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This seems to be an important question to me. I don't think it helps us at all to think of ethics as transcendental. I don't think ethics is transcendental except in its connection to aesthetics. Beauty is transcendental, and virtue ethics seems to connect virtues with what is generally attractive to humans. Courage is attractive, cowardice is not. Kindness is attractive, cruelty is not. Consideration of others is attractive, disregard of others is not, And so on. — Janus

That's interesting. I haven't thought of virtue ethics this way, but it makes sense. I often find myself using aesthetics as prism for viewing much of my experince.

On the other hand, we could ask why these things are attractive, and we might give pragmatic reasons for their attractiveness. The virtues promote social harmony and the vices (those that consist in behavior towards others at least) may lead to social discord. — Janus

Yes, and that seems like a reasonable next step. Thanks.

Do you subscribe to virtue ethics yourself?

Much of this would seem to be perspectival, 'virtue' perhaps being somewhat rubbery.

:up:

I am a little bewildered at how often I've heard versions of this in response to submissions that God either doesn't exist, or if It does, is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, (and all other dualisms arising only to a species like us who have constructed difference.) — ENOAH

I guess it is a vested interest of many religious views to imagine that only the right god/spiritual belief can provide morality. Of course religious folk, just like secular folk, have no access to an objective morality. Morality is always an act of either interpreting or creating what we believe to be right.

This was the point of the reference to the drug addict. Not that "heroin is an objective bad," but rather that someone whose drug problem has ruined their life can claim, with good warrant, "it was not good for me to begin doing drugs." — Count Timothy von Icarus

And the person for whom the drug has made it possible to continue living by making life bearable has a differnt perspective. I don't think its so easy to avoid from the perspectival nature of most matters.

There are some very good studies on the phenomenology of truth, the basic aspects of experience from which the notion emerges. Good metaphysical explanations of truth then need to explain this, to explain this adequately, which is easier said than done. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have no metaphysical explanation of truth. Truth seems to be an abstraction and clearly means quite different things in different contexts.

I personally believe that every sin, lie or bad action has consequences — javi2541997

Why? What demonstration of this do you have? This sounds more like an odd compulsion.

That is what it is about... Suffering from the anxiety of being aware that I had done terrible things. How can I heal this? — javi2541997

There's nothing to heal. You have chosen to view it like this.

Because without God everything is permitted' as Dostovesky would say... Well, I would say: Without a spirit, everything is permitted. — javi2541997

But as Zizek points out, believers in god commit unspeakable atrocities in its name. Dostoevsky (if he wrote this) is wrong. It should be: 'If there is a god, then anything is permitted.'

Of course Dostoevsky didn't really put it like this, Sartre did in a paraphrase of Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky the line closest is in The Brothers Karamazov a character asks: “But what will become of men then?” I asked him, “without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?”

If I lied to my parents is due to trying to flirt with a woman. Nature surpassed my innocent spirit. — javi2541997

I often found it useful to lie to my parents. It made life easier. I have no regrets and now they are dead. Game over. :wink:

An atheist background would affect me in the sense of denying the existence of a spirit. — javi2541997

What is spirit?

Remember too that some atheists believe in reincarnation, ghosts and other supernatural stories. Atheism is just about the god belief.

I remember when the song came out. I forgot about that particular shooting.

Do you not like Mondays? — AmadeusD

I hate Mondays. But I'm a cunt most days... :wink:

That's funny. I live near the site of an almost forgotten mass shooting back in the 1980's in Melbourne. I was there yesterday and talking to a friend on the phone. The guy shot 13 people, killing 8 and he finally jumped from the building, plunging to his death. 'You never hear of a disgruntled 22 year-old woman doing this kind of shit,' my friend observed dryly.

I don't knwo a single person who hasn't grown out of Nietzsche once they get a job. Literally none. Though, half of them decided Zizek was the next guy, so it's probably that I went to High School with idiots. — AmadeusD

That's very amusing. Good quesion however - who covers the same space in philosophical thinking in more recent times? I suspect you hate the postmodernists, but I'd say this is where Nietzsche's type of project (perspectivism and antifoundationalism) landed. Rorty was big on him - Deleuze, Adorno, Derrida...

Could be. If people find Peterson helpful I don't have an issue with that. There's plenty of things that don't work for me that work for others. Here's the thing. I'm around Peterson's age, a little younger. But I wonder what I would think of him if I were a young man today, say aged 20. Many of my friends at that age were seduced by Nietzsche, copying his prose style and making similar sounding declarations as though they had thought them up. Would Peterson, if he had been available to me then, appealed? Would I have started spouting Peterson's? I have no idea.

Both show him in a very different light and use his work as jumping points, rather than just political stuff. — AmadeusD

I've seen them. The GQ interview is my favorite of his that I've seen. I've watched at least 30. I've also watched around 6-10 of his podcasts and seen some of his early lectures. His comments on Dostoevsky often dismay me as I dislike him as a writer, apart from the Gambler which is a rare terse and targeted accoutn of an issue (in this case addiction) which so undermined D himself.

Churches have always been (and they still are) a place where people feel they belong to. — javi2541997

It might be better to put it: where some people feel they belong. There are probably just as many people (perhaps more?) who find churches cold, intimidating, unremittingly vulgar or simply unsafe on account of having been abused (or know people abused) by religious clerics and laypeople. Just saying. :wink:

We all have to make a decision. It's quite possible that we'll make a wrong decision, that goes with the territory. — Wayfarer

:up: True that.

I think you're conflating a few things about him here. HIs demeanor is not anxious at all. He's quick-tempered. Perhaps you're seeing that? He usually sits laid-back, laughs through responses and concentrates adequately when it's required. — AmadeusD

Sure, I might be wrong - I'm just describing what I see. I have worked in the area of mental health for 34 years, so I'm not flying blind. I just looked him up - seems like he had a significant addiction to benzodiazepines for anxiety. So there is that.

I have seen him interviewed many times but not for a couple of years or more. I have no useful view of his work.

Spoken from the true secularist perspective! — Wayfarer

Is that an attempt at a slight? As in - 'What would you know, you're a secularist?'

I think my position on faith is fairly robust. What approach do you have to demonstrate which person's faith is correct and which one is not?

You also have conscience. — Wayfarer

Consciences are relative. :wink: Pretty sure those South Africans slept well at night with a clear conscience.

And your statement is incomprehensible as well. If we are not motivated by perfection, by truth; ideas which are synonymous, then what is the source of these motivations? It cannot JUST be internal. There has to be resonance with the external. I would likewise say it cannot just be external. — Chet Hawkins

I have long suspected that we embrace ideas which appeal to us aesthetically and emotionally but we take them as facts. Sounds like you relish notions of perfection and objectivity, two ideas I don't find convincing. I recognize that humans love their absolutes and their god surrogates. No point arguing further since there's no common ground. :wink:

What I meant was, for those who know, belief is no longer necessary, but that up until then, it has to be taken on faith. — Wayfarer

The problem with this is there is nothing which can't be justified with such an appeal to faith. I remember sitting down with South African whites in the 1980's (they were sincere Christians). They told me that I didn't understand apartheid and that it was god's will, in fact they had it on faith that apartheid was good and that 'the blacks need it'.

Now while this is clearly racist bullshit, where do we draw the line between a legitimate appeal made to faith and one which is dubious? Could it be that all we have is reason after all?

Do we not have good reason to fear those who claim to 'know' but can only justify this knowledge based on some version of ineffability or transcendence?

Seems like you don’t understand the point made. No matter. I can’t speak for him but Josh’s does not subscribe to notions of ‘objective truth’ and I would be sympathetic to this. I certainly don’t believe in perfection.

Ok. I think your view is the more popular, the other competing account is that he’s mostly an idiot. I find him difficult to watch because of his anxious style which you can even hear in his terribly strangulated voice. I feel for him. But, hey, I might be wrong. I’m just reporting how he appears to me. Whatever the case, he’s like a guru for a lot of disenfranchised boys.

Peterson always strikes me as a man having a breakdown in slow motion, reciting philosophical ideas and psychological theories as a kind or catechism of reassurance.

The problem with such a claim is that it slips into an extreme relativism. For why would truth be better the falsehood? It wouldn't. Truth would only be better in cases where we feel it is better, and so our feelings ultimately dictate truth claims. If it falsehood feels better then, at least for that moment, it is better. If our feelings change, the good simply changes.

This simply doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. We all make bad decisions in our lives. It seems silly to say these were good right up until we regret them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am open to relativism, so this concern doesn't really bite for me. I suspect that human notions of truth are contingent upon our language, social practices, and historical context. We can talk about intersubjective agreements (consensus) around issues like killing and theft, but I am suspicious and doubtful there is some concrete 'good' that our behavior might correspond to. Intersubjectivity I believe allows people to see issues categorically as being good or bad, true or false, when really what they are seeing is a shared subjectivity, a truth manufactured by agreement.

Likewise, was starting to use heroin good for heroin addicts until they began to regret it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting you raise this one. The answer might be yes to this. I work in the area of addiction and mental health, so I would often hold a different view to others on this. Hence how we might view any given issue is down to contingent factors. I would say that heroin, while it may harm health, is also one of the reasons why people are able to survive trauma. Heroin (and other drugs) becomes the reason people can cope and endure. So it isn't as simple as saying it is bad. If heroin were legal it would cause less harm than alcohol, for instance. Many of its harms are a product of its illegality. But this is a digression.

I think the point is somewhat sharper than this. I've been interested in the role emotion and aesthetics play in our sense making and values. People tend to see themselves as creatures of rational decision making but...

The arbiter of validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world, but affectivity, in the sense that empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. — Joshs

This is something I'll mull over. Notice that in this account the truth isn't just about what's objectively real. It's also about how we feel about and intuit events. If something matches our expectations and values, we accept it as true. And our feelings, such as apprehension or satisfaction, signify whether things are in line with what we believe. I think this circle of interpretation is helpful to consider in the ceaseless debates about gods or politics.

What it says about existentialism I can't tell you as I find Sartre unreadable.

I think the criteria of successful construing of the universe is the inverse of the direct realist slogan that the ‘facts don't care about our feelings'. The arbiter of validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world, but affectivity, in the sense that empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment. It is our feelings which tell us whether we get it right or wrong, and by what criteria. — Joshs

:up: I find this frame particularly rich and interesting.

Peterson loves Nietzsche because Nietzsche is an atheist who can be used to support Peterson’s thesis that atheism leads to a series of blood baths, and catastrophes via the death of God. Theists seem to l like Nietzsche perhaps because he says things like if you believe in grammar, you’re still a theist.

:up:

Very poor. Relies on conjecture and tendentious arguments. — Wayfarer

Really? Kastrup's arguments, of have I missed something?

Side note: it seems to me that if we talk about laws, we must talk about a lawgiver, although you seem to disagree with this. — NotAristotle

Side note response - Isn't this just an argument from Muslim and Christian apologetics 101? For one thing this is an anthropomorphism fallacy - by attributing human-like characteristics (such as legislating laws) to the concept of the 'laws of nature'. Laws of nature are descriptive, not prescriptive, and do not imply a conscious lawgiver. The word 'laws' is a distraction. 'Natural regularities' might be a better term.

It also sounds like a fallacy from incredulity - 'I can't understand why there are regularities in nature, so I'll attribute them to a magic man (lawgiver).' This overlooks the possibility of naturalistic explanations and assumes that one's personal incredulity constitutes evidence for the existence of a lawgiver.

I don't think Greene will provide you with succour, just stating that he is there waiting for you. Note also that Shūsaku Endō the Japanese (and Catholic) novelist was often described as the Japanese Graham Greene. If Catholicism and personal ethics is important to you Greene's The Power and the Glory may be of interest.

Spirituality is still tangled with religion to me. I can't explain or understand it without any connection with religious creeds. — javi2541997

More accurately you appear haunted by the religion of your upbringing and culture. It's not as if you are concerned about the spiritual truths found in Islam or Jainism. Seems to me that the position you are in is fairly common - how to be good without religious interpreters telling you what is good. Graham Greene (for instance) wrote entire books about the complex relationship between Catholicism, faith, morality and individual conscience.

Seems an odd quote, as the later Wittgenstein never preached religion, but the article from which it was taken was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Association. — Wayfarer

Wittgenstein was an prodigious eccentric who took up and abandoned projects, who knows why he thought the way he did?

There are a few ways to interpret (or make use of) this quote. One is to side with Richard Rorty and maintain that ethics are contingent. The end. But we can use the word transcendental also to refer to the symbolic and metaphorical. We might find some comfort in referring to their transcendental value in a poetic sense. Human beings do inhabit an imaginative, conceptual world where we push around abstracts (e.g., beauty, truth, goodness) in the hope of managing our environment. Our imaginations are key to our identity.

it is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

Either way, how does it help us to promote the notion of ethics as transcendental?

There is a "transcedent" Good, but it isn't a sort of spirit realm sitting to the side of the realm of the senses. The question of knowing what is truly good is not absolute then, particularly in later Platonists. One can know and be led by the good to relative degrees, and be more or less self-determining. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thank you for you considered response. While I am mildly interested in why humans find notions of transcendence to be a useful frame, it doesn't work for me.

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

I find this framing purposeless. It appears that we are treating 'good' as something concrete, when it is merely an adjective applied conditionally. How would one make the case that a concept such as good is anything more than a sign we apply to things we approve of (a construction of our practices, language and norms) and that this approval is perspectival?

Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about? — Wayfarer

Can it even be shown?

The man who can't actualize what he thinks is truly good is limited in some way, as is the man who acts out of ignorance about what is truly good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does anyone know what is truly good? I'm assuming you also are putting your hopes on transcendence and Platonic realms?

I don't think morality is an objective matter. What's that Wittgenstein aphorism? 'Ethics is transcendental'. It comes from something deeper than that. The Christian teaching is that conscience is an innate faculty which discerns what is right, and I'm sure there's something in that. — Wayfarer

Transcendental ethics would posit that moral truths are not contingent upon individual beliefs, cultural norms, or empirical facts, but rather have a universal and objective reality that transcends human understanding. Any way we can demonstrate that this is the case?

Well, anyway, my modus vivendi after four decades remains:
striving to overcome my suffering by reducing the suffering of others — 180 Proof

Ha! Yes, we've explored this a bit over the years. Your ideas are arrived at philosophically, mine are not. I've also adopted a presupposition along the lines of 'we should not cause suffering and we should minimise it'. But I hold this belief intuitively, perhaps because it pleases me aesthetically. If I had to provide rational justification, I would probably say that I dislike suffering, I don't like seeing people suffer, so if I am in a position to not cause suffering or minimise it, I try to do so. I find this satisfying but I am not a zealot about it.

I thought about morality and values as a code of conduct too. I even considered religious values, or the belief in believing in X, as a waste of time because those people were brainwashed by dogmas. Nonetheless, thanks to reading Kazantzakis or Kierkegaard, I came up with a different approach. At least, my aim is to understand these values differently. What I fully have as basic premises are: 1. I am deeply concerned about my spirituality, and I think I shall act ethically, (2) but I do not know what a sin is, how to define 'spirit' or 'ethics'; and why I feel rotten when I lied to a person (for example). Therefore, (3) although spirituality depends on religious beliefs, I tend to be in midterm. I want to act ethically as much as possible, but I don't want to be trapped in religious dogmas. — javi2541997

I'm not sure I understand your thinking. You seem to be identifying as a nihilist, yet you also seem to be advocating for some fixed idea of morality and spirituality. Perhaps a part of you still believes in God's judgement? Wouldn't it be better not to worry about any of it and just get on with life?

Do you feel the same? — javi2541997

No. I am not spiritual or religious. I'm not always sure what 'spiritual' even means. I ususally understand it as an emotional relationship (connection) humans can have with people, place, memory, beauty, art, the transcendent - pretty much anything.

Morality and values to me are like a code of conduct that we go along with to varying levels of commitment. I have emotional reactions to behaviours and values which are the product of culture, upbringing and probably evolution (our strength is as a social species after all).

I read Kazantzakis and while I found his ideas dramatic (existential authenticity versus societal/religious expectations), they had no impact on me personally.

But I understand that many of us (perhaps you too) grew up in religious cultures which inculcate ways of relating to the world where the spiritual and religious (and even, sometimes, the mystical) jostle for interpretative supremacy. I grew up in a religious tradition (Baptist) but for whatever reason I'm fairly certain I never had a single day of belief in god or anything transcendent. I've never found it necessary to my sense making. That said, I have known a number of very decent religious folk from Aboriginal, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Sikh faiths.

I don't believe that anyone has access to objective morality - whatever people imagine they are basing their morality upon, they must either interpret god's will or intention (good luck with that) or construct an ethical system based upon theories/values which themselves would seem to be arrived at contingently.

People arguing with me that Jesus is like Spiderman or Harry Potter are just not familiar with the research that has been done on this subject.

So yes, among people who actually know what they are talking about, it's universally accepted that Jesus at least existed and was crucified. — Brendan Golledge

Sure. But I don't think anyone is arguing that Jesus is just like Spiderman. That's a misrepresentation. The point made earlier was that when Christians say that New Testament must be true because reference is made to real geography in the stories, this is unconvincing. The aforementioned superhero comics are set in New York. Myths are often set in real locations. It is not good evidence - nevertheless Christians regularly make this argument.

There seems to be agreement that there may have been a preacher or two who inspired the stories and myths. But we have no reliable information about what took place and what the teachings might have been. The mythicists hold a more extreme position which can't be demonstrated.

Describes John Hick as a ‘well-meaning syncretist thinker, not a perennialist’. — Wayfarer

Interesting. I never much liked syncretism (homogenisation, cultural appropriation, etc) but then I'm not a theist, so who cares?