f someone can come along and challenge me, why shouldn't I challenge them in return? — baker

No reason. This entire milieu revolves around it.

The premiss of the OP is to explore the historical causes of the divisions between religious/secular, mind/matter, and so on, whereas many of the contributions just exemplify the very division at issue.

Don't we both agree that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, a part of the "given world" rather than some sort of intrusion into it? Do you think science is hobbled by its methods so that it can only inquire into certain parts of that world? — J

I'll refer to the potted quote I provided from Husserl again:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl (PRS 85; Hua XXV 13). Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one — Routledge Intro to Phenomenology

Also, as you mentioned Nagel, another passage I quote regularly:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Thomas Nagel, the Core of Mind and Cosmos

I would further claim that consciousness is a necessary postulate for many scientific inquiries — J

Not as an object of science, but as its pre-condition. Note the juxtaposition of 'natural' with 'transcendental' that Husserl refers to, which he derives from Kant, although he differs with Kant in signficant ways. Transcendental is 'what is necessary for experience but not given in experience.' So consciousness is not an 'intrusion' into the world, but neither is it an object within it.

:up:

Why, thankyou. Nietszche is not among my normal sources, but I'll take that on board.

Yes and no. Yes, methodologically. But no, not ontologically. There is nothing in the scientific viewpoint that has to deny subjectivity, or claim that it must be reducible to the currently understood categories of physical objectivity. — J

I'm afraid that's not the point. Modern scientific method was founded on a deliberate division between what came to be called the primary and secondary qualities of bodies — a move that located objective reality in quantifiable properties (extension, motion, mass) and relegated qualitative appearances to the mind of the observer. Locke and the British empiricists codified this, and Descartes’ separation of res cogitans and res extensa reinforced it. And none of that is a matter of opinion.

From that point on, the objective sciences proceeded by isolating the measurable, repeatable, intersubjectively verifiable aspects of phenomena — the features that should appear identically to any observer. That methodological bracketing was enormously fruitful, but it gradually hardened into an ontological assumption: the belief that the model thus produced is the whole of what is real.

This is the confusion Nagel examines in The View from Nowhere: the tendency to mistake the “view from nowhere” for a perspective that could exist independently of the conscious beings who adopt it.

When you say “it’s objectively true that you are conscious,” you’re appealing to an abstract inference that science can register only at one remove. The felt reality of consciousness — what it’s like to be an observer — is not something that can be observed. It’s not one more item within the world; it is the condition for there being a world of items at all.

If all agree that consciousness has always been there, and had just been ignored for certain purposes, then I don't know what the debate is about. — Patterner

The debate is about what you mean when you say 'there'.

Indeed. And isn't that the central factor in this debate?

I don't agree that this is what panpsychism is attempting to do. — Patterner

The metaphor Schrodinger gave was, 'once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit." 'Putting colour back in' is a metaphor, but, leaving aside whether the metaphor itself is apt, Schrodinger's starting-point is accurate. Scientific method disregards or brackets out the subjective elements of phenomenal experience so as to derive a mathematically-precise theory of the movements and relations of objects. Consciousness is 'left out' of this, insofar as it is not to be found amongst those objects of scientific analysis. So panpsychism proposes that it must in some sense be a property of those objects, even if current science hasn't detected it. I think that's what Schrodinger's criticism means, and I think it is an accurate description of what panpsychism proposes to do.

As for whether its advocates are really trying to do that:

“Experience is the stuff of the world. Experience is what physical stuff is ultimately made of.”
— “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(10–11), 2006.

“If physicalism is true, the experiential must be physical, because the experiential exists, and physicalism is the view that everything that exists is physical. The only way to avoid radical emergence is to suppose that experiential being is present throughout the physical world.”
— ibid.

It is exactly this kind of gambit that Schrodinger's critique anticipated.

Rather, it (panpsychism) is saying that if and when we understand what consciousness is, we will discover that our current division of "objective" and "subjective" into areas that can and cannot be studied scientifically, is just plain wrong. — J

But this division is intrinsic. Science depends on the bracketing out of the subjective. Its power lies in its ability to treat phenomena as objects of measurement and prediction, abstracting from the first-person standpoint. But that same abstraction ensures that consciousness — the condition of possibility for any object to appear — cannot itself appear as an object in that framework. In Husserl’s terms, consciousness is not one more thing among things; it is the ground within which “things” arise.

Bitbol’s point in Beyond Panpsychism is that phenomenology doesn’t try to patch consciousness back into the scientific picture (as panpsychism does) but to reverse the direction of explanation: instead of asking how consciousness arises within the world, it asks how the world appears within consciousness. That’s what makes phenomenology radical — it goes to the root (radix) of the knowing relation itself. The goal is not to extend the scientific image to include the subject, but to reveal that the scientific image itself is a derivative construction grounded upon experience. And you can see how this dovetails with Chalmers critique.

Sure but this isn't just about you and your individual take on the meaning crisis. — Tom Storm

Subjective, right? Personal preference. Edifying, but personal.

I know what you think of this, — Tom Storm

That there is bad religion, and it's worse than no religion.

It interests me that Hart has called fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (as is practiced widely in the US and throughout MAGA lands) a cult and heresy. Which is not hard to see. But it does beg the question what counts as the real thing? — Tom Storm

It doesn't beg the question. Begging the question would be 'The Bible is the word of God, because God says it is.' What I was responding to, was the blanket assertion, often made on this Forum, 'religion is belief without evidence'. To which I respond, what counts as evidence? I was pointing out the fact that Christianity, for instance, had a huge impact on the formation of Western culture. That furthermore the sacred literature and testimonial evidence of world religions amounts to an enormous corpus of actual information. Of course most of it is not subject to peer-reviewed scientific analysis, which as good as invalidates if for many of our number.

I'm not seeking to revive Christianity so much as the 'sense of the sacred', in light of which human life and suffering are meaningful and intelligible, and not just something to be borne, Sisyphus-like. As I've said already, it's why I've always sought the cosmic dimension in philosophy. As one of my analytic philosophy heros, Thomas Nagel, put it:

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. He even seems to have suffered from a version of the more characteristically Judaeo-Christian conviction that we are all miserable sinners, and to have hoped for some form of redemption from philosophy. — Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

Or Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

(Although as far as empirical evidence is concerned, I recall a 2025 NY Times article on the review of so-called miraculous cures associated with candidates for Sainthood, written by a medical doctor who was called on to revew a case. It might make for an interesting discussion.)

Agree. I think an awful lot of specious reasoning is associated with multiverse ideas. (Not that it isn't fertile ground for science fication.)

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. — Janus

So says A J Ayer. There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius. David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empire’s pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted—human dignity, equality (in some form), charity, care for the vulnerable, the idea that the strong have moral obligations toward the weak, the notion that human beings are more than cogs in an imperial machine. He says that many secular cultural “goods” have Christian roots. He argues we need to recognise this transformation if we’re to assess religion’s legacy honestly, whilst also acknowledging that Christian culture has its faults and shadow sides. For sure it wasn't always beneficial but it demonstrably was foundational to the formation of Western culture.

Furthermore in religious epistemology, knowing is not merely an act of detached cognition based on third-party observervation, so much as participation in a transformative way of being. Truth is verified not only by correspondence between propositions and facts, but by a reorientation to the nature of existence towards that which is truly so in the holistic sense — the change in being that follows from insight. As Gregory of Nyssa or the Upaniṣads would say, to know the divine is to become like it.

Scientists don't know what Energy & Fields are in substance, but only what they do in causal relationships between material objects. To avoid misleading, when I use the Quantum Field or Universal Gravity as analogies to the Cosmic Mind notion, I try to make clear that these "forces" are not "objective" and observable, but rationally inferrable from observed processes. — Gnomon

Right - so what you're saying is that 'cosmic mind' is analogous to the 'noumenal'. Agree they might be rationally inferred, but as such cannot be empirically validated.

So my point is that what we know about the Big Bang should act as a constraint on our metaphysical claims. — apokrisis

Do you think that the 'multiverse speculation' (that there are potentially infinitely many 'other' universes) can be or ought to be similarly constrained?

As Erwin Schrödinger cogently pointed out, once lived experience has been left aside in order to elaborate an objective picture of the world, “If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts; and as such it becomes wrong”. Panpsychism is the unambiguous target of this criticism. It represents a clumsy attempt at overcompensating the consequences of adopting the intentional/objectifying stance needed to do science, by adding to it (or by replacing it with) patches of experience very similar to the patches of colour added on the surface of an uncoloured drawing. As soon as this is done, the new picture of the world looks like a scientific picture, apart from the unfortunate circumstance that its additional elements cannot be put to test as it would be the case of a scientific theory. This does not make panpsychism plainly wrong, but rather torn apart between its phenomenological origin and its temptation to mimick a theory of the objective world. As a consequence, panpsychism proves unable to define adequate criteria of validity for its own claims. — Michel Bitbol, Beyond Panpsychism

Reference is to Schrödinger E. (1986), What is Life & Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press

I think this criticism applies to all the current proponents of panpsychism - Philip Goff, Anakka Harris, Galen Strawson, etc. They're all trying to preserve the veracity of the scientific model while injecting an element of subjectivity into it 'from the outside', so to speak.

@Patterner

Perhaps because I don't see anything as a matter of fact. I call that closed mindedness. So I have instead mere opinions, and yes, ones that don't correspond with your 'facts'. — noAxioms

Well, that solves it. All living beings are made from marshmallows, and the moon really is cheese. Time we moved on.

A very short geneaology of idealism from an essay on Buddhism:

The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating it as the primary substance while reducing the remaining substance to derivative status. Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.). Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.).

Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism.

Idealism, in its broadest sense, came to encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality. Most forms of theistic and theological thought were, by this definition, types of idealism, even if they accepted matter as real, since they also asserted something as more real than matter, either as the creator of matter (in monotheism) or as the reality behind matter (in pantheism). Extreme empiricists who only accepted their own experience and sensations as real were also idealists. Thus the term "idealism" united monotheists, pantheists and atheists. At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited a mind (or minds) as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism) metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisions and creates the universe.

A more limited type of idealism is epistemological idealism, which argues that since knowledge of the world only exists in the mental realm, we cannot know actual physical objects as they truly are, but only as they appear in our mental representations of them. Epistemological idealists could be ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially; they could even accept that mental states derived at least in part from material processes. What they denied was that matter could be known in itself directly, without the mediation of mental representations. Though unknowable in itself, matter's existence and properties could be known through inference based on certain consistencies in the way material things are represented in perception.

Transcendental idealism contends that not only matter but also the self remains transcendental in an act of cognition. Kant and Husserl, who were both transcendental idealists, defined "transcendental" as "that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience." An example would be the eye, which is the condition for seeing even though the eye does not see itself. By applying vision and drawing inferences from it, one can come to know the role eyes play in seeing, even though one never sees one's own eyes. Similarly, things in themselves and the transcendental self could be known if the proper methods were applied for uncovering the conditions that constitute experience, even though such conditions do not themselves appear in experience. Even here, where epistemological issues are at the forefront, it is actually ontological concerns, viz. the ontological status of self and objects, that is really at stake. Western philosophy rarely escapes that ontological tilt. Those who accepted that both the self and its objects were unknowable except through reason, and that such reason(s) was their cause and purpose for existing - thus epistemologically and ontologically grounding everything in the mind and its ideas - were labeled Absolute Idealists (e.g., Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), since only such ideas are absolute while all else is relative to them.

With the exception of some epistemological idealists, what unites all the positions enumerated above, including the materialists, is that these positions are ontological. They are concerned with the ontological status of the objects of sense and thought, as well as the ontological nature of the self who knows. Mainstream Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle has treated ontology and metaphysics as the ultimate philosophic pursuit, with epistemology's role being little more than to provide access and justification for one's ontological pursuits and commitments. Since many of what are decried as philosophy's excesses - such as skepticism, solipsism, sophistry - could be and were accused of deriving from overactive epistemological questioning, epistemology has often been held suspect, and in some theological formulations, considered entirely dispensable in favor of faith. Ontology is primary, and epistemology is either secondary or expendable. — Dan Lusthaus, What Is and Isn't Yogācāra

I'm nearest to epistemological idealism, although transcendental idealism also appeals to me. But I take Lusthaus' point that Western philosophy on the whole has had an ontological tilt, concerned with the nature of what ultimately exists, although I don't think that can be said of existentialism or phenomenology.

faced with his own mortality, which is both terrifying and freeing..... — BitconnectCarlos

That would depend on whether there is karmic retribution, in which case one's mortality would not be freeing at all. A lot of modern culture is fundamentally nihilist - nothing matters in the end, right? We'll all end up dead. ( I didn't end up watching Breaking Bad, although it had a reputation as a cracking drama, and many other streamers I have watched are equally nihilistic in that sense).

OK, from this I gather that your statement that you're asserting an ontological distinction, a distinction in the mode of being, you're merely expressing opinion, not evidence of any sort. — noAxioms

I see it more as a matter of facts which you don’t recognize.

Thank you. Must read some more.

Very true :pray:

A comment I read about the distinction between the New Left and the conservative religious critique, was 'For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and Enlightenment are dialectically intertwined: Enlightenment arises from myth but reproduces myth’s structure of domination in a new, “rationalized” form. Thus, the way out is neither regression to pre-rational faith nor blind progress through science, but a self-reflective form of reason — one that is conscious of its limits and its entanglement with power.'

But I still sense a lack in their spiritual anthropology, so to speak. I think, for the religious, humanity has a cosmic signficance with which it seeks reconciliation. I think, perhaps, this is what Habermas was getting at in his dialogues with Ratzinger and his subsequent books.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing?

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I'd say maybe they are 'spiritual' rather than religious. It seems to me religion implies something more public with practices and institutions that curate a certain tradition. — ChatteringMonkey

We did touch on this theme a few posts back. It's an important point. Like many others, I set out to sort the wheat from the chaff of dogma and tradition when much younger. I believed (naively, in hindsight) that there were experiences or epiphanies which would provide first-person insight into spiritual realities outside the strictures of ‘churchianity’. (This was the 1960's, when such ideas were in the air). Why only believe, when you can see! This was associated with hallucinogenic experiences, Timothy Leary and Alduous Huxley. (There was an amusing line in a streaming comedy recently where a sub-adolescent girl was told by one of the principles that ‘you meditate so you don’t have to go to Church any more’.)

There were some real insights coming out of that. Needless to say however such experiences are fleeting and can't be stablised. But I vividly recall the realisation of an ecstatic dimension of existence, the extraodinary richness of natural beauty, and thinking 'why isn't life always like this?'

But what I failed to reckon with was the accumulated momentum of cultural conditioning and of one's own habitual pre-dispositions. They are real obstacles in the development of insight and they're deeply rooted and culturally re-inforced. I'm sure that's where many of the practices associated with religion originated - memorisation, repetition, ritual. They operate on both the symbolic and the somatic level to remove those obstacles. But then over time the original vision is lost sight of and they are repeated because - that's just what we do. That is when they loose their connection with the insight that originally motivated them.

I assume that in Plato's day they just called it Philosophy. Perhaps, you are stating the obvious, that modern versions of Platonic Idealism are not ancient. But I was referring to the general belief that A> Reality is fundamentally Mental*1, or B> that the Human mind's model of reality is as close to true reality as we are likely to know*2. — Gnomon

These are very difficult distinctions. But the point of my other thread, Idealism in Context, was that the human sense of their relationship with the nature of being has fundamentally changed over the course of history. (This is an Hegelian theme). The ancients did not have the sense we do that the world comprised material objects being driven by physical causation. Because of their religious sense, the Cosmos was seen as in some sense purposeful or as alive, in a way that is very hard for us to grasp. The way I put it in the other thread was:

The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight). — Wayfarer

So here, at the risk of sounding trite, the theme is the at-one-ness of being and knowing. Not as an intellectual construct or as the idea in the subject's mind corresponding to the object in the external world but as a way of being-in-the-world. That innate sense we possess of subjective awareness in a realm of objects had not yet taken hold. (I suppose, in some ways, this can be related to Julian Jayne's 'bicameral mind' or to R M Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness'. )

It is often said that Aquinas is a realist - which is true, but he was a scholastic or Aristotelian realist, which means something completely different to what we mean by 'realist'. For Thomism, with God as Being, reality is inherently participatory, in a way that it can't be for us. It is ecstatic realism, if you like. But as the belief took hold that the Cosmos was not an expression of the divine Intellect, then physical reality was accorded the kind of inherent reality that scholastic philosophy would never grant it. This is the origin of the 'Cartesian division' and the pervasive sense of 'otherness' that characterises the modern mind. (See this blog post on Radical Orthodoxy).

So Berkeley's idealism was a reaction against the whole idea of matter as a mind-independent substance - something which wouldn't have occurred as neccessary in earlier philosophy, as material form was always seen in combination with the intelligible idea which was immaterial as a matter of definition (but emphatically not an 'immaterial thing'! :brow: )

This is why expressions such as “cosmic mind” are inherently misleading when taken to denote some objective existent, as if it were on par with scientific concepts like fields or forces. In classical thought, the divine intellect was not conceived as an object within the universe but as the very ground of intelligibility — the condition under which being and knowing are possible at all. To interpret it as a thing among things is already to have shifted into a different ontological register. Whenever such expressions are used, we risk reifying what was never meant to be reified — trying to understand the source of intelligibility from within the subject–object framework that depends upon it.

I know that the Upanisads (for example) were described as 'idealist philosphy' by a German scholar, Paul Deussen. But the term 'idealism' only entered the philosophical lexicon with Leibniz, Kant and Spinoza. Once the term was introduced with its associated ideas, then precursors to it could be seen in Greek and Indian philosophy. But at the time, they didn't use that terminology and they didn't have the same categorical distinctions between mind, matter and idea, that modern idealism contains. "Idealism” in its systematic sense — the thesis that reality is in some way dependent on mind or spirit — only becomes a defined philosophical position in early modern Europe, with Leibniz’s monadology, Spinoza’s substance monism, and especially Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Once that vocabulary existed, scholars like Deussen and later Radhakrishnan could look back and identify idealist currents in Plato, Plotinus, and the Upaniṣads. But those traditions themselves never used the conceptual apparatus of Idee, Bewusstsein, or Geist — their metaphysical language was quite different.

The abstract noun “idealism” appears in French as idéalisme by the late 17th century and in English around the mid-18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first philosophical use in 1702, referring to “the theory that external objects are known only as ideas.”

So, yes, there are ancient pre-cursors to idealism, but idealist philosophy really only appears in the early modern era. This is further discussed in the thread Idealism in Context (of which yours was the first comment.)

I'm not sure I fully understand K's "reasonable" and diligently documented update of ancient Idealism. Also, in order to maintain a philosophical line of reasoning, and to avoid getting into Religion vs Scientism diatribes, I prefer to use less dogmatic & divisive terms than "God". But Kastrup is bolder, and more self-assured than I am. — Gnomon

'Idealism' is not ancient. The term first came into use with Liebniz, Berkeley and Kant. In hindsight, it is possible to describe some elements of Platonism as idealist, but it is not a term that was used in Plato's day.

As for Kastrup, I think he's worth reading, or listening to. He's an articulate defender of idealism.

I think the pushback is the natural reaction to test someone's claims to authority. Especially religious people seem to think that they can go forth into the world, make claims to authority, and the world then owes them submissiveness. — baker

That is how quite a few here will inevitably categorise any discussion of what they consider religion. As I said upthread, I think much of this stems from the oppressive, indeed authoritarian, role of ecclesiastical religion in historical Western culture. After all, religious authoritarianism is what Enlightenment humanism so painfully liberated itself from. But on the other hand, that requires an implicit acceptance of that this is all that religion or spirituality can mean or amount to.

Consider this passage from Edward Conze, a Buddhologist who was active in the mid 20th c in his essay on Buddhist Philosophy and it’s European Parallels.

Until about 1450, as branches of the… "perennial philosophy,” Indian and European philosophers disagreed less among themselves, than with many of the later developments of European philosophy. The "perennial philosophy" is in this context defined as a doctrine which holds [1] that as far as worthwhile knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted, than others; and [3] that the sages have found a wisdom which is true, although it has no empirical basis in observations which can be made by everyone and everybody; and that in fact there is a rare and unordinary faculty in some of us by which we can attain direct insight into the nature of the Real --through the Prajñāpāramitā of the Buddhists, the logos of Parmenides, the Sophia of Aristotle and others, Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, Hegel's Vernunft, and so on; and [4] that true teaching is based on an authority which legitimizes itself by the exemplary life and charismatic quality of its exponents.

Of course, this is highly politically incorrect and I wouldn’t expect many here would accept it - but I still believe that there are such degrees of insight and understanding, and that not everyone has them by default, as it were. Of course it is also true that spiritual hierarchies have often been the source of egregious abuses of power, but they’re not only that, even if that is the only thing that some will see when they look at them.

Good work by the way pointing to the epic/etic distinction, it is something I studied in anthropology and not often noted here.

Its own dogmas become transparent (one being the prizing of multiplicity as a sort of proxy for freedom) — Count Timothy von Icarus

The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.

Yet that is the secular view of secularity, its own self-understanding. — “David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole

———

” (Sam) Harris makes it sound as if there is empirical, scientific evidence for the Buddha's normative teaching, including the ideal norm of buddhahood and the possibility of its attainment. I disagree.” ~ Evan Thompson — Joshs

I remember that passage from Thompson’s book, Why I am Not a Buddhist. Whilst I concur with a lot of what he writes in that book, I’m not so much in agreement on this distinction (not that I’m any fan of Harris, perish the thought.) I agree with Thompson that Buddhism is not the ‘inner science’ that many of its modern adherents seek to portray it as. But the question of why it isn’t or cannot be is not, I think, so clear-cut as Thompson makes it out to be. Agree that whatever evidence there might be, is not empirical in the sense of able to be reviewed in the third person. But at the same time - and this goes for religions other than Buddhism as well - there are fairly coherent and consistent schemas of (let’s say) experiential insight that aspirants progress through on the spiritual journey. Whilst not scientific in the sense that physics or chemistry can be, neither do they rest solely on the idiosyncratic expressions and utterances of their adherents (although there will always be idiosyncratic types as well). But then, on the other hand, many of its modern enthusiasts may take it to be a science in the way that is not, in lacking the deep enculturation that it’s emic adherents naturally possess.

I’m not going to get near to resolving that question here, or possibly ever. But I think there are disciplined structures, methods, and practices in these traditions that do traverse and replicate recognised states and stages in a way that popular devotional religions do not. Agree that these practices are not scientific in the third-person sense but I don’t know whether that makes them automatically and only doxastic (matters of belief).

The point that interests me is his refutation of the ‘is/ought’ distinction. He phrases it in terms of relevance realisation This revolves around discerning relevance - perceiving what features of a situation could be important in each moment. It puts questions of value, importance, significance and the sacred at the center of the ‘salience landscape’.

Why bring in ‘the sacred’? Where most cognitive scientists stop at mechanism — mapping functions, algorithms, and neural correlates — Vervaeke insists on situating cognition within the broader context of human condition: the experience of being a meaning-seeking, self-transcending animal prone to self-deception. His language of “salience landscapes,” “relevance realization,” and “ecologies of practice” attempts to harmonise descriptive science and philosophical anthropology.

Sorry Wayfarer. — Tom Storm

Not at all.

What I was going to say is that surely the whole concept of the purposelessness of the Universe, with any sense of purpose or meaning being relegated to the individual prerogative, is precisely what the thread is about. It is also what my earlier thread On Purpose was about (although there it was an effort to provide a phenomenological perspective on the question.)

I agree completely with @Pierre-Normand's Aristotelean perspective on the issue. But I also think we have a burden of responsibility. The fact that we are able to grapple with these questions says to me that we must. It is part of the burden of rational sentient being. In some ways, I think the physicalist denial of free will (a la Galen Strawson et el) really amounts to an unwillingness to face up to that responsibility. It is far easier to believe that we really have no ultimate responsibility for our fate than to face up to what having it might entail. But then, as I've already owned up, I recognise that this is the residue of the Christian concscience that my cultural heritage bequeathed me.

Vervaeke argues that normativity doesn’t need to be imported from a cosmic telos or moral law.
It’s implicit in our very capacity for rational, self-corrective cognition.

Our “is” — our biological and cognitive architecture — already entails competencies that can be exercised well or badly. “Ought” simply names the direction of self-correction toward more adequate realization of those competences.

So instead of:

facts ⟶ mysterious jump ⟶ moral prescription (the classical 'is-ought' problem)

he proposes:

cognitive agent ⟶ degrees of competence ⟶ appropriate normative orientation (“ought”)

It’s a kind of naturalized virtue ethics: to be the kind of being you are is to strive to actualize your capacity for insight, relevance-realization, and flourishing.

Furthermore, Vervaeke recognises that as rational, sentient beings, right action isn’t an optional add-on but intrinsic to the topology of our salience landscape — the way we perceive and value what matters. Acting well refines perception itself. It doesn’t require an appeal to a supernatural judge or cosmic law; it arises naturally from our capacity to discern and realise relevance more truthfully. (Which is not to deny there is a cosmic law. Me, I accept the reality of karma.)

Let's ask ourselves, where do we get these [standards]? The way [this is] asked this is how do we come up with our normative theory — not meaning statistically normal here, but normative meaning the theory about the standards to which we should hold ourselves accountable when we're reasoning. So where does our normative theory come from?

Reason has to be autonomous. Let's say I believed that my standards were given to me by some divine being, in the sense that it is commanded of me. There is some Moses of rationality, and then he comes back with the commandments for how we're supposed to reason. If we follow these just because we are commanded to do so, that is ultimately not a rational act. That is to give into authority, to give into fear...

If we follow the standards because we acknowledge that they're good and right, that means we already possessed the standards. This is an old argument that goes back to Plato. It's in the Euthyphro dialogue, right? Where normativity has to be really deeply autonomous. If something is only good because the gods say it, then the gods aren't good in saying it...

So we have to possess the standards internally. This is an argument that's crucial in Kant. Reason is ultimately autonomous… it has to be the source of the very norms that constitute and govern reason because that's how reason operates. So we have to be the standard.

Ought implies Can. … If I lay a standard upon you, ‘You ought to do this,’ then you have to be able to do it. It makes no sense to apply a standard to you that you do not have the competence to fulfill… So we are the source of the standards. People acknowledge the standard, but they fail to satisfy them. … We have to make a distinction between competence and performance. — John Vervaeke, AFMC, Lecture 40, What is Rationality?

I’d hate to associate myself with Steve Bannon :yikes: I’d much rather Charles Taylor.

I was an undergrad student alongside a fellow by the name of Harry Oldmeadow, who went on to become an independent scholar in the area of the perennialist philosophers.(He won the University Medal for his Honours Thesis. His brother, Peter, was one of my thesis supervisors in Buddhist Studies. They were both really good people, I don't know if they're still with us.) As you will probably both know, the perennial school was a kind of clique of academics and artists, notably René Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, and Ananda Coomaraswamy (among others), who extolled the 'philosophia perennis' (Liebniz' term) - that the various spiritual traditions of the classical period are diverse expressions of an underlying primordial wisdom tradition.

At the time, I was quite impressed by these scholars, although I never fully assimilated their books. But as time went on. I don't feel their ouevre has worn that well (ironic, considering the subject matter). Some of those associated with them, notably Julius Evola, became associated with reactionary fascism. (In his later years in Bloomington, Indiana, Schuon became embroiled in controversy over ritual gatherings that included nudity and were alleged to involve minors — allegations that were investigated and ultimately dismissed. It did tarnish his reputation though.)

In any case, the point I'm making is that expressed in the title of a critical book about it - Against the Modern World, Mark Sedgwick (his blog). I have discovered there was quite a lot of common ground between the perennialists and reactionary politics, which I don't want to be associated with. (I was also dismayed to learn that Steve Bannon used to quote Guenon.) Neverthelss, I really do understand why one can be 'against the modern world' and the way in which the post-Enlightenment project can be seen as a kind of degenerate age (the 'Kali Yuga' in the perennialist terminology, taken from a Hindu myth.) I don't necessarily agree with it, or endorse it, but I can see the logic. Guenon might be considered an eccentric, but I don't think that's all he was.

(There's something similar in some of the current French cultural critics - Rémi Brague for example - a more temperate and academically grounded critic of modernity who situates his analysis within the Western philosophical tradition itself.)

Perhaps I misunderstand 'mode', but I see 'being' simply as 'existing', which is probably not how you're using the term. To me, all these things share the same mode: they are members of this universe, different arrangements of the exact same fundamentals. — noAxioms

Which is, in a word, physicalism - there is only one substance, and it is physical. From within that set of assumptions, Chalmer's and Nagel's types of arguments will always remain unintelligible.

Am I missing something in Vervaeke's perspectives on the matter? — javra

I think you're misunderstanding the intent of that particular message. Vervaeke would not dismiss nor deprecate any of what you've said in the preceeding paragraphs. Indeed, a large part of his work is restoring 'the sense of the sacred' (e.g. this course). And he's in respectful dialogue with diverse disciplines and traditions.

What that post is criticising is the kind of buffet-style syncretism where you choose the elements you think you want from the 'spiritual supermarket' and attempt to practice them or apply them by yourself. It seems feasible, especially with the abundance of educational resources on the Internet. But this can easily become, and often is, self-centred and self-seeking. Hence the importance of others - a spiritual community or companions on the path.

Vervaeke stresses both 'ecologies' and 'communities' of practice.

Ecology:

• It is plural (practices) and integrated (they support, check, balance one another). One practice alone (e.g. solitary meditation) is not sufficient
• It is purposefully arranged (there is a “logos”, a rationale) rather than just a random aggregation of habitual actions.
• It spans domains of being: cognitive/intellectual, embodied/somatic, imaginal/creative, relational/dialogical. His program describes four “domains”: Dialogue, Imaginal, Mindfulness, Embodiment.
• It addresses what Vervaeke calls “perennial problems” (structural, developmental, functional) that underlie our meaning-crisis (e.g., alienation, absurdity, reflexiveness gaps).
• It is pragmatic and lifeworld-oriented: not just theorising, but practising, training, habituating. Compare “having” (propositional knowledge) with “being” (skillful engagement).

Community:

• Practices are done together with others in fellowship and “mutual support” (i.e., not simply individual meditation or movement but relationally embedded).
• "practice, discussion, friendship”.
• Modern isolation undermines our ability to cultivate meaning and wisdom hence the requirment for communal practice environments or 'spiritual friendship' (Buddhist kalyāṇa-mitratā)

All of which rings true for me. For about ten years I was member of a Buddhist fellowship that met monthly or bi-monthly to present and discuss themes and practices. My practice has really gone downhill since that broke up.

We seem to have a vastly different notion of what constitutes an ontological distinction. It seems you might find a stop sign ontologically distinct from a speed limit sign since they have different properties. — noAxioms

I’m not using “ontological” here to mean merely “a set of observable traits.” I’m using it in its proper philosophical sense — a distinction in the mode of being. A rock and an amoeba both exist, but not in the same way. The amoeba has a self-organising, self-maintaining unity: it acts to preserve itself and reproduce. This isn’t a mere property added to matter, but a different kind of organization — what Aristotle called entelechy and what modern systems theorists call autopoiesis.

That distinction is categorical, not merely quantitative. Life introduces an interiority — however minimal — that inanimate matter does not possess. It’s what allows later forms of experience, cognition, and consciousness to emerge. So the “list of attributes” such as homeostasis or metabolism are not arbitrary descriptors, but outward manifestations of this deeper ontological difference.

But this distinction also bears directly on the problem of consciousness. Nagel points out that modern science arose by deliberately excluding the mental from its field of study. The “objective” world of physics was constituted by abstracting away everything that belongs to the first-person point of view — experience, meaning, purpose — in order to describe the measurable, quantifiable aspects of bodies. That method proved extraordinarily powerful, but it also defined its own limits: whatever is subjective was set aside from the outset. As noted above, this is not a matter of opinion.

This means that the gap between third-person descriptions and first-person experience isn’t an accidental omission awaiting further physical theory; it’s a structural feature of how the physical sciences were established. To describe something in purely physical terms is by definition to omit 'what it feels like' to be that thing. So the problem isn’t just about explaining how consciousness emerges from matter — according to Thomas Nagel, it is about how a worldview that excluded subjectivity as a condition of its success could ever re-incorporate it without transforming its own foundations.

That’s why I say the distinction between living and non-living things is not merely biological but ontological. Life is already the point at which matter becomes interior to itself — where the world starts to appear from a perspective within it. From that perspective, consciousness isn’t an inexplicable late-arriving anomaly in an otherwise material universe; it’s the manifestation of an inherent distinction between appearance and being that the physical sciences, by their very design, have bracketed out. But that is a transcendental argument, and therefore philosophical rather than scientific.

If a biological explanation turns out to be the correct one, I imagine it will also show that most of our rough-and-ready conceptions about subjectivity and consciousness are far too impoverished — J

I've been going through a pretty dense paper by Evan Thompson, 'Could All Life be Sentient?', which is useful in respect of these questions about the distinctions between various levels or kinds of organic life and degrees of consciousness. Useful, but not conclusive, leaving the question open, in the end, but helpful in at least defining and understanding the issues. I've also generated a synopsis which will be helpful in approaching the essay.

Gdocs Synopsis (AI Generated)
Could All Life be Sentient? Evan Thompson

The physical sciences are defined by excluding subjective experience from their domain ~ Nagel

I disagree with this. Neurologists require access to that, which is why brain surgery is often done on conscious patients, with just local anesthesia to the scalp. Of course they only have access to experiences as reported in third person by the subject, so in that sense, I agree. — noAxioms

Galileo's point, which was foundational in modern science, was that the measurable attributes of bodies - mass, velocity, extension and so on - are primary, while how bodies appear to observers - their colour, scent, and so on - are secondary (and by implication derivative). That is the sense in which the physical sciences 'excluded subjective experience', and it's not a matter of opinion.

As to why neuroscientists converse with subjects, in fact there's a textbook case of these kinds of practices which lends very strong support to some form of dualism. I'm speaking of the Canadian neuroscientist Wilder Penfield (1891-1976), who operated on many conscious patients during his very long career. He reported that his operations often elicited or stimulated vivid memories of previous experiences or could induce movements of various kinds. But he also reported that subjects could invariably distinguish between effects or memories that were elicited by him, and those which they themselves initiated. He concluded from this that the mind and the brain are not identical. While electrical stimulation of the cortex could evoke experiences, sensations, or involuntary actions, it could never make the patient will to act or decide to recall something. Penfield saw a clear distinction between neural activity that produced experiences and the conscious agency that could observe, interpret, and choose among them. In his later work (The Mystery of the Mind, 1975), he wrote that “the mind stands apart from the brain but acts upon it,” proposing that consciousness is not reducible to cerebral processes alone.

As these operations showed, direct cortical stimulation could evoke experiences, movements, and memories, but never the act of will itself. Patients could always distinguish between something they themselves initiated and something induced by the surgeon. Penfield concluded that the conscious agent — the mind — cannot be identified with neural circuitry alone.

So the “third-person substrate” may be describable, but that doesn’t make it understandable in the relevant sense. Understanding would mean grasping how physical interactions, which by definition exclude subjectivity (per the above), could constitute subjective awareness itself. And that’s not an empirical gap that can be closed with more data or better simulations; it’s a conceptual distinction. A fully simulated brain might behave exactly like a conscious person, but whether there’s 'anything it’s like' to be that simulation is the very point at issue.

In short, you’re arguing from within the third-person framework while intending to account for what only appears from within the first-person perspective. The result isn’t an explanation but a translation — a substitution of the language of mechanism for the reality of experience. That’s the “illusion of reduction” you yourself noticed when you said commentators “appropriate first-person words to refer to third-person phenomena.”

When you treat the first-person point of view as something that emerges from a “third-person-understandable substrate,” you are collapsing the distinction Chalmers and Nagel are pointing out. By assuming the substrate is “understandable” in third-person terms, you've already presupposed that subjectivity can be accounted for within an objective framework. So you're not addressing the issue, but explaining it away.

As it happens, as a subscriber to Vervaeke's mailing list, his most recent missive was about 'spiritual but not religious'.

Metaphysics was at one time discovered. It wasn’t merely invented. Maybe it was partly that we discovered ‘that we invent’. We reflected on knowing/sensing. — Fire Ologist

By Kant's time, metaphysics had become highly dogmatised and he rightly criticized it on those grounds. But I've found that the neo-Thomist philosophers are still able to make a coherent case for classical metaphysics. Nearly all of them are Catholics, of course, and that's not coincidental, because it provides the experiential dimension that academic metaphysics all too easily forgets.

I agree with your point that classical metaphysics, starting with Parmenides and Heraclitus, was a critical reflection on the nature of knowing. It wasn't simply dogmatic slogans and aphorisms. (see Eric S Perl Thinking Being.) The rejection of all of metaphysics too easily throws the baby out with the bathwater (murky though that water might be).

This is not meant to refute Nietzsche or Buddha, but to recognize what they added to metaphysics and epistemology and ontology. — Fire Ologist

It is often said that the Buddha rejected metaphysics. In a way, that is true - but on the other hand, the whole basis of the Buddha's teaching, the 'principle of dependent origination', is a metaphysic, although of a completely different kind to the Aristotelian.

But again, the crucial point is that it is always connected to experiential insight rather than dogma. (I first came to Kant through a 1950's textbook called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, which contains comparisons between Kant and Buddhism (reference) This book is nowadays criticized for its perceived eurocentrism but became a foundational text for me as it enabled me to synthesize Eastern and Western philosophy in a practical manner.)

But if there is any such thing as the absolute at all, like the paradox, how could it truly be dismissed? The answer is, the same way it could be embraced - by an act of the subject. — Fire Ologist

There is much confusion about 'philosophies of the absolute'. On the one hand, most modern and post-modern philosophy will dismiss any consideration of it. Those philosophies that do discuss it often seem cumbersome and obscure. Again my attitude has been influenced by Buddhism, which refuses to reify (make a thing of) any idea of the absolute. Why and how it does that is probably impossible to spell out, but suffice to say that what is required is more than an exercise in rational thought - hence the central role of zazen meditation in Zen Buddhism.

the good news is, we can truly be right, but the bad news is, we can truly be wrong — Fire Ologist

Because we are free to discover, or not to discover. But this is also why an 'ecology of practice' is necessary, which will nearly always end up being religious in nature.

Hell of an interesting article you wrote my friend, indeed. As i understood the general idea of your idealism idea is that ideas (i'll stop) you are in agreement with an empirical, "self evident truth" -to call it something- that the physical reality does exist, but that the mind has "created" a reality or, rather, interpreted the physical reality to something arbitrary. — Oppida

Thanks for the compliment! The way the mind interprets or constructs its sense of what is real is far from arbitrary. It is constrained in all kinds of ways - by the kinds of beings we are, the kinds of minds and sensory capabilities we have, and so on. Also by cultural factors. But the point is that what we typically take to be outside of or independent from us, is not truly so (which was Kant's major discovery). Science typically operates so as to eliminate subjective bias, which is an important and necessary step. But even so, the role of the subject or observer remains indispensable in deciding what to analyse, how to interpret the results - what the findings mean, in short. It is all too easily overlooked or neglected in the pursuit of the objective understanding (a principle basic to phenomenology).

As this OP says, the modern idea of 'the physical universe' grew out of Galileo and Descartes division between the primary (external, measurable) and secondary (internal, affective) attributes of bodies, and the corresponding distinction between matter (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans). These divisions deeply condition the way we think and see the world. That is the key idea.

Saint-Simon’s idea of a technocratic elite managing production and social welfare was revived almost verbatim by the 1930s technocracy movement. — Joshs

In which, for the benefit of those reading, Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldemann, was an influential figure, founding a political movement called Technocracy that foreshadowed many of Elon Musk’s later ideas. Subject of a lot of coverage of late, see for example this article.

Lovely story. I guess that is because, for them, the holy is still real, a source of solace, hope and wonder, in a way which for us it can't be.

I've been discussing 'reason' in another context, that of artificial intelligence (of which, by the way, I'm a dedicated user). But the point I've been trying to get at, and this is also what Horkheimer gets at, is the sense that reason 'goes all the way down' (compare Hegel 'the real is rational') . It doesn't mean that everything about existence is intelligible to human rationality - far from it! - but the sense that there are reasons for the way things are. Hence one of my favourite quotes from David Bentley Hart:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

I notice that in Western culture the very idea that rationality pervades the natural order is regarded as a sentimental throwback to a less enlightened time (oh, the irony). Again, that it is rational doesn't mean that it's always scientifically intelligible, but that it is meaningful, on a deep level, even if that is often a very difficult faith to maintain.

If he believes that one is right I assume he would be a devout member of that religion. — praxis

Vervaeke doesn't see it that way. Maybe give some of his lectures a listen.

Yes, that's exactly how I put the question. And moreover, what needs to be done to "go beyond the boundaries," to see from the outside? Is it possible? — Astorre

The key term is the 'the unconditioned'. It is a very elusive concept, if indeed a concept it is. But you find analogies in for example, in Hegel's 'absolute spirit' and in The One of Neoplatonism. Here is an open-access essay on The Unconditioned in Philosophy of Religion although it's rather technical.

My intuitive understanding is that the unconditioned is the goal of spiritual life. One of the Buddha's aphorisms, the Nibbana Sutta, is 'there is that which is unborn, unconditioned, unmade' which represents 'escape' from 'the born, the conditioned, the made' (ref). The goal of the Buddhist path is to realise or live in the light of the Unconditioned (which in Buddhism, is not cast in theistic terms.) It can only be approached through the 'way of negation' - the negating of mental constructions (vikalpa and vijnana) and intent concentration on what is - which is the basis of Buddhist mindfulness meditation.

In my view, the absence of any equivalent to the unconditioned is a conspicuous gap or lack in contemporary philosophy. You will find it in some of the existentialist schools (perhaps Gabriel Marcel?) but in analytic philosophy it is barely considered.

Episodes 8-10 in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis are about Buddhist 'awakening', mindfulness and related issues.

What I mean to say is that Vervaeke seems to think that religions are—to put it plainly—wrong — praxis

He doesn't say that at all, from what I've read and heard, which is a quite a lot. In the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, he gives space to religious figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Tillich, to name a few - from a critical perspective, to be sure, but certainly not from the perspective of religions being wrong. If you can find anything from him which says that, I'll revise my view.

Now, "truth" has been replaced with "the capacity to predict" as the standard for knowledge. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is the critique of the 'instrumentalisation of reason' - that truth is what works, what achieves the means to an end, and so on.

I had a bit of pique, but I got over it. I've been on this and previous forums for quite a few years now, and sometimes I feel I have become too habituated to it. Also that my interests are sometimes at odds with secular philosophy (although I'm not an overtly religious type) meaning that a certain kind of objection has come up again and again over this period, which got on my nerves.

But thank you very much for your words, they are very kind, and I appreciate it. I will continue to post here.

I’d be the last to deny it.

When traditions speak of “higher knowledge,” the term “higher” need not imply rank or authority - something that seems to push a lot of buttons! - but rather a difference in mode, scope, or reflexive awareness. In a psychological or developmental register, ‘higher’ can describe a more integrated or self-aware mode of cognition—what cognitive theorists might call ‘higher-order consciousness’ or ‘skilled cognition’. In a philosophical sense, it can mean a level of insight that grasps not just objects of knowledge but the conditions under which knowing itself arises, as in Plato’s distinction between opinion and understanding. That is metacognitive insight - insight into knowing how we know.

In early Buddhism, the corresponding term to ‘higher’ is ‘abhi’ This is found in abhidharma (‘higher dharmas’, the philosophical psychology of the Buddhist canon) and abhijnana (‘higher knowledge’, meditative attainment or insight.) In that context “higher” designates knowledge that is non-conceptual, direct, and liberating, escaping the ‘self-other’ dualities that underlie ordinary cognition.

Something similar can be found in phenomenology’s turn toward seeking insight into the structure of experience - Husserl’s epochē. Husserl’s wrote admiringly of Buddhist abhdharma .

However it has to be acknowledged that Buddhist (and in general, Indian) philosophy has a soteriological dimension (aimed at liberation or ‘salvation’), which is mainly absent in Western philosophy. And this is one of the reasons that any mention of ‘higher knowledge’ produces such a lot of pushback. ‘Ah, you mean religious’ And we all know that religious authority is something to be disdained. Why, it’s dogmatic!

But that reaction is also characteristic of the very division that this thread is about. It’s why I said that Western religion is one of the sources of this conflict. The emphasis on right belief or religious orthodoxy, and the exclusivism of the Western religious mind (‘no other God but me!’) has engendered these divisions at a pre-conscious level of awareness, and they condition many of the responses to the very idea of ‘higher truth’ or ‘higher awareness’. (This is one of the reasons that dharma has to be differentiated from religion, but that is for another thread.)

:100: Written in a kindred spirit, so to speak.

:pray:

Do you think that full reflection is possible for a person who is inside a paradigm? — Astorre

I wouldn't want to try and proscribe what is and isn't possible for others. But suffice to note that historically, at least, many religious cultures were associated with renunciation of society and 'the world'. Those that sought to integrate with society were mediated through codes and rules to maintain the distinction between the sacred and the profane (Eliade). Part of the problem with modern culture is the way it tends to level out all those kinds of differences.

That said, I think it's quite possible to become critically aware of the way we as individuals have absorbed the prevailing attitudes from the culture around us. That was a big part of 60's counter-culture, whether it succeeded or not (see Theodore Roszak).

The split between the purely private and inner (reflection) and the socially constructed (paradigm) is artificial. — Joshs

Rather a sweeping statement. Buddhism originated as one of a number of Śramaṇa movements that rejected both society and the authority of the Vedas (another surviving example being Jainism). They were deliberately 'outside' or removed from the prevailing (or any) cultural paradigms, although it is true they went on to form new paradigms of their own. Nevertheless, there is always an element in Buddhism which remains outside paradigms of all kinds (śūnyatā as neither a mental nor social construct).

Many thanks, very insightful. I could benefit by reading more of Kierkegaard, difficult though his prose might be.

Historically, such a view of man seems to flow from voluntarist idealizations of freedom and power that first crop up in theology, not secular philosophy. That was originally the whole impetus for attempting to uproot the old metaphysics, and for the resurrection of empiricism itself; absolute divine will can brook no "natures" as a challenge to its freedom in willing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the central theme of Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, which I read just as i started posting on Forums. Especially the substitution of the physical universe for the Divine.

...how notions of reason become wholly discursive, such that by Hume and Kant's day they can basically just write-off most of past thought (Eastern as well as Western) by asserting this fact about reason definitionally (i.e., dogmatically) and no one calls them out on it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, true! I'm interested in, but will probably never get around to actually studying, those neo-thomists who grapple with Kant - they're mostly French Jesuits, as I understand it. Also Bernard Lonergan. But Jacques Maritain, for one, while respecting Kant, also declared that the 'intuition of Being' escaped him. On the other hand, there's also Ian Hunter, who says that Kant's philosophy really amounted to an alternative religion - he has a forthcoming book, The Kantian Religion.



Aristotle does have a strong element of contemplative spirituality, though. I think this is what enabled the Muslim and Christian scholars to find in him such a kindred spirit.

But if happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudomonia) consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect (νοῦς nous), or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [θεωρητική, theoritikós) — The Nicomachean Ethics 1.1177a11

Can you give an example of a religion in the pre-scientific era addressing existential dilemmas? — Janus

That's what they were about, although the term 'existential dilemma' is very much a modern one. But they sought to situate humanity within the cosmic drama, either positively (orthodox Christianity) or negatively (gnosticism). That provided a reason for why we are as we are in terms other than physical causation.

I've always sought the cosmic dimension of philosophy, which is why I lean towards some form of religious spirituality. Apropos of which:

...we may be surrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual 'I'. — The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy

Note the resonance with the above quote from the Nicomachean Ethics.