I probably should have referenced Evan Thompson rather than Bitbol. — Tom Storm

I see Even Thompson and his ilk as intellectual Buddhists, which, frankly, is fine if you're going to be teaching it (the history, the explanatory texts), but radically off the mark otherwise. Thompson read and read, talked and wondered, but what he did not do is put his life into the slow process of its own annihilation, and by this I am just referring to revelatory nature of Eastern liberation, which is very hard to swallow for academics, or anyone, in the West. Buddhism, taken to its foundations, is more than radical: it is a complete undoing of one's relationships with the world. The claims are not, as Thompson would say, about Buddhism being a part of the variety of ideas that have a meaningful place in the general societal mentality. I did read the Embodied Mind earlier, and their conclusions include a turn away from foundational thinking, which is both good and bad in my view, for what one turns away from is the historical traditions that stand, as Jean luc Marion put it, like idols that fascinate our gaze. Good riddance. But then there is the turn towards a secularization, an incorporation of Buddhism into meaningful living for all, and this is just wrong.

See the Abhidhammattha-Saïgaha (as weird as it is in much of it): Buddhism is not for directing our collective moral compass, even if it can do this. Nor is it for encouraging a theory among theories that make us more reasonable in practical matters, though it may do this. Meditation and withdrawal are an attempt to discover something hidden deep in human subjectivity.

At the start you wrote “the matter has to be approached phenomenologically” so that’s what I’m doing. You are entirely free to confer whatever meaning you like to the phenomenon of your subjective experiences of satisfaction. I’ve not made any judgment of it, simplified it, or polarized your meaning. — praxis

But the idea that was put on the table was that attachments, affections, and so on, are errant engagements of our original actuality, the Buddha nature, and the idea that "life is suffering" needs to be understood apart from this bald statement. No Buddhist is going to say I am miserable when I am having the time of my life, unless the lines of demarcation are radically moved regarding what suffering is.

The idea of an attachment has to be looked at more closely, and this requires looking at one’s subjective constitution as Wittgenstein did in Tractatus. To value anything does not belong to the world of facts. It is a simple givenness, off the radar of what can be said, and it is thus a transcendental presence, though, Witt is going to tell us that the speaking of this is just nonsense. The Tractatus itself, he tells us, is fundamentally nonsense, for one cannot explain sheer givenness. Dennett denies at length meaningful talk about qualia, a “phenomenological purity” of apprehending things in the world. So whence comes value? From the original source of valuing a thing, and this is us, our nature which stands before a thing and feels desire and abhorrence.

So, liking ice cream is not proof positive that the world is not all suffering, or, it is, but only if you think simplistically about it. My attachment to ice cream is only possible in a context of contingent affairs, but the Buddha within, the source of affection itself, is not contingent, not, that is, dependent, relative, context dependent; nor is it as trivial as ice cream indulgence AS ice cream indulgence. This is a sticky matter, and Kierkegaard helps unstick it: His Knight of Faith lives in God, and ice cream becomes part of her existence in this divine dynamic. A weird, but interesting ways to look at this. It was Witt who said a depressed man lives in a depressed world. So where does the Knight of Faith live? In what "world" does a deeply committed Buddhist live?

All boats rise. (Meaning, when one's world is elevated to a sublime apprehension of things, all things are transfigured.)

Faith is believing in something, which appears out of the range of thought, for the sake of the good the intuition seems to sense in it. I assume Buddhism has much of this. I was wrong to equate Nirvana with Heaven because Heaven has resurrected bodies and God, neither if which are in Nirvana. Anf the goal in the West seems much more specific such that you can have palpable faith in it. But meditation is not a rational process but an intuitive one, so I don't think belief/faith in contrary to the Buddhist religion. Isn't belief part of all religions because it goes beyond the world of sense? Some say all thought begins and ends in faith. Reason is in the middle

Your subjective experiences of satisfaction are essential, not simplistic. Again, you are free to confer whatever nuanced meaning you like to your experiences of satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. That’s up to you. Religions confer all sorts of grand and nuanced narratives to the world and our essential experiences.

Faith is believing in something, which appears out of the range of thought, for the sake of the good the intuition seems to sense in it. I assume Buddhism has much of this. I was wrong to equate Nirvana with Heaven because Heaven has resurrected bodies and God, neither if which are in Nirvana. Anf the goal in the West seems much more specific such that you can have palpable faith in it. But meditation is not a rational process but an intuitive one, so I don't think belief/faith in contrary to the Buddhist religion. Isn't belief part of all religions because it goes beyond the world of sense? Some say all thought begins and ends in faith. Reason is in the middle — Gregory

I would counter that Heaven has nothing to do with God or resurrected bodies. One needs to get to the essence of the term, not just the historical bad metaphysics. How was such a term ever even conceived? It issued from what we experience every day, which is the joys of our existence, and what is called love is the best thing we have going. And love is just another word for being happy, the old Aristotelian summum bonum. Heaven is just a radicalization of what is commonly experienced set in metaphysical idea. But it doesn't end there. does it? After all, now all eyes are on finding some account of what happiness is. It can be very deep and full: Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

But the metaphysics of happiness is not a meaning less concept.

I doubt anyone can find happiness without a good understanding of themselves. The process may never end

I doubt anyone can find happiness without a good understanding of themselves. The process may never end — Gregory

But this places the matter in a mundane perspective, and I certainly agree with you here. But then philosophy steps in and the world is no longer what it seemed.

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is" Albert Camus

Interesting. Are you a practicing Buddhist?

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is" Albert Camus — Gregory

It does beg the question, doesn't it? In order to refuse to be what I am, I have to actually be something. What is that?

Buddhism says that "that" is just illusion because we are all everything which is nothing. To traditional Western philosophy that is nihilism but many modern philosophers would disagree. Hegel says we are being and nothingness at the same time

Certainly. But I am not bound to this and what Buddhists talk about usually doesn't interest me. As I see it, the whole affair comes to one thing, and that is a reduction of the world's interpretative possibilities to the original intuitive givenness: Nunc stans. A pure phenomenology.

Buddhism says that "that" is just illusion because we are all everything which is nothing. To traditional Western philosophy that is nihilism but many modern philosophers would disagree. Hegel says we are being and nothingness at the same time — Gregory

Kierkegaard said Hegel probably didn't understand Hegel. Being and nothing the firs dialectical movement? Or something like that. Maybe one day I'll take a closer look. At any rate, I think a rationalist like Hegel is miles away from Buddhism, which revelatory, not dialectical. As to the illusion of being a person, a self, this is, to me, very interesting. What is illusion? and what is a self? As a construct in the world, the self is a language entity. Thinking is where identity comes from. What is anything? you could ask, and the first thing that steps forward is language, of course, for the question itself is an expression of language and logic. The old testament Yahweh utters the world into existence (says John), and self identifies in the tetragrammaton, which is an utterance itself.
It is in language that all things are conceived, and it is in the conception that illusion arises: errors in interpretation as to what the world is. Is a person a nurse, a politician, a plumber, a doctor, and so on? And all the rest we say we "are", what is the grounding for these? They are mere pragmatic conventions, institutions that allow us manage our affairs.
The Buddhist tries to see more deeply into what we are, but not through religious dogma and faith. It is through a liberation of our deeper selves. Is there such a thing? One can only look for oneself.

As I see it, the whole affair comes to one thing, and that is a reduction of the world's interpretative possibilities to the original intuitive givenness: Nunc stans. A pure phenomenology. — Constance

Thanks. I have no sensus divinitatis, so it's mostly just word games to me. :wink:

As to the illusion of being a person, a self, this is, to me, very interesting. What is illusion? and what is a self? As a construct in the world, the self is a language entity. Thinking is where identity comes from. What is anything? you could ask, and the first thing that steps forward is language, of course, for the question itself is an expression of language and logic. — Constance

I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts..

The reason I mention being and nothing is that only the insane would deny they experience being (and the insane are detached from that) but if one can answer "nothing!" to all questions of being *nonetheless*, this would be Buddhist. People without a mystical side won't understand this, but look at it this way: dependent origination means everything is connected as one without a foundation (because it is nothing), an infinite series. As Aristotle said, an infinite series needs an essential first cause. This is true philosophically unless WE are the first cause and everything, even us, are nothing. God is in all our eyes

I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts.. — Janus

This may well all be the case. What however... and I ask this genuinely... is the point of this kind of frame? Can you share how this might be of use to you in life?

As I have no doubt you know, Wittgenstein saw his project, saw philosophy properly conceived per his view, as being "a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language." This statement is somewhat ambiguous as it could be interpreted as meaning that either the bewitchment or the battle is by means of language, or both. Can we be liberated from the kind of reificatory thinking that comes with language, merely by means of language?

Buddhism is more radical and would say 'no' in the final analysis, I think, although of course language is necessary to teach the soteriological techniques of any spiritual practice. But the spiritual techniques are designed to take us beyond language and to effect transformation of consciousness. Now you may have no interest in such a thing, or you may believe it is impossible, a fantasy perhaps, but of course you could not know that unless you tried it yourself, and even then if you failed that would be no guarantee that no one has succeeded or could succeed.

So, the question as to what use such understandings could be depends on what one's interests are. If you have no interest then of course such understandings would be of no use to you.

I get that. I was curious what you got out of it. What difference does it make to you? We spend a lot of time here talking about abstractions and the experiences of generic humans.

But the spiritual techniques are designed to take us beyond language and to effect transformation of consciousness. — Janus

What do you mean here; are you referring to the gradual journey towards enlightenment/liberation, or something more prosaic?

The world is an unfathomably large supermarket of ideas and lifestyles. I am curious 1) why people go shopping and 2) why they put certain items in their shopping cart. :wink:

To put it quite plainly, the practical benefit of such a pursuit is simply the reduction of anxiety, existential and others sorts. The ‘cessation of suffering’ that the Buddha promises is a fat carrot that religious types find irresistible .

I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts.. — Janus

I pretty much agree, except for one thing: Our acknowledgement of just this is itself a language event. This is hermeneutics. So the world has two faces, Janus: the one is the language existence we live in and, if you will, are "made of". The other is all that lies before one that is not language (and following Wittgenstein, language "is" not language, though this is nonsense to say, for the generative source of language is unrevealed. The world is shown, nothing more). Actuality is not a thesis. It is a non propositional "presence" which cannot be possessed by language, and since there is nothing that escapes being actual, it does follow that all things are metaphysical. Metaphysics is not some entirely impossible other of the world (though it is that, for sure). It is there, in the cup, in the coffee, in our affairs. Is our affairs.

The reason I mention being and nothing is that only the insane would deny they experience being (and the insane are detached from that) but if one can answer "nothing!" to all questions of being *nonetheless*, this would be Buddhist. People without a mystical side won't understand this, but look at it this way: dependent origination means everything is connected as one without a foundation (because it is nothing), an infinite series. As Aristotle said, an infinite series needs an essential first cause. This is true philosophically unless WE are the first cause and everything, even us, are nothing. God is in all our eyes — Gregory

Interesting. Schopenhauer thought that without our perceiving agency to divide the world, the world would some impossible singularity, impossible because such a thing cannot be conceived, for the thought of it itself imposes division. I thinki there is something in this, a vague but exotic intuition that tries to consider being as such, and finds in this attempt, the grasp concepts have on things slips. One way to look at the mystical side of things. Wittgenstein, who Russell accused of being a mystic when the former said he had missed the point of the Tractatus and wanted to break off contact, was no mystic. But he did realize the mystical dimension of things was built into the world (the Tractatus was not meant to emphasize the boundaries of what could be said, but rather what could not be said, and this was much more important than what could be said; so he said).

As to first causes, certainly not a temporal first cause, for this is intuitively impossible. But how about a first cause as the generative source of existence. Eugene Fink made a bold claim in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, saying he (and Husserl) "have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity." Reading the Sixth Meditation is quite an experience. It plays on the (in)famous phenomenological reduction: I see an object before me and the I am instantly aware of its identity. Now take this knowledge and reduce (remove) it until you have removed everything but the bare intuitive presence. Here you have the bare, pure phenomenon, the simple "thereness" of the object.

When you say it would be insane to to deny the experience of being, you do open up a can of worms, for it has to be admitted that the object before you is entirely conditioned, and structured by, the past. I never see anything in this pure phenomenological sense, for nothing comes to me "pure". It is always given as a concept in a context, and without the context there is no meaning. So, I want to say that there is this inviolable intuitive apprehension of things, this certainty, yet certainty seems to be bound to contingency of the language as language steps in between you and the object an language makes the utterance, the truth bearing proposition. How does language possess this magical power to say what things are? Or that they are? Whence comes this "are"?

And yet, as you say, the presence of the world is simply there, regardless of these issues. I would say that here, in this issue, lies the secret to a philosophical approach to God. After all, if there is something there that is absolutely there, then this is tantamount to a burning bush in its apprehension, for one is not merely there, nor is the object. Rather, one and the thing are metaphysically there. Finitude and infinitude merge.

To put it quite plainly, the practical benefit of such a pursuit is simply the reduction of anxiety, existential and others sorts. The ‘cessation of suffering’ that the Buddha promises is a fat carrot that religious types find irresistible . — praxis

I suspect this is largely true. I spent a lot of time on the periphery of a Buddhist society in my city in the 1980's. I was surprised to find that its members were as riddled with anxiety, ambition, status seeking, in fighting and general BS as any other group of people. One of the monks would regularly polish off a bottle of whiskey in the evenings and complain about life. Buddhism seemingly had minimal transformative value. My partner used to joke, "You should have seen them before.'

I pretty much agree, except for one thing: Our acknowledgement of just this is itself a language event. This is hermeneutics. So the world has two faces, Janus: the one is the language existence we live in and, if you will, are "made of". The other is all that lies before one that is not language (and following Wittgenstein, language "is" not language, though this is nonsense to say, for the generative source of language is unrevealed. The world is shown, nothing more). Actuality is not a thesis. It is a non propositional "presence" which cannot be possessed by language, and since there is nothing that escapes being actual, it does follow that all things are metaphysical. Metaphysics is not some entirely impossible other of the world (though it is that, for sure). It is there, in the cup, in the coffee, in our affairs. Is our affairs. — Constance

Right, of course our acknowledgement, as expressed, is a language event. And I recognize the "two faces" of the world, but our lives are not our (propositional) "language existence", that is our deaths. "All that lies before us" and is known prior to language, and is what makes language itself possible is our lives. Propositional discourse is the "city of the dead" that, if participated in without the care that comes with awareness, robs us of our lives. That said, there is a dimension of language that is also life, and the enrichment of life. but it is not to be found in the anal preoccupations of the walking dead.

So, yes, actuality is a "non-propositional" presence; although I would say it is there when the cup and the coffee cease to be merely "cups" and 'coffee".

I get that. I was curious what you got out of it. What difference does it make to you? We spend a lot of time here talking about abstractions and the experiences of generic humans. — Tom Storm

I hope you do get it. My experience tells me that the difference lies in the nature of experience.

What do you mean here; are you referring to the gradual journey towards enlightenment/liberation, or something more prosaic?

The world is an unfathomably large supermarket of ideas and lifestyles. I am curious 1) why people go shopping and 2) why they put certain items in their shopping cart. — Tom Storm

I'm referring to the journey back to life, from out of the endarkenment of propositional discourse.The journey from analysis to poetry, from logic to metaphor.

People search for ideas that may bring them to life because they feel the cold grasp of the grave, and the absurd killing viciousness of greed, resentment and corruption that rules human 'life' beneath the veneer of 'civilization'. Your "supermarket" and "shopping" metaphors say it all; they speak to the intolerable banality of modern human "consumer" life. Of course (for the "lucky" ones) it is also warm, cosy, safe and secure, and it is just there that the problem lies.

I'm referring to the journey back to life, from out of the endarkenment of propositional discourse. The journey from analysis to poetry, from logic to metaphor.

People search for ideas that may bring them to life because they feel the cold grasp of the grave, and the absurd killing viciousness of greed, resentment and corruption that rules human 'life' beneath the veneer of 'civilization'. Your "supermarket" and "shopping" metaphors say it all; they speak to the intolerable banality of modern human "consumer" life. Of course (for the "lucky" ones) it is also warm, cosy, safe and secure, and it is just there that the problem lies. — Janus

Nicely put and intriguing. 'Journey back to life' is particularly juicy stuff.

Those metaphors, by the way, are not how I generally see the world. They were chosen for their brutalist effect (a la Weber to which you probably allude) in contrast to all this lofty talk about metaphysics.

Can you say more about the journey back to life? It sounds a little like a 'paradise lost' narrative. Does it relate to Buddhist metaphysics? Are you suggesting that Buddhism might be a kind of antidote to the present era of capitalism, scientism and managerialism?

I agree with what you write.

The world is presented to us and it is as we subjectively present it to ourselves. If we say H2O, what kind of knowledge has come forth? We know abstractly that we can put "this" with "that" and get something to drink. But even when we know what something tastes, looks, feels, and smells like, this doesn't give us knowledge beyond the senses

To be trapped without mysticism is unphilosophical. We are the unconscious and speech, Father and Son. We are totally the Logos and the Father and Son are One, and nothing at the same time. I think we need the side of Nothingness to know how we are in the divine. If God is pure substance we could never become one in it, because we are "thrown" (Heidegger). Within the finite, the mind corrects speech and speech corrects the mind. The former is very Buddhist but there comes a point when you can't control anymore, so you turn to speech to correct the mind. And Buddhist preach right speech. There is dialectic in use and it follows its own logic. We are spoken so that the unseen is seen

anal preoccupations of the walking dead. — Janus

That THAT is precious.

So, yes, actuality is a "non-propositional" presence; although I would say it there when the cup and the coffee cease to be merely "cups" and 'coffee". — Janus

Heidegger and most others would disagree, simply because the being there of the cup and the coffee cannot be parted from the "cups and coffee". Language is "of a piece" with actuality, and it is only by an abstraction that we think of them as separate. This is an idea of some profundity, really. there really is no logic, value, language, and so forth, and this regards all things that the understanding takes hold of, for to think at all is categorize, and, as Rorty would put it, there is no truth "out there" because there really is no out there, for such an idea is a foolish metaphysics, this "original Unity". I am inclined to agree, except for one very important issue, which is metaphysics and the revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world Buddhists talk about. This is not a religious fiction.

The world is presented to us and it is as we subjectively present it to ourselves. If we say H2O, what kind of knowledge has come forth? We know abstractly that we can put "this" with "that" and get something to drink. But even when we know what something tastes, looks, feels, and smells like, this doesn't give us knowledge beyond the senses — Gregory

And, as I see it, this "beyond the sense" is a tricky phrase, for it implicitly draw a line: there is here, and there is this beyond. I think this kind of thing can really trip us up, and my thinking goes a bit off the rails here: In the perceptual act itself, and not beyond this lies the impossibility of existence, as the actuality before me in its existence is not reducible to some explanatory account. But there are many explanatory acccounts there implicit in the act itself, meaning, when I perceive a thing, I am not just innocently taking in what it tells me; I am doing this. It is not taking in the thing, but my interpretative history making the tacit determination and I just go along as if the world were transparent to me. But there is nothing transparent at all in this encounter with the thing. The event is filled with the past. We generally affirm this past conditioning of a present (and time is an issue that plays significantly in this) encounter as "knowledge" about the thing, but this kind of knowledge never even beholds the thing to encounter it. The encountering is a temporal dynamic, not an encounter at all, for, for this, one needs to put down the years of knowledge building.

Guess the point would be that the beyond is right there, immanent, not transcendental, and the Buddhist/Hindu thinking is like rope and snake of Vedantic thinking: merely an error in judgment/interpretation, it is just that interpretation is not simply a tag of words onto the world, but are dynamic and powerful attachments (as the Buddhist would put it. The final step in Buddhism is the liberation from just these conceptual attachments, it can be argued) . I think this important: It is not so much that what is behind the sense of not revealed (a Kantian, et al claim), but that the revelation is there, at hand, before the waking perceiver.

I do struggle with the terms immanence and transcendence. In the end, there is no division, and to see this is to annihilate the past-present-future illusion. Concepts are just this.

It sounds to me as if you agree with Schopenhauer over Hegel. Is the world pure will, irrational and free. Or is the world pure reason wherein new truths build on old one in a structure. In medieval times, they had this same debate between Thomists and Scotians and I'm assuming Buddhism tends more towards will