if P is entirely outside S, and independent of S, then knowledge is impossible.

So when you talk of "being as it is sensing, presently and in "truth," and "free" of the displacing projections/imposition thinking" you are treading close to post-Husserlian phenomenology, idea that if you put "the ordinary world" on hold, and look closely only at the phenomenological pure presence of what is there actually that the ordinary world presupposes, you discover this dimension of truth that is altogether ignored by science. To make this move is uncanny, for the world is reclaimed by mystery or "unknowing". All this is done with and in the language that first opens world to the understanding. This is the paradox of phenomenology. When I look at my coffee cup like this, it is no longer a coffee cup, nor is it qualia, or anything at all. Its "isness" is stand alone, and this is a quasi-mystical state, but language doesn't flinch: I know it is a coffee cup now, Nothing has changed in this as it remains in the background just as I did when I was doing my taxes or talking to an acquaintance.

A bit windy on that. Sorry.

Yes because "qualia" if that "experience" of direct sensation, is before meaning has been constructed and projected.

The Truth as in essence of religion, is unmediated, not knowable by logic or reasoning. More similar, in human knowledge, to "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Or, a God who dies a criminal, to save humanity, no less. — ENOAH

I remain uncertain about things not knowable by logic, because after all, logic doesn't really know anything. It is the form of knowing, that is identified in the structure of judgment. Not that there is any such thing as logic outside of the systems of thinking that recognize it. But that aside, you know, one has to be rational to know since knowing is the affirmation, the denial, the conditional, the conjunction and so on. Even when one is being her LEAST rational, there is the foundation of reason that makes this so.

The best way to look at this is to recognize that when one is finally of age, and questions rise up, and one can freely deal with the world and its ponderables, one is already IN a culture of science and daily living, and this culture permeates thoughts and feelings. It is the collective spirit of the times, the era, the zeitgeist, the historical framework. Call this the "totality" referring to the cultural literacy everyone has. This totality (as in Emanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity. First conceptualized like this by Heidegger, I think). This is the ordinary plain talk, from the idle banter to hard science. THIS is what possesses one such that one cannot understand the "truth" as you have been describing it. One is busy, entangled and fascinated IN the totality.

My only comment here is to acknowledge that physical pain is an example of that kind of truth. The "suffering" we primarily experience is purely constructed and projected and calls for something like "the essence of religion" to relieve us from.

However, though the first instant of physical pain provides a glimpse into that same "truth", just like it is in Zazen, or deep contemplative prayer, the truth in much physical pain is quickly bypassed by attention to imposition thinking. — ENOAH

You would have to explain this to me, that suffering is constructed. Not that I doubt the adept Buddhist's ability to ignore pain. Thich Quang Duc comes to mind, the Vietnamese monk who set himself ablaze in protest. Unless one is Thich Quang Duc, this about physical pain being quickly bypassed baffles me.

But also, from that. The so called order is the determinate world which has displaced the natural indeterminate reality. To me, the latter has neither ethical nor moral concerns. It (literally) just is that it is-ing, and we are that we are-ing. — ENOAH

You sound a lot like a love and peace hippie. This is a good thing, mind you. The hippies may have been a little out to lunch, but they were possessed by something more deeply authentic than, say, the hospital ethicist who deals with matter of bioethics. To talk about compassion, empathy, pathos, caring, conscience, love, as well as "it hurts; it hurts and I know it!" as the Real foundation of ethics, prior to, or more primordial than, principled thinking like Kant's categorical imperative of the principle of utility does not solve complicated entangled ethical dilemmas, but these latter are entirely contrived out of affairs that themselves stand outside of ethics. Robbing a bank to compensate for being thrown into structural poverty and ignorance and this justification standing vis a vis the necessity of the law that prohibits bank robbing---this creates a serious dilemma for justice, and compassion will not resolve this because ethical confusion runs so deep in such a thing. But if compassion had ruled culture to begin with, prohibitive laws like this would be far less necessary.

But keep in mind the OP: Religion has its grounding in something more basic. Go fall in love and observe. Being in love has everything IN love, or, a person in love lives is a world of being in love. Is love reducible to further analysis? Of course, there are neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, and so on who have sometihng to say, but there the question goes to the "pure" phenomenon, the condition itself that is there to be understood. It is a quality of the given world, and science cannot elucidate qualities. It can only talk about quantitative relations, degrees, intensities, causal relations of these, and the like. Now take the ethics of, say, the prohibition of divesting someone of love, which is a prima facie rule: one shouldn't break the heart of another. A defeasible rule, to be sure, for often circumstances are intractable, but note: the prima facie rule is PRIOR to the entanglements, so from whence comes this? It comes from the world itself, for love issues from the world! It is not a principle, but an actuality, not even arguably, the most salient feature of our existence. And moral realism has just been proved. This kind of reasoning applies across the board to any and all ethical cases: find the value that is at stake, at risk, to be won or lost or compromised, etc, and you will find the essence of the ethicality. And value issues form the world (Wittgenstein's Tractatus, e.g.)

Because love is a quality of the, as you put it, "is-ing, and we are that we are-ing" it issues from the world itself, from being. It is as if all ethics had the same metaphysical grounding as those stone tablets written by God on a mountain. Only ethics is Real.

I think the movement we are ripe for today is that philosophy has forgotten we are organic beings. — ENOAH

Spiritual beings, I would say. The word 'spirit' has too much history, I know. Spoils meaning. But our spirituality is really a thing so easily understood. When the question is raised regarding the nature of the self, note that one does not find anything at all that is remotely a thing, all the caring, worrying, thinking, happiness, misery, and on and on and on: there is nothing physicalist in any of this. Then how can one classify this? These qualities are spiritual, this passion for hagen dazs spiritual, this desire to go for a swim, meet friends, etc. spiritual. Objects are what they are, we are what we are. In itself, it says nothing of redemption and consummation and the eternal duration of the spirit. It is a simple observational fact.

Thus, ”all is one”, ”experience of self is an illusion” etc. — Jussi Tennilä

And I did fail to give a comment here: So if experience of self is an illusion, what agency is
"experiencing" that spear in my kidney?

I differ with this only in the order of experience/realization: developmentally humans experience death, therefore instinctively fear it, long before realizing – those who do explicitly – that the 'I-world duality is irreconcible (or even irreparable)', which compounds the fear (i.e. suffering) that requires relief and succor in degrees of self-consoling reality-denial (e.g. dreams of / quests for symbolic / magical immortality) aka "religion". — 180 Proof

A good example of the failure to understand. Death is only an issue if one first cares about dying. Death, to be taken seriously, needs to be understood as to what makes it so serious. Thus, caring is primordial. Caring has an existential counterpart, which is that which is cared about and this moves to the nature of encounter itself. These are the actualities of experience, and they are logically PRIOR to "self-consoling reality-denial."

One must deal with presuppositions. This is the telos of philosophy.

Religion, to me, is about, and rises out of, the irreconcilability of experiencing being whatever ”I” refers to, and the simultaneous existence of the outside world that is perceived as ”different” or ”other”. From this distinction questions arise that cannot be answered leading to suffering. Many religions thus aim to reconcile this difference by denying it. Thus, ”all is one”, ”experience of self is an illusion” etc.
Fear of death is downstream from the realisation of this distinction between ”I” and ”other”. — Jussi Tennilä

What questions arise? This is the most important. One faces a world of terrible impositions and joyful engagements, and religious questions arise. I think you are right in saying, as I put it, that there is this "distance" between the thinking, feeling, intuiting person and the world she is thrown into (so to speak). But to speak of it as simply a "difference" doesn't describe what it is that makes the interface with the world religious. Religion deals with the passion, the need, the angst, the dread, the terrors, all which demand redemption (a churchy word I don't really want to use) as well as the love, the happiness, the compassion, the beauty, the dreams all which demand consummation. Metaphysical redemption, that is.

This is a hard sell because, you know, while it IS an argument, and I can argue it with you if you like, one has to be attuned to what can be called threshold experiencing the world. If one is thoroughly IN the world, and here I mean the unquestioned commitment to the culture's values, the getting married, raising a family, the possessions that follow, the devotion to friends, and on and on. then one is not going to understand this very well. They will be, as Heidegger said, living in a tranquilized world of little if any real meditative thought.

I think if one wants to understand religion in its essence, one has tocare about these foundational issues of our ethical and aesthetic (Wittgenstein thought these were the same thing) existence. Being in the world is caring. We are thrown into caring. Suffering in the world is not simply a question in an equation of thought. It is in the second and third degree burns over half ones body after a car accident, or the gangrened extremities of plague.

We know material being, we live it. So, I don't think it is necessary to witness it, in some way analogous to how one witnesses events, or material beings of the various kinds. We don't know any other kind of being than material being, although of course we can think immaterial being as its dialectical opposite. — Janus

No. It is very important that one is able to witness something they "know". Otherwise, it is just bad metaphysics. You might as well be talking about God and her omniscience, omnipotence or how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Metaphysicl materialism is simply an extension of loose talk about things in the world. Material physics is not a metaphysical concept, but refers to observable properties of things. The underlying substratum of all things will never been observed because it is not A being. It IS being. The only responsible way to talk about such a substratum requires the term transcendence, simply because there is nothing to say. This is Wittgenstein's "world" which is mystical.

I don't deny that the idea of transcendence has moment for we humans; it is an inevitable feature in the movement of thought, just as zero, infinity, and imaginary and irrational numbers are in mathematics. Of course, the indeterminable cannot be determined, but it features prominently as an absence, a mystery, the unknowable, in our thinking. It has apophatic value, in other words. — Janus

On the other hand, experience is not a numerical indeterminacy. Hagen Dazs is not a numerical indeterminacy, nor sex or love or death by a thousand cuts. This is what religion is all about. Analytic philosophers generally deal with the good and bad of ethics/aesthetics as if the normativity of these terrible and wonderful things are to be dealt with just like one deal with facts of the world. But to do this ignores the nature of the normativity itself, which issues from the pain being "bad" and this is in double inverted commas because we are dealing with a "quality" in the presence of pain that makes the "ought" of a prohibition what it is. This is the ontology of value-in-being.

Usually, oughts are contingently conceived, that is, they are part of a conditional construction, IF...THEN, as in If you want get an A on the exam, THEN you have to study, and so, the ought entirely depends on something else. But in ethics, the ought is stand alone.

I agree, we live predominantly in our sensations, feelings and emotions, they are what is most vivid, most real, for us; without them life would be as good as nothing. — Janus

Brilliant! Nothing at all, and in an important way this tells us that the greatest "wisdom" of philosophy is not going to be found in mere propositional truth or the pragmatics, or rational soundness, or representational alignment of knowledge claims. The answer to the question of life the universe and everything lies with the elucidation or the enlightenment about and realization of value-in-the-world.

I'd say it is more a phenomenological question than a metaphysical. Well, at least it is if taking "metaphysical" in its traditional sense. — Janus

Metaphysics is only meaningful to the extent it is realized phenomenologically, for phenomena are all that IS. Anything that is posited that is not grounded this way is just bad metaphysics. Kant didn't see this. He thought of metaphysics as hopelessly transcendental in the absolute sense of this term and impossible to talk about. But then, where are the grounds for the discussion about it being beyond discussion? And how is it possible that noumena and phenomena are to be conceived as separate ontologies when the former has no delimitations for to delimit noumena is to draw a line and one cannot draw a line about something utterly transcendental' it would be like separating finitude and infinity, a separation that occurs only in language! A rope or a snake, asks Adi Shankara.

It is language and its pragmatic nature that so strongly inhibits understanding of metaphysics.

I agree, and that is why I have argued recently in another thread that experience or perception is not "in the head'. — Janus

If you understand this, and I trust that you do, you have realized something very profound about our existence that I won't, following Wittgenstein, trivialize with talk beyond saying that in you are right there with the (serious) Hindus.

I agree with Hegel that all the historical movements of thought are important, but I also believe we cannot go back. I agree with Gadamer that we cannot even be sure what the ancients philosophers meant. This is the problem of anachronism, and to imagine ourselves as returning to think like Plato or Aristotle, is anachronistic. Which is not to say that we cannot find interest there, but we will always interpret that interest as moderns. — Janus

When dealing with an ontology of language and culture, I agree. But then, there is the taboo ontology that Gadamar or Heidegger will not take seriously because it underscores the notion of the "pure" phenomenon, which Husserl took up so rigorously and was rejected for the impossibility of the claim that the phenomenological reduction could bring one to the absolute presence of the object. There are those, particularly Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion who continued forward with this radical taboo ontotheology of religious revelation in the objective study of being (of course, all in the long shadow of Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time and latter works. The very term ontotheology is from Kant then Heidegger from the Greek. For more on this see his [what I consider quite difficult] Identity and Difference and his Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics. Again, a bit of a struggle for me. For clarity, you could ask JoshS).

I, on the other hand, take this taboo philosophy very seriously. I am sure that philosophy leads one to foundations, and here, even the receptive "meditative thinking" can only be an index to "the world," a pragmatic index, if you will, "opens seeing".

I disagree here. I think we do directly apprehend objects. Further thinking about that will of course include what you said, though. I see no reason to think that animals don't also apprehend objects, but I see good reason to think that they don't think about it in general terms as we do. We do that because symbolic language allows us to abstract generalities from particular experiences. — Janus

But you know how this problem goes: The only ontology that can sustain in what-is-and-can-be-known is hermeneutics. Long and involved. I want to agree with you, but I can't see how acknowledging my cat as my cat can discover the "my cat" in an objective claim so familiar, in the language that is in the apprehension of it being my cat. But I do stand with Michel Henry who takes us through a Cartesian path to affirmation (in his Manifestation of Essence): Descartes made a basic mistake in that the cogito is impossible to conceive apart from the cogitatum. The indubitably of "I think" is nonsense apart from an object, and this is, of course, Husserl's intentionality, which Henry uses as the basis of his thinking. the idea is that when I acknowledge my cat, it is patently ludicrous to imagine nothing is happening here and that which it IS: that is not language.

The trouble is, what one can say is bound up in the structural entanglements of the language (the difference and deference, as Derrida put it) and this makes my knowledge of my cat entirely contingent and contextual.

Only one thing survives this analysis: value-in-being. "Ouch!" and "oo and ah and yum" experiences are not language, BUT they "speak" the "language" of ethics. The bad and good, that is; the non contingent "bad" of the "ouch" of having teeth pulled without anesthetics is a "bad" that issues from the world.

A bit much here. Apologies. Talking about these things tests the limits of talking.

You will necessarily consider the government the steward of the rules, science the steward of knowledge, and religion the steward of ethics and meaning if that's the system you've decreed, but that isn't where society began. It's where it happens to be now, but only in some parts of the world. — Hanover

I dont consider empirical science the steward of knowledge at the level of examining the presuppositions of science. Science gets into very serious trouble when it comes to basic questions because it cannot address the simple question as to how knowledge of the world is possible. Its job is not epistemology. Ask a scientist how the world "gets into" a knowledge claim and she will not even know what you are talking about, yet this is fundamental to knowing the world. To be clear: it is not that science has some working paradigm about how knowledge relationships and this will advance based on new observational data; rather, science has no clue at all as to how such a relationship could even possibly work given the scientist's "ontology" of physicalism/materialism.

But of coursr, when it comes to the familiar classificatory work of science and pragmatic efficacy, science is the steward of knowledge.

Government the steward of rules? But prior to this is ethics. Government is right as it reasons ethically, and wrong when it doesn't regardless of the outcome. I refer here to the "good will" of intensions.

That is, some turned to religion not only for reasons to do with death, truth, or meaning, but because they wanted to know what to do if their neighbor's ox gored theirs, what sorts of foods were safe to eat, and when they should have celebrations and when they should be solemn. They also wanted to know why the sun rose and fell and why the animals did as they did, and so they came up with all sorts of explanations. — Hanover

I am not here concerned with any analysis of why people turned to religion. More often than not, there simply was no choice, conform or die. The way we are entangled with other people, desires and fears brings in matters that are not that have nothing to do with the essence of religion, and more than political favor for certain research has anything to do with the essence of science. It is not why people believe in a religion, but what is means for something to be religiously significant at all! What is there in the world that makes religion even possible outside of narratives and power plays, etc. Or better, what makes the world a "religious place" in the same way that it is a place of science? You mentioned ethics, and I agree, but this just opens the door for discussion. What about ethics makes it the essence of religion?

But this conversation isn't about all this. It's about why you folks think people still cling to religion when science and government has prevailed and from there the psychoanalysis follows. It must be, you assume, because the world is scary, uncertain, and otherwise amoral. — Hanover

No, no. I mean, it is scary and uncertain, obviously, but I am arguing precisely that the world IS a moral place. I am arguing that religion, beneath all those absurd assumptions of faith and dogmatism, the essence of religion is the realist thing one can imagine, and lies deep in our existence. This is the value dimension of our world. Ask, what is real? in the philosophical sense, not in the general sense in which this term is tossed around mindlessly. I argue that there is nothing more real than affectivity or the "pathos" that saturates experience in every interest, abhorrence, love, hate, and so on.

Of course, to see this, one has to put aside science's absurd claims about science's metaphysics called physicalism (and the like).

Religion is an all encompassing worldview, just as is scientism. It can reach as far into the realms of science as much as science can reach into the realms of religion. The question is where to draw the line, but I do think the quest for meaning is as inherent a human drive as is the quest for knowledge. While science can tell us why the world does as it does, it can't tell how to live in it. That's why I'd suggest religion perseveres in an otherwise scientific world. It simply provides answers science does not. — Hanover

One has to put aside this kind of categorical thinking. This is metaphysics, but responsible metaphysics, so if it has a name at all, it would be ontotheology, the being of theology that is elucidated through a close look at metaethics. Metaethics, as I am thinking about it here, deals the the notorious "good" and "bad" of ethical matters. Think G E Moore's non natural property, as he tries to explain what the ethical good in essence IS. Contingent goods and bads are easy to understand, as with good knives or bad performances, good news, bad radio reception, and on and on. Ethical goods and bads are very different, for in order to "observe" such a thing, one has to acknowledge something very strange that literally constitutes ethical situations, as in the ethical prohibition against the rack or applying thumb screws. Exhaust the empirical descriptive features of such a thing, and there is the residuum called the "bad" of it. Few take the time to look closely at this: it cannot be seen, yet it is by far THE most salient feature applying the thumb screws has, which is the ethical/aesthetic "bad" of the pain.

Note how one cannot give this further analysis, for pain as such is not a "thing of parts" but is "stand alone what it is," and this makes pain irreducible to anything else, any other explanatory account. It is literally IN the presence of the world, and I would quickly add, MORE SO than anything science can ever come to know, for science's knowledge is essentially quantitative in nature, meaning it processes information through meansuring how qualitative presences can be represented in intensities, degrees, numbers, etc. in quantitative relations. Very complicated, certainly, but, and this is the point: derivative, derived, that is, through discursive reasoning. This is a very rough but accurate way to talk about science's knowledge claims. Take any science, geology, e.g.: ask a question about, say, the orogeny of mountains or plate tectonics or carbon dating, and you will not find anything enlightening about the world cannot be reduced to talk about relative quantitative relations. Qualitatively, the world is there, of course, but the understanding about the world is going to be about relative quantitative relations.

This is why science cannot talk about ethics any more than it can talk about reason qua reason as Kant tried to. Reason, like ethics' value, cannot be observed and quantified. Modus ponens doesn't have a quantitative dimension to it, but this is where the argument gets interesting, because the ethical/aesthetic "good and bad" does, which leads to the most basic part of this analysis: We look here at ethics as Kant looked at reason, trying to isolate the "purity" of value-in-ethics. Kant had to go transcendental because of the apriority of the logic discovered in judgment, and here, we, too, go thsi way. What religion seeks is an account of value-in-the-world that is AS apodictic as logic, but is ABOUT existence. Logic is vacuous, let's face it. It is, as Wittgenstein said, just tautological in nature, so its apodicticity is equally vacuous, meaning, who cares? It only has meaning in contexts of meaningful affairs, like seeing that IF you want to stay dry in the rain THEN you must bring an umbrella. Pure form is only intersting if you TAKE in interest in it. But value: Demonstrate that value qua value is apodictic, like logic, and now you have an extraordinary affirmation of foundational meaning of our existence.

Like proving God exists, but without God and all the churchy fetishes; the depth of meaning is now absolute, and our ethical throwness into the world carries with it the redemptive and consummatory promises inherent in religion.

You are speaking of physical pain, the sufferings of the flesh, no? How is that not the suffering that goes with material being? — Janus

We put the plain ontology of "stuff" out of relevance, but we keep the term "material" if you like, simply because it can be used to indicate the actualities in the world, the "material basis" of ethics and religion is excatly to the point. But as a metaphysical thesis that posits the most basic thinking in ontology, material being it is most misleading, for even at best, it is just a functional place holder for general references. At worst, it is entirely vacuous, for one can never witness "material being" since being is not A being. There is no one thing, but is meant as the eternal substratum of all beings. (But it is not as if there is nothing to this nothing. No name dropping here, but this once: the matter of the nothing of metaphysics and its anxiety is covered in a fascinating discussion by Kierkegaard and Heidegger.)

No, I prefer to keep with reality. What is THERE, evident to our sight, and makes the strongest claim to the Real? I'd say a death by a thousand cuts qualifies, or being in love, or Hagen Dasz, a close second.

Of course there would not be pain without awareness of it. We live to some extent at least, conscious lives. It is very difficult to consciously eliminate intense physical pain from consciousness; we need physical intervention to achieve that. We need analgesics and anesthetics to eliminate pain.

Why do we care? We care because we wish to avoid suffering and experience happiness, joy. We also want our lives to be interesting, and perhaps for some, creative. Above all we wish to be comfortable and confident being ourselves. — Janus

But now you have to take the next analytic step, which is into ontology. I am asking about the ontology of value-in being. It is not so weird as it may sound. Here I am, the observer with my senses and reason in full and clear apprehension, and there is this "presence" emanating from my sprained ankle. One asks, what is this? Of course, if this were an empirical question, one would have context ready to hand for classification, but we are not asking that kind of question. This is a metaphysical question and the classification takes us into far less solid analytical territory, at least at first.

And if this were simply a question of what analytic philosophers call qualia, then it would be a vacuous, for who cares about "being appeared to redly" and the like? Red as a pure phenomenon is unspeakable presence or "givenness". Value, the broad sense of "pathos" in the world. But sprained ankles and the like are not vacuous at all. Indeed, it classifies as THE most salient feature of our existence, and of existence in any context.

It is a perspective that does require a rather unusual intuitve move, I think, I have observed: One has to understand that by dismissing materialism or physicalism, we also dismiss the idea of the metaphysics of locality. It is one thing to say there is a mountain over there, a tree at the base, and I am here, and so on. But one of the most striking features of taking this normal kind of referencing and raising it to the status of metaphysics is this localization is inserted into the question of being. But being is not A being. It is not here and there, but rather here and there are "in" being. The importance of this lies in ontological prioritizing, for science deals with beingS, and this significantly undermines the importance if importance, if you will, for something being important is conceived as a localized affair, and this has led to the absurd analytic view that a thing being important is "there, in that locality called a human being," and therefore of no consequence outside of contexts of, say, anthropology, biology or psychology. The idea here is that this view undermines our existence AS it exists. We are, in the most basic way to put, existence itself, not a localized thing.

We cannot rationally combine different contexts into a comprehensive "master context" (which would amount to a total lack of context), that could unify all our experience and understanding. That is a folly, a delusive dream, born of intellectual hubris, I would say. It is important to know our limits; we cannot be omniscient. — Janus

If all there were, were contextuality of meanings in a finite setting, then I would agree. But this is not the world. Consider that it is not the scientist's hubris that gave us physics. It is the scientific method (or, the hypothetical deductive method of Popper and the pragmatists, if you like) and what does this tell us, I mean, loosely speaking? Observe and think, only here, we have withdrawn from empirical categories because the question is not an empirical one. Nor is it about the analyticity of logic. It is about the analyticity of existence.

What is religion all about? It is about an analytic of existence that gives a foundation for ethics that has the certainty of logical apodicticity. This I would emphasize is what is all about. I should underline it because it is a pretty good way to put it. There.

We can see that myths of omniscience, godhood, grow up around charismatic spiritual figures like Jesus and Gotama, but this only leads to empty dogmatism. The human spirit constantly evolves and we need to find ourselves, become ourselves, in the modern context, not in looking back to the ancients, focusing on and bemoaning what we mistakenly imagine has been lost. — Janus

Well, forget about al this. You and I are responsible thinking people, not mindless dogmatists (though I am sure Gautama Siddhartha was on to something very much to the point here). Not at all intersted in ancient thinking, though the ancients themselves are quite interesting.

For me it seems a step backwards. "Universal" denotes that which applies in all contexts, and I don't believe there is any such thing, Hegel's absolutism was not a step further than Kant. — Janus

Well, one has to look at the language and how it makes knowledge possible. It is not that Hegel was right in all he said. But somethings make some sense. I have before me the full being of a coffee cup. Yet I know my knowing this is through the general, the historicity of coffee cups, cups in general, drinking vessels and on and on. The apprehension of THIS coffee cup is through this language that understands things, not through any direct apprehension of the object. The only thing that is directly apprehended is value-in-the-world, and this is of course received in language like everythign else, but , if you will, pain and joy "speak" which is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about it. Speaking ruins, vitiates the world of importance-in-things.

Your wording seems a complicated way of saying something simple and fairly commonplace - that philosophy has the capacity to lead individuals to deeper contemplation and understanding, surpassing the traditional realm that religion once solely occupied. Perhaps yours is a quest for foundational justification for compassion. — Tom Storm

Yes! But hold on with that word justification. The process of the affirmation is discursive, but the evidence, in the end, is ontologically revelatory. Ontology is a sticky word, meaning it is, as with all philosophical foundational words, inherently metaphysically indeterminate. When one talks about THIS kind of ontological inquiry, one is already in religious analysis. i would put the case like this: Imagine that the ten commandment were true. It's just a supposition, and so you can't just dismiss because one can so easily. That would miss the point. So let's say its all true, as true as physics, but more so. And what is now simply an assumption, an axiom of existential standing, is a proper premise for justification. In the light of this, how does this change the way one understands the world?

Here the question goes not to the gravitas of its commandments, but to the gravitas of what stands behind them, for something like "honor thy mother and father" is still, in itself, just a bit of ethical normativity. God is now the foundational ontological justification, and by definition, if you will, there is no gainsaying God. It is at least as strong as, say, modus ponens or the principle of identity, in rational coercivity. You know, no choice. Even Dostoyevsky's Underground Man would have to bow low. The difference here is, this apodicticity, or necessity, is existential! How would this change the world? So we drop the ten commandments, and we drop God, for the supposition served its purpose, and now what is left is the, heh, heh, "the power and the glory". I really shouldn't use such a phrase because of its connotative bs, but I'll keep it. Because what I am trying to reveal is, IF this argument for the essence of religion I have been trying to defend, is right, and I am sure it is, then we live in just this kind of world. One does not go to ancient texts for justification. It is "written" in the analysis of our existence.

How so? I say, all we need to do is observe the world's ethical and aesthetic dimension. Look closely, that is, analytically. What is the nature of this dimension? This is the question. It is not a question of the way it is historically taken up in the reification of traditions, because all of this is just a bad attempt, bad metaphysics, since it was not conceived responsibly with an eye exclusively on the what is in-the-world. This here is just good science. Just not empirical science.

Given his "fundamental question", maybe Constance has not considered (e.g.) Spinoza's conatus. — 180 Proof

Not quite there. It is more fundamental than this. The value dimension of our existence is something that cannot be further reduced to more talk about metaphysical tendencies, direction, energy, or "impetus" or anything else. It is entirely irreducible, that pain in my ankle and this amazingly delicious hagen Dasz. Of course, facts are facts entangled and singularity is lost in the richness of the world. But this does not alter the nature of the value-presence, which is most evident in the the strongest and most unambiguous expressions, like having your head in a vice.

Maybe it's Schrodinger's — Wayfarer

Something weird going in quantum mechanics. But the weirdest thing I can imagine lies in the simplicity of the epistemic impossibility of there being a cat at all. This is not to say there is no cat, certainly not. It is to say that the HOW of knowing there is a cat is impossible to discover. Epistemology is impossible, unless a new paradigm of discovery is admitted, for causality in a physicalist paradigm is just flat out wrong. The trouble with quantum mechanics, and this is not a technical observation, is that it may be that the only way understand things like quantum entanglement is through the phenomenology of our existence that studies the imposition of the conditions of perceptual possiblity: the "out there" of physics is woefully inadequate. The failure to observe the epistemic connectivity between us and the world is bound up with the failure to see quantum entanglement.

Half dead cats? Adorable.