I'd say that narrative is not logical -- or, at least, narrative brings with it its own logic, if we wish to logicize a narrative. Something along the lines of "with each sentence time progresses", or whatever -- but then there's always a storyteller out there who notices that people are logicizing stories, then changes it up to thwart the logic. — Moliere

I mean something much more basic: there is nothing that is free of logic, simply because to have an idea at all, fact or fiction, is to have this within the framework of logic. For example, "Oh, my offense is rank" is, among other things, an affirmation, a logical category.

I can get along well enough with phenomenology-talk that I don't feel the need to clear it with another theory. One starts somewhere, after all. My doubts aren't based in a notion of what philosophy ought to be, as much as based in particular experiences of people claiming to have so-called special knowledge.

And sometimes phenomenology is very grounded and attending to our experience, and sometimes it goes off the deep-end and claims that everything is consciousness correlated to the special ideas the phenomenologist can see.

It's the latter that I think goes off into what Kant called noumenal speculation. Maybe to the speaker, they can see something special. That's what mystical experience is about -- seeing something others cannot, and purportedly attempting to translate what cannot be translated for people who do not have that mystical experience. And, religiously, perhaps that flies -- but I've yet to make sense of such talk in a rational manner, at least -- though I remain interested. — Moliere

As to Kant's noumena, what I think is clear now is that Kant's grudging affirmation of something on the radical objective and subjective side of things that is the invisible ground of all things. I say, there is nothing invisible about it. Noumena is a concept that has its grounding right before one's beholding the world. What we "see" before us is a radical indeterminacy in everything. This is how phenomenology takes, not drawing lines, but making a setting for discussion to embrace this indeterminacy. Husserl has his intuitional affirmations, Heidegger has interpretational foundation, which is really, a foundation if indeterminacy. I lean Husserl, not because we do not live in an interpretative ontological unity of thought and actuality, but because the epoche takes one to a reductive process where the world "appears" in a startling new way. And it is here that propositionally vague but meaningful words that have little use in everydayness truly rise to the occasion: words like profundity, sublimity, holiness, divinity, the absolute.

This takes philosophy beyond its proper category. I say, philosophy's proper category IS the onto-theo-philosophical examination of our "thrownness" into a world, and the center of this inquiry is ethics/value, in an metaethical and metavalue exposition.

Why value? Because all propositional pursuits of philosophy reduce to this, I argue. Truth is indeterminate, and to the extent talk about value is "language" talk, it, too is indeterminate. But value talk possesses the, what I will call, direct (a risky term) "indexical" pursuit of value, so called.

Tough to talk about, but then, religion has never understood itself, so mired in bad metaphysics.

I think that's a warning sign, for myself at least, that I've fallen into a transcendental argument -- it's valid, but it's also easy to construct and usually based on an unstated feeling (what, Kant acting on unstated feelings?! He's a being of pure reason! ;) ) — Moliere

But put Kant's dividing line aside. The transcendental issue is embedded in phenomena. Put bluntly, one does not "divide" eternity. The reason we have to talk this way is because we face it in everything we can conceive. The question really goes to why we have warrant to give any priority to this, and this is a value issue. Analytics (like Davidson) assume truth is not value (he says this), but Dewey is closer to being right: everything that transpires before us IS value; the separation of cognitive functions occurs in analysis only. The philosophical problem has never been about rightly determined propositions, but rightly determined propositions in the disclosure higher affectivity.

Only Buddhists, Hindus and various mystics talk like this.

When I feel I don't know what the negation of some philosophy is, I'm focusing on some universal idea -- a totality, one might say, that encompasses, explains, relates, feels, connects, guides, and soothes. Something like God, but in a phenomenological world -- so God can be replaced by Man, ala the Enlightenment, or something else, but it's all religion at the end of the day. Magical beliefs, big-M Meaning, the mystical -- these things are more important because they make life worth living. — Moliere

I think the is very important nail's head hit very hard by this. But God is not God, nor are daseins, daseins in the context of this thinking. Not is the sun the sun, and so on. Such things fall away. I see concepts not as labels tagged on to objects, but as powerful dynamic world makers, Heidegger's temporal dynamic is an extraordinary exposition. I think of it like this: what is left after past-present-future is divested of its existence making process? the argument is, this cannot be done, hence the complaint against Husserl, who thought "pure" phenomena could "appear" in the epoche. For pure phenomena to make sense at all, one would have to "turn off" the world itself.

I disagree, of course. One can turn off the world and be in the world at once. Not unlike what Kierkegaard has in mind with his Knight of Faith. At heart, K was an irrationalist, which is why he fought so against Hegel. One did not have to read Kant or Hegel or even Kierkegaard to make this extraordinary movement toward affirmation, a yielding to God, in theological terms. Where I disagree is in the irrationality, where terrible mistakes allow for distortion, dogma, and moronic authoritative thinking to undermine the whole enterprise. Philosophy's "job" is to steer through such things.

And so the transcendental argument springs forth -- how does anyone really do/experience/say/be anything at all? Phenomenology is the only possible way we live our actual lives, and clearly we do live actual lives, therefore phenomenology is the way. To bolster the first point we must first list all the possible alternative ways, and defeat them until Phenomenology is the one that stands -- then say, abductively, "See if you can come up with a better explanation"

The problem being -- it all relies upon what sounds good to the speaker. It's just as easy to set up the exact same argument with materialism. It follows the same pattern (and is akin to the moral arguments for God's existence): — Moliere

The answer to this lies in the epoche, I claim. It is a method, first, not a thesis, first. The most radical form of this is found in meditation, when seriously undertaken, which really amounts to expunging the contents of the world.

When you talk about living our actual lives, you suggest phenomenology has practical wisdom. I don't see how philosophy has this dimension apart from the way it can be applied, and what comes to mind is Heidegger, who was briefly a Nazi, and this does seem to follow from his ideas of history, freedom and self realization.

On materialism: it is not as if this concept has no meaning, even though it has no properties, as all vacuous metaphysics goes. It carries, however, an unmistakable connotative meaning, which is due to its being lifted from contexts found in natural science, and thus, when this term is used, it implicitly endorses scientific settings for philosophical thinking. What I mean is, when we think of material substance, we think the underlying substratum of all physical objects, and so we are directed toward objects, their physical analyses, their localities in space and time, their causal relations with other objects, etc. Phenomenology takes a term like material substance and registers its significance in "predicatively defined regions" of the naturalistic attitude. It is a term, like all other terms, and its meaning is context dependent, and so it is NOT a foundational term for ontology. Husserl thought philosophy had its true calling in the foundational intuitions of the world. Heidegger did not share this. I am in between.

How does anyone really do/experience/say/be anything at all? Materialism is the only possible way to explain our lives, and we clearly do live ("some of us, anyway" scolding the eliminative materialists), therefore materialism is the explanation at least until something better comes along, but all these other explanations are bad for these reasons. — Moliere

Well, phenomenology has come along. Materialism is not a philosophical concept, as I see it, because philosophical questions go deeper than science can conceive. One must make subjectivity the center of inquiry. Ask, what is it one is confronting in the world, in actuality? It is the what appears before us. To take materialism as a philosophical idea is pure empty metaphysics based on an extension of what science thinks about regarding what is NOT material at all.

What is the ethical dimension to Husserl's thought? — Moliere

I should say, I am don't defend Husserl, Heidegger or anyone else in full. Husserl and empathetic relations is interesting, but it is not a metaethical account (though I would have to read more on it). My take on the discoveries of ethics via the epoche issues from reading of Michel Henri and others, but I was first struck by G E Moore's non natural property of ethical matters. He was talking about the Good and the Bad. I won't go into this unless you want to, but it is a big issue, basic to my thinking: Suffering stands as its own presupposition, that is, the badness of suffering is not bad because there is a discursive exposition of it being so. AS SUCH, suffering is a stand alone feature of our world. It is an absolute. Nothing more axiomatic than this. Arguable, granted; but in the end, not really to be gainsaid.

“We encounter phenomena first. Period.” Wow, this sounds so definitive. Can’t be argued without sounding absurd. Let me try. What do we humans encounter first? I would say a very hostile world in which we need to survive. We encounter objects that we need to run or hide from, we encounter objects that will aid in our survival. To call this ‘phenomena’ sounds like a cold abstract thing that is ruminated on rather than experienced.

“…examines the foundations of being a human being”, is this discovered like a pair of shoes hidden in a closet? Or just created by a phenomenologist that gets everyone to go along with it? Or maybe its just what Wittgenstein said about “absolute simple objects”: “But I do not know whether to say that the figure described by our sentence consists of four letters or nine? And which are its elements, the type of letter, or the letters? Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstanding in any particular case? — Richard B

Regarding the first, of course it sound definitive. I think there really is a definitive approach to the discovery of what a human being is at the level of basic questions. This doesn't mean at all that I think God just sent me a memo; it simply means that there is a method, grounding, from which more organized thinking issues. I mean, this is what it means to have a considered point of view, a defensible set of ideas. Ironically, my view emphasizes indeterminacy, not anything definitive.

The encountering first? Look at it like this, ask a scientist what existence is, and she will put the answer in the range of material substance, naturalism, the stuff atoms, quarks, and so on are made of, etc. This is a scientist's ontology. A phenomenologist will say terms like this are fine in contexts where they are common and make sense, but for philosophical ontology material substance has no meaning. I mean, what is it? for there is nothing there to fill the explanatory space. It is really just an extension of a scientist's vocabulary into a philosophical claim, but it has no empirical presence.

Phenomenology, the way I see it, simply takes what appears before us as the foundation for philosophical inquiry. In doing this, it grounds theory in what is there, simply put. Its historical precursor is Kant's "concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."

First, you think Wittgenstein was not an analytic philosopher. Well, I and the rest of the world count him an analytic philosopher because he did his philosophy by using logic to analyse the language of philosophical problems.

Next, you think that I have not addressed the "content" presented. Doubtless this is because I have been unable to grasp what you are getting at, but so far as I have understood it, I maintain that Wittgenstein thought that any value in ethics was in the doing, not in ethical theory. — Banno

Here's what I understood.

First, you think Wittgenstein was not an analytic philosopher. Well, I and the rest of the world count him an analytic philosopher because he did his philosophy by using logic to analyse the language of philosophical problems.

Next, you think that I have not addressed the "content" presented. Doubtless this is because I have been unable to grasp what you are getting at, but so far as I have understood it, I maintain that Wittgenstein thought that any value in ethics was in the doing, not in ethical theory.

You seem to think that Quine showed the indeterminacy of meaning, rather than the indeterminacy of reference. Roughly, I agree, but think that Davidson deals with the issue better, and that, following Wittgenstein, the mooted indeterminacy is an outcome of meaning being the use to which we put language as we do things.

And I continue to think that the "phenomenological epoché" cannot be made coherent. — Banno

Nevermind

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language... — Banno

Here's the rub; Wittgenstein is an analytic philosopher. Hence there is a contradiction in your account. — Banno

No, not really. Analytic philosophy began WITH Wittgenstein, following Russell. Russell thought Witt was a mystic and they parted ways on this matter of that which should be passed over in silence.

And btw, your response has nothing of the content that was presented to you. Curious. What do you think of the issue at hand regarding Witt and ineffability and Witt's statement about value and ethics, specifically in the Trac5atus, the Lecture on Ethics and in Value and Culture?

Why indeterminate? Unstated, experienced, enacted, perhaps, but not indeterminate. — Banno

Indeterminacy is simply where inquiry takes all matters that may come up. But the approach to understanding this has three, as I understanding it, courses of proceeding. Consider Derrida's deconstruction and Quine's Indeterminacy of translation. The former goes directly to the failure to produce a contextless center for meaningful talk. In order for anything meaningful to be said at all requires context, the "gathering" of regionalized ideas in which a given idea is set, and from which the given idea gets its individualization. There are NO stand alone meanings. A cat is not a cat because there are cats out there that bear their own meaning as cats. A cat is a cat, at the basic level of analysis, only as a "play" of relevancies: and then, what about this very explanatory position itself? Yes; it too is a play of relevancies. Nothing escapes this. Heidegger's existential analysis of time, say, is itself hermeneutically indeterminate: He doesn't think he has found the final answer, only that this is best that can be done in the contextual possibilities of our world. Quine, the second I referred to, was defending the same in his naturalism, but note, he always came back to a naturalistic foundation, and in doing so had to reject the thesis of meanings of terms. He writes,

Within the parochial limits of our own language, we can continue as always to find extensional
talk clearer than intensional. For the indeterminacy between “rabbit,” “rabbit stage,” and the rest
depended only on a correlative indeterminacy of translation of the English apparatus of individuation—the apparatus of pronouns, pluralization, identity, numerals, and so on. No such indeterminacy obtrudes as long as we think of this apparatus as given and fixed. Given this apparatus,
there is no mystery about extension; terms have the same extension when true of the same things.
At the level of radical translation, on the other hand, extension itself goes inscrutable.5
the third is but my thinking the most extraordinary: the indeterminacy of intuitive encounter. (Ontological Relativity, p 32)

You see, Quine, too is destined to admit that at the end of a persistent inquiry, indeterminacy of meaning looms large.

The third, most powerful, for me, is simple and intuitive: Experience the bare exposure to indeterminacy of time, space and Being. This goes directly to the isseu to ineffability. Alas, it is hard to discuss. One has to go there, simply put.

In so far as the phenomenological epoché is in the first person, it is private, dropping like a beetle. It could not therefore be part of the public narrative. In so far as it is part of the public narrative, it cannot perform the intended task of setting out the experience exactly as experienced. We are embedded in a world that is social and real, and hence not only can one not bracket all one's experiences at once, one cannot bracket one's experiences at all. See Isaac's comments above regarding the conceptualisation of colour involving those parts of the brain that use language...

Phenomenology sets itself an impossible task. — Banno

Public narrative? The question here is the public narrative embodied in the subject, the historically constructed individual, the center of institutions embedded in language and culture that we call a self--what happens when this kind of entity examines the foundations of being a human being. We encounter phenomena first. Period. The social and the real are first order terms that begs the further foundational questions.

Where ethics is statements that transcend all times and places, to speak these statements would require a vantage point that's unavailable. People still go on and on as if they do have this vantage point, though.

I don't think Wittgenstein's point is that we know ethical principles, but we just can't put them into words (ineffable). It's that we can't know these transcendent facts to begin with. That's the problem with ethical discourse. — frank

Most emphatically. He cares little for moral principles in the way they replace the earnestness of real experience. Perhaps he is even close to Nietzsche on this, who said, I don't refrain from lying because a moral principle tells me not to do this. I refrain from lying because I am just not a liar. You see how this closes in on something genuinely engaging the world. Of course, N would have none of this talk about ineffability; nor would Witt., but he does point to it, mention it, bring it to light in order to disclaim it in meaningful talk. But again, N would never talk about the Good as does Witt. Interesting comparison.

And you are right about the vantage point: it is like talking about reality or the world, as these have no counterpart in a possible denial. A thing can make sense only if its denial makes sense. You can't question the validity of logic, say.

This is consistent with how Plato originally explained "the good" in "The Republic". It is in a strange way, always outside of knowledge, therefore not truly knowable, making virtue something other than knowledge. But the good has a profound effect on knowledge, as what makes the intelligible objects intelligible, in a way analogous to the way that the sun makes visible objects visible. — Metaphysician Undercover

I do like this way of putting it, for it opens up the issue. Those in the cave facing the shadows on the wall turn around to see that actual figures producing these. This is an act of philosophical reflection, whereby one pulls away from mundane interpretations of the world. I would like to call this an engagement in the method of Husserl's phenomenological reduction, a dismissing of everydayness, or, the "naturalistic attitude". The light that illuminates all things is the Good.

You say it is outside of knowledge, and in a qualified way, I agree. Heideggerians and many others want to make the affective dimension of our existence of a piece with the language that makes it "unhidden" (alethea), but on the other, the language is "open" interpretatively, so the nature of what is there is an open concept to the understanding, thus we live in existential openness, our freedom. The move outside the cave is a metaphysical move. The question of ineffability begins here, I think.

I like to take ponderous metaphors like this, and bring them home: here I am, cat on sofa, clouds and trees and houses outside. Now, what IS the Good? It is here, in the actuality of the lived event that this question has its authenticity, I hold. To your point: If the good makes the intelligible, intelligible, then the good is logic and language, something Kantian? Plato is called a rational realist, and so I always thought along these lines. But the affectivity, this is happiness, joy, love, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, and other words that mean essentially the same thing. How does this "Good" effect knowledge, I want to ask. Not that it doesn't, but to characterize somehow is a worthy question.

This is the difference between the general principles which we apply, and the particular things or particular circumstances which we find ourselves engaged with, and requiring the application of general principles. This difference often creates a conundrum for decision making because the general principles often do not readily fit the particular circumstances.

The problem with "states of affairs" is that this terminology creates the appearance that a particular situation can be represented by general principles, and expressed as a state of affairs. The issue, with what cannot be said, is that there is a fundamental inconsistency between how we represent general principles, and how we represent particular situations. There are features of the particular circumstances, which by our definition of "particular" and the uniqueness assigned to "particular", which makes it so that the particular cannot be represented by descriptive terms, which we employ as general principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with this, but there one has to get by the difficulties. One is this: Consider states of affairs as a temporal dynamic, and not as a spatial one. Thus, what it means to have an encounter in the world at all has a temporal model to work out, for when we talk about general principles' failure to grasp the palpable realities before us, the "before us" is a "presence" in time, in which the past and the future are a unity where recollection (history) offers the basic existence conditions out of which a future is constructed, and this occurs as a spontaneous production of our Being There. In this, the present vanishes. All that lies before me is bound to this past-future dynamic. I don't see a tree in the mundane sense, for trees are forged out of education, habits and familiarities over years of experience, and this is what rushes in as I walk down the street "understanding" things? Being caught in this cycle of temporal production.

This kind of thinking places everything that crosses our path in a finitude, out of which there is no exist, for how can one even conceive of such a thing when conception itself is an historical event? Never spontaneously "there".

I say, true, yet put a spear in my kidney and the is not an historical event. Or listen to music, fall in love,, and all of the affective spontaneities that are always already there as well, and THIS declares the present., the Real with a capital 'R'. I defend a kind of value-ontology: the determination as to what is Real lies in the felt sense, and this sense of not epistemic; rather, the "raw feels" of the world are aesthetic. The "features of the particular circumstances" you speak of have their ineffability in the desire, the interest, the satisfaction, the gratification, and so on, that saturate experience.

A difficult sentence. For Wittgenstein, ethics is not transcendent, but done. Looking at transcendence rather than action has mislead you, I think. So I disagree with — Banno

??

It is clear that ethics cannot be put
nto words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the
same.) (Tractatus 6.421)

Such an index would be a saying, not a doing. He does nto tell us what to do. — Banno

An index points, and leaves the exposition up to that to which the pointing intends. Very important to note this distinction: analytic philosophy wants to say that that which must be passed over in silence is about nothing. But this is directly contradicted by Witt. He says just the opposite in the above, and in Culture and Value where he states the Good being what he calls divinity. He does not emphasize this kind of thing at all, for he believed that the spoken word vitiates meaning, and on this he is on the threshold of apophatic thinking (what is called in the East neti neti), that is, silence is the negative approach to discovery of things that

There are indeed things that cannot be put into words; They make themselves manifest.

In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.

Keeping in mind that he puts ethics and aesthetics in the same basket, for it is here that the the world "speaks" the ineffable: the Good and the Bad. No doubt for Wittgenstein, Beethoven "spoke" the Good. But what does the Good mean here? If you mention it, do you truly vitiate it, as he thought? Only if the words pull meanings down to mundane comprehension, but words can also elevate matters, as was done by religious metaphysics for centuries. Clearly, words language can distort and distract, which is why philosophers like Husserl wanted to make the whole affair of transcendental analysis into a science: what if words were reduced to their strictly descriptive function, as say a geologist does examining rocks and minerals, assigning values that try to adhere to observation? Husserl's famous, or infamous, reduction does just this, and thereby takes the question of ineffability to its finality: the terminal point where thought is suspended altogether. Even if this does not make sense on the surface of it, it has to be taken in the Wittgensteinian sense that even if you DO have a language in place that qualifies, conditions, this doesn't mean the apprehension of value is impinged. One simply has to shut up and listen, watch, feel, receive. Language interpretatively, implicitly attending to every intimation, but the bliss of it, the horror of it, is itself the original potency, and one knows this.

The importance of this is seeing that while ethics/aesthetics remains deeply indeterminate, one realizes that that which imposes these entanglements issues from eternity, so to speak. On this I stand with Wittgenstein, the Good is that which I call divinity.

It's not that ethics is ineffable, so much as that talking is the wrong sort of thing to do with ethics. There's a piece of apocryphal, that he was visiting a friend, who's wife came into the room to ask if they would like tea. The friend said "Don't ask, just do", to which Wittgenstein agreed, wholeheartedly. The good thing to do was to bring the tea in and make it available rather than talk about it. — Banno

Yes, he did want to quash talk about ethics. I think this exchange here would be addressed like this: It is better allow the original thrust of a kind act to play out than to mix this with a deflating discourse. But there is no question of the the event itself.

I think he was responding especially to Moore, who had written his Principia Ethica, stating that moral goodness and badness were non natural properties, and Witt just would have none of it. Goodness was self revealing. I am saying this kind of thing is exactly what the ineffable is about.

As for phenomenology, it sets itself an impossible enterprise in attempting to suspending "states of affairs" as if they were distinct from "perceptual engagement". — Banno

No, no. It is a compatibility in that states of affairs may usher forth true propositions, but therein, does not lie an impediment of intuitive realization. This is Witt's position.

is ill-framed. The Tractatus is not about "purifying of the familiar and spontaneous". Phenomenology tries to escape language, like a clown cutting off the branch on which he sits. The enterprise undermines itself. — Banno

Keep in mind that I am not defending all Husserl says, and so it is to no avail here to produce standard objections. I am saying value in ethics and aesthetics are qualitatively revealing, and Husserl's epoche gives these their existential clarity. Wittgenstein was no mystic, but he was threshold in his thinking about ethics and aesthetics in the Tractatus and elsewhere. But the argument here does not rest with what he said. I just bring him in because he was right on this.

I suspect that you will find you have much in common with Anscombe, a devout theist. — Banno

Anscombe was professedly not a phenomenonlogist, and was an analytic philosopher. You think she is aligned with the outrageous things I said? Just for your recollection, I am looking at this from Witt:

What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.
Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural. MS 107 192 c: 10.11.1929

Of course, in his Lecture on Ethics, he was clear, talk of the nature of ethics was nonsense. Yet, the Good is at the very center of ethics. The implicit question was this, How is it that Wittgenstein was capable of, at once, a flat out denial of the possibility of talk about ethics; yet confessing this about the Good? Keep in mind that in the Tractatus ethics was transcendental. "The Good lies outside the space of facts."

You should see where this is going. Witt was struggling with the contradiction inherent in the confrontation with the world that one the one hand possessed logical delimitations, and on the other, intimated with such insistence that ethics and value were embedded in the intuitive presence of things (putting aside his own language limitation here, just to discuss) that he broke off with Russell on account of the latter failing to see that the essential point of the Tractatus was not what was revealed to be affirmed within the "state of affairs" of discourse, but rather just what it was that could not be said at all. This was the major thrust of the work.

The discussion in this thread is about ineffability. Wittgenstein has clearly given us an index to just this: ethics and aesthetics. I want to give this the full breadth of its analysis, a nd this brings Husserl's phenomenological reduction, which is a method of suspending "states of affairs" to use Witt's language, in order to release perceptual engagement from the intrusive knowledge claims that attend implicitly always, already.

The question put to you, who are interested in the matter of ineffability (this is your OP), is, what do you think of Witt's apparent dilemma? And what of the reduction toward a purifying of the familiar and spontaneous, toward a clearer understanding of what it is that should be passed over in silence, the key purpose of the Tractatus?

Here, I am looking exclusively of what I bring to bear on the issue. Other works have no bearing, that is, unless you have something in mind.

You still haven't made the case that value is transcendent. Values talk is simply a conversation people share about the world. Like the idea of truth, value is an abstraction and is not a property that looks the same where ever it is found. Values can only be understood through specific examples - it is a process applied to beliefs, objects, people, behaviours, etc. The process of setting or accepting values is mundane and subjective and messy - it is deliberative and people disagree. — Tom Storm

And reason is an abstraction, that is, something about our existence that is taken up in analysis. and all of our categories are like this. There is no knitting, no arboreal things, no lunch and dinner; everything you can think of is construct, and thinking cannot occur without these. But in its categorizing of the world, thought comes upon the world itself, and questions step forward: What is reality, reason, truth and so on, and so we have philosophy, but its categories are weird and intractable.

All disciplines tries to take what you call the messiness of the world and conceptualize them. So how can we conceptualize value. I first give Wittgenstein's answer: Don't even try. But it is not the messiness he has in mind. Just the opposite: value is a term exceeds the function of facts/concepts for it is, its is, as Sartre put it, this impossible superfluity, though he doesn't talk like this, a pure phenomenon, that cannot be fit onto the logical grid for logic in the world is contextually grounded, and "the world" is a-contextual. Again, I talk like this, not Witt, as I put the puzzle together, but I am sure this is a defensible interpretation. His insistence that we should pass over in silence that which cannot be spoken, is an insistence that goes to the vacuous claims about qualia (think the world qua world), and these are supposed to be pure phenomena.

This is where I begin my thoughts: I don't think at all that one can make any sense out of qualia, this "being appeared to" foundation of knowledge, when it comes to factual categories or "states of affairs" and neither did Witt. It would be like talking about the logical analysis of logic itself, using logic as a presupposition to analyze logic: logic as logic is not a "thing of parts" because the only parts you can imagine, the modus ponens, the disjunctions and conditionals, etc., are deployed in the analysis. "The world" is not a thing of parts, and in order for a thing to be analyzed, it has to have parts; analysis is, after all, taking apart of something. What is knitting? Its parts are all you can say, which is quite a bit. The world as the world has no of this.

So, if a thing has no analytical possibilities, we have simply to remain silent about it, and as I said, regarding qualia, the pure phenomenon, the presence qua presence of a thing is simply unanalyzable. But my agreement ends on value. It possesses an unanalyzable dimension the categorization of which makes for a truly unique and impossible category: that of the ethical right and wrong, good and bad. The "pure phenomenon" of "being appeared to redly" is a very different kind of phenomenon from being in pain. This is the premise that I claim to be an existential universality and apriority, impossible because it does not issue from logic, but from existence.

All this is wordy and says little to me, I'm afraid. Not sure what your point is. Good and bad have multiple meanings, many subjective, most people know this. As animals who depend on and risk so much to survive, it's hardly surprising that humans have created a multiplicity of notions for good and bad. Valuing things (making judgements and making choices) is how we stay alive, it's hard wired. — Tom Storm

But you are not allowing analysis its due. Take any given ethical issue ask what it is. It can be analyzed. My sister wants to borrow the car, but she has had her license suspended, but then, it is an emergency because someone has appendicitis and needs to go now, but again she could be lying just to get the car and have fun; but on the other hand; and so on .All ethical issues have their examinable affairs. Metaethics asks, but what is it that makes it ethical at all? Ask what makes a spoon a spoon, and you get the familiar features of spoons, and this has nothing to do with any particular case of using spoons. Only spoons as spoons. Same here. What makes ethics ethics at all. At the existential core of this is value. An ethical case must have something of value at risk. So what is value? Value is the strange stuff of the world, a given dimension of existence. Then, see the above.

Too much writing, I know. You can pick and choose. Some repetition here. I was busy and forgot what I was doing, a bit, when I came back to it.

Cool. If it's not a logical procedure, then I believe can get along with it well enough -- though by no means am I an expert on Husserl, just an interested bystander who likes to think about these things. — Moliere

But then, its not as if it's not a logical procedure. What is free of this?

Sentence 2 would have us go down the rabbit hole of phenomenology that I'd want to bracket, for the moment, in order to be able to differentiate phenomenology from not-phenomenology. Phenomenology, I'd say, is one way of talking about why it is we can differentiate language from not-language. But surely it's not the only way? (even if it happens to be, say, the one true way) — Moliere

I think phenomenology is one of two ways to discover presence as presence, for it clears perception. And I think it is an intellectualization of the process of liberation that leads to what they call enlightenment in the East. As I see it, it is important to understand that what is sought is not propositional knowledge, and I say this disregarding what is written in familiar texts: the "science" of describing the world of intuitive presence is incidental to the revelatory encounter. The real question phenomenology puts before us, I hazard, is, is it really possible for an encounter of "pure phenomena" to occur? It is not that one has to clear this with theory first, for it is really not a method to a propositional affirmation, though I am sure this is necessary part of the conscious act being conscious. The discovery of pure phenomenal encounter is a description of what is revealed. The theory, in my view, follows what is made manifest in the method. One is not, in the serious undertaking, just trying to make sense of ideas; one is seeking a new "sense" altogether. One is trying to dismantle the familiar world of spontaneous recognition in the "consummate ordinariness" of our affairs. This is the kind of rabbit hole I have in mind.

differentiate phenomenology from not-phenomenology — Moliere

I don't think this puts it right because I don't know what the "non phenomenological" is. Ideas are phenomenological presences as well as sensible intuitions. Indeed, there is nothing that is not. The phenomenon is what is there stripped of the belief that what we think in the usual way (the naturalistic attitude) is what reality is (see Caputo's Transcendence and the Transcendental in Husserl's Philosophy). When it is seen that what we have been "seeing" all along is not reality, we face the bare phenomenon. A moment of wonder and awe. I am saying (as does Caputo, I think) this is a threshold revelatory experience of Reality with a capital 'R'.

Because that might be an interesting focus for the debate on ineffability -- if we hold that we can differentiate between language and not-language, and we hold that we can "access" not-language without the use of language, AND we hold that we cannot access such and such with language THEN, and only then, could we say what is ineffable while not falling into the trap of saying what can't be said (and its attendant performative contradiction).
(I think, at least.... a first guess at some conditions for being able to state ineffability) — Moliere

I do see your point and it's a fascinating one: It is not as if at the moment of liberating perception from the multitude of suppositions that are as a matter of course, always already there, is a departure from the world of rocks, trees and stars and galaxies, but rather that this same world sustains through, but what is lifted is, well, let Caputo make a point. For Husserl, the transcendencies are the various things and ways of the world; they are " an inexhaustible otherness and fullness which consciousness now apprehends this way and now that. It is whatever manages to escape consciousness, to over flow it, to be too much for it at any one time. Transcendencies are mundane, empirical realities which give themselves to subjectivity in a complex of present and absence...(but) transcendental does not belong to the world at all.....but instead transcends the world. It is prior to the world, providing the ultimate subjectivity before which the world rises up as a phenomenon. the transcendental is not in the world,. nor above the world., but is a condition of possibility prior to the world.

This last statement needs to be examined. Phenomenology is what is there, presupposed by an engagement with the world of usual affairs. Phenomena are "prior", meaning always already there, but ignored thematically (as they would put it), i.e., just not talked about. Keep in mind that Kant was in the same mode of analysis, only in the search for the rational structure of thought and judgment. Husserl wants to make that analytical movement toward the phenomenological totality that is always there in the analysis of everydayness, not just rational structure. Kant says concepts without intuitions are empty and intuitions without concepts are blindd; Husserl says, let's make this synthesis of thought and sensible intuitions as THE landscape of the world as it is, omitting the idea of "representation". This before us IS what it is IS to BE. (Keeping in mind, as always, I have not read and absorbed the breadth if his thought. Never written a paper in Husserl).

A truly momentous move, rejected by most philosophers simply because it is so radical in its claim that the world as it is, is right there before you, realizable after the reduction intuitively and thematically removes talk about other things, the "petty" transcendencies of day to dayness. What Husserl calls transcendental, Buddhists call liberation, nirvana, no-self, and so on. I hold that philosophy's phenomenology is meant to be the final replacement of religion. It is a course toward an intuitive disclosure, not simply analytic philosophy's the empty spinning of wheels.

I agree that the taste of a pear is not a language event. And notice how often we indoctrinated in western philosophy reach for non-visual senses to get at the non-linguistic nature of experience? So there's something intentionally fuzzy about this notion, like it's defined as what cannot be said.

One experience I have to complicate this, though, is how I listen to classical music before, and after, reading about classical music. The more I'd read about classical music, the more my actual experience would change, even though it was an identical recording (like, literally, the same YouTube link :D Classical music is much easier to study than it used to be...)

I attribute this to the analytical and conceptual things I learned from reading. That is, the more I knew about the basic experience, the more the basic experience changed -- but in a way that was enhanced rather than dulled. Aesthetically, then, my thought is the exact opposite of reducing value to the raw experience. The raw experience, for the case of aesthetics at least (and not just individual enjoyment), is just an un-tutored mind. It's fun to think back on, but really, the more we come to know things about the art, and especially the more we listen to how others encounter the work of art, the more we get out of it.

So language, in my estimation, must go some way to constructing experience. Even at the level of acquiring it in my individual skull. But, from the phenomenological side of things, it seems impossible to be able to state to what extent it does or doesn't, hence my feelings of skepticism of such things. (not a hard skepticism, just an uncertainty). — Moliere

I think the "untutored mind" is always a matter to deal with. Think again of Kant: His analysis assumes that one has empirical experiences in which the structures of reason can be revealed. No language and social transaction, no demonstration of pure reason. Also consider that while you music education can enhance appreciation, it you were born to an enviironment of classical music, you would take to it intuitively. Your infantile exposure would BE you education, ands this applies across the board.

I wonder if learning music theory, say, can really enhance the aesthetic experience. Some music is very intellectual, like atonal pieces. Sure, you CAN appreciate them aesthetically, and certainly tonal dissonances can be just gorgeous, but IN tonal contexts! I have an open mind, but the aesthetics of Anton Weber (see here, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+anton+weber+atonality&rlz=1C1GIVA_enUS965US965&sxsrf=ALiCzsZhkrviWDoQp5TK4QsU0-uxHgQuwA%3A1669479356704&ei=vDuCY5XRKsytqtsPptWd-AQ&ved=0ahUKEwiVn5Cgn8z7AhXMlmoFHaZqB08Q4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=youtube+anton+weber+atonality&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIFCAAQogQ6BAgAEEc6BwgAEB4QogRKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQrAZY2iNg2CZoAHACeACAAZsBiAHtDJIBBDEuMTOYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:6339fa33,vid:ctLLqVy_kB0

is challenging.

But music can be powerfully beautiful. A weird way to put it, those two words together, but there is that extraordinary rapture that that comes over one that can and should be the object of great philosophical interest. Alas, philosophers tend not to be aesthetes. But when one listens to, say, the first several minutes of Mahler's ninth, or Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, or whatever, there is something extraordinary that steps forward. (But how about Brittany Spears' Oops!? This raises a very interesting question pretty much untouched by philosophy, which is the possibility of qualitative gradation of evaluation of the "pure" affectivity of music and art, looking into whether some music is simply, qualitatively better than another. How could this be determined? Solely on the listening event; but this goes to your point about education, enculturation, and how this makes appreciation possible. Play Beethoven to bushman, and I am sure there will be mostly confusion.

Anyway, I would say all music is received in an environmentally structured way, but this structure is not the aesthetic, just as, to borrow Kant's way, pure reason is not about which language or culture it appears in.

If we take the assertion that language-world is fused, Heidegger's phenomenology of Ancient Greek to modern German should have worked -- and he wouldn't have posited something entirely different from what Plato said (or, maybe, he knew what Plato really said if we're true devotees :D ). His procedure would have seen the original meaning right there, rather than creating a very interesting treatise that is interesting specifically because it is a creative work and a fusion of ideas.

(It doesn't help Heidegger's case that he got lost in his own hermeneutic circle and couldn't even finish the 6 books that were planned, and then was seduced by fascism)

Where I think you and I, from the rest of what you write, will get along well is with Levinas -- I agree with you and him that ethics is the starting point for philosophy.

And if ethics is the starting point of philosophy, then there's no point in discussing proposition from non-propositional knowledge, or whether an ontology of naturalism is better from an ontology of phenomenology without, at first, understanding the ethical dimensions of these things. — Moliere

Heidegger thought, I have read, that ancient Greek and German were privileged languages, and that Greek terms were a cure for centuries of bad metaphysics. And I have read about the culture of the 1930's that influenced a lot of thinking, a quasi mystical belief in early races that were pure, once, and needed to be made pure again. There was something of this in Heidegger, who thought historically of about ontology, and I think this is the basis of his brief but terrible tryst with Nazism. I think he said he was "disappointed" and never condemned what they did. But he thought he could lead Germany to a new era of "self invention" recalling that a major part of his thought was to take the inquirer to that understanding of one's freedom to make one self, and this content of oneself was, of course, always already there in one's historical throwness (geworfenheit). Germans were Germans, so all there is to do is make the perfect German! In a creative act of authenticity grounded in the grand historical conception.

This creepy thinking is dangerous, and all too familiar in recent politics; nationalism is born out of thinking like this. But his analysis of our "there being" is just breath taking. Can't read Levinas without him, or, you can, even without Husserl, but he really needs context. Heidegger said Husserl was just walking on water with his "pure phenomenon". What you call "language fused", I hold, should be understood in terms of Husserl's transcendentalism: he thinks that this recognition of our "captivity of unquestioned acceptance" of the world's events is more than stepping beyond Heidegger's throwness; it is an ontology in the old, pre Heideggerian sense, you might say, of real Reals, and it is here I think he is right, though to speak of it makes the whole thing instantly assailable. But ot me this misses something very important, which brings the matter of pure phenomena to the table. Pure? In what sense? Certainly, the everydayness is suspended, but then what happens, for we are still IN everydayness when we do this in a critical way, which is the foundational interpretative engagement of language.

Put Heidegger's historicity aside, I say, and now see where the epoche takes one. I hold the only thing that really survives is value. And this is a major part of my thinking: a value-ontology, which means the only phenomenological purity comes to us entangled, of course; but the less entangled we can see it, the more it reveals itself. This is where metaethics takes us.

Levinas' Totality and Infinity opens this door, but he does not, as I can see, affirm the primacy of ethics as in the givenness of value as such. the face of the Other conveys this, but what IS this that is so important, a nd how can it be determined in the reduction that moves to purity? This is witnessed in the pain and pleasure, agony and bliss AS SUCH. It is manifest in its manifestness. or, it is its own presupposition.

Reading Levinas? Quite a different world you are in. Makes us something of a cult of two. He, and others, take religion seriously, something Heidegger would complain about (he called Kierkegaard a religious writer, with an unkind intention, even though he owed him a great debt of thanks for some of his thinking). But Heidegger didn't see the primacy of ethics. He is always me, mine, my death, my (our, in the case of his nationalism/naziism) freedom.

Hrmm, for me it's the foundationalism that's an issue (same issue I have with Descartes, for that matter). Also, I have a feeling we have very different notions of what science is :D -- but that's going to take us very far astray. Maybe put a bookmark on this line of thought for another thread? — Moliere

But it has to there: here is where ineffability lies, in the ethical and aesthetics of our world. A huge topic. My sources are too broad to mention (not at all that I am a master of these), but for the phenomenological reduction's theological "turn" see Being without God by Marion; too many others.
I like the intro to Michel Henry's works:

Henry’s phenomenology of life is radical precisely because it situates life’s original dimension beyond the realm of what is accessible to the natural sciences and even to objectivity as such, namely, by locating it in an affective immanence that escapes every attempt to objectify it.

This originarity of the "affective immanence" is striking. I want to stress that this dimension of affectivity is discoverable as a potency embedded in the revelation of absolute ontology. Of course, the rub lies with saying such a thing and not being misunderstood, for the problems that leap up at you are created by familiar language, even or especially philosophical language, that have no footing here, yet it is not as if the "something ineffable" about this can't be said. It can be said just as well as anything else, but that would take a system of language use in which this kind of affective immanence is common.

I hope my prodding isn't seen as disapproval. Because your posts have been a treat to think through some thoughts. So, at least from me, I have nothing but approval, though I am naturally inclined towards skeptical thinking, and skeptically inclined towards naturalism. Usually I doubt people who claim to have special knowledge. But, then, there's the curious fact of our individuality, our interiority, and so on that doesn't seem to be physical.

I just wonder if we really lose out on naturalism, for all that, when we think of naturalism as a philosophy rather than as "What physics books say is the whole truth and nothing but the truth"-style naturalism. Or, even further, I doubt metaphysics ever produces knowledge, ala old Kant's line of thinking. So, if phenomenology be an object of knowledge, then it's not metaphysical and thereby amenable to the methods of science. And if it's an object of knowledge, it would be effable, shareable, study-able.

But if it's an ethical basis, then it wouldn't. In which case, what is Husserl doing when he asks us to reject naturalism? What is the ethical dimension to Husserl's thought? Isn't that the important part? — Moliere

In the all too busy comments I made above, all that you say here is relevant and poignant. Kant's old line of thinking is the jumping off place, because he did understand that there is something unnatural or noumenal that was intimated in phenomena. What he didn't see is that in order for this to be the case, then phenomena itself must be noumenal. The metaphysics he conceived drew a line. But this was wrong. There is no line; only being, and metaphysics has always been about the physics that stands before us. Nor did he realize, as the very fewest "philosophers" have, the the whole point of our existence is to be found in affectivity: the Good, says Wittgenstein, this is what I call divinity.

This sounds theatrical and reminds me of Voltaire - the joke about how god designed the nose just so we could wear glasses. For the rest I am not clear what your points about suffering mean.

But let's just drill down into one thing since this is discussion has expanded and is messy. — Tom Storm

No, no. Ethics IS the matter on the table for talk about ineffability. In fact, it is the major theme. The point about the person who has the distinction of having suffered more than anyone else is to bring out latent curiosity that stands before philosophical inquiry, nothing more. The theatrical aspect you detect comes from a prevalent cynicism regarding ethics, and this is a very big problem for an enterprise that is supposed be trying to understand human existence. Suffering is not just a proper theme for philosophy, it is the most important one. Ethics is first philosophy, and the actuality (call it) of ethics in the world is value, and value, I repeatedly argue, is (and I stand with Wittgenstein on this) ineffable. It is not a dramatic presentation of poor Robert or Jane who suffered most; it is just a poignancy of the extremity to make the case most visible. In truth, I could have given any example at all, to make the point, but weaker examples, like the time I skinned a knee or failed a quiz, do not make the case as well.

Keep in mind that philosophy is full of such oddities, as with the hedonic glutton counter example to utilitarianism, or the barn facsimiles and severed head remedies to Gettier problems.

So this is a style of argument we get from many; from Islamic religious thinkers to David Bentley Hart (an interesting Eastern Orthodox theologian). Can you demonstrate that there is any value which transcends human perspectives and perceptions? — Tom Storm

Not any value. Value as such. It is not an argument from dogmatic authority, but from what I would call phenomenological ontology, and by this I simply mean, take an occasion of ethical ambiguity and give analysis. there are facts before you, like your friend who owes to money but will not pay, but you owe him from a prior business, and does the one cancel the other? This kind of thing. Facts are facts. Ask in this conundrum, what is it that makes it ethical, and not just a logical puzzle, as, say, an engineer might face in a design problem. Value is IN the problem itself and not incidental to it (as with engineering); it is the very essence of the problem. Your friend is a fried, and you value this, and you also value being paid, and so on. But what is this valuing about in this philosophical analysis?

Philosophy is an inquiry into everything and anything at the most basic level. Kant looked at the formal dimensions of thought, not just occasions where thought was in play. So what is this foundational analysis of value about? The good and the bad, to give it categorial recognition (keeping in mind always that such analyses are abstractions. There is no such thing as pure reason or value as such. These are ways we talk about reality). Good and bad can be contingently understood, as with a good couch or a bad knife that doesn't cut cleanly. This is not the ethical good and bad. Follow analytically any contingent use of these terms and eventually you will run into the non contingent good and bad: the discomfort of a bad couch, the frustration of a knife that won't cut. Now the analysis has gotten to the final question, what is this discomfort all about? That goes to the feeling, and here, this cannot be derided or deflated: we have come to the analytic basis of the, if you can stand it, meaning of life.

But this absurd term, 'the bad' sounds ridiculous, like some kind of platonic ultimate reality. It is best to leave historical platitudes out of it and just attend to the matter at hand. No one is talking about the "form of the bad". This is just bad metaphysics. We are talking about a dimension in our existence thatdefies presuppositional analysis. Value as value is its own presupposition. And I have to leave it at that unless you want a further go at it.

Wittgenstein means little to me and for what reasons should I accept his authority on the subject? What I liked most about LW is that he went out and actually did things. Brave things. The point for me is getting on with it. — Tom Storm

Yeah, I really respect this person. But wanting to go to war to face death is puzzling. He wasn't doing it for country (in fact, I think he wanted England to win) but for the encounter with a world that was a powerful presence to him. He was passionately engaged with the world, which is unusual for a philosopher. Well, he wasn't a philosopher, had read nearly nothing.

Not his authority. Philosophy is analytical, not authoritative. He helped elucidate the world. I certainly do not understand all he said, nor am I interested in all of this. I find his thoughts right, where I am interested.

Not you alone. It's one of questions most people seem to ask themselves. It's at the heart of Buddhism. I hear this question often when working with people who are experiencing suicidal ideation. — Tom Storm

There are people who come into existence just to suffer. Indeed, if we had a hedonic accounting of all who suffered, and could compare who had what and how much, it would be possible to identify the one person who suffered more than any other human being. I would like to take this person and hold him or her up for a proper examination. Suffering is not given its due, since, as you say, a lot of philosophy is just bad metaphysics and story telling; what I mean by this is that when we bring a matter into discussion, we familiarize it in the contextualizing influence of habits of thought. We hear about terrible things so routinely that we are very good at making them benign-in-conversation, whereby suffering is no longer suffering. It becomes something else, a place on the grid of familiar affairs, and all of this makes perfect sense: after all, if we really looked suffering squarely, all schools in abeyance, just the pure phenomenon of terrible pain, it would be an existential crisis of the first order. Ignoring this is a necessary condition for our sanity, granted. But the world opens in a new horizon of discovery.

I am guessing I lost you on that point. This is it is lost on almost everyone, and this is why phenomenology is so important: the suspension of knowledge claims uncovers an original experience.

That must sound weird. We don't live in a world that encourages this kind of thinking.

How did you determine this was an impossibility? We really have no way of determining if this is the case. It may seem it from our vantage point (our particular kind of inferential thinking) but given the erroneous and tentative nature of much human thought... who knows, right? — Tom Storm

I refer you to Wittgenstein:

Consider, from Culture and Value:

What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.
Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural. MS 107 192 c: 10.11.1929

You cannot lead people to the good; you can only lead them to some place or other; the good lies outside the space of facts. MS 107 196: 15.11.192
And then

It is clear that ethics cannot be put
into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the
same.)

He is talking about value-in-ethics, the good and the bad of ethical matters. Here is what I wrote to Banno on Wittgenstein and his Tractatus:

He does not defend the same thinking as, say, John Mackie who wrote an excellent book on why there are no objective ethics (obviously I disagree; but it is very clearly written). Witt goes much further: We cannot talk about ethics because (and this is the Tractatus, early on) ethics and aesthetics are not states of affairs, not merely formal, tautological placements in the logical network, and this is where sensible talk occurs. But he does talk "about" such things, he simply intends to talk around them.

My point here, regarding the ineffable, comes from here, among other places (French Husserlians like Emanuel Levinas, et al). I think Witt is right, ethics is utterly mystical, that is, a foundational indeterminacy like everything else, but with ethics, it is not that it is simply off the grid of logical possibility like some ontologically adrift qualia. It presents an injunction. If ethics is transcendental, and I have no doubt it is (though always keeping in mind that everything is like this once one's inquiry leaves familiar categories) then value (entirely off the grid: "If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case") is an absolute. And this means all of our ethical affairs are grounded in an absolute.

Frankly, I don't see why there is resistance to this thinking. It is crystal clear: all ethical issues have some value at risk, in play. Without this, there simply is no ethics. This is what Witt was talking about when he said ethics is transcendental. What is Good is divine, too. What good is he talking about? Why, the good we witness every day.

Of course not. But why do it then? And the analysis is itself replete with confusions, omissions, contradictions, contortions and, perhaps, the odd glimmer of understanding. And Christ knows who can tell what's what? — Tom Storm

I don't mean there is no purpose to it. I just mean its purpose, the analysis, is not manifestly practical. The purpose, I believe, of philosophy is to take the place of religion. Religion is mostly bad metaphysics and story telling. But beneath this, there are existential issues that are profound, and this goes to ethics, the metaethical question about the nature of the good and the bad in ethical cases.

Religion as we know it is dying out. I say good riddance. But this leaves a void that is not contrived, as Nietzsche would have it, by deluded people who resent and want to lash out at the strong and the spirited. I put the matter simply: why are we born to suffer and die? An innocent enough question, and I would think the matter clear. As I see it, one good way to ask it is to give it a scientist's setting: why, after a Big Bang threw the basic stuff of things into existence (so to speak. Hardly matters) did this after 13 billion or so years, begin to torture itself through the agency of human beings (and dogs and cats, etc).

I think it is a fair question, given how impossibly important such a thing is.

Ok, why are you arguing when you should be bracketing. Why are you trying to convince someone, when you should be detecting the pure presence of phenomena. — Richard B

Language is both what reveals the world, and what tells us to bracket the world. As I see it, the difficult time that philosophy has in trying to deal with Husserl's epoche is that it is seen as contradictory in its insistence that intuitive purity is possible, on the one hand, yet in order to realize this, one has to deploy language, education, knowledge claims, the very thing that confounds purity. How can one defend any meaningful conception of pure phenomena, yet give an analysis of the way the past predelineats experience of phenomena, since this intrusion from the past surely saturates the perceptual event, making the present, and the so called nunc stans (standing now) an impossibility?

But the way I approach this is not as a logical set of propositions. Bracketing is a method, a practice, and the errors in its conception are assailable, but the revelatory dimension of this remains sound. This is why I associate Buddhism with the phenomenological reduction.

But we don't live in the examination, we live in the experience. — Tom Storm

But then, philosophy is not telling you how to live. It doesn't care, I would argue. It is analysis at the most basic level and nothing more.

The sorry state is, that this is pretty much Wittgenstein's point in turning his chair. Somehow you seem to have misunderstood what he was doing. — Banno

Consider, from Culture and Value:

What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.
Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural. MS 107 192 c: 10.11.1929

You cannot lead people to the good; you can only lead them to some place or other; the good lies outside the space of facts. MS 107 196: 15.11.192

And then

It is clear that ethics cannot be put
into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the
same.)


He does not defend the same thinking as, say, John Mackie who wrote an excellent book on why there are no objective ethics (obviously I disagree; but it is very clearly written). Witt goes much further: We cannot talk about ethics because (and this is the Tractatus, early on) ethics and aesthetics are not states of affairs, not merely formal, tautological placements in the logical network, and this is where sensible talk occurs. But he does talk "about" such things, he simply intends to talk around them.

My point here, regarding the ineffable, comes from here, among other places (French Husserlians like Emanuel Levinas, et al). I think Witt is right, ethics is utterly mystical, that is, a foundational indeterminacy like everything else, but with ethics, it is not that it is simply off the grid of logical possibility like some ontologically adrift qualia. It presents an injunction. If ethics is transcendental, and I have no doubt it is (though always keeping in mind that everything is like this once one's inquiry leaves familiar categories) then value (entirely off the grid: "If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case") is an absolute. And this means all of our ethical affairs are grounded in an absolute.

Frankly, I don't see why there is resistance to this thinking. It is crystal clear: all ethical issues have some value at risk, in play. Without this, there simply is no ethics. This is what Witt was talking about when he said ethics is transcendental. What is Good is divine, too. What good is he talking about? Why, the good we witness every day.

I am not sure 'why' questions are of much use when applied to life but, as you suggest, there are plenty of baroque 'answers' available such questions. My favorites are mundane: nihilism and naturalism. We're back to the ineffable it seems. For my money there is nothing 'true' we can say about life when questions of meaning arise. There's a few thousand years of speculation and superstition no one can agree upon and it's all of no use in finding a plumber on a Saturday night when the sewerage is backed up. — Tom Storm

Depends on the meaning. Do you mean dictionary meanings? We live in an interpretative world, and such meanings are indeterminate. Take a "spin" (it can be dizzying) in a deconstructive analysis, and you will find the concepts never find their grounding in something a-conceptual and Real. Phenomenology, I argue, puts all eyes on the manifest world in its original presence. Alas, when it comes to "being appeared to redly" and the like, there is little there to claim independence from the contexts of contingency that usually rush in to make a knowledge claim, as in red compared to blue, and red as a signal of danger or stopping at a traffic light, and so on. It seems that red as a color qua color losses all meaning when contexts are withdrawn. But here is the rub to the "why" of ethical questions: There IS something independent of the contexts of contingency. for this, the proof is in, if you will, in the pudding. I don't have to explain to you why a broken wrist is bad, nor do you need a context for prima facie discernment.

For the most part I am not looking for metaphysical truth or foundational justification, just things that work. — Tom Storm

Okay! I can't help but argue though. For me, as I grow older, the matter is exactly the opposite. I simply must understand why oh why we are born to suffer and die. And this goes metaphysical in an instant.

Better to turn your chair to the wall. — Banno

But Wittgenstein was not turning away like this when he went to war. He wanted to know this experience, at the front line, something he made formals requests for.
You cannot speak the world, and I agree. But then, our words NEVER do this. I think Rorty and others right when they say that at root, truth is made, not discovered. But ethics has this extraordinary dimension to it which is value IN the presence itself. This is still given to the understanding in only the way thought can do this, but it is the residuum of experiential presence that sustains through to the end of the interpretative reduction. It will not be reduced to anything, and so philosophy needs to be very attentive to it. It is AS IF the world itself speaks: do not do this! Think of the default prohibition on assault: Why not! It hurts, and this speaks for itself. Hurting IS an interpretative term, contextually bound; but there is that certain ineffable "otherness' that is there.
The practical upshot of this is, well, extraordinary: Our ethical entanglements have a gravitas beyond what can be said.

Is the mind and brain a Cartesian duality or a phenomenological unity. What is the relationship between the brain as form and the mind as content. If a Cartesian duality, how can the form access the content. If a phenomenological unity, how can the form be the content. — RussellA

Put aside historical references. It will only confuse. Think of the differences as they are laid out before you here, in the argument.

Protopanpsychism as the link between the form of the brain and the content of the mind
Consciousness is the hard problem of science. Whether consciousness exists outside the brain as some ethereal soul or spirit or can be explained within physicalism as an emergence from the complexity of neurons and their connections within the brain, protopanpsychism is not the belief that elemental particles are conscious, rather that they have the potential for consciousness that only emerges when elemental particles are combined in some particular way.

As an analogy with gravity, the property of movement cannot be discovered in a single object isolated from all other objects, but may only be observed when two objects or more are in proximity. In a sense, the single isolated object has the potential for movement, but doesn't have the property of movement. The property of movement emerges when two or more objects are in proximity with each other.

Similarly, the property of consciousness could never be discovered by science or any other means by observing a single neuron, yet the property of consciousness emerges when more than one neurons are combined in a particular way.

Protopanpsychism breaks Cartesian dualism by enabling both the brain and the mind to come under the single umbrella of physicalism. The content of the brain and the conscious mind emerges from the form of the physical brain.

If the mind and brain are two aspects of the same thing, and are part of a physicalist world, then this explains the epistemic connectivity between mind and brain. — RussellA

Yes, all very predictable. You simply have to move out of how science would defend materialism, and into how philosophy would (should) do this. The latter looks to the presuppositions of the former. Once again, you have to go to foundational assumptions. Before the world systems of thought can even be discussed, what needs to be discussed is the basic conditions of knowing things at all. And how an ontology can be possibly conceived.
I would ask you not to ignore this basic issue, basic to the question of ineffability. If you have ready to hand a long list of ready made responses quoting scientific journals, you are simply begging the question.

Heidegger wrote The Origins of the Work of Art between 1935 and 1960, whereby the "origin" of an artwork is that from which and by which something is what it is and as it is, its essence. The artwork has a mode of being that it is the artwork itself. The origin of an artwork is the artwork itself. An artist may have caused the artwork, but it is the artwork that has caused the artist. The artwork determines what the artwork will be, not the artist. The artist is just a facilitator. Art as the mode of being makes both the artist and artwork ontologically possible. Art unfolds the artwork. The artwork has a life of its own, independent of any maker. Heidegger's phenomenology emphasises the artwork as "Being", as he said "back to the things themselves".

On the one hand, to appreciate art one must start with an understanding of what art is, yet on the other hand we can only appreciate art from the work itself. A paradox described by Plato as "A man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know. He would seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for". This is a circle only broken by an innate and a priori knowledge of Kantian pure and empirical sensible intuitions, of space, time and the categories of quantity, quality, relation, modality.

An artwork has Being and is its own Origin, yet we can understand art from our innate and a priori knowledge of aesthetics and representation that precedes ant experience of art. We can understand the aesthetic form and representational content as a single unity of apperception as a holistic synthesis of form and content. — RussellA

Heidegger is NOT going to help you defend materialism. At any rate, here is a passage from his Origin of the Artwork:
What art is should be inferable from the work. What the work of art is we can come
to know only from the nature of art. Anyone can easily see that we are moving in a
circle. Ordinary understanding demands that this circle be avoided because it violates
logic. What art is can be gathered from a comparative examination of actual art works.
But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on art
works if we do not know beforehand what art is? And the nature of art can no more be
arrived at by a derivation from higher concepts than by a collection of characteristics
of actual art works. For such a derivation, too, already has in view the characteristics
that must suffice to establish that what we take in advance to be an art work is one in
fact. But selecting works from among given objects, and deriving concepts from principles, are equally impossible here, and where these procedures are practiced they are a
self-deception.
Thus we are compelled to follow the circle. This is neither a makeshift nor a defect.
To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of
thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art a
circle like the step from art to work, but every separate step that we attempt circles in
this circle.

This "circle" is hermeneutical, not material foundational.

In language is the syntax of form and the semantics of content. Language is a set of words. A word is a physical object that exists in the world, as much as a mountain exists in the world. — RussellA

You do see the issue that comes out of this, fight? I mean, to refer to a mountain at all is to "say" or think 'mountain'. So in order to see how language stands to mountains and the like, one has to look to language first, that matrix out of which mountain is conceived. If it were the case that mountains and other objects directly confronted inquiry, as a direct communication it its "mountain-ness" that is apart from you and your existence, then you would have a kind of metaphysical logos, the "what they are" being "out there" and you there receiving it.
But what is this epistemic nexus that makes this even conceivable? If you can't even IMAGINE what this is, then the idea is unsustainable. This is the trouble with materialist thinking.

As mountain is being referred to by mentioning "mountain", as pain is being referred to by mentioning "pain", as it is asserted that the reference of "mountain" is identical with mountain, as it is asserted that the reference of "pain" is identical with pain, as the similarities between "mountain" and mountain, "pain" and pain are being clarified, then the linkage between a word and what it refers to fulfil all the requirements of a metaphor. — RussellA

It is an odd way to think of this. Metaphors borrow from one context to fit another, but it is not identity that is passed on; it is similarity. I am a real lion before my morning coffee, e.g. There is nothing of the desire to kill and eat live gazelles in this. But I am grouchy and ill tempered, a small bit like a lion's aggression.
And concepts are NOT what they refer to. If I say to you that I broke my ankle, I am not thereby transmitting to you a broken ankle. Words "stand in" for the world.
And the whole idea you present carries the assumption that we all know what mountains are. Of course, we do, but how does this occur, THIS is the question. Materialism, even something like Galen Strawson conceived in his Real Materialism, can't handle this.

As language is metaphorical, and as every known object in the world or known private subjective experience can be expressed in metaphorical terms, everything that is known can be said, whether concrete concepts such as mountain, abstract concepts such as pain, non-existents such as “The present King of France is bald.”, negative existentials such as “Unicorns don’t exist.”, identities such as “Superman is Clark Kent.” or substitutions such as “Taylor believes that Superman is 6 feet tall.”

Only that which is unknown cannot be put into words. Only that which is unknown is ineffable. If it is known, it can be put into words and is expressible. — RussellA

I see nothing but problems with this. How is it that material brain cells have a metaphorical relation with anything but brain cells? And if it is physical brains cells all the way down, how does physicality not reduce all that is said here to mere physicality? You can say, well, our experience is just what physicality does, but then you have to completely reconstrue what the idea means to accommodate perception, affectivity, values, thought, ethics, aesthetics, consciousness, and so on.

But then, meaning does not issue from what materialism can provide. One has to think again, completely reorient the approach, and this takes you only to one place: phenomenology, the "beginning" of things.

"Only that which is unknown is ineffable"?? We don't know how to send a rocket to another galaxy, yet. Is this an issue of ineffability?

I'm just not sure that there is, in fact, an alinguistic given. Not everything is language, but we are the sorts of creatures who are deeply integrated with linguistic practices... it seems a stretch to think that we can bracket away language in looking at objects. They're all named and have differentiations and everything. We can pretend that the object we see doesn't have all of the "naturalistic" predicates pertaining to it and see where our mind takes us -- but I think that's about it. That's just a suspension of judgment, though, and not a mental ability to see things as they are absent a worldview. Or, at least, that's how I'd put it. — Moliere

Bracketing should not be looked at as a logical procedure, I argue, as if the object can only be seen if language contributes nothing to the perception. I hold that one can, in the temporal dynamic of receiving the object, acknowledge that which is not language within the contextual possibilities language gives us, and this is evidenced simply in the manifest qualities of the encounter, visual, tactile of whatever. to me it is as clear as a bell: the taste of this pear is not a language event, notwithstanding attendant structures the understanding deploys in the event of the experience. The trick seems to be to overcome the default reduction of the pear to the familiar. This is habit (this goes back to Kierkegaard who actually thought this habitual perceptual event was what original/hereditary SIN was about. Weird to think like this, but his Concept of Anxiety originally holds a great many of the century later themes for continental philosophy).

I think philosophy has thought its way out of "direct apprehension" of the world, and in doing so, undercuts the actuality before us. Philosophers have "talked their way out of" the actuality of the world. But this leads to the core of this argument: how do language and the world "meet"? This is no place for a thesis, so I'll say I agree with Heidegger and others who say language is part and parcel of the objects we experience, and it is only by a perverse abstraction to think of them as apart. But there is nothing in this that says language and any of its descriptive analytic accounting, is the sole source of the understanding's grasp of the world. I don't agree with Rorty, in other words, when he rejects non propositional knowledge;I think rather, non propositional knowledge occurs IN propositional knowledge. I think of Hume saying reason has no content, and would just as soon annihilate human existence as not. It is an empty vessel, and the meanings are unrestrained by this. God could appear in all her glory, and language's restrictions wouldn't bat an eye.

Also, I'll note, I don't think there are foundations to science, so losing its foundations isn't something I mind. Science isn't as grandiose as Husserl puts it, in my view. Which might go some way to making sense of our views here: — Moliere

You are certainly not alone in this. But Husserl is clearly NOT defending scientific foundationalism. Just the opposite. Science is a contingent enterprise, for it takes no interest in examining its own presuppositions. Prior to talk about timespace, there is Heidegger's (or even Kant's) temporal ontology, and Husserl's Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. It is an analysis of the structure of experience at the presuppositional level of inquiry.What Husserl thinks is so grand is not empirical science, and repeatedly emphasizes this. It is the intuitive givenness of the world that is taken up by and underlying science.

I agree that givens in the world just are. And if they cannot be spoken, then what does metaphysics have left to say? — Moliere

That is a good point. This is why I argue for a value ontology. Redness as such really has no independent epistemic intimation of what it is. But the pure phenomenon of ethics and aesthetics does, and Wittgenstein agrees, sort of. "The good is what I call divinity," he wrote (Value and Culture). Pain itself constitutes an injunction not to do that, whatever it is. What of pleasure, love, happiness? This kind of thing bears the injunction to do such things encourage these. To me, this is simple, obvious. It is not that the world speaks, but one has to see that an ethical question takes one beyond facts, and so, what is the difference between what is factual and what is ethical/aesthetic? The answer lies in a value reduction whereby facts are suspended or bracketed. The essence of the ethics is this value-residuum. I say Kant did the same thing with reason.

Why is value and ethics grounded in metaphysics? That is a hard question.

This kind of inquiry is metaethical as it tries to isolate the value dimension of ethical affairs. This "good" of "bad" of happiness and suffering. Consider how Kant had to build an argument that ultimately posted transcendence as the metaphysical ground for pure reason. This is because, and I defer to early Wittgenstein again, there is a complete indeterminacy at the terminal end of inquiry. Value issues from this indeterminacy, which I call metaphysics.

This line of thinking is stubbornly resilient critique, because it puts the onus of justification on the world and its presence or the Being of beings. if you prefer. It is an appeal to actuality. I do not expect, nor have I gotten, nods of approval.

Hmm. I suspect there's a very healthy dose of value and meaning making within secular humanism and environmentalism, surely as robust and arrogant as any overtly transcendent spiritual system? — Tom Storm

But value as such is not very mysterious and no one likes to talk about it. What is it, in the final analysis, that makes bad things bad and good things good? Factually speaking, there is nothing there, so where and what is it, this, what G E Moore called "non natural property"? Wittgenstein famously said there is no such thing and value; and if there were, it would have no value. But he also identified divinity with the Good. He insisted this was strictly off limits to discussion, and when the Vienna Circle met, he would turn his chair to the wall if they started talking about ethics.
Sure, we talk about value all the time, but philosophically, can sense be made of it, this mysterious, non natural property of the good and the bad in our affairs?

Surely this would need philosophy (and a particular type of philosophy at that) to be more broadly valued. How does complex philosophy of this kind move from a narrow subculture of specialised interest (where disagreement is the norm) and become anything approaching a cultural preoccupation and new way of 'seeing'?

Given your views on phenomenology and the ineffable how do you determine what is effable and what is not and why does it matter? — Tom Storm

As you know, that is a really tall order, and it requires a really tall philosophical thesis to rise to the occasion. Best place to start here is Husserl Cartesian Meditations. You may be a bit shocked by what he has to say. A snippet:

As we go on meditating in this manner and along this line, we
beginning philosophers recognize that the Cartesian idea of a
science (ultimately an all-embracing science) grounded on an
absolute foundation, and absolutely justified, is none other than
the idea that constantly furnishes guidance in all sciences and
in their striving toward universality whatever may be the
situation with respect to a de facto actualization of that idea

What he has in mind can, I think, perhaps rests with this single intuition: One can attack any thesis, any proposition, essentially the way Descartes did. But can you doubt the merely descriptive just being there? This is not leading to Descartes affirmation of the cogito. It is much broader, this affirmation that one is in an indubitable intuitive world of presence. Not I think, therefore I am; but, everything IS there before me; therefore everything IS apodictically grounded in an intuition of pure phenomenological presence. This, he argues, underlies as the universal presuppositional basis for all empirical science, and he wants make this intuitive horizon of our existence the foundational science for philosophical inquiry.
In a qualified way, he is on to something very important. This goes to metaethics. E.g., one cannot doubt one is in pain. One can doubt the propositional content, the veracity of the facts, and granted that there are ambiguous examples of pain, but in cases of unambiguous pain, as occasioned by being stabbed in the kidney, say, one is witnessing an absolute. And it is not some tautological apriority; it is existential, and this is supposed to be impossible, the kind of things miracles are made of.

Just to note, I don't think "wanting" implicates "true". Because religious beliefs are never amenable to methods of knowledge-generation, like ever, while they could be true -- they'll never be known. — Moliere

I think religion is just as amenable to knowledge generation as anything else; it is just that religion needs to be rendered clear in terms of what it addresses that is in the world, that is actual. I hold it that popular religion is nothing less than the narrative response to the metaethical question, what is the good and bad of ethical problems? I think religion removed from its incidental encumbrances such as Who Saves Who and Why, and all the rest, has a existential core to it. Notice how ethics and religion would vanish if the question of good and bad were settled foundationally. Religion, properly understood, is the metaphysics of the ethical good and bad, the source of what we are calling ineffability. Questions about the Real, what consciousness is, the relation between thought and the world, and on and on, are dramatically overshadowed by questions of our suffering and delight.

I feel like I've found a kindred spirit, but I'll admit I think I'm now on the materialist side of things. And not as an inference, but as a choice. I think the materialist way of looking at the world makes us better, for the kinds of creatures we are. (we can sorta glimpse that there may be more, but usually, the "more" makes us do bad things) — Moliere

Not sure I follow. As I see it, materialism takes what is a metaphysics of the Real of "out there" things, and applies it to mind, affectivity and moods, inquiry, language; but how does it explain any of this given that these are not revealed at all AS material. In fact, I cannot see how material is delivered to us at all as a working concept, except as a stand in for other thinks one doesn't really want to go into at the time. You know, grab your materials and run! If anything is a philosophical nonsense term, it's material substance: never been witnessed.

My way of thinking is that if something is an accounting in metaphysics, then it's already something which we can only decide upon based on our feelings on the matter. Want to live forever? Sure, we're immortal. Want to note how we don't? Well, sure, we're mortal.

Like, literally, you could say anything, and as long as people like what you say then it'll be counted as true.

So the brain IS -- immortality. Or whatever religious belief you want.

EDIT: Just to note, I don't think "wanting" implicates "true". Because religious beliefs are never amenable to methods of knowledge-generation, like ever, while they could be true -- they'll never be known. — Moliere

Metaphysics, I argue, is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. Many roads to Rome here, but take any concept that has meaning in our world, put it to the test and inquire about it, following inquiry down the rabbit hole in the search for something that is not questionable, that is absolute and as an underpinning to your concept, guarantees its veracity, or reality. You will not find this, BUT, you will find intimations of such things. As with value, discoverable in our ethics and aesthetics. One example I have won out, but makes the point with poignancy: put a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds. Now ask, why is it morally wrong to do this to another person (or you cat)? Words may be there at the ready for you to say this, but it is not the words that address the question. I is the pain. What is pain? A given, a preanalytic alinguistic given. As if the world were "speaking" the principle, don't do this!

But givens in the world cannot be spoken. They just are. Meet metaphysics. It is not some distant speculative notion, conceived in the imagination. It is the hard, arguably the hardest, because understanding is above the common course of thinking, reality. to me, it has its power revealed in the most powerful encounters with the world: like being sentenced to the stake's flames, for midnight trysts in a forest's alluring mysteries, and screaming to God for deliverance.
Not to put you off, but such things are the Real we seek, when we ask philosophy's most imposing questions.

This may be limited characterization of Anglo American philosophy. W. V. Quine, one who belongs is such a tradition, said the following in Word and Object, "There are, however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its own traits: its disposition to keep on evolving." — Richard B

But the evolving he has in mind follows science's lead. Causal explanations of
psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry,
and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states. From Facts of the Matter (pp168-69) he writes, Causal explanations of psychology are to be sought in physiology, of physiology in biology, of biology in chemistry, and of chemistry in physics—in the elementary physical states.

"As Christopher Hookway succinctly puts it, “for Quine, the physical facts are all the facts." (from David Golumbia's QUINE, DERRIDA, AND THE QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY)

As a non-philosopher I find this is dense and hard to follow, but very interesting.

It sounds like you are advocating for a metaphysical, shall we even say, 'faith based' belief? But obviously not in the traditional sense.

In essence, you seem to be saying that analytic philosophy's approach is too narrow and limiting and serves to keep metaphysics safely at bay and 'the unfamiliar world and its stunning issues' contained. And you are suggesting that the future of philosophy and some notion of transcendence may be found in using the phenomenological method and the metaphysics it 'opens up' to our awareness (sorry if the language is clumsy). Is this a fair summary?

What is it that you think lies beyond the censorious methodologies of analytic philosophy? Where do suppose the phenomenological approach takes human beings for it to be called a 'new religion'? — Tom Storm

Sorry if this is hard to follow. I guess a person eventually becomes the what he reads.

My take on religion and philosophy is at a glance, pretty simple. the world is moving into an era of radical disillusionment, and the old narratives are simply not sustainable. What we see in the lying and cheating in politics is in part the death throes of popular religion, as believers become desperate in an increasingly unbelieving world.

You know, back in the sixties many scientists actually believed religion would simply die out. But this will not happen. For religion has an existential grounding, not just an historical one, and this lies with ethics and value. Science cannot touch these issues, and there is a strong tendency to redefine them to fit what physical science can say. But ethics and value are the MOST salient features of our being here in the world, and I don't think this can be argued about. If it was not for this dimension of our world, we would be as very complex sticks and stones.

Religion is, at root, "exclusively" about this very dimension of our existence. It is hard to see this given all of the history and metaphysics, but ethics and value is what religion is ALL about. Not even a challenging claim, as I see it. Phenomenology is a way to isolate essential things int he world and give them analysis at the foundational level of what they are. Kant was the first (?) phenomenologist as he took the givenness of experience and abstracted pure reason as a structural feature of our existence. It was there, everywhere in everything we encountered; i.e., part of its essential structure so that in order to be a human experience at all, it had to be invested with reason. As I see it, the same is true form value, only here, we have abstracted to the meaning of things, and not dictionary meanings, but the concrete meanings that give the world its "impossible" dimension. Wittgenstein wouldn't talk about it. this is a man who went to war with the intended purpose of facing death! Meaning, or value-based meaning, was paramount to him, that is, he felt the world very deeply and he had to know. Such an interesting person, brilliantly analytic, but so passionate! Few ever like him.

Anyway, in the end, religion will not parish because what it is about is an integral part of our being here. In the structure of our existence, there is the openness of metaphysics; ethics and value facing this openness insists on consummation and remedy. The next religious phase of our philosophical evolution will be to prioritize ethics and value. As I see it, Husserl's epoche lays a foundation for what will happen, for it is a Cartesian move inward, and here, I argue (as best I can) this leads to a radical unfolding of subjectivity. What this is about and what the argument is has its beginning just here. The more I read post or neo Husserlian thinking, the more I am convinced.

I believe that there are limits to what language can explain about the word because of the intellectual limits of the human brain, in that language cannot transcend the mind. Language doesn't have a power that is not given to it by the mind. — RussellA

I understand what you're saying about language, but brain talk used to explain language's limitations has a serious problem. I won't labor the point, but brains are language, too. So they get their meaning from the contexts in which we talk about brains, and outside of contextual identities, it loses meaning. So there must be something else, some other explanatory means that can account for brains AMONG the trees and tables and coffee cups of the world. In other words, brain talk is not foundational.

And if you are defending a physicalist view about the world, then the thesis is just untenable, unless you can explain epistemic connectivity between brains and objects in a physicalist setting with out abandoning physicalism itself.

Perhaps neither the anti-reductionist Phenomenology nor the reductionist Cartesian method can be used by themselves. Both lead to problems. The Cartesian method suffers from treating the world as a set of objects interacting with each other. Phenomenology suffers from rejecting rationalism, relying on an intuitive grasp of knowledge, and free of intellectualising.

Taking the analogy of art, a complete understanding of a Derain requires both an intellectualism of the objects represented within the painting and an intuitive grasp of the aesthetic artistic whole. IE, a synthesis of both the Cartesian and the Phenomenologist. — RussellA

You sound close to things Heidegger says, that the world and its concepts are "of a piece". I think this right, with emphasis! But on the issue of ineffability, I also think there is nothing precluded in this regarding novel and extraordinary experiences in which there is an intimation of deeper, more profound insights about our Being here. Descartes and his substance talk leads to trouble, but the direction for greater more "epistemically proximal" apprehensions of what we call reality toward our interiority makes sense to me.

Materialism takes an objective model and applies it across the board, but this leads to an existential alienation, as if what we really are is forever distant in t he "out thereness" of things, and one could argue that this kind of thinking in the modern age, so bound to its objectifying methods, is what has led to the crisis of identity.

What can I say but that:

This passage has an ineffable quality of sophistry

Thank you for the list! — Richard B

Sorry about that. Henry is pretty out there. The basic philosophical idea is this: When you face the world with understanding, it is not that the world is sitting there telling you what it is. What makes the world the world is your history of experiences, and this is what separates your world from a "blooming and buzzing" infant's world. But if it is education that informs the understanding, then how is it that the this education can ever access the "out there" of the world as it really is, given that the understanding is all about this stream of recollection? Sure, there is something before me, a tree or a couch, but isn't this recognition of what these are just the occasion for memories to be brought to bear in the specific occasion, and the palpable things of the world in their "really what they are" ness just an impossible concept; impossible because to have it as an an object at all is to be beheld AS a kind of regionalized set of memories, you know, memories about couches kick the moment you see a couch and there is no "in between" time to catch the couch in all its "pure presence". To perceive at all is to, with humans, with language taking up the world AS this language phenomenon.

Husserl thinks it is possible for a person to stand apart from the naturalistic attitude in which everything just moves along in the usual fashion, and couches are there as couches with no question, and insert a kind of conscious divide that allows the "intuitive actuality" of the occasion of encountering the couch to be recognized, as if one could SEE the world as it really is with the natural tendency to just go along suspended.

It is a very strong claim. Most think it impossible. But it goes directly to the issue of ineffability, for what is really on the table here is whether it makes sense to talk like this at all. For me, in t he meditating mind in which one allows memory, not to put too fine a point on it, to fall away, there occurs a crtain uncanny freedom, and in this freedom the world becomes a very different place, as if what was there all along had been forgotten in the naturalistic attitude.

This state of mind is proximal to what the issue of ineffability is all about. It sounds like sophistry, or as others have put it, the "seduction of language," when reading Henry because he is deeply embedded in the scholarly works of the neoHusserlian thinking. These guys just assume.

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Please list the presuppositions that I have to consciously dismiss that give me the familiarity of the world in a perceptual event. — Richard B

Speaking generally, consider what Michel Henry has to say about the the four principles of phenomenology. It is a movement toward pure givenness:

The first—“so much appearance, so much being”—is borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term “appearance,” we prefer this strict wording: “so much appearing, so much being.”1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, “that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: “zu den Sachen selbst!” The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”

Henry comes after Heidegger and was well aware of the criticism regarding having a "pure experience" of phenomena. But this is a methodological and descriptive thesis, not a deductive argument. What is "pure" lies in the unfolding, not in what the concept says. the question is, can one make this dramatic move of severance from ordinary experience?

The list you mention would be everything, as I see it, that would encourage the assumption of knowledge in which the seeing passes over the presence of the phenomenon and into our "consummate ordinariness". Husserl wanted to get "zu den Sachen selbst!' Back to the things themselves!

Reminds me of Monet who said he wished he could be made blind from birth, and then to have his sight given to him so he could see with a truly innocent eye.

Anyway, it is hard to argue about. Not really far off from what Kierkegaard called this the beginning of original/inherited sin: when self consciousness makes one aware of the world, as if for the first time. He thought this was a rudimentary step toward redemption.

If knowing is a justified true belief, I don't know there is a chasm. I believe there is and I can justify my belief that there is. I infer there is, but I don't know there is as I don't know whether or not my belief is true. — RussellA

The rub lies in the justification. What are you tryin to justify? What is being argued here is simple: how is it that epistemic connectivity can occur between two objects, a brain and my couch? Justify this. If this proves impossible, and it is, then you have to reassess the basis of your ontology. You will have to turn to phenomenology, which is about the Totality of our existence, and not just an aggregate of localized arguments that is found in analytic thinking.

Hrm, I feel the exact opposite. Phenomenology is a potential route to giving scientific explanations for religious feelings -- if we understand the structures of consciousness, then we'd have theories by which we can understand how people have visions, and such.

To me phenomenology shows how experience is a rich place for exploring the limits of language -- it's able to objectify what isn't, strictly, an object and make us able to communicate about general patterns of experience (at least, insofar that phenomenology isn't just a nonsense, a solipsistic invention for someone by themself -- a possibility, by all means, but it seems too intelligible to me for that) — Moliere

Look at phenomenology as a presuppositional analysis, and just that, of what we experience in the usual way. I certainly won't bore you with what they say, and this would be Kant through Heidegger (and while I have read a lot of it, I am by no means an expert) but will simply point out that Richard Rorty thought Heidegger was one of the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and this was a very busy time for philosophy. Rorty is important here because he really understood, though in an arguable way, continental philosophy, and he wrote extensively about and with and against analytic philosophers (like Davidson, Putnam, et al). He was strongly influenced by Thomas Kuhn whose Structures of Scientific Revolutions showed how one could explain science's progress in a way that kept theory really more about itself and less about the way the world revealed itself. He wrote about Heidegger and Derrida with this exact "distance" kept away from science's faith in empirical work's ability to "reveal" properties about he world, and defended, and this is and has been a very important revelation to me, the idea that there is noway anything out there can get "in here" (the brain).

Of course, he talked like this to simplify the strong claim he made that truth is made, not discovered. One has to give that notion some serious thought. He also thought Dewey, the pragmatist/naturalist, was among the three greatest philosophers, and you can see this in his writing: talking naturally about the world in terms familiar and commonsensical, but all the while, underlying this, was a theory of foundational pragmatism that entirely denied traditional models of a world independent presence in the intimation of its existence to empirical observation and interpretation. He was no Kantian, nor a phenomenologist, if you asked him, but in the broader sense of phenomenology, he was well aligned with Heidegger (arguably, again). You know, the early Wittgenstein is thought to be a phenomenologist.

It was the same epistemic divide that pushed Rorty to hold that truth was made, not discovered, that is in place for transcendental idealism. I read phenomenology because empirical science cannot address this simple yet all important question: how does anything out there get in here?

Only one way out of the problem this simple question poses: it is not a denial that brain generates experience, but that what a brain IS, like all things, has it accounting in metaphysics. we think of a delimited object like a house of a fencepost, and so this epistemic connection utterly fails. this delimitation has to be removed, and then the full breadth of what we are can be revealed. I hold this is possible, though not very familiar in reasoning why this is so. Oh well---the world is NOT a familiar place at the basic level of analysis.

A word such as "mountain" is a physical thing as much as a mountain is a physical thing. The "mountain" is as much an object as the mountain. Somehow, "mountain" means mountain, is linked with mountain and corresponds with mountain. The "mountain" came after the mountain, in that "mountain" has only existed for less than 100,000 years whereas mountain has existed for at least 4 billion years.

As the "mountain" came after the mountain, as the "mountain" is an object, as the "mountain" somehow relates to the mountain, in that sense, the "mountain" has objectified the mountain. — RussellA

I would never argue against such a thing. Never crossed my mind to even try. But the issue of ineffability is not about how air tight language's hold on the world is. It is about how all of this confidence falls away when basic questions are asked.

The limits of our concepts
I have learnt the concept of "mountain". On arriving in Zermatt for the first time, the reality of mountains far exceeds my concept, but on leaving, my concept will probably have changed, hopefully giving me a better understand of the nature of mountains. Yet no matter how much my understanding improves, my understanding of the true nature of mountains will always remain insignificant. Metaphorically, my understanding of a mountain will be that of a horse's understanding of the allegories in Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, not because of a lack of trying, but because of the natural limitations of its brain. I am sure that if a superintelligent and knowledgeable alien race arrived on Earth, and tried to explain the true nature of time and space, we wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what they were saying. Not because we didn't want to know, but because of the physical limitations of our brain. — RussellA

Physical limitations of the brain; what an interesting assumption. A rigorously conceived materialism leads to only one conclusion: the annihilation of any and all knowledge claims. The annihilation of knowledge. Unless, of course, you have an escape route to some acausal relation of accessibility between two objects, like a brain and my couch. This escape route, of course, would be a refutation of materialism.
Hemmingway likely never intended any allegorical reading of his work. Not that this matters to interpretation, but it is interesting to note that he had no romantic illusions about anything.

Sartre and existence
If knowledge and understanding is limited by the inherent structure of our brain, and similarly our use of language, then it follows that there will be a natural limit in our understanding of the reason for our own existence. In Sartre's terms, the "for-itself" may exist without ever finding a reason for its own existence. Existing without any justification or explanation, which is, for Sartre, a tragic existence. Without an explanation for our own existence, to exist is to simply be here. One experiences a groundlessness, existing without ever knowing why. An existence that is accidental and subject to chance, We may search for meaning, but ultimately there is no meaning in "being-in-itself", as there is no meaning in the world waiting to be discovered. — RussellA

My point about Sartre goes to this thesis that the world is not a "system" of rationalized entities of Kant. Kierkegaard inspired him on this (see his Concept of Anxiety and you can literally see where Sartre got his thinking), and it was an attack on Hegel's rationalism. To me, this was a very important insight when it came to a discovery of the nature of ethics, for ethics is "about" (I mean, in the basic analysis) value, and value is not a rational category. The thousand natural shocks are the sticks in our eyes and scorched flesh sticking to burning automobile seats, and THIS is not a conceptual affair, and its presence to the understanding is not the way understanding can conceive of it. It is an intuition that is "prior" to language, or presupposed in language's interpretative taking it up "as" something, some contextually bound discourse.

But I don't agree with Sartre nihilism. Look, if you are going the talk about brains producing experience, you're not talking about Sartre. And btw, obviously I do believe brains produce experience, for this has been shown in such abundance that one would just as soon believe the moon to be made of Gruyère cheese as deny it. But here, the discussion goes to presuppositional analysis, where this kind of thing simply is suspended.

The limits of language
Language is a product of the brain, and is therefore limited by the brain. If our understanding is limited by the brain, then what can be achieved by language must also be limited. Language cannot be used to escape the "for-itself". Language can only mirror our limited understanding of the world, a world that radically exceeds that which can be explained in language. The chasm between the world and what can be explained in language is insurmountable because of the limited nature of the brain

Language as a mirror of the intellect is limited in its description of the world by the limits of the intellect, which is limited by the physical structure of the brain. Consequently, our understanding of the world is more about how the world appears to us, rather than how it actually is. — RussellA

This chasm, how do you know about it? You see the problem?

Are you claiming that, that of which these monks speak is ineffable? I invite you to contemplate how that could be. If it is ineffable, then they cannot b speaking about it; and whatever they are speaking of, it is not ineffable. — Banno

But this goes to the point, which is that ineffability is defined in such a way that the foundational issues of our existence are rendered nonsense, empty, because there is found here an apparent impossibility. which is an explanatory nullity that underlies everything. It is not as if science has met its new paradigmatic anomaly, and quantum physics is there to rescue empirical theory; rather, it is that Kant was absolutely right about one thing, that underlying all we acknowledge as real in the world is an index to metaphysics. He was wrong about another thing in failing to see that metaphysics is an existential "phenomenon", and this term is highly disputatious in its use here. But I disagree with philosophy's familiar categories that place powerful but nebulous experiences out of the boundaries of, call it palpability or realizability. Put bluntly, metaphysics is not some Kantian extrapolation to an epistemic impossibility (the noumenal transcendental unity of apperception) that cannot be spoken, for if it could not be spoken, we would live in world that had none of its intimation in the first place. This is the way I read the early Wittgenstein's cancelation on bad metaphysics, but he was wrong to take what he thought to be most important and declare it nonsense (most egregiously in ethics). And language games keep metaphysics at bay as well: an attempt to fill a breach in human understanding, a breach that is a structural part of our existence.

Ineffability has been argued into indefensibility, and this has created a false sense of thinking that to be in intellectual good conscience in philosophy, one must never speak of the most stunning issues that press upon us. this is where Husserl and Fink left off. They need to be rediscovered, for the they were right: beneath the familiar world, there is an altogether unfamiliar world of intuitive apprehension. This is revelatory in its depth as it intrudes into and discovers "intuitive ineffabilities" in what belonged to religion, and this is where philosophy belongs.

As I see it, philosophy is going to be the new religion, and phenomenology will be its method.

If trying to get “straight” our concepts about our shared reality is a dead end, I will enjoy the fruits as I build roads to new frontiers. If the alternative is listening to some phenomenologists talk about a privilege and private realms of deep insight, I think I might get more by learning a Gregorian chant. — Richard B

Didn't mean to provoke. I though everyone knew analytic philosophy went nowhere. Private realms of deep insight? Well, are you saying private realms have none of this? To me, this is just dismissive. What do you have in mind?

Words objectify what they are referring to. "Morality" identifies morality as a thing, "mountain" identifies mountain as a thing. This is how language works, and this is how we can use language to communicate — RussellA

But this just puts the burden on the term "objectify". I prefer to say one faces something, and this something is more or less closed or open as to what it is.

But as you say "If God were actually God, and this was intimated to you in some powerful intimation of eternity and rapture that was intuitively off the scales, would language really care at all?" No, language wouldn't care. I don't need language to have the private subjective experience of morality or a mountain. Humans experienced these things pre-language. — RussellA

Pre-language is a problem, given that you say it, to say what it is. But I actually agree with you, and instead of "pre-language" I want to say discovered IN language, but that which is discovered is NOT language. The discovery of what is not language, is a discovery that takes place in language; and even if one has to speak to say it, this does not reduce "it" to the saying. This may seem obvious, I mean,after all, put a flame to my finger and this is not linguistic event. But it can and will be. The question is, in the understanding, when we say the thing, the event, what it is, are we not wholly committed to the language possibilities provided by history and culture? Below, you seem to say, yes, we are so committed. I say yes and no.

On the one hand, language imposes restrictions on what can be said. My understanding of a "mountain", my concept of "mountain" has grown over a lifetime of individual experiences, and is certainly different to your understanding and concept of "mountain", built up over a lifetime of very different experiences. Yet we both use the same word when using language to communicate, seemingly inhibiting what we can say.

For me, the word "mountain" is a label to a set of private subjective experiences. A single word can label a set of experiences. A single word is an object that refers to a set of experiences. When I think of a word as a label I am thinking not of a single thing but of a set of experiences linked to that word. When I think of a word I am thinking of the set of things that that word refers to

When we use the same word in conversation, we will be thinking of very different sets of experiences, but providing we have agreed beforehand with the definition that "A mountain is an elevated portion of the Earth's crust, generally with steep sides that show significant exposed bedrock.", although our language may restrict what can be said, it doesn't restrict what we can think. — RussellA

Yes, I agree with this. This is the default body of meaning that comes into play always already there when I encounter something. Importantly, there a cultural history, that presents centuries of language development, as well as a personal history in which these were assimilated.

"Love" is a thing, but I don't think of it as one thing, I think of it as labelling the vast set of things that it encompasses. Language is not that inhibiting. — RussellA

I think it is and isn't. Depends. I wake up in the morning, open my eyes, and there is the world. But the is given to me in my education that is tacitly brought to bear on things, making the world familiar and comfortable. So there is this. But this does not preclude something "new". The ineffable is made notorious by claims of some impossible, non propositional knowing. My question is, why impossible? Sartre had this concept of radical contingency: when we encounter the world, the world radically exceeds what language can do, for language has this structure, an early Wittgenstein's logical grid, and logicality itself is a perfect, tautological system of meaning relations, and this perfection rules in the way you bring out, which is Kantian: we "see" entire categories, universals (Hegel emphasized) IN the one thing, and without this unity, there is no thought. Sartre's famous Nausea was about this "superfluity" of existence that is unbounded by reason. Nothing to stop my tongue from turning into a live centipede, for the world is not constrained by anything.

I side with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it is, in my thoughts, rather profound to think how the world is radically independent of our categories of thought. Where does this leave ethics? For ethical restraint is NOT a logical determinant.

I vaguely feel like I might have asked this already but can't find it. Some cultures seem to believe time is circular versus linear. I don't know what that can mean. Like a cassette tape that records over itself after a certain amount of time has passed, or is it a simple emphasis on how the seasons change and each winter will be more similar to other winters than other seasons? What do they mean? — TiredThinker

Just a thought: There is in place a structural problem, which is that you can never get the bottom of what time is since time is presupposed by the "getting". But more importantly, the linear concept of time has as its basic elements, past, present and future, and it is very difficult to disentangle these from one another. first, past and future don't have any, well, presence, I mean, there is never a past of a future there to witness, for witnessing is always a present event, but this present falls apart entirely without a past of future to give it meaning. How would this even work, given that to acknowledge a present event begs the question, what is an event? And what is an event if not a beginning toward and end, and what are these if past and future are removed from the analysis? So we are stuck with this construction: past, present and future are aspects or features of a temporal unity that itself of not a "thing of parts", if you will. But this unity itself stands outside of time, or rather, does not "stand" at all, for it belongs to metaphysics.
All inquiry meets metaphysics, and this is ubiquitous at the level of basic questions. But to consider how past, present and future are, in analysis, just ONE. One dynamic. The question in my mind is, can we realize this prior, primordial unity in a way that is not an abstraction of speculation? How does this play out in meditation, say; or Husserl's reduction? Or apophatic theo-philosophical inquiry?

"But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it" — Richard B

Interesting: See how Eugene fink takes Husserl's reduction down to the Kantian cutting edge, where the occurrent experience is at the threshold of its production. I think a thought and thereby "give" this to the world. But when the thought manifests, the only way I can identify this as a thought is through yet another "giving" to the world of thought. Cut out the middle man: it is, through the agency of myself, the world giving to the world.

It is the nature of words to objectify what they are referring to, to identify as a thing, whether it be "mountain", "pain", "searching" or "wanting".

If a philosopher wanted to understand a topic, such as morality, without objectifying it, then they would have to use something other than words. Philosophers use language because there is no other way. The alternative is not even to try, and that would be a dead end. — RussellA

Just to note: Is language so inhibitive? If God were actually God, and this was intimated to you in some powerful intimation of eternity and rapture that was intuitively off the scales, would language really care at all? Language imposes one restriction on what can be said, and this is logical form. Meaning can be anything at all, and it being "objectified" simply means it can be placed before you awareness. this doesn't reduce whatever it is to object status, but could elevate objects to a higher status, or lower, in the case of my cat (arguably).

But unlike others, he had the acuity not to say more. — Banno

But then, phenomenologists had a lot to say. One cannot say the presence of the world, but what does this mean? One doesn't speak in this way about anything. The point would be about that dubious assumption that there is nothing to say: keep in mind what it takes to speak meaningfully, which is to have interlocutors who have shared experiences. In Tibet, it was (is?) common for monks to speak in extraordinary ways, by our standards, to one another about experiences of deep meditative states. It was rather standardized to them. Such conversations included intimations of things we might call impossible if we were to attempt to fit them into our language's contextual possibilities.

There is the assumption in western philosophy that "sense" of the Real of the world is unproblematically determined, something we all know. Ineffability gets it bad rap from just this, but it should be understood that this is a cultural determination, and the sense of the Real is actually something indeterminate. Take Husserl's reduction down the phenomenological rabbit hole as far as it goes, and what you encounter is a revelation Wittgenstein never imagined.

No wonder anglo American philosophy is such a dead end, so busy trying to squeeze meaning our of ordinary language. Well, the world is not ordinary at all.

That's one task, which you are interested in. I don't see why this MUST be philosophy's goal. It is a distortion of the history of philosophy to look at in this manner. — Manuel

It is not an historical claim and cares nothing for historical consistency. Philosophy isn't the history of philosophy any more than empirical science is the history of science. It is something that issues from the structure of existence itself.
At any rate, Good Luck in all your study endeavors. You sound like someone with an open mind and I am sure you will find great things!