I still haven't finished forcing myself to believe in God anyway. — javi2541997
Unamuno is interesting
— Paine
It is another important thinker regarding this issue, but Spanish philosophers are hardly known by people overall. It cheered me up you actually brought him to this topic. :smile: — javi2541997
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? — Tom Storm
I'm curious as to your thoughts on Peck's view. — wonderer1
In September 1914, Wittgenstein, off duty, visited the town of Tarnow, then in Austrian Galicia, now in southern Poland, where he went into a small shop that seemed to sell nothing but picture postcards. However, as Bertrand Russell later wrote in a letter, Wittgenstein “found that it contained just one book: [of] Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times.” No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein became known to his fellow soldiers as ‘the one with the Gospels’. Tolstoy’s book, however, is a single Gospel: hence its name: The Gospel in Brief. It is, as Tolstoy himself says in his Preface, “a fusion of the four Gospels into one.” Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ’s life and teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy’s synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.” It implanted a Christian faith in Wittgenstein. Before going on night-duty at the observation post, he wrote: “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. Through God I will become a man. God be with me. Amen.” — PhilosophyNow
“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.
Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:
“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”
In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:
“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is 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
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 guess all who want to be more critical, and dubious about the set of norms, tend to be against the Church. — javi2541997
I am not even baptised. — javi2541997
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
it is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”
I hold that it does, but you have track it down like anything else to discover what the essence of religion is. — Astrophel
You must begin and end with the world. — Astrophel
Spirituality is still tangled with religion to me. I can't explain or understand it without any connection with religious creeds. — javi2541997
And what is the essence of religion, which I assume you have tracked down? — BC
You must be setting a pretty high bar, then. Do you have any examples of those you think might have? — Wayfarer
Not at all. I read their writings much later.I wonder to what extent Kierkegaard or Dostoviesky inspired you ... — javi2541997
No doubt. My claim, however, is that, applied or not, 'naturalistic morality' is always applicable wherever and whenever there is needless suffering.The code of conduct is not universally applied.
Reducing suffering is like reducing illness: though the local customs of morality (or public health) vary, the problem confronted is the same for every member of the human species. How can it not be?What we think, in the Western world, as norms and values can be very different in the East. The basic notion of how to act accordingly to ethical principles is still blurred.
:up: :up: Oh yes (decades ago for me, especially Paz).I find Ortega y Gasset an important counterpoint to Unamuno. A struggle to understand experience.
As an "American", Octavio Paz hits me hard with many of the same questions. — Paine
I don't because, in the following sense, I'm neither "spiritual" nor "religious":Do you feel the same? — javi2541997
"Spiritual" means to me haunted by ghosts (and "religious" belonging to a spiritual community). Th[ere] may be proof of feeling haunted, [but] not "proof of ghosts" (i.e. disembodied entities). — 180 Proof
And, sometimes, the church is against members who deviate too far from the tenets of the faith. — BC
About 7% of active church participants did not believe in the resurrection, for instance. Were the study, Faith and Ferment, repeated today, it is likely that the results would show decline in belief in basic tenets, like the resurrection, — BC
Do you think you would benefit by being baptized? In mainline theology, Baptism provides for the erasure of original sin, something cooked up by the early church. Baptism doesn't make you a church member, it makes you part of the body of Christ. It's all very mystical, but you do get wet. — BC
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. — Tom Storm
Graham Green (for instance) wrote entire books about the complex relationship between Catholicism, faith, morality and individual conscience. — Tom Storm
In sum, 'churches' – organized/official cults – are confidence games (i.e. pyramid schemes) and 'heretics' make the grift harder to keep going and harder to keep the suckers in the game. Like any other racket, customers (victims) straying from the authorized script(ure) is bad for business. IMO, the more 'missionary' and corrupt a religion is, the less tolerant of 'heresy' it becomes. Read histories of (e.g.) Catholicism and Islam.Why do they do this? — javi2541997
Shūsaku Endō — Tom Storm
If Catholicism and personal ethics is important to you Greene's The Power and the Glory may be of interest. — Tom Storm
If I want to know about Christianity, I want to know what Christ - the sage - had to say. His followers I'm not so interested in. — Tzeentch
And I've come to realise that this is what philosophical spirituality is always trying to convey, but that it's a very difficult thing to convey and to understand — Wayfarer
It is an exploration of the relationship between the individual life and the ultimate nature of being, through the perspective of Eastern philosophy particularly Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, but also with references to Christian mysticism. — Wayfarer
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