But for now, I think it best to leave things here, and think the thoughts that come. — Moliere

K:blush:

The household meaning is the important meaning -- not the philosophers meaning. It's the household meaning that holds the house together, that connects the family to the community, that provides consolation and guidance and a means for talking about and to one another so that the family can live its life in economic productivity and safety. — Moliere

But those important ideas of family solidarity are incidental to God as a concept. It could be sort of thing that works like this that holds people together. The idea here is, is it an idea that is defensible when brought before inquiry. This is an important question, as, for one thing, religions have a great deal of influence on how we deal with our general affairs, and foolish beliefs can engender prejudice and impaired judgment in social issues. For another, clear thinking about religion can actually bring about startling insights.

I am in a minority position in holding that there actually IS a Truth with a capital T, so to speak, notwithstanding how this sits with modern thinking.

And then it's pretty easy to see how people experience these things differently, upon listening to them. In some way I'd have to accommodate the apparent inconsistency. — Moliere

I don't see this. Other people see things differently, true. But this doesn't mean there is no objective basis for comparison. My view is that phenomenology gets overlooked due to the overwhelming privileging of empirical science in our society. If one has any philosophical inclinations at all in an anglo american setting, one is simply not introduced to Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and so on.
Philosophy struggles with acceptance, and the continental tradition seems too fuzzy compared to what is popular, which is in our time the kind of thing that makes cell phones work. What they, philosophy departments, have done is sacrifice content for clarity. So people in the profession are clear headed and logical, e.g., read Rorty's The Social Hope. He was logically gifted and really, could have done anything academic. He chose philosophy because it suited him. Just that. there are lots of puzzles and localized problematic entanglements, but, as I have seen, little of broad thematic works of continental philosophy. It has all moved away from the Husserl and the Heidegger and the rest because in the age of reason, science rules.

And they were sick of over a hundred years of Kantian based thinking. But idealism was never refuted. Complained about, certainly, with good cause, the the idea that the world is phenomena is not refutable'

But it's not consistent. And so it seems we've left the standards of reason behind in seeking to speak truth about the mystical, when the mystical is neither true nor false. — Moliere

But again, true and false are propositional terms. Reason has no biases and nothing to say; it is an empty form of judgment. Not reason, content of culture.

Heh, that might be a agree-to-disagree. We can mark our departure, at least. If philosophy has a grounding, I do not see it. Maybe it's firm. But I think it just goes back to an individual's convictions and desires (themself a social product of the process of life). — Moliere

I know you think like this, and all I can say is, it isn't true that just anything is okay and that philosophers are just talking about themselves and their cultures. If I ask you one of my favorite questions, How does anything out there, get in here (in one's brain)? I am not asking about what one should wear for a wedding in Kenya. The former is objectively demonstrable, the latter is made up in historical affairs. There is, however, a dividing line, but take Quine, the quintessential analytic philosopher and consider my previous quotes. You can see that his thesis indeterminacy in translation is actually very close to the kinds of things Derrida says! And for this, you would have to read these guys (not that I am so well read myself, remember. I mean, I am an amateur philosopher, like most others here. But I have read the things I talk about).

Frankly, I don't see your point on this at all.

Yeh, but here I'm saying -- bury the hatchet. This distinction will be forgotten because it's just a blip in the history of philosophy. — Moliere

Grrrr. It's not a blip. Phenomenology holds the key to the final resolution of the human religious condition. Buddha was the ultimate phenomenologist. As popular religions' narratives lose standing, the essential religious situation will rise to awareness, and then, basic questions, rid of the burden of myths and history, will be clear.

Heh, heh....you'll see. Or, no you won't, because it will never happen in our life time.

This probably goes some way to our disagreement, too, and goes some way to elucidate what I mean by everyday/exotic experience.

I was raised in a very religious household. I figured out science later. The arguments from experience and all that were my bread and butter, and I've seen how people in communities react to and use such arguments "in the wild", outside of the philosophers concerns. My skepticism in such things is based in experience -- hence my doubts about phenomenology leading one to God, but rather, from my story, it leads one to nature. — Moliere

But God in the "household" meaning of the term is instantly assailable. Religious households are the worst places to discover phenomenological inquiry. Worse than empirical science classrooms, perhaps. Tell me you were raised in a household where Kierkegaard's arguments with Hegel were discussed regularly, say, then you will have been somewhat prepared.

Language does not prohibit hallucinations either. — Richard B

But hallucinations aren't God. It's a supposition, so one has to play along.

So if p then q, p, therefore q is based on intuition. I don’t think we are using “intuition” correctly. — Richard B

How do you know the conditional works at all? Or the disjunction? It comes and is not analyzable, not reducible, this intuition qua intuition, for any analysis that would be brought to bear on this would beg the question given that it would itself presuppose just that which is being analyzed. Heidegger would give an historical account of this, but this dismisses the ineffable intuition as ineffable. Witt affirmed this as mystical (in the Tractatus).

No, I would say he was bound by the success of make predictions of future stimuli. — Richard B

Which is the litmus for establishing the consensus.

This is incorrect, we encounter trees, apples, humans. Also, it does not make sense to say ALL we ever encounter in the phenomena, is phenomena. — Richard B

Phenomenology is a second order of analysis. It first takes the encounter of trees, apples, etc., then gives analysis of the presuppositional claims that go to the totality of the claim, and not just an aspect of it. But it no more conflicts with encountering trees and apples than does Newtonian physics. It simply says something ABOUT encountering trees and apples. That they are, at the level of basic questions, phenomena.

In science, there is a certain inaccuracy with measurements. Is this a concern? Should it impede progress? No, they march forward. They apply the measurement, where there is practical gain, and live with the uncertainty, or strive to improve. Some philosophers could learn from this example. — Richard B

Don't make objections where there is no claim to make them about. These phenomenologists do not take issue with scientific progress, I mean, not even by the wildest sane interpretation. It is simply another order of thinking. Either one is interested in this kind of inquiry or not. Regarding phenomenology, it is almost always the case that one has no interest because one has not done the reading. Understandable, as it is difficult and alien to what is familiar, but it makes criticism vacuous.

In that light, I'd say that neither materialism nor phenomenology are terms worth fighting over, because only people educated in this stuff would really get something out of the distinction, — Moliere

Hmmm, true. But just because it is not a popular issue doesn't help here. All that we know and accept as true was once not popular.

Husserl is one I've read selections from -- I have a reader I've read but I haven't done the deep work. So, yes I've read parts, but no I haven't read it all. He's someone I need to, but he's still far enough away from present interests that I've sorta just kept him there — Moliere

You know, it really does take the reading. Consider that empirical science was there at the beginning of our acculturation and we were, in those early years, exposed to nothing but, through high school and beyond. Phenomenology is a radical departure from this, beginning with Kant and onward. A monumental task it was for me to finally understand why it is so important: it is about the totality of our being here, and it is able to look closely at the metaphysics, if you will, of our existence. It is not confined in any way. It does not deny science at all, but simply understands that this is not the revelation of our existence at the basic level that philosophy seeks.

I think the differences are institutional, and what's more what is institutionalized are aesthetics of reason. Aesthetics are a necessary component to human judgment, and certainly needed to teach human judgment -- but are they true? Are they the sorts of things which lead us to say, this is the one way to do philosophy? I think not. — Moliere

It is an interesting way to think. But the "institutions" are in some relation of connectivity to actualities, even though the very idea of an actuality is itself part of the institutional construct. This is not to think in correspondence terms, not as if our words somehow slink up with "things". It is rather to think as Quine does, that language is a tool. I have thought this right for some time now: the "scientific method" is a forward looking confirmation of a "theory" about the world, and this is at the most basic level, like walking down the street. the foot moves forward, anticipating the resistance of the sidewalk, descends, carries the weight to the next step, and so on. All knowledge claims at the basic level are like this; temporal events of problem solving.
But there is always the impossible "givenness" of the world that is intractable to the understanding. Always keeping in mind that this pragmatic view itself is conceived in this abiding indeterminacy. My position is that philosophy is right to the extent that it serves to disclose foundation. The spirit of empirical science simply DOES NOT possess this capacity for disclosure. It is not even ABOUT the world we experience. At the level of ontology, it is just bad metaphysics.

Truth is bound to language. And if the mystical is not true, because it is outside of language, in what way can we claim that it is reasonable? — Moliere

The mystical cannot be true or false because this is a feature of propositions, not states of mind or existential encounters. It is what is said about these that can be true or false. So what if God actually appeared before me and intimated HER eternal grandeur and power? Language does not prohibit this; it is the content of language that prohibits this, that is, what is familiar and usual. Language is entirely open and even the Wittgensteinian Tractatusian prohibitions are not categorical. They rest on intuitions about logic, and these are, in Heidegger's terms, taking up the world AS: When logic speaks of logic's own delimitations, this is an imposition that occurs within the finitude of logic's application.

But if one is seeking the mystical, to be unbound by language, then I think that's likely when we've hit the boundary of philosophy. (also, something funny here -- when mystics disagree) — Moliere

They do. On the one hand there is Meister Eckhart who prays to God to be rid of God, in his apparent frustration with the way familiar finitudes seem to bar the way to actual realization. then there are the tibetan monks who, as I read in an intro to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, would talk freely of their "subterranean" experiences. And pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite in The Cloud of Unknowing reveals a remedy:

How a man shall have him in this work against all thoughts, and specially against all
those that arise of his own curiosity, of cunning, and of natural wit.
AND if any thought rise and will press continually above thee betwixt thee and that darkness, and
ask thee saying, “What seekest thou, and what wouldest thou have?” say thou, that it is God that
thou wouldest have. “Him I covet, Him I seek, and nought but Him.”
And if he ask thee, “What is that God?” say thou, that it is God that made thee and bought
thee, and that graciously hath called thee to thy degree. “And in Him,” say, “thou hast no skill.”
91
And therefore say, “Go thou down again,” and tread him fast down with a stirring of love, although
he seem to thee right holy, and seem to thee as he would help thee to seek Him. For peradventure
he will bring to thy mind diverse full fair and wonderful points of His kindness, and say that He is
full sweet, and full loving, full gracious, and full mercifu

It is not an event in a reaffirmation of the ordinary forms of knowing, but of something outside of this, and yet, accessible? Of course, this is generally taken as a bunch of religious drivel, but this is the spirit of empirical science talking. It reminds me of something Quine famously said:

“As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”

Extraordinary!

Did he say the "myth" of physical objects? He is right, isn't he, in this pragmatic epistemic view?: All that "comes to us" is, well, mystical. Wittgenstein wrote (inspiring Quine?): "The world is the totality of facts, not of things," and, "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."

Of course, not included in this statement is the possibility that the "that it exists" could be presented in deeper more profound ways, the kind of thing Eckhart was looking for. As an empiricist philosopher, Quine was bound to a scientific consensus, but he knew this simply fell apart when examining, let's call it dasein: "semantical and intentional phenomena cannot be incorporated within the science of nature as I would wish," add to this the entire range of human experience. And again, ALL we ever encounter in the world, is phenomena. Materialism, a derivation and kind of embodiment of science's objective claims, is just, to borrow from Quine's own critical words, epistemically inferior in accounting for all we actually witness!!

Rather, given I don't even have institutional ambitions, philosophy is more personal, social, and connective. It is something done for pleasure, rather than a competition. — Moliere

I do disagree here: Philosophy does have its grounding, which is firmly there before inquiry. This is the foundational indeterminacy of all things. It appears to us as trivial because we are all like Quine, at the basic level of analysis: full of certainty and faith regarding our societal collective knowledge claims. All inquiry ABOUT these claims leads to indeterminacy. Philosophy's job, I argue, is to bring this to the fore and understand it.

This opens, not avenues into empty space, logical or otherwise; but value revelations. I.e., wha has been traditionally called God, here, divested of its "myths" as Quine put it.

Well, that at least gave me a laugh. — Banno

That I will yield to.

Certainly not of one like the third — Philosophical Investigations

How does a clarinet sound? Of course, you can describe this, but this would be a contingent description, relying other said things, each of which would present yet a new context that needed to be explained. Even the height of Mont Blanc moves like this through definitional routing and rerouting. Circular. Heidegger understood this. In his Origin of the Work of Art, he discusses What comes first, the work of art or the nature of art that informs us what art is? He writes,

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.

It is really well said-- this "strength of thought" is a true intellectual's delight through which art's meaning is wrought.

There's something very unconvincing about using biography to impute philosophical argument. It results in simplistic overgeneralisation. I'll leave you to your misleading biographical speculation. — Banno

No no, Banno; you simply have it all wrong. The Tractatus is not a biography: "6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."

His biography does, however, confirm the weight he gives this, and other things he says in the same vein. Perfectly honest?: I think you protest too much.

You asked how "foundational matters" are worked out in analytic philosophy. On Certainty sets out why foundations do not matter... indeed, are — Banno

See my responses to Richard B

"Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is." Wittgenstein PI124 — Richard B

And yet, there are all those occasions where he acknowledges what is "there" to be left "as it is". This is why I take him up in a discussion about ineffability. He rarely comments on it, but this is because it is too important to do so. One can infer a strong claim about the primacy of ethics/aesthetics/value that cannot be spoken: certainly what ineffability is all about.

Then there is Husserl. And here your objections may have their relevance. But then, phenomenology certainly does "leave everything as it is." It is a descriptive account. Any foundation Husserl posited was simply there, to be acknowledged.

o say that science needs a foundation that only phenomenology can supply because there appears to be a "philosophical problem"-yet science manages to successfully march forward with progress- is itself the problem you should examine. Your longing for foundations is due to what Wittgenstein said "when language goes on holiday" — Richard B

Well, you should know that Wittgentein's falling out with Russell was all about the latter's failure to understand that the Tractatus' importance was in that-which-should-be-passed-over-in-silence, and not the prohibitive delimitations analytic philosophers are so fond of. Russell thought he was a mystic! Witt thought he and Russell should sever correspondence on their difference regarding the matter of the question of value in ethics and aesthetics. Consider further that Witt's favorite philosopher was Kierkegaard, whose foundational longings are legendary (and terrifying to theologians). Did you know Witt held that divinity was found in "the Good"?

You should take a hard look at the simplicity of this, which I repeat: All anyone has ever witnessed is phenomena. This isn't contestable, and science is not in competition with this. What alternative is there to this, materialism (one form or another)? Pure metaphysics, materialism. Naturalism? Better. Dewey, Quine, Rorty were in this camp (in their own way), but note, the pragmatism that underlies this is what hs to be called pragmatic phenomenology.

Wittgenstein himself has been called a phenomenologist in his Tractatus. States of affairs are not a scientist's conception. A fact is a logical entity, which reminds us of the grandfather of phenomenology, Kant.

And yet science continues to make successful predictions and enhance understanding.

Maybe to phenomenologist, and for Quine sensory surfaces, but most scientists they continues doing what they are doing without worrying about phenomenologist's subjective content, or Quine's cultural posits, pragmatically speaking. — Richard B

Not sure about the point. Obviously, science's problems are not philosophy's. Scientists continuing "doing what they are doing"does nothing to address philosophical problems. The questions here are philosophical.

The fact that scientists can proceed so independently of what philosophy has to say is simply evidence that the two lines of inquiry are entirely distinct. Ask a scientist how it is, for example, that an object like a brain, an absolutely epistemically opaque thing, can generate experiences "about" other things. She will simply dismiss this. But then, such a question is central to philosophical interests.

So move past the Tractatus and on to On Certainty. Instead of looking for what it makes sense to believe, look to what it makes sense to doubt. This post, here, now? — Banno

I find that rather unresponsive. No, I've read it, but I'm not going fishing because you can't find a fitting response. If you have a position, state it.

It is simply not the case that there is a binary choice between science and phenomenology. Which is just as well, since phenomenology remains vexed. — Banno

All I have ever asked of analytic philosophy is to simply tell me how foundational matters are worked out. Because materialism, even Strawson's Real materialism (or naturalism, or naturalistic materialism, or physical naturalism, or any other useless distinctions) falls flat is it capacity for discovery.

Or perhaps you can disabuse me on this.

So how does Quine come to such a position. (From the Pursuit of Truth): "From impacts on our sensory surfaces, we in our collective and cumulative creativity down the generations have projected our systematic theory of the external world. Our system is proving successful in predicting subsequent sensory input." And thus we have the start of Quine's naturalized epistemology. In a nut shell, our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors. In contrast, I presume, phenomenology starts with appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, from a first person point of view, then attempt to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest or achieve some sot of knowledge of consciousness. — Richard B

Yes, and I agree with the forward looking pragmatist's thinking on truth, knowledge and thought. But he knew where this kind of physicalist talk takes one. From Ontological Relativity:

When . . . I begin to think about my own verbal behavior in theoretical or semantical terms, I am
forced to admit that, here too, indeterminacy reigns. Philosophical reflection upon my own
verbal behavior, concerned with hunting out semantical rules and ontological commitments,
requires me to make use of translational notions. I then recognize that the intentional content of
my own psychological states is subject to indeterminacy: semantical and intentional phenomena
cannot be incorporated within the science of nature as I would wish.2

He knew, as Heidegger did, that foundationally all roads lead to indeterminacy. I am inclined to believe that when we encounters this, it is generally handled by the basic inclinations of analytic philosophy in a resort to naturalism, and is evidenced in his confession above. And naturalism simply cannot proceed at all. What is happiness, misery, and all the "semantical and intentional phenomena"?

Of course, this kind of talk leads to none other than a phenomenological turn.

our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors. In contrast, I presume, phenomenology starts with appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, from a first person point of view, then attempt to define the phenomena on which knowledge claims rest or achieve some sot of knowledge of consciousness. — Richard B

You likely know how this goes. As Rorty put it, and Quine well knew, causal relations are not epistemic relations, or, as Rorty put it, " I no more know the world (the "out there" things science and everydayness talks about) than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail." Quine knew full well that not just knowledge issues, but everything that constitutes being a person simply goes unaddressed because this cannot be fit into a naturalistic schematism.

All we ever really see, encounter, understand, deal with intellectually, pragmatically, and so on, is phenomena.
Hence, the turn to phenomenology.

I think Quine would think that philosophy is continuous with science, but in a more general way. So his “ilk” would be Einstein, Newton, and Bohr. — Richard B

The question then is, do Einstein and the rest provide an explanatory basis for philosophical questions? No, I say, simply. His naturalism leads to statements like this:

the terms that play a leading role in a good conceptual apparatus are terms that promise to play a
leading role in causal explanation; and causal explanation is polarized. 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

Causal explanations in scientific settings, moving down the line to physics, which is the resting place for inquiry. How THAT can account for things like value and knowledge I would like to know. How is a causal relationship an epistemic one?

I’m wondering if you are familiar with the ways in which Husserl and Heidegger, respectively, burrowed within the grammar of formal logic to expose it as a derived abstraction of more fundamental constituting performances ? For instance, are you aware of how Husserl, in Formal and Transcendenral Logic, took Frege and Russell’s starting point in the propositional
copula and traced it back to a developmental sequence of constituting intentions? — Joshs

I am asking myself, do I want to read Formal and Transcendental Logic? Yes. But do I have it. No, but I'll get it. I'll read it and get back to you. As always, so appreciative of your references, etc. It motivates.

Get back to you....I'll keep it short.

but the problem here is that such a method becomes a beetle in a box. — Banno

You think like this because you likely think like Quine and his ilk think, that scientific models of what things are and how to talk about them are models for philosophical thinking. One has to think, if you will, out of the box.

I wish to cross-reference. If I can’t do that, because I can’t get what I need for it, I’ll stick with what I know. Destructive because, as far as I know, that was not what he said. — Mww

It is what he said.

Yes. Your translator’s reading doesn’t match any of the four of mine. It’s a technicality for sure, but in a system built on them, such ambiguity is either confusing or destructive. — Mww

Destructive or confusing in what way?

What about the not-ideas?

Facts and fictions are composed of words, I'd say -- language, rather than logic. Rather than focus the copula and the categories I'd say that language is more powerful than these logics, that language is what makes logic comprehensible in the first place rather than the other way around. — Moliere

Interesting to note that 'logic' is itself a particle of language. Interesting because when drawing distinction between words and logic, one has to be in words, so to speak, to do this. But you do say this, don't you: "language is what makes logic comprehensible in the first place rather than the other way around." It reveals the primacy of hermeneutics in laying out the bottom line for knowledge claims. See how Heidegger affirms this in his Origin of the Work of Art as he discusses how the art work and the artist define each other:

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.

You can see how he relishes the "game" of the combinatory power of language, and how in this is the cutting edge of the freedom to reconceive oneself.

For me there is the inevitable encounter with the world apart from language, which is conceived IN language. Take causality: I can't imagine my cup moving by itself. This is an intuitive impossibility, but it is not as if by assigning a term and then more terms to inscribe in our understanding a principle, makes it entirely understood. There is an openness inherent in the concept, as there is in all concepts. The world in language is taken AS what we interpret it to be. So this language taking up the world AS (Derrida said language does not stand for things, but "stands in" for things. No doubt a gift from Heidegger) does not contain it, and this applies to all we can think, even hermeneutics.

The trouble with all meaning being bound to contextual interpretation is that it makes for a concept of freedom and openness that is closed in its delimitations to the historical possibilities of a language.

That is where my thoughts about indeterminacy run. One has to be made free from language, even though language leads and controls the conversation in acknowledging just this. Fascinating to behold the world unhinged from the categories of ordinary thought. Mystical.

I look at philosophy anarchically. Each philosopher defines for themself what is important, and ranks things in accord with their philosophy. Philosophy is one of the most unlimited disciplines. Only institutions, I'd say, have notions of what is proper to philosophy. And that is important, because philosophy is actually difficult, and it's difficult to teach, and to learn we need standards put before us. But eventually, we are simply free.

So, from that vantage, I see onto-theo-philosophical examination of our "thrownness" into a world as very interesting. Each philosopher defines their own project, really, and that's the whole point. It's why it's mind-expanding.

But I don't see it as being any more proper than any other way of doing philosophy. — Moliere

But this movement, call it (Kierkegaard called it that) from first order ordinariness to acknowledging one's throwness is universal, belongs to the structure of conscious awareness itself. Granted, from this, one can go different ways. I find myself doing serious reading in the so called French theological turn, with Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emanuel Levinas and others examining Husserl's reduction and epoche and its radical disclosure once we realize that that great Kantian division in being is all wrong: the appearance IS being.

Husserl, then Heidegger then all the post Heideggerian thinking (that I certainly do not keep up with; you know, I have another life) leads some extraordinary revelations that are not contained within discussions of ordinary language, but are found outside of these, in the world; and then back to discussion.

But with analytic thinking, extraordinary revelations are simply off the table, which is why it has been in crisis for a long time now. It has run the course of everyday language possibilities. I object to materialism because this term carries considerable baggage in its exit from scientific contexts to metaphysics. Heideggerian/post Heideggerian thought pulls emphatically away from this.

I agree that religion has never understood itself, and I find that pursuit to understanding religion very interesting. It's pretty clearly connected to how human beings function in the world, given how it's literally part of every culture ever and secular thoughts are relatively new, in the scheme of all written history.

I'm not sure I'd say value-talk is less determinate than truth-talk, though. I'd say that value-talk ends in convictions, rather than in values. And convictions, given that people have different ones, lead to conflict, but for all that, we still cling to them. — Moliere

Quite right, I think. Value talk is, after all, talk, and talk has this historical dimension that creates the possibilities for meanings. But value, I argue, tells of an extraordinary feature of the world, that when said carries a weight of a wholly other order of existence, which is the ethical/aesthetic good and bad. Surely we are when speaking thusly, taking the world AS value, ethics, etc. But this is not like being appeared to redly, say, a vacuous sensuous intuition. It is about the depth, the intensity of meaning of feeling and thought (which are one prior to our abstractions of analyses). Or, if causality, say, is a taking up the world AS causality, the principle, the expository account, there is in this the intuitive impossibility of a thing's movement being its own cause and this intuition exceeds the language that would explain it. But, as with the color red qua color, it is a trivial acknowledgement in itself (of course, the quantitative dynamics of causality in physics is very useful, but that is not the point. In itself, it is trivial). Value, on the other hand is a stand alone meaning that is not trivial at all, evidenced by the our thrills and sufferings.

I don't think that there's really a question of deeper than science or shallower than philosophy. What is "depth", other than the desire for meaning in life? — Moliere

I don't know anyone who says science has no value. It would be absurd. But the depth of science is limited to the reach of its paradigms, and science's paradigms are empirical/theoretical. Phenomenology steps away from this in a dramatic philosophical move that derives its themes from a second order perspective.

When I ask, what is it I am confronting in the world, in actuality, I see a natural world. And meaning in it is had by living happy lives with others for the time you get. There's not a grand answer to it all -- we simply are born without purpose, and die without reason. Everything we care about is just that -- what we care about. In actuality, I think there are no deep mysteries. — Moliere

But ask Husserl about this. When you confront the world phenomenologically, you are NOT seeing a natural world at all. You are witnessing phenomena. Have you read his Cartesian Meditations? Levinas' dissertation was on Husserl. His phenomenology is, by anglo americam standards, just off the charts. Almost no one wants to think like this, because it is downright spooky. I say, sorry; the world IS spooky, and ignoring this is just sticking your head in the sand. All that analytic philosophy holds dear is indeterminate, and they don't see this because analytic philosophers tend not to be aesthetically endowed.

Moore's concept of ethics is super interesting to me. I'd say he's right, and that there are no non-natural properties, and therefore, there are no true moral statements. Goodness is what we care about, and it is our human responsibilty to act on it, or to not -- we get to choose. If we care about it, we can pursue it. But if we stop caring about it, then we can choose not to. Hence, the natural world, especially as we gain more power over it, is our responsibility exactly as it is. But it's still natural for all that. And it's a collective responsibility, not an individual one. — Moliere

I would never disagree that goodness is what we care about. I would ask that the question go one step further: what is it t care about something? What is the anatomy of a care, for it has parts: I care about my cat being free of fleas. Now, analyze this phenomenologically you find an agency of caring, me, and that which is the object of my caring, my cat, but what do I care about specifically? I am looking for the essential feature: just as Kant looked for the essential feature of a rational judgment, and pulled away from particulars to generalize, so I am looking for the essential ethical feature, the kind of thing that, were it absent, the ethicality would vanish as well. What I care about is my cat's suffering (as well as mine having to deal with fleas around the house). What makes this a care all is the value, the measure of pain and pleasure and joy and suffering and everything in between, that is in the balance, at risk, whatever.

It is a transcendental argument, just like Kant's, for it serves as an index to transcendence. Where Kant's CPR was an index to pure reason, Here I postulate the idea of pure value, adding quickly that I by no means think there is anything such as a pure anything. This kind of thinking only serves to underscore a feature of an unknowable primordial unity.

Whose translation is this? — Mww

Is there an issue?

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.