Of course it doesn't. People say such things. Burning sensations to not say things. — praxis

No, not literally. But the burn: I know what it is as well as anyone. It is not a "mere" fact of the world, this is clear. Facts are affairs that sit comfortable on the grid of logic: the sun is farther from the earth than the moon; the color green is of a higher frequency than red, and so on. There are an infinite number of facts. With value, there is something else, once the facts are exhausted for their content. there is the "non natural" property of good and bad. This finds its justification in the pain or joy itself--these serve as their own presupposition, as I have said. They are not things that defer to other things for their meaning; but the meaning is stand alone; the injunction, e.g., not to torture another person is found in the stand alone evidence of the torture experience itself, so when we do give this expression in language, the the expressed principle issues from the world, not just some arbitrarily conceived bit of pragmatic systematizing of our affairs called jurisprudence.

Buddhist seem to think like I, the world being being and Nothingness, a yin and yang of opposites. For how can an untainted God sustain the being of what is ugly and offensive to all rational creatures? How can courage to expressed by a God that already has it all thanks to what he just is? How can he brag to Job? How can he live and sustain a child's cancer, asking it to accept the pain because when it gains the power of reason it can learn from the pain. And a pain this God knows nothing of first hand. None of this sounds right — Gregory

God was never this. This is the talk of a historical busy-ness of filling the concept with bad metaphysics. thinking of God, why am I committed to listening to anything that has not understood the one thing Kant really got right: Noumena is not discussable. Only what is before us can be talked about, and here there are things extraordinary, miraculous. Time and space: intuitively impossible, but there they are, embedded in eternity, so what is eternity? It is exactly what one faces when one puts aside all the knowledge claims implicit in our default understanding of the world. What is Being? it is exactly what one faces when one puts aside all the knowledge claims implicit in our default understanding of the world. This "putting aside" is not new to philosophy in the west. It is Husserl's epoche.

You mention God several times and do you use to to refer to a being undisclosed? Humanity lives in time even if its spirit does not. I have several objections to a being who is father if humanity in the divine sense. This being, according to classical logic, will have never suffered like its sons, loves necessarily and yet somehow (?) freely, and is the active cuase and lives within every crime, ugliness, and humiliation thar there has ever been. Something about the idea seems absurd to me and I genuinely doubt it exists — Gregory

But this is a long history of metaphysics talking, specifically, Christian metaphysics. Father? the author of all things? A creator? Why is this associated with God? To conceive in a way that puts the concept of God outside of the prejudices of narratives, of history and its groundless meta-thinking, requires a step beyond these. This is both difficult and easy: difficult because one has to step out of something firmly fixed in our culture; easy because the solution lies with the Buddhists, which a kind of apophatic existential approach, a "simple" dropping of the illusions of knowledge suppositions by practical negation: ignoring desires and attachments. The most fundamental attachment is knowledge of the world.

It's not the world speaking, it's you speaking. You are saying "don't do this," not the world. — praxis

Quite right. And this is just a manner of speaking, and it is why Witt refused to talk about it. It cannot be said. But consider the usual examples of so called qualia, being-appeared-to-redly, say. Qualia is an attempt to reduce things to their sheer givenness, apart from the ways contexts generate meaning. Compare this to the "qualia" of pain. Pain out of context is more than the context could bring into the making of meaning. This is a very big point: When the attempt is made to remove pain from its contextual settings, there is what you could call an existential residuum, a value meaning that is transcendental, that is, exceeds language's ability to say what it is, for to "say" is to contextualize, and contexts are suspended.

The obvious objection is just fascinating: the moment you entertain the argument's reference to qualia, you are already in a context, that is, to think at all is inherently contextual, so each utterance of "existential residua" is itself conferring context, if I can put it like that. But then, Kierkegaard haunts this issue, for actuality is clearly not language. That burning sensation is not a language experience, and there is nothing in language, it can be argued, that really sets those existential delimitations on meaning. Value-in-the-world does "speak" just not in words. Does that burn "say" with undeniable clarity, "don't do that"?

It sounds like you've determined indeterminacy. — praxis

You did put your finger on this. Nicely done yourself! Because this is where the argument lies, in the determinate world where things are usually clear as a bell and the intimations in this world of imcompleteness. Metaphysics is a term that has its existence "discovered" at threshold of knowledge, but not where science meets its anomalies (as Thomas Kuhn put it way), rather, where epistemic inquiry meets a wall of "impossible" knowledge: non propositional "knowledge". Such knowledge is found in the ethical dimension of our world. Any example will do: place your hand in a fire, and ask what is this pain? It is not a construct of language; it is the world itself "speaking" so to speak. It says, don't do this, to yourself, anyone, just keep this out of existence.
Of course, in the entanglements of our affairs, things get rerouted, and ethics gets messy and complex and full of conflicting obligations. But the primordial meaning is as clear as anything can be, and as such, is apodictic and indefeasible. Note how this kind of language is easy to recognize in logic's apriority; but here, this is not logic, but is the palpable Real. It carries the weight of a deity.

You haven't talked about metanarratives yet, which is curious. — praxis

To suggest that anything metaphysical is reducible to a metaphysical narrative, like Christian metaphysics. But this really doesn't get interesting until one turns away from the grand narratives to the micronarratives of everyday living. The question is, what is not a narrative? and the usual answer to this is science, but this idea of narration needs a little exposition: It is assumed that a story is a piece of fiction, but then, at the level of the most basic questions about the world, is it possible to remove "narrative" from even science? Rorty and others argued that knowledge itself is a pragmatic social function, and this does ring true when you think about the inter-relational nature of language, that language and logic formed out of communicative needs: a word belongs to speech and writing, and these reach beyond subjectivity, and it is argued that self's thought and the self itself is an intersubjective construct, an internalization of observed relations and the noises and gestures made to reach from one subjectivity to another. So, when I have a thought in my head, I am essentially "talking to" myself, treating myself as an "other" and the divisions in the world are reducible to just this language divide we created in the social matrix. A self IS a social matrix. Heidegger doesn't say things this way, but his dasein is very much an existential environment of social possibilities.

There really is something to this. Herbert Meade, I recall, thought like this and his argument was more conventional, referring to observations of animal behavior and the like. Is the self a walking micro-narrative, a part of a system of institutions laid out by culture and history, wrought out of social needs? Yes, I think so. But this doesn't address the issue at hand.

There are many ways to explain a human being. How about neurology? Or physics? Or genetics? Or evolution? These are "natural sciences", and they presuppose the givenness of the world; and they do not touch metaphysics, and God is metaphysics. One has to bring analytic discussion of this observable world into a "context" of metaphysics to talk about God. The obsolete grand narratives of the past are now in retreat, and this opens philosophy to either empirical science or phenomenology, and empirical science, regardless of how speculative extrapolation can carry its paradigms into meta paradigms, is metaphysically question begging, that is, ask a scientist about basic assumptions, and she won't know what you are talking about. Not really.

The way to make this connection between finitude and infinity, if you will, begins in two places. One is the Kantian need to discuss noumena, and other is ethics and metaethics. Painfully simply put, Kant insisted we had to talk about metaphysics, but cold know nothing at all about it, because there was nothing in t he sensuous medium a concept could bond with. But: how is it that he simply had to talk about it? There must be in the world something that intimates this, and this is the very essence of metaphysics: the deficit, the "nothing" that inquiry encounters; this is an existential nothing, meaning if it were not there, then world itself would be radically different, and this is arguable, of course. The movie Pleasantville comes to mind: Two kids are thrown magically into a world of black and white where no one can even imagine an "outside" to the town of Pleasantville. That is, not until their eyes open, and they begin to see color and conceive of a fuller sense of what is there already: something always already there, simply not acknowledged! So we live in a world in our everydayness much like this: metaphysics is always already there, but it needs a catalyst to bring it to discussion. Science is like this, surely, for science "discovers" the world. Here, it has to be admitted that metaphysics is discovered as a profound deficit in our understanding that is "there" in all things always already. This is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence: take any concept about the world, any at all knowledge claim, and it can be demonstrated readily that there is no "center" no "final vocabulary" no "metanarrative" no stone tablets or anything at all that will intimate what is truly and really what the world IS.

There is a LOT of philosophy in the above. But I can tell you the conversation phenomenologists have been having on the matter of metaphysics for the last two hundred years is fascinating.

The final premise lies with a phenomenological examination of the meta ethical dimension of our existence. Is this okay?

The great question: why are we born to suffer and die? Can be answered with "to suffer is to understand what is not right with the world, to be born is to participate in that great battle, to exert influence on the outcome. To live is to have the opportunity to circumvent suffering not just for yourself but for your loved ones. Your ability to tackle suffering with knowledge and empathy extends well beyond the self. That is the godly approach to ethics. — Benj96

I think you have something there, and it has crossed my mind more than once. I have some thoughts:
We suffer and delight in the world because this teaches us what these are, so what are they? Take an example: drive a spear through my kidney and what you get is an intuitive disclosure, to put it formally, of an injunction NOT to do this to yourself or others. Why? Here, again with some jargon, the moral precept is its own presupposition! Meaning, to witness the pain IS the precept! This, as you say, is the "Godly (I add the capital letter) approach to ethics." I think this right! But how is it Godly?

God is a metaphysical issue, and can't be observed, but only be acknowledged in a recognized deficit of some kind, and in human epistemology, everything has this. Everything. For all knowledge claims are dubious at the basic level. Take space: If I say I am in a room, but cannot say at all where the room is, then clearly, I don't where I am beyond being in a room, but note: we have in the background of the question Where are you? a whole body of meaningful possibilities, and the judgment that I do not know where I am plays against these possibilities. I mean, to know where the room is has to refer to some building, street, a town, a state...the world, and so on; so being in a room really presupposes the room is somewhere of a body of possibilities everyone knows about. Eventually metaphysics steps in, for beyond the world and the universe, your intuitions take you out until meaningful talk disappears....but the world-in-eternity does not disappear. I can't say what eternity is, but there is this very weird deficit in the boundlessness of space, which we simply ignore, after all, what can be said? Clearly, space as such just doesn't matter; it is not really an issue. But intuition insists that space beyond what we can say, is not nonsense; it is a palpable insistence that space is eternal, whatever that means. I think space is a good introduction to the interface between the infinite and finitude.

Now take God and ethics: God was produced by culture to address a profound deficit, and the term we have for this is moral nihilism, just what Wittgenstein had in mind when he said value had no value, and if it did, it would have no value. But very plainly, the pain of the pierced kidney and the joy of being in love, these are absolutes, and as such they belong to metaphysics (hence, unspeakable). How is this so? This is the line of thought that leads to what I would dangerously call metaphysical affirmation.

The essense of morality is cooperation and not avoidance of harm, if that's essentially what you're claiming. Harm/care is only one dimention of morality. This is important because the aspects that you neglect are essential for religion to fulfill its purpose (it's not all about ethics). — praxis

Cooperation? Cooperation for what purpose? Cooperation, principles or good conduct, a "good will", weighing consequences in terms of utility, and anything else you can talk about in ethics and the determination of what makes right and wrong actions what they are, beg the one question regarding the nature of what it is that is at stake, and this is value. Value is ubiquitous in our affairs, but, to use Witt's language, value is absent from the facts of the world. Take the color yellow. What is this? There is nothing to say. Obviously, you can talk about it, but this simply brings context into the definition, and all contexts get their meanings from their own contextual embeddedness. This is what is meant by contingency in language (and what Derrida had so much fun with; and essentially why Dennett denied qualia made any sense). What you cannot say is what the color yellow is apart from contexts, and this goes for everything, really. The interesting, impossible thing about value is that, unlike yellow, value "speaks" in a way. It carries the injunction to do or not to do something. this is where the argument is going: why should a person, as a default principle of moral action, not harm another? Talk about the contract one has implcitly with society, or the law, or rules and the like, do not penetrate to the core of this matter, for it defies analysis. One should not harm others because it hurts. What is this? What is that scorched finger feeling like? Talk is useless. Was this a result of evolutionary processes that favored pain and pleasure over their competitors in the struggle to survive and reproduce? Yes; and? It is beside the matter altogether.

The claim is not that a metavalue account of ethics is everything there is to ethical decision making. It is just that other questions are suspended here simply because they are not relevant to the inquiry.

Talk about God is why this metaethical line of inquiry is taken, and questioning about God is metaphysical inquiry.

To be as succinct as I can, desperation is reckless in nature, leading to rash and extreme behavior. Such behavior is quite often less than exemplary in good moral character.

Desperate people are easy to lead though, the more desperate the better. — praxis

But here we are at a "second order" of inquiry. First order inquiry can be talk about our relations, moral character, and ethical behavior, but a second order of inquiry asks questions about first order presuppositions. So, what is exemplary moral character about? It has to do with right choices, motivations and intentions, but intention to do what? Treat others as one should. Why is this a concern at all? Because all people are vulnerable to suffering. If a person cannot be hurt at all, then this is not a person for whom others can have a moral obligation. Then what is suffering that is generates moral possibilities? This is the question taken up here. It is a metaethical question, a question "about" morality. It is a question of the ontology of morality, a "what is it? question.

I'm being patient. :smile: — praxis

Okay. On the table is value, as I say, the weirdest thing in the universe, by far, this "badness' of a scorched finger. It deserves to be released from the contexts we like to give things, for these knowledge claims contexts bring the world to heel, and it gives us the illusion that we understand it. But it is clear that when it comes to the primordiality of what is "given" we are of our depths, (and I really should add that the essential inspirations I am dealing with in all of this were conceived in the minds of others, whom mention only in passing from time to time. E.g, Jean luc Marion's Givenness an Revelation had a profound influence. Alas, I am not just making all of this up myself. I do, as do all, carry my reading into my own thoughts). Value is a term that encompasses the affective side of every experience we have and it is ubiquitous in life, for everything moment of lived life is a value-moment, as with the interest in play as I write these words. When I wake in the morning, value i always already there, in the mood, the recollection of before and the anticipation of the day. It is not an analysis of our theories and the cognitive events of our lives that make for the important discoveries in the, if you will, foundational meaning of life. It is the AFFECTIVE part of all this, and this cannot be emphasized enough: We, in this grand dramatic narrative of life are not seeking some propositional satisfaction, the error analytic philosophy makes (close to early Wittgenstein on this); we are seeking deeper, more profound VALUE in life, which is why I take Buddhism and nirvana so seriously. And this is God: the embodiment of absolute bliss, the affective response to the value indeterminacy (and thus, the ethical determinacy; see below) and value desperation of our lives.

What I am doing here is an attempt to penetrate into what God is really all about, certainly not some pointless exposition of what people, believers, atheists, traditions and history say, moving along wn the usual circles. Since God is not here to be examined, we have to go on what is there, in the world that gave rise to the conception in the first place. This brief talk about value tries to make clear that the issue that God is a response to, not a deficit in the understanding as a knowledge deficit, though this is not apart from the matter, but to the horror and miseries of the world, as well as its blisses and indulgences, this uncanny value-nature of our being here.

As to the ethics: If God is an embodiment of, call it a value perfection: god is love, many say, and what is love but happiness? And what is happiness: the summum bonum; then how is there a connection between God and the world, for God is an absolute, a metaphysical entity, and there is no apparent metaphysics in the world, because if there were, it would be metaphysics, would it? This is the last part of the argument.

Are there issues in any of this thus far?

To your mind, have you made an argument for why you think God (or religion, including Buddhism) is all about our ethics or are you ignoring my question? — praxis

No, this is just the introduction. The reason why God is essentially an ethical account is because God was conceived in a response to the ethical indeterminacy of human existence. A difficult matter to discuss briefly, or at all, for one has to take a hard look at value-in-the-world. There is some length to deal with.

First, it has to be acknowledged that the meaning of human existence refers us to two kinds of meaning. There is conceptual meaning that defers ideas to other ideas, as when the response to the question, what is a bank teller? is other definitional terms, like money and economics, savings accounts, and so on. These can and do, of course, defer to other terms for their meanings, and this is an endless game of questions and answers (Derrida's "Differance" is about this). The other kind of meaning has to do with value, as in, This strawberry is so good! or, I love Julian! this kind of thing is NOT something that defers to something else for an account of what it is, and this is an argument of critical importance in metaethical analysis: The "good" to the strawberry, what is this? This is a kind of good that refers directly to the good experience of the taste and the satisfaction it brings. It does not refer us (defer) to definitional meanings that circle (hermeneutically) around. It is a "given" of the world. On the radical negative side of this, the lighted match on your finger gives pain, and pain is not analytically reducible. And as Witt would say, givenness is not factual, meaning we cannot talk abou it, and that which cannot be talked about "should be passed over in silence."

So we can't really talk about value as such, and more than we can talk about analytic's qualia. It is a phenomenological irreducible.Now we can turn to God and the world. If we lived in a world of Wittgensein's facts, like in that big book he talks about in his Lecture on Ethics, there would be no ethics, for ethics has this, call it a non natural property, like G E Moore does, and what is this? This is the ethical bad and good. Consider: the lighted match applied to your finger, there is more here than the fact can say, for this is in the world, and propositions are only as good as far as the world shows itself, and the "badness" really does not "show" itself. It is an odd thing to try to wrap your mind around, this elusive "value" property, for it is neither rational apriori nor is it empirical, and yet it is the most salient feature of our existence. the argument cannot really proceed until Wittgenstein's point is clear: When he says talk about value is nonsense, he means it is not a idea of "parts" that defers one to something else to explain it. It is, as Kierkegaard would put it, its own presupposition, a "thereness' that is both in the world AND apodictic, and just as one can't explain logic (why does modus ponens "work"?), nor can one explain this.

Any thoughts so far? We all know that logic is apriori, that is, validity depends on logical form only and tautological relations are absolute (though we are not going into post modern objections to this kind of thing here). But to say something in the world is also apriori is impossible. The world itself would have to possess something intuitively absolute, like logic, only REAL.

There is, of course, more.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. "What-to-do questions" are questions of normative ethics and not metaethical. In any case, you've made an argument? — praxis

What to do presupposes the doing carries a certain weight. Metaethics inquires about this.

"Meta" is an indication of a higher order of analysis, as in metalanguage or meta-anything, really. I refer you to Wittgenstein, just for one. See his Lecture on Ethics, which is available online, I think. ethics has as its core what can be generally called value, and value is the essential ethical presupposition of good and bad in ethical matters. Witt wrote that the good is what he calls divinity, and he meant that value is simply in the givenness of the presence of the world, and is therefore not reducible. Not unlike wwhat analytic philosophers call qualia, but on this, see Moore's Principia Ethica in which he referred value statements as possessing a "non natural quality". He was referring to the metaethical dimension of the good and bad: Put a match to my finger for a few moments. This powerful event is NOT found in the "states of affairs" of the world, and hence, says Witt, it is nonsense to talk about. But it IS there, only unsayable.

I disagree with Witt, somewhat. I think you can talk about it. Value is the weirdest thing in the universe, but talking about it is done indirectly.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. — praxis

I think the term generally refers projecting features we possess on to foundational descriptions of the world. But take reason: can judgment about what the world is in any way escape the imprint to the reason inherent in the judgment itself? It is not just about blatant physical features as in the image of an old man on a cloud. It is all constitutes human experience, and in this, nothing we give thought to can be free of the anthropomorphic features that are inherent int he thought.

I strongly disagree. Can you make an argument for why you think God (or religion, including Buddhism) is all about our ethics? — praxis

It goes to the matter of metaethical questions and the metavalue of ethical issues. Our mundane ethical affairs have metaphysical underpinnings, and it is here that religious mythology meets the world of the actual.

Yes, and it has often struck me that theists are not conceptualizing the same thing when they allegedly share this belief. The notion of god seems incoherent or 'diverse' enough to embrace everything from the 'ground of being' to a throne dwelling elder, with a flowing grey beard. — Tom Storm

But you know this is because this is all scripture based and no care at all is given to making religion respectable to sound thinking. Philosophy is the cure. Philosophy's mission is to replace religion by rationalizing its content (rationalizing in the good sense of this term).

The existence of God is controversial also, nevertheless belief in God is kind of a prerequisite in many religions. Maybe there are secular theist too though. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. — praxis

Is it so far fetched, though? After all, God is more than just an anthropomorphic image constructed out of the imaginations of a people. It has this solid basis in the world upon which fictional thinking rests. Keeping in mind that, speaking of the anthropomorphisms of religions, all we ever see is anthropomorphic, meaning what we call perceptually "out there" cannot be removed from "in here". To do so just yields an abstraction.
God is all about our ethics and the great question that haunts our world: why are we born to suffer and die? The what-to-do questions presuppose this ethical primordiality of our existence. Buddhism, in it analysis, I think addresses both.

You believe that nirvana is merely an uncanny experience? Like seeing a ghost or something? — praxis

I did say "experience of extraordinary dimensions" which doesn't sound like something is "merely" anything. Quite the opposite, wouldn't you say?

But this uncanniness does need to be looked at, for it is not the kind that applies in familiar contexts, that is, it is not like a ingenious move in a game of chess or a knack to catch on to things (an uncanny ability). It is of all things in a sweeping impossibility, impossible because there is no assumption lying in the background that it couls make any sense of it. Making sense is fitting into a body of "facts" and their logical construction. The only way explaining could work is in a shared experience with a language index, as when one sees a thing and reports to another the thing seen, and the other "knows" this because it is familiar. It is shared familiarity that makes language possible, not qualitative content, and ours is not a society of mystics!

I think this uncanniness goes to subjectivity and the apprehension of the self: what is existence? there is, in this question, something impossible, yet there on the intuitive radar. This is me, and one can discuss this in a qualified Cartesian model of existence: the closer inquiry moves to an affirmation of existence, to more uncanny the world gets, and this movement is toward subjectivity. Buddhists affirm just this, and the uncanniness here is the kind of affirmation of a qualitatively different content from our everydayness.

I've been interested in epoche for some time. Since I was a child I have often found myself regarding the world around me as unfamiliar and strange and wonder at this. It leave me feeling light and unshackled. In the quotidian life we inherit/develop a way of seeing that seems to be primed by conceptual schemes. You seem to agree. — Tom Storm

If you since childhood had this feeling that something was simply out of sync between you and the world, then I most certainly do agree here, and this is a major theme, if not THE major theme, of existential philosophers, that impossible distance that defines and undercuts all relations, as it is a "suspicion" at the base of all things, preventing one from being part of the world's affairs. As I've read, what this is about entirely rests with what kind of person you are. Putting it very plainly, either you are inclined toward a "spiritualist interpretation", or you are not. Look, I am not a great mathematician or visual artist, though certainly some are. We are all very different kinds of people, and some are possessed by this impossible intuition about the world, others are not.

The objection would be that here, in religio-philosophical inquiry, one cannot make extravagant claims about something only some can see. This undermines philosophical objectivity. I respond, there is nothing I can do about this difference among people. It is simply there. Even those who provide me with the basic vocabulary to talk about such things often seem unable to affirm this in experience. Those who can they call mystics.

My own thinking is that the jumping off place for philosophy is where a person encounters the "saturation" of existence by indeterminacy. This is rather an involved discussion.

That is an interesting idea. Self-realization seems to involve a type of self-shedding, no? — Tom Storm

But then, what is a self? It is here, in the way we think about basic ideas that all of this unravels. It is not so much a shedding but a realization that this self is something else. Many ways to approach this. One is to consider time to be foundational. you know, ask me what the past is and all I can give you the "present". Past and future cannot be observed and are in a very important way, just fictions of process that is just transcendental, for one would have to be outside time to say what it is, this temporal unity. The self, it has been written is not in time. It IS time (Kant, Heidegger, in different ways). Buddhist enlightenment is to stand timeless before the world, and the only way to explain this is to actually stand thusly, and acknowledge it.

That's a striking description and resonates with me. — Tom Storm

Me, too! this experience is utterly fascinating, poor as I am in understanding it. Christians say God is love. I say, love is being in love, listening to Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose (Ma Mère l'Oye, esp. the second movement. You may not be into this; it matters not), autumnal affective indulgence (whatever that is), the standing there and simply having the world transfigured into pure phenomenological bliss that fills the horizon of experience. Now there here is a discussion the likes of Meister Eckart could only talk about. Not exactly philosophy, is it. but this is where philosophy goes, ineluctably.

See Wittgenstein on value in his Tractatus, Culture and Value, Lecture on Ethics--this god of analytic philosophy, he knew human affectivity was off the far off radar of our "states of affairs".

Have you ever tried hallucinogens or meditated? — Janus

Yes, which accounts in part for my philosophical eccentricities. I would add, music is the voice of god. Music, mescaline and meditation: a very powerful antidote for mundanity.

Can you say some more on this? What is a 'revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world'? Do you see this as a possibility elsewhere - Christian/Sufi mysticism for instance? — Tom Storm

Sorry for all the writing. I got a little carried away.

Revelatory: Existentialist philosophers take the "distance" between what is said and what is actual very seriously. You read it in Kierkegaard, Sartre "radical contingency, Heidegger's metaphysics and nothing; Husserl is interesting: He thought one could see what is actually there such that the actuality witnessed is absolute, unqualified and non composite. Heidegger thought he was walking on water with this, for it is such an extravagant claim to say there is in one's worldly perceptual witnessing, a "presence" that is a pure, a kind of, "it is there" that can't be second guessed, is like encountering God herself.
And this gets to the point: Husserl famously defended his phenomenological reduction, or epoche. Keep in mind I am no Husserl scholar, but I have read him and about him, and these days there is a so called French theological turn I am reading which plays significantly through this reduction. The idea is, I think, very Buddhist, and Husserl does call it a "method" rather than just a theory. He holds that the object before your gaze is generally thick with the "naturalistic attitude" which refers to our everydayness affairs, but it is grasped with such spontaneity, it seems direct and natural. The epoche is a method of reducing this perceptual encounter to its bare presence, such that the object itself (back to the things themselves! is his rallying cry) in its intuitive purity is revealed. This purity has been hidden beneath experience all along, but we have been so busy, we never noticed it, and have never really been living in the "real" world, but in a kind of fiction of narratives with our established and habitual culture and language (Kierkegaard called this our hereditary sin, as an existential analysis of Christianity's original sin, which he derided).
Does Husserl's epoche bring one, with practice, to a revelation of pure phenomena? Are we not here very close to what the Abhidhamma calls, in translation, ultimate reality? Isn't the epoche what the Hindus called jnana yoga, a form of what we call apophatic theology, or neti, neti? Keeping in mind that one does not become the Buddha, as one is always already the Buddha, but needs to awakened to this. My thinking is, beneath the skin of experience, there is something deeply profound.

Non discursive: this is tough, for the argument goes that even when we are in our most spontaneous encounters with the world's objects, we never can observe actuality itself, because the understanding is essentially conceptual. Rorty was no rationalist, but he emphatically denied non propositional knowledge. Even in the most intimate moments of realization that I exist, one has to see that this is not being, but becoming I am witnessing, and becoming is time's past making an anticipatory future in the crucible of the present.

Indeed, this "actuality itself" is just vacuous metaphysics, they say. this seems like a strong argument, and it is, by my thinking, if it wasn't for that intuitive dimension of affectivity, like pain: take a lighted match and apply it to your finger and leave it there for a few seconds. Now, am I NOT in a Real actuality? Just because I live in an interpretative world of temporal dynamics, doesn't mean at all that I do not experience non discursively, events, like a burn, or a broken limb, or being in love or lasagna, or the direct apprehension of my existence. Implicit discursive processes, that only seem like immediacy, do nothing to deny non discursive intimations.

I agree with Husserl on the essential epoche as a way to self realization. His epoche is a less radical version of meditation.

Affective apprehension: what is nirvana? And what is liberation/enlightenment? The epoche is a method, so what happens when thought encounters the world, and is reduced to the bare perceptual away from the apperceptual (sp?)? The self becomes free. It is not just an intellectual movement, but an experience. Enlightenment is the wonderful feeling of experiencing the world free of implicit "knowledge claims, keeping in mind that knowledge never was just a conceptual tag hung on a thing; it is a conditioned response to the world established since the time of infancy, and it is settled deep into experience as a default acceptance of things. Release from this is not just a nullity, though there is much that is nullified. It is an uncanny experience of extraordinary dimensions.

That would be the nutshell version. Don't know about Sufi, Christianity has many mystics, like Eckhart, Pseudo Dionysus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

anal preoccupations of the walking dead. — Janus

That THAT is precious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not a complement. I merely point out that you subjectively experience the phenomena of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and this is evidence that life is not dissatisfaction but both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. If your body is dehydrated you will suffer the dissatisfaction of thirst and should you be fortunate enough to find water and drink your thirst will be satisfied. This isn’t “materialist” science. It is phenomena that you subjectivity experience. — praxis

But it shows none of the nuance of the brief review of the matter I provided above. Yours is a manichean pov, a reduction to a two sided simplicity of something that is not really simple. I took t that you didn't really read what I wrote and so, oh well.

There you have it. — praxis

Oh. Well, thank you very much!

Are you suggesting that liberation is not a value or an entangled concept? Incidentally, are you a Buddhist, or are you working to 'connect' Buddhist principles to phenomenology or both, like Michel Bitbol? — Tom Storm

It is not a reference to quantum physics, no. Entanglement here is a descriptive feature of being attached to things in the world, like sex and ice cream. But the French do have my attention, only here is Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emanuel Levinas, and others.

I don't think Buddhism has anything at all to do with physics. Not that one cannot make a connection, but that connection would be extraneous to the discipline.

This seems to be a lengthy way of stating 'you can't put this into words' - which is one of the standard message of ineffability inherent in most religious traditions. Sure. As someone outside of Buddhism (or phenomenology) this construction of 'liberation' sounds much like an appeal to faith. — Tom Storm

I think you can talk about anything. there is nothing in language that stops this. Ineffability is about there being no shared experiences, not about the failure of a concept to grasp an experience, for concepts don't do this. Concepts are social constructs, vocabularies invented in the process of evolvement by groups to share experiences, but they never impose limitations on experiences, that is, as Hume said, human kind could be eradicated altogether, and reason wouldn't bat an eye. It is the formal limitation of judgment, but has no limitations in experience, and if God were to actually appear before me in all her depth and grandeur, and the same happened to you, we could talk about it, refer to it, develop new vocabulary, and so on. Ineffability refers to something alien to a people's familiarity.

Liberation I don't think is about faith. It is an experience, but something nobody talks about because it is alien to our culture.

It is rational certainly, though it is not a rationalization or compromise of any sort. Earlier, you were claiming this must be approached phenomenologically. Do you not personally experience the phenomenon of satisfaction? — praxis

I certainly do. Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream is squarely there. But this enjoyment is, you might call it, a hedonic fetish. A fetish is something that draws on some original energy for its appreciation, but it itself does not have this as a native feature. It is a parasitic gratification, you might say. now Buddhists say that one does not become the Buddha; rather, one always already is this, but has become entangled in desires and attachments. To realize who one "really is," one has to be liberated from these attachments. So what energy is there that is so fond of Haagen-Dazs? It is one's original energy misaligned in such affections. I think it is very important to see that attachments are value driven, and what it is to be attached is to have your original nature, which is the source of value in the world (Wittgenstein affirmed this: we bring value into the world, and apart from this value, the world is mere states of affairs), confer value in other things. So what is a mere fact of the world, to refer again to Witt., is elevated to a value saturated possibility.
And again, btw, Kierkegaard called this attachment original, or hereditary sin, this yielding to the world's cultural institutions, what he calls the aesthetic stage of our existence. Of course, K uses terms like God and the soul, but he does talk in ways that correspond to eastern thinking.

Buddha blames life, claiming that it is all disatisfactory. That is, of course, a lie. There is both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Life requires both to achieve homeostasis (the middle way). — praxis

Not do much a lie if you consider what suffering is. Not that, say, requited love, is just miserable. But Buddhists claim this is far short of what nirvana is: a sustained being in love (only more than this) without the instabilities of an actual life, the latter being the entanglements I mentioned earlier. And being in love is invariable an entangled affair, isn't it?

The balance you speak is a rationalized compromise of something foundationally pure, a Buddhist would say.

I think the word one is looking for is *suffering*. — praxis

Sure, but consider that the world IS suffering, Any time your mind wanders into any of the various institutions that comprise this world, from breakfast to geopolitical conflicts, you are in suffering. So the practical matter before you is a resistance to, or a permitting a falling away from, these concerns, each of which is inherently a kind of suffering.

The world is what makes suffering because it is complicated; that is, suffering is so entangled in our affairs and we not think of these as suffering at all. Value is an entangled concept. Buddhists say retract from these essentially social and pragmatic constructs, and this gets down to the, call it the pure meditative act: No discrimination here, for every thought is equally occlusive to the purpose. In the end, one do not give these institutions time or energy. They become irrelevant. All that remains is nirvana.

Incidentally, this is very close to what Kierkegaard had in mind in his Concept of Anxiety. What is sin? It is an immersion in the distractions of culture, the money, the relationships, the egoic endeavors, all inherently sinful (NOT, he is quick to point out, in the Lutheran sense of offending God with some primordial original sin. Kierkegaard was pretty enlightened for a Christian).

have often pondered Buddhism and emptiness and how this sits with nihilism - perhaps passive nihilism. Nietzsche (admittedly with an inadequate understanding) thought Buddhism expressed nihility. But might there not a connection between Nietzsche's goal of self-overcoming and citta-bhavana the Buddhist concept of (mind-cultivation). In used to read Suzuki on Buddhism in the 1980's. This quote resonated and I have often adapted it (perhaps controversially) for some expressions of nihilism.

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.
D.T. Suzuki — Tom Storm

But this seems to bypass the essential idea, which is really quite simple. The meditative act is very simple; the interpretation brings in the complexity, for people have questions that are extraneous to this one simple notion: liberation. But, one has to ask, liberated from what. This IS the extraneous question. Liberation itself answers this question, but does so do not by issuing text after text of dialectic superfluity. The abhidhamma was written for instruction and understanding, but the assumptions about what this understanding is are really quite foreign to general thinking. This is because liberation is about something wholly Other than general thinking, and to talk about it, one has to step away from it and enter into the historical and cultural mentality, where everything is entangled with everything else.

Liberation does not "speak" and it is not anything that can be spoken; but then, this is true, really, of all things, isn't it? Look around the room and there are chairs, and rugs and walls, etc. But these are interpretative events, the seeing and understanding that things are such and such this or that. These are contextualized knowledge claims played out in the understanding. Liberation in the profound Eastern sense puts these events on hold, thereby terminating world determining events.

The matter, like any matter, can be approached from various angles, including scientific or “materialist.”

Can you explain why you believe it has to be approached phenomenologcally? — praxis

Of course, it can be approached in many different ways. Historically, physiologically, contextually, even politically. But the business of understanding Buddhism simply does not lie with any of these. Consider phenomenonlogy as an interpretative stand that allows what appears to one to be determined as it is in this appearance, and not how it is taken up in other thematic context. E.g., Buddhism is certainly a historically grounded body of thought, but this history really has no place in the radical meditative process of liberation, which is an attempt achieve apophatically (think neti, neti, the Eastern notion of what we call apophatic theology/philosophy) a profound departure from the everydayness of living, a departure from its "historicity."