"We use language to talk about language". In this sense, language becomes the space of essentiality. It is what Heidegger pointed out when naming language as "the house of being". That is why I point out this exteriorization of language, even of language on itself. We give ourselves in language, not so much by language but by the transcendentality of language that is even at the level of the cogito. And I would go further, to the level of perception and sensibility: memory. When you say that pain is something mine and mine alone, you are already carrying out a re-appropriation: there is no pain without duration. So the repetition already takes place even at the level of sensibility. That is why we can remember a pain, because its meaning as pain transcends it and makes it possible (as duration or repetition). It is almost like the movement of a language, full of signs and signs of signs. Pain is also a sign. — JuanZu

The space of essentiality if you think like Heidegger. Husserl was an absolutist who thought that there is a true actuality in the eidetic presence, a "pure" phenomenon and Heidegger thought he was trying to walk on water. For me, I think callinglanguage the house of being can only made sense if you take being to be an ontological analytic, such that meaning at the level of basic questions lies in the combinatory possibilities of what can be said in the "potentialities" of what lies in a finite culture (Kierkegaard called this the "sin' of the race). See Heidegger's lecture on ontotheology and his " Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition." In the old Christian or Cartesian or Platonic sense of metaphysics there is this substantival view being, like Descartes' cogito, a thinking substance, this substratum of perceived affairs that underlies all (for us, res cogitans, for the world, res extensa). For Heidegger, this is simply out the window, making all that IS reduced to what language can construe something to BE.

Husserl is obviously not a substantivalist. But he does, to use Heidegger's language, defend the idea of a singular primordial Being discovered in the reduction. What is before me, my cat, is not a cat at the basic level. It IS pure presence. I mention all of this just to get here: I think Husserl is right! And Heidegger wrong on this single point. Heidegger is probably to most helpful philosopher I have ever read because, for one thing, he helped me articulate why I think Husserl is right. Being and Time gave rise to an entire culture of philosophical responses, among them are the post Heideggerian neo Husserlians, whom I read.

I believe you are right about the way language constitutes the Being of what can be said. But not the Being of what cannot be said. When language is deployed to speak the world it encounters the impossible, that is, what is "exterior to itself. A toothache's ache is not a thesis. I put most emphasis on the value dimension of our existence which is so emphatically underscored in the existential declaration of what it is. This I hold to be evident beyond question: screaming agony, say, as the most poignant example, is NOT an interpretative phenomenon in the purity of its presence. Heidegger is notoriously not an ethicist, and I think the reason he was able to reduce religion to ontotheology (see his THE ONTO-THEO-LOGICAL CONSTITUTION OF METAPHYSICS) is because he could not see this monumental point. There is no constituting interpretative language for value qua value (the essence of ethics and religion). Of course, when I speak of the pain, I am committed to the content of my time, culture and language, but value experience, when cleared of entanglements, is absolute. "The Good," I often mention Wittgenstein as saying, "is what I call divinity." This from a philosopher who took Occams' Razor to the radical exclusion of all metaphysics. He is not Heidegger, but they certainly align in their insistence that nothing may be said about the unspeakable. Heidegger speaks "around" the unspeakable in the section Care as the Being of Dasein, which is a fascinating discussion. But I part ways with him here, using the terms you raise: The exteriority of metaethics is "pure" metaphysics, not his ontotheology. Ethics is absolute at the level of basic questions.

The thing is that it is not universalization in the strict sense. It is transcendence, and singularity begins with transcendence (as has been said above about pain qua singularity) and signification. Hence we can establish an ethics about pain because if it were so absolutely singular it would be impossible to remember, or even to be aware of it. Religion, according to my reasoning, is a case of reappropriation of the field of transcendentality. It is something that still establishes universal maxims that must be followed by humans. God according to tradition is a cogito, but his condition of possibility (transcendence) exceeds the cogito. — JuanZu

If you confine the world's apprehension to the delimitations of language, then you will end up in Heidegger's thesis. But here, I invite you to take Husserl seriously, that is, Michel Henry, a post Husserlian (along with Levinas, Marion, Nancy, et al): terminate thought and allow yourself to participate in the vivid sensation of being here. The trouble with Heidegger is that he, while running a very different course of arguing, finds himself sharing the same end game as analytic philosophers, which is the attempt to address the living experience of our dasein in terms of language and its "potentiality of possibilities." This essentially is a reduction to dust, says Michel Henry (Barbarism). But the epoche of Husserl leads us out of this and into an affirmation that cannot be affirmed in the contingencies of language. Hermeneutics throws a broad blanket of contingency over all meaning. Yet when the reduction (epoche) is taken all the way to the direct interface with the world, contingencies dissolve yielding to revelation, seeing that we actually exist, as Kierkegaard put it.

I cannot see that pain being an absolute would make it impossible to remember. This is true of, say, in the way I am able to acknowledge an environment of equipment, as Heidegger put it: I walk into a classroom, familiar with all I see, and these are ready to hand, the desks, the lectern, and the rest. And each moment is a recollection/anticipation unity, and all is, as Husserl put it, predelineated in time. To know is to always already know PRIOR to encounter, and this is "desevered" (see his section on "Space") when encountering classrooms, etc. But pain as such is not recalled IN the painful moment. The knowledge desevered when reviewing what happened, how intense it was, how familiar and in what ways, all of this IS an experience of interpretative nature, true; but while IN the pain, one is not recalling pain, one is not desevering pain to recall what it is. Its BEING, I want to remind Heidegger, is stark evidence of the actuality that lies "outside" language.

Here, I do not care if I am caught in the middle of interpretative necessity (after all, saying something is outside language is itself an occasion pf language) which have no limit in subsuming phenomena, and the "purity" of the pain. The screaming pain of this sprained ankle IS absolutely authoritative, and this sense of absolute IS aligned with the traditional sense of ontology, which Heidegger wants to ignore.

As to universal maxims being followed by humans, we take no issue with this. But the analytic of ethics/aesthetics (Wittgenstein says they are the same thing, and I agree) reveals a transcendental Reality that has nothing to do with the Kantian/Heideggerian ontotheology.

And God is, I argue, certainly NOT a cogito. This is a rationalistic perversion invented by logicians.

I think the essence of religion is belief in something beyond yourself and what you can see. — John McMannis

I take this in the affirmative. I simply ask, what IS it that is beyond oneself? Turns out to be a fascinating question in phenomenology.

I would not confine language and all the mediatedness in which we are involved as a simple medium that divides two poles so easily: man and the world. My view is that the medium is more than what can be confined in a cogito, in a self, or in man. Language for example is not a mere medium for thought but a possibility of it which reveals to us -perhaps even better- the very nature of thought itself, or rather, something essential to thought which does not allow itself to be secluded in thought and which slips into language as a necessary possibility of thought. — JuanZu

As to language revealing to us the nature of thought, there is that problem that language cannot tell us what language essentially is because to say what it is presupposes language. Wittgenstein said this about logic. It would require a perspective removed from language, but this too would find its analysis question begging and would also require yet another pov, ad infinitum.

But on the other hand, language is inherently open. It confines or limits content in no way, even regarding its own nature, meaning when I ask what language is I get answers, as with symbolic logic and semiotics, but ask what these are and there are more answers, but these, too, are questions deferring to others, and so on (Hermeneutics). But there is in all, when one tires of running through a dictionary, this a truly basic question ALSO conceived in language, and this is the question of existence itself which inquires about everything's being. One can now say language has discovered its own existence! The question is now the true "piety of thought." To stop everything and notice that inquiry leads one to self revelation goes to the point you make about language revealing its own nature. Analytic philosophers tend to close shop at this point. This is what happens when you put questions of our existence in the hands of logicians! You might as well ask a mathematician to get such clueless understanding.

Yes, I do have an ax to grind with the empty spinning of wheels in analytic philosophy.

For example, if we take an affirmation such as "I am" supposed for thought, it never presents itself in a pure singularity but in a repetition (Kant said that the I accompanies all our representations) in which its meaning implies the possibility of repetition. Thus the "I am", or the "I think", makes sense on condition of my own absence and disappearance. Hence man can speak of the I am as something that even makes sense in language, in writing, etc. According to this, if thought did not "begin" as repetition, it would not be possible to write "I am" in a book and for another person to understand it when reading it. — JuanZu

This is why the whole matter has to be reconceived, just as you say. The universal cannot grasp the singularity, but only itself, and this is undone by Derrida who argues it does not even do this, and one feels a kind of thud as one hits the bottom of the rabbit hole. The question ends there, for it has turned on itself as one's curiosity faces a world, perhaps for the first time, as an uncanny presence. Important to see, I am saying, that once in this "no man's land" it is thought that got you there. Thought is the way "in" as well as the way "out" (in and out, two particles of language. But why should language be set apart from the very uncanniness it brings one to? There is an epiphany in this: ALL is indeterminate, or transcendental, if you like.

This I argue is the foundation of religion.

Perhaps this is what Husserl was referring to when he spoke of the original intersubjectivity at the level of the cogito. But do we see the passage from one to the other? So language is not an accident of thought, nor something that is simply recruited into a cogito, it becomes a necessary possibility of intersubjectivity. And why not beyond? All this indicates that there is an element of exteriority in our interiority. Derrida said that the outside is the inside. Ultimately I agree with him: the separation between subjectivity and the world cannot be maintained so clearly. Not if it is analyzed from the point of view of the whole framework of exteriorization that implants us in the world and does not allow for a radical gap as has been thought since Descartes. — JuanZu

Does Husserl span the distance with the nexus of intentionality between thought/knowledge and object? Thereby establishing an epistemic intimacy with and in eidetic essences? What a question, I struggle with this. Note that I am not a professional philosopher and I read and write posts for interest's sake. Anyway, it is THE struggle to have. There is my cat, lamp, a tree, and here am I, and I know they are there. How? As it stands, the cat is transcendental, an "over there" that is entirely other than me. You mention language to be a "necessary possibility of intersubjectivity" but while language brings this to light, I mean the whole affair is "thought" to a conclusion or an insight, but then, the terms of actual engagement is something other than this. There is Kierkegaard's "collision" with actuality, and the realization that, as you mention with Derrida, all lines drawn are lines of contextuality, not actuality, and such lines are an imposition, and actuality is only JUST "coming into view," there on the cusp or in the residua of the "trace" (that leads us to water but cannot make us drink, so to speak) that is both there and not there. Under erasure as written.

As to the "original intersubjectivity" and Descartes's cogito, Descartes provides the basis for method of phenomenologizing, the phenomenological reduction, which looks to the intimacy of apprehending, and finds that the pure phenomenon is absolutely intimately bound to the consciousness that beholds it. Consciousness is always "of" its object and the Cartesian cogito is just an abstraction from the actual interface. Descartes pinned the real on res cogitans, but this makes no sense, some disembodied thinking thing; thinking is NEVER disembodied. And since the object (broadly construed) is part of the essence of consciousness, unlike Descartes' Deus ex Machina, the object becomes indubitable as well. Thus, the event is indubitable, but it is not science's object at all. It is the phenomenon that is absolute. I think this is where you come in. The phenomenon has no parts. The sun does not emit light nor do planets revolve around it. Nor do dogs bark, or even make a sound. The world of phenomena is a very strange place, no inside or outside for all contexts are suspended. It is the world presupposed by the familiar, entirely ignored by science. It takes the reduction to discover this "world".

I argue that once one has gotten to this point, religion becomes much more clear. For we generally live in a body of assumptions that do not survive the reduction the reduction: a kind of apophatic approach, a "neti neti" as they say in the East: not this, not this.... (See John Caputo's Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida).

Religion is at the heart of this matter. Our evaluations from the origin contemplate its repetition (something that is valid for other men). The divinity that man thinks is perhaps an act of recognition of the exteriority of our valuations. In the sense that my evaluations escape from me (just like the I am of which we spoke above). The error of religion in general is perhaps not to consider that repetition and exteriority escape subjectivity. Thus, we still make the presentation of our evaluations too subjective. The divinity, as will, thinking being, etc., is the cogito trying to reappropriate that which exceeds it. — JuanZu

This sounds very Hegelian, and I would respond, in a qualified way, recalling Kierkegaard's response where he says Hegel has forgotten that we exist (something I would apply to the entire field of analytic philosophy). Subjectivity is more than the error of universality in the "sense" of one's "I". Jab a knife under my ribs and the pain is exclusively me and mine. It is not a cogito at all that experiences this. The transcendental ego, I argue, IS existence, made evident by the actual singularity of experience.

Divinity? I follow Witt from his Value and Culture: divinity is what I call the Good (or the inverse. It matters not).

I have read much. I don't take it seriously. Neither do the vast, vast majority of academics and students I've interacted with through Philosophy education.

Weirdly, this response is the kind of outlandish, comedic set of assumptions that has most trained philosophers rejecting continental philosophy as fart-sniffing. I tend to agree.
Pretending you understand Heidegger is not exactly a good thing. — AmadeusD

Yes, but all of these "most trained" philosophers are trained in analytic philosophy. Those who have actually read serious philosophy see this kind of thing as a waste of time, a trivializing of philosophical questions. It is primarily due to a lack of French, German and Greek and a realization that to study continental philosophy one has to have studied these language, at least somewhat, as well. Americans are the absolute worst: the best way to avoid this language prerequisite is simply to deny the thematic content that requires it. Now they have slipped into an intense and well stated vacuum of inquiry.

Fart-sniffing? This is rather juvenile. Anything interesting to say?

My point is that cognitive architecture comes first, not some inescapable reality standing outside all narrative. — hypericin

Not first, but, as Heidegger put it, equiprimordially. He simply is agreeing with you, saying the moment something is apprehended at all, it is always already IN a context of thinking, and since thinking is complicated, a thing that crosses one's mind is complicated. A "feast of thought" he calls it, the working through an idea.

But one has to ask, when the thumb screws are applied, is this really equiprimordially received? Is it discursively concluded? Of course not. In fact, it is given most purely, this vivid pain. The What is it? question is going to have to include the recognition that the knowledge of this pain is very different from that of, say, a bank teller: a bank teller interfaces with bank customers dealing with their money matters. What is money? Money is a name for the medium used in the exchange of goods. What are goods? In this context, things bought and sold, and so on. Easy. Now value/ethics: What is ethics? a term that designates issues of good and bad behavior. What is good? Two kinds of good/bad: Contingent goods are things like good shoes and good weather. Absolute good/bad refers to things like thumb screws and falling in love. Value qua value. What is this?

Now we have reached religion's essence, so I argue. It is open for discussion. Pain IS outside all narrative, yet it is conceived inside a narrative. One has to look into the nature of a narrative to understand this. It is a language construct, so what is language? Language possesses the possibility for truth as alethea, in which truth is conceived as "openness". ALL of our words are open, that is indeterminate.

I think that I agree with Witggenstein on this matter. There is no confrontation. Spirituality is the solution for a problem that rationality cannot solve.

Anybody trying to determine rationally if God exists or not, is wasting his time. The correct question is: Does faith in God give you spiritual satisfaction? If yes, then you are one of the lucky ones, blessed with the ability to stave off the absurdity of meaninglessness. If not, then you are unlucky because you will almost surely fail to find a satisfying alternative. — Tarskian

I would agree that it is a waste of time ONLY if one has not asked about the nature of God in the first place. What sense is there in talking about God if you haven't at all understood what the term means?
The same goes for spirituality.

What is God apart from the atheist's strawman arguments of a bearded old man in a cloud? One has to first observe the world and find the basis for the metaphysics that makes God a meaningful idea at all. The dismissal of reasonable talk is careless. You are right to side with Wittgenstein's passion to preserve the dignity of divinity. But wrong, I argue, to think one cannot bring clarity to what we mean by this term.

Free of all the omni's, free of the anthropomorphic assumption of God the creator (especially the Thomist view of creation ex nihilo. Truly the worst metaphysics imaginable to posit something literally unimaginable). These are entirely superfluous and groundless, and Occam's Razor, again, I argue, cuts them loose from thought.

God in really grounded in two essential indeterminacies of our existence. One is consummation and the other redemption. These are very discussable.

In my opinion, rationality is a tool and spirituality is another one. If your only tool is a hammer, then the entire world will start looking like a nail.

We know very well that rationality cannot deal with the question about the meaning of life. It would be the same as asking a computer why he exists. Humans can answer that question. The computer cannot, at least not rationally. The computer would have to ask us, because only humans know the answer to that question.

Concerning the meaning of life, we would only be able to rationally answer the question, if we had created it. So, since we didn't, we can try to ask the one who did. That is not a rational endeavor but a spiritual one. — Tarskian

The idea here is that when you when you talk about the meaning of life and basic questions, you have to look to the most basic understanding of what is there before you, just as a scientist might say about what science does, though keeping in mind that a scientist is never free of the presuppositions of her field and the "purity" of observation is nothing pure at all, but, to think like Kuhn, is packed with the paradigmatic assumptions of "normal" science. (See Karl Popper, not that I read much of him, but the essential idea of the hypothetical deductive method rings true with the pragmatists, and I think they are often right.). Since philosophy is a "regressive" discipline, meaning it moves back to the most basic questions assumed in popular thinking, it becomes a search for foundational ways to talk about the world. So how does one do this?

The scientific method comes to mind, which is the hypothetical deductive method, which says, simply put, that when you approach the object of your inquiry, you are always already IN an interpretative setting. This is what it means to ask a question at all. One is not free and open to receive what is there, but is equipped with ideas already in place, in search, if you will, for an anomaly.

Religion, too, has its paradigms in etiological stories and metaphysical narratives, but these are not scientifically conceived at all. This is where the interest in an objective account begins. One has to put aside a lot, most, probably, because religion through the ages has occluded the responsible thinking concealed in the actual metaphysics of our existence. Rationality not being able to "deal" with the meaning of life is simply an assumption grounded in badly conceived religious epistemology, the impossible "distance" between me and ultimate issues, treating the absolute as a land far, far away. This has to be, well, at least put aside so that one can take the time to be free to understand what really is in-the-world at the basic level.

Science (above) is burdened by its own paradigms and popular religion is burdened by bad metaphysics. But religion IS metaphysics, so how can one proceed in analysis? Close down knowledge claims altogether so one is no longer possessed by science and popular religion and what is revealed? It is the world of presuppositions ignored by science. Knowledge of rock strata and shifting star spectrums presupposes the basic epistemology of receiving the world in a knowledge claim at all. If this epistemic relation is not defined, the ALL of science's claims have to be reconstrued at the basic level. Simply put, the astronomer tells me the chemical composition of Jupiter's great eye, but the philosopher asks, how is it that the very presence of Jupiter is even possible in this knowledge claim?

See, this is where science ends. It has no epistemology, just assumptions. It is not reason that falls short, but simply the unquestioned assumptions! Epistemology/ontology (same thing) is one of the cornerstones of religion's essence for it reveals, objectively and not in the "absurdity of faith" as Kierkegaard put it, but clear for all to see, the foundational indeterminacy of our existence.

But by far religion's essence lies with value. The indeterminacy of value experiences, meaning the question, What is value? is open. Again, reason does not fail one. The givenness of what is there, rather, is not fully reasoned through, and when reason faces the "place" where paradigms "run out" it is fully within reason that this occurs.

More on value if you like.

I knew there was a reason Continental philosophy isn't taken seriously... — AmadeusD

.....isn't taken seriously by those who have never read it. To those who have read it, it is taken very seriously. But Wikipedia is not reading.

Fair point. I'm not sure that I've ready philosophy in the spirit of "love [ing it] with all of my heart soul and might." There might be something to that; but the "arrival" will have to reach beyond the reaches if reason if it is to be ultimate. — ENOAH

Well, if ever you get the impulse put to heart and soul forward, be aware that anglo american thinking is very different from the metaphysics of continental philosophy. The former enjoy puzzles, little more. Clever about arguments, but regarding the world, they, as Kierkegaard said of Hegel, simply have forgotten that they actually exist.

I see. I haven't been clear enough about tge relative absurdity of seeking what is unattainable to the Seeker. I say a solution is drop the Seeker and look at being (for a second). You seem to say drop the seeking, and focus the seekers attention on what is good. I agree, but consider yours to be the next step. This is how I see tge metaphysical as necessarily preceding the ethical. Step one: know you are not the projections; albeit inextricably entangled. Step two: focus on making the projections good (as in morally/as in without tge ego) — ENOAH

Dropping the seeker. Explicit seeking, yes. But the question is not about what is encountered only. It is about what has to be the case given what is encountered. An extrapolation.

But first, what is actually witnessed. The following I think you will agree with. Suffering is, again, poignant and makes the case most visible. So I am now in my phenomenological analytic, and not that of biology, medicine, chemistry, and the rest of the "natural" sciences. Such a position is unique, even sui generis, for to observe phenomena qua phenomena, one has to engage in the method of the reduction. Like I said, it is a bit of a no man's land, a radical forgetting, if you will. Imagine what is was like for the ancient mind to behold the sun with such a dearth of presuppositions about the world that it was possible to think it a God. Put aside the modern prejudice that comes with its "grand narrative" of knowing; you've heard this term before, no doubt. It is Lyotard's referring to the postmodern collapse of metaphysics. Science, too, is a grand narrative, more obfuscating and intrusive than the church ever was in its explicit denial of metaphysics. We are all trained k through 12 and beyond in this. This entire education has to be ignored. This is why I think the Buddhists are very advanced phenomenologists, for all they do is sit quietly, but not "doing nothing". Rather, they are annihilating the world's knowledge structure, and this is just what the reduction does, if allowed to do so.

So what is actually witnessed as the "pure" phenomenon really does need a liberation from everydayness. Can one observe the sun (errr, without burning a retina) or a tree altogether without habit and familiarity at all? See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety where he investigates Christianity's original sin. "Habit" of the race, he calls this impediment of culture and he condemns the displacement of faith by all of the many institutions that had become so privileged. Free of the tedious recollection, beholding it only in repetition. A Kierkegaardian book on this called Repetition: to participate in the world not as the way it is possessed by prior knowledge, but as it is first done, first encountered, free of this. The idea in Repetition is an attempt to explain just this above, to receive the world not as a backward looking event, allowing memory to dominate and determine, but as a first encounter, in each encounter, a first, forward looking with the anticipation free of encumbering presuppositions. This is phenomenology's mystical perspective (notwithstanding Heidegger, who nevertheless gives this kind of thing a wealth of conceptual facilitation), this uncanny discovery of the now, in which one looks around, and is lost as the habits of perception do not spontaneously seize the moment.

Now we can think of suffering. Its "thereness" released from interpretation. What is witnessed is now without identity save its own, but note the event is proximal in some way. It is not over there, but "here"; but where is here? The here is me, and the concept of mine pins the suffering to me. When the attempt is made to severe suffering altogether from proximity, there is a misrepresentation of what is witnessed. Recall the old Cartesian cogito and Henry (and Husserl's) complaint. What is there is witnessed to be there, and, as I have argued, the more the object is loosened from the relation, and becomes disembodied "thereness" it drifts into nothingness. Can suffering exist without agency? Without anyone experiencing the suffering? This I take to have a negative answer.

But it IS a very, very good question, I think. That such an idea is impossible (I am affirming) has serious implications. It is not like the quale red, say. Agency and "being appeared to redly" does not have nearly thislogical insistence (or the logic of the intuition of agency and suffering being inseparable). Can the color red appear sans agency? Hmmm. If there is no value in the experience of the "being appeared to redly" (thought this is just an abstraction) that is, if there is no caring, no vital intimacy or even interest, boredom, then we could very well dismiss Husserl's Transego. But value; this is altogether different. One might call it an argument for the soul, the "seeker" who is the non seeking existing agency that is the center of affectivity.

I'm too unclear. Yes. Of course thought is unavoidable and the necessary pre-step in my aforesaid steps one and two. I assume that because I participate, it is obvious that I recognize one cannot avoid this pre-step. I accept H and H executed admirable presteps. — ENOAH

They are giants. Worth reading if you just want to see if you can keep up. With Heidegger, it is Being and Time in one hand and Greek terms he uses to rethink philosophy in the other.

This and only this, I think is where we may diverge. Yes, child "understands" nothing without language. But since all judgement, including those flowing out of that fact exist only in language, "language" adjudges understanding to have ontological(?) epistemelogical(?) metaphysical(?)--Truth--priority over what that hypothetical child receives from so called God. It's not "meaning" another species of "language". And yes, I cannot identify or label for you what that receipt from God is without language. Duh (not you, all of us). I can only receive it. My theory (already ultimately false as I repeat it) is that the Child receives Life from God. But because (completely hypothetical) Adam chose knowledge over life, we are always in need of redemption--not because God withdrew Its Gift--but because our fixation on wanting to understand it, obstructing us from just being it. — ENOAH

There is a lot in this. Putting aside Adam, I do see the idea. All I can say is that language itself is just as alien and impossible to pin. It opens possiblities. The uncanniness of the world is revealed as what is not language, but this is done in the openness of language. More on this if you like.

We were not built to live without spirituality. That is why it is so universal across the globe and throughout history. — Tarskian

I lean to saying yes to this. But "spirituality" is in need of a proper "deconstruction" and by this I only mean that when you start looking into the term and its possibilities, you discover more clearly where the issues lie. Spirituality is an intellectual and existential struggle, or, it should be. When one pulls one's head out of the sand and asks the big questions that inspired the ancient stories, the difficulty lies in "the void" as you put it, the indeterminacy of all our affairs. What actually happens when you confront this? For most, very little. meaning one either retreats beneath sand of old stories and rituals or one just rejects the sense of the confrontation, like Wittgenstein. But note, he was by no means an atheist. He placed Kierkegaard in the highest regard, but argued that this cannot be argued or spoken of because there is nothing in the grid of states of affairs that is "value". Positivists are bad Wittgensteinians because they took nonsense to mean without meaning, which is just the opposite of what he was about. For Witt, value meaning in ethics and aesthetics was TOO important to be trivialized by philosophers .Anyway, very few take the third alternative, which is to try to understand religion at its foundation. An analysis of spirituality, if you will. Two questions: what is value? and what is knowledge/ontology (same thing, I argue)?

This is what is being attempted here.

Religion is how this symbolic space is colonized in different cultural arenas. It apparently cannot be left empty, it has to be filled in one way or another. Everything has meaning in religion, because religions fully fill the symbolic space.

So your question, what is the true meaning of religion, is itself an expression of the basic religious impulse to fill the symbolic space. In this case, the space behind "religion".

And this is why science is a competitor to religion. Not because the mechanistic accounts of how things work differ. But because it offers a parallel, and empirically grounded, vision of what explaining the meaning of things looks like. The tree isn't just the tree we see. It is the vast scientific story that explains it. — hypericin

On the other hand, the science that discusses a tree is not just filling space, not just a lot of empty fictional narrative. Religion, too, taken seriously, is not this. Of course, there is a great deal of fiction in the "grand narratives" of metaphysics, but just as, say, when the tree is put into a more rigorous context of discussion, its more frivolous narratives are dropped, so with religion, we seek to drop the frivolous and discover what it is "really" about.

It can ALL be called a story, certainly. Geology is a story about the earth, astronomy one about the stars, and so forth. But a view like this divests the engagement of any objective verisimilitude at all. But then, as Kierkegaard said about bible stories, fictions no more fictional than modern claims of discovery. This is what happens when you either, as Kierkegaard put it, think of thought and reality as a collision of entirely unlike natures, or, like Heidegger, think all truth is an historical construct. Truth is made, not discovered, said Rorty.

I actually think all of this is right, or close to being right. Fascinating idea, really. Reading Paul Ricoeur, I find the idea that we mostly live a narrative compelling, and if you want to talk about it, fine. But for the matter here concerning religion: For this argument, the claim is one can stand outside narrative. Doing this, one no longer stands among the familiar notions that clutter living, the everydayness, the "idle talk" (Heidegger), and the mindless "narrative" of one's affairs that mostly defines who we are. Long story on this, but again, religion: Stand apart from the familiar naivite of daily events, and witness the phenomena that lies "beneath" such things. Now you can observe the presuppositional grounding of the world, phenomena. What one finds here is not narrative, but stark presence, even obscenely vivid and real beyond ordinary apprehensions. This is "life" says Michel Henry (his own use of the term).

I argue that one can discover the nature of religion here, in the nature of human affectivity. Affectivity is the existential value Wittgenstein was talking about when he said "The Good? this is what I call divinity."

If you are looking for the godhead, than ask that fateful question, only take it very seriously: how does anything out there get into a knowledge claim? Not that it does not get into a knoweledge claim, for clearly it does. But how is this possible? It is crazy to go after this, but once you see that the epistemic relation between you and the lamp on your desk is epistemically impossible in all the familiar models, you have to then go to some other model. Phenomenology only can see this.

they are not elucidating on any ultimate Truth about so called Eternity, or how the Universe/Reality/Godhead (if you wish), function, but only on how the human mind constructs and projects.
The former, is utterly not propositional, not knowledge in any form. It can only be accessed by the being in its being: thought is a distraction. Mind has displaced truth with make-belief. — ENOAH

I do continue to disagree with this.

To get to Universe/Reality/Godhead, you have to work through phenomenology. There is a letter to someone, can't remember who, in which Husserl relates that many of his students found in phenomenology a sound basis for religious understanding. Surprised him a bit. The way I see it is this: I don't read Heidegger to understand Heidegger, nor Husserl to understand Husserl. Rather, I read them to understand the world. But they are only as helpful as I am eager to understand. A person has to be REALLY eager to read this philosophy. One has to be already looking rather emphatically for Universe/Reality/Godhead to discover how phenomenology can facilitate discovery; or, one has be just be really interested in existential puzzles. Rorty straddled the fence and came up with very helpful thoughts for me. But he had no core religious interests. Dropped philosophy altogether at the end, taught literature, convinced there was nothing more to say in philosophy. But this was because he was through and through an academic, and had no, well, intimations of anything else. When he said there are no truths beyond propositional truths (truth is something a proposition has, and there are no propositions out there in the trees and rocks) he was following Dewey's naturalism.

Husserl does talk about the universe, reality, not so much the godhead. I talk about this kind of thing, though the talk is "threshold" talk. The reduction takes people like me to the threshold of finitude. The reduction facilitates this, inspires it, clarifies it, gives vague but strong curiosity a contextual setting for thoughts to make sense. Kant helps and Heidegger helps massively, and so does Dionysius the Areopogite and Meister Eckhart. And Derrida, and ALL of them. This is mystical phenomenology, where no self respecting anglo american philosopher will step foot.

Truth: I defend one truth, really, which is that what is sought here is not truth. One seeks the Good. We are not trying to discover what IS qua IS; this is patently absurd and it gives us his "equirpimordaility". for Heidegger, an historical ontology of structural features clear to inquiry. But, I argue, there really is a primordial singularity, and this is value, the Good, what the entire universe/reality/godhead is "about". What is the the Good? This is existential, by which I mean one has to look away from discursivity, and toward existence. Stop thinking, in other words. Husserl's epoche, all the way down the rabbit hole, leads no where but here, the cessation of thought in order for the world to "speak" at the basic level.

Of course, this is close to what you have been saying, but you do continue to say "thought is a distraction" and I can't abide by this. It is a distraction if you are trying experience something that is itself expressly not thinking. If you are trying to learn how to ride a bike, you don't talk your way through this. But once done, and you get it, the understanding is there, and always has been there. Try to imagine what it would be like to know how to ride a bike, but when asked to explain, absolutely nothing came to mind. What, no feet applying pressure to pedals in a circular thrust connected to a series of gears, etc.? Yes, a child might find herself like this, but a child has very limited understanding. A child may have God attending every moment of life as an infinite grounding of meaning, but the child will understand nothing. Language does this. Thought does this. Affective cognition; this is what we are, and the two are one. The Good, or God, is not itself the thought of the Good, but through thought one acknowledges and understands. Through thought, thought recognizes its own finitude. What is thought really? This question is transcendental. You were impressed by the Fink passage. earlier. He is saying the the entire ground of world acceptance is open and the epoche allows us to stand in the openness of the world.

I do suspect you harbor still a deep physicalist ontology, as we all do. This has to be, well, cured. Kant is the cure. He is not, certainly, right about everything. But if you have the curiosity that will sustain through several hundred pages of rather dense thinking, then you will come out the other end a very changed philosopher.

What I'm saying is, no one can say them. — ENOAH

Yes and no. To say "no one can say them" tells us first that the not being able to say is already said in the utterance itself. One can say X cannot be said, but for this to make sense, X has to be brought into a context of saying. Nothing but paradox. X can be said, but is not in the saying itself, what is said. Same goes for my cat. X is always already in need of a context to disambiguate. This in no way intrudes or undoes what it IS, but it raises the issue of where and how thought allows this to happen. For Husserl, and post Husserlians like Henry, the proof is in the pudding. Once the world is divested of all language has to say in all of its reigning mundanity, the world beneath, the hidden primordiality of the world becomes more evident. The reduction takes one INTO the world and reveals the things that are suppressed by familiarity. And one can see the foundational religiosity that modernity has preplaced.

Not sure re "pragmatics" but I generally relate to the Pierce quote. Anyway, why for me apodictic does appear in degrees, and what I mean by "sprouted same field," is also related to my referencing organic feeling. While laws of logic seem apodictic, you'll note some Moral Laws also come close (which is your objection, "comes close" is thus not apodictic). Think of both as ultimately a belief (I believe it absurd or un-do-able to believe "I am a married bachelor"/ I believe it "absurd" un-do-able to believe "I'm going to kill my only child"). Neither actually has anything to do with a pre-existing attribute/state/law/tendency/desire of any all encompassing reality governing the universe or my body. Both are paths stored in memory as "language" to trigger functionally fitting responses. These triggers are so well entrenched in the feedback loop from language to feelings, that they promptly "release" whatever organic feeling it is which inspires a powerful confidence in the animal which would cause it to without hesitation act. Powerful trigger in the form of language is apodictic. Most people would also "with the fervor of apodiction" never eat shit. It is the same mechanism but not so obviously organic, buried in signifiers. — ENOAH

Consider what happens when you try to imagine an object moving itself. This is buried in signifiers? What is meant by buried? Does it mean that there is an indeterminacy of the "trace" in talking about anything? But this is addressed: the trace is the interpretative value that inhibits any sort of direct apprehension of things in the world. But now, take the lighted match and apply it to your finger. Are you thereby distanced from the terrible pain because the language that stabilizes your understanding of what is occurring cannot be shown to be correspondingly linked to it? The notion is absurd. Clearly, the world is this overwhelmingly vivid and its existence cannot be doubted for a moment at this level of inquiry. What can be doubted is the interpretation of the world, and so the pain you experience: What is it? is an interpretative issue, save one thing, and this is the OP. Now consider an object self moving: it is impossible. Surely we can talk about certainty and the feeling of moving toward doubt and how the need for fixity asserts itself, but you find yourself in Hume's world, where Kant points out that there is difference between the mere concatenation of two events that happen with such frequency that they are mistaken for an embedded law, and events that happen by necessity.

One way to go is Quine's in his Two Dogmas paper: He doesn't argue against necessity, but against analyticity: two terms that differ have different senses (the morning star and the evening star) even though they may have the same object. I'd have to read it again. But it is an interesting point, and perhaps in line with your thoughts. And if there is an impact on the thesis of the OP, it would be a favorable one, for religion has its essence in metaethics and metaaesthetics, and these are powered by value-in-the-world. Value's apodicticity is IN existence, not form, and the existence of suffering and delight is even less effected by considerations of language and trace. That punch to kidney is far more actual and indubitable in its consequences than the principle of negation. Not more; it is absolute. There is no more or less here.

Yes! And irrationality does work for some. Those suffering delusions (obviously, doesnt work for the rest of Mind but its "working" for that mind and we need not get intonthe reasons*); those inspired by a teleology requiring the suspension of rationality (e.g. a parent acts against reason to lift a car off a trapped child; romantic love; an individual is willing to temporarily suspend even reason in pursuit truth etc). Our minds with well tread paths to the Subject, reject any ideas--like such radical relativity--but a Phenomenological Reduction might reveal that "if it works" is what is at the root of every belief held by every mind. — ENOAH

I couldn't agree more. Same goes for Husserl. There is one exception, which is posited several times above. It has to be kept in mind that we are dealing with phenomena, not the familiar world. In the phenomenal world, planets do not revolve around the sun nor does UPS deliver boxes. All of this is suspended. The phenomenal world is an extraordinary "place" and Kant is a good way to look into it at first. It is a very odd world, and if you have a kind of well passion to find out about what can be said about existence and the godhead, then you will be taking a step into a kind of no man's land. A far greater intimacy with the world than most can even imagine.

This sounds like something I need to understand better. If you don't mind clarifying when you can. — ENOAH

It is just that there is no analysis to something truly primordial (Heidegger aside). That pain CANNOT be refuted or argued about or divested of its essence, which in our hermeneutical setting we call bad. The pain can made ambiguous in familiar ways (torturing someone into telling you where the bomb is located, and the like) and it can be strangely transmuted in weird associations, like masochistic fetishes, but that just changes what is clearly pain ul to what is now complexly painful, and this is the world. Not what this is about. If there are no transmuting conditions that would compromise the pain's being bad, then...... Not hard to imagine, screaming children in burning cars and the like are exemplary. The fact that you can reconstrue pain says nothing about its nature. This is the point.

Same as above. I mean, what makes a stab in the kidney "bad"? — ENOAH

Exactly! Do an exhaustive analysis of the factual contents of the kidney-in-pain event. Compare to a non-value fact, like the earth having more mass than a river rock or the DNA molecule having genetic material. Any non value fact is presumably exhaustible by an empirical analysis. Even an apriori analysis, if you like. But what happens with the analysis of the kidney? You will find, and this is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about it, something "else". You are invited to question this, but this is not well received in modern philosophy. Just because it is massively mysterious. What is the Good? The love, the happiness and bliss and pleasures, and the horrors and terrible suffering; what IS this dimension of our existence?

Am I far from where you are going? This one has puzzled me. — ENOAH

One has to disengage explanations. This is what the reduction is all about. Look as if one were a scientist looking for objectivity in one's observation. Do you find the "non natural" property, as G E Moore put it (Principia)?

The essence of religion consists in giving a face and a will to the universalizing influence that is exerted upon us and upon which we are deployed. It is the law with a face and a will. Hence that face and will can become anthropomorphic (God). The question is why do we give a divine face and will to the unfolding of the law? The essence of religion, it seems to me, lies in the answer to the question of why we give face, will and divinity to the quasi-universalizing (it would be better to say Exteriorizing) unfolding of our valuations. — JuanZu

In a very serious way, everything around us is already anthropomorphized, but to see this, one might have to go through Kant. But the basic idea is that when I perceive anything, that which is perceived is an event and a synthesis. Seeing a tree is to "see" my perceptual contribution to the event of seeing the tree. A tree IS the thought, feelings, intuitions, and so on as well as "that over there". Epistemology and ontology come together, two sides, if you will, of the same thing.

I have no idea what something is outside of this synthetic being I witness, and it is just bad metaphysics to even think such a thing. "The world is mystical," wrote Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. But whether it is "states of affairs" or language games, clearly metaphysics like this is foolish.

So here we are, in a world saturated with "the human," always already anthropomorphized when we catch a bus or study geological.

But how? I think H² aimed for pure being, but, to put it plainly, couldn't detach the ego. Makes perfect sense, reason, like it's particular, logic, and its universal, the rest of grammar, necessarily includes subject and predicate. Even in the first modern phenomenological reduction, there it necessarily was, I think. No your body doesn't think; your mind constructs extremely fitting signifier structures, and projects them. Descartes remained in the projection; aimed for the body, but, just as is being done here, fell short.

Why do we all fall short? Any intellectual effort is necessarily short of Truth. Intellectual pursuits are projected constructions. From what I have gathered, I can detail the mechanics less complexly than Dasein and all of its--though H2 may deny it--categories. But we're all just making and believing what fits various malleable criteria, triggers.

Again, H might have realized but fell short due to his locus in History, that the only access to being is by a non intellectual path, one involving the being, the Body, not in pursuit of being, but having returned its aware-ing to its being. Philosophy needs to have the courage to admit a more functional truth, even if it proposes a practice which is virtually impossible. But it cannot. So we turn to religion. . . — ENOAH

There is too much in this to take on. You know Heidegger was arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and his views are comprehensive. I can only give sketchy ideas where hundreds of pages are written. Heidegger explicitly rejects "pure being" as a descriptive term for dasein, human existence, that is. He doesn't use terms familiar terms like ego or consiousness (the German equivalent). H wants to start a new discussion with new terms in play, mostly Greek ones, going back to Parmenides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Plato, because, like Nietzsche, among other things, the intervening thought he thought distorted philosophy. Purity is replaced by "equiprimordiality". The purest you can possibly get is hermeneutics, which is the opposite of purity: The most basic things one can say about our existence is complicated, not simple and pure. Descartes was simple and pure with his cogito: a thinking substance here, and res extensa there. This is the kind of thing Heidegger argued against very early on in Being and Time. For both Husserl and Heidegger, the reduction takes one to the foundation of thought and Being. Husserl thought it took one to single primordiality, pure phenomena. For Heidegger, and he is qualifiedly right about this, this is a fool's errand.

So he does not share you idea of Truth. There is no such thing as this impossible finality. The world is foundationally open and indeterminate. Truth is made, not discovered, Rorty says, partly influenced by Heidegger (mostly Dewey), philosophy, as you put it, has "the courage to admit a more functional truth." Pragmatists hold the same (Peirce, James, Dewey; though Peirce goes a bit too far with his "long run inquiry"). A very strong position most can't get behind. My position is he right, and the only exception in Being-in-the-world is value-in-the-world. Not that what we say about value by calling it "the Good" itself "speaks" what it is. Rather, in value experiences, value speaks "through" knowledge claims from sources unseen, and its "language" is ethics. This is, I say, exactly what religion attempts to do in its essence.

I do get confused on some of your positions. See, I want to agree with "Any intellectual effort is necessarily short of Truth" but the line between what an intellectual effort is saying and what this "truth" is needs to be made clear. There are complications. Is truth propositional truth? Or is there a dimension of "truth" that is non propositional, and I think you agree with the latter. But again, see where this goes: You "agree" with the latter? You mean a proposition that states the latter? And when you "think" about your position, the understanding you have certainly can be of something that is not language, like being burned or put to the rack, but the what is it? question, well, language is all over this! Language tells us X is not language. The only way to make this work is to think of language, not in propositional "distance" from the world, but part of that which language is not.

Apodictic only applies within the field in which both ethics and logic sprouted. Both are "apodictic" in varying degrees. First, you use "coercive/insist" I like that. Both, when, following a dialectic, present(v) to the aware-ing being in ready-to-project form, autonomously trigger a feeling which in turn triggers a further dialectic, and so on. I know I'm vague. I'll illustrate. — ENOAH

Okay, but there are no varying degrees of apodicticity. This is the nature of an "absolute". When you mention a "feeling" I am intrigued. See what Pierce says here:

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid......The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry,

See how he recasts cognitive statements in terms of feelings and struggles, something more basic in the analysis. Language to Peirce has been conceived in this Cartesian tradition of res cogitans, a thinking subject and this is just wrong. His analysis is pragmatic, a "doing" such that doubt spurs one toward belief, a stasis of comfort and settledness, a cessation of struggle. Heidegger is similar in his "ready to hand" mode of dasein's being.

Anyway, I wonder if this is what you have in mind when you talk about the "field in which both ethics and logic sprouted." Pragmatics. I think this is right, myself, but the view here goes further than this, deeper into the presuppositions

To simplify. In logic, take a statement like, "I do not exist." It triggers a habitually well tread path to whatever that bodily feeling for so called rejection is; and the next structure presents a temporary settlement which resolves the so called contradiction. Bad e.g.? So be it, hopefully you see where I'm going. Logic readily triggers feelings for immediate belief [i.e. in what the particular rule of ligic presents]. I'm not saying we're brainwashed. I'm saying there are settlements which are so functional, they lay potent triggers. — ENOAH

And by this apodicticity of logic is like Peirce's Fixation of Belief, above; this "temporary settlement which resolves the so called contradiction." This wants to demystify language, and certainty is just a feeling of fixity that is, perhaps, hard wired, but no more. There are no eternal truths for Peirce, though he does not hesitate to say, if irrationality actually "works" for someone, he really has no ground for arguing the point, for after all, there simply is NO foundational Truth. What is true is what works!

But I'll stop you where you say "bad, e.g.?" It is not feelings of belief, nor the rote meanings in things, nor the settled functions that we respond with. It is the qualitative presence of the pain of having your kidney speared. The world "does" this and it is impossible to interpret what is bad about it out of what it is.

In ethics, the dialectics are much broader, the paths not so well tread to the specific feelings to settle at belief. "Don't exaggerate your gas expense on your taxes" triggers certain feelings (so called uneasy for e.g., but we cannot label them) which trigger a broader and vague range of potential settlements, leaving an opening for a slowed down and projected dialectic. "Don't kill your partner" a much more clear path to the feeling which promptly and narrowly settles the dialectic. Like a rule of logic. — ENOAH

Ethical problem solving is not the issue here. Metaethics is. A rule of ethics is an embedded phenomenon. But ask, what makes an ethical rule what it is? It "ethicality" issues from where, at the most basic level? It is not the feeling that something is wrong or right, nor is it about belief, though one does believe. It is not an epistemic issue about how beliefs are fixed. It is the simplest of all inquiries into the "pure" phenomenological presence of what makes something "bad" in the ethical/aesthetic sense (Witt conflates the two).

You can go ahead and link them philosophically if that fits. E.g. that ethics is logical even. I don't know. — ENOAH

The idea is simpler than you suggest. A person loves Ravel, and goes to a concert and experiences aesthetic bliss. The question here is, what does this value-fact of the bliss experience yield to analysis? Just this. The prescribing Ravel, the belief that Ravel should be as a rule listened to by others, and so forth, all presuppose this most basic analysis.

This is the way it has to be to approach something like the essence of religion and ethics. There is no claim the ethics is logical. The matter turns of apodicticity, not logical apodicticity, but that which is AS coercive as logic. What is it for something to be apodictic? It is such that one cannot even imagine something that is apodictically true, to be false. Like imagining an object moving itself. The Good of bliss is tautological, and one cannot even imagine bliss nothing being good. It is impossible.

The argument of the OP turns on just this. Note that logic's apodicticity is vacuous; while value is just the opposite of this: value is the essence of something being important at all.

Through the evolution of these structures, logic, and ethics, they generally function in these ways. That's as far as I can say. When projected; our bodies readily respond. — ENOAH

It doesn't matter how the body responds. All that matters is the apriori analysis of a value event. Only this.

Apodictic need not be something sourced in some pre-Historic Reality or Truth; it could just be a function of Mind going about its business in potent ways. In nature there would be no concern about existence nor I. And there would be nearly no moment where one would kill one's partner.

There must be an agent for human existence, yes, because Mind has evolved the Narrative form as most prosperous, and so predicates must have subjects. But what is really taking place is that well practiced code is triggering our Being to feel in ways which trigger action, or choice, emotion, or ideas; all just more code. No longer is the human animal aware-ing the drive only to mate, bond with and preserve partner, never-mind the odd growl; it is triggered by thoughts of justice, passion, revenge. No longer is the being aware-ing living; it is triggered by ideas of a self, a special place moving in existence, rather than just existing; and obsessions ensue.

But. Yes. Ethics is like Logic that way. Both can have immediate and positive effects upon feelings and actions. If that's apodictic. — ENOAH

Evolution is off the table, as is any science that may have an opinion. Evolution simply presupposes the existence of value. this is about the apriori analysis of value. The mating, the bonding and the anthropology all are off the table. One has to approach value as Kant approached logic and reason: it lies here and now in midst of the analytic, ahistorical, aempirical, qualitatively contained in what is there before your waking eyes and what has to be the case given what is there. Nothing else. Heidegger's historicity is suspended.

But images structured for just such a purpose flood the aware-ing and displays ontological pain-ing with, and I won't even illustrate with the obvious few, but there may be hundreds triggering feelings, coloring the pain-ing with the making known of experience. — ENOAH

Far simpler than this. Put a lighted match to your finger and observe like a good "scientist". What do you witness? Wittgenstein saw that there was something there too profound to be taken up into the deflationary ways of philosophy.

Everyone may agree that one plus one equals two but in ethics, for whatever reason, people's values don't always align. — praxis

But this analysis is not about judgments people make and where they disagree. It is about the existential ground of ethics. A metaethical argument: what IS the Good? What IS the bad? of value in experience? This is what makes ethics possible and our differences have no bearing on this. We are hardwired closely the same, but softwired often very differently. I love a rainy night, another hates such things, so the case in which I am deprived of experiencing one makes for a greater ethicality than would apply to this other. But the question here is, what does it mean to "love" something AT ALL? To feel good. or miserable, pleasure or pain, etc.

If the Agent as TransEgo is the "purest" form of human being why can't the Agent experience "itself" without "intimations"? Why? Because there is no Agent; there is only intimations. And, not beyond, but behind or before those intimations, there is Real Being, no attributes nor expressions, just the present participle pure and simple. — ENOAH

The most curious thing I can think of. Where Husserl, and everyone for that matter, goes wrong, and this lies with ethics: even Heidegger with is Being as Care: there is this paper on Heidegger and "the ethics of care" which spells out pretty well how he really doesn't have the dimension of ethicality in his thesis. Care is all me and mine, and being with others (mitsein) the same. All thing fall with the domain of ME, and this ME is not transcendental, not Husserl's transego; it is just the description of the structure of the ontology of dasein. It goes back to Kant's transcendental unity of apperception, which, long, long story short, says see how all that I acknowledge AT ALL belongs to an egoic center. The particulars fall way in Kant's "reduction" basic logical forms, but there is IN the analysis of this structure, the structure of me and mine. This scent of flowers from the hallway is MY scent, and no one else's, and the same goes for the thoughts in my head, the feelings I have, and so on. The whole enterprise is MY world.

When you deny agency, you are not acknowledging this basic feature of our existence. This is not to say there IS a transego at all. It is simply that IN the horizon of observable phenomena, one discovers this identity of all that is there. There is this paper by Haugeland mentioned by the Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus, I may have mentioned before, that tries to make dasein into an institutional entity only. See Dreyfus' Being in the World for his refutation.

Why do I disagree with you? This is a central question, for the entire idea here rests solely on the "phenomenon" of value-in-the-world. It is an argument:

The question is, what if ethics were as apodictic as logic? Clearly, logic is absolutely coercive to the understanding, but it is also only vacuously coercive. Who cares if logical form insists? It carries no authority about anything, only itself. But what is it about logic that is absolute? No one can say, and we can only obey, for one cannot get "behind" the intuition of logic. It stands as its own authority. It is both absolutely coercive and stands as its own authority. Is ethics like this?

Yes, very much. Without going into the rigor of a formal argument, just look at the basics. First, ethics has as its core, real pain and pleasure, not to put too find a point on it, and this is pervasive in our existence, making everything we experience a ethical possibility; why just stealing my time, say, has ethical consequences. Time is valuable simply because the experiential content of unit of time is inherently valuative in human experience. From the vaguely interested to extreme sports, and from mild boredom to having your liver vivisected without anesthetic, there is this "real time" good and bad in play, lost, like logic gets lost, in the matters one is attending to---but this is a reduction down to a discovery of what is structural and unnoticed in everydayness. Keep in mind that value-as-such does not exist, nor does logic, nor does it not exist. These are analytic terms about our existence, an imposition on the entangled givenness of the world. They do, however, reveal a dimension of our existence. The problem is that both logic and value is understood in the contingencies of language and, as Heidegger rightly said, language is a historical system of understanding, hermeneutical, that is, interpretative in nature, so when we go after anything, we are always already IN a language context.

But this is where things get truly interesting. I cannot claim that logic is an absolute because the very term absolute is bound up in the merely contextual possibilities a language can provide. But there is this very real insistence of knowing an object cannot move itself, say, and while I have to suspend the acknowledged system of symbolic logic (and Kant's categories. The world of tautologies and contradictions), this insistence is not itself of this system, that is, it is not a discursively grounded "truth" that things cannot move themselves (though it is through discursivity that we discover it). So we are witnessing something "impossible" in the logically coercive "intuition". Logic is mystical, as is value. Logic says nothing about the world, where value says a great deal. It says that all of our ethical and aesthetic affairs issue from Being as a single primordiality. In the world's entanglements with "states of affairs" this primordiality goes unseen, even by Heidegger.

But all of this rests with this primordial simplicity: Put a lighted match under your finger and observe. Ask, ontologically, what IS this? Nothing of this event is more salient than the ethical bad or the existential bad of the experience. Most philosophical arguments want to toy with the language of ethical judgments we make (see John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Obviously, I both disagree and agree with this notion. Language "invents" the means of construing the world, but ethics finds its authority in something PRIOR to discovery.

The former is supposed to be free of ethical principles, values, or goals. — praxis

A principle in normative ethics is contrasted with ordinary pragmatic normativity, as with where one should turn the faucet knob clockwise for the water to flow, and the like. Someone like Dewey might take issue with this, but this really is not the point. All normativity is pragmatic. Anyway, pragmatics is contingent on what needs to be done, but ethics has a noncontingent property, which is what this idea is about. And if it's a matter of contingency, the factual content can be exhaustively accounted for in the mere facts that are there. The "fact" is, my shoe is untied. Examine the evidence empirically, do an analysis of the apriority of the proposition's structure if you like, even deconstruct the terms in play (attend to the "differance" in the meaning generative interdependence of words), and in the end this fact will have been exhaustively analyzed. Literally nothing left to say. This is Wittgenstein's "state of affairs," finite, delimited and exhaustible. There certainly will be more to say in some future and unseen context of meanings; perhaps physic's string theory will be a more elaborate and well founded idea, or the Higgs boson particle will be found to have other properties. Kuhn's paradigms of scientific revolutions will continue to be challenged, but in these challenges, what will ensue is yet another delimited finitude of meaning. This is the point: there is nothing "absolute" to be discovered in a "state of affairs". (If you read any Heidegger, this is his "totality" that defines the "potentiality of possibilities" in a given culture).

But what could something "absolute" even mean? The best we can imagine lies with logic and apodicticity. Modus ponens will not be contradicted. This is formal requirement and it cannot even be imagined to do so. One CAN make claims about the historicity of language settings and say, after all, 'logic' is just a term that belongs to a language and language itself is contingent, and the "truth" language produces is "made" not discovered, (see Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, e.g.); but the intuition (another word) "behind" the logical insistence, this is absolute. Like trying to imagine an object moving itself, impossible.

Regarding value, here is a question: what do you think about the idea of ethics having the same apodicticity as logic?

To say that value is an absolute, and that it’s IN existence, that it’s exactly what God in its essence IS, is completely meaningless to me. If it has meaning I don’t see why you couldn’t express that meaning. — praxis

I am aware. I don't think it is dialectically unachievable. It just takes the right leading questions and a willingness to follow through.

Question: there are facts of the world, mere facts, like those found in everydayness and science. It is a fact that baseball is a game and that moths are attracted to light, and on and on. An infinite number. Putting aside the many issues about facts, how they align with the world, the nature of the knowledge relationship between a fact knowing agency and that which facts are "about" and so on, and bringing attention solely to "value facts," the kind of thing Wittgenstein insisted there was no such thing as (putting aside his complaint and allowing facts to include the value that attends the "mere" factuality. I think his definition of a fact in the Tractatus is arbitrarily narrow). All facts are value facts, simply because a fact is apprehended in a value constituting system, perception; but this we put aside as well. Later but not now, for the value facts I want to look closely at are those facts that exhibit the strongest presence of the value, simply to make the case poignant and clear.

So the first step is to recognize that value facts are qualitatively distinct from, call them, natural facts or plain facts or "states of affairs". An explicit value fact would be something expressed in the proposition, "This sprained ankle is killing me," or " I'm in love," or, "This Hagen Dazs is so good!" The first question is this: what is the difference between natural facts (as Husserl called them) and value facts?

I don’t recall much about it but years ago I read something to the effect that the death of religion is due to the categorization of value. Your one candidate became many. — praxis

It is what it is because it is an absolute. Value propositions qua value possess the same apodicticity of logic: universality and certainty. Value-in-the-world is as coercive as logical form itself. Logic, of course, is empty, an existential nullity. I mean, even if there were actually something in the world called logic, it would tell us nothing beyond the tautological nature of itself. But value is IN existence, and thus our everyday ethics, the ordinary matters of keeping promises and not acting horribly to others, and all the talk about utility and deontological duty, embodies a dimension of existence that is apodictic.

This is exactly what God in its essence IS.

Understood. My observation is that, while thinking that the phenomenological reduction ought, also, to bracket Nature, H did not take the phenomenological reduction far enough. It is all "modes" of Mind, including the ego, and all "modes" of the ego, including a so called transcendental ego, which ought to be bracketed so that the practitioner arrives finally at the aware-ing body, not as yet another "mode" of human being for the ego to contemplate or experience, but at being: just being.

Whether or not that aforementioned interpretation of H is even possible to execute is an open question. But I do think, notwithstanding H's language, that such being is what he was truly after. Like everyone from Plato to Descaryes, to Heidegger, he stopped just short of transcending Mind, because of attachment to ego. — ENOAH

This I think is where disclosure of being becomes radical and impossible, the impossible is what you have in mind, and I don't mean this in a critical way, but in a way that reveals the true nature of the problem. Heidegger is always there wagging a finger of disapproval: even in your most profound intimation of being freed by the method of bracketing, and one understands freedom and being outside the totality language and culture, one cannot reduce agency to that of an infant or a feral adult: what might they be able to "think" of their "being" intimations. Frankly, they would not only not think about them, but they would not have such intimations. Even Thic Quan Duc's masterful freedom from physicality, REQUIRES language to manifest this freedom in the understanding. Every possibility of experience for a person (dasein), because it is an experience, is going to have to go through Heidegger's thoughts about this: We are never free from language in understanding something. Rather, language MAKES freedom possible because words are inherently open. Bracketing occurs within the broader scheme of language possibilities, and philosophy itself is a discursive disclosure of the world. It always comes back to this: as outside of the meaning possibilities as an insight might seem to be, it occurs not only within a context of thought, but is made possible by the context of thought.

I am only disagreeing with the idea that the no holds barred reduction cannot and should not be conceived as free of language. One IS language. Does this mean that we thereby confine disclosure to the Totality of finite culture and its language possiblities? Of course not, firstly because language is intrinsically open. But it really DOES depend on the thinker/experiencer: Some stand in this openness, like Heidegger, and really have no, well, "intimations of immortality" at all. Others have such intimations. But certain things cannot be ignored and are there for all to see, and one is that whatever intuitions one has about the world, it occurs in the understanding as thought. Thought meets the world and in this itself.

Isn't SK's infinite resignation, ultimately acceptance that ego and its attachments are not the ulrimate; that ego has no means of grasping the ultimate; and, his leap and teleological suspensions, like N, H, H and S to follow, prescribed methods to "transcend" that ultimately incapable ego, for [a more authentic way of] being [one with God (for SK) or Truth (TE for H1, Dasein for H2, Good faith for S)? Yes, I am over generalizing their processes and methods. But even if unwittingly, they are all recognizing human perception is mediated, desire constructed; we need a means to return to unmediated sensation and organic drives? — ENOAH

I never though Kierkegaard really understood ethics because he was, as everyone during his time, preoccupied by Hegel's rationalism. To really understand K one would have to deeply into Hegel, something I have put off for a long time. K clearly held ethics in contempt, as if ethics were simply the rules we lay down. Metaethics for him is exemplified by Abraham's willingness to kill Isaac, faith so implicit and absolute, it is like breathing. But it is a commandment from God that supersedes all other "commandments" of categorical ethics. Why does K not see that the "commandment" of normal ethics itself possesses the divine commandment? This is one way to state the central idea of the OP.

But on the other hand, remember that infinite resignation is not a description of the knight of faith. To understand K on this is not easy, for me, anyway. I have most difficutly with the absurd. See his account to the lad who in love and the love is hopeless. The absurd is to believe in it anyway. Now, this is not meant as a way to live life in ordinary affairs. It is meant to be a way to explain Abraham: It is insane, or absurd, to believe that Isaac will be spared, and yet, in K's reading, Abraham believes this implicitly! And so it is with God and faith: The idea of a perfectly redemptive God is absurd (just like the lad believing he has a chance with the princess), yet the knight of faith has no question at all. She maintains a normal life, but "inwardly" there is absolute faith.

K puts the matter to faith. I put the matter to "observation" and philosophy: once the reduction takes us down to the existential core of ethics, the "pure" phenomenon (and to remind, there really is no such thing as this. It is discovered by the understanding in the reduction) acknowledged in the burn, the broken bone, the joy and the pleasure, and so on, we find an element of the absolute (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. It's online).

If religion is “bad metaphysics” and such, then isn’t it a step away from what you claim is the primordial beneath it?

Is the essence of a car the materials it’s composed of or the function is serves, namely locomotion. — praxis

Well, you're not going to like this answer, but the question about the essence of something doesn't belong to anglo american analytic philosophy, something most here associate with (whether they know it or not). Rather, it is a concern of continental philosophy which deals with metaphysics, and the whole affair of philosophy's place in the world is very differently determined. So, having prepared you, Since religion IS metaphysics, the thematic interests are limited. But take the car you mention: many ways you can look at this, that is, many contexts that can be the frame of talk about the "essence" of a car. Is it merely locomotion? Or entertainment? Or purely practical? Perhaps what a car IS refers to its mechanical working parts. Perhaps a context of human evolution, a car among the most contemporary expressions of survival and reproduction; or the way a car is an extension of the body's own working parts (like Marshall McLuhan put it). One can go on all day, I suppose. But the essence of a car is so bound to our cultural, scientific entanglements in the world, it is hard to abstract from these to something truly primordial about a car being what it is. It is "equiprimoridal" in its essence. It is an odd sounding word, but I think the idea rather clear. All of our cultural institutions are like this. What is the essence of, say, marriage? Or science? A library? A restaurant? Anything you can name sustains multiple candidates.

What would it be like for something to have its essence in a singular primordiality? I am arguing that religion is like this. This is the primordiality of value. One really should read a bit from Wittgenstein's Tractatus to see where this argument has its basis (though, God forbid HE discuss it. Witt wanted nothing to do with the way philosophy mangled and distorted something so important). Ethics deals with the GOOD, and alas, the BAD, in capital letters to steer clear from the contingent good and bad, like a good chair or bad gps reception.

What IS the metaethical "good and bad"? It is far stranger than people know, for attention is not on the entanglements of the world. ONLY the pure phenomenon. What does this mean? Why did Wittgenstein call the good divinity? And not to be found in the "states of affairs" of the world? Most have there eyes closed to this question. It is a metaethical question, this primordiality, this that "stands as its own presupposition."

Like epistemology, one has to, well, stare at this problem to understand it, what Heidegger called meditative thinking. It's peculiar nature lies in it NOT being discursively constructed. One is asked to literally stand before the world and describe what is "there". That's phenomenology.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that religions tend to be dogmatic and not very open to analysis. — praxis

The whole point here is to give analysis to that which popular religions are dogmatic about. To look beneath all those churchy fetishes. What is a fetish? It is a practice, and object, anything, really, that is parasitic on an original source of value, and they can completely dominate to the point where the original gets lost in the entanglement. What is religion beneath all of that all of that historical contrivance and bad metaphysics? Something truly primordial, like logic is primordial to thought.

We want to be saved from our suffering, don't we? — praxis

Sure. But then the whole matter turns on suffering and the ethical/aesthetic dimension of our existence. This is in the OP. GM solves fairly straight forward problems, hires a legion of engineers and product designers, and so on. But religion reaches into metaphysics because the relief sought here is not IN our existence; it IS our existence. You are right, of course, about the narratives and rituals that bind people together, but, as with GM, there is this underlying condition, a need, that is being addressed that itself is NOT part of the pragmatic apparatus that responds to this, but is PRIOR to this. For GM it is a practical matter entirely. For religion it is existential, and this requires inquiry to move into an existential analysis, not merely a practical one.

So then, what is the existential analysis of suffering? Suffering, pleasure, misery and happiness and all of the entangled nuances of our ethical and aesthetic affairs fall under the general category of value. Religion's essence then is determined by what we can say about value-in-being, or the "pure reduced phenomenon" of value, which simply means we are not looking at the many contingencies that complicate instantiations of value that occur all the time. Value is going to be an apriori analysis into the universality and apodicticity of value-in-the world.

Thus far, does this make sense to you?

GM and UPS can brand themselves in various ways, whatever it takes to capture a segment of the market. Religion is all about branding too, just at a grand scale and backed with ultimate authority. It promises salvation but it only needs to deliver meaning.

We don't seem to be going anywhere. — praxis

I think it is going splendidly. An argument is a conversation. So religion promises salvation. But I am curious, salvation from what? Do people think they need to be "saved" from something?

H's TransEgo is not a return to organic aware-ing or conscious living (I think, though expressed in different terms, that's what he thinks he's providing a method to reach), but rather, TransEgo is an experience mediated by mind. Why? Because ego--no matter how polished up-- is still assumed the experiencer. Organic aware-ing has no agent. It is aware-ing. Not I am aware-ing; and not I am aware-ing in the third person. Rather, real organic consciousness or being is the activity of present aware-ing. Not, some imagined agent doing the aware-ing. — ENOAH

Husserl would ask you not to use the term "organic aware-ing" simply because something being organic refers us to the naturalism that one has to suspend in the reduction. The hardest part of phenomenology is making the "qualitative movement" of Kierkegaard's away from naturalistic thinking. The transcendental ego goes back to Kant and his transcendental unity of apperception. Heidegger is only partly aligned with this: The ontology of dasein is structurally "me" and mine": See Hubert Dreyfus' Being in the World, where he writes (and I will give you the long paragraph since you have real interest) under the heading Consciousness is not a Conscious Subject:

Since, as Heidegger holds, getting the right approach is crucial, we
must stop here to get the right approach to Dasein. "Dasein" in
colloquial German can mean "everyday human existence," and so
Heidegger uses the term to refer to human being. But we are not
to think of Dasein as a conscious subject. Many interpreters make
just this mistake. They see Heidegger as an "existential
phenomenologist," which means to them an edifying elaboration
of Husserl. The most famous version of this mistake is Sartre's
brilliant but misguided reformulation of Being and Time into a
theory of consciousness in Being and Nothingness. Other
interpreters have followed the same line. Dagfinn F0llesdal,
one of the best interpreters of Husserl,
justifies his Husserlian reading ofBeingand
Time by pointing out that while Heidegger was working on the
book, he wrote Husserl: "The constituting subject is not nothing,
hence it is something and has being .... The inquiry into the mode
of being of the constituting subject is not to be evaded. "4Heidegger,
however, warns explicitly against thinking ofDasein as a Husserlian
meaning-giving transcendental subject: "One of our first tasks will
be to prove that ifwe posit an 'I' or subject as that which is primarily
given, we shall completely miss the phenomenal content ofDasein"
(72) [46].

Sartre makes a similar complaint in his famous Transcendence of the Ego, though he was defending something very different and Cartesian. Heidegger did not think a singular "primordial" ontology was possible, and this is a big part of his thinking: ontology is "equiprimoridal" meaning at the basic level of analysis, consciousness as Being qua being never shows up. Onology is about the being of beings, and this simply takes us to an examination the most basic framework of discussion, not a soul, something which would lie outside of where the reduction is able to go. Consciousness is not a phenomenon, I think puts it simply. But me and mine, these do show up as a structural; features of experience: this lamp I witness belongs to MY dasein, not yours or the postman's. There is a paper on this that Dreyfus goes after, by John Huageland, "Heidegger on Being a Person" which I have and Haugeland tries to make dasein into an institutional entity, a public gathering of collective thinking, giving no heed to the "egoic center" of experience. Haugeland draws on Heidegger's notion of das man, the world of general affairs we ARE when we speak and interact in the usual ways. His ontology asks us to rise above this "tranquilized" state of acceptance without question, but he is adamant about the original integrity of this "the they". We ARE this institutional interface in the world, and General Motors and ham and eggs for breakfast is part of the conditions of our "being there" and thus IN a constitutive analysis of our existence. I think of Hirsch's concept of cultural literacy, which conservatives love so much as it curtails cultural acceptance down to a finite body of identity features that belong to us-as-a-culture or a race, is what Heidegger had in mind when he described human dasein, and Haugeland was right about this. (One can see here why Heidegger actually had high hopes, initially, for the Nazis and the "volkism" that was circulating at that time throughout Germany. Does Being and Time promote national socialism? Yes, in a way, I think.)

But take Husserl's reduction more seriously, I say, down to the wire where language ceases to be in control at all in the job of encompassing what lies before one as a perceiving agency. Heidegger drops the transcendent ego, and replaces it with hermeneutics (the equiprimordiality of ontology), but has he not bypassed the critical move that "affirms" thereness of what is there? This is Michel Henry's point: While Heidegger is right acknowledge that we are "always already" IN a world prior to analytic thinking, a world of "environments" of equipment or utility, that is, of just dealing---this is Heidegger's pragmatism, that ontology lies in this "irreducible" world of non analytic working things out; he is wrong in that he fails to attend to precisely where the reduction takes us: to this "Being" that is not being at all, that is, not belonging to the interpretative language event. To see this critical moment of interface, if you will, talked about at length in Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, when one steps away from language's "taking as" structure, and, like Walt Wittman, feels the leaves of grass intimately and palpably, one sees the "other" of the world. This other that is radically and impossibly "there". Why impossible? Because it is OUT of Heidegger's being entirely. The scent of a flower is not a problem solved (a pragmatically conceived context of dealing with things) nor a cultural institution nor hermeneutically derived. Terribly difficult to argue this because it is not observable, this being-beyond-being. (I can see Wittgenstein wagging a finger of disapproval: Beyond?)

This is why I say analytic philosophers are good at understanding arguments, but just bad at understanding the world. They refuse to plunge into the life of the world, if you will. The world is a living affair, saturated with meaning that has to be encountered as it is, and this is really what the OP is about: taking the reduction down to where the world itself "speaks" the very nature of ethicality. What IS the normativity of all ethics grounded in in the final most basic "primordiality"? Principles? Feelings? Attitudes? All of these beg the value question.

For a religion to function it must provide meaning, which it supplies with grand narratives, shared values, moral codes, etc etc. The ‘binding’ is desirable and meaningful. Transcendence, on the other hand, is not essential, and transcendence does not require religion. — praxis

Yes, religion is an institution like anything else, and it has it's utility. But one can say this of ANY institution. GM makes automobiles and UPS delivers packages. These bind, have narratives, rules, as well. The question is, what is this institution religion all about?

From my brief exploration so far (Cartesian...) Husserl rests in the same place as Descartes: not far enough. Both are happy to assume that because the ego is the last trace back (reduction) in knowledge, that in ego appearance is present (I get the sense, like being). — ENOAH

Wait a minute. You are reading Husserl? And not Wiki'ing him? This is earth shattering! I'll get back to you, soon. A bit busy now.

From my brief exploration so far (Cartesian...) Husserl rests in the same place as Descartes: not far enough. Both are happy to assume that because the ego is the last trace back (reduction) in knowledge, that in ego appearance is present (I get the sense, like being). — ENOAH

Enjoyed the chat — Tom Storm

Same here.:ok:

Moral redemption doesn't require religion, and religion may or may not provide it. The essense of religion is simply binding a community in shared values, narratives, etc. — praxis

If the whole affair were not entirely set against radical indeterminacy, then I would agree. Caring in a truly finite setting only has a finitude of redress, a foundation that could be spoken and laid out clearly as one would talk about the nature of a bank teller or fence post: just look in the dictionary and there it is. But the "binding a community in shared values, narratives, etc." begs more basic questions: what is a value? Why bother to bind? What are these narratives there for? Look in a dictionary, and you find more questions just like these. This is because all of our affairs lack a final vocabulary, as Rorty put it, and this "lack" is not simple definitional; it is existential. I mean, ask why we bind, and you may follow Hobbes or Rouseau in some social contract theory, and this justified social binding, the question of why bother in the first place looms large. It is for protection, greater security against threats, in short, it has greater utility than not binding. So what are threats about and why the need for security, and so on? You see, ALL such matters reduce to the ethical structure of our existence: we are "built" to care, and caring refers us directly to what is IN existence to care about: the joys, pleasures, the wretched suffering and terrors.

I think this clear enough. Analysis always goes to the most basic questions. Here we have arrived at the most basic analysis of religion, what it essentially is, and this is a littl difficult: it is not about fear, simply. Think of Ahab from Moby Dick. He is not pursuing in hateful revenge a whale that took his leg. He wants what is "behind" the4 whale. The Being that was there prior to whale and leg that gave forth the reality of the horrors of flesh being torn and shredded. It is the reality that is our world. The plague must have been lovely; and being consumed alive by fire speaks for itself. But this fills the world, saturates it, thinking of the tonnage of suffering our current existence emerged from. Same is true for love, happiness, pleasure, and so on. This is the value dimension of our existence.

Value: what IS it? This is THE question of religion. What is the good and the bad of ethics? There is a way to address this, but it takes analysis.

This makes ethics essentially a meaningless term if it can mean anything. I cannot agree nor see the point in pretending to do this.

Thanks again for your time — I like sushi

And thanks for yours, for reading. One parting thought, though. Can't be helped:

Thrown into a setting of wretched suffering then death. If this were a given a social setting, then it would be "to arms" against it. We would be outraged and heartbroken and would seek remedy and justice. You know, innocent child kidnapped and "things done" to the child: the very idea makes us shudder with disgust. Such is suffering, and we all are "thrown" into it. And yet, when the phenomenon is lifted out of its context of familiarity, as is done when analysis discovers "responsibility and accountability" empty into indeterminacy at the basic level, this moral dimension does not simply vanish. And it is not just the outrage, the "boo" factor: It is what the outrage is about: The suffering itself.

Anyway, I will shut up. Thanks again.

Isn't the point of philosophy to examine the hell out of basic assumptions and our glib answers? Isn't it the case that some of the most obvious questions may well be pointless? Is it not also the case that sometimes the pragmatic response to philosophical questions is better than theoretical dead ends or infinities? — Tom Storm

One has to know how to judge what pointlessness is. You seem to take a lack of definitive answers to things as evidence that they have been exhaustively examined and deemed pointless. But this is not where arguments lead. They rather show us that all along we really didn't know what the questions were. We thought we did, but we were in that world of glibness and bad assumptions and idle talk and banter. Why not read Heidegger's Being and Time to find out? You know, he breaks radically with tradition, and so one can read him with a sense of an entirely different approach. Husserl is like this as well. See how he begins his Cartesian Meditations:

Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim the
decision that alone can start me on the course of a
philosophical development I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing.

You will NEVER find an analytic philosopher talking like this.

Husserl will find a great deal of resistance, but, as he says, it is a "personal affair" of the reader. One is taken to a world of inquiry and one has to go there to be rid of the "tranquilized" existence of "idle talk" (Heidegger, Being In As Such). Heidegger sounds just like someone you could relate to. Two, three months study and you would start to see what it is really like to be free of "glib answers."

How do you know that the transcendent significance you identify is not merely something you put there? — Tom Storm

Exactly what I am talking about. It is argued, that is how. One has to read the arguments, and they are thick and difficult. Kant dominated philosophy for a hundred years, and still does, indirectly. This is for a very good reason. One has to read The Critique of Pure Reason. It'll drive you a bit insane, but in the end, you will be a very different thinking person.

Not just basic questions. Specific questions which you have already stated are impossible to answer. — Tom Storm

Impossible without drastically modifying common sense, that is. It is not the answers that matternearly so much as it is the questions; the world does not wear its philosophical insights on its sleeve. Rather, insight is constructed out of the language of engagement, like everything else. One engages through inquiry, and discovers a new world of "openness" which is one's existence: freedom is our essence (Heidegger). A question IS freedom. If you find this puzzling, it can be argued if you are interested.

What is religion? It is the response to the foundational indeterminacy of our existence, above all, ethical indeterminacy. This is not merely a proposition being either true of false. It is a revelation about one's existence. This is the answer to your Why bother? question. This argument about the essence of religion, if followed through, reveals that in the midst in our living affairs, there is the gravitas of religion, without the churchy fetishes and bad metaphysics. Consider what religion does: it takes this embodied finitude that issues from, as Heidegger put it, the "potentiality of possibilities" of our inherited language and culture, and attempts place human signification in an absolute setting in an effort to resolve the matter of our joys and sufferings: The joys are now consummated; and the sufferings redeemed. This can be, again, argued. See the OP: there is an absolute discovered in the analysis of our everydayness. One is already IN an absolute setting!

Whoa there, parter, you are rushing ahead. Did I ask about why we are born and suffer? No. Did I say I wasn't engaged? No. I'm simply expressing a different view to yours. Does it follow from this that I am therefore against all of philosophy? — Tom Storm

I had read, " We have more than enough to work with in order to talk meaningfully about morality. Leave transcendence to the academics and the religious apologists" to mean you had no interest in basic questions. Oh well.

I'm just trying to cut to the chase. Is there any merit in lingering in the mist and miasma of transcendence when we have useful practical responces we can actually use? You don't have to agree with me, but that's my take on this philosophical conundrum. — Tom Storm

Heh, heh, philosophy....useful?? One has to think of it in Husserl's terms above: It is a personal engagement into the questions of one's own (and others') existence. This openness I speak of (derivative, of course, of those I read. And they derived from and of what they read), this indeterminacy, is US. I try to make this clear to myself constantly: me and my world of rising early in the morning, making breakfast, and the calling, the talking, the cares and interests rising and falling during the day, and so on: THIS is a life, a human existence. Physics cannot discuss this, and if it tries it commits the absolute worst "sin" to the integrity of what we are. Take this Heideggerian "dasein" and put it under the analytic microscope, and now you have an ontology. Taking my trash to the corner for pick up is now an ontological event, not a physical incident. Remember, I often say, ALL one has ever witnessed in the world is phenomena. Impossible to witness anything else, for a phenomenon is "to be wittnessed."

Anyway, of course, I understand this immediate rejection of "transcendental" talk. But transcendence is always already there in the world, and all of those practical matters rest with this openness of our existence. The only issue is whether one takes an interest. You know, starry night, one looks up at the night sky (aka, the inside of one's cranium), and wonders. Wondering deeply enough, one discovers religion. One wonders thoughtfully enough, one moves to Kierkegaard. Then Kierkegaard opens the door to one's self.

If there is no answer then what's next? — Tom Storm

See the above.

What kind of area would you say you are talking in? Is Moral Realism appropriate? Such categorising may be messy but it is useful to understand the general gist of where you are coming from. — I like sushi

If you begin from a position of categorizing, with an intent to bring ethics to heel is a coherent system of thought, then you will be missing the essential idea. Certainly not to take issue with sound thinking, but soundness is about the world, and philosophy taken to its metaphysical threshold has to yield to questions of meaning that are powerful, yet take the matter where understanding has to let go of categorical thinking: One has to witness the world first, is the point, and witnessing cluttered with assumptions that impose clarity that issues from standards that are not fitting to what is witnessed and this leads to nothing but bad thinking. You've read Husserl, so you know he intended his phenomenology to be like a science. He has the most trouble because he cannot liberate the pure phenomenon, his foundation for science, from the nexus of intentionality. I mean, there is nothing "pure" about a phenomenon that is received and constructed in language.

But see philosophers like Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion: Husserl has to be understood in the blatant, palpable living experience. One simply does not sanely deny, say, the agony of suffering. This is where categorical thinking must yield to a world that has nothing categorical about it.

The general gist lies in first questions, ones that issue from the world. The question Why are we born to suffer and die? is one of these.

Of course, we judge through values. Ethical judgement is one value judgement of many. The same would be left if we removed what is prudent. My question would then be does judgement about what is prudent come before the judgement about what is ethical. If so, we can then say that what is prudent is the 'essence of ethics' right?

So a scheme of Value < Judgement < Prudence < Ethics < Religion ... not that I believe all Religion is is its relation to ethics in its original formation. — I like sushi

One should prima facie be prudent, given that prudence can on occasion be counter productive. Why? Cut to the chase: being prudent generally maximizes utility. And what good is this? Well, utility, happiness and well being, and it avoids unhappiness, not to put too fine a point on it. There it is. The bottom line, for we have now reached "the world". Why be ethical? It is the same reduction. And by world, it is not important to distinguish between scientific metaphysics, some kind of physicalism or naturalism, and phenomenology. The prima facie ethical injunction against torturing our neighbors finds its essential ethicality regardless.
A scheme? Too messy? Think, again, of Husserl and his claim about the absolute primordiality of the pure phenomenon. He meant this to give science and everydayness a true foundation, but the "messiness" of meaning made this untenable. Ethics is messy, too, entangled in the "states of affairs" of the world. But when we look at vivid examples of ethical normativity, like the prohibition against murder by a thousand cuts, we see something decidedly not messy at all: intense pain. The moral authority of intense pain: this has the kind of authority Husserl was looking for, and it is both epistemic and ethically grounding, for intense pain isitself entirely noncategorical, and yet, it is "originary" and “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition.” (Ideas I) Husserl was shooting for closing the epistemic distance between agency and the transcendent object, and this is debatable (one has to go through Heidegger's complaint the he was trying to "walk on water"); but intense pain, is there really any epistemic distance between me and my pain? No, I am arguing. Calling it pain, and describing what causes it, and explaining it, these constitute "distance". And what about the authority this invests into the ethical injunction against handing this out to others? It is an absolute. Not discursively determined and not derivative of anything more basically justificatory. It is not IN the world; it IS the world.

How is this possible? How can a moral injunction find its grounding outside of language? This is the question. It is the kind of thing religion is "essentially" about.

No liking, no ethics? Mmm ... I guess so. But that is basically like none of one category of judgement means no ethics. Nothing is surprising there. One would still make other kinds of judgements. — I like sushi

Liking is not a category until one talks about it. The pleasure of this Hagen Dazs as such is not a categorical "discussion". Value, the general term borrowed from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is part of the basic thinking here, does not belong to the mere "facts" of the world.

The 'essence of value' is emotion. I think there is something to the whole "boo!" and "hurrah!" of emotivism in regards to moral judgements. Drinking water when you are thirsty is 'good' (beneficial/targeted), while stealing water from someone else is 'not good' ("boo!"). — I like sushi

No, I am saying. The essence of value is not emotion. The essence of emotion is value. Value is the foundational phenomenal ontology. Quenching thirst is good. Stealing water can be good, can be bad, and there is an indeterminacy of the affair that is lost in entanglements of the case at hand. But this has nothing to do with the thesis here. Here, it is not the utility being weighed, nor some inviolable sense of duty. All of this kind of thing is off the table. I ask a particle physicist what the world IS, what constitutes the world and I will get an account of energic transformations and a lot of technical talk, mostly, if not exclusively, quantitative, but the physics issues, at root, from observation about the behavior witnessed, what the world DOES if you will. My point is simple: Quench your thirst, and observe. Reduce the event to the aesthetic/valuative/ethical essence --- phenomenological reduction, suspending the science and the many assumptions always already in place in the "totality" that makes for the potentiality of possibilities (Heidegger's dasein). There is the residuum, which is "the good" of the quenching. This good, I am arguing, is the essence of ethics and religion. Wittgenstein agrees, indirectly, in the Tractatus.

If my hand is burning it is not an ethical issue. If someone sets my hand of fire then it is "Boo!" — I like sushi

And this is directly to the point. If your hand is burning, it IS an ethical issue. All that makes an issue ethical is the some value-at-risk or in-play. All that is required is a value-agency, a person, for example. Boo! is a deflationary attempt to trivialize the world by reducing its affairs to manageable concepts. It is the great sin, if you will, of analytic philosophy.

This is so obvious me to I am puzzled why you even have to point it out. I am not entirely sure why there is a fixation on ethics though as you could name other judgements OR just say Judgement instead. Is there something I missed in your meaning? — I like sushi

It is not about judgment. Being six inches off the ground in love is not making a judgment. Nor is Hagen Dazs (for me, anyway) and nor is having your kidney vivisected without anesthetic. The idea here is that ethics qua ethics is not grounded in judgment. It is grounded in the world, and that would be Wittgenstein's world, not Heidegger's. Heidegger's world is grounded in hermeneutical finitude, onto theologically defined (historically, that is). The world, Witt wrote, is mystical. This is was not received well by Russell and positivists, and Witt told them to take a hike. The good is what I call divinity, he writes in Culture and Value. He understood this.

I think most think as you do, that it is too obvious to say, just as when I ask how things in the world get "into" knowledge claims, they generally scratch their heads. What is missed is that one's experience IS the world. Events are IN the world, and these are hermeneutically indeterminate, but qualities, the being appeared to redly quale, say, ARE the world. The trouble with qualia is that minus the contextuality of talking about it, there is nothing "said". And Dennett was right about this ( I seem to recall); but value qualia is a very different notion. Pain "speaks". It speaks the defeasable injunction NOT to do something. This prohibition issues first from the world, the qualitative actualities that our existence encounters.

You can probably tell by now that I think you missed some significant steps in your reduction. Ethics is layers above what matters. Ethics comes through other value judgements (it is not THE value judgement, if that is at all what you were hinting at), and value judgement is embedded in emotion ... now we do hit a rather hard problem because what emotion is is also a matter of sedimentation. — I like sushi

It is not a matter of ethics. It is one of metaethics, the nature of ethics. And hence, the nature of religion.

I came to Husserl via studying the Cognitive Neurosciences, and I am rather inclined to use what I have learned there as a check on what is feasible. I do not really see that Emotion is something that can exist separate from Logic. I have been of the broad opinion for some time that they are effectively two sides of the same coin, each necessitating a kernel of the other to exist. — I like sushi

To be clear, emotion, logic, affectivity, reason, pragmatics, and so on, these are analytic terms. Value does not exist. It is a dimension of our existence discovered in the "openness" made by language (gelassenheit). Emotion is not separable from logic because the analysis that produces categorical thought is an analytical imposition. You know, there is no "logic".

Sticky wicket. And as to two sides of the same coin, for me, that is epistemology and ontology. To be is to be known. A cat is not a cat until I bring catness to the cat. Only one thing I can think of that stands as its own presupposition, and that is value-in-the-world: The good cannot itself be bad any more than modus ponens can be a contradiction.

Much like Kant espoused with his “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.”, I am inclined to say “Reason without emotion is empty, emotions without contexts are blind. Logic can intuit nothing, the emotions can think nothing. Only through their unison can value arise.” — I like sushi

I quite agree. Reason without emotion is an abstraction. One can think about reason independently, of course, just as we think about knitting without thinking about the molecular structure of the material. But knitting and physics are taking the world "as" these. The world sustains many interpretative values at once about the "same thing" (though this same thing is transcendental and under erasure, as Derrida put it). The question is, is there anything that can be acknowledged as truly primordial, as God is for many? This is value, though I do not expect to be agreed with on this. Value as such is absolute.

None of what you say is new to me. My point is it need not worry us. Just act and reflect. We have more than enough to work with in order to talk meaningfully about morality. Leave transcendence to the academics and the religious apologists. :smile:

But I am curious - what use do you derive from this: — Tom Storm

Academics, religious apologists, and don't forget philosophers. Isn't this a philosophy forum??

Hmmm, What use is it to ask basic questions of our existence? Curious question. I bit like asking what the point is to ice skating, going round and round in circles. One is either engaged or one isn't. Hard to argue against indifference. Questions like Why are we born to suffer and die? have to be meaningful at the outset for understanding religion.

Part of the response to this question certainly lies in the need to be attuned to basic questions. Kant through Derrida and beyond. Anglo American philosophy is what you get if you ask a logician philosophical questions. An abstraction. Only in continental philosophy does one discover the hidden questions that have always been there but have been pushed out of place by science and technology. See Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology. See Husserl's Cartesian Meditations. See Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. See........

Look, you are what you read.

I need not have a full account of 'good' or 'bad'. We can understand them in quotidian contexts without needing to contrive a thesis on the subjects. We already do and it works reasonably well. Abstractions like 'good' or even 'truth' vary with the context. In most usage, I don't need to have a full account of such terms to make robust use of them. That's all I am saying. And if the epistemic crisis is as thick a fog as you suggest, then better to say home. — Tom Storm

It is only a fog because it is in the language of these philosophers that the clarity of these issues can be revealed. It is the same fog one has about physics prior to taking any physics classes at all If you are on the outside looking in, it will all seem like bullshit.

Only if you insist.

I'm not pretending that I have answers to old epistemological questions. I'm not even sure that they matter. But it's not hard to see how morality is pragmatic consequence of experience. Why confuse this with questions about how my knowledge of a lamp works? If we don't know the answer to this (and I suspect there are many healthy explanations already: scientific and philosophical) it would be a shame for an appeal to ignorance to lead us into accepting transcendence as the only explanation. — Tom Storm

Well, just to follow through briefly, there is no answer to epistemic crisis. Not a matter of ignorance. Ignorance implies that there is something that can be known, and one just doesn't know it. Not the case here. There is NO way for knowledge claims to penetrate through the "distance" between objects and knowing. Healthy explanations? Neither healthy nor unhealthy. There simply isn't one.

Epistemology's radical indeterminacy is part of a general indeterminacy of all of our thinking in the world, and one is not going to really understand religion until one cuts loose from "common sense".

But you're right, talk about knowledge issues in philosophy is not immediately to the point; so to the point: You said, "We live together as community and this means holding values." The matter at hand is not about values with an 's'. It is about value, a philosophical inquiry into what it means to value something at all. So before talk about the "resulting conversation" about what to do given that we live in a world filled with values (family values? Cultural values? Workplace values? Child rearing values? Etc.?) there is the unaddressed question about the nature of valuing. Philosophy wants to know.

I won't bore you with a thesis. Just this: If I asked about the nature of logic, what would you say? Logic is there, and it has structure made visible in symbolic logic, the bare bones, if you will, of ordinary talk and thought. Weird thing about symbolic logic: pure formal truths come out of it. One big tautology, the entire system. And each propositional structure is apriori, that is, necessary and universal. So, "beneath" our conversations about this and that, there is this discovery of structure.

Value then: abstract from ordinary situations to discover what value IS, just as is done with symbolic logic. Is there anything "behind" the many occasions of valuing this and that to be discovered? Yes. It is the ethical good and bad. Nothing is all of existence more odd. Value and the good and bad of valuing is entirely sui generis. You are invited at this point to consider G E Moore's way of addressing this: What does it mean for something to be "good"? Not a good couch or a good deal on a car, but good AS SUCH. And bad: what is the bad of a sprained ankle? Yes, we get sprains and have to deal with them, but what does it mean for something to hurt? Moore called it a non natural property. Why non natural?

For this, I leave to you to consider, if you are interested. But I will say this: Facts of the world, natural facts like the atomic weight of helium of the weathering processes that made the Grand Canyon are VERY different from value "facts". Wittgenstein would not call value facts, facts all all. See his Lecture on Ethics (online and very accessible). It is because value cannot be observed at all!

This is the beginning to understanding the nature of religion.

Is it really that difficult and elusive? We live together as community and this means holding values. It's impossible not to. Ethics emerges from the resulting conversation just as surely as poo comes from eating. We couldn't avoid the subject of morality even if we wanted to and the only magic or transcendence inherent in such moral conversations (that I can see) is there if we confuse morality with mysticism — Tom Storm

If questions about the epistemic, ontological and ethical foundations of our existence didn't exist, then I would completely agree. But they are there, right in our midst. Ask the timeless question, how does anything "out there" get into a knowledge claim? So simple and accessible. Just look at the lamp on your desk and ask, how is my knowledge of this lamp even possible? You are not in some abstruse and abstract argument. You are IN the world of eating and pooing, just asking a simple question.

It is difficult to see "through" habits of thought and familiarity. The whole world is like this epistemic problem. The world is a "meta" problem, just sitting there staring back at you.

Part of common sense is knowing when there is no rational answer. — Tarskian

I agree and disagree. Realizing that the pain "as such" of this sprained ankle is in no way at all a discursive event, in no way derivative through logical avenues of inference, is itself rational judgment. On the one hand, nothing escapes this rationality. the moment one brings the matter up at all, one is already IN a rationally structured environment, and the very idea of something being not having an answer is "conceived" rationally. Even the term 'rationality' is interpretatively embedded.

But that sprained ankle and its pain: clear as a bell this is stands "outside" of what reason does. So it is like all things: language and its reason saturate experience WHEN a thing is brought before judgment. But prior to this, it "stands in the waiting" as when someone asks you about the sprain.

The OP is about this sprain and its pain and the ontology of this pain.

Surely you can see why I have problems untangling the meaning/position you are trying to convey here? — I like sushi

I was trying to accommodate what you said here, " but in this instance I would have to argue against this as ethics is about analysis of moral positions." The awkwardness of this really has no bearing on the intelligibility of the idea. The issue is generally conceived as metaethical not metamoral.

Morality and the interplay of reason to distinguish poorly constructed views/arguments ( — I like sushi

Morality begs the same question: what is morality? It is of course an interplay of reason, but then what isn't an interplay of reason? All things have this underpinning of reason and justification, ready at the glance. So we have to think, surely; metaethics asks us to think about the nature of ethics.

Then there is also the stance that ethics is generally referring to the application of moral principles to society at large - as a means of analysis. — I like sushi

Sure. But take the matter another step: When the term is used at all, what is there in a case that makes it ethical? A "meta" question.

Ah! So we are looking at the essence of morality then rather than ethics (as I outlined it)? The 'being' of morality rather than ethics? I will need confirmation here. — I like sushi

See the above. But t is a distinction without a difference, for both terms beg the same question. Some call my position moral realism, yet the ontological question refers us to metaethics. See John Mackie's book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, in which he specifically addresses the issue brought up here, though not as I am defending it, and there are lots of others.

I would have to say we are then looking for the root of judgement rather than ethics, as ethics is a judgement as is prudence. Morality is not intrinsic to value. Valuse can emerge in areas that have no prominent claim to ethics or morality. — I like sushi

No, for Wittgenstein judgment is about all those "facts" on the logical grid (Tractatus and Lecture on Ethics). Prudence presupposes value: why be prudent at all? Morality presupposes value: Remove the value a thing has, it the ethical dimension of the thing vanishes. Simple as that. All ethical situations reduce to this analysis. The many conflicted problems of our ethical lives have to do with facts that in themselves have no ethical dimension. You want to steal meds from the pharmacy needed for a loved one's illness, but you haven't the money because you were born into poverty, and so on. But being born into poverty, the pharmacy having the meds you need, the law that could put you in jail, and all the rest are facts, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun is a fact, and no more than this (unless you want to give this analysis as well). There is nothing ethical about the fact of moonlight. It can be put into circumstances that make it part of an ethical equation: all one has to do is care about it.

It is to ask about practical use of rather than an emotional judgement of 'right or wrong' flavoured values. — I like sushi

No doubt the practical use goes to dealing with the world, and the point is to do things right. The Greek arete comes to mind; and of course, the principle of utility. But this presupposes the more fundamental analysis: what is ethics? Ethics as such, the essence of ethics, that is, that, if it were removed from a situation, the ethicality itself would be removed. This is value.

I cannot even begin to see where/how/if you are trying to insert religion into the scheme, or what you actually mean by religion if you are essentially stating it is synonymous with 'ethics'/'moral laws' (which I still need clarity on also. — I like sushi

What is value? It goes back to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is open for discussion, but one has to give value a proper analysis, and this takes analysis to palpable events in the world, like putting someone in thumbscrews or stealing their dessert. Why are these prime facie wrong? Because one likes dessert and hates thumbscrews, obviously. No liking or disliking, to put it generally, no ethics. But what is liking? This is what I will call truly primordial: it is "among" the facts of the world, but it is not a fact. The good of ethics (and the bad) is not contingent, as Witt said. It is not like a good knife, say, contingent because one can explain it. Ethical goodness is very different. Explaining suffering is just a tautological exercise. It is what it is, or, it stands as its own presupposition, an absolute. It is, like logic, apodictic. Kant found apodicticity (apriority) in logic, I find it in value. The latter is far, far more significant.

Of course, there is the fascinating post modern complaint that even logic is cast in language, and language is contingent, historical (Heidegger), and even the term 'apodictic' is given to us as part of this. Apodicticity really is a term under erasure because it has no language counterpart. This is a tough issue, so I won't go there unless you want to. But the idea here is that even if logic cannot say what logic is, that is, as Witt said, it "shows" itself, but no further. But I do not let this to second guess modus ponens which is intuitively absolute. Nor can one second guess the "bad" of the pain of scorching of live flesh (masochists notwithstanding. Such an issue does not enter into the matter at hand). It would be just as "impossible" to deny the badness of such a thing as it would be to deny modus ponens.

Value as such is not relative or interpretatively derived. It is "the world". Not IN the world. Ethics is IN the world. Metaethics is about the world as world. Our existence is the world. We are IN a world, as well, and we ARE the world. This is something that has to be understood.

This, I am guessing, is unfamiliar language to you. This is due to anglo american philosophy's divorce from metaphysics. It might as well divorce itself from the world itself, which is exactly what it has done. A failed attempt.

Religion: If ethics is discovered to be an existential absolute, in its essence, as I am claiming, then the world is a very different "place". Our familiar ethical entanglements are now matters of far deeper significance. This deeper significance is what religions strive to affirm dogmatically. Here, it is demonstrably done, I claim, after all is said.

Thank you for taking the time to respond — I like sushi

Same here. All of the above is argumentative and confrontational. And quite right, by my thinking. It does take a certain openness and pulling away from standard assumptions. It is an ontological argument, a "what IS it? at the most basic level of assumptions argument.

I wrote "This is logically prior to, that is, it presupposes," and should have written "...is presupposed by..."

You discover judgement before ethics? Sorry, the more I look closely at what you have written the less it makes sense. — I like sushi

ethics is about analysis of moral positions — I like sushi

And the analysis of ethics is the analysis that is about the analysis of moral positions. This is metaethics, and religion is about just this metaethical analysis.

It's not about Kant and the apriority found in judgment. Kant's deduction was an attempt to discover the apriority in judgments about the world. The idea here is the attempt to find apriority in ethics. Here the similarity ends. One could talk like Kant does, though: Take a judgment about ethics, not about reason and logic, and give analysis. What is there that makes ethics what it is? This is logically prior to, that is, it presupposes, as you say, persuasion and social framing and prudence and anything one has to say about how ethics plays out in actual situations. This is, again, logically prior to all of this. It is a question of ontology: the question of the being of ethics, a question that is begged in all subsequent thinking about how to think about ethics.

One is now a scientist, if you will: observe an ethical matter and identify its properties. There are issues of entanglement that are unique to each case, but these presuppose the essence of ethics. One has to look specifically for this essence in inquiry. Kant's emphasis on duty, for example, steers us directly away from the very feature of the world that all ethical affairs deal with. This is, and Wittgenstein uses this term and it seems to work very well, value, the value dimension of our world. Ask, why does Witt insist both that the divine is "the good" and ethics/aesthetics is beyond analysis? See his Lecture on Ethics and the Tractatus (and with Philosophical investigations, Witt still holds firmly to the finitude of language, but never second guesses his earlier views on ethics). Also see his Culture and Value. He talks like this because "the good" is not an empirical or analytical concept. It is not among "states of affairs."

The OP introduces the idea that ethics is, in its foundational analytic, impossible. It is a transcendental term, and Wittgenstein knew this. How? Ask: What IS ethics? Not anything beyond the simplicity of the apriori "observation". This is to ask, What is the good and the bad in ethics? It is a metaethical question.

The "sense" of it lies in the simplicity of discovery. Put a lighted match under your finger and observe. Now ask the ontological question. Religion is ALL about this.