Ok, my apology. I read your OP a couple of times and now I know what you are arguing about. To me, the essence of religion is not about ethics at all but about spiritual and mystical experiences. Although there are religions with a set of commands, what we ought to do and what we ought not to do, but to my understanding there is no religion that provides reasons why an act, good or evil, is right or wrong. Therefore, religion is not about ethics. — MoK

But of course religion "provides reasons why an act, good or evil, is right or wrong." Religion tells us that God is moral foundation of such "reasons".

But I would respond to the idea of religion being about spiritual and mystical experiences. Not that it is not about these, but that mysticism itself does not stand apart from our ordinary affairs: what is mystical lies with understanding that ordinary affairs themselves are entirely indeterminate at the basic level of assumptions, which undermines all knowledge claims, something altogether ignored as we are so absorbed in the usual matters. Just to say, that one should keep such the "mystical" within the bounds of what is IN the world vis a vis our existence, in order to keep the very idea available. If you read mystics like Meister Eckhart or pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite you find intimations that never really leave the perceptual event, but rather ackowledge something always already IN what is observed normally. A long discussion in this.

Why do I claim religion is all about ethics? You saw the point in the OP: Religion is metaphysics, specifically metaethics. Metaethics is inquiry about the essence of ethics, as is the question, what IS the good? It is a question for ontology, for the good and the bad in ethics, prior to discussions about the should's and shouldn'ts, rights and wrongs, refer to the actual affairs in the world that make ethics even possible. The basic idea lies here: what if ethics possessed in its essence something as apodictic as logic? I claim it does. Beneath the entanglements of our ethical lives, there is something that makes these matters' ethicality even possible. This is value, a category identified in Wittgenstein's Tractatus which he says is unspeakable, as it is IN the world and not merely in states of affairs. (It helps to read this brief if enigmatic book.)

Again, what if ethics possessed at its core something apodictic? If so, religious issues would be instantly resolved! No, I'm serious.

Glad to see that you agree that the pain is not bad for all agents. — MoK

I take pain and pleasure to be bad and good analytically. If one is enjoying X, then, heh, heh, one isn't in pain. Period. If something is standardly called pain, but is nonstandardly received as pleasure, I ask, why should standards hold up against reality? And I keep in mind that so much that we call painful or distasteful are conditioned pov's. I remember finding cigarette smoking so awful it made me sick. Then I was addicted for 16 years. The lack of objectivity in the goods and bads of the world was never due to their not being anything objective about the good or the bad. It was always about the variance in was brought the good and the bad into existence. Flames scorching living flesh? Hmmm, like I said, this one is tough to imagine being enjoyable. But who cares. It really isn't the point. If one is miserable then one is miserable.

Your accusation of "bad metaphysics" is clearly a projection and non sequitur. — 180 Proof

Oh. Really? Explain.

Well, ime, metaphysics – making sense in the most general way of the whole of reality – is conceptual (i.e. presuppositional > descriptive), not theoretical (i.e. propositoonal > explanatory). Besides, metaphysics does not entail the 'false hopes' which are the basis and motivators of religion. — 180 Proof

It certainly does depend on what is meant by metaphysics. Here I refer to metaphysics in the way of "bad metaphysics" which rises out of groundless speculation, I mean, literally speculation that has no ground, as with talk about the nature of God often goes, following through on a supposition that is itself its own presupposition. God is a definitional concept that is the genesis of a great deal of bad metaphysics simply because it is NOT its own presupposition, but is a contingent and constructed concept, something "of parts" that defers to other concepts for its meaning. At any rate, when you talk about overpromising and underdelivering, you implicitly say that delivering and promising make sense in this context. Making sense requires justification, so where does the justification come from? Unless one is able to show that such a thing is demonstrable in the "observable" (belongs in double inverted commas for a good reason) world, either directly or through apriori argument, one will have to resort to what can be neither observed nor inferred from what is observed. The very definition of bad metaphysics.

As to false hopes: one needs to go into this: false hopes about what? Religion does not deal in contingent matters, so it is not about false hopes of any particular (read accidental) issue, the particulars of any of a multitude of ethical problems one can have. So the hope in quiestion here has is analytically reduced something more fundamental, which is discovered IN the very structure of our existence. This is value.

All Christian sects preach that every person has an "eternal soul" (i.e. "I AM" = EGO sum (re: "imago dei")) that will be either "saved" or "damned", no? Iirc from my Jesuitical education, each follower of Christ seeks only the "eternal salvation" of his "eternal soul" ... in the world to come". Augustinian / Kierkeegardian subjectivity (i.e. "leap of faith") metaphysically screams "ME ME ME". :pray: — 180 Proof

Yeah, I know, and it is a fair point to make. But then, it is the "world denied" that made Nietzsche so incensed. If one reads Kierkegaard, especially in The Concept of Anxiety, Sickness Unto Death and, well, everywhere, really, he comes down very hard on the affections we have for this world; indeed, it is his Attack on Christendom that plays this out in concerns about the fallen state of "Christendom" which to him is just the very embodiment of sin. Buddhism and Hinduism are very explicit about this: the world is suffering, an illusion (maya) and we must be delivered from our affections bound therein. These affection are, literally, the indulgences of the ego.

Humans' denial of death via myths / symbols of 'immortality' (e.g. scapegoating, redemption / propitiation sacrifice, martyrdom, "teleological suspension of the ethical", etc) as I've pointed out on this thread ... — 180 Proof

Yes, you pointed it out, but you haven't argued through the OP. So many argue a case about religion as if religion were no more than the sum of bad metaphysics. This is a straw person argument, instantly assailable. It doesn't address religion in its essence. Most of what you cite above are ideas that that are badly defined or have no place in a foundational analysis at all.

I wrote this piece of nonsense:" Its overpromising and underdelivering is itself for into metaphysics, i.e., beyond verification and falsification." Should have written this: overpromising and underdelivering is itself metaphysics, that is, beyond verification and falsification.

Well, that is quite the opposite of what you stated regarding religion. To you: "But religions are about a dogmatic authority, and so the analytic of good and bad has no place.". — MoK

No. What is defended and discussed here is an analytic of religion, not religion as it is taken up in regular affairs. Read the OP.

God is a term that issues from the basic religious situation. It belongs to a basket of terms that create issues rather than resolve them. Say God is the greatest possible being, then I will give a hundred ways to entangle this into an entirely contrived issue generating concept. Wittgenstein was right: leave such things alone for, putting is simply, lack of grounding in the world. In other words, the world shows itself to us and our job in philosophy is to say what is there at the most basic level.

But you don't give the idea its due: take someone's masochism regards beatings as somehow delightful. The pain of the beatings is no longer, therefore bad, or another way to go would be to say that what is bad in the pain is entangled with something that makes if good (a fetish's very definition) and familiarity makes for a settled matter, psychologically. On this point I don't care about the variability of the way we experience the world. All that matters is the value in play when value is entangled (it almost always is). It can be clear as a bell, as when the flame is put beneath the palm of my hand--hard to fetishize this one. Not impossible, but then...well, I hard to even imagine. I can imagine Thích Quảng Đức did; he was the Buddhist monk who set himself ablaze in protest. But this is a different matter as he had trained himself to ignore the pain, not enjoy it. But the source of enjoyment is just not at issue. What is at issue is the nature of pain when one is feeling pain. Just that. You have a fetish such that burns and beatings are a good time, then I do not classify your beatings as painful, but delightful.

This story (myth) is not "salvation" because, in fact, one's "suffering" (i.e. frustrations, fears, pains, losses, traumas, dysfunctions) ceases only with one's death. The world's oldest confidence game ritually over-promises and under-delivers: false hope. Besides, most historical religions preach that every person has an 'eternal soul' – imo, there isn't any notion that's more of an ego-fetish than this. — 180 Proof

Its overpromising and underdelivering is itself for into metaphysics, i.e., beyond verification and falsification.

Christian metaphysics is not at all egoic, but precisely the opposite: it is in the denial of the ego and its personality and attachments (fetish or otherwise. Freud thought that the entire structure of a culture was something of a fetish of sublimated libido). Kierkegaard called this hereditary sin.

If you re looking for what is essentially religious about our existence, it begins with the OP. Why waste time on the silliness of historical popular religion? These self implode right at the outset of inquiry.

But religions are about a dogmatic authority, and so the analytic of good and bad has no place. As for a description, this is what observation does. So what is there to observe? Just the arbitrary command (which may be a good idea or not. The point is that the determination about its goodness or badness is not based on justification and merit).
— Constance
What is your religion and why did you choose it?

Pain is apodictically "bad".
— Constance
Not to a masochist. — MoK

I am of the school that says if something hasn't been through the analytic grinder, then it is not worthy of belief. I no more take religion in any popular sense seriously at all. Such a thing is no longer a a living possibility.

If a masochist likes X, then X isn't pain to the masochist. I take this as both analytically true as well as experientially.

I completely agree with you. That is where both religion, and, with respect, much philosophy, east and west, has gone astray. That is the exact point. Fetishization of the Subject, causes our awareness to focus on that illusion as a thing which suffers and ought not to. I'm wondering whether (like so many things which history corrupts) the essence of religion (to remind/warn against etc. this fetishizing of the ego) has been "lost." — ENOAH

A thing which suffers? Nobody argues this. Heidegger interpreted Descartes to make the point that dasein is not what he called a mode of desein's being called "presence at hand" but this isn't where the interesting phenomenology takes the issue. Post modern thinking on the theological side of all this takes one to transcendence. On this lies at the end of the ontological question of agency. Put it like this: Kant was all in on this absurd metaphysical affirmation based on the transcendence discovered in the analysis of judgment. You go deep enough into questioning the structure of actual thought and judgment and you discover apodicticity beyond the reach of experience. Such is where transcendence takes one for Kant--to an utterly vacuous world of absolute existence that has no ground at all in lived experience.

Kant is to metaphysics what Hobbes is to political philosophy in that he opened a door that he himself could not pass through. The Critique had to be critiqued! Michel Henry and his ilk (recall that you liked this thinker earlier) come along and say, look, if you are looking for something absolute about our existence, you are simply mad to bring all attention to a complete abstraction of and from, well, our existence. The critique of the critique is simple: you want something that abides through all logically possible objection (like Descartes' doubt that inspired Husserl's reduction), just (my example) put you hand in boiling water or over a lighted match. Ask now, what IS that? This question is not ever even touched by analytic philosophy (take a quick look at the metaethical nihilism that runs through the thinking among those posting here. Ask this question of them and they will either not respond or ignore what you ask move elsewhere. Imagine THE most salient feature of our existence and a philosophy that is entirely afraid to even approach it.

At any rate, if you think about the self, human dasein, as a thing, you are deep in scientific reductive territory.

To try simply, borrowing (not necessarily endorsing) an Abrahamic metaphor, so called "God" cares only about the living(ness) of "his" "creation" i.e., organic; and not the becoming, knowledge, that "he" actually warned humans against. Out of the latter, we invented a universe of our own, unreal, and not "precious" to "God." Now, yes, I am being "poetic" and do not necessarily hold to "God," and "precious." My point is, we have been clinging to knowledge at the direct expense of living. Living is not in our constructions, but in our being. The whole false spirit/body duality, is a direct result of that clinging. — ENOAH

There is a lot in this. I won't wag a critical finger in your direction, but I should ask questions. For example, Does the Bible have any prima facie authority at all on matters of philosophy? What does creation have to do with it and what is the connection between creation and the idea of the organic? Is the old Testament really talking about a biological category? God does not fit comfortably into a discussion of basic questions because it generates its own questions, which is a sign of bad metaphysics; questions about God's greatness and the omni-this-and-that are grounded in the very thing you are trying to avoid, which is the excesses of knowledge claims which need to be eliminated in order to see the matter clearly. This is what Husserl's reduction does, or can do, though one does not have to agree with everything he says. This is why phenomenology really is the "science" of phenomenology: it studies the apriori structure of perception and its content as open, because the reduction is open: it takes inquiry closer to what is presupposed by everydayness.

As to that false spirit/body duality, I find this objectionable in the way this is taken historically, which is as an ontological duality (something Heidegger strongly objected to. Ontology for him is
equiprimorial" meaning not about some singularity of existence, like Descartes' res cogitans or res extensa). But this is not to say there are no differences in the way the world shows itself. Certainly, if you think, as Husserl did, that an object is constituted by the contribution made by perception, then the question goes to the perceiver, as with Kant and cognition. But just a rationalist. Rational primordiality certainly does not describe the world (for one thing, it does not have Derrida available to deconstruct it. Ask, what is reason? and deconstruction takes you to the countless contexts in which it is found. It is "scattered" if you will. Hermeneutics can do this, Derrida shows (see Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. Caputo is a post modern....errrr, hard to say what he is. He is a post modern philosopher of affirmation) that is, remove a meaning from its "place" in some absolute hierarchy of the way the world is. I am reading, or trying to read, Derrida's latter work (Incidentally, I have thousands of pdf files. You are welcome to them all if you can tell me a way they can be sent that costs nothing to me and does not involve handing out my email address. Huge files. Many gbs) and clearly, one has to be able to have a sense of irony to grasp this (Rorty names his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity --in which there is an entire chapter on Derrida): irony is a principle feature of language in its ability to generate difference), for he is being deliberately ironic, because he is trying to make the impossible point about the "trace" being a generative feature of language, while actually speaking (writing)! Which is why, like Wittgenstein, the whole conversation is under erasure. Witt is really saying something very close to Derrida

But I was trying to say that duality certainly does have its place as long as ontology is not about something like Descartes' had in mind. Though this is slippery, for in phenomenology, what you could call categorical ontology is certainly okay. I mean, we can talk about differences among phenomena, and group these as science might talk taxonomically about things, but when the Occam's razor of the reduction bracketing cuts deeper and deeper until one is left facing "being as such" then where justified true belief have its place? This is really what is behind my objection to your defense of the unsayble and unthinkable and this extends to the early Wittgenstein: obviously we can think what cannot be thought! For without thought we are as infants.

Knowledge at the expense of direct living: Slippery again: My quarrel with popular religion is that since it possesses a great lack of justification for its beliefs, it is arbitrary, and being arbitrary and authoritative is a very bad combination. Philosophy is essentially religious in that it is the objective analysis of our world at the basic level of inquiry and this leads to acknowledging foundational indeterminacy which is the essence of religion. All roads lead to this foundational discussion.

The question is, is it possible for an idea or an experience or a disclosure of any kind to be both what it is, yet occurring to "no one" ? Not about occurring in some locality, which is trivially true (Locality?), but experience of any kind requires it to be an experience to, or of someone. There is no such thing as an unmoored experience.
— Constance

Is this the "tree falls in a forest" conundrum? I say it makes a sound. To humans only, the question matters, because of the illusion of separation between sound and perceiver/object and subject/cause and effect. EDIT: experience, by the way, I hold to be restricted to humans. So that is why "there is no such thing as an unmoored experience;" there is no real such thing as "experience" period. — ENOAH

No, it is not about what we mean by sound. It is about whether one can make sense of an experience of, say, terrible pain without agency. I think this is an important question. I say a "disembodied" pain is impossible, and to speak of such a thing shows only a possibility of words, i.e., one can SAY this, sure. But it is not unlike talking about causes and effects: one cannot imagine a causeless effect. Can't explain this, but it is just primoridially true, if you like (Edith Stein uses this term a lot). So with a pain, or pleasure of some kind, this is impossible without agency of some kind. Who knows, perhaps atman is the Brahman and you and I are one, making agency this grand eternal singularity. Could be.

To my knowledge, no religion describes good, evil, right, and wrong. It just gives a set of commands: what we ought to do (considered as good) and what we ought not to do (considered as evil). — MoK

But religions are about a dogmatic authority, and so the analytic of good and bad has no place. As for a description, this is what observation does. So what is there to observe? Just the arbitrary command (which may be a good idea or not. The point is that the determination about its goodness or badness is not based on justification and merit).

What I intend here is to think about ethics as a phenomenon: take any ethical matter and ask, what makes for its ethicality? The essence of ethics. Ask about the essence of common ideas and you get definitional content that is contingent, that is, whatever is said defers to other content. Ask what a teacher is, say, and other words come flooding in about teachers, what they do, the qualities they have, and ask about what these are and more definitional qualities ensue; and this simply never ends. Contingency yields no necessities, just dependencies. No language is stand alone.

There are two problems here even if we accept that ethics is apodictic: (1) Which religion is the correct one? and (2) What is the reason for religion being the only reliable source when it comes to ethics?

(1) is important since there are conflicts in many religions and even there are conflicts within a single religion. (2) What if someone comes up with an apodictic idea regarding ethics such as each human has all rights when it comes to his or her life but she or he does not have any right when it comes to the life of others unless both individuals agree on terms and conditions? — MoK

One cannot "come up with" an apodictic idea. If you were to look into the nature of logic, everywhere you look you would find apodicticity (or apriority, or necessity). One big tautology. I am saying the same is true for ethics (and hence, religion). The analogy goes like this: Logic is not about the many logical problem solving affairs we engage in, for these are entangled with things that have nothing to do with logic, referring to all the complications of our intertwined lives. Logic in itself is about the apriori principles of reasoning. Ethics stands in the world in a similar way. The ethics of my obligation to pay a debt or refrain from harming others, and so forth, is not about the facts of the cases. A fact just sits there: The soup is 35 degrees F. But put this in an ethical setting, as with my promise to someone to heat the soup well above one hundred degrees, and this fact is now ethically in play. The details are variable (it could have been a stew, or the desire to make it cooler, not warmer, and so on), but no detail has an ethical dimension to it.

So what is this apodicticity of ethical matters about? Value. Ask, what is it for something to be apodictic? It is for that thing's contradiction to be impossible to imagine, as with causality, say: one cannot imagine an object self-moving. Value refers us to the world, not reason, and specifically to the value in play, as with the satisfaction hot soup brings or the peace that comes with the confidence that promises will be kept. Ethics is ALWAYS about some value in play. No value in play, and ethics simply vanishes.

So finally, what is it about value as such that is apodictic? One must look to the world, for here lies value; it is IN the pains and delights of our existence. Long story short lies in an example: The injunction not bury a knife's blade into one's neighbor's back rests entirely with the horrible pain this brings. One may want to talk about principles of ethics, but these just beg the the question. Pain cannot be second guessed. Pain is apodictically "bad".

Of course, the statement here is not complete.

I cannot see how that could be true. Religion does not tell us what good, evil, right, and wrong are. Does it? — MoK

Well, it tries to. But the point here is that when we are trying to understand something in the world, we look to a description of how that thing appears. So we "observe" religion much as we would, say, the law, or geology or anything we want to understand. I am saying religion is what we encounter when ethics meets metaphysics. So what is ethics and what is metaphysics? In ethics, there turns up something apodictic, which is really not the way philosophers prefer to think about ethics, because apodicticity is irreducible. I.e., nothing to talk about.
So what to do now? What if ethics were apodictic? I am claiming it is.

Yes. I'm good with that. I only refer to trace relationship as a courtesy, the final convenient fiction, imagined as "taking place" just as human existence leaves being and engages time, just as mind's perception displaces sensation with signifiers of the latter, and we lose our point of return. There is no trace because the gap between mind and being is untraceable. We cannot be being through the mediation of time; even the ego is of time and has no place in a True reduction beyond mind. — ENOAH

But when you say untraceable, I find room for issue. It is a simple thing, yet troubling. It goes again to agency. Whatever is outside of the states of affairs of possible discourse, is revealed to "someone" that is not merely a construct. It is impossible for there to be disclosure without "real" agency. This I take to be axiomatic. And this goes double for value intense experience. Frankly, I had never really seen this clearly until now. The question is, is it possible for an idea or an experience or a disclosure of any kind to be both what it is, yet occurring to "no one" ? Not about occurring in some locality, which is trivially true (Locality?), but experience of any kind requires it to be an experience to, or of someone. There is no such thing as an unmoored experience.

Consider also: A babe in arms has no constructed agency, no historical self, neither personal nor cultural, yet her suffering and delight must have agency. Dogs and cats, pigs and goats alike. What makes an animal a moral agency? The capacity to suffer and have delight

This does not make the "untraceable" less than what it "is". Strange how this works: Being is not an abstraction, nor is it derived from anything. One has to stick to how if is disclosed, not simply that it is disclosed.

If the former is sound, that shouldn't matter. — ENOAH

That is an interesting thing to say. The soundness of deconstruction must refer to the method. To me, it is the logical completion of Husserl's epoche, which is what the contemporary French phenomenologists like Henry say. One brackets and brackets until language confronts itself, the final frontier, one could say, and what remains is to cease thinking altogether, the final emancipation from the constraints of language; not unlike the Buddhist, no? Takes practice, but this is likely philosophy's telos. Deconstruction takes one to annihilation of our existence, the encultured agency of meanings. This is the only "soundness" that survives the method, but to return to the above, this cannot be the end of agency itself. Such a thing is not conceivable.

I get it entirely. But with respect, I am not using Organic from the perspective of a scientist and in my humble opinion, while I should employ the right terminology as best I can etc., in this case, being an unconventional viewpoint, there is no "better" word to describe the human qua being, than organic. And I sense the word is slightly offensive because of the implications for spirit which we have been so conditioned to favor. My rejection of spirit is not scientific, on the contrary, it is profoundly "religious" in the way you have been in my opinion properly referring. — ENOAH

Spirit is a term loaded. I prefer "tout autre".It is, after all, only negatively conceived, though it depends on the individual as to what actually survives the phenomenological reduction, which I think deconstruction to be the end game of.

Still a bit mystified by "organic," though.

I have read two/three of those books — AmadeusD

You haven't. There would be evidence in your thoughts and there is none. I really did read all of your long post and found nothing, absolutely nothing of a working intellect. A lot of insults but nothing even remotely about anything these philosophers had to say.

Sorry my pretentious friend, but you are just a troll who doesn't know what he is talking about.

You seem to be ignorant to the entire world of philosophy. And a dick. — AmadeusD

Might I remind you of your juvenile intrusion into this thread?:

Weirdly, this response is the kind of outlandish, comedic set of assumptions that has most trained philosophers rejecting continental philosophy as fart-sniffing.

There is no argument here, no mention of anything remotely related to the OP, not even a single thoughtful construction. Just pure insult (Did you not mention later that I was committing a non sequitur? After this blunder of sequence??) yet your pour you off hand opinions freely into the cup. You got no more than your deserve, you inelegant ass.

I have called your bluff on Tractatus — AmadeusD

You have not made a single reference to anything in any text at all. And I am sorry you wasted your money on a vacuous education in a field that has all but been abandoned. Here is a book I recommend:

"The Fate of Analysis: Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash-Heap of History" by Robert Hanna

This is utter garbage, sorry. There is literally nothing that be done with this line that isn't pulling it apart. — AmadeusD

Look, AmadeusD. I read your post top to bottom, and I understand your position. My fault for misleading you, for sometimes I make the mistake of thinking that everyone, if they would just attend to the ideas and their simplicity, should understand the basic thinking here. But this is wrong. You cannot walk through a door that you don't even know exists, and phenomenology is just this kind of door for you. All of this will forever seem nonsense to you...unless, that is, you read Being and Time, The Critique of Pure Reason, Derrida's Margins. and on and on.

So the best of luck to you.

Rather, religion is the foundational determinacy of our existence, and in this, ethics is prescribed. — praxis

Yes, religion as a determination is a body of what I lately like to call a bundle of churchy fetishes. A fetish is, after all, something that has a derivative existence, drawing on something more basic and singular. Like sex. Walk into a church and the feel of quiet stillness, the subtle and somber twilight of stained glass, then the rituals, the symbols and the group prayer, and so on. This is a mirror image of a mind in reverence, of meditative affirmation. And yes, the whole point is to lay out a determinacy, it could be said. Something that fills the metaphysical emptiness with positive assertions.

But otoh, religion as a reduced phenomenon is the confrontation we have with a world that is utterly transcendental, and its value-in-the-world puts to inquiry an extraordinary question. One has to understand this to understand the nature of religion just as one has to understand Wittgenstein did VERY well. What drove him to face death during the war? Or nearly memorize Tolstoy little bible book? The Tractatus is really about just this impossible dimension of our existence, the what cannot be said but only shown. He was wrong about this in the Tractatus, closer to being right in the Investigations, which made language into something fluid and open; but right about the importance of it. It is the importance of what it means for something to be important at all. This is the issue: how is it possible for anything at all to be important? The determinative body of a religious icons and affects, etc., begs this question as inquiry whittles down to basic assumptions. It finds indeterminacy where consummation and redemption should be. This, of course, is arguable.

Please explain this line to me like I am a first year phenomenology student. — AmadeusD

1. Make a qualified Cartesian move. One is not affirming the cogito as the ground for all possible affirmations. In fact, Descartes made a fundamentally bad move: there is no thinking unless there is thinking about something. So the indubitability of the cogito extends to the world of objects.

2. Think of the world as an event. Is perception a mirror of the world? One has to look very hard at this idea. When you see something, and do the basic science of what this is about, it is not even remotely possible that this in my head (and this is a physicalist's science, the kind of thing we are educated to understand) reaches out to apprehend that tree out there. I make this point frequently, simply because whenever I make it, I am greeted with doubt and disdain, something I find so absurd that it defies credulity. Epistemology is impossible with this physicalist model, for as Quine and the naturalists hold, this model's bottom line is causality, and there is nothing epistemic about causality.

4. This here has to be read and pondered, not simply read. When we observe the world and its objects, whether they be things, emotions, ideas, and so forth, that observation is part of the constitution of what is witnessed. This is a very old idea. It sounds like idealism, and it is, in part, and by this admission I simply reaffirm that perception is not a mirror image of the world. Show me the mirror. In fact, I simply cannot even imagine anything more opaque than a brain. But on the other hand, an honest account of what stands before me reveals the ordinary perceptual conditions of things being outside of myself, apart from me, at a distance over there, is not something that can be dismissed, Why? Because the whole point is to understand the world, and the the world is simply given to us with these divisions and differences.

So all this critical thought that undermines a physicalist's epistemology certainly does not violate the field of perception as it is given to us. It simply tells us that we need to think very differently about our selves as perceiving agents in a world. This opens the door to an entirely different approach to explaining what things are, ontology, and how we know them, epistemology, for we now have to look to the relation between ourselves and the world to understand the "what it is" that is there. This is the phenomenological approach. E.g, you see a brain and witness a patient undergoing a fully conscious surgical procedure so the scalpel does not remove important tissue. The probe touches a


5. So now in answer to your question: When inquiry turns towards the self that "partly" constructs the event of engaging with the world and generates a knowledge relation, things turn up that were entirely unseen. This is Heidegger's analysis of dasein, but beyond, into the paradox that occurs when language turns to an analysis of itself. If my faculties, call them, actually constitute the relation of a knowledge event, then what is the most visible feature if this? Language. I look at my cat, and all sorts of knowledge claims are implicit, "claims" not explicit in the looking, but are there, stabilizing the event, creating a general familiarity, and this stabilizing feature is time, and time's phenomenological analysis reveals issues about the present in the past-future dynamic of theevent of perceiving.

Long story short, the present SHOULD NOT exist, is one way to put this. Every time I look up and take on the world in this way or that, I am informed by "the potentiality of possiblities" that my enculturated self carries with it into various environments, as when I walk into someone's kitchen and already know everything about knives, sinks, cabinets, etc. THIS is what constitutes the knowing of the world, this potentiality of possibilities that spontaneously rises to identify the world! So the present is altogether lost, that is, the metaphysical present is lost, the intimation from the world as to what it is outside of the temporality that claims a thing in the simplest apprehension. This presence of the world is the foundation of our existence and that of all things, and yet the perceiving of this presence is impossible. One would have to literally stand outside of experience an announce what is witnessed! Yet there it is, in full color and intensity, and this goes to ethics and value. See Wittgenstein's Tractatus for the inspired insight that ethics and aesthetics is transcendental. Why does he say this? Because they reveal something in the events of the events of our lives that is outside of the knowledge grid of our existence. IT is there, the value-in-the-world, in the good and bad experiences we have, yet the good and bad has no real appearance as other thing do. Moore called the good a non natural property.

This is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. It begins with the epistemic problem, and moves to ontology of all things (keeping in mind that ontology is now very much about the agency that knows), especially the good and the bad of ethics, and discovers that impossible presence of the world (the world is mystical, says Witt), and finds an abiding openness in the examination the phenomenal events.

Yes. The REAL ground is living bodies feel real pain. At that real level however, no one thinks of sticking a hand in boiling water because at that level no one thinks. Thinking and the moral prohibitions emerge out of these organic feelings, are effected by them; but there is no (ontological? metaphysical?) relationship. Pain feeling a certain way for triggering certain behavior is nothing like Morality. The trace relationship between REAL pain and any and all moral prohibitions is long long gone; so long gone that there is an unbridgeable gap between the REAL "reason" (I.e. REAL pain) and all of the multitudes of constructed ones. — ENOAH

Trace relationship? But there "is" no trace relationship, for such things are under erasure. What deconstruction does is deliver the purity of the world out of the grip of assumptions, at least, this is what it CAN do, for the reduction itself, the movement toward transcendence, is not simply an apophatic exercise, any more than meditation is this. Deconstruction and religion are method and manifestation, respectively. The former parallels The East's neti neti, which is simply a liberation from interpretative norms that generally define the world for a person. The latter is a change in the way the world is perceived in a default perceptual disposition. In other words, if one in earnest questions the world at the basic level of assumptions, those assumptions fall away simply by the weight of their own contingency. We live in a world of contingencies, or accidents, as the old language has it. Language is mostly this, save for the transcendental function of language: its openness. The question, as I frequently say, is the piety of thought (borrowed from Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art). Look away from arguments and behold the world, and then proceed with the reductive, apophatic method of "discovery" (I think you said you've read Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. In this book, Rorty states up front that truth is made, not discovered. He had zero interest in the "where it takes one" of deconstructive thinking. I am sure this is because for Rorty, there is no where to be taken. See the footnote on p 123 where he argues with Caputo about the latter's claim about "the silence from which all language springs." This really is close to the Positivist Otto Neurath's response to Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" which was to say, yes, one must be silent, but not about anything! This silence is where Derrida takes us. You may find yourself on Rorty's side of this coin, but then, this would take a long interpretative excursion into Derrida that cannot be done here. All I can say is this: I have as a default predisposition toward the world, a "spiritual" bent, however, any standard religious term like "spiritual" is to be defined in the openness of the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. When I think spirituality, I first think of Heidegger's massive phenomenological exposition of our existence. But he was no transcendental spiritualist, but was entirely bound up in the finitude of language possibilities. He and I are intuitively antithetical in this matter.

I do note that you insist on the term "organic" as a kind of bottom line to thinking about our existence. I can't really address this, for it is a kind of "scientism" by which I mean it is a borrowing from empirical science's descriptive terms to think philosophically. But science is not philosophy. I argue that phenomenology is the nature of philosophy. Everything else is the "philosophy of" as in the philosophy of animal husbandry or one's philosophy of raising children. Phenomenology is where inquiry goes when the most basic questions are asked, and this is philosophy proper, you could say.

"Feeling pain is nothing like morality"? Well, this has to be unpacked. No one I know hs ever made such a claim that it IS morality as we deal and speak about moral issues. Of course, these are entangled affairs. I only argue that IN these affairs, when reduced to the ethical essence, that is, what makes them ethical, is found something apodictic. This is found "behind" the obvious variability of ethical cases, as a constant and irreducible. Here, we do not toy with terms as analytic philosophers do so well.

We both know its meaning. Can you perhaps rephrase the question? — praxis

Welcome to deconstruction. We both know that heat is measured in molecular agitation, say, and if a then ask, what is agitation? we know this refers to excited movement, then ask what is excited? we think of a lack of calm or perhaps excessive energy, or a relatively diminished or deficit state of animation, depending on what the standard is. Animation? Sounds a lot like agitation. Not exactly, but these are synonymous.

Here you can see, I think, where this issue goes: this conversation could go on forever, though there will be repetitions and restatements that are equivalent to repetition. One will ever discover news ways to say the same thing, and never get to that actuality, whatever it is that is outside language that language is supposed to be about. Most of what we talk about, does it really exist? Does General Motors exist? Does a system of thought exist? Not in the sense that a cup or a saucer exists. These only exist in the agreements between constructed meaning. But then, what about the meaning of the cup and the saucer? It is an empirical presence, a cup, but the constructed meaning that allows us to say General Motors exists is also the kind of thing that makes this "cup" exist. That is, we gather thought around that over there on the table, and can talk about it freely and meaningfully, but the "existence" of this gathered thought is entirely outside the existence of the thing. This is the collision Kierkegaard talks about in his Concept of Anxiety, between Hegel's conceptual realism and the palpable world.

Heat? There is a reason why I tried at the outset to make the epistemological point about our knowledge relation with the world. Also a reason why a temporal analysis in this issue is so important. There is a very strong argument that our mundane world is, at the level of basic assumptions, utterly metaphysical. After all, what really is metaphysics if not what is there, and not fiction, yet will not yield to the understanding's attempt to say what it is.

It is hot in this room, but what does that mean? It can only have meaning if the terms used have meaning, yet each term defers to other terms for this determination. This is one response to the question, how does anything out there get into a knowledge claim? Two answers. One is, it doesn't. The other is, "out there" is a nonsense term in this context. They are both right.

What has this to do with religion? Religion is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence, and in this, ethics is underscored. Once one puts down all of the familiar, rote and facile ways to think about ethics, one sees that all that talk about cups and saucers above applies most profoundly to ethics.

[

Not true, the color red speaks, and says different things depending on the form of life it appears in. In an orchard red says “ripe”. In the temperature of objects red say “hot”. — praxis

What if I asked what hot is?

False. Plenty are colour realists and believe the colour red exists outside the qualia Red. We are having this exact discussion elsewhere.

It would help if you didn't erroneously decide that Continental Philosophy is worthwhile, and Analytical not, if you're going to take up analytical discussions. The Continentals have nothing but disdain for taking thinking seriously. — AmadeusD

State your case.

To try to clarify, I offer the example of the moon. If I ask you where the moon exists you might simply point to it, if I were in a position to see your finger. It's not quite that simple though, right? You require an internal model of the world and the moon in order to point your finger at it. If that model didn't exist then you couldn't locate the moon. You would have no concept of 'moon' to begin with. Without an internal model that included the sky, earth, moon, etc. I don't know what you would see if you were looking towards the moon. The existence of the moon is dependent on our internal model of the world that we continually develop throughout life. Is goodness also dependent on our internal model of the world, even though unlike the moon we can't point to it with our index finger? Pain and pleasure are transmitted to the central nervous system in the same manner as all our senses. Where does pleasure exist? Point to where it feels good. — praxis

First, everything is a concept for us. One could argue that this is true for ducks and goats, but it would be a matter of defining what we mean by concept. I think it is arguable that once a goat spends some time on the farm, anticipatory features of the goat's epistemic relation with its environment would emerge, and while this is not symbolic conceptualizing, it could be a proto-conceptualizing, having an internal time structure that conforms to ours, and concepts are inherently temporal: When I observe the moon, as you say, I come into the perceptual event with a "predelineated" ability to encounter the moon as the moon, and not as a star or a cloud. Memory structures the occasion structures the concept, as does anticipation, for the moment the memory emerges, the perceptual identity of a particular environment fills an unmade future. And this is a stream of consciousness, as James put it. A unity of past and future, only analytically divided.

But what about the present? By many's thinking, such a thing is simply not possible, that is, some magic presence (Derrida's "metaphysics of presence," as if standing before an object, language could reach beyond itself and align with what is not in the "trace" of language) that announces itself, and I think this really is right: there is nothing beyond the text, meaning, to behold and understand is to be IN a contextual environment.

This, I take to be your position, or close to it. It has been argued that qualia, the presence that has an independence from the interpretative function of language, is immune to this temporal critique. Most reject this.

What is being argued here, however, is that there really is one thing that is immune, and this is a qualified immunity: value-in-being. Value qualia, is a good term. Value qualia refers to something that is not in any way or form, language. Tout autre. Think about the qualia of the color, that is, the being-appeared-to redly. We know this is not a language perception, this red-qua-red, and no one will gainsay this. But there is nothing IN the red-qua-red that "speaks," so to speak. It nature remains entirely alien to language, yet the understanding can only think of red conceptually. The concept exhausts the meaning.

Value qualia is very different. Think of Wittgenstein's insistence that value is transcendental. He means that in the scorched flesh, the sublimity of love, etc., meaning actually issues from the non linguistic end of the qualia! What is the difference between a fact, a state of affairs, and a "value fact"? There is a distance between the two that is, well, impossible. Love "speaks" the good. It speaks the bad: the hand in boiling water (just do it and observe, like a good scientist). Value facts (call them) issue forth the voice of reality! Wittgenstein knew this. That horrible pain carries the moral authority of a God.

I'm trying to understand how "the good" is fundamentally different than words and concepts. I can't see how "the good" isn't conceptual in nature. — praxis

Now you have me confused. Put it this way: If we lived in a world in which no one cared about anything, is ethics possible?

I don't think that's correct, the honorific name 'Buddha' means 'one who knows'. And according to Buddhist dogma, what is known is 'the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the path to the end of suffering'. To be enlightened is to be liberated from the morass of suffering that is entailed in saṃsāric existence. I'm not saying you should believe it, but that is what Buddhists themselves would say. In Platonic terms, there's definitely a 'noetic' element to Nirvāṇa, insight into a truth. — Wayfarer

It is an interesting issue. I think it comes down to agency, not so much the knowledge claim about value. To be in a profound meditative state is not to be talking about being in a profound meditative state. The latter is a social event, the former is not. The same could be said about spraining my ankle or being in love.

So what IS the most salient feature of Buddhism, Hinduism, or simply meditation going very well? This goes to liberation and enlightenment. But enlightenment about what? Is it a discursive process that leads to a conclusion-- inherently discursive just as waking in the morning and "knowing" everythign around me has this discursivity abiding throughout: ask me what anything is at this moment, and you find logical structures and implicit understanding everywhere, linked in logical implications. There is a lamp, and lamps do not belong outside in the garden, and if you saw your lamp outside in the garden you would be very curious. And so on. In other words, just to be IN a language environment, anywhere at all, that is, you have this "noetic" dimension implicitly in play such that simple perception turns on demand into a logically structured knowledge claim. I want to say that when meditation goes very well, say, if you are called to explain your experience, you can, even though this is a difficult thing to talk about. You could reach for metaphors, talk about intensities, familiar experiences, emotions, how one thing yields to another, another vanishes altogether, the process of advancing, and so on. This descriptive conversation is the noetic element you speak of, and I agree with the honorific name, the one who knows.

But this kind of analysis also belongs to anything at all. It is a matter of what the Buddha knows. This is the enlightenment. My way of understanding this lies with seeing my lamp out in the garden where it doesn't belong at all. The lamp is suddenly off the grid of anticipated events, and I have a question (the piety of thought!), but with lamps, I retreat into the familiar: WHO put it there? Am I seeing this right? Perhaps a practical joke? Or someone needed light during the night in the garden? All very mundane, and soon the question will be closed. But enlightenment, this is very different, isn't it? One stands in an openness of a termination of anticipated possibilities, and all the question remains OPEN. One is now no longer possessed by rote and practiced affairs that run their course, and in this language, the machine that generates ready to hand responses to questions, is explicitly dismissed. I call meditation the open question that stays open.

So what does the Buddha know? It is a non standard knowledge claim. Consider: I sit and stare at this lamp, but deliver the event from interpretative imposition altogether, I mean, I shut up and shut down anything that would claim it. THIS, I want to emphasize, is a most extraordinary experience, but I can't really speak for others. For me, the lamp undergoes an uncanny transformation as the particularity recedes, but it is not the universal (Platonic) that is discovered with some enhanced clarity, for this universal was, it can be argued, exactly the problem: Mundane affairs are "about" universals, and their inherent knowledge claims never really "touch" the palpable existence before one. So the universal and the particular race through our understanding joined at the hip, so to speak, in simple perceptual encounters, and this is what "taking the world "as" is about (though there is a lot more to say on this). Anyway, it is not the universal that is discovered in this uncanny transformation, nor is it the "real" object before me. Neither of these. It is, to borrow from some very interesting French post modern philosophers, the radical other, the "tout autre": unspeakable "presence" of the givenness of the world. Buddhists and Hindus strive to live in this "place," putting aside all of the historical and analytical metaphysics, something I very much try to do. The only authority lies with the sublime apprehension itself. Thought and its language is pragmatic as it is an inherent part of the method of discovery, AND, and this goes to my original concern, thought and language constitute a dimension of agency that cannot be brushed aside. The lamp, the object before me, loses its identity as it yields to the openness of meditation (the question. Or am I wrong to talk like this? Interesting, this idea of the openness of the question and the openness of meditation are the same), and the meditator also loses her identity as all implicit knowledge claims fade, yet what of the historical self, the person one is. What is it that displaces this personal history that is behind the "I" of my meditative perceptual self?

Long story short, I think this is where liberation finds its meaning. One always already is the Buddha, it is said. But this is NOT a noetic acknowledgement. It is tout autre.

I agree it seems a preposterous notion, but I believe there's a sense in all the cosmic religions that existence is inherently imperfect and bound to entail suffering. In Christianity, that is represented in the Fall and the original sin. In Buddhism, it is represented by beginningless ignorance in which living beings are ensnared. The first link in the chain of dependent origination in Buddhism is ignorance. Liberation from ignorance is also liberation from being reborn due to karma (although in Mahāyāna doctrine, enlightened beings may be voluntarily born out of compassion.)

Alongside the 'doctrine of evil as privation' there's also the kind of theodicy explained by John Hick in his Evil and the God of Love. Hick argues that suffering plays a crucial role in the development of moral and spiritual virtues. According to Hick, humans are not created as perfect beings but rather as morally immature creatures with the potential to grow into morally and spiritually mature individuals. Suffering and challenges are necessary conditions for this growth, as they provide opportunities for individuals to develop virtues such as courage, compassion, and patience. Hick also says that for love and goodness to be genuine, they must be freely chosen. Suffering is a consequence of the freedom that God grants humans. This freedom allows for the possibility of both good and evil actions. Without the possibility of suffering, free will would be meaningless, and humans would be automatons, incapable of genuine love and moral choice.

The reason this all seems alien to modern culture, is that today's culture tends to normalise the human condition, by putting the individual self at the fulcrum. But then, that's the essence of a secular age, the only redresses being political, social and technological. — Wayfarer

I want to agree, and I do, but only in a qualified way because I am predisposed to doubt grand ideas that tell me what is really going on, for these exceed to limits of defensible thinking. But yes, it is not an unreasonable speculation to say, as Dewey put it, without problems to solve, we would never grow. The question would never occur. Why this is the case is impossible to say, like asking why about screaming children in burning cars.

I see you have chosen to do nothing but slide further into ad hominem(and this time, it's outright racist). I am, again, not surprised. Please don't be surprised when you're treated the way you behave. — AmadeusD

Just say something interesting, AmadeusD.

self-involved, preening narratives
— AmadeusD
- this is the form of the majority of Continental Philosophy, on my view - again, a direct response to the obvious nonsense you've written;
5. This is my 'social media'. I would avoid ridiculous ad hominems like this, particularly when you are dead wrong;
6. I am neither American, nor live in America.

Please avoid devolving into comments about me rather than my comments. I have stuck to commentary on your comments. I'll do so again: — AmadeusD

Hard to respond nicely. The bottom line is this: you really don't demonstrate any knowledge of the issues. Yet you have opinions. This is a very bad situation.

No offense intended to Americans, really. Just pretentious people and the hobgoblins of their little minds...... unless, that is, you actually have something to say about metaethics.

Where? — praxis

Not sure I understand the question. A place? How about the delight my cat felt as it tortured its mouse last night?

Are you claiming that “the good” exists in “the world” separate from minds (words and concepts)? — praxis

Yes.

This is a non sequitur for the ages. I did warn about this - continental philosophy is rhetoric only. That's why teenage boys are still finding Satre interesting. We all go through a death on the way adulthood - pretending these self-involved, preening narratives are somehow extrapolable is a serious mistake, and probably a good portion of why this type of 'philosophy' is both derided readily, and defending vehemently. But this is like defending Christianity because it pulled you thruogh your divorce. Arbitrary. — AmadeusD

Please take notice, AmadeusD, That after reading your post, twice, I find nothing at all that is responsive to the idea you quote. Do read this thing you wrote, and ask: Did you address, or even mention, the claim made in the quote to target for criticism? What does Sartre have to do with it? Self involved, preening narratives?? These are just words thrown.

You do sound like someone who posts on social media a lot. Ah America, the vast land of the mostly unread!

There’s a host of concepts involved in “the moral prohibition against doing this [putting someone’s hand in a pot of boiling water] to others” that is far removed from the experience of that pain. I must not be following rightly. — praxis

But try understand that ALL of this "host of concepts" presuppose something that is not a concept at all. This is a reference to existence, not a category of existence. Were nothing at all to happen when one immersed a hand into boiling water, then the entire ethical conceptual possibility would simply evaporate. The entire explanatory analytic of "the good" would simply have no meaning at all unless the move is made to this that is outside the explanation.

The concepts in play in a discussion of the concept good withdraw entirely from this existential dimension, simply because there is nothing to say (as Wittgenstein was keen to point out) here. To speak at all one is referred to the many ways the good can be intelligently, if superficially, analyzed as a concept of ambiguous meanings and contexts. I refer you to RM Hare's discussion of functional words where he notes how a term like good finds it meaning to refer to very different things, like good knives or good tennis players. One could say good refers to efficiency, but then efficiency refers us back to the efficient for what? question, and a vast relativism steps in throwing the whole matter regarding the good into usage, or Wittgenstein's "family resemblances". There are many more ways to talk about this, but they all seek to talk, and this is the real issue. Philosophy gets bored with simplicity, especially the entire edifice of anglo american philosophy which is founded on boredom. Which is why Moore''s non natural property has been so disparaged: it is like saying the good is like the color yellow: a mere observable property, not non naturally observable.

The idea defended in the OP is both MOST boring and MOST fascinating. For an tried and true intellectual, hell bent on filling space with dialectic, it's the former. But if one is interested in the world and not just the way words work, then the latter. The former is an attempt to turn philosophy into a meaning game. This is what you get when you hand matters over to a logician (like Russell). Completely vacuous. But fun to puzzle about.

'the good that has no opposite'. It is distinguished from the our conventional sense of what is good, which is defined in opposition to, and so in association with, the bad. — Wayfarer

Accomplished Buddhists report that the sense of well being we have in the familiar world is actually, even at its best, spoiled by concerns and anxieties unseen (Freud said the same thing but that is another story). So this conventional sense is conceived out of a false limitation placed on what the good can be since our existence is corrupted by an anxiety that runs through everything. Consider that nirvana is not really a knowledge claim (enlightenment), but a value claim (liberation). Philosophers in the west are stuck on epistemic truth, but our existence is about "value truth,' that is at the heart of knowing. A discovery that can certainly be propositionally expressed, but this is incidental, and this is a difficult claim because agency is so bound to language. Truth as propositional soundness begs the question, what is the world that aligns with propositions? Things never go anywhere like this. Truth as revelation? Well, what is revealed? This brings inquiry back to the starting place.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Because "something" is driven toward an absolute aesthetic affirmation.

The 'doctrine of evil' that flows from that is 'evil as privation of the Good', which is associated with Augustine, but similes of which can be found in Advaita. This is that evil has no real existence, it is real in the sense that shadows and holes are real, as an absence or lack of knowing the true good. Redemption consists in coming to awareness of the true good, which is concealed or obscured by ignorance (in Advaita) or the original sin (in Augustine.) — Wayfarer

The only way I can confirm such an idea evil is a privation would be to ignore the direct evidence of suffering. But is this reasonable? I do think it right that ordinary lived life is a privation of certain possibilities, among which are positively extraordinary and important in ways impossible to assimilate into familiar assumptions. In a sublime affirmation, there is an understanding of what is real that is outside of the familiar altogether, and this could be the justification for an ontological claim of evil having no real existence. I mean, if Thich quang dong (the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who self immolated) was simply not available for the pain his body was reporting, and he was "elsewhere" and this elsewhere was entirely without painful possibilities, I don't see any room for denying this. But to move from this to a thesis that pain doesn't exist would have to be inclusive of the existence of pain prior to "not being available" and this seems patently false.

Like putting aside the concepts of good and bad, right? — praxis

On order to take metaethics seriously, one has to look, not to the concept, the understanding's counterpart to the living actuality, but to just this actuality. The proof for this lies in the pudding: putting one's hand of a pot of boiling water, for example: NOW you know the REAL ground for the moral prohibition against doing this to others.

I don't know what you are getting at here. You are discussing redemption, and then this looks to be about the notion of "inherent good and bad" or so it seems. — schopenhauer1

I think you have it. Redemption is a fairy tale, as is consummation of faith, unless there is an absolute decree making it so. What would this be? Traditionally, God. But what is God once the traditions and bad metaphysics are removed? I am arguing that the surviving metaphysical residua of a God reduction down its essence is metaethics. Metaethics, in the continental sense (not the analytic vacuity) refers to "the good" and "the bad" and we all know how these are played out in the metaphysical Christian fiction, but this reduces to, simply, the good and the bad as absolutes. Now, what is an absolute? If something is apodictic, it is an absolute, is the claim. Can't even imagine, say, an object moving itself, as its own cause. This is not logically possible. One can argue about the apodicticity of logic, and I am willing to do so if you like, but for now the idea here hinges on this: in logic we have apodictic truth (again, Derrida aside. But then, you will find Derrida's position VERY interesting here, though). If this apodicticity were a feature of ethics, then ethics would be just like God's decree. After all, what is the basis for the absolute authority of God? In popular religion, it is pure dogmatics, but what does the dogmatic position say? It says one cannot even imagine a greater authority that could gainsay God. The greatest possible being is Anselm's idea. I.e., apodicticity. Cannot be gainsaid on pain of a contradiction. I am arguing that the good and the bad cannot be gainsaid, just like logic.

So, your question about redemption: What is redeemed? Suffering. What is the necessity of the redemption of suffering that makes it apriorii necessary, like logic? The apodicticity of "the bad". In logic we have the conditional form, the affirmation, the negation, the disjunction and so on. There are rules to their concatenation, expressed in symbolic logic. In ethics there are two "rules" which have to do with the good and the bad. There is here NO toleration for evil. One has to observe this "logic of ethics" which is primordial just as one observes the logic of modus ponens. The "form" of ethics, if you will, is the good and the bad. Just as a contradiction in logic formally upends an argument (the reductio ad absurdum), so in the "argument" of our ethical lives is upended by evil.

Which is a way to say, the evil must be redeemed by necessity.

Keep in mind here the simplicity of this. Logic itself is simple in its basic rules (Kant's categories). But for ethics, we are NOT directed toward an argument and logical form. We are directed toward the world, existence, the real. This has always been the jurisdiction of God: an absolute grounding of our ethics. But God, divested of the usual anthropomorphic features and all the absurd narratives, reduced to its essence, remains, as does the authority it possesses.

Neither good nor bad, or both good and bad. I don't think it matters which way it's conceptually considered. — praxis

It is about putting conceptual considerations aside. This is the point. Suffering as such is not a concept.

Truth is in present being; not in the I's comings and goings — ENOAH

Just to add: This turn from the "comings and goings" to "present being" is not a turn away from language. One has to incorporate language into the revelation of presence to be on meaningful ground. This turn is away from prereflective engagement, prior to the question of being that throws everything off course. The matter of ontology only rises up if the ontology of everyday affairs is thrown into question. The question abides throughout, for the question is the very openness you stand in as you stand before "presence". Apophatic philosophy is the philosophy of negation, negating, that is, the autonomy or free flow of conscious matters, and stopping them quite vigorously, if you are a serious Buddhist. But that "space" that opens up to the Buddhist is the same space of the epoche's deconstructive movement toward the impossible affirmation, that is, your "presence"; as John Caputo puts it, "The voice of “negative theology”—one of them, for it has several—is deeply, resoundingly affirmative. Oui, oui."

You think I go too far in abstracting from the contextual because I abstract from the abstracter in the end; I think you do not go far enough because you leave the abstracter in place; you do so because the result is absurd otherwise. A compromise? At least admit the abstracter is a necessary fiction, because ultimately the abstractions are done in its name and for its sake. — ENOAH

Abstractor? But consider that it is just the opposite in the case above: It is not the abstraction of thought and the imposition of an interpretative identity called an ego or a transcendental ego. The basis of the idea presented here is not the abstract idea of a self. When you observe a value event (the very substance of ethical concern) you observe something altogether "tout autre" from what language can do (keeping in mind that all along as I defend the notion that there is nothing abstract about language, I have been trying make clear that when we turn to something "tout autre" like this, we are committed to a language setting that makes this possible. I have been saying that when we encounter anything, it is affirmed in language, notwithstanding it being entirely OTHER than language. This is the paradox of deconstruction.

These conversations about deconstruction and theology are very weird, but it is Derrida that takes the argument to this very place I have been trying to hammer out: me and my language standing before a world that is not language, telling me this is a tree and that is a computer, but entirely mute when these are delivered from their explicit knowledge claim (recall Kierkegaard's riposte to Hegel's rationalism: Hegel has simply forgotten that we exist!. This is essentially what his infamous absurdity turns on). I use the term tout autre because Derrida does, and this wholly other is, I am confident, what you have in mind, here and there, in your thinking.

Language is NOT abstract. Rather, abstraction is conceived IN language. And it depends on what one means by the term. Often it is meant to refer to something that is just an idea, and ideas are not like furniture or fence posts. Here, it is intended that ideas do not exist. You insist that the self argued about here is like this, a fiction conceived in nonreal ideas, and there is a lot about this I agree with (you might say I "half" agree with this) but it is not the language that is unreal, but the ideas conceived IN language that are in error. If I say the moon is made of cream cheese, I am wrong.

Just to repeat the essential point: I do not argue an abstract transcendental ego. I argue that caring and its value dimension, because it is entirely other than language (perhaps joined at the hip, as Heidegger would have it) affirms the transego's "existence" exactly because it lies outside of language.

But it’s not in the least bit a contingency. Pain is good. Pain, like pleasure, moves life to homeostasis. — praxis

Because it moves life to homeostasis? This is the very meaning of contingency here: Pain is good IN the context of moving life to homeostasis. Remove the contextual contributions to meaning making, then all you have is the pain, the pain as such. pain simplciter, pain that stands as its own presupposition, therefore presupposing nothing for its existence.

Homeostasis? What "good" is this? It encourages survival and reproduction? What good is this? Eventually, after you've put enough of questions like this forward, you find that you are chasing language around. You have to make that fateful move out of language and into actuality. There is the pain now free of contextual presumption. What IS this? This is the question. It does not issue from established thinking about evolution, biochemistry, or anything at all. It is about something that issues from the givenness of the world, "outside" of language (yet, concurrent with language, in us).

Observe how well it cauterizes a wound, proving its value, expressing its goodness. — praxis

This kind of thinking is inevitable. One has to make the move from the way contingencies create multiple contexts of engagement. When we observe suffering in our regular affairs, this is what we witness. The argument is here apriori: Just as we see logic played out in such affairs, and abstract from these to conceive of the purity of symbolic logic (or Kant/Aristotle categories), so here we abstract from all of the contextual variations in which we find the good, bad, should, shouldn't, right, wrong of ethics, and inquire about the nature of what is in what is observed.

Truth is in present being; not in the I's comings and goings — ENOAH

As an old prof used to tell me, you're not going to get that tart to your dessert plate. Hard to argue this because it has this uncanny quality in the meditation on trying to release value from agency. To me, it is a fascinating intuition. I simply cannot even imagine suffering (or bliss or some simple pleasure or irritation. The magnitude of the value experience is the the issue, but the most intense are the most vivid and telling) apart from agency. This is what, to use a term I use repeatedly, picked up from Edith Stein, Husserl and Heidegger, primordial: It is apriori true that suffering cannot exist apart from agency.

As I see it, philosophy's job is criticism at the basic level, so of course one can ask why, find no explanatory basis and then proceed to deny this. I CAN argue this position, I believe, but the strongest justification for this apriori claim lies in this intuitive affirmation. What is not being discussed here is the language construct, the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception as he calls it, that sythesizes the world into general terms. This is the "I" that has its stamp on each thing perceived, and while this is right, I think, and wherever my attention goes, it encounters the me and mine of what is witnessed, the me and mine here, and this is critical, is, entirely unlike Kant, existential, palpable, the very core of meaningful engagement.

If I were to argue the case, it would in the direction of affirming the local nature of an experience and hence the horizon of value events, showing that it is not a disembodied object, floating among the debris of the journeywork of stars. Next, the matter would turn to the quality of what is in play and how it presents entirely novel relationships with the world. And so on.

But just to give emphasis: the argument would inevitably find the inextricable bond between agent and value. Value issues from us; we bring it into the world.