Quietism sounds like the Christian/Catholic response to meditation. Only the latter is generally not explicitly about God, the meditator "yields" the ego's desires to something greater, all the same. God, after all, is a terrible nuisance in metaphysics, and it closes doors, often, because the body of religion around it is dogmatic. I'll take the holiness and put aside the metaphysics. This at least purifies the concept to something immanent and unquestioned, but of course, the term 'holy' is left self sustaining.

You wrote, "Ah, so you are misunderstanding my point about unnecessary suffering. Unnecessary in the fact that, unlike most of life where you do indeed have to worry about not doing X to prevent Y, and weighing various outcomes of harm.. This is a case where you (the parent) can not create ANY harm for another person.".

You assume that the unborn child does not exist, therefore, there can be no harm for the other person because the other person does not exist yet. One cannot have moral regard for nothing. Is This it?

I'm going to stop you right here, because it actually doesn't. There are some things due to the special nature of procreation vs. already existing people that make the decision different. — schopenhauer1

I'm listening

Why can't circumstances change depending on the situation? This is a ridiculous characterization of how my argument is stated. You have a chance to not create harm onto a future person. I am saying this non-action is the most ethical course. Don't create the harm. — schopenhauer1

I just don't think you understand your own argument. Children to be don't exist, true. Parents can bring these into being; it is a choice. True also. It is an imposition on the possible child of suffering. True. But this future possibility regarding the well being of others (however they may be conceived) is something that applies to all actions we take. Parenting is a future-looking affair, just as buying shoes or making charitable contributions; I mean, in all we do our affairs are like this. Parenting is thus one occasion of forwardlookingness and so the matter turns toward not simply parenting, but to the very structure of experience itself, which is inherently forward-looking.

In other words, conceive of all that you could possibly do. Each that you conceive will be something of consequence and there are no exceptions to this, whether is is deciding about bringing children in t he world or pay8ng your taxes, there will be a "cost" in negative utility. If your argument is right, then we have no right at all to bring into the world any suffering., for suffering is inherently bad and all choices would be inherently bad due to this negative utility.

Your take on parenting is arbitrary, for the logic of it penetrates all that we do.

An argument from analogy for original sin:

1. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy et all (serial killers) were all sentenced to death and they were all evil.

2. Every one of us is sentenced to death (we're mortal)

Ergo,

3. Every one of us is evil.

4. This evil we're all guilty of is called original sin in Christianity. — Agent Smith

Christians will call this a transgression to God (See Luther's Smallcald Articles). The evil here is qualified in this way.
Also, this is affirming the consequent, a fallacy in logic. You are saying we are all sentenced to death BECAUSE we are evil: if you are evil you will be sentenced to death, we are sentenced to death; therefore we are evil. Is this your thinking?

If one is already born, one cannot but help but create suffering (this I deem as necessary suffering). For example, creating a lesser harm to prevent a greater harm.. However, in the case of procreation, none of it is "necessary" to perpetrate onto another. You are not preventing a "person" from a greater harm, as they don't exist, you are simply creating unnecessary harm from the start. — schopenhauer1

Look, it's a given that when you have children, they will not have a life free of suffering. This is not heaven. But your argument analytic in that is moves from the concept of suffering to its analysis of that which is inherently to be avoided in actions. This is true, this does follow and you will never get anything else out of the concept of suffering as such, other than the injunction not to do it.

But if you treat the concept of suffering as a maxim for taking action, you will thereby be obliged to kill yourself now in the most merciful way. You will conclude that any suffering whatsoever defeats any possible justification for allowing the existence of something.

So that is the question then.. Are the parents obligated to create "happiness" if they are creating "unnecessary collateral damage". Of course I think it is always wrong to create unnecessary collateral damage for someone else, as this will be the state of affairs if they exist. It is not wrong to not create happiness as this brings about no negative/bad state of affairs for anyone. — schopenhauer1

It's a dreadful argument. Always wrong to create unnecessary collateral damage? Living and breathing is creating unnecessary collateral damage. Time itself is unnecessary collateral damage, for time is constructed in the Hypothetical. My next banana contributes to an exploitation of third world people. Writing these very lines could give you a heart attack. The future itself does not exist, and each creative act is a hypothetical leap. You can't simply talk about parents bringing children into a dangerous world. That is arbitrarily, for this is only one occasion of hypothetically anticipating affairs.

What is a "good" property? Is positive electrical charge a "good" property? — litewave

Finally, someone put the proverbial finger on this. Arguments are only as good as their definitions. You can't go on about the GOOD unless you have in place a defensible df. Here, it is God's goodness. But wait, do you have something in mind here for God's df?

The question begging is awful, like swirling clouds confusion. Talk about God has to get back to basics, conditions logically prior to fancy proofs.

Its a lousy (Laozi) statement after all! I'm sorry, I couldn't resist the pun — Philosophim

No, not lousy. Does saying something deny it its own validity at a certain level of understanding?

What does Beckett say? — Agent Smith

I must go on; I can’t go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I
must say them until they find me, until they say me (The Unnamable)

Interesting thought experiment to try this at home: Observe the thoughts that are yours "in production". Consider: are we being ventriloquized by history? Where is the generative source?

We're responsible for what we do with our thoughts. — 180 Proof

But in that responsibility, we think.

“1. Omni-benevolence entails permitting the most perfect world possible to obtain.

2. Necessarily, if God is omni-benevolent, God will permit the most perfect world possible to obtain

3. The most perfect world is one with no imperfections, to which its perfection could not be increased.

4. God is perfect- and necessarily omni-benevolent & omnipotent

5. Therefore a world where God alone exists is perfect by definition, since nothing can increase or add to its perfection.

6. The world where God alone exists is a possible world.

7. Therefore God would necessarily permit a world where he alone exists to obtain.

8. A world where God exists alone does not obtain.

9. Therefore God does not exist — spirit-salamander

Essentially saying what point would their be to creating anything outside Himself if He were already perfection itself. Not a far throw from Leibniz, no? Trying to reconcile imperfection (moral imperfection, that is, the only kind that really exists) with perfection. You know there is a bad premise in there and you have find this. But wait, they are ALL bad premises. Just bad metaphysics: You assume to talk of God as if the term could fit in a definition. Omni benevolence? What is this, the will to do good absolutely. What is the Good? This is the moral good, not the contingent good like good shoes. What is this absolute good such that were we to conceive of God's omnibenevolence we could call it a desire to do this kind of thing?
And not just omnibenevolence, of course. Omniscience. Hell, I am omnibenevolent in my WILL to do nothing but good. So God knows WHAT the good is, where I do not. The Biblical Job's God haunts this thinking: Who are you to question God?

I see your point that they are clearly different aspect with different proposes. But where I disagree with you is in the fact, you shared, that religion finds out truth. I guess this is exactly where Kawabata made the debate. For him, probably literature is the only available matter where we can pursue freedom because we are opened to write/read whatever we like.
But, in the other hand, religion tends to be dogmatic, because you would not see religious books of killing God, loneliness, suicide, etc... — javi2541997

I don't think about popular religion here, just as I don't think of bad reasoning when I think of Kant. what people do with religion is an entangled business, a lot of which has nothing to do with religion as such.

But it is a very good question, that regarding the truth of religion. What can religion be reduced to once all of the arbitrary entanglements are put aside? Science takes care of the facts, so to speak. Religion takes care of the affectivity of our existence, something science cannot do since affect is not observable. I mean, we can, of course, witness its presence, but there is a dimension of affectivity that which is not observable, and that is its good and bad essence. Put me in screaming pain and after the sciences give all due analyses, there is a residuum of what altogether defies analysis. As Wittgenstein put it, it shows itself, like logic, yet resists analysis because the bad of the screaming pain is not a construct. It is simply a given, a "presence" that language may reveal to us, but its language values do not exhaust what it is.
In this, it is metaphysical, but then: there is no metaphysics that is not "made of" the stuff in our actual presence.
Religion begins here, in the primordial scream, fist clenched raised to heaven. Or, in the bliss of being in love that seeks foundational consummation. Literature can "show" these to us.

One might say that philosophy is simply a rigorous form of literary narrative, which has gone astray in its metaphysics, just like religion.

Someone may notice, that we can't even say that "God is incomprehensible" because we couldn't say anything about God himself ("can't say anything about things-in-themselves"). But aren't we then admiting that "God is something we can't say anything about". That's still something said if not about God himself then about our conception of God, isn't it? But by saying "X is incomprehensible", "X is something we can't say anything about" etc., I'm already using and/or creating a conception of X and if that's the case, then how I was able to use/create a conception of something I can't understand?

How do I know that I can't comprehend God? — Zebeden

All this talk about ineffability and things in themselves creates a problematic division that leads away from the substantive issue. One has to first deliver the matter from metaphysics, and think of metaphysical themes to be something that something grounded in things before our very eyes, simply ignored. Ask, the question about God, what is it material basis? By material I mean in the world available to experience. Of course, the answer is joy and suffering. these drive our ethics as well as our religion as well as our pragmatic lives...let's face, value-in-the-world is what gives meaning to everything, especially God. We fall in love, get scorched by fire...well, heaven and hell!

But then all of this grand human drama is played out against eternity, and I mean this is our reality: we do not have a foundational generative account of all we experience. It is simply given, the presentation and its depths unseen. Our world IS eternal--what else? finite? Where does finitude begins and infinity end? But this mystery is immanent, not remote and metaphysical.

Our finitude is the illusion, if such a concept has meaning here, for no event can ever be divided from eternity, no imagined possibility can conceive of this. It is an apodictic truth. Talking about Kant's noumena? Where can noumena possibly have its epistemic prohibitive border laid? Does the concept at all allow for that-which-is-not-noumena? Ask, what is the thing in itself? and I add: what is the appearance/representation in itself? Noumena follows ontologies everywhere.

This means out affairs ARE eternal. The implications of this are what God is all about.

When it comes to a beautiful face it seems obvious that it is beautiful, but the longer I look at it the more plain and normal it starts to seem. An ugly face gives a much stronger more visceral repulsive feeling. Perhaps a beautiful face isn't so much beautiful, but undefinable and plain and we intellectually add in our minds more than is actually there? — TiredThinker

Consider the difference between happiness and gratification. the latter comes and goes. The former is abiding. Beauty possessed by an object is, I think, a contradiction to this, for the beauty of the object is a finite rapture, happiness reduced to objectivity, not merely a gratification (which we associate with food, sex, amusement, and so on).

There is something about the rapture of beauty this reminds me of Hegel: to see the beauty is to recognize something profound with yourself, something, I would add, that exceeds the desire to a measure that refuses to be finitized.

When Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) was honoured with the Nobel Prize of literature, he said: literature will defeat religion. This statement made a good debate among Japanese readers and philosophers back in the day that they wondered what Kawabata was considering about.

It is not the first time where through books or novels religion is criticised. Poets or writers, when they wrote their plays, sometimes suffered the consequences or even were banned by church.
This is why somehow literature is also seen as a good knowledge tool against sacred texts and so.

Why do you think Kawabata said literature can defeat religion? Is it related to promote a better educational system or the pursue of a free state of knowledge through books?

Note: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1968 was awarded to Yasunari Kawabata "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind." The Nobel Prize in Literature 1968 — javi2541997

Better put perhaps: literature Is religion. How so?

Just some thoughts: Let's call literature a kind of mimesis, to borrow from Aristotle, of a praxis, which simply means it imitates life. But not only imitates, does so poignantly, with an eye to something about our "dramatic" human situation--"its tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral..." (Polonius). so in literature we do not get simply the affairs of life. We get an affective erudition of life played out before us so that we can stand apart and wonder. What Dewey would call a consummatory performance played out in the author's imagination. What has this to do with religion?

Much philosophy fails in that it concerns itself exclusively with an abstract mimesis called propositional truth: what is in the world and what are the conditions for knowing it? Religion, mostly, is an abundant muthos, affectively satisfying, but caring little for propositional truth. Literature, however, displays both, contains both: wonder and truth.

\

(What are you talking about?) — 180 Proof

While it may be true that being poor in the country is less stressful than the city, at least it sounds intuitive true, you still sight the virtues of being poor. Listen to the hyper wealthy talk casually about poverty, and you will find exactly that kind of dismissiveness. Jeff Bezos and his ilk are especially flippant about what is in fact a living nightmare, being poor that is.
However, putting aside how this kind of thinking plays into the hands of a wealthy person's rationalization, my happiest days were when I was, well, free of the bondage of possessions.

I am rather on the other end of this.

Philosophy does not show us how to live. It's not a what to do? kind of thinking, but a what Is it all about? kind. But no doubt, philosophy as a method is absolutely essential to producing an enlightened mind, and this has the crucial role of delivering us from bad thinking, bad metaphysics, indefensible ideas. But it is mostly a critical enterprise, tearing down irrational institutions. It gives us the ability to think critically at the basic level of things, which is certainly useful, but this kind of thing turns to specific areas of involvement, and once a person sees how an argument works regarding, say, human rights and third world exploitation, then more sound moral thinking displaces messy, parochial thinking. An examination of how well an idea stands up under scrutiny is, of course, a very common thing, and philosophy, the method, steps in, bypassing extraneous incidentals. A "philosophy of" some particular area follows along these lines.

But philosophy proper is all about moving away from particular areas, and into the threshold thinking at the level of the most basic assumptions that are presupposed in all things. Having a philosophical outlook on many things is obviously a good thing, but this is not philosophy proper. It is just an extension of the particular. Talk about the philosophy I have of cooking for large parties is not the philosophy of the presocratics through postmodernism.

You take me far too literally. I'm saying that calling Heidegger philosophy incarnate is like claiming Jesus was the Word made flesh. It's a substantial, I would say greatly exaggerated, claim. To that claim (which I think preposterous) I made a response which I thought responded, sarcastically, to such a claim, noting that philosophy incarnate was also in that case an unrepentant Nazi. — Ciceronianus

He should have denounced the Nazis. Beyond this, I don't see anything substantive.

Well, we all know that, do we not? If not, in what sense don't we know it? I think you're looking for some kind of a religious or mystical revelation. — Ciceronianus

Not for me to say what people see when they spend a lot of time second guessing the nature of the world. The world is, after all, structured by those very ideas that are assailed in deep scrutiny. In a letter Husserl wrote, he told that his students were turning toward religion to come to grips with the phenomenological reduction, which is a method of doing phenomenology that suspends most knowledge claims in order to get at the "thing itself". Husserl, then, was not himself very religious.

Taking this reduction to its ultimate expression, and this gives you meditation yoga, which is an complete suspension of all explicit knowing and experiencing (though underlying, there must be a construct of the self to constitute agency, I would hazard. What is NOT so constituted , a transcendental self, is entirely another matter). The Abidhamma speaks of profound intuitive revelations. Not a popular life's choice these days.

For me, sure, the more the familiar is made unfamiliar, whcih is what questioning things like this does, one is left with an openness that was closed in the tyranny of ordinary affairs, to borrow a phrase. The world is seen differently, perhaps radically so.

Well, he was an unrepentant Nazi, and you say he was great, so in what way is the statement untrue? But of course it's a silly reply to a silly statement, i.e. that he's an "embodiment of the entire history of philosophy"; philosophy incarnate, as it were, philosophy made flesh as Jesus was the Word made flesh. — Ciceronianus

Ad hominem fallacies go to the person rather than the argument. Everyone knows this. And then the straw person argument that because Heidegger embodies the history of Western philosophy, he as untenable as Christian metaphysics. Curious. Why not simply look at the discussion and figure it out?

So you want to know the mechanics of cognition, what happens when we think? — Ciceronianus

Me? I want to know what it is to be a existing person in the middle of reality, "thrown into" a world of suffering and joy. I mean, thrown in this qua thrown. Popular theories do not touch this. Evolution, for example, tells you nothing about this. It simply gives a justified account of how it got here, which no reasonable person disagrees with. No, the question is philosophico-theological. Justifications here are apriori, so we look at, say, pain, its presence. What IS this AS pain, not as a science would simply contextualize it. It is first a descriptive matter.

But you seem to be saying that we can't know what it is to know, in abstract, and without context, without relations, etc. If that's the case, we don't disagree. — Ciceronianus

Well, there is nothing without context. Nothing abstract about this. Take my cat on the couch. Nothing abstract about my knowing she is on the couch at all. Now, ask what does it mean to know something at all? How is this any more abstract than inquiring about how brakes work, knowing full well how to use them? Asking how knowledge works is an inquiry that in no way steps beyond the boundaries natural inquiry.
So I am saying an inquiry into the nature of knowledge is not an abstract matter at all.

THIS takes the matter full swing towards the egoic center, where the much sought after justification for P finds its home, and P is US all along. — Constance

Just to add, Dewey is a part of my thinking only. As is Witt, Heidegger and the rest. So don't take to the letter anything I say as I USE them, to be a representation of what one might encounter in some expository course. Husserl, for example, and intentionality, I present here as a problem.

There may be a typo or two up there

Yes, and also the world's greatest unrepentant Nazi. We've been over this before. — Ciceronianus

its a vacuous reply. A fallacy that is so obvious it has a name: ad hominem.

What is, and what for that matter is "the basic level"? — Ciceronianus

I gave you an example: I know what an apple is in a ready to hand way, but I don't know what it is to know something in this way. This knowledge relationship, what is it? What are concepts and how they relate to the world? Affect we call emotions, but emotions are certainly not concepts. And on and on. Philosophy is about basic questions. It is not how fast light travels, but what it means make a claim of any kind at all. You could say, as Dewey does, it is basically about experience (edging toward idealism, but, as with Heidegger, idealism is a thesis that comes AFTER the most basic inquiry. The most basic puts the relationships and meanings first, for these are first encountered, logically, that is, prior to any thematic undertaking (what is this or that as such, simpliciter?)). Phenomenology is a descriptive account that asks very simply: prior to our categorical knowledge (sciences, everydayness) there is already there, in place, a foundation for this. As you say, the wax example: this is not how we think about wax and there is nothing in the way wax turns up in our sciences, in our conversations, this question about the "existence behind the appearance" has no referent in the world at all, a complete fiction. Heidegger completely agrees, and his discussion of Descartes is a refutation. It is not this metaphysics of the object, it is what is there in the clearest way describable. Where this comes from is Husserl. You might want some day to look into his Ideas, Cartesian Meditations, and others. Husserl gets it from Brentano.
Empirical science is the greatest! That is, for what it does, and it does not do philosophy.

Do you know what it means to not know what it means to know what something is? That would seem the pertinent question if that's the case. Presumably, that's something you know now. Please explain why you think you don't know what it means to know what something is, and what you think it would be you would know if you did know what it means to know what something is. — Ciceronianus

Because knowing my cat is on the couch is different from knowing what it is to know my cat is on the couch. Simple. My car stops when the pedal is pressed and I know this. But I don't know the analysis of this: talk about brakes, brake fluid, pressure, and so on, is very different. This is because braking is, if you will, a thing of parts, it is analyzable.

To make a very long story short, the entire matter turns finally to ethics/aesthetics. You ask "what you think it would be you would know if you did know what it means to know what something is and the key to this lies in value, or metavalue, and discussion in metavalue, metaethics, metaaesthetics (meta here means an thematizing of the analysis of the nature of value; ethics and aesthetics are inherently value affairs: e.g., no value, no ethics) are where the final inquiry must go. The analysis of knowledge is inherently an analysis of value (that's Dewey), and it is value that is the existential core of meaning in the world. Knowledge ABOUT something, my cat or stocks' daily yield, is reducible to an ontology of value and cognition, and cognition, assessed in itself, bears no actual. Or: epistemological analyses utterly fail because there is no foundational dimension; they always begin with the relation, and relations are justificatory and justifications are discursive such that the foundation is always at a distance from t he affirmation sought: P is always on the other side of S. This is why Husserl is so important: that Cartesian bit about res extensa is out the window, but the immediacy of the Cartesian center is not, for it is here where, and I disagree intensely with many on this, our existence and existence itself is disclosed. Existence IS value. That is Dewey, even if not in so many words.

THIS takes the matter full swing towards the egoic center, where the much sought after justification for P finds its home, and P is US all along.

There's need to be insulting. I may be aligned to Dewey, however, who knew this and wrote of it before Heidegger. — Ciceronianus

Heidegger is radically different. He is an embodiment of the entire history of philosophy as he critiques and rejects many of its central claims. The pragmatic event, for example, is not what defines understanding, and affect is not sidelined as incidental merely, but given full examination and fit into an inclusive phenomenological concept. Dewey, from my readings of Nature and Experience and Art and Experience, along with marlinal readings in education and elsewhere, is still fixated on general concepts familiar in nature and material accounts. This is not at the basic level.
Heidegger is more like the Greeks, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant combined. The pragmatic end, his ready-to-hand is, in my thinking, well complimented by Dewey and the hypothetical deductive method; but Dewey is seriously deficient in describing the world at the basc level. For all I know, Heidegger read Dewey prior to Being and Time. He also read the Greeks. It doesn't matter.

The question I would ask, myself, is--When and in what circumstances do we, or anyone else, ask "What is a pen?" Or for that matter, "What is a cup?" I think the answer would be only in very isolated, contrived, artificial circumstances. The context in which such "questions" arise is significant, and when we ask them we're playing something like "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend, in other words, that we don't know what a pen or cup is, or whether they differ from us.

That should suggest to us that these aren't real questions; we have no doubt what they are, nor do we have any doubt that we're not pens, or cups. Why ask them, then? I'm inclined to think this is one of the non-problems which are fabricated when we accept dualisms and the concept of an "external world." — Ciceronianus

Well, that's hardly fitting. I mean, asking what a pen is at the level of basic questions, is just an example of the openness of inquiry of all things at this level. It is not about fabricated dualisms, but about the world and what is THERE in authentic inquiry. That is all. It's a matter of observing the world at the level of basic questions. Just that. I see a cup,I know what it is, but I don't know what it means to know what something is. Now I am in the philosophical mode.

This is a second order of thinking, a reflection on meanings as they are given, not at all unlike what science does when it makes its way through the openness of established paradigms. We know how this works, but we, I mean the general thinking, do not know how this works philosophically: questions about the presuppositions of our knowing, about the presuppositions of science and everydayness.
So then, why bother with this? You can't say philosophical questions are not real questions and this is because they issue from the world, not our imaginations. Ancient cultures did not invent and hand down to us the incompleteness of all knowledge claims. Such a thing is a solid fact of our existence. All you have to do is follow through on inquiry. Consider that you can take Einstein's time and space, ask him how his observations of the world make it into perceptual schemes at all, and he will have nothing to say. He's a physicist, not a philosopher. But then Kant''s Space, Hegel's Time, Heidegger's Being: these are not definitive, but neither is science. They DO give extraordinary insight into the nature of the inquiry and give paradigmatic theories that are AS spot on as plate tectonics or chromosomal theory, given the nature of their field.

Which takes us to metaphysics, that which nearly ALL of 20th philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic, have attempted to tear down. Philosophy does not make cell phones. It is interested in foundational truth, and even if this is impossible, it reveals, in the process of discovery, that the real, foundational questions are not at all what we thought when we were just reading scientific journals. It opens inquiry at the threshold of knowledge.

There is a wall between philosophical understanding and the general pov. A wall of unfamiliarity. One does have to read to know that it is interesting at all.

Descartes made I distinction I don't. — Ciceronianus

And speaking of Descartes, think of that wax of his: do you think a self, an "I" is reducible to what the was is reducible to in his famous analogy?

I'm not a disciple of any philosopher, though I favor some over others. I'm not even a disciple of my daemon, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And certainly not of Descartes, whose dualism was rejected by Dewey. I think Dewey also rejected the distinction you seem to make, separating the practical from the "ontological." — Ciceronianus

That is promising. Nothing worse than the dogmatic adherence to what someone said. Less interested in this, much more in how this serves my own evolving thoughts.

There's no "in there" or "out there." There's "here." There's no "external world" nor is there an "internal world." There's a world in which we live as participants in that world. — Ciceronianus

Then you are very much aligned with Heidegger and others. Of course, then you have to deal with the object as an analytical problematic. Here is my pen. At the level of the most basic inquiry, what IS it? Science has a lot to say, but this is not the most basic level. If it is stated that the pen has mass, e.g., we see that "having mass" is not as if the pen is some kind of eternal penness being intimated by the pen. Where did this designation come from? Of course, the sound 'pen' is what is being tossed around, but this sound is entirely arbitrary; it could have been anything. Then we have the concept (think structuralist Saussure), so how is it that concepts work? This is a thorny matter discussed for centuries, but out of this one thing is clear: Concepts are epistemic, objects are, traditionally, anyway, ontological. No way around it: Were are bound to include the epistemic IN the ontology.
Pragmatists do this, of course, regardless of the language that makes this into a complication. My pen is an event in time, for the epistemology, the apprehending of the pen, is an event. This requires an analysis of time, events, beginnings and terminations, and apparent fluidity (James' Stream of Consciousness, e.g.), meanings, aesthetics/ethics, and all that is IN primordial time. I think the pragmatists are right! Just incomplete.

I'm saying the philosophical conception of an "external world" and an "internal world" is misguided and confusing. I think this is what Dewey says, as well. We should speak of certain activities and things, what they are, what they do, as different parts of the of the same world, but should not speak of them as if they take place in isolated realms. I'm critical of the view there is an "external world" apart from us, which we merely observe and react to, somehow, though excluded from it. — Ciceronianus

But then, there I am, and there this cup is, and there is no denying that there is some "space" (space: more than one kind) between us; I mean, I am certainly NOT the kind of thing a cup is: A cup has presence, visible features like other things. I, on the other hand, don't have any of this. I am not an object to see; I have no presence, there, like a cup on a table. Nor am I a brain with a body. I can see brains, brain matter and its magnification, but to see my "I" is impossible, for the observational event to affirm this would presuppose the very "I" that I would be trying to affirm.

This is not to argue that there is no compelling reason to believe there is a brain/consciousness relation, obviously. It is merely to say that observation as such cannot achieve observational perspective on the generative source of an observation. This idea has a long history in philosophy. You can INFER that consciousness IS what consciousness observes in the world of objects, but this simply dismisses ad hoc that problematic mentioned here.

But I suppose it is the fact that we cannot exist without that portion of the rest of the universe with which we interact which makes me wonder why we're inclined to separate ourselves from the rest of the universe in this fashion and in other respects. We're living organisms and like other living organisms we've been formed by our interaction with each other and the rest of the world over time. As we are part of the world, the idea that we are incapable of knowing what other parts of it really are doesn't make much sense. If we didn't have that knowledge, we wouldn't exist. — Ciceronianus

Ciceronianus....are you being serious? You are a pragmatist. Knowledge is pragmatic, not ontological. Knowing other parts, as you say, is a matter of knowing how to deal, solve problems, but issues about knowing the external world are ones that respond to the Cartesian claim that there is res extensa "out there" as opposed to res cogitans. Are you a res extensa proponent? If so, you are no disciple of Dewey, James, et al.

What is an argument over the nature of value? Step it out if you have time.

I take the view that there is no capital T truth out there to be found. Humans make truth. Utility seems to me to determine the traction or value of any given narrative. How well does it work for us to meet our goals. — Tom Storm

If I have time? Sorry, but yes, I do have time. I like writing about this because it reminds me of what I actually think. Hope it's not too long.

Any analysis imaginable, if taken to the very end of its logical output, turns to value, for in the end, once all concepts have been exhaustively examined there will remain the question that all along has attended the entire enterprise: what was the point of all this analysis? The question of what good the whole affair is hovrs over all that is done. If it were finally and definitively determined that God does exist, what good would this proposition be? God, after all, is not about the successful positing of a creator Being of infinte power; no, all along it has been about us, our desire for something wonderful beyond all reckoning, and a deliverance from suffering. Bring on all of this, and God just disappears as pointless.

All possible endeavor vanishes into the air if there is no value in what is done, and thus, value deserves first place in our philosophical priorities, for all that would compete for this position beg the value question. I see no way around this: the human enterprise, call it, is not one that seeks truth, for truth is propositional-- only sentences bear truth and we are certainly not struggling to achieve the greatest sentence possible. Rather we are looking for the greatest experiences possible, that is, the greatest joy, bliss, rapture, the deepest and most profound, with all the superlatives one can think of thrown in. Find this, and then construct the true proposition: this is just fantastic! and you have found yourself in greater proximity to what is sought after.

So this love affair with truth has to end: truth, in the end, is contingent on value. Trivial truths, like the bath water being too cold or there being 12 inches to a foot, are facts, and facts have no value as facts. (Of course, the pragmatists are right: talk about facts qua facts is just an abstraction, for such things do not exist. A fact is "of a piece" with the structure of experience itself, and value is there in the fact-value event).

Value needs to be given its due: what IS it? This piano sonata is beautiful, a splinter is painful, this study is interesting, and so on. It first has to be understood that this kind of thing is utterly pervasive. We don't have valueless experiences (Heidegger does an extraordinary examination of this kind of thing in his "deficient modes of Being with" in his Being and Time. This guy is an amazing philosopher.). So when we speak of value, we are not referring to this experience ot that, but to the entire stream of experience itself.

As to what it is, this needs analysis. Value is the existential core of ethics. No value, no ethics, or aesthetics. If no one cares about anything, then no one can be harmed or delighted, hence, no prohibitions or rules that would govern these. Then, value itself: Take a radical example: being scalded by boiling water. This has two dimensions, the incidentals: the hot water, the sensate vulnerabilities, the anatomical experience making systems, etc.; and the pure phenomenon of pain, which is evident and irreducible. The incidentals are variable. It could have been that a couch fell on your head or your were stabbed in the liver and the ethical dimension would still be there, so the incidentals are dismissed as nonessential to a determination of the nature of value. Something certainly caused the pain, but the pain is the essential feature, not the couch.

Finally: consider that there are two kinds of good and bad. there are contingent goods and bads and these are very common. This is a good coffee cup because it's easy to hold, has good thermal qualities, etc. The "goodness" is contingent several things. But note how this goodness works: this is a good knife because it's sharp and balanced and so on; but then, if it is going to be used for Macbeth, you don't want a sharp knife at all! Someone could get hurt, and now what was good is now bad, just like that. That is contingency.

The other kind of good and bad is non contingent, or, absolute, and this is where value finds its analysis. Take the pain mentioned above of being scalded. There is a "bad" in this pure phenomenon of pain that cannot be diminished in any possible way. To illustrate this, consider a scalding and other lovely tortures of someone for an entire weekend. Then consider any possible way you might ethically choose to inflict such torture on someone. Perhaps a solid utilitarian choice sits before you: do this or thousands of others, children, in fact, will suffer not for a week, but for a thousand years! Now, I think there is a very good argument here to choose against the thousand year alternative, but note: unlike the sharpness of the knife, the contingent nature of its goodness easy undone by circumstances changing, the torture for the weekend is not at all diminished in its "badness", as dumb and awkward as that term sounds.

One has to look, I hold, long and hard at this claim. thik about the difference between being tortured and its badness, and the sharp knife and its badness for the use in Macbeth. These are very different meanings of BAD. There is nothing even imaginable that can diminish the pain's ethical dimension, its badness; therefore, this badness is an absolute, (notwithstanding the problematic of explaining absolutes. There is more argument to this, but I have given the essentials) .

They do sound interesting but I don't know if I'll ever read them, life is short and books are many. (But glancing at Marion's wiki entry, I read something that immediately resonates, "We live with love as if we knew what it was about. But as soon as we try to define it, or at least approach it with concepts, it draws away from us. — Wayfarer

They are working outward from Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl, for me, made a profound discovery. Of course, this is something that had been in place for centuries in the east, but Husserl revealed how this could be broached in the otherwise prohibitive tradition dominated by Christian metaphysics, rationalism, empiricism, positivism, and other isms.

But then that is within a domain of discourse where such expressions are meaningful, there's a shared understanding of what these experiences are. — Wayfarer

Certainly. Shared experiences is what makes language possible. I only want to say that it is not right to say something is beyond language. The only thing beyond language is the ability to explain language, which would require language to do so. But so what. Language as a possible vehicle to explain things is open and free. It always has been.

That is the area of hermenuetics, the interpretation of texts. It's a topic within Buddhism itself, because of doctrinal disputes that arose in the early part of the tradition. Some of the Mahāyāna Sutras (e.g. Ārya-saṃdhi-nirmocana-sūtra) purport to present the 'definitive interpretation' concerning various difficult or disputed points of the earlier tradition. In any case, the central concern of all the schools is with realising that state of enlightenment. — Wayfarer

I observe a blade of grass. Now where is the basis for interpretative disagreement? It lies within the language that was there prior to the observation. One does not enter into observation and inquiry without already having been enculturated. It is those pesky extraneous affairs and "traditions" that obtrude into the saying what something IS that undoes the purity of the event. In this, Hegel was right, I suppose: it will take time and dialectical struggle to work this out; but then, this IS the conversation humanity has to be having with itself.

Because of an absence of knowledge on the other’s part, we were hurt.Greater insight ( a process of learning) would prevent the problem in future. — Joshs

Hurt? Problem? What is it about these that make the matter an issue at all? I am looking not at these contingencies. One can, in this line of thinking, construct multiple contexts of ethical entanglements, and I certainly agree that clearing the way for greater mutual understanding reduces problematic entanglements. Organizational features of interpersonal understanding are, I find myself agreeing, a good way to lay out a general sense of what needs to be done. But I have, in this matter, no use for this, any more than I have use for Kant or Mill. My one fascination is non contingent good and evil that emerges in the analysis of the value present in all of our affairs. Extreme examples are the most poignant, hence that match to the finger: what is that horrible experience? What IS it in the "present at hand" sense of IS, if you will? Heidegger misses this, or, talks around it. Even Levinas misses this.

Frankly, I find it a little bewildering, this move toward what is NOT pain at all, to provide an explanatory context for what it is. Others make the move toward evolutionary accounts, neurophysiological reductionism, relativism in the inconsistencies of ethical systems and aesthetic taste, and so on. I don't take issue with these.

I look plainly at the phenomenon before me. Phenomenological reduction is the only way to even approach ontology, for here, entanglements suspended, incidentals dismissed, and core features of ethics are revealed.

This polarization of the world is a direct result of failing to reduce the basis of quality-value thoroughly enough. I believe we can reduce it to the point where we discover that good and bad are derivations of simple presence and absence. What it is that is present or absent is irrelevant to the meaning of good and bad. One would then say that the direction of the good is the world coming to know itself more and and more intimately, in a kind of condensation or invagination. Goodness is then a correlate of the ‘density’ of the presenting of presence in the flow of time.

This view explains concepts like evil, violence, god and polarization as derivatives of a more originary dynamic that is not itself any of these. — Joshs

I think you are right say it polarizes the world.

But hmmmmm: failing to reduce the basis of quality-value enough. This is puzzling. Value as a derivation of presence? As you say, presence or absence is irrelevant to the meaning of (ethical) good and bad. Then how does this reduction work??
And: not evil, violence, god. This is, by my thinking, categorically confusing. God is an anthropomorphism, violence implies evil, but then, is more complex, putting an eye to what causes evil. And indeed, all terms are laden with connotative superfluities. The term I would use is meta-good, meta-evil, meta-value. With these, the incidentals can be tossed.
There is nothing more originary than presence, granted. But as such, vacuous. It is the content that gives us existence.

There are all sorts of ways to contextual our it that would finish its badness Neurospsychologically speaking, the sensation itself always emerges as what it is out of a contextual field. Any alteration in that field
changes the perceived nature of the sensation. This is how accupuncture and biofeedback work. — Joshs

But this is about badness "as such". The phenomenon of badness, the touching the flame and the ouuuccchhh!
Clearly, anything can be contextualized. Language itself is auto-contextualizing, you might say: no context, no meaning. I recall Dennett writing about qualia, showing that such a pure phenomenon" is simply not defensible, and I agreed. Qualia is already rendered contingent the moment it comes to mind at all. But then, there is that match burning my flesh: this is not "being appeared to redly"; no even close. this is something radically different. The badness of the pain is not language bound, even though I must have language to give it transmittable meaning. No, there is something else: the world apart from my systems of understanding DOES this. Ontologically equivalent to Moses' tablets, without the anthropomorphic baggage.
This makes me a kind of meta-moral realist.

On the other hand, as I noted in an earlier post, I am closer to enlightenment than any of you are. — T Clark

No, no. I am, heh, heh, "far closer".

Becuase it is not the content of events which dictates value, but the the organizational relationship between events and a construct of events. If we could see that events are nearly content-free, then all that determines value, sense and meaning is how effectively we assimilate events along dimensions of similarity and likeness with respect our our previous experience.
When we assume ‘fat’ qualitative content to the world, the. suddenly it seems that anticipatory sense making must be tied to some originating valuative content ( the goodness of God). — Joshs

To find the originating content is not so far flung. Just observe the pain in your finger as the lighted match burns, or the love of another. Observe it, analyze it. There before the inquiring eye, there is the this originating content in the event itself. The burning sensation qua burning sensation is not a contingent "bad', for there is no way to contextualize it that would diminish its badness. No utility can touch this. In my mind, this analysis reveals the meta value that is equal to God's mighty judgment. This latter is just an anthropomorphic abstraction of this common "phenomenon" of the goodness and badness in all things. Concern, interest, appetitive wants, emotional desires, they all possess this one bottom line, if you will, of meaning that grounds the world in the "absolute".

Good is whatever aids sense making , and sense making is anticipative. So what is good is whatever helps us anticipate events. And what’s the purpose of anticipating events? So that we will avoid being plunged into the chaos and confusion of a world which doesn’t make sense, where we do not know how to go on. — Joshs

Also begs the question: Chaos and confusion are, well, bad. Why? This is the true course of philosophical inquiry, isn't it? Follow the rabbit down the hole of analysis until the questions run out. I claim this terminal point is a question: What is the value of all of this inquiry? This puts the final question to all other questions, as all contingencies press on to something that is not contingent. Wittgenstein put a do not enter sign right there. Foolish. We can build narrativesaround meta value, metaphysics, meta aesthetics, and so on. It is not as if there is nothing "there". There is the "Other". All roads lead here, and "here" is the value of value question. By my lights, the only one left.

'The unborn' is a reference to what is not contingent and/or conditioned; it could equally be expressed as the 'unconditioned'. A natural question would be 'what is that?' or 'What is this referring to?' And my response would be that there is nothing against which to map or translate such expression in the modern philosophical lexicon. (Perhaps if you admitted the domain of philosophical theology, then there might be comparisons to be made with the 'wisdom uncreated' of the Biblical tradition, even if in other respects there are dissimilarities between the Buddhist and Christian understanding.) — Wayfarer

But then, the trick is to define, make accessible to the understanding in language and logic, what is not contingent. I think what you say is quite right, but this just puts OTHER questions before us, better questions, in analytic terms, because explanations are like what the physicists say about nature: it doesn't like vacuums, and has to "fill in" where one is exposed. Buddhist enlightenment, ot to put too fine a point on it, is. I think, exactly where all of this inquiry should be moving toward: toward the intuited apprehension of the world that yields....but then, there is the rub: SAYING what it is. It is not as if it cannot be said. Keep in mind that language as a kind of hard wired vessel that, in its pure form, has no content. Being in the world gives it its content. So then, what is the world giving out? The limitation that experiential truths are subjective and cannot spoken is simply a reflection of our inability have shared experiences. Language''s inability to "say" is grounded in the lack of experiencing the same things, as we do with everything else. Reading a preface to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I came across the remark that it was common for monks to talk freely about their most intimate meditative experiences.

For me, the most interesting word being done is in French post modern theology/phenomenology: Michel Henri, Jean luc Marion, Jean luc Nancy and others. Why are they so interesting? Because they pursue a line of thinking that goes to the experiential "presence" itself. It is in presence qua presence of the ordinary world we live in wherein lies the clue to enlightenment.

Perhaps we could say that enlightenment is directed toward the development of more and more useful narratives. — Joshs

Begs a question, doesn't it?" What "good" is a narrative?

My own view is that this notion of enlightenment is simply tied to various narratives people hold. I am unsure whether anything meaningful can be said about the subject, except from a historical perspective - that is, locating the idea in the context of this or that worldview. — Tom Storm

Well, you should know that enlightenment isn't JUST a narrative. Even narratives are not just narratives. When we understand a narrative, we can ask questions, basic questions that are no different from anything else, since everything is given to us in a narrative; this discussion with you is a narrative. But what is IN the narrative? A scientist will deliver a narrative (lecture) about star composition or plate tectonics and so on. Philosophical enlightenment is quite different because here, we think at the level of basic questions. Here is a piece of what I would call foundational enlightenment:

Understanding the world in propositions that have some truth designation, always begs the question: What is the point? Something may be true, there are many things true about what science tells us, that my cat is a finicky eater or my front porch needs sweeping, these are all true, but then, their being true is utterly without meaning in the form of being true. That is, formal truth bearing, as Hume said (not in so many words), has no value at all. The "point" of it lies with something having value. Enlightenment is concerned with truth, and therefore, to address the begged question we are forced to affirm that value is an essential part of this.

The matter then turns to value: what is it? An argument over the nature of value is THE philosophical discussion to have. Until the nature of value is revealed, talk about enlightenment is just question begging. This makes ethics/aesthetics the first order of affair. All that talk about Buddhists, theologians and Gods, rationalists and their quest for axiomatic assurance, all of these "narratives" come down to an analysis of value and its meaning.

Thanks for potentially diagnosing my situation, C. You may be right but your use of language is somewhat indirect and jargonistic to me - are you a denizen of academe perhaps?

What do you mean by - "too fixated on a propositional conclusion that requires no foundational alterations in the act of perception itself." Can you provide an example of a foundational alteration in the act of perception. And yes, I see how you referred to Wittgenstein earlier.

You are adding the word revelatory to enlightenment - can you spell out an example of such a phenomenon? Are you referring to the sudden attainment of higher consciousness?

You say 'forget about Jung' do you have reasons for dismissing him or is it just personal taste? — Tom Storm

Jung was a psychologist, notwithstanding his unorthodox claims. I want to look prior to this, logically prior, into the thought that puts the idea there in the first place. This is presupposed in anything said. I am pretty simple in this: the world is NOT a closed concept. It is in fact entirely open in every way, given that any proposition you can make about the world, loses grounding instantly on inquiry. That is, there is nothing that can be said that is not contingent. If you were to give this an illustration, there would be a person at the center, and arrows pointing outward in all directions. The caption would read: human knowledge.
This is not a contrivance, but the way the world really is, and the "is" of it cannot exceed the epistemology, putting ontology IN the observable conditions of the world. Thus, the world is, in this illustration, nothing but arrows, if you will, at the level of basic questions (obviously, prior to basic questions, there is nothing but answers everywhere).
What is enlightenment? It begins with this understanding, for contingent affairs are certainly not what we are after here. Enlightenment in the familiar sense, as in, where did the money go? Enlighten me! is not what is at issue. So here we are, arrows upon all things. Then the question is, how does this proceed beyond the abstract argument, and into Real enlightenment, and into the perceptual event itself? This IS the question. Otherwise, you are just playing with logic and language (the sign of a true analytic philosopher).
Until this is acknowledged, there is no meaningful concept of enlightenment even on the table. How to proceed from here is where it gets interesting.

It is not the same form of familiarity with all objects that we encounter. Familiarity can take the form of dread, confusion , hatred or enlightenment. If we gave up living on the world we would have to give up any and all forms of familiarity , since familiarity implies world. So it’s not a question of giving up living in the world , but of how we live in it. Attaining a richly enlightened state requires utilizing all that the experience of world can provide in order to transcend the experiences of confusion, despair, chaos and hostility. — Joshs

A Buddhist monk would disagree.

Perhaps what is familiar is an entangled affair. In it, about it, one can inquire. Maybe the world is deeply grounded after all in something extraordinary, and enlightenment is an aesthetic/ethical matter, is grounded in value first, and cognition simply follows. Reason is, after all, recalling Hume, an empty vessel. God literally could appear to a person and reason wouldn't flinch. What would is a body of assumptions about the way the world is. But these never had any claim beyond mere familiarity in the first place. And really, how far does this reach into the world? Can it even touch questions like, why are we born to suffer and die?

Other people have expressed many different opinions about metaphysics throughout this fairly long thread. For me, your statement expresses a metaphysical position and, therefore, is neither true nor false. I can see that it might be a valuable way to see things. I sometimes call myself a pragmatist. Your understanding seems like a pragmatic way to approach the subject. — T Clark

I don't see pragmatism entering into it. Dewey and co. would have nothing to do with this. Rorty included. No, this is an honest observation. Observe the simplest thing and proceed with philosophical inquiry. Eventually you will, as Putnam put it, end up where the words simply run out. You have to see that when you affirm anything at all, you do this through language, and if you are in Wittgenstein's court, you toss your hands up and say, oh well! failing to see the that in the simple encounter, as the words run out before your very eyes, you are literally witnessing the threshold of metaphysics. Ask yourself, where does eternity end and finitude begin? Do you think eternity is a fiction? Of course not; it is there, in the structure of the world, but most are so busy trying to bring all things to toe the line of familiar meaning making to bear on this that they never see the that the deficit is existential, not abstract. It is in the language itself. Language is the pragmatic imposition on the world. See the pragmatist theory of knowledge: to know is to have a problem solved as to what to DO with a thing. Heidegger is close by here. The trick, I am saying, lies with understanding that such a threshold is existential, IN the fabric of things. To see this one has to reduce all things to their presence.
But here, there is an earnestness in the revelation of the world: IN the perceptual event, there are actual features that are no fabricated, which demonstrate that metaphysics inherent the presence of affairs of the world themselves.