Yet, to allow that we can be wrong about things—wrong about what is truly "useful"—seems to presuppose a truth of the matter that is prior, not posterior, to our beliefs about usefulness. And at any rate, the ubiquitous experience of regret seems to show that we can certainly be wrong about what is useful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't thinkg ethics is grounded in pragmatics. Truth is hermeneutical, but there is something, as you say, prior, and this is the essential givenness of the world: appearance in the appearing. Touch a stone, and you stand in the midst of an absolute. This of course, is an issue.

1. You say the theory doesn't allow that "anything goes," and this is because: "constraints" determine what we find useful and how human practices and beliefs develop. Is that a fair characterization?

Now either the italicized statement is true outside current human belief and practice (i.e., it is always true of all practices, regardless of what they currently affirm) or else it is only conditionally true, i.e., it is true just in case current belief and practice affirms this statement.

Here are the two horns of the dilemma. If the statement is always true of all beliefs and practices, then it is true regardless of (or outside the context of) current beliefs and practices. But this contradicts the claim that truth is just what is affirmed by current beliefs and practices.

If we grab the other horn and say that the statement is itself only conditionally true, then it is true just so long as current belief and practice affirms it. This means it can "become" false if belief and practice change such that it is no longer affirmed. Thus, the assertion we are relying on to prevent "anything" goes, turns out to be overturned just in case we all stop believing it, in which case it seems that "anything goes." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not quite. The reason pragmatists like Rorty, a post modern language philosopher, hold truth to be pragmatically variable is because language is contingent. Language evolved out of problem solving, and problem solving has a temporal structure, and truth is thus a forward looking event conceived out of the hypothetical deductive method. He is aligned with Heidegger to a degree: what is a chair? It IS the end result what would happen if one approaches the chair, uses the chair in an an "environment of a certain instrumentality where, perhaps there are desks, lecterns, whiteboards, etc. Uses vary, change: this paper weight is now a weapon, now an aesthetic object or a family heirloom. In postmodern thought, there is nothing beyond the context, no "absolute conext" to which all things must conform. Sure, things are constrained and it is not "anything goes" but to talk about some "final vocabulary" to which all things are answerable and which serves as a foundation for truth is simply bad metaphysics. All we know is contextually bound, but again, this doesn't mean things are not grounded in a social matrix of meanings. We have established rules in every facet of our our existence. But yes, it does mean that if I take this can opener and hold the door open with it, it isn't a can opener in the "doing" this. (See Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class?)

2. It is self-refuting. It is not a theory of truth that is currently widely accepted. Hence, if truth just is what is widely accepted vis-á-vis common practices, then the theory is false by its own definition. If we affirm the theory as true, we are forced to affirm that it is false, and so we contradict ourselves. To use Rorty's framing, if truth is "what our peers let us get away with," then Rorty's theory is false because it was harshly criticized from a number of different directions. His peers didn't let him get away with saying this, therefore his theory is false.

It leads to: "if A, then not-A" while asserting A essentially (the same problem with 1). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Widely accepted...by whom?
Such self refutations are in everything! This is because language is variable, flexible, useful in different situations, not something you find in a truth table in a logic class. You treat truth as if it were an absolute, but this is to understand it purely a logical concept, and not the way truth "works" at all. Of course, our "peers" differ, according to the context. In literature there is use of language where peers actually seek out novel usage with metaphor, irony, imagery, exaggeration, and other literary devices. But science is less malleable in its language use though. consider this science lab: Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions reveals how paradigms have historically yielded suddenly, if stubbornly, to new thinking in the evolvement of its ideas.

Nothing sustains for ever, that is, unless by divine decree, and Rorty and philosophers generally will have no truck with this.

3. It seems to equivocate on common understandings of truth. It uses the word "truth" but then seems to describe something quite different. That is, it seems to deny that truth as traditionally understood, or anything like it, exists. Arguably then, this is epistemic nihilism that is papered over by the equivocation.

I will allow though that the force of 3 is probably significantly lessened if the second horn of 1 can somehow be overcome, or if we grab the first horn of the dilemma in 1. But if we grab the first horn, we seem to be either contradicting ourselves or defaulting on the claim that truth is always posterior to current practices and beliefs.

Like I said, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the analytic "view-from nowhere," "objectivity approaches truth at the limit" schema that this sort of view emerged to correct. Yet this solution seems to me to have even greater difficulties. More broadly, I think the impetus for such a view stems from failing to reject some of the bad epistemic axioms of empiricism, and from a particular metaphysics of language and the reality/appearance distinction that I would reject, but that's a whole different can of worms.

I suppose a final option is to refuse to grab the dilemma by the horns and to simply be gored by it, allowing that the theory is both true and false, and that it itself implies contradictions, and so this is no worry. But I think that's exactly the sort of thing that is generally meant by "anything goes relativism." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your final option seems close to right. One needs a Copernican Revolution to overcome the traditional, and frankly disastrous, views of truth. Truth traditionally understood is untenable, for traditionally, the object is conceived apart from the perceptual act, and this is impossible. One would literally have to stand outside of experience to affirm it. Rather, the object is an event; this coffee cup is an event, a temporal object, recalled and anticipated in what it IS.

What does this have to do with ethics? Thoughts about ethics are properly about the world. Are they IN the world, or simply In moods, attitudes, feelings (Mackie)? Rorty is just wrong on ethics, because he is doesn't understand the world. Like most philosophers, he understands arguments better than he understands the world.

If God is ethics, as you claim, why are at least 99.9% of all the species that have existed on Earth already extinct? Why do non-vegans cause pain and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms and 3 trillion aquatic organisms per year? Why do humans cause harm and death to other humans? Why do living things have to consume other living things to live? Why didn't the God, who is allegedly ethics, prevent all harm, injustice, and death and make all living things forever happy? I posit that God, if it is real, is the source of all evil. — Truth Seeker

I think these are very good questions, but have nothing to do with God being ethics. What I mean by this is that when one withdraws from incidentals of ethics' problems and issues, and pulls back and asks what God IS, and one wants to get the bottom of it, that is, think philosophically, and put aside dogma of ay shape and kind, as well as religious narratives, fixed theological themes and errors grandfathered into the conversation, one then faces the world as it is. This reduction to the world is not empirical, of course, because religion is not about empirical inquiry, and so empirical science has been suspended as well. Where one finds the in-the-world ground for religion is ethics, and value and aesthetics. God is born out of ethics, which is the struggle to resolve the way the value dimension of our existence runs through our lives. This struggle reaches into metaphysics in the discovery of the question: Is ethical nihilism, the affirmation that this struggle is exhaustively delimited in our finitude, a justifiable claim? God, once the concept is cleansed of nonsense, is a response in the negative. God-as-ethics means really God-as-metaethics. This begins the argument.

Typical apologist's strawman. — 180 Proof

Suggesting you really do think religion is reducible to something like this, whic is, I suppose, just a bunch of imaginative story telling, which it is, of course, in the telling of a religious story; but the same thing might be said of the theory of the four humours, yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm, which was just a fiction, believed for centuries. But because a story is fiction, this doesn't mean psychology as we know it today is a fiction. The question about religion (and its god, gods, whatever) has its ground just as any science does, and this can only be discovered by asking basic questions, putting aside traditional thinking.

Is it? — frank

Why, yes. Once you banish the atheist's straw person thinking about god being an old man in a cloud and the like from conversation, and ask about what it is in the world that religion addresses, then you move into a very different thematic content. Who cares, I say, about the way the ancient mind came up with its myths and legends; these are scattered across the world, and are mostly just fiction (though, fictions do exist, and it is hard to find something that is NOT a fiction. Rorty argued that science was essentially a social concept, and social structures of ancient belief were not objectively less true than what science had to say, and he thought this because he held that thre is nothing outside of the believing and its practices and its culture against which an idea can be judged. If it is pragmatically efficacious, then it has status as "truth"; and Rorty may be right, mostly). But what ARE these about essentially? This is the question. And god does endure this scrutiny, if in a qualified and reduced way.

No, I don't see this either. — Philosophim

Well, you could just move forward and say why you don't see this. But then, I gather from your comments you don't want to talk about it if I don't read the entirety of the pages of this other thread. I never do that. I just say what I think and be done with it.

What God and ethics? God IS ethics.

Ok. I say you forgive by the grace of God because I don't know any other way to explain it. You can't do it by your own power. I don't believe in God. — frank

Yeah, but you first have say what God is before you say you don't believe in it. It is a slippery term.

Only on a particularly deflationary view of "science." At any rate, those who embrace such a view, and who stick to a "hard" empiricism and naturalism also often tend towards denying causality. But in such contexts, consciousness itself, reference, intentionality, etc. are every bit as "queer" as "evaluative judgement."

Might I suggest though that this is an unhelpful starting point for framing a metaphysics of goodness, given that camp largely tends to deny goodness, or else to put forth some sort of reductive, mechanistic view of it as reducible to "brain states?" I mean, your earlier point about kerosene (or presumably also one's own beloved, or anything else) being reducible to empirical data seems to already have assumed an answer about ethics. Yet it can hardly be one that it is "good" to affirm. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A scientist denying the primacy of causality in discussing science? I have heard of this. But the "intuition" of causality, is apodictic, and you will not find scientists denying this (mostly because they don't think about this kind of thing). But then again, causality's apodicticity is just as fragile as anything else that is taken up in language, for while the intuition that tells me that this cup cannot not throw itself off the table, but must be caused by something else to move at all, I am still faced with the authority of the language in which this idea is given. What we cll apodictic is not what it IS simply because language has conferred its being upon it; it is not piece of fiction like 'General Motors' (though this is still a question, for though people literally once declared GM to exist, and there it began its existence, the fiction lies in what was "intended" but the actuality of declaring is no fiction at all). I don't know what it IS apart from its appearance, and the appearance as such IS apodictic.

Mechanistic views and brain states: this line of thinking is preanalytical. Take a brain state and ask the basic question: what is a brain, and how is it that acknowledging a brain to be what it is is is somehow not a brain state itself? Now you have gotten to a basic question. Prior to this, just question begging. Take this inquiry down to the wire, and you will find that a brain is discoverable ONLY in a brain state, and its therefore a brain state itself, and this puts the question as to what is PRIOR to brain states such that affirmation is lost in the analytic primordiality of someting being a brain state can be reestablished. Obviously, we drop brains and their states altogether, for this belongs to a second order, a derivative order, of knowledge claims found in empirical science and its theories. Presupposed by this is the foundation of phenomenality. What is prior to brain talk is the essential appearing out of which brain talk has it genesis.

Phenomenality is foundational for ontology and epistemology (which are really the same thing). At this FIRST order of inquiry, we encounter value, not in the contexts of an entangled and derivative world, but in itself. This is the metaethical/ metaaesthetic ground for ethics. It stands outside the spoken idea, yet is irrevocably bound to it for its ontology, that is, for its essence, the saying "what it is". The good is no more or less that the actuality that is the presuppositional (logical) ground for an ethical situation's ethicality: If this value dimension of our existence were absent, ethics would simply vanish.

So I would put it this way: suffering and well-being are not just contingencies of language, but the shared, universal ground of our moral experience. Whether one interprets that as divine or not, I think we agree it is where ethics takes its root. — Truth Seeker

I agree with this, almost; there always is a "but": Divinity is an odd word. Has anyone every experienced divinity, divine grace? Or is this an entirely empty concept? One can be knocked out by my strudels and pies, but we don't call this a discovery of divinity in the religious sense of this term. Even if we admit that the 'good' of the strudel has its actuality outside of language's finitude and issue from "the fabric of the world," so to speak, the manifest quality of something being delicious hardly qualifies as having a divine nature.

I qualify food, fun and sex as finite experiences, meaning they really don't have a "calling" beyond what they are. An appetitive desideratum will come, go, but the "divine" desideratum seeks a consummation, as in the intimacy of "I will love you forever!" How does anyone make any sense out of "divine desideratum"?

Christians, some, talk about being reborn, and I usually ignore them jsut because it is embedded in a lot of nonsense talk, so I dismiss them out of hand. But I do not deny that they experience this something that has depth and importance, just that when they talk about it, they wander into Christian dogma. Let's say saints actually DID experience "God's grace," "divinity," but no care is taken in interpreting this (and how could analytic care be taken in ancient thinking?). They speak sincerely, sacrifice, throw themselves into suffering all for ...a descriptive error??

One can only look within the depths of one's subjectivity to see if there is anything to this. I think, as the epistemologists put it, that "there is a presumption in favor" of affirmation, simple because I find a certain corresponding "unknown X" within when I look into myself. (Again, my thinking is borrowed --then qualifiedly adopted-- from others. Here, it is Emanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Meister Eckhart). I also think this buried "sentiment" is in all of us, arguably; it IS what we are. To show this objectively is not possible. It is in "insight" or intuition" where it is found. Words do not argue so much as "lead" to.

How so? — frank

Theodicy issues from a deficit in the world. Put God and all that tradition aside. Religion is essentially redemptive and consummatory, reflecting the "open endedness" of metaethics. Put plainly, screaming children in burning cars in the delimitations of its acceptedness for what it is in a society, in a set of identifying interpretations, has a metaphysical residuum in its existence, and this residuum is the ethical: that suffering "should not" exist. This notion is not born out of a principle, but out of the existence of the suffering as such.

So the answer to your question: a determination of any kind at all leads inquiry to being in the world. The reason we don't take God seriously in its traditional anthropomorphic depiction is this simply doesn' turn up in observation. But what DOES turn up is ethics, and ethics is value-in-being played out in the chaos of entangled living. It is discovered in screaming children in burning cars and the like. Metaethics is an indeterminacy of our ethics that trails off, if you will, in the openness of the question: what is the non-contingent good and the bad of our throwness into a world?

In my view, recognizing suffering as fundamental doesn’t point us to the divine, but to the very real ground of our shared experiences, such as pain, pleasure, fear, love, hate, grief, sadness, rage, happiness, compassion and so on. — Truth Seeker

Don't know how well this will come off:

Everything I say is derivative, of course. I am what I read. I put things together as I see fit, here and there, but the body of thought is Kant through postmodern thinkers like Derrida's essentially apophatic approach, and beyond to Jean Luc Marion, Emanuel Levinaas, Michel Henry who affirm....in the midst of indeterminacy.

Consider: At the most basic level, at the metaethical level where we encounter non formal value-in-ethics (Scheler), ethics insists on a foundation. It is apodictic insisting, like logic insists. But like logic, it can't tell you what it is for logic is in the matrix of understanding that would approach understanding itself, and thus one would have to stand outside logic to really "see" it, but this would require another perspective, a third one, and it, too, would seek aground for its existence, and the same reasoning begins anew. Logic can only show you what it is, and this is done in language, but language is not apodictic, but contingent, I mean, it issues fromt he ages: ages of a generation of signifiers, as Derrida would say (borrowing from Saussure), words (gestures, etc.) that "represent" a world, and all meanings flow through language, ARE language (a tough distinction). So in ordr tp get to the essence of logic, one has to take on the language that casts its existence, and thus, as with all things, logic becomes lost in indeterminacy. I know its structure cannot gainsaid, but I cannot "talk" about this.

Ethics is the same. One can't say what it is apart from its manifestation, so the point of talking about an "essence" of ethics is to get at what is there apart from all the incidental details, nto unlike what Kant did with pure reason: here the question is about the dimension of a given ethical problem that makes its ethicality what it IS, and this is value, non formal value (Scheler's term. See his Formalism in Ethics and Nonformalism in Ethics and Values), what you agree to above. The good and the bad in ethicsare, for this conversation, really just analytic terms, or metaanalytic, for what is IN the manifestation of the world, "meta" because there really is no good or bad, like Platonic forms might be. These are metaphsyical terms, but this is the "good" metaphysics, not the absurdities of ancient religious theology. Metaphysics here is what lies outside of the totality of language because it is not language at all, like being in love or being tortured. The whole world is, essentially, metaphysics, or transcendental. BUT: all that is manifest is given IN this totality, and so finitude and "the infinite" are one.

Long story. I am reading Michel Henry's doctoral thesis, the Manifestation of Essence, and you can see the language I use comes from this. But then divinity: What lies out side of languge is metaphysical, but nothing "lies outside" of language: metaphysical "essences" (definitions, "what something is") lies with language; this is ontology, to "say" what something IS). Being, otoh, is the manifestation, the givenness of the world, and this stands both IN language and out of it. Being is a threshold concept (different philosophers say different things about this), and the aches, pains, terrors, loves, delights, and all that constitutes the Being of an ethical matterare here. This "Other" of the other side is a fascinating concept here. Henry, borrowing as well, holds that Being is utterly seamless, a monolithic "presence," and this has a rather spooky intuition about it, for we have significantly (never altogether; this is impossible) slipped the bonds of language to acknowledge this. We stand in wrold delivered from its compulsory common sense, and ethics IS now something other than the mundane description. That is, the Being of pain and its abhorrent nature, and the Being of joy and its to-be-strived-for and sought out belongs to absolute reality.

This is essentially what religion is. God is just an embodiment of the Other of the good of being in love, of music: aesthetics (recalling Wittgenstein famously said ethics and aesthetics were the same. He was right: these are value terms, and value is essentially bound the this Other. When the analytic smoke clears, divinity is this struggle for the good, away from the bad (remember, there really are no such "things"; these are analytic terms only), only all of this is conceived in metaphysics (what is there, staring back at you in the ordinary world). So now, what is love, the walking six inches off the ground, head over heals for the "face that launched a thousand ships"? Now it is divinity.

I think there are advantages to occasionally looking at the world through an amoral lens. Judgment and understanding stand in opposition. The more you judge something or someone, the less you understand, because once the judgement is made (that was evil!), there's no reason to look further. Understanding requires putting judgment on the shelf. For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations. — frank

Absolutely. Such is the way things are, one crisis after the next. I take it that looking through an amoral lens is exactly what necessitates a foundational morality. It is really not an argument anymore, but a kind of seeing (phenomenology is, after all, essentially descriptive): being is thrust into existence 14 or so billion years ago, so to speak, and then simply starts torturing itself. I can't speak for all, but when I let this intuitively settle in my mind, I see it as impossible as contradicting modus ponens.

So, the consciousness implements our reality and its experiencing, through qualia-appearances; it is the messenger - whose message seems to be existence and being. Even though it is movie-like, its happenings are identical to what would go on if all events were what we would call 'real': if there is no qualia gas in the qualia car, then the qualia car won't quaila run.

An implementation difference that makes no difference to the message itself is truly no difference, but is still of interest to those who want to know the mechanics of our reality. — PoeticUniverse

Implements? Consciousness implements our reality? Not that consciousness takes up reality for some useful purpose, but rather that consciousness is itself an activity, and objects in the world are temporal events. Thus, familiar activities, driving, walking and all the rest, are activities the ontological foundation of which is an activity.

Nothing is done through qualia experiences. To talk of qualia, one has to look to pure phenomenality. When one does something, qualia designates the presuppositional ground of all that is there in the doing. Everything that is in the normal and familiar way of things possesses deeper analytic into the existence of this. This is discovered by asking basic questions, and suspending the familiar to find the answers to these. What is time? for example. It could said that there is a qualia of time that found when the vulgar linear structure of time is put aside, and time is revealed to be hic et nunc: a singularity which is intuited in the pure phenomenality of of the self.

A messenger, the message of which is existence and being? Now you're talking, though messenger is just a metaphor. But I agree: qualia is just a term that conveys, reveals, being as such. All language reveals being in the apprehension of beingS which it makes possible, but qualia, pure phenomenality, makes possible the essence of being to be shown--language shows, opens, brings forth meanings, and in the "saying" of something, the saying opens Being, brings a thing to light. Qualia is an extraordinary term that belongs to ontology: it opens Being.

Qualia gas, qualia car, and the rest: Think of it like this: there is the world of ordinary events and objects, and cars and gas have their place. But the discovery of qualia requires a suspension of this language, and this is not unlike suspending the language of physics to talk about knitting or sailing. One contextual setting is simply different from others. Qualia has its own contextuality, such that normal language designations across the board are suspended.

If you're truly interested in the discussion, please check out the argument in addition to the definitions to see why this ends up being a fundamental. As well, it would probably be better if you post there to not distract from this person's post, as well as have easy quoting access to the argument and responses. — Philosophim

Sorry, I'm not going to read all of that. I read through some, and it occurred to me that it was excessive. Existence must possess the ground for good and evil. And it does. But existence qua existence syas nothing about this. OTOH, there IS no existence qua existence; this is just an abstraction from what there, in the givenness of the world. to see this, one has to move toward inclusiveness, that is, including everything that IS, and this means all of what is usually excluded, human subjectivity. This move is difficult for most because it requires a rejection of a naturalistic pov, for naturalism (materialism, physicalism) is reductive of ethics down to a value-free ground of "scientific metaphysics"; that is subjectivity is reduced to a thing, and value, judgment, thought, antidipation, sentiment, choice, reflection, and on and on, these, the very ground of ethics, are altogether lost. This deflationary account of ethics is what survives in analytic thinking. And again, this constitutes a view of existence which has no place for your thesis.

So all said, talk about existence simply needs clarification. Obviously, existence is should be ONLY if existence is inherently ethical, that is, metaethical, which means existence must resolve itself into an ethical conclusion of redemption for "the bad" and consummation for "the Good". Religion, mostly, is exactly what does this. But religion is cranky and silly, even. Ah, it is this, but not in "essence".

You thesis amounts to a world where divinity subsumes existence. Of course, divinity needs unpacking.

Sure, but is it good or evil? Or neither? It's the intellect's job to answer that. You can't go wrong spending a little time with analytic philosophy, especially if your mind has a tendency to take flight like a bird. AP is slow and humble. — frank

Surely you are right. Have you read Mackie's Inventing Right and Wrong? One of my favorites, because it is SO well wrtten and is meant to be a text book for an analytic class in advanced ethics, which I took years ago (not with Mackie himself, of course). The argument is altogether against an objectivist ethics, calling moral realism too "queer" (the argument form queerness"). It is an intensive analysis of anglo american moral thinking, but his is mostly straw man thinking. Call moral realism a platonic form of the good (FOG as my prof put it) and now you have an absurd ontology, a "substantival" good, as if ethics were "something".
But that is not the claim here. Good and evil, these are just analytic terms that emerge out of what is there in the giveness of the world. Put plainly, ouches and yums actually exist, but they're not things "at hand". They show this "queerness" as Mackie put it, which is no more or less than what it is to experience it. Phenomenology looks directly at this and asks, what IS this? All schools of science and common sense in abeyance. And Mackie is right, there is something IN "ouch!" that is not empirical but "existentially apriori"---Kant's pure reason was on the same track, after all, causality tells one that this cup cannot throw itself off the table, and this cup does exist. Very queer, I would say, this causality. But ethics: this is not the vacuous Kantian form of judgment and thought. Here there is depth of meaning.

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.