That’s a beautifully put reflection. I think you’ve touched the heart of the matter: suffering is not merely a social construct or a linguistic convention, but a fundamental experience that resists reduction. When we ask, “What is bad about suffering?” the most honest answer might be that it needs no further justification - it reveals its badness in the very act of being endured.

Language and culture may frame or contextualize suffering, but the raw experience of agony, despair, or anguish is prior to those frames. That’s why so many ethical systems, despite their diversity, converge on minimizing suffering and promoting well-being. They are built on the foundation that suffering is not an arbitrary preference but an undeniable reality, and well-being is its natural counterweight.

In that sense, good and evil are not metaphysical mysteries but responses to the lived fact of suffering and flourishing. — Truth Seeker

Yes, prior, logically prior, meaning if this dimension of our existence were to be removed, then the very concept of ethics becomes meaningless. So here, one has to step out of language andlogic entirely for the logical ground to be what it is. Now, the same canbe said for science, I mean, remove, well, the world, and science vanishes, but science only cares about quantifications and causal connections and works entirely within the structure of thought of its paradigms. It doesn't ask about the nature of scientific observation, say, because it doesn't care since this kindopf thing; it doesn't have to. After all, the color red, say, just sits there. It is nothing without the language that discusses it analytically. The phenomenon itself has no qualities that are not reducible to the categories of language contexts.
But that sprained ankle, not like a color (as such) at all. The very salient feature of its pain is the very essence of the category! This empirical science cannot deal with this, and analytic philosophy simply runs away, because to admit this is ,like admitting an actual absolute. Like admitting divine existence in their eyes.
But are they wrong? After all, this IS the essence of religion: an absolute in the metaethical analysis.

A very significant insight. Recall the gospel teaching 'he who saves his own life will lose it, he who loses it for My sake will be saved'. The 'eastern' interpretation of that is precisely the overcoming (actually the death) of one's sense of egoic consciousness. Again a distant ideal, although in the religious context is is at least recognised. But in practice, the way it manifests is in self-giving. — Wayfarer

Distant, yet "nearest" of all, prior to bringing up the themes of inquiry. And it is IN, if you will, the fabric of the universe, not discovered in the discursive work that attempts to generate meaning apart from it. Philosophy needs to rediscover its own essence and ground. I am reading Derrida's White Mythology, an essay that uses Anatola France's Gardens of Epicurus brief dialog between Polyphilos and Ariste (sp?) to discuss this "distance". Polyphilos argues that metaphysics is like a coin, worn and torn through the ages, no longer bearing the distinctive images it once had, and so the "original" markings are lost, and this is like what the language of metaphysics is: having lost all sense of the original language that once was unconditionally clear, it becomes a blurr of abstractions. There is something here close to what analytic philosophy thinks, that there is a reality in the naturalism of science which is clear in its attempt to discover what is really there in the clarity of its quantifications. Something original and true that ancient thinking has blurred in its theo-metaphysics. Derrida thinks this idea of some original language is only going to be conceived in the very "corrupt" current body of language use that is supposed to have risen out of it. In other words, the wear and tear of the coin in this metaphor could only be meaningful if one could observe from this lost perspectiv, which makes the entire metaphor collapse upon itself, that is, language and its metaphysical "distinctions" cannot be compared to anything original, for this latter would lie outside of this current distinctive totality.

So on distance: one way to look at this is as a critique of scientfic metaphysics in which it is thought that science has as its ground of inquiry in some independent reality, something there that has always been there discoverable in the rigorous attempts to "recover" it details. But language does not have this relation with the world, no matter how rigorous it is. Words do not stand for a world, but "stand in" for a world, and the distance between language and the world is altogether indeterminate.

Or is it? Another look at Poyphilos' position: It is language that brings the world into view, but also keeps it at a distance, for in language we conceive of distance itself. The actuality, what lies before one's very eyes, is that there really never was any such distance (almost affirming Polyphilos' claim, though in a different way). The infant opens her eyes and learns language out of an original unity. It took centuries of thoughtful alienation to create distance. Not that the infant's insights are original and profound; she has no insights. But the original singularity of our existence is there in the "original" infantility, lost in the societal and scientific (them same thing really) evolvement, and in this way Polyphilos is right; only, and I suppose this is my point, it is through language and the construction of agency (which you gave affirmation to) that insight is possible.

And just to follow through, This original unity refers to the proximity of the world: meditative discovery, "panna", the wisdom that issues forth after all that hard meditative work, is a coming home to something original, something that has always been there, but forgotten post-infancy, however now it is WITH insight and agency. We are "thrown" into a a forgetfulness; this is our existence.

I think dearness as a concept only exists relative to its opposite: worthlessness. I've already talked about some of the ethical structures we've inherited: progress, health, and covenant-based. It's clear to me that structure is primary, so I guess we'll agree to disagree here. — frank

Okay, but language stands in binary structures, not aches and pains and pleasures and delights. These latter are not language at all, notwithstanding that they are "said"; it is thus "under erasure, as Derrida put it. Their being said demonstrates their being logically bound to the essence of ethics, that is, it is only in language that recognition of something outside of language is possible. And as much as philosophy can tear such a thing to shreds (philosophy is hell bent on nihilism---and for a very good reason, don't get me wrong. It keeps the road narrow, just as the rigors of science does) it is not nonsense (as Wittgenstein called it early on when he said ethics and aesthetics were transcendental), I claim. It rather issues from the starting point of any inquiry, which is observation: the non linguistic nature of non formalism in value and ethics (Scheler calls it that) is simply "there" .

And yet what you've said here is a manifestation of the structure of human thought: that a signifier implies something signified. You're giving voice to structure. Is it the structure of the mind? Is it the structure of the world? Is it both? You don't have any vantage point from which to answer that. Whereof one cannot speak. — frank

Th vantage point lies in the concept of pure phenomenality, which is, in its essence, only "partly" a concept (language loses it grip in discussions like this). There are two camps on Derrida. One is that of John Caputo in his Radical Hermeneutics, The Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida, and elsewhere. Caputo tries to shwo that in Derrida there is the crux of religious affirmation. Hard to talk about briefly, or at all really. I find phenomenology opens conversation to the metaphysical openness of our existence, and in this openness is the presence of the world, standing monolithically before our eyes. Heidegger was right, what is there is "of a piece" with the language that speaks what it is; but he was wrong to ignore the...this is where it gets a little weird: ignore the primordiality of the ontology of value-in-being.

I won't go into this here unless you want to. Jean luc Marion lays this issue out in his Givenness and Reduction. Impossible to read unless one follows Husserl and Heidegger closely. I don't follow closely enough, really. Postmodern thinking, or post-postmodern thinking, teeters on the brink. BUT: in its defense, this brink is discovered, not altogether "made" (as Rorty puts it). The world IS the brink.

You want an answer as to what goodness is beyond the uses the word is put to. That's why you're ending up needing a transcendental basis. I think you're begging the question. — frank

I certainly can see why you say this. But consider: kick me hard in the kidney. The question is begged, and is ALWAYS begged in anything language can say about this, for all that can be said lies in the contingency of language. There is nothing sacrosanct in language, for anything can be gainsaid, and so just in the saying there is the refutation. This is why philosophy remains unsettled after millennia--it is an apriori inquiry, meaning its questions rely on what is IN language's meanings, and this is why Heidegger insists on a finitude of dasein's being. But that pain in my kidney cannot be second guessed. Like logic's modus ponens? Stronger. Logic is given to us in language. The pain AS SUCH is not.

Qualia are the brain's own invented language? — PoeticUniverse

Qualia is very much to the point. The brain is not. I argue that true qualia is not the appearance absent its concept (what Kant would call the "blind" intuition). For such a thing, like "being appeared to redly" is nothing at all, just being there which is the same as "being" as such. Its "thereness" lacks categorical distinction. But what it really lacks is affective categorical distinction---Qualia as it is discussed so disparagingly in analytic philosophy, is an abstraction from the original experience which is saturated with meaning, call it "value qualia," the importance and interest the color red is invested with in the perceptual event, this is what makes qualia a meaningful concept. The cup is possessed by the interest, however small, I have when I observe it, and this makes this relation between myself and the cup a singularity that stands apart from mere empty being. This is my position on qualia.

The brain? Hard to fathom this, I guess, but look at it like this: what does one do with the qualia we call the brain? Qualia, recall, does not have any particular object, rather, any and all objects are first qualia in the bare phenomenon. We tend to think the brain is first, the source of the conscious event in which the brain is seen, but this is not what is shown. Rather, we see the brain appearing as an appearance, and this appearance therefore is the real ontological ground for consciousness. Put plainly, consciousness and its appearances is PRIOR to any idea of a physical brain. The true ground for all existence is consciousness.

Put in Kant's terms, the brain itself is just a representation, like everything else. It has no privileged ontological status.

Why not structuralism? It's a candidate for answering what ethics is. — frank

I don't see it. Put plainly, when you have an ethical issue, the ground for this takes one away from structure and into the value dimension of the world. The prima facie prohibition against stealing something dear to you is the fact that it is dear, and this dearness is not a structure of anything, Saying what it IS has a structure, but the bare phenomenality has none of this; and yet, if this phenomenality were to be absent, the ethicality would be absent as well. Thus, what it means for something to be ethical defers to the manifestation of what is important, and importance here is a nonformal (non structural) actuality. Ethics has its determinative ground here.

See the issue: ask me what a dog or a cat or an interstellar mass IS, and language is forthcoming; and ask what this explanatory language IS, and more language is forthcoming; and this circularity has no end. But what of the "presence" of what is there? This is "apprehended" IN language, yet stands entirely apart from it. If this were, say, the color yellow, then the paradigmatic status of this as a color may indeed evlove with scientific insight (in its "revolutions"), but whatever newly arises, is going to be within the "structure" of existing existing paradigms. Ethics will work like this as well, evolve in time, BUT: the ground of ethics is not like the color yellow, or any other empirical concept. It is value-being, meaning, simply put, the difference between moonlight being a reflection fo sunlight, and a punch to the kidney. Both facts, but the latter radically different. It is this difference that makes ethical phenomenality what ethics is really all about.

The ancient Persian answer is that goodness is the direction we're reaching out toward. Evil is what we're pushing away from, so a good person is in motion, or progressing. In this view, it doesn't matter what your present condition is, if you're progressing, you're good. If you're stationary, you're evil.

The ancient Jewish answer is that goodness is clear for all to see in your health and well-being because obviously God is blessing you. A similar outlook is Roman stoicism, which aligns goodness with Nature. It's in a tree's nature to grow toward the light, if it fails to do this, it becomes sick. Sickness and evil are basically the same thing: a failure to abide by your nature. I like the the Roman view because it's efficient.

If you notice, both these views allow flexibility in what actually counts as good. We may discover through experience what really constitutes progress or health. On the other hand, they conflict in whether goodness shows up on the surface, or if it can be hidden. Our present worldview is a fusion of ancient views. — frank

Yes, I have read. But this puts the uses and purposes that are freighted into ethical issues INTO the essence of ethics. To establish what ethics IS, we do not look to good this and that, for this begs the foundational question: what is the nature of something being good...at all? This is the determinate question amid the prevailing indeterminacy of purposes and uses in which the good is embedded.

The above is the full argument so you can understand where I'm coming from. — Philosophim

Her is where the argument has trouble:

Definitions:
Good - what should be
Existence - what is
Morality - a method of evaluating what is good

This puts existence under the critical determinations of ethics, a call for an "ethical ontology" under which all things abide. Now, someone like Mackie (see his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) will call this "queer"--for what kind of ontology IS this to rule over all existence? Only God has had this impossible place in the world, and God is conceived in ancient terrified mentalities. What is the basis for this assumption of a "God" (notwithstanding the absence of the term in your argument. The Godlike "queerness" holds.

Not that I think Mackie is right. But this above needs to addressed.

Good = actions that prevent or reduce suffering and promote well-being for sentient beings.
Evil = deliberate actions that cause unnecessary suffering or destroy the capacity for well-being in sentient beings. — Truth Seeker

Yes, I think you are closing in. But there does remain the final question: what is there that is bad about suffering? You may, as I do, hold that this is self evident, though this gets lost in our entangled affairs, where competing goods and bads struggle. But the question is now momentous, not mundane: Suffering is now not a convention of the language and culture that talks about it, talk that leads to variability because suffering is inevitably caught up in uses and purposes. Suffering is the bare manifestation of that terrible pain in your ankle, and this, if you can stand it, transcends the finitude that language that would hold it down, keep it familiar, contained in reduction to the ordinary. But suffering is not ordinary, not an institution. It is that original that institutions of ethics have their foundation in.

I don't think it can be, for the brain 'paints a face' on the cup as the noumena becomes phenomena.

One time I saw a fire burning at the base of a far away road sign; a closer look showed it to be some ribbons dangling and waving in the breeze. — PoeticUniverse

One step further: That phenomenon which is a cup cannot be conceived as apart from its noumenality if 'noumena' can be made sense of at all. There can be no "other side" of noumena, for one would have to draw a line upon the noumenal itself. All that is metaphysically sustainable, is so because its ground lies IN the world before us. Noumena is a term that abstracts from the given of the world. That cup as it is before you IS the metaphysics of the world. The question then goes to how phenomena sustains the positing of noumena.

Quite. There is also a geneological relation between Buddhism and Pyrrhonic scepticism, purportedly owing to Pyrrho of Elis travelling to Gandhara (today's Kandahar in Afghanistan, but then a Buddhist cultural centre) and sitting with the Buddhist philosophers. See Epochē and Śūnyatā. — Wayfarer

Yes, I have always thought this. Meditative thinking require one to listen to the world, not just constructions of ideas. This latter gives us nothing but arguments which are onherently arguable, leading to more arguments, and this becomes an independent process of endless self renewal in philosophy: mere possiblities engendering possibilities. This is why Heidegger fails, and his later thought bringing up Meister Eckhart and Buddhism. Richard Williamson says, when you keep pounding away at metaphysics, eventually you find it pounding back at you. There is an inevitability in the epoche. I have read here and there in Buddhist texts, notably the Abhidhamma (the zillion ways of citti's configurations. A hard read, given the massive detail. Written explicitly for those committed to working through to enlightenment. Unlike Husserl, who wrote to disillusion Western philosophy by disabusing everyone about science and naturalism) and it can only be taken seriously if one is inclined to take it so; inscrutable otherwise. But when you allow yourself to go into it, it is extraordinary. It understands that our existence is not about truth in truth tables and arguments. It needs to be approached descriptively first. This is phenomenology.

Renunciation, in a word. — Wayfarer

Yes, but what is it that needs to be renounced? Language itself, which has a strong hold in ordinary experience. Language is bound to habits of perception. It IS habits of perceptio, and these are "what we are" in all the familiar ways. One has to give up being a person, yet maintaining one's personhood at the same time, for this boundness of being a self is the structure that makes agency possible. I can imagine my two year old niece can be insanely happy, yet "who" is this without the language structured agency that can gainsay all of this, step aside ecstatically from all things? A feral child, entirely absent of the possibility to make a movement of ascension, if you will.

'If one takes the everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged' ~ Martin Heidegger, 'What is a Thing?' — Wayfarer

Quite right. Fascinating to note that philosophy occurs in solitude, and this can only lead to no good in the public eye. The "other" person is both an intrusion and a constitutive feature of our existence.

Well, objection works with the early analytic notion of the "absolute ' which was bound up with their conception of "abstract objects " and the notion that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit." It comes out of a certain view of naturalism where the perspective of consciousness is a sort of barrier to be overcome, the much maligned but often reproduced "view from nowhere." However, such a consideration of the "absolute" has probably had a longer life as a punching bag for continentals than it did as a position that was actually embraced by large numbers of philosophers. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"View from Nowhere" is an attempt to slip past the glaringly obvious world of actualities we live in. But nowhere means nowhere IN the potentiality of possiblities that arise with a particular ontotheology, where this term is bound to finitude, like talking about Christian metaphysics and a list of superlatives that belong to God, the whole affair extracted from the familiar and its habits of thought of a particular time and place. "Nowhere" is being itself. "Absolute" is a categorical attempt to speak this, which fails, to put it in Kant's terms, because it is a concept without intuitions, empty. The real question that haunts this inquiry inspired by Hamlet's claim in the OP is, is there really no intuition beyond the (merely) empirical? If you break a leg, does the excruciating pain not deliver an "intuition" that stands up to the vacuity of the locution "view from nowhere"? This question issues from outside the historical matrix that informs language's "games".

I would think though that to be properly absolute, in the sense the term is normally used outside that context, is not to be "a reality as set over and against (and outside) all appearances," but rather to include all of reality and appearance. Appearances are really appearances, and so they cannot fall outside the absolute. Hegel's Absolute does not exclude any of its "moments" for instance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps you intend it this way: like Kant's noumena, what is it that is NOT noumenal? To say the phenomenon is not noumenal means to draw a line between the two, but how is a line to be drawn if the noumenal is impossible to conceive? It is not that the noumenal is some impossibly distant ground for all things; rather, all things are the ground and metaphysics is discovered IN phenomenality: in the foundational indeterminacy of categorical thinking and the presence of empirical objects. It is all a unity, yet beyond unity.

This is relevant as far as grounding the human good in human nature goes. Sometimes, one sees the claim that: “there is no such thing as human nature.” Prima facie, such a claim cannot be anything but farcical if it is not walked back with so many caveats so as to simply reintroduce the idea of a nature in some modified form. It is clear that man is a certain sort of thing. We do not expect that our children might some day soon spin themselves into cocoons and emerge weeks later with wings, because this is not the sort of thing man does. We know that we will fall if we leap off a precipice, and we understand that we are at no risk of floating away into the sky when we step outdoors. Things possess stable natures; what they are determines how they interact with everything else. Beans do not sprout by being watered in kerosene and being set ablaze, nor can cats live on a diet of rocks. Attempts to wholly remove any notion of “human nature” invariably get walked back with notions like "facticity," “modes of being,” etc. (Generally, the original idea of a "nature" is presented as a sort of straw man in these cases). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Unless the question as to human nature goes to language itself. Then all things lose their nature, their essence. Sure, we know that beans do not sprout watered with kerosene, but kerosene: what is this apart from the repeated results of a scientific determination, where repeatable results define what kerosene IS. Light a match to kerosene and it burns, without fail under "normal conditions". But IS kerosene reducible to this IS and others like it that congeal into habits of perceptual anticipation? But then, who cares? The factual dimensions of kerosene are absent of meaning apart from the basic features of language, the logic, irony, metaphor, imagery, pragmatics (especially), and so on, and kerosene can be contextualized and recontextualized into eternity, and when these are put to rest, the residuum is nothing, mere being as such...that is until the value dimension is recognized. Now being as such is "life" as Michel Henry talks about it. Meaning outside conceptual open endedness.

The original idea of a nature as a strawman, referring to something as absurd as a real subject, like a soul, absurd because unobservable.

It sounds like you're asking what normativity most fundamentally is? And you sound like a structuralist. You're looking for a answer that explains all the disparate pieces, like the two-dimensional people building a theory from watching a spoon pass through their plane. All they see is a dot that turns into a line, and back to a dot. What is it?

I read a book by a structuralist who focused on gnostic myths. The typical myth goes like this:

In heaven, all was silent because nothing is undone in heaven. Then, out of the silence came the first question: what is this?. God turned to the questioner and said: "Silence yourself. There are no unanswered questions in heaven." The questioner understood and complied, but something about this event caused a part of the questioner to fall out of heaven, and this part is known as Sophia. In time, Sophia gave birth to a blind god named Samael. Samael's body is our universe, but everything that happened in Samael took place in blindness. There was murder and violence, but it didn't mean anything. It was like a play with no audience.

Sophia felt sad when she looked at her son, who couldn't see her. So she whispered into his ear and what she said pervaded his body and coalesced in humans. Humans awoke and began to see their world for the first time. They felt guilt and shame. They had become their own audience. And they turned to see beyond their world, to heaven, where all questions are answered.

For a structuralist, a story like this could be about something that is always happening in the present, maybe below the surface. — frank

Not structuralism. Post structuralism, the denial that language really has any rigorous commonality among those in a language group. No, the idea here goes beyond this discussion. The issue is about the essence of ethics, what is ethics such that were there an absence of this, ethics would cease to exist, like logic vanishing without tautology and contradiction. I am saying that the dominant position that is the denial of objectivity in ethical matters is wrong, and the evidence for this in, if you will, in the fabric of existence: suffering and delight. What ARE these? No less than the explicit manifestation of, say, having your teeth pulled without anesthetic, or being in love. Max Scheler refers to this as non formal value and ethics (arguing against Kant's ethical formalism). But no more than this? This is a hard question. To say what happiness is IN a context of relations, uses and purposes is one things, but then, what about "out" of these contextual indices? This outside is a matter of being outside of language. Suffering lies outside of language, as does the beauty of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. We do face interpretative contexts everywhere in our entanglements with the world, but these interpretations are what suffering IS.Suffering IS what it is in al its manifestness, and this is acontextual.

Well, objection works with the early analytic notion of the "absolute ' which was bound up with their conception of "abstract objects " and the notion that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit." It comes out of a certain view of naturalism where the perspective of consciousness is a sort of barrier to be overcome, the much maligned but often reproduced "view from nowhere." However, such a consideration of the "absolute" has probably had a longer life as a punching bag for continentals than it did as a position that was actually embraced by large numbers of philosophers. — Count Timothy von Icarus

"View from Nowhere" is an attempt to slip past the glaringly obvious world of actualities we live in. But nowhere means nowhere IN the potentiality of possiblities that arise with a particular ontotheology, where this term is bound to finitude, like talking about Christian metaphysics and a list of superlatives that belong to God, the whole affair extracted from the familiar and its habits of thought of a particular time and place. "Nowhere" is being itself. "Absolute" is a categorical attempt to speak this, which fails, to put it in Kant's terms, because it is a concept without intuitions, empty. The real question that haunts this inquiry inspired by Hamlet's claim in the OP is, is there really no intuition beyond the (merely) empirical? If you break a leg, does the excruciating pain not deliver an "intuition" that stands up to the vacuity of the locution "view from nowhere"? This question issues from outside the historical matrix that informs language's "games".

I would think though that to be properly absolute, in the sense the term is normally used outside that context, is not to be "a reality as set over and against (and outside) all appearances," but rather to include all of reality and appearance. Appearances are really appearances, and so they cannot fall outside the absolute. Hegel's Absolute does not exclude any of its "moments" for instance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps you intend it this way: like Kant's noumena, what is it that is NOT noumenal? To say the phenomenon is not noumenal means to draw a line between the two, but how is a line to be drawn if the noumenal is impossible to conceive? It is not that the noumenal is some impossibly distant ground for all things; rather, all things are the ground and metaphysics is discovered IN phenomenality: in the foundational indeterminacy of categorical thinking and the presence of empirical objects. It is all a unity, yet beyond unity.

This is relevant as far as grounding the human good in human nature goes. Sometimes, one sees the claim that: “there is no such thing as human nature.” Prima facie, such a claim cannot be anything but farcical if it is not walked back with so many caveats so as to simply reintroduce the idea of a nature in some modified form. It is clear that man is a certain sort of thing. We do not expect that our children might some day soon spin themselves into cocoons and emerge weeks later with wings, because this is not the sort of thing man does. We know that we will fall if we leap off a precipice, and we understand that we are at no risk of floating away into the sky when we step outdoors. Things possess stable natures; what they are determines how they interact with everything else. Beans do not sprout by being watered in kerosene and being set ablaze, nor can cats live on a diet of rocks. Attempts to wholly remove any notion of “human nature” invariably get walked back with notions like "facticity," “modes of being,” etc. (Generally, the original idea of a "nature" is presented as a sort of straw man in these cases). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Unless the question as to human nature goes to language itself. Then all things lose their nature, their essence. Sure, we know that beans do not sprout watered with kerosene, but kerosene: what is this apart from the repeated results of a scientific determination, where repeatable results define what kerosene IS. Light a match to kerosene and it burns, without fail under "normal conditions". But IS kerosene reducible to this IS and others like it that congeal into habits of perceptual anticipation? But then, who cares? The factual dimensions of kerosene are absent of meaning apart from the basic features of language, the logic, irony, metaphor, imagery, pragmatics (especially), and so on, and kerosene can be contextualized and recontextualized into eternity, and when these are put to rest, the residuum is nothing, mere being as such...that is until the value dimension is recognized. Now being as such is "life" as Michel Henry talks about it. Meaning outside conceptual open endedness.

The original idea of a nature as a strawman, referring to something as absurd as a real subject, like a soul, absurd because unobservable.

If someone offers you your favorite meal to eat and a rancid, rotting fish, is it difficult to decide which option is better? Or is it hard to choose between being awarded $5,000 and having to stick your hand in a blender? — Count Timothy von Icarus

But it's more about an apriori analysis of the good and bad, Contingently, good knives, bad shoes and anything you can think of finds the judgment of good or bad bound up with certain features and uses, like sharpness or comfort, but these judgments find their ground outside contingency. Consider: nothing were important, then ethics would cease to exist. So what does it mean for something to be important? Not this or that, but importance itself. Answer this, and you have determined the essence of ethicality.

So all empirical facts are subjective and relative. One could say with Michel Henry that they are the product of ecstasis, the securing of experience by relation to other experience. Does one need then to ground experience in some ethical substance absolutely immanent to itself to put a stop to this apparent infinite regress? That would be the case if one considered the only choice to be a binary opposing pure self-affecting immanence and alienating , mediating reflection. But there is another option: an ecstasis whose repeating act of self-difference is always original , fecund and productive rather than derivative and secondary to an immanent self-affecting ground.. This ecstasis is already a language prior to the emergence of verbal speech, the social within nature , inseparably nature/culture. Pain, angst, desire, attunement, feeling are the very core of ecstasis as self-displacement and self-transcendence. — Joshs

Ethical substance? I consider the good and the bad of ethics to be analytic terms, abstractions from an original unity. Plainly put, there is no good or bad "outside" of the manifestness of being punched, flogged, burned, loved, delighted, aesthetically immersed, and so on, that we can talk about. This manifestness IS. I argue that the good and the bad are dimensions of our existence, not platonic forms or substance. Reduction to the essence of reason, for Kant, was a deduction to transcendental purity. This doesn't mean there IS such a thing as pure concepts. "Pure" is just a categorical term. So is "the good" and "the bad'.

The need to stop the regress at a terminal point ? But there is no regress in phenomenality. The question is then, in the reduced phenomenon, what is there that is there? Presence as such is nothing, a reduction to nothing, but this is not one what faces. One always already "cares" in some attunement, but what IS it one cares about? Here the reduction goes to the meaning of one's existence, the value of value, as the early Wittgenstein put it. I think he was saying that value cannot be categorized. I think it can be and should be, for this opens being's possiblities. Heidegger's truth as alethea I would argue, opens metaphysics, allowing meaning, banned by positivists, to flood into realization.

An ecstasis whose repeating act of self-difference is always original: In my thinking, ethics and its metaethics insists on a foundation. I am aware that I just said "substance" was out of play. I would use something like value-in-being. How does it insist? The answer to this question lies outside philosophy. Does suffering insist on redemption (in a nontheological sense of this term, a sense that is underlies and grounds theology)? Yes.

Does this mean a field mouse's suffering is redeemed? Maybe, yes, no... But this is the voice of aporia, the doubt that reduces everything to an apophatic wandering. In phenomenology, I claim, there is a suspension of doubt that contravenes phenomenality. This suspension is the reduction.

There is Kierkegaard's Repetition in your alternative (and I would say Deleuze, but the last time I tried reading Difference and Repetition I had to give it up. I cannot yet get into his mind. One day...). Kierkegaard thought Repetition was about the hic et nunc where religious affirmation had its basis in everyday living. You would have it conceived outside of any religious thinking. Can this be done without violating the phenomenon, the appearing as such? I think it cannot.

This is the best I can do thus far with these ideas.

Certainly. Existence is good, and it can be measured by actual and potential over time. Morality in human terms is simply an expression of morality that that exists though all existence. At a very basic level, imagine if there were sheep and no wolves. Eventually the sheep would multiply, eat all the grass, then die out. But if there are wolves and sheep, the wolves make sure the sheep don't get out of hand. So instead of sheep alone living 100 years then dying out, you create a cycle that allows sheep and wolves to live for hundreds of years. — Philosophim

Existence is good? I am reminded of Voltaire's Candide, or my favorite, Monty Python's version: Chapter one: I Am Eaten by Sharks. You are going to need some kind of theodicy to make this claim stick. I imagine being eaten alive to be the very opposite of a good existence.

But what would this theodicy be? Forget about God; rather, just allow the world to show itself: the good is as it shows itself, and vivisection by shark's teeth is clearly bad. My view is that ethics is real, more real than anything else (which I am willing go into). But first, what is your view on this?

Language may not capture the full nature of the divine or numinous experience. The silence of meditation experiences may capture this, as does those who speak of mystical experiences. Of course, understanding in the rational sense is important, but it is limited. This is with or without the notion of God. The emphasis on the limits of language and silence were spoken of by Wittgenstein. He did not speak of God and it may be that the idea of God symbolises that which lies beyond the realm of knowledge. — Jack Cummins

Actually, I don't think language has any limits at all. Only when one takes language to be something it is not is there an error. If one calls something a tree and thinks thatin the calling there has been some kind of seeing what that IS, apart from the calling, then there is a misunderstanding of the nature of language. Language, rather, takes itself by the tail, like an oroboros, in every utterance. It seizes upon the world, bringing it to light, but in doing so, imposes upon the world an existence that is foundationally indeterminate, meaning language does not ever "penetrate" itself into the being all around it. Ask me what anything IS, and I can consult a dictionary: more words and sentences. BUT: it is IN language that the possibility to penetrate, so to speak, itself is raised. Language inquires "beyond" itself. The question, that "piety of language" Opens into metaphysics, "real" metaphysics, not the contrived stuff of ancient minds. All of this around me is formally tables, chairs, lamps, rugs., etc., as eidetic structures of intelligibility, but it is also, all the metaphysics of the commonplace. And so, back to limitations and language: This cannot be realized outside of language, this sense of alienation from ordinary things that discloses Being as such, any more than my cat can do logic. Language itself belongs to metaphysics, and by this I simply mean all realizations are born out of thought and its logic, and in order for the insight into its own questionability to be possible, language must be on, if you will, the other side of this question. Recall Wittgenstein saying that for something to make sense, its contradiction has to make sense, and hence, as I remember, metaphysics is doomed. But what apparently did not register with Wittgenstein (this is early on) is that this threshold of inquiry is a real "space" for thought to enter. Don't know if you've read any Heidegger, but his idea of space refers to the way thought rises into proximity when one encounters something, like entering a classroom and knowing instantly all about desks, chairs, lecterns, etc.; language games? Sure, but much more. The question is, can language "talk" not about what is beyond language, but what it is to "stand before" what is beyond language, even when what stands before language is language itself. Meister Eckhart comes to mind.

So language seems both finite and infinite, if you will. And in this, its limits are, well, weird and indefinable. A waiting-to-see is where we are. It puts us on the cusp of what-is-not-language.

Perhaps I misunderstood. 'Prior' is the usual jargon. Then prior to what? My claim is that the analysis of X cannot be prior to X, where X is something in the world as experienced, in this case, a reflection in thought on actions and a judgement thereon, aka 'ethics'. — unenlightened

Thoughts on actions and judgments: A judgment, as with, Raskolnikov is guilty of murder! But what is there in murder that makes this judgment ethical at all? Murder is "something in the world," as you call it; yet as it stands it is underdetermined for a discussion that the OP begins with Hamlet's "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Really? Putting aside Hamlet's ruse, it is a question of the ground of ethics. Good and bad actions beg just this question: What does it mean for something to be good or bad that is non question begging.

Calling an action good doesn't settle the matte as to what it is for something to be good.

Consider the proposition, "Falsehood is better than truth."
If it were true, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
If it were false, then it would be better to believe that truth is better than falsehood.
'Therefore, 'truth is better than falsehood' is the only tenable moral position on truth. — unenlightened

You mean truth as a logical function in a sentence. Do you think ethics hangs by such a thing?

What difference does it make? — frank

If ethics is grounded outside of ethical problem solving and thinking that issues from sources of variability, that is, different cultures, subcultures where ethical problems actually brew into issues, then what could this be? I am arguing that it is not a principle at all, nor does it emerge out of a matrix of problem solving. It is the ground of ethics, what makes ethics possible---what it IS.
Look at the matter apophatically: What is NOT in the ethicality of the prima facie prohibition not apply thumbscrews to my neighbor? It is the incidentals, the entanglements. The facts that my neighbor is a serial killer who perhaps deserves it, that I have some religious convictions that call for it, or that my neighbor knows something that needs to be tortured out of her, and so on. And these entanglement have their underpinnings in more entanglements : facts about upbringing, abiding beliefs and conditions that are part of my culture, and there really is no end to this. These are dismissed because they have no inherent ethicality about them. There is nothing in a promise, a stated duty, an honor driven mission, and so on, that is inherently ethical. They all beg the question: what good is this? Even a clearly contingent sense of good, like calling something a good couch or bad knife, begs this same question: what good is a soft cushion or a well functioning recliner? The term 'good' is like the copula 'is': it is everywhere, saturates stated affairs. 'Is' leads to more inquiry about what it IS that is a response to the question of what something IS. The good/bad lie with mere interest, caring, curiosity, wonder, seeking, desiring, and on and on. See Dewey's Art As Experience for a rather mundane but clear talk about this.

So, this was just to be clear as to what is on the table. The difference? No objective values and torturing my neighbor ha no status at all in the most basic analysis. The opposite of this is that it does have status foundationally. How this plays out is not given; not yet. Perhaps in some future Hegelian frame (think of Slavoj Zizek) of discovery this will become "unhidden," (as Heidegger put it). But what is acknowledged is the gravitas of our existence and our actions and experiences. This is the difference.

Good is saving and improving lives. Evil is deliberate harm and the murder of sentient beings. How do you define good and evil? — Truth Seeker

I wait until the argument settles. What good is saving lives? Saving a life is one thing--there, you saved me from injury, but there is nothing in the term "saving" that has any ethicality to it. I can save this cup of coffee from being tossed down the drain. And life? what is it about life that makes it part of a moral conversation?

The brain not only uses clues coming from without but also uses clues from within, such as memory and experience in expectation of what is a cup. — PoeticUniverse

True. But memory all the more puts distance between oneself as an epistemic agency, and the object, for what stands before one is now not only causally distant, if you will, but being a memory object, is compromised by memory in what it IS. In other words, I see the cup, but if memory crowds the perception, what actually unfolds before me is no longer the cup but a qualified memory perception of a cup. The cupness never was the object, but memory informing me that "that" there is acknowledged AS a cup.
The problem of getting to that which is before me in a knowledge claim has to do with an analysis of what "getting to" is all about. How is the "distance" between me and the cup closed so my thoughts about the cup are really about that over there called a cup?

Thanks for your insightful comments! One of the books I've been studying the last couple of years is Thinking Being, Eric Perl. It helped me understand the sense in which metaphysics could be a living realisation, not the static religious dogma it has become. I've read parts of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, but I'm not completely on board with his analysis. I think the flaw that he detects is that of 'objectification' - that philosophy errs in trying to arrive at an objective description of metaphysics, when its entire veracity rests on it being a state of lived realisation. (This is the subject of Perl's introductory chapter in the above book.) — Wayfarer

The lived realization you talk about refers to Husserl's epoche. There are phenomenologists who take this reduction all the way down, apophatically, if you will, to an ontological revelation. I have always thought the quintessential phenomenologist to be the Buddhist, keeping in mind though that even the competent and committed meditator has to pass through, that is, undo and outright violate, the interpretative structures of understanding that have taken a lifetime to build, and while one may stand on an extraordinary threshold, the decisive move forward has to deal with these structures that always already make affirmation: the tree is still a tree, the clock a clock---the doldrums of ordinary experience that are the very temporal foundations of our being. This is Heidegger's dasein, Kierkegaard's hereditary "sin", the totality that is me-in-the-world. Heidegger takes one to water, so to speak, but does affirm the validity of drinking. To really do this, I am convinced one has to leave standard relations with the world behind, a monumental task. Psychologists will call this disassociation, a pathology. Radical insight is a radical existence in which it is the psychologist is now seen as dissociated, alienated. I don't read the Christian Bible much--read it once in a course called The Bible as Literature--but I do recall Jesus saying one must hate pretty much everyone to be a true devotee. Now, 'hate' is a problematic translation from the Aramaic, but even a tame reading tells us to set aside everyone (and everything), put them out of mind, dismiss them from thought and feeling. (Incidentally, I do read now and again, Tolstoy's Gospels in Brief, which Wittgenstein use to carry around wherever he went. Tolstoy was no fool.)

Anyway, it is like two very different worlds that are radically opposed, yet a unity, what Michel Henry calls ontological monism: in the being of beings, beings fall away, meaning one no longer sees a tree there, a fence post beside the tree, the sky above, and so on, for all of these categories of thought yield to what is "stable and absolute" and this can only be acknowledged in the phenomenological reduction: not simply a concept, but a consummatory experience.

Thanks for Eric Perl. I will give him a read.

I wonder if it might be more precise to describe values as having a pre-linguistic dimension (in experience, emotion, embodied life), but that they only become social, reflective, and enduring through language. Morality then is social relations with language. Our entire discourse would vanish without language. — Tom Storm

No, I claim. I mean, yes, if language were absent then discourse would be absent, but the core matter of ethics remains hidden in the same way, say, time/space was hidden prior to theoretical "discovery". Language brings physics to light, but prior to this, Einstein's concept was a possibility latent in the potentiality of language and existence. So ethics, prior to the language that made ethical discourse possible, was hidden (lethea) or unmanifested in the world. Concepts like good and evil do not exist prior to language, yet in the revelation of thought, they become manifest, but what is it that is being brought forth? Something that was already there, yet unseen. In this way of thinking, ethical discovery is like scientific discovery. Copernicus was right, but not simply because this language won over Ptolemaic language, but because actualities in the world insisted (though what those actualities ARE is indeterminate). We conceive of prehistoric savagery, when we think about it as we would, say, of starvation and disease in our own time. Part of language's function is to dismiss the actualities of this savagery so we can live comfortably in a savage world. Of course, we all know this--- like not thinking of the slaughter house that produces Mcdonald's hamburgers.

But with ethics, things are much stranger than science can ever be, and much more important: we want to say the sun never revolved around the earth, ever, but the conditions for discussing such things cannot reach into the world where the true foundation for talk about the movements of celestial bodies is made manifest. If this were possible, all science would stop on this matter, for an absolute would have finally been found. But why isnp't this possible? Because science is not about absolutes; it is about contingencies. The scientific method is a future looking construction of the conditionally structured sentence, "If...then...", that is, repeatable results are always grounded in finitude, and there is nothing in reason's logic to apodictically guarantee things will continue in this way (Sartre's notion of radical contingency is about just this: the world's behavior is not logically constrained). But ethics has a completely different ground: Good and Evil, without argument, the strangest thing in all of existence, though this is hard to acknowledge. Take two states of affairs, one ethical/aesthetic (Wittgenstein conflates the two), the other factual only, like the sun rising in the east or facts about the order of numbers; just a plain fact. what is the difference? What makes an ethical state of affairs ethical? Good and Evil, and here, unlike in science, the extralinguistic reference is itself (is such a thing even possible?) qualitatively makes the difference, evidenced by pain and pleasure.

Whatever prelinguistic or 'transcendent' origin ethics might have, we cannot demonstrate it, nor can we access it. And, as you say, we are limited to using language. I wonder if it is safe to leave it behind, as it is difficult to see what use this frame has beyond engaging in abstract speculation or intellectual exercises. Unless you add God (which you seek to avoid) which might provide us with a putative foundation or grounding for it all and this also comes with a 'to do' list. (Not that this frame is convincing to me either.)

My question to you is this: how do we talk about ethics as a society? Setting aside the abstruse, speculative material of academia or in a forum like this, what can we say (as per the OP) that is accessible and useful at a societal level about right and wrong? — Tom Storm

The reason why this is so important, I believe, is what you are asking about.
To talk like this, it is assumed that at the societal level, one has to leave talk about the foundation of ethics and get down and dirty, so to speak, in the affairs themselves of conflicting points of view, weighing utility, conceiving consequences and benefits and looking within to one's feelings and thoughts. But consider the above where I pointed out that if science were to reach into the true foundation or ground of some issue, that issue would cease to be an issue, for science would simply stop there. It would be "done". But science cannot be about absolutes because there is nothing in the discovery that cannot be second guessed and this is true because, at its most basic level, it is a language construction and ALL that language produces can be second guessed--this is the nature of contingency itself: One spoken thing has its meaning only in context. One would have to reach out of contextuality itself to posit an absolute, and this is absurd.

But that sprained ankle you have because someone tripped you up hurts terribly, and this hurting is the ground for the standing ethical prohibition not to do this, so all eyes are on the hurting, and pain is not a proposition, an attitude, a feeling about the pain nor a thinking of any kind. It is rather a stand alone "prelinguistic" that is entirely acontextual. Ethics "stops" here, as does ethical nihilism. The importance in everyday affairs? Like asking about the importance of science having a stopping place. Makes quantum indeterminacy look like child's play. Of course, ethics doesn't get that kind of press. Affirming the objectivity of ethics would be like stone tablets from Sinai, but without to commandments, without the irrational dreariness of religion. One would have to follow through on this. I attempt this with my own Essence of Religion paper.

Normally, traditions that build on Plato—Boethius, the Golden Age Islamic thinkers, many of the Patristics, the Scholastics, etc.—also posit a sort of "knowing by becoming" here. Praxis is essential (e.g., contemplation, ascetic labors, etc.). But within these schools it isn't "knowing the good" that comes first, but knowing what essentially precludes knowing and consistently willing the good, which is being divided against oneself and controlled by one's passions and lower appetites, rather than the rational appetite for goodness or truth as such. Hence, ethics here beings from a sort of "meta" position, from looking at what must be the case for any ethical life regardless of what goodness and justice turn out to be. Indeed, much of what Plato puts out there would seem to hold even if "good" just means "what I myself will prefer." It applies to anyone not embracing full nihilism, in that being ruled over by one's appetites and passions will only lead to good outcomes by accident (and we know from experience that it will often result in disaster). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yet all of this remains discursive, merely. Such is philosophy, and the assumption is that this is the best one can do: postulate from a position that is at a distance from reality which is philosophy's impossible desideratum. As long as this scholarly need to publish continues to dominate thinking (and really, what is a philosopher do to if not speak endlessly about what someone said vis a vis someone else?), doors are closed. And philosophy is reduced to entertainment, and in modern anaoytic thought, not even serious entertainment--for what is philosophy without a primordial metaphysics? Nothing. Even Kant, with his absolute ceiling on meaningful thought, is an attempt bring the house down on philosophy by simply drawing a line between representation and something that is not representation, not realizing, and this is an important insight for me, that to draw such a line can only be done if both sides of the line are intelligible (as the early Wittgenstein observed), and so the radically other of this both remains and yet is lost to sense making, for metaphysics will not be dismissed in a wave of spurious rigor, nor can it be reduced to nonsense (contra positivism) because the radicality of the other is IN the phenomenality of what is given.

This is just a glance at something I think intrudes dramatically upon the story of the metaphysics of the good you sketch out above. The good is a term so burdened by such thinking that one forgets Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that there was in his thinking a failure to acknowledge that one actually exists. Metaphysics can do this, that is, impose, say, some Christian idea about faith and the church and how platonism can provide a model for the world and divinity, and how thinking leads to more rationalizing, and soon, one is burning heretics and believing god to be some kind of embodiment of superlatives. I argue all of this fails to understand religion, ethics and its good and evil.

To really deal with ethics, one must, as Walt Whitman put it, have all schools in abeyance, even the schools that inform inquiry. The good and the bad of ethics stands outside of thought entirely, though philosophy brings thought to realize this. Such is the paradox of metaethics. The prima facie injunction against bludgeoning one's neighbor is grounded in an actuality not bound to the finitude of the totality onto-ethicality. It issues from, if you will, eternity. (Levinas has much to say on this).

I would imagine that suffering and happiness were experienced before language, so there’s that.

I would think also that morality comes from our interactions with the world and other creatures, not just language. But given you wrote of relativism “is all that is left” it sounds like you’re not comfortable with it. I think we’ve had this conversation before. — Tom Storm

Yes, it is a philosophical obsession of mine, ethics. I think most philosophy is an abstraction, as is science and the pragmatic os dialy living; an abstraction in that all knowledge is categorical, as when one says light is really a spectrum of wavelengths: light, wavelengths, spectrum, etc., these are categorical ideas that subsist in hierarchies of subsumption, and they are abstracted from the whole of the givenness of the world. Derrida wrote The White Mythology, and in it he takes a very close look at Anatole France's Garden of Epicurus, near the end, in a conversation between Polyphilos and Ariste in which the claim is made that metaphysics is like a faded coin that has been tossed about in its wear and tear for years, and barely preserves the original images. This is a metaphor for the way metaphysics came into being: "at first" there was a natural language, long ago, that was clear and right in the way it spoke about the world, a primordial language----God's logos? Is there such a thing? Not as absurd as it sounds, I think, because when analysis attempts to look at language, it is essentially looking at itself, which is impossible since the metalanguage is the same as the object language, and all you will ever get is reflections of the metalanguage, or more strings of metalinguistic thinking; think of logic trying to get to the ground of what logic is. One then is stopped hard in the tracks of inquiry, suddenly, if you will, lest one simply go on reeling off more of the "same" that can never penetrate into the desideratum: the true ground-language that springs into existence with every thought. One can only stand there and observe the threshold of one's acceptance (see Fink's Sixth Meditation if you like) in the act of thinking, and the question of the ground is pushed into metaphysics. Put 'God' aside, for it is nothign but trouble, but metaphysics is there, right at the tip of one's tongue as she speaks, thinks, feels, wonders, and so on.

Anyway, off track a bit, but OTOH, not really: Derrida's idea (as best as I have gotten so far. He WANTS to be puzzling so you don't glide through reading) is to question this metaphor: the assumption is that metaphysics is born out of the wear and tear of language through the ages, a process that corrupts what was once clear and right: a borrowing of the essential meanings originally given, to construct dizzying heights abstract thought, and that process is inherently metaphorical, the making of novel meanings by contextual interchange of language. There was a time when things were much simpler, but once language moved into the extravagant mode of excessive creation, and things were moved from their grounding into where that had no business

Derrida uses this little dialogue if France's to illustrate a point: Once one inquires about the true foundation of language and tries to conceive of something that once was, one comes face to face with the very language that is supposed to be corrupted and out of which the very notion of corruption issues for itself. As I see it, it is like the evolutionary science: If our current horizon of possible conceiving at all issues from an evolved mentality, then any attempt to "look back" and draw up theories about how this mentality evolved is going to meet with its own evolved categories of thought. A kind of scientific Hegelianism: we are currently IN a modality of possiblities that is delimited, and anything that is produced therein cannot exceed its own delimitation.

Which bring me to ethics: To speak at all is to work within such a delimitation, and there is no way out of this....except through Kierkegaard (and his ilk): We actually exist, and this is existence is not simply about how our evolving language possiblities can speak what it is; rather, existence is palpable, real, hic et nunc, and its reality is striking, overwhelming, and this is where ethics finds its ground, this ahistorical real, not in the historicity of the what-can-be-said, which is where philosophy performs its eternal aporetic advance to nihilism. Philosophy is already done, but philosophers mostly just keep wheels spinning. Ethics is about, foundationally, value-in-being, and value lies outside of language, notwithstanding that I am speaking just this.

Albert defined good and evil. Veganism is good because it saves and improves lives. Vegans value all sentient lives - not just human lives. — Truth Seeker

But sentience as such possesses nothing of ethical possibility. And something being alive is equally without an ethical dimension. How do you define good and evil? What does it mean to say something is evil? It can't be because it gives rise to something else, some purpose or use value, because these beg the question about the nature of evil itself. This, I argue, is where the question leads thought. Not to what is called evil, but what evil is itself, its nature, its essential meaning. If one wants to understand ethics, one has to understand what ethics IS.

How can there be? How can ethics be discussed before there are ethics? First the fall into knowledge, and the birth of shame, then the questioning and discussion. It's always the same with philosophy, it wants to start at the beginning but cannot, it always starts in the middle and in a muddle.

Ethics are grounded in the questioning of life, in the second guessing of behaviour, in the thought that things might have been different, and might have been better.

A path is made by walking on it; ethics are made by questioning our actions. — unenlightened

Before, not in the temporal sense, but in the logical presuppositional sense: Ask the question, What is ethics? and you uncover the analytic of ethics, like a geologist opens a rock or a mineral looking for its contents. What is sought is an analytic of ethics, a determination as to what makes an ethical case ethical at all. Prior to the "case" is the condition laid out in the world to which ethic reasoning is a response, something IN the world that ethical issues are "about". This goes to the essence of ethics: value. What is value?

I have been watching an explanation of Spinoza and I like all is God. For me, telepathy means there is an energy that is different from our other forms of communication, which are all physical. If there is another energy other than physical energy, that makes life after death possible, doesn't it? — Athena

There is, you know, an inroad into telepathy that perhaps you haven't thought of. It is a philosophical inroad, not from empirical science. It begins with a question: How does an object, event, person, etc., make its way into my mind such that my thoughts about this are indeed about it? The light shines on my cup, some parts of the spectrum are absorbed others reflected, those that are reflected make their way to the eye, through the lens, back to the rods and cones in the back of the eye where they are converted into neuronal stimuli via the optic nerve brings them into the brain turning them into mental events and seeing is complete, roughly speaking. But note: all of these physical relations are causal, and causality has nothign epistemic it; that is, in any model you can imagine of a causal sequence, there is nothing of cause that survives in the effect. light reflects off the cup, but reflected light is nothing at all like a cup, aso according to this physicalist thinking, the system of relations that deliver an object to the brain are completely absent of the object. And this applies to any and all thinking about causal sequences.

So if the good scientist is going explain knowledge, she fails before she even begins, because science's bottom line is causality, and causality simply does not deliver knowledge. BUT: it is plain as day that I do know this cup is here, on the table, just as I know the sky is clear, the trees green, and so on. Clearly I DO reach beyond the horizon of what a physical brain can do, so how is this possible?

Simple: perception is not localized in a brain. To think like this leads to madness (See the argument Hillary Putnam has with Richard Rorty, where the latter insists that Putnam never really has seen his wife, for causally grounded knowledge is impossible. His wife is rather acknowledged and conceived in localized propositions and brain events). It must be the case, in order to explain knowledge relations, that perception itself epistemically "extends" to its objects, beyond the delimitations of the physical.

It is the only way for knowledge to be possible: the perceptual interface with an object must be such that the object is allowed to intimate its appearance in the interface, and thus perception cannot be conceived as impossibly distant from the object. Put simply, the cup is both over there AND intimating its existence to me. This aligns with telepathy in that it is knowledge at a distance, if you will. What makes telepathy so repugnant to most people is that it violates the locality of the brain: how can one enter into another's thoughts and experiences? But it should be evident that this locality leads to a disastrous epistemology, and cannot be right. Once it is abandoned, one has entered into a post, post modern grounding of our existence. To observe at all is to be already IN the locality of the object as well as IN the locality of one's self.

Now, when thinking about God and the question or meaning of such existence, I see it as being fairly fluid in human conception, but as the potential, or force, underlying all manifest existent forms in the universe, and possibly beyond. — Jack Cummins

It does lead thought to a very strange affirmation about the world, these basic questions. The Tao famously tells us to refrain from speaking, as does the Buddhist's censure when insight is taken up in thought by the clueless neophyte. It is argued that the real trouble lies in the way language is taken for a means to to truth, which it generally is, of course, but what is most often not understood is that while language speaks amidst a world, the speaking and all of that out there that constitutes the presence of a world have to first be understood as very different things. As Rorty put it, truth is a function of propositions, and there are no propositions "over there" on that hill or wherever. The proposition is here, in this utterance, and the hill over there. This is a strong position, Rorty's: a complete discontinuity in a naturalistic, causally determined world, between all things.

I don't mean to go this way here, but it does relate to the matter of God: when we speak of God at all, can we ever hit, however "fluidly" or obliquely, the target of divinity's Being? Or does language inevitably take that divinity and impose a concept, a description, a definition on it, thereby bringing God to heel in a finite system of thought? So the only way to be free is unhinge language and thought from God. This is what meditation is essentially about, I argue, and what the Hindu concept of maya is about: the illusion lies in the everydayness of language habits. Kierkegaard said as much in the Concept of Anxiety: when we engage in the world, and we give our thougths and feelings to all the things language articulates, the various cultural institutions in our daily lives, we thereby turn away from God (unless one has mastered the terms of the knight of faith, which K himself confesses he cannot do, who can do both).

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.” – Albert Schweitzer, “Civilization and Ethics”, 1949. — Truth Seeker

Okay, and it is not that I disagree with Schweitzer, but there is philosophy unsaid in these words, and this is where thought has to go. Reverence for life. but reverence is a way one comports oneself toward a thing, and reverence toward life is too vague to serve as way to say what this is. Of course, I know what he means: human life but what is it about human life that makes it something to be revered? A principle? But philosophy has lots of principles laid out through the centuries, notably, principles of utility and deontological principles like Kant's notion of duty. But they are all question begging as to what it is that makes ethics what it IS. A principle as such has nothing ethical about it, and calling it an ethical principle presupposes and understanding of what ethicality IS. Life cannot be foundational here, because there is nothing in the idea of living, living as such, that makes ethics what it is. How does one define living in thsi context? Breathing, heart beating, liver cleansing blood, and the rest? How does this generate ethical obligation? Or is it the sensate dimension of experience? I mean, what in life makes a person an ethical agency at all?

I don't see how it could be. If ethics is the study of ends, of what is sought, then it seems clear that some ends are not sought merely as a matter of convention. People do not seek happiness and avoid suffering as a sort of convention. That it is, at least ceteris paribus, bad to be blinded, to have one's hand cut off, to suffer brain injury, etc. does not seem to be a matter of convention. Convention itself is only coherent if it springs from a sort of goal-directedness that already presupposes value, else there would be no reason to follow conventions.

As to discoveries, surely some moral insights are discovered. Newton famously drank mercury because he thought it was good for him. Yet today, knowing what we know about the effects of mercury ingestion on the body, we can say that, all else equal, it is bad for people to have mercury slipped into their food and drink. This is knowledge of value that must be discovered though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

To say ethics is the study of ends presupposes the value of an end. This is where the basic philosophical question leads one. One states an end, a purpose to one's actions, and no matter what this is, there is another question latent and ignored: What good is this? But now the issues hangs on this idea of the good, which resists inquiry. Or does it?

This very discussion is the foundation, and the discussion develops with our abilities to act, and knowledge of consequences. — unenlightened

But prior to this, there is the discussion of what ethics IS. Actions, granted, do not have to proceed with with perfect clarity on about the ontology of ethical standards since actions are embedded in a culture and its ways thinking and valuing. But philosophically, metaethics is basic: the OP asks about whether ethics is all just in the thinking, and beyond this it is all open, with no intruding standard from outside of the norms of one's society. If the answer to this is in the affirmative, then ethics is lost to nihilism.

But to understand why idealism is important, we need to be clear about what prompted its emergence in the early modern period, and what about it remains relevant. That is what I hope this brief essay has introduced. — Wayfarer

Simple, almost, to answer, but it does seem to be, as Heidegger said, the most remote from common sense, yet the most intimate in the midst of our being in the world. The reason why phenomenology persists is because it must, and it must because of the primordiality of phenomenality: It is impossible to observe anything but phenomena. And this deserves a dramatic, Period!

The reason why this is not understood is because it is embedded in some of the most difficult thinking there is; it goes beyond Kant into a labyrinth of neologistic language that most cannot or will not deal with. For me, to read Husserl throws the matter of our existence into a powerful indeterminacy that follows on the heels his neo Kantianism and leads to Heideggerian hermeneutics, and now all that is solid melts into air, philosophically. Hence the need for neologisms: for metaphysics was so burdened by centuries of bad thinking, and this thinking is embedded in language, and so the only way to remove this onto-theological core of metaphysics was to change the language of metaphysics, and bring ontology down from the heights of otherworldliness (Nietzsche partly inspired this, of course) into the finitude of actuality.

Anyway, what prompted its emergence is found in Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the Greeks, Hegel, etc., and what THIS is all about is, even prior to Husserl, the reduction-to-metaphysics discovered in an authentic analytic of what stands right before one's waking eyes. Note that this is just what Kant did to "discover" pure reason (those scare quotes are important): reduce ordinary experience to its logical structure, a structure that is there IN the foundational analysis of experience, and therefore not metaphysics at all---though we all know it really is THE most divisive metaphysics. One does not have to talk about noumena to see this: pure form Cannot be witnessed, only deduced. Deduced to what conclusion? Of course, the metaphysics of reason. Clearly, a big issue; one that divided philosophy in two. But while pure form cannot be witnessed and is hopelessly lost in mere groundless postulation (What is a ground regarding something that cannot be witnessed??), the world as it appears is no postulation at all. The appearance of appearing is as apodictically, well, appearing, as modus ponens. THIS is why phenomenology will not go away. It is certain, not merely likely, that when analytic philosophy learns to drop empirical science from its assumptions, anglo american thinking will turn to the phenomenon: the ONLY thing one has ever "observed" or can ever observe.

In the two scenarios which you describe it is possible that there is no difference. So, it may be that the idea of an afterlife, which often is associated with the idea of God plays a major factor. Personally, I am inclined to think that the question of life after death matters more than the existence of God. I admit that I have spent more time wondering about the various possibilities of life after death. That is because if one doesn't continue in any form what is the significance of God in relation to one's own personal identity. It becomes rather abstract and more about being known in 'the mind of God'. — Jack Cummins

I appreciate your interest in this, for it weighs on my mind as well. But thoughts here get so bound up in extraneous and historical content that has no business in this matter of God. Before moving forward, onw has to ask what God IS first, and then a great deal of what troubles this issue simply vanishes. So what do you think God IS?

Although I can't prove anything beyond that, and the discussion is purely philosophical beyond that point, I think that any assertion of morality should not violate this core tenant. — Philosophim

I wonder if you could say what this core idea is.

If anybody has any ethical questions, they can just ask me. — frank

The ethical question I have is THE ethical question: What is the ground of ethics? This is the be taken as Kant took up reason (though, not to even come near endorsing his absurd rationalism on this issue). Kant's method of reduction is what I have in mind: First isolate the desideratum from incidentals. Do you think ethics has a reductive residuum that survives the suspension of incidentals (or accidentals, if you prefer)?

So the foundation of most moral systems seems to be preventing harm and promoting wellbeing. — Tom Storm

Which begs the question: is this foundation discovered in the mere thinking, or is there something timeless and absolute in the presuppositions of an ethical problem? The problem itself is, of course, messy, as the OP notes, but does this make ethics itself reducible to the thinking only, that is, ethics being the kind of thing that is made and conventional only, and not discovered. If ethics is essentially discoverable, then this implies something outside of thought , addressed by thought to determine how to understand it. But if ethics is entirely made in the matrix of language dealing with the world, "made up" if you will, then this is end of there being a true independent ground for ethics, and a radical relativism is all that is left.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2, "Hamlet".

Is right and wrong just a matter of thinking something is right (e.g. it is right to save and improve lives) and something is wrong (e.g. theft, fraud, rape, robbery, enslaving, torture and murder are wrong)? Is there any way to know for sure what is right and what is wrong? Different countries have different laws. Even the same country has different laws at different times. How do we decide what should be legal and what should be illegal? — Truth Seeker

Right and wrong just a matter of thinking something to be so? Sounds absurd. The prima facie obligation not to bludgeon my neighbor certainly has to be thought out, given the circumstances, but the conditions that make right and wrong ethical in the first place are PRIOR to this thinking out, viz., suffering being bludgeoned causes. Suffering is not thinking. This pretty much covers the true ground of ethics. It is the non ethical entanglements that give rise to indeterminacy in ethics, not the nature of ethics itself. Hamlet was famously caught in such indeterminacy.

You are perhaps a qualified Heideggerian. NOT that he thinks language occludes our real being, he is not like this at all, but he does argue that subjectivity is a concept that needs to be removed from the analysis of our existence. I am listening to Herbert Dreyfus lecture on youtube, "Hubert Dreyfus - Heidegger's Being and Time (Part 1)" and at 26:30 or so you will find things like Marilu Ponty's "empty heads turned toward the world" in the rejection, the radical rejection, of subjectivity. Sometimes things are put just so and make the point so poignantly. I, of course, disagree. I think when you get to that rarified "space" of a phenomenologically reduced world and thought is free of the clutter or habituated assumptions, THERE you discover the transcendental self. Husserl was too bound to the analysis of experience. But the real telos of the reduction takes one beyond this. But keeping with what analysis shows: so there you are, an empty head turned toward the world, but the center of this is the illumination and the ecstasy (nirvana). Heidegger and Marilu Ponty were too much fixated on description and analysis that they could never simply put this down, as the Buddhist does. It is unthinkable for someone like Heidegger NOT to think, in other words. This is why Husserl could not move forward: too much the philosopher.

Well, if they say so. But that does not make God a moral foundation. The reason for that is the very diverse range of religions with different teachings. Most religions give teachings that contradict the teachings of others. There are even contradictions within a single religion. Not all religions are the same and all of them could not be possibly true. So even if accept the premise that God is the moral foundation then we still face a problem: Which religion is true? — MoK

If you approach religion like that, you will find no solution to the question at all. Ask, why doesn't science have this problem? Well, it does, but we don't notice because variances are these historical events that happen within a world that is assumed to be stable because of the way science is able to quantify consistently. You've seen one DNA molecule, you've seen them all, and every time you see it, it's the same. Science has changed over the centuries because new models arise our of enhanced ways of perceiving the world that bring about unseen ways to quantify. But results in each historical paradigmatic setting (Kuhn) are always consistent. No consistency, no science.

Finding what is consistent in religion makes a move from all of the religious culture, to an exclusion of all of this (all the sermons and symbols and singing) to find what is there essentially, not unlike the way science excludes the messiness of our affairs to do just this (Kant did this with reason); you cannot do astronomy if you're thinking about astrology! The next part of this argument deals with value and ethics. Religion has its foundation in the pure valuative dimension of our normal everydayness. This can be discussed if you are interested.

Well, if they say so. But that does not make God a moral foundation. The reason for that is the very diverse range of religions with different teachings. Most religions give teachings that contradict the teachings of others. There are even contradictions within a single religion. Not all religions are the same and all of them could not be possibly true. So even if accept the premise that God is the moral foundation then we still face a problem: Which religion is true? — MoK

If you approach religion like that, you will find no solution to the question at all. Ask, why doesn't science have this problem? It is the consistency of results: put nitroglycerin in the same experimental context, the results will be the same. If you treat religion like a culture, like you seem to be doing, then all you get is cultural differences, but if you look for the essence of religion to see if there is something just as unwavering, and you look "through" the narratives, the churchy fetishes, the bad metaphysics, and so forth, to what survives after all of these contingencies are suspended, and you find the metaethical indeterminacy of our existence. This is what religion is all about.

Very long story short: a determinate ethics is simple to understand. We see it in our laws, rules, principles, explicit or implicit, and so on. The ethical normativity of our existence. Indeterminacy is what we run into when we ask for basic rationality on which these are founded: why pay taxes? Because we need money to run a society. What is the point of that? See contract theory: it's better than the state of nature; much better, because people are safer from harm. What is wrong with harm? Errrr, What do you mean? This is an indeterminacy that runs through all of our affairs, hidden beneath the veneer of conversation. The prima facie moral call not to cause harm really has NO justification beyond it being stand alone bad, which is weird for anyone who likes explanations.

But take those ethical complaints that intrinsically deal with harm, and there you are stricken with plague or burning to death in a car somewhere, and there are no laws to protect you, no authority to redress the wrongs, that is, the intrinsic wrong of it being there AT ALL. Take the broad context of our ethical issues in the world, and see that ultimately, no redress is forthcoming at the foundational level! THIS is where religion has its essence, why, that is, societies "came up with" religion, and why religion is in all cultures. We are all "thrown into" a world of unredeemed suffering and unconsummated desire. This is the essence of religion: to bring these to their completion.

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Why have you forsaken me?" He became sin for us. Our transgressions, all of them, died with him on the cross; God the Father, turns His face away from evil (sin). — Ray Liikanen

What transgressions? Not to say that we are all so perfect, but the issue goes to responsibility: the behavior, the thought,these can be transgressive, meaning they bring into the world an alienation from our true nature which is a "spark" of the divine (without putting too fine a point on it), toward all of the cultural affairs that draw us away from this. Original sin, K held, was, for us (not Adam, whose situation is quite different, though it has to be kept in mind that K was not giving credence to a myth. He uses this myth to explain "original sin" which is, by all accounts, just weird and senseless. He criticizes Luther's generally held position that we, somehow have committed the most egregious offense to God imaginable, and so on) the sin of the "race" which means it is the historical generation of a very bloated and distracting culture, filled with what you could call worldly fetishes: the institutions, the personality identities, the endless "idle talk" and in general the bringing the eternal down to be absorbed into the finite in those churchy settings, thereby losing original religious insight which is subjective and not public at all.
But though one can find fault with this alienation, the transgression lies with the condition, and are not "ours" because we were merely thrown into a world into which this occurs. I think this is important to understand, because Christianity seems fixated on the individual's accountability in the usual sense of being accountable, as with the many rules of society; but to take this model and apply it to religious sin is absurd, for the context in which responsibility rise up are metaphysical.