Is Buddhism truly metaphysical?
It has occurred to me of late that Buddhism has two ideas (or 4) that are reduced to contradiction. Or are they paradoxes, or, better, philosophical koans?
The concepts are:
1) there is no self
And this is contradicted by their doctrine that we create our lives fully and should take responsibility for our own births.
The basic message I believe is that you are simply not who you think you are. So is then anatman a tool in the sense that this will disentangle you from yourselves and your own grasp?
2) the world is illusion
This is contradicted by the idea that Nirvana is now, is here. To see the world without mental essences is a goal of meditation. The result is seeing the world for what it is. But what happens to maya? How can you treat the world functionally as real while doubting what it is?
The concepts are:
1) there is no self
And this is contradicted by their doctrine that we create our lives fully and should take responsibility for our own births.
The basic message I believe is that you are simply not who you think you are. So is then anatman a tool in the sense that this will disentangle you from yourselves and your own grasp?
2) the world is illusion
This is contradicted by the idea that Nirvana is now, is here. To see the world without mental essences is a goal of meditation. The result is seeing the world for what it is. But what happens to maya? How can you treat the world functionally as real while doubting what it is?
Comments (257)
Taking responsibility is not the business of the so called so-self. the logic goes more like this: If there is no self, then there is no one to take responsibility. The act of taking responsibility can be understood as the illusory self, which is a construct (a personality constituted by language and cultural institutions), which is a necessary condition for the self effacing finality of nirvana.
Quoting Gregory
The disentanglement is Of the empirical self. The no-self, as odd as this sounds, is never put in play, so to speak, for it is a kind of nothing, a nothing relative to our gaze. The Buddha nature is always there, pure and inviolable. How does it, then, come under the "spell" of delusory thinking? this is unanswerable, since to speak and answer would be a deployment of the delusional self. This is not unlike the Wittgensteinian objection that logic cannot be known, for this would require logic to make it so.
It is a metaphysical problem.
Quoting Gregory
But this "seeing the world without mental essences" is just part of the illusion, this kind of thinking that divides and builds meanings out of "differences". Derrida is in the background on this issue. If there is anyone who makes this case, it is Derrida. See his Structures, Signs and Play (and certainly Not his "Difference" which will simply irritate. Think of illusion as, not simply words as tags on things; rather, it is experience, the past/present/future construction is the very foundation of the world. No wonder serious meditation is so hard to achieve. Daunting at best, for one is not just trying to calm the mind. One is quite literally attempting to erase/nullify/annihilate the world.
To annihilate the world in this sense would mean erasing our internal model of the world. Clearly, that's not the case and practice is more like temporarily bypassing particular neural networks, perhaps strengthening some and weakening others in a more permanent way.
It's a religion like any other, and like other religions, I think it's built on some valuable insights. The concept and experience of 'emptiness', for instance, has value because it can lead to well-being (when not fetishized).
Quoting Gregory
Supposedly by realizing the that world and everything above, below, and to each side of it is empty.
Do you think this can be demonstrated?
Absolutely, yes, although not in a way that is likely to be agreeable to a... fetishizer.
Various studies have been conducted on the suppression of the neural default mode network.
OK. What on earth is that?
Isn't it the fetishizers who have a Jones for evidence based everything these days? I think it's the denigrators and vandals like me who doubt evidence. :razz:
Good question. It's worth looking into, imo. :grin:
Jeeez, ya blokes from daunundda are lazy:
Full article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529365/
Yeah I am but I've seen this some of this stuff already. I was thinking more about Buddhism specifically. Mediation doesn't care if you are Sam Harris or the Dalai Lama.
Emptiness is the core of Buddhism.
And the core of nihilism. Or at least some expressions thereof.
You're claiming that the core of a religion is nihilistic in nature? :chin:
You are a self-described picker and chooser from the philosophy bin of life. I would think you've been exposed to eastern philosophy enough here on the forum and elsewhere to know whether or not you think it has anything to offer intellectually or spiritually. If it doesn't, toss it back in the bin. But if it does, you'd be foolish not to take it with you.
You make that sounds like a bad thing. :wink:
But no, I was responding to what you said about emptiness - it was just a quip and isn't really germane to this thread.
Quoting T Clark
One man's trash is another man's treasure. Or so I am told.
Philosophy as dumpster diving. I can get behind that.
I didn't really like the whole "philosophy bin of life" metaphor. I tried to think of a better one, but couldn't find it. I like yours better.
I like the Suzuki quote. Everything changes and therefore everything is empty. Without change nothing is possible.
I don't think that any religion is about self-overcoming. I recently read a quote in a book that went something like, "If you don't master yourself someone else will be your master." I think that's true, and that religion is all about someone else being your master.
Interesting. I can't help feeling that religions, when practiced from a certain perspective - are often about overcoming or transcendence - perhaps as simple as overcoming your baser self or your more human urges, but right through to attaining enlightenment. Of course this all depends on how one constructs those ideas and no doubt there is a spectrum of possibilities.
As far as I can tell, all religions each claim the correct constitution.
Aka anatta - something other than truth, oui mon ami?
Meditation is not to be understood with talk about materialist reductions. The idea is absurd, for all things become the same thing. As if being in love or experiencing plague symptoms are analytically reducible to regionalized brain functions. No, the matter has to be approached phenomenologically. Buddha, the quintessential phenomenologist, it is said, and I believe this right, takes the world as it appears, and the annihilation of the world in the context of Buddhist thought sees the world as a construct that can be put down, ignored, and this is a affectively revelatory event of profound dimensions.
there is no understanding of Eastern thought apart from this essentially phenomenological description of the world.
What is meant by "self". As in, what are the limits of the self? Is it the physical body? Because if not, if the self is as fundamental as the energy and matter that makes up one's self as we exist in human form, then self extends to all matter and energy in the universe. In essence, in this case self is equivalent to the universe.
Quoting Gregory
What is meant by the "world"? Is it everything exterior to the self (the physical body). Or is ones body included in and a subset of: the entire world/universe?
These two tenets are equivalent in that I have reduced them to the same question. What is world and what is self? And how do we distinguish the two relative to eachother?
For me there is no distinction other than what you choose to believe. You can choose to be all things (the entire universe) but then you must acknowledge all things as fundamentally the same thing.
Or the second option: you may put up partitions. You may delineate self from other - but then you must justify why other is different from you.
For me the sensible answer is both options simultaneously. It is obvious that you are part of a whole and constructed of the same "stuff", but also unique in that you are a human having experienced a specific time span and specific places.
Duality is prudent to see all aspects of the truth. The truth is not black or white. It is both, as well as the grey in-between. The "whole". Not the "cherry-picked".
The matter, like any matter, can be approached from various angles, including scientific or materialist.
Can you explain why you believe it has to be approached phenomenologcally?
As opposed to the not whole?
Of course, it can be approached in many different ways. Historically, physiologically, contextually, even politically. But the business of understanding Buddhism simply does not lie with any of these. Consider phenomenonlogy as an interpretative stand that allows what appears to one to be determined as it is in this appearance, and not how it is taken up in other thematic context. E.g., Buddhism is certainly a historically grounded body of thought, but this history really has no place in the radical meditative process of liberation, which is an attempt achieve apophatically (think neti, neti, the Eastern notion of what we call apophatic theology/philosophy) a profound departure from the everydayness of living, a departure from its "historicity."
But this seems to bypass the essential idea, which is really quite simple. The meditative act is very simple; the interpretation brings in the complexity, for people have questions that are extraneous to this one simple notion: liberation. But, one has to ask, liberated from what. This IS the extraneous question. Liberation itself answers this question, but does so do not by issuing text after text of dialectic superfluity. The abhidhamma was written for instruction and understanding, but the assumptions about what this understanding is are really quite foreign to general thinking. This is because liberation is about something wholly Other than general thinking, and to talk about it, one has to step away from it and enter into the historical and cultural mentality, where everything is entangled with everything else.
Liberation does not "speak" and it is not anything that can be spoken; but then, this is true, really, of all things, isn't it? Look around the room and there are chairs, and rugs and walls, etc. But these are interpretative events, the seeing and understanding that things are such and such this or that. These are contextualized knowledge claims played out in the understanding. Liberation in the profound Eastern sense puts these events on hold, thereby terminating world determining events.
I think the word one is looking for is *suffering*.
Sure, but consider that the world IS suffering, Any time your mind wanders into any of the various institutions that comprise this world, from breakfast to geopolitical conflicts, you are in suffering. So the practical matter before you is a resistance to, or a permitting a falling away from, these concerns, each of which is inherently a kind of suffering.
The world is what makes suffering because it is complicated; that is, suffering is so entangled in our affairs and we not think of these as suffering at all. Value is an entangled concept. Buddhists say retract from these essentially social and pragmatic constructs, and this gets down to the, call it the pure meditative act: No discrimination here, for every thought is equally occlusive to the purpose. In the end, one do not give these institutions time or energy. They become irrelevant. All that remains is nirvana.
Incidentally, this is very close to what Kierkegaard had in mind in his Concept of Anxiety. What is sin? It is an immersion in the distractions of culture, the money, the relationships, the egoic endeavors, all inherently sinful (NOT, he is quick to point out, in the Lutheran sense of offending God with some primordial original sin. Kierkegaard was pretty enlightened for a Christian).
Buddha blames life, claiming that it is all disatisfactory. That is, of course, a lie. There is both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Life requires both to achieve homeostasis (the middle way).
Not do much a lie if you consider what suffering is. Not that, say, requited love, is just miserable. But Buddhists claim this is far short of what nirvana is: a sustained being in love (only more than this) without the instabilities of an actual life, the latter being the entanglements I mentioned earlier. And being in love is invariable an entangled affair, isn't it?
The balance you speak is a rationalized compromise of something foundationally pure, a Buddhist would say.
Are you saying we accept responsibility before we abdicate ourselves?
Quoting Constance
That's a neat logical trick. Interesting, it's like a supertask. And yet can one escape the mind in Buddhism? Appeals to intuition seems to me to be appeals to faith
Quoting Constance
I do need to read one of his books. When I do i'll start with that one. It was my point that emptiness means not nonexistence, but the opposite, that there would be a world as it is, without additions from the mind. Maya would be what we place outside ourselves from within. The Buddhism don't seem to have a Western concept of subject and object like we do (somehow)
I also wanted to add that it everything is perception, that everything we see is alive, being in the mind as it is. Sounds and sights would be as alive as your mind. That makes me see the world a little differently
Is this called qietism in the West? The dichonomy between resting and acting (internally) is not clear to me
It is rational certainly, though it is not a rationalization or compromise of any sort. Earlier, you were claiming this must be approached phenomenologically. Do you not personally experience the phenomenon of satisfaction?
Is Nirvana empty and does it change?Quoting Benj96
I see self as identity, as identity as personhood. The personhood is spread out through the the body. And separation of bodies is part of scientific theory, right? How can you have physical causality without at least 2 objects? Are you saying we are part of the world physically or spiritually?
No, meditation is... I don't think I need to explain.
Quoting 180 Proof
... an attempt at a pragmatic deflation of 'the supernatural' to the existential.
This seems to be a lengthy way of stating 'you can't put this into words' - which is one of the standard message of ineffability inherent in most religious traditions. Sure. As someone outside of Buddhism (or phenomenology) this construction of 'liberation' sounds much like an appeal to faith.
Quoting Constance
Are you suggesting that liberation is not a value or an entangled concept? Incidentally, are you a Buddhist, or are you working to 'connect' Buddhist principles to phenomenology or both, like Michel Bitbol?
I certainly do. Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream is squarely there. But this enjoyment is, you might call it, a hedonic fetish. A fetish is something that draws on some original energy for its appreciation, but it itself does not have this as a native feature. It is a parasitic gratification, you might say. now Buddhists say that one does not become the Buddha; rather, one always already is this, but has become entangled in desires and attachments. To realize who one "really is," one has to be liberated from these attachments. So what energy is there that is so fond of Haagen-Dazs? It is one's original energy misaligned in such affections. I think it is very important to see that attachments are value driven, and what it is to be attached is to have your original nature, which is the source of value in the world (Wittgenstein affirmed this: we bring value into the world, and apart from this value, the world is mere states of affairs), confer value in other things. So what is a mere fact of the world, to refer again to Witt., is elevated to a value saturated possibility.
And again, btw, Kierkegaard called this attachment original, or hereditary sin, this yielding to the world's cultural institutions, what he calls the aesthetic stage of our existence. Of course, K uses terms like God and the soul, but he does talk in ways that correspond to eastern thinking.
My take is rather simple, perhaps simplistic, too simplistic: It's not the self (re anatta) that reincarnates, it's something else that does! What that something else is is anybody's guess.
[quote=Master Yoda]A lot to unpack there is.[/quote]
That sounds gnostic, as if the physical self is reincarnated bodies while this false self has not awaken to its true relation to reality
The so-called self may not be what we think it is. It may just be a temporary entity, there only to, well, complicate our already miserable lives.
Nirvana is not heaven! Or so they tell me!
There you have it.
I think you can talk about anything. there is nothing in language that stops this. Ineffability is about there being no shared experiences, not about the failure of a concept to grasp an experience, for concepts don't do this. Concepts are social constructs, vocabularies invented in the process of evolvement by groups to share experiences, but they never impose limitations on experiences, that is, as Hume said, human kind could be eradicated altogether, and reason wouldn't bat an eye. It is the formal limitation of judgment, but has no limitations in experience, and if God were to actually appear before me in all her depth and grandeur, and the same happened to you, we could talk about it, refer to it, develop new vocabulary, and so on. Ineffability refers to something alien to a people's familiarity.
Liberation I don't think is about faith. It is an experience, but something nobody talks about because it is alien to our culture.
It is not a reference to quantum physics, no. Entanglement here is a descriptive feature of being attached to things in the world, like sex and ice cream. But the French do have my attention, only here is Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emanuel Levinas, and others.
I don't think Buddhism has anything at all to do with physics. Not that one cannot make a connection, but that connection would be extraneous to the discipline.
Oh. Well, thank you very much!
Yes, that's what I was referring to. Not QM. Also I was thinking about Bitbol's connection with phenomenology, not his QM work. But I hear you. I probably should have referenced Evan Thompson rather than Bitbol.
Quoting Constance
Hmmm. Don't disagree but I'm not sure I follow why you say this. You originally said this.
Quoting Constance
I'm afraid your arguments are passing me by - perhaps it's my lack of philosophy.
My understanding of ineffability is that for all the talking we do, the truth about some things is beyond words.
But perhaps we can stop here, I'm not sure any of this matters. Nice talking to you. :smile:
They told you right. :up:
Its not a complement. I merely point out that you subjectively experience the phenomena of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and this is evidence that life is not dissatisfaction but both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. If your body is dehydrated you will suffer the dissatisfaction of thirst and should you be fortunate enough to find water and drink your thirst will be satisfied. This isnt materialist science. It is phenomena that you subjectivity experience.
But it shows none of the nuance of the brief review of the matter I provided above. Yours is a manichean pov, a reduction to a two sided simplicity of something that is not really simple. I took t that you didn't really read what I wrote and so, oh well.
At the start you wrote the matter has to be approached phenomenologically so thats what Im doing. You are entirely free to confer whatever meaning you like to the phenomenon of your subjective experiences of satisfaction. Ive not made any judgment of it, simplified it, or polarized your meaning.
I see Even Thompson and his ilk as intellectual Buddhists, which, frankly, is fine if you're going to be teaching it (the history, the explanatory texts), but radically off the mark otherwise. Thompson read and read, talked and wondered, but what he did not do is put his life into the slow process of its own annihilation, and by this I am just referring to revelatory nature of Eastern liberation, which is very hard to swallow for academics, or anyone, in the West. Buddhism, taken to its foundations, is more than radical: it is a complete undoing of one's relationships with the world. The claims are not, as Thompson would say, about Buddhism being a part of the variety of ideas that have a meaningful place in the general societal mentality. I did read the Embodied Mind earlier, and their conclusions include a turn away from foundational thinking, which is both good and bad in my view, for what one turns away from is the historical traditions that stand, as Jean luc Marion put it, like idols that fascinate our gaze. Good riddance. But then there is the turn towards a secularization, an incorporation of Buddhism into meaningful living for all, and this is just wrong.
See the Abhidhammattha-Saïgaha (as weird as it is in much of it): Buddhism is not for directing our collective moral compass, even if it can do this. Nor is it for encouraging a theory among theories that make us more reasonable in practical matters, though it may do this. Meditation and withdrawal are an attempt to discover something hidden deep in human subjectivity.
But the idea that was put on the table was that attachments, affections, and so on, are errant engagements of our original actuality, the Buddha nature, and the idea that "life is suffering" needs to be understood apart from this bald statement. No Buddhist is going to say I am miserable when I am having the time of my life, unless the lines of demarcation are radically moved regarding what suffering is.
The idea of an attachment has to be looked at more closely, and this requires looking at ones subjective constitution as Wittgenstein did in Tractatus. To value anything does not belong to the world of facts. It is a simple givenness, off the radar of what can be said, and it is thus a transcendental presence, though, Witt is going to tell us that the speaking of this is just nonsense. The Tractatus itself, he tells us, is fundamentally nonsense, for one cannot explain sheer givenness. Dennett denies at length meaningful talk about qualia, a phenomenological purity of apprehending things in the world. So whence comes value? From the original source of valuing a thing, and this is us, our nature which stands before a thing and feels desire and abhorrence.
So, liking ice cream is not proof positive that the world is not all suffering, or, it is, but only if you think simplistically about it. My attachment to ice cream is only possible in a context of contingent affairs, but the Buddha within, the source of affection itself, is not contingent, not, that is, dependent, relative, context dependent; nor is it as trivial as ice cream indulgence AS ice cream indulgence. This is a sticky matter, and Kierkegaard helps unstick it: His Knight of Faith lives in God, and ice cream becomes part of her existence in this divine dynamic. A weird, but interesting ways to look at this. It was Witt who said a depressed man lives in a depressed world. So where does the Knight of Faith live? In what "world" does a deeply committed Buddhist live?
All boats rise. (Meaning, when one's world is elevated to a sublime apprehension of things, all things are transfigured.)
Your subjective experiences of satisfaction are essential, not simplistic. Again, you are free to confer whatever nuanced meaning you like to your experiences of satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. Thats up to you. Religions confer all sorts of grand and nuanced narratives to the world and our essential experiences.
I would counter that Heaven has nothing to do with God or resurrected bodies. One needs to get to the essence of the term, not just the historical bad metaphysics. How was such a term ever even conceived? It issued from what we experience every day, which is the joys of our existence, and what is called love is the best thing we have going. And love is just another word for being happy, the old Aristotelian summum bonum. Heaven is just a radicalization of what is commonly experienced set in metaphysical idea. But it doesn't end there. does it? After all, now all eyes are on finding some account of what happiness is. It can be very deep and full: Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?
But the metaphysics of happiness is not a meaning less concept.
I doubt anyone can find happiness without a good understanding of themselves. The process may never end
But this places the matter in a mundane perspective, and I certainly agree with you here. But then philosophy steps in and the world is no longer what it seemed.
"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is" Albert Camus
It does beg the question, doesn't it? In order to refuse to be what I am, I have to actually be something. What is that?
Buddhism says that "that" is just illusion because we are all everything which is nothing. To traditional Western philosophy that is nihilism but many modern philosophers would disagree. Hegel says we are being and nothingness at the same time
Certainly. But I am not bound to this and what Buddhists talk about usually doesn't interest me. As I see it, the whole affair comes to one thing, and that is a reduction of the world's interpretative possibilities to the original intuitive givenness: Nunc stans. A pure phenomenology.
Kierkegaard said Hegel probably didn't understand Hegel. Being and nothing the firs dialectical movement? Or something like that. Maybe one day I'll take a closer look. At any rate, I think a rationalist like Hegel is miles away from Buddhism, which revelatory, not dialectical. As to the illusion of being a person, a self, this is, to me, very interesting. What is illusion? and what is a self? As a construct in the world, the self is a language entity. Thinking is where identity comes from. What is anything? you could ask, and the first thing that steps forward is language, of course, for the question itself is an expression of language and logic. The old testament Yahweh utters the world into existence (says John), and self identifies in the tetragrammaton, which is an utterance itself.
It is in language that all things are conceived, and it is in the conception that illusion arises: errors in interpretation as to what the world is. Is a person a nurse, a politician, a plumber, a doctor, and so on? And all the rest we say we "are", what is the grounding for these? They are mere pragmatic conventions, institutions that allow us manage our affairs.
The Buddhist tries to see more deeply into what we are, but not through religious dogma and faith. It is through a liberation of our deeper selves. Is there such a thing? One can only look for oneself.
Thanks. I have no sensus divinitatis, so it's mostly just word games to me. :wink:
I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts..
The reason I mention being and nothing is that only the insane would deny they experience being (and the insane are detached from that) but if one can answer "nothing!" to all questions of being *nonetheless*, this would be Buddhist. People without a mystical side won't understand this, but look at it this way: dependent origination means everything is connected as one without a foundation (because it is nothing), an infinite series. As Aristotle said, an infinite series needs an essential first cause. This is true philosophically unless WE are the first cause and everything, even us, are nothing. God is in all our eyes
This may well all be the case. What however... and I ask this genuinely... is the point of this kind of frame? Can you share how this might be of use to you in life?
Buddhism is more radical and would say 'no' in the final analysis, I think, although of course language is necessary to teach the soteriological techniques of any spiritual practice. But the spiritual techniques are designed to take us beyond language and to effect transformation of consciousness. Now you may have no interest in such a thing, or you may believe it is impossible, a fantasy perhaps, but of course you could not know that unless you tried it yourself, and even then if you failed that would be no guarantee that no one has succeeded or could succeed.
So, the question as to what use such understandings could be depends on what one's interests are. If you have no interest then of course such understandings would be of no use to you.
Quoting Janus
What do you mean here; are you referring to the gradual journey towards enlightenment/liberation, or something more prosaic?
The world is an unfathomably large supermarket of ideas and lifestyles. I am curious 1) why people go shopping and 2) why they put certain items in their shopping cart. :wink:
I pretty much agree, except for one thing: Our acknowledgement of just this is itself a language event. This is hermeneutics. So the world has two faces, Janus: the one is the language existence we live in and, if you will, are "made of". The other is all that lies before one that is not language (and following Wittgenstein, language "is" not language, though this is nonsense to say, for the generative source of language is unrevealed. The world is shown, nothing more). Actuality is not a thesis. It is a non propositional "presence" which cannot be possessed by language, and since there is nothing that escapes being actual, it does follow that all things are metaphysical. Metaphysics is not some entirely impossible other of the world (though it is that, for sure). It is there, in the cup, in the coffee, in our affairs. Is our affairs.
Quoting Gregory
Interesting. Schopenhauer thought that without our perceiving agency to divide the world, the world would some impossible singularity, impossible because such a thing cannot be conceived, for the thought of it itself imposes division. I thinki there is something in this, a vague but exotic intuition that tries to consider being as such, and finds in this attempt, the grasp concepts have on things slips. One way to look at the mystical side of things. Wittgenstein, who Russell accused of being a mystic when the former said he had missed the point of the Tractatus and wanted to break off contact, was no mystic. But he did realize the mystical dimension of things was built into the world (the Tractatus was not meant to emphasize the boundaries of what could be said, but rather what could not be said, and this was much more important than what could be said; so he said).
As to first causes, certainly not a temporal first cause, for this is intuitively impossible. But how about a first cause as the generative source of existence. Eugene Fink made a bold claim in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, saying he (and Husserl) "have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity." Reading the Sixth Meditation is quite an experience. It plays on the (in)famous phenomenological reduction: I see an object before me and the I am instantly aware of its identity. Now take this knowledge and reduce (remove) it until you have removed everything but the bare intuitive presence. Here you have the bare, pure phenomenon, the simple "thereness" of the object.
When you say it would be insane to to deny the experience of being, you do open up a can of worms, for it has to be admitted that the object before you is entirely conditioned, and structured by, the past. I never see anything in this pure phenomenological sense, for nothing comes to me "pure". It is always given as a concept in a context, and without the context there is no meaning. So, I want to say that there is this inviolable intuitive apprehension of things, this certainty, yet certainty seems to be bound to contingency of the language as language steps in between you and the object an language makes the utterance, the truth bearing proposition. How does language possess this magical power to say what things are? Or that they are? Whence comes this "are"?
And yet, as you say, the presence of the world is simply there, regardless of these issues. I would say that here, in this issue, lies the secret to a philosophical approach to God. After all, if there is something there that is absolutely there, then this is tantamount to a burning bush in its apprehension, for one is not merely there, nor is the object. Rather, one and the thing are metaphysically there. Finitude and infinitude merge.
I suspect this is largely true. I spent a lot of time on the periphery of a Buddhist society in my city in the 1980's. I was surprised to find that its members were as riddled with anxiety, ambition, status seeking, in fighting and general BS as any other group of people. One of the monks would regularly polish off a bottle of whiskey in the evenings and complain about life. Buddhism seemingly had minimal transformative value. My partner used to joke, "You should have seen them before.'
Right, of course our acknowledgement, as expressed, is a language event. And I recognize the "two faces" of the world, but our lives are not our (propositional) "language existence", that is our deaths. "All that lies before us" and is known prior to language, and is what makes language itself possible is our lives. Propositional discourse is the "city of the dead" that, if participated in without the care that comes with awareness, robs us of our lives. That said, there is a dimension of language that is also life, and the enrichment of life. but it is not to be found in the anal preoccupations of the walking dead.
So, yes, actuality is a "non-propositional" presence; although I would say it is there when the cup and the coffee cease to be merely "cups" and 'coffee".
Quoting Tom Storm
I hope you do get it. My experience tells me that the difference lies in the nature of experience.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm referring to the journey back to life, from out of the endarkenment of propositional discourse.The journey from analysis to poetry, from logic to metaphor.
People search for ideas that may bring them to life because they feel the cold grasp of the grave, and the absurd killing viciousness of greed, resentment and corruption that rules human 'life' beneath the veneer of 'civilization'. Your "supermarket" and "shopping" metaphors say it all; they speak to the intolerable banality of modern human "consumer" life. Of course (for the "lucky" ones) it is also warm, cosy, safe and secure, and it is just there that the problem lies.
Nicely put and intriguing. 'Journey back to life' is particularly juicy stuff.
Those metaphors, by the way, are not how I generally see the world. They were chosen for their brutalist effect (a la Weber to which you probably allude) in contrast to all this lofty talk about metaphysics.
Can you say more about the journey back to life? It sounds a little like a 'paradise lost' narrative. Does it relate to Buddhist metaphysics? Are you suggesting that Buddhism might be a kind of antidote to the present era of capitalism, scientism and managerialism?
I agree with what you write.
The world is presented to us and it is as we subjectively present it to ourselves. If we say H2O, what kind of knowledge has come forth? We know abstractly that we can put "this" with "that" and get something to drink. But even when we know what something tastes, looks, feels, and smells like, this doesn't give us knowledge beyond the senses
To be trapped without mysticism is unphilosophical. We are the unconscious and speech, Father and Son. We are totally the Logos and the Father and Son are One, and nothing at the same time. I think we need the side of Nothingness to know how we are in the divine. If God is pure substance we could never become one in it, because we are "thrown" (Heidegger). Within the finite, the mind corrects speech and speech corrects the mind. The former is very Buddhist but there comes a point when you can't control anymore, so you turn to speech to correct the mind. And Buddhist preach right speech. There is dialectic in use and it follows its own logic. We are spoken so that the unseen is seen
That THAT is precious.
Heidegger and most others would disagree, simply because the being there of the cup and the coffee cannot be parted from the "cups and coffee". Language is "of a piece" with actuality, and it is only by an abstraction that we think of them as separate. This is an idea of some profundity, really. there really is no logic, value, language, and so forth, and this regards all things that the understanding takes hold of, for to think at all is categorize, and, as Rorty would put it, there is no truth "out there" because there really is no out there, for such an idea is a foolish metaphysics, this "original Unity". I am inclined to agree, except for one very important issue, which is metaphysics and the revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world Buddhists talk about. This is not a religious fiction.
And, as I see it, this "beyond the sense" is a tricky phrase, for it implicitly draw a line: there is here, and there is this beyond. I think this kind of thing can really trip us up, and my thinking goes a bit off the rails here: In the perceptual act itself, and not beyond this lies the impossibility of existence, as the actuality before me in its existence is not reducible to some explanatory account. But there are many explanatory acccounts there implicit in the act itself, meaning, when I perceive a thing, I am not just innocently taking in what it tells me; I am doing this. It is not taking in the thing, but my interpretative history making the tacit determination and I just go along as if the world were transparent to me. But there is nothing transparent at all in this encounter with the thing. The event is filled with the past. We generally affirm this past conditioning of a present (and time is an issue that plays significantly in this) encounter as "knowledge" about the thing, but this kind of knowledge never even beholds the thing to encounter it. The encountering is a temporal dynamic, not an encounter at all, for, for this, one needs to put down the years of knowledge building.
Guess the point would be that the beyond is right there, immanent, not transcendental, and the Buddhist/Hindu thinking is like rope and snake of Vedantic thinking: merely an error in judgment/interpretation, it is just that interpretation is not simply a tag of words onto the world, but are dynamic and powerful attachments (as the Buddhist would put it. The final step in Buddhism is the liberation from just these conceptual attachments, it can be argued) . I think this important: It is not so much that what is behind the sense of not revealed (a Kantian, et al claim), but that the revelation is there, at hand, before the waking perceiver.
I do struggle with the terms immanence and transcendence. In the end, there is no division, and to see this is to annihilate the past-present-future illusion. Concepts are just this.
It sounds to me as if you agree with Schopenhauer over Hegel. Is the world pure will, irrational and free. Or is the world pure reason wherein new truths build on old one in a structure. In medieval times, they had this same debate between Thomists and Scotians and I'm assuming Buddhism tends more towards will
Can you say some more on this? What is a 'revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world'? Do you see this as a possibility elsewhere - Christian/Sufi mysticism for instance?
I think its a problematically human-centric perspective. And it should not be forgotten that all we are talking about here are different perspectives, different seeings, not some absolute reality The problem is that cannot explain how the food and bowl, for example, is there for the dog; it is not there for her as "food" and "bowl", even if she learns to associate those sounds with the food and bowl, she cannot conceptualize them as items within a greater conceptual context. Absent language the cup and the coffee are not there as "cup" and "coffee" of course, and sometimes they may even be there for us absent language. (That said, they would not have existed in the first place absent language (culture), but that is a separate issue, it seems to me).
Have you ever tried hallucinogens or meditated?
Right, I think those metaphors are apt though, in that it seems as if that is just how life is for many people; a great supermarket created for our consumptive pleasure. Now we have the consumption of the consumer. It is "brutalist" indeed, in it's most banal dimension. I see metaphysics as very ordinary, but of course it would appear "lofty" compared to that all-consuming banality.
So the "journey back to life" as I see it it is just the journey away from the deathly banal to the merely ordinary. The ordinary is no paradise, it has its rigours, which are seen all the more as our gaze becomes less hypnotically fixed on the banal "life" of consumption. But at least then we can say we are alive in more than merely the "technical" sense, right?
Yep.
Quoting Janus
Yes, that's how I intended it. It's lofty by comparison with most current dominant worldviews.
When you wrote "journey back to life" it sounded like a metaphor for a revival/recovery/regeneration or reinvention - possibly even in a Nietzschean sense.
I am mildly obsessed with the ordinary which I insist of calling the quotidian.
I do have a lot of sympathy for the Nietzschean sense of "becoming who you are".
:up: :lol: @Wayfarer used to call himself Quotidian.
Sorry for all the writing. I got a little carried away.
Revelatory: Existentialist philosophers take the "distance" between what is said and what is actual very seriously. You read it in Kierkegaard, Sartre "radical contingency, Heidegger's metaphysics and nothing; Husserl is interesting: He thought one could see what is actually there such that the actuality witnessed is absolute, unqualified and non composite. Heidegger thought he was walking on water with this, for it is such an extravagant claim to say there is in one's worldly perceptual witnessing, a "presence" that is a pure, a kind of, "it is there" that can't be second guessed, is like encountering God herself.
And this gets to the point: Husserl famously defended his phenomenological reduction, or epoche. Keep in mind I am no Husserl scholar, but I have read him and about him, and these days there is a so called French theological turn I am reading which plays significantly through this reduction. The idea is, I think, very Buddhist, and Husserl does call it a "method" rather than just a theory. He holds that the object before your gaze is generally thick with the "naturalistic attitude" which refers to our everydayness affairs, but it is grasped with such spontaneity, it seems direct and natural. The epoche is a method of reducing this perceptual encounter to its bare presence, such that the object itself (back to the things themselves! is his rallying cry) in its intuitive purity is revealed. This purity has been hidden beneath experience all along, but we have been so busy, we never noticed it, and have never really been living in the "real" world, but in a kind of fiction of narratives with our established and habitual culture and language (Kierkegaard called this our hereditary sin, as an existential analysis of Christianity's original sin, which he derided).
Does Husserl's epoche bring one, with practice, to a revelation of pure phenomena? Are we not here very close to what the Abhidhamma calls, in translation, ultimate reality? Isn't the epoche what the Hindus called jnana yoga, a form of what we call apophatic theology, or neti, neti? Keeping in mind that one does not become the Buddha, as one is always already the Buddha, but needs to awakened to this. My thinking is, beneath the skin of experience, there is something deeply profound.
Non discursive: this is tough, for the argument goes that even when we are in our most spontaneous encounters with the world's objects, we never can observe actuality itself, because the understanding is essentially conceptual. Rorty was no rationalist, but he emphatically denied non propositional knowledge. Even in the most intimate moments of realization that I exist, one has to see that this is not being, but becoming I am witnessing, and becoming is time's past making an anticipatory future in the crucible of the present.
Indeed, this "actuality itself" is just vacuous metaphysics, they say. this seems like a strong argument, and it is, by my thinking, if it wasn't for that intuitive dimension of affectivity, like pain: take a lighted match and apply it to your finger and leave it there for a few seconds. Now, am I NOT in a Real actuality? Just because I live in an interpretative world of temporal dynamics, doesn't mean at all that I do not experience non discursively, events, like a burn, or a broken limb, or being in love or lasagna, or the direct apprehension of my existence. Implicit discursive processes, that only seem like immediacy, do nothing to deny non discursive intimations.
I agree with Husserl on the essential epoche as a way to self realization. His epoche is a less radical version of meditation.
Affective apprehension: what is nirvana? And what is liberation/enlightenment? The epoche is a method, so what happens when thought encounters the world, and is reduced to the bare perceptual away from the apperceptual (sp?)? The self becomes free. It is not just an intellectual movement, but an experience. Enlightenment is the wonderful feeling of experiencing the world free of implicit "knowledge claims, keeping in mind that knowledge never was just a conceptual tag hung on a thing; it is a conditioned response to the world established since the time of infancy, and it is settled deep into experience as a default acceptance of things. Release from this is not just a nullity, though there is much that is nullified. It is an uncanny experience of extraordinary dimensions.
That would be the nutshell version. Don't know about Sufi, Christianity has many mystics, like Eckhart, Pseudo Dionysus.
Yes, which accounts in part for my philosophical eccentricities. I would add, music is the voice of god. Music, mescaline and meditation: a very powerful antidote for mundanity.
I think the world is "set up" / evolves in such a way that the irrational and the rational both cohabitate. They depend on one another. I'm dragging the geometry as an analogy
A circle/ cycle is a phenomenon where a linear, discrete and rational thing - a line - is distorted by the irrational (pi) into a perfect loop. No start, no end. Pi as a number runs along infinitely never repeating itself (completely nonsensical) while a linear line is objective, reasonable and finite.
How many cycles can you name in nature that operate in harmony to establish dynamic but stable ecosystems? Planetary orbits? Seasons, tides, reproduction, the water cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, predator and prey populations, the clock of time, frequencies, vibrations, the pendular back and forth swing of Liberal and Conservative governments, war and peace time, circadian rhythm, music, patterns, hormonal regulation in the human body, learning and teaching, the list of cycles of opposites goes on and on. Wherever two of nature's cycles oscillate or overlap with one another a new emergent property appears.
Buddhism is even founded on a cycle - samsara. Perhaps that is the truth of things.
I've been interested in epoche for some time. Since I was a child I have often found myself regarding the world around me as unfamiliar and strange and wonder at this. It leave me feeling light and unshackled. In the quotidian life we inherit/develop a way of seeing that seems to be primed by conceptual schemes. You seem to agree.
Quoting Constance
Quoting Constance
That is an interesting idea. Self-realization seems to involve a type of self-shedding, no?
Quoting Constance
That's a striking description and resonates with me.
You believe that nirvana is merely an uncanny experience? Like seeing a ghost or something?
Not purporting to answer for @Constance but I'd say it's an altered state of consciousness, not a matter of seeing something uncanny (like a ghost) but seeing ordinary things uncannily.
Note the definitions of 'canny' given here:
Definition of canny
(Entry 1 of 2)
1 : clever, shrewd a canny lawyer also : prudent canny investments
2 chiefly Scotland a : careful, steady also : restrained
b : quiet, snug then canny, in some cozy place, they close the day Robert Burns
If you since childhood had this feeling that something was simply out of sync between you and the world, then I most certainly do agree here, and this is a major theme, if not THE major theme, of existential philosophers, that impossible distance that defines and undercuts all relations, as it is a "suspicion" at the base of all things, preventing one from being part of the world's affairs. As I've read, what this is about entirely rests with what kind of person you are. Putting it very plainly, either you are inclined toward a "spiritualist interpretation", or you are not. Look, I am not a great mathematician or visual artist, though certainly some are. We are all very different kinds of people, and some are possessed by this impossible intuition about the world, others are not.
The objection would be that here, in religio-philosophical inquiry, one cannot make extravagant claims about something only some can see. This undermines philosophical objectivity. I respond, there is nothing I can do about this difference among people. It is simply there. Even those who provide me with the basic vocabulary to talk about such things often seem unable to affirm this in experience. Those who can they call mystics.
My own thinking is that the jumping off place for philosophy is where a person encounters the "saturation" of existence by indeterminacy. This is rather an involved discussion.
Quoting Tom Storm
But then, what is a self? It is here, in the way we think about basic ideas that all of this unravels. It is not so much a shedding but a realization that this self is something else. Many ways to approach this. One is to consider time to be foundational. you know, ask me what the past is and all I can give you the "present". Past and future cannot be observed and are in a very important way, just fictions of process that is just transcendental, for one would have to be outside time to say what it is, this temporal unity. The self, it has been written is not in time. It IS time (Kant, Heidegger, in different ways). Buddhist enlightenment is to stand timeless before the world, and the only way to explain this is to actually stand thusly, and acknowledge it.
Quoting Tom Storm
Me, too! this experience is utterly fascinating, poor as I am in understanding it. Christians say God is love. I say, love is being in love, listening to Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose (Ma Mère l'Oye, esp. the second movement. You may not be into this; it matters not), autumnal affective indulgence (whatever that is), the standing there and simply having the world transfigured into pure phenomenological bliss that fills the horizon of experience. Now there here is a discussion the likes of Meister Eckart could only talk about. Not exactly philosophy, is it. but this is where philosophy goes, ineluctably.
See Wittgenstein on value in his Tractatus, Culture and Value, Lecture on Ethics--this god of analytic philosophy, he knew human affectivity was off the far off radar of our "states of affairs".
I did say "experience of extraordinary dimensions" which doesn't sound like something is "merely" anything. Quite the opposite, wouldn't you say?
But this uncanniness does need to be looked at, for it is not the kind that applies in familiar contexts, that is, it is not like a ingenious move in a game of chess or a knack to catch on to things (an uncanny ability). It is of all things in a sweeping impossibility, impossible because there is no assumption lying in the background that it couls make any sense of it. Making sense is fitting into a body of "facts" and their logical construction. The only way explaining could work is in a shared experience with a language index, as when one sees a thing and reports to another the thing seen, and the other "knows" this because it is familiar. It is shared familiarity that makes language possible, not qualitative content, and ours is not a society of mystics!
I think this uncanniness goes to subjectivity and the apprehension of the self: what is existence? there is, in this question, something impossible, yet there on the intuitive radar. This is me, and one can discuss this in a qualified Cartesian model of existence: the closer inquiry moves to an affirmation of existence, to more uncanny the world gets, and this movement is toward subjectivity. Buddhists affirm just this, and the uncanniness here is the kind of affirmation of a qualitatively different content from our everydayness.
Quoting Constance
Yes, I agree with this too.
A brain state, yes. A suppressed DMN, to be precise. I don't think that uncanny is a good descriptor though because it means something strange, particularly in an unsettling way. That's why I mentioned a ghost sighting. Seeing a ghost would be both strange and unsettling. Nirvana, on the other hand, means liberation from the cycle of life and death and perfect happiness. Quite unlike a ghost sighting.
Also, if Constance is talking about a transient experience then they are not talking about Buddhist nirvana and the liberation from karma and the cycle of life and death.
Nirvana - liberation and not 'unsettling'
Constance's uncanny experience - unsettling and of unknown duration
You can think of it as a suppression of the default mode network, and what does that mean? It means the suppression, or better, suspension, of our usual "canny" ways of dealing with the world. This may happen with ingestion of hallucinogens, and can that experience not be uncanny? It may be deeply unsettling to the discursive mind.
Quoting praxis
That's one, perhaps simplistic, interpretation of the meaning of nirvana. Buddhists have also said that nirvana just is samsara. Do we know what that experience is for adepts? Must it be the same for all, in any case?
Indeed. I'm not someone who has reason to believe in the existence of Nirvana/enlightenment (except perhaps as metaphor), but what can we meaningfully say about such a nebulous conceptual artifact if we are not actually there? I had read and heard that the experience of attaining (if that's the verb) enlightenment can arrive as a great shock.
I'm with you; I don't believe in Nirvana as some eternal, in the sense of endless, or of infinitely great duration, existence; I see it as being eternal, in the sense of stepping out of the temporal round of "birth and death" (birth and death understood as being the mechanically automatic fluctuating states of the discursive self) and entering into a dimension of experience which is as Blake expresses it:
[i]To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour[/i]
Well, I've never heard of a Buddhist heaven, high up in the clouds or whatever, so nirvana must be right here, neck deep in the midst of all the shit. Where else would it be?
If we're talking about Buddhist Nirvana, it must only be what they claim it is. If we're not talking about Buddhist Nirvana, then we are completely free to confer whatever grand and nuanced meanings we wish to our uncanny experiences.
I like this line. :up:
So where is the adept who has reached nirvana when her body dies, and "all the shit" along with it?
Quoting praxis
The only consistent claim seems to be that it is liberation from suffering, perfect peace and happiness. Perhaps you are thinking of different associations of the word "uncanny", but for me that experience would be uncanny indeed.
If you want to say it is necessarily thought of as permanent, then how would you answer the question above about the whereabouts of the enlightened adept. The other thing to consider is how it would be if you found yourself permanently is such a state, and become used to it such that it is your native state, as opposed to being thrown into it from time to time, via hallucinogens or whatever. I tend to think it would seem more uncanny in the latter case.
Buddhists do not consider liberation a temporary mental state. That's pretty clear, isn't it? If a person is 'reborn' in any sense, then according to a Buddhist it is because of their karma, which means that they are not liberated.
That's a strong generalization. I think if you perform an internet search "Is nirvana a permanent state" you'll find that it is not uncontroversial. Secular Buddhists in particular might not agree that it is. Studying the brain chemistry involved in states of consciousness might lead to thinking it would be impossible for it to be so.
The existence of God is controversial also, nevertheless belief in God is kind of a prerequisite in many religions. Maybe there are secular theist too though. Wouldnt surprise me in the least.
:up: Especially among Buddhists.
Yes, and it has often struck me that theists are not conceptualizing the same thing when they allegedly share this belief. The notion of god seems incoherent or 'diverse' enough to embrace everything from the 'ground of being' to a throne dwelling elder, with a flowing grey beard.
It seems as though the mere consideration of "what god is/could be" is, in itself, the most omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient thought possible - it contains all imagination, logic/reason and ethics to be so, standing the test of time, ever present in human consideration, impossible to prove (reduce to a singular thing) yet impossible to disprove by proxy. Argued infinitely. Something that could be anything... Perhaps then is everything.
Is it so far fetched, though? After all, God is more than just an anthropomorphic image constructed out of the imaginations of a people. It has this solid basis in the world upon which fictional thinking rests. Keeping in mind that, speaking of the anthropomorphisms of religions, all we ever see is anthropomorphic, meaning what we call perceptually "out there" cannot be removed from "in here". To do so just yields an abstraction.
God is all about our ethics and the great question that haunts our world: why are we born to suffer and die? The what-to-do questions presuppose this ethical primordiality of our existence. Buddhism, in it analysis, I think addresses both.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Quoting Constance
I strongly disagree. Can you make an argument for why you think God (or religion, including Buddhism) is all about our ethics?
But you know this is because this is all scripture based and no care at all is given to making religion respectable to sound thinking. Philosophy is the cure. Philosophy's mission is to replace religion by rationalizing its content (rationalizing in the good sense of this term).
I think the term generally refers projecting features we possess on to foundational descriptions of the world. But take reason: can judgment about what the world is in any way escape the imprint to the reason inherent in the judgment itself? It is not just about blatant physical features as in the image of an old man on a cloud. It is all constitutes human experience, and in this, nothing we give thought to can be free of the anthropomorphic features that are inherent int he thought.
Quoting praxis
It goes to the matter of metaethical questions and the metavalue of ethical issues. Our mundane ethical affairs have metaphysical underpinnings, and it is here that religious mythology meets the world of the actual.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. "What-to-do questions" are questions of normative ethics and not metaethical. In any case, you've made an argument?
What to do presupposes the doing carries a certain weight. Metaethics inquires about this.
"Meta" is an indication of a higher order of analysis, as in metalanguage or meta-anything, really. I refer you to Wittgenstein, just for one. See his Lecture on Ethics, which is available online, I think. ethics has as its core what can be generally called value, and value is the essential ethical presupposition of good and bad in ethical matters. Witt wrote that the good is what he calls divinity, and he meant that value is simply in the givenness of the presence of the world, and is therefore not reducible. Not unlike wwhat analytic philosophers call qualia, but on this, see Moore's Principia Ethica in which he referred value statements as possessing a "non natural quality". He was referring to the metaethical dimension of the good and bad: Put a match to my finger for a few moments. This powerful event is NOT found in the "states of affairs" of the world, and hence, says Witt, it is nonsense to talk about. But it IS there, only unsayable.
I disagree with Witt, somewhat. I think you can talk about it. Value is the weirdest thing in the universe, but talking about it is done indirectly.
To your mind, have you made an argument for why you think God (or religion, including Buddhism) is all about our ethics or are you ignoring my question?
It's white not grey...dammit!
No, this is just the introduction. The reason why God is essentially an ethical account is because God was conceived in a response to the ethical indeterminacy of human existence. A difficult matter to discuss briefly, or at all, for one has to take a hard look at value-in-the-world. There is some length to deal with.
First, it has to be acknowledged that the meaning of human existence refers us to two kinds of meaning. There is conceptual meaning that defers ideas to other ideas, as when the response to the question, what is a bank teller? is other definitional terms, like money and economics, savings accounts, and so on. These can and do, of course, defer to other terms for their meanings, and this is an endless game of questions and answers (Derrida's "Differance" is about this). The other kind of meaning has to do with value, as in, This strawberry is so good! or, I love Julian! this kind of thing is NOT something that defers to something else for an account of what it is, and this is an argument of critical importance in metaethical analysis: The "good" to the strawberry, what is this? This is a kind of good that refers directly to the good experience of the taste and the satisfaction it brings. It does not refer us (defer) to definitional meanings that circle (hermeneutically) around. It is a "given" of the world. On the radical negative side of this, the lighted match on your finger gives pain, and pain is not analytically reducible. And as Witt would say, givenness is not factual, meaning we cannot talk abou it, and that which cannot be talked about "should be passed over in silence."
So we can't really talk about value as such, and more than we can talk about analytic's qualia. It is a phenomenological irreducible.Now we can turn to God and the world. If we lived in a world of Wittgensein's facts, like in that big book he talks about in his Lecture on Ethics, there would be no ethics, for ethics has this, call it a non natural property, like G E Moore does, and what is this? This is the ethical bad and good. Consider: the lighted match applied to your finger, there is more here than the fact can say, for this is in the world, and propositions are only as good as far as the world shows itself, and the "badness" really does not "show" itself. It is an odd thing to try to wrap your mind around, this elusive "value" property, for it is neither rational apriori nor is it empirical, and yet it is the most salient feature of our existence. the argument cannot really proceed until Wittgenstein's point is clear: When he says talk about value is nonsense, he means it is not a idea of "parts" that defers one to something else to explain it. It is, as Kierkegaard would put it, its own presupposition, a "thereness' that is both in the world AND apodictic, and just as one can't explain logic (why does modus ponens "work"?), nor can one explain this.
Any thoughts so far? We all know that logic is apriori, that is, validity depends on logical form only and tautological relations are absolute (though we are not going into post modern objections to this kind of thing here). But to say something in the world is also apriori is impossible. The world itself would have to possess something intuitively absolute, like logic, only REAL.
There is, of course, more.
I'm being patient. :smile:
Okay. On the table is value, as I say, the weirdest thing in the universe, by far, this "badness' of a scorched finger. It deserves to be released from the contexts we like to give things, for these knowledge claims contexts bring the world to heel, and it gives us the illusion that we understand it. But it is clear that when it comes to the primordiality of what is "given" we are of our depths, (and I really should add that the essential inspirations I am dealing with in all of this were conceived in the minds of others, whom mention only in passing from time to time. E.g, Jean luc Marion's Givenness an Revelation had a profound influence. Alas, I am not just making all of this up myself. I do, as do all, carry my reading into my own thoughts). Value is a term that encompasses the affective side of every experience we have and it is ubiquitous in life, for everything moment of lived life is a value-moment, as with the interest in play as I write these words. When I wake in the morning, value i always already there, in the mood, the recollection of before and the anticipation of the day. It is not an analysis of our theories and the cognitive events of our lives that make for the important discoveries in the, if you will, foundational meaning of life. It is the AFFECTIVE part of all this, and this cannot be emphasized enough: We, in this grand dramatic narrative of life are not seeking some propositional satisfaction, the error analytic philosophy makes (close to early Wittgenstein on this); we are seeking deeper, more profound VALUE in life, which is why I take Buddhism and nirvana so seriously. And this is God: the embodiment of absolute bliss, the affective response to the value indeterminacy (and thus, the ethical determinacy; see below) and value desperation of our lives.
What I am doing here is an attempt to penetrate into what God is really all about, certainly not some pointless exposition of what people, believers, atheists, traditions and history say, moving along wn the usual circles. Since God is not here to be examined, we have to go on what is there, in the world that gave rise to the conception in the first place. This brief talk about value tries to make clear that the issue that God is a response to, not a deficit in the understanding as a knowledge deficit, though this is not apart from the matter, but to the horror and miseries of the world, as well as its blisses and indulgences, this uncanny value-nature of our being here.
As to the ethics: If God is an embodiment of, call it a value perfection: god is love, many say, and what is love but happiness? And what is happiness: the summum bonum; then how is there a connection between God and the world, for God is an absolute, a metaphysical entity, and there is no apparent metaphysics in the world, because if there were, it would be metaphysics, would it? This is the last part of the argument.
Are there issues in any of this thus far?
To be as succinct as I can, desperation is reckless in nature, leading to rash and extreme behavior. Such behavior is quite often less than exemplary in good moral character.
Desperate people are easy to lead though, the more desperate the better.
But here we are at a "second order" of inquiry. First order inquiry can be talk about our relations, moral character, and ethical behavior, but a second order of inquiry asks questions about first order presuppositions. So, what is exemplary moral character about? It has to do with right choices, motivations and intentions, but intention to do what? Treat others as one should. Why is this a concern at all? Because all people are vulnerable to suffering. If a person cannot be hurt at all, then this is not a person for whom others can have a moral obligation. Then what is suffering that is generates moral possibilities? This is the question taken up here. It is a metaethical question, a question "about" morality. It is a question of the ontology of morality, a "what is it? question.
The essence of morality is cooperation. You seem to be essentially claiming that it's avoidance of harm. Harm/care is only one dimension of morality. This is important because the aspects that you neglect are essential for religion to fulfill its purpose (it's not all about our ethics).
Cooperation? Cooperation for what purpose? Cooperation, principles or good conduct, a "good will", weighing consequences in terms of utility, and anything else you can talk about in ethics and the determination of what makes right and wrong actions what they are, beg the one question regarding the nature of what it is that is at stake, and this is value. Value is ubiquitous in our affairs, but, to use Witt's language, value is absent from the facts of the world. Take the color yellow. What is this? There is nothing to say. Obviously, you can talk about it, but this simply brings context into the definition, and all contexts get their meanings from their own contextual embeddedness. This is what is meant by contingency in language (and what Derrida had so much fun with; and essentially why Dennett denied qualia made any sense). What you cannot say is what the color yellow is apart from contexts, and this goes for everything, really. The interesting, impossible thing about value is that, unlike yellow, value "speaks" in a way. It carries the injunction to do or not to do something. this is where the argument is going: why should a person, as a default principle of moral action, not harm another? Talk about the contract one has implcitly with society, or the law, or rules and the like, do not penetrate to the core of this matter, for it defies analysis. One should not harm others because it hurts. What is this? What is that scorched finger feeling like? Talk is useless. Was this a result of evolutionary processes that favored pain and pleasure over their competitors in the struggle to survive and reproduce? Yes; and? It is beside the matter altogether.
The claim is not that a metavalue account of ethics is everything there is to ethical decision making. It is just that other questions are suspended here simply because they are not relevant to the inquiry.
Talk about God is why this metaethical line of inquiry is taken, and questioning about God is metaphysical inquiry.
Very true Constance. I agree. "As above so below" (hermeticism). In other words what is out there reflects what is within. We perceive reality based on what we hold within. If we are pessimistic - full of doubt, negativity and a feeling of general pointlessness, we shall only see that negative side of the external world. If we are hopeful, optimistic and bright we will likely see that side to daily life beyond ourselves.
We don't need to anthropomorphise reality to bring it down to our level. In fact, we can alternatively see ourselves as but a fraction of the whole..
The great question: why are we born to suffer and die? Can be answered with "to suffer is to understand what is not right with the world, to be born is to participate in that great battle, to exert influence on the outcome. To live is to have the opportunity to circumvent suffering not just for yourself but for your loved ones. Your ability to tackle suffering with knowledge and empathy extends well beyond the self. That is the godly approach to ethics.
We have choices to make. Those choices impact ourselves and others. The pursuit of knowledge, of awareness - of self and other simultaneously, is to take full control of yourself and be responsible for your actions. Only when we know ourselves and control our actions can we truly influence others in a beneficial way - all things considered.
Whether you believe in God or karma (Buddhism) - No one can deny you have authority over yourself. And that authority can both ruin others lives or fulfill them through action. The choice is always yours. For better or for worse
You haven't talked about metanarratives yet, which is curious.
I think you have something there, and it has crossed my mind more than once. I have some thoughts:
We suffer and delight in the world because this teaches us what these are, so what are they? Take an example: drive a spear through my kidney and what you get is an intuitive disclosure, to put it formally, of an injunction NOT to do this to yourself or others. Why? Here, again with some jargon, the moral precept is its own presupposition! Meaning, to witness the pain IS the precept! This, as you say, is the "Godly (I add the capital letter) approach to ethics." I think this right! But how is it Godly?
God is a metaphysical issue, and can't be observed, but only be acknowledged in a recognized deficit of some kind, and in human epistemology, everything has this. Everything. For all knowledge claims are dubious at the basic level. Take space: If I say I am in a room, but cannot say at all where the room is, then clearly, I don't where I am beyond being in a room, but note: we have in the background of the question Where are you? a whole body of meaningful possibilities, and the judgment that I do not know where I am plays against these possibilities. I mean, to know where the room is has to refer to some building, street, a town, a state...the world, and so on; so being in a room really presupposes the room is somewhere of a body of possibilities everyone knows about. Eventually metaphysics steps in, for beyond the world and the universe, your intuitions take you out until meaningful talk disappears....but the world-in-eternity does not disappear. I can't say what eternity is, but there is this very weird deficit in the boundlessness of space, which we simply ignore, after all, what can be said? Clearly, space as such just doesn't matter; it is not really an issue. But intuition insists that space beyond what we can say, is not nonsense; it is a palpable insistence that space is eternal, whatever that means. I think space is a good introduction to the interface between the infinite and finitude.
Now take God and ethics: God was produced by culture to address a profound deficit, and the term we have for this is moral nihilism, just what Wittgenstein had in mind when he said value had no value, and if it did, it would have no value. But very plainly, the pain of the pierced kidney and the joy of being in love, these are absolutes, and as such they belong to metaphysics (hence, unspeakable). How is this so? This is the line of thought that leads to what I would dangerously call metaphysical affirmation.
To suggest that anything metaphysical is reducible to a metaphysical narrative, like Christian metaphysics. But this really doesn't get interesting until one turns away from the grand narratives to the micronarratives of everyday living. The question is, what is not a narrative? and the usual answer to this is science, but this idea of narration needs a little exposition: It is assumed that a story is a piece of fiction, but then, at the level of the most basic questions about the world, is it possible to remove "narrative" from even science? Rorty and others argued that knowledge itself is a pragmatic social function, and this does ring true when you think about the inter-relational nature of language, that language and logic formed out of communicative needs: a word belongs to speech and writing, and these reach beyond subjectivity, and it is argued that self's thought and the self itself is an intersubjective construct, an internalization of observed relations and the noises and gestures made to reach from one subjectivity to another. So, when I have a thought in my head, I am essentially "talking to" myself, treating myself as an "other" and the divisions in the world are reducible to just this language divide we created in the social matrix. A self IS a social matrix. Heidegger doesn't say things this way, but his dasein is very much an existential environment of social possibilities.
There really is something to this. Herbert Meade, I recall, thought like this and his argument was more conventional, referring to observations of animal behavior and the like. Is the self a walking micro-narrative, a part of a system of institutions laid out by culture and history, wrought out of social needs? Yes, I think so. But this doesn't address the issue at hand.
There are many ways to explain a human being. How about neurology? Or physics? Or genetics? Or evolution? These are "natural sciences", and they presuppose the givenness of the world; and they do not touch metaphysics, and God is metaphysics. One has to bring analytic discussion of this observable world into a "context" of metaphysics to talk about God. The obsolete grand narratives of the past are now in retreat, and this opens philosophy to either empirical science or phenomenology, and empirical science, regardless of how speculative extrapolation can carry its paradigms into meta paradigms, is metaphysically question begging, that is, ask a scientist about basic assumptions, and she won't know what you are talking about. Not really.
The way to make this connection between finitude and infinity, if you will, begins in two places. One is the Kantian need to discuss noumena, and other is ethics and metaethics. Painfully simply put, Kant insisted we had to talk about metaphysics, but cold know nothing at all about it, because there was nothing in t he sensuous medium a concept could bond with. But: how is it that he simply had to talk about it? There must be in the world something that intimates this, and this is the very essence of metaphysics: the deficit, the "nothing" that inquiry encounters; this is an existential nothing, meaning if it were not there, then world itself would be radically different, and this is arguable, of course. The movie Pleasantville comes to mind: Two kids are thrown magically into a world of black and white where no one can even imagine an "outside" to the town of Pleasantville. That is, not until their eyes open, and they begin to see color and conceive of a fuller sense of what is there already: something always already there, simply not acknowledged! So we live in a world in our everydayness much like this: metaphysics is always already there, but it needs a catalyst to bring it to discussion. Science is like this, surely, for science "discovers" the world. Here, it has to be admitted that metaphysics is discovered as a profound deficit in our understanding that is "there" in all things always already. This is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence: take any concept about the world, any at all knowledge claim, and it can be demonstrated readily that there is no "center" no "final vocabulary" no "metanarrative" no stone tablets or anything at all that will intimate what is truly and really what the world IS.
There is a LOT of philosophy in the above. But I can tell you the conversation phenomenologists have been having on the matter of metaphysics for the last two hundred years is fascinating.
The final premise lies with a phenomenological examination of the meta ethical dimension of our existence. Is this okay?
It sounds like you've determined indeterminacy. Nicely done. :up:
You mention God several times and do you use to to refer to a being undisclosed? Humanity lives in time even if its spirit does not. I have several objections to a being who is father if humanity in the divine sense. This being, according to classical logic, will have never suffered like its sons, loves necessarily and yet somehow (?) freely, and is the active cuase and lives within every crime, ugliness, and humiliation thar there has ever been. Something about the idea seems absurd to me and I genuinely doubt it exists
Buddhist seem to think like I, the world being being and Nothingness, a yin and yang of opposites. For how can an untainted God sustain the being of what is ugly and offensive to all rational creatures? How can courage to expressed by a God that already has it all thanks to what he just is? How can he brag to Job? How can he live and sustain a child's cancer, asking it to accept the pain because when it gains the power of reason it can learn from the pain. And a pain this God knows nothing of first hand. None of this sounds right
You did put your finger on this. Nicely done yourself! Because this is where the argument lies, in the determinate world where things are usually clear as a bell and the intimations in this world of imcompleteness. Metaphysics is a term that has its existence "discovered" at threshold of knowledge, but not where science meets its anomalies (as Thomas Kuhn put it way), rather, where epistemic inquiry meets a wall of "impossible" knowledge: non propositional "knowledge". Such knowledge is found in the ethical dimension of our world. Any example will do: place your hand in a fire, and ask what is this pain? It is not a construct of language; it is the world itself "speaking" so to speak. It says, don't do this, to yourself, anyone, just keep this out of existence.
Of course, in the entanglements of our affairs, things get rerouted, and ethics gets messy and complex and full of conflicting obligations. But the primordial meaning is as clear as anything can be, and as such, is apodictic and indefeasible. Note how this kind of language is easy to recognize in logic's apriority; but here, this is not logic, but is the palpable Real. It carries the weight of a deity.
It's not the world speaking, it's you speaking. You are saying "don't do this," not the world.
Quite right. And this is just a manner of speaking, and it is why Witt refused to talk about it. It cannot be said. But consider the usual examples of so called qualia, being-appeared-to-redly, say. Qualia is an attempt to reduce things to their sheer givenness, apart from the ways contexts generate meaning. Compare this to the "qualia" of pain. Pain out of context is more than the context could bring into the making of meaning. This is a very big point: When the attempt is made to remove pain from its contextual settings, there is what you could call an existential residuum, a value meaning that is transcendental, that is, exceeds language's ability to say what it is, for to "say" is to contextualize, and contexts are suspended.
The obvious objection is just fascinating: the moment you entertain the argument's reference to qualia, you are already in a context, that is, to think at all is inherently contextual, so each utterance of "existential residua" is itself conferring context, if I can put it like that. But then, Kierkegaard haunts this issue, for actuality is clearly not language. That burning sensation is not a language experience, and there is nothing in language, it can be argued, that really sets those existential delimitations on meaning. Value-in-the-world does "speak" just not in words. Does that burn "say" with undeniable clarity, "don't do that"?
Of course it doesn't. People say such things. Burning sensations to not "say" things. Sensations are not independent minds that make recomendations or whatever.
If someone needed to cauterize a wound, for instance, they may think positively about a burning sensation and basically think "do that." The sensation itself doesn't care what you do.
But this is a long history of metaphysics talking, specifically, Christian metaphysics. Father? the author of all things? A creator? Why is this associated with God? To conceive in a way that puts the concept of God outside of the prejudices of narratives, of history and its groundless meta-thinking, requires a step beyond these. This is both difficult and easy: difficult because one has to step out of something firmly fixed in our culture; easy because the solution lies with the Buddhists, which a kind of apophatic existential approach, a "simple" dropping of the illusions of knowledge suppositions by practical negation: ignoring desires and attachments. The most fundamental attachment is knowledge of the world.
God was never this. This is the talk of a historical busy-ness of filling the concept with bad metaphysics. thinking of God, why am I committed to listening to anything that has not understood the one thing Kant really got right: Noumena is not discussable. Only what is before us can be talked about, and here there are things extraordinary, miraculous. Time and space: intuitively impossible, but there they are, embedded in eternity, so what is eternity? It is exactly what one faces when one puts aside all the knowledge claims implicit in our default understanding of the world. What is Being? it is exactly what one faces when one puts aside all the knowledge claims implicit in our default understanding of the world. This "putting aside" is not new to philosophy in the west. It is Husserl's epoche.
You said that attachment to the world is illusion yet you want us to take the world as it is presented to us. Is this not a paradox?
No, not literally. But the burn: I know what it is as well as anyone. It is not a "mere" fact of the world, this is clear. Facts are affairs that sit comfortable on the grid of logic: the sun is farther from the earth than the moon; the color green is of a higher frequency than red, and so on. There are an infinite number of facts. With value, there is something else, once the facts are exhausted for their content. there is the "non natural" property of good and bad. This finds its justification in the pain or joy itself--these serve as their own presupposition, as I have said. They are not things that defer to other things for their meaning; but the meaning is stand alone; the injunction, e.g., not to torture another person is found in the stand alone evidence of the torture experience itself, so when we do give this expression in language, the the expressed principle issues from the world, not just some arbitrarily conceived bit of pragmatic systematizing of our affairs called jurisprudence.
I am not going to take responsibility for the way the world is. I don't think the world is an illusion, as when I break a bone or slip a disk; but then, what we say about this pain when we interpret what it is is compromised by conflicting contingencies. And when we talk theoretically about pain, we have many contextual settings which qualify the pain in such a way that what is said is really about the value-arbitrary facts in which things are embedded, as when a patient at a hospital complains about some misery and this is instantly interpreted into medical jargon, and THIS displaces the pain itself, treating the pain as a subjective counterpart to the explanatory account. THIS is illusion. When I rise through the ranks at the office and make it all the way to manager, this is an illusion. The institutions of this world, an institution being something instituted, established, taken for a new reality, like the conferring of a name on a person, this is illusion. And the world we live in is a body of institutions. Language is mostly a pragmatic, intersubjective exchange of institutional knowledge.
What do they mean in the East when they talk about illusion? They are talking about interpretation, and interpretation is not just this pulling away from something to say what it is. It is, rather, affectively and cognitively qualifying as to the way a thing or a set of affairs is experienced. It is important to see that concepts are not simply what Kant thought, these principles of a synthetic function of the mind. As Kant conceived this, he conceived of an abstraction; not that he was wrong about synthetic functions, but that this is by no means all of what a concept is. A concept seizes hold of the world existentially, and is a powerful dynamic in normal perceptual experiences, always, already there in the simplest of apprehensions as an affective presence. The Buddhist idea of attachments is usually conceived as a kind of affective binding of the self to things, and this is of course right; but beneath this is the world-taken-AS, and I borrow this from Heidegger, who says when we encounter the world, we take the world AS the way we encounter it. he held that there is no way to a-conceptually or a-linguistically understand anything. I think he is wrong about this. I think when the Buddhist "goes under" and suspends consciousness's categories of taking the world AS (AS a tree, AS a cloud, or a mathematical formula, etc.) there is a radical departure from "the world", or there can be if things go right.
So we are talking about fantasies?
Quoting Constance
This is not true. Our world is quite limited. I know it may seem like we know, or can know, everything about the world but trust me, we don't, and I highly doubt that we have the capacity to know everything.
Quoting Constance
There's nothing unnatural about the experience or concepts of 'good' or 'bad'.
Quoting Constance
Our conditioning does not require justification.
Quoting Constance
Everything requires context to have meaning.
Quoting Constance
Arbitrarily conceived laws? :lol: But you're right of course, they don't issue from jurisprudence.
No. Someone extracts your tooth without analgesic: not a fantasy. In fact, far more ethically emphatic than any rule can possible be.
Quoting praxis
No, no. Facts. How far is London from your house? In fractions of an inch. In infinitesimally diminishing quantities? How many numbers are there?
Quoting praxis
Then you take issue with this, as do I, because the demarcation between what is natural and unnatural is arbitrarily drawn. But then the "goodness" in this sense taken up in ethical matters is sui generis. It is not like a good knife, say. A good knife is sharp, well balances, and so on. But say you want to use it for a production of Macbeth. Now the sharpness is not good at all; it is fact, bad. This is contingency, or relativity. There is nothing that cannot be recontextualized to change what it is. But then meta ethical judgments like pain is bad: these do not change. This is important: Conditions in whcih the judgment takes place can change, and this does make our ethical issues so ambiguous; but in cases where the entanglements are minimal, and the value as such is clear, even pure, as when you stick your hand in a fire, value is an absolute. Consider: your are given the choice to torture one child for an hour or a thousand children for eternity. Most would go the utilitarian way, and opt for the one child, but note: choosing this one child, because it is preferred on sound moral grounds of utility, in no way mitigates the suffering; indeed, unlike the the knife example in which a good quality changed to a bad one, here, it is impossible to mitigate the suffering. This is what is meant by the ethical bad (and good) being an absolute. It is not that it does not diminish here or there; rather, it cannot be mitigated. Nothing can undermine the badness, to speak awkwardly, of torture. Pain is apodictically bad.
And because this matter is not about logic's apodicticity, logic being the form merely of judgment, but about actuality, this absolute is existential. God's essence is her existentially absolute goodness. So called, "The Good".
Quoting praxis
Talk about something being its own presupposition is to say it has no explanatory ideas the reference to which is required to explain what it is. It is stand alone what it is.
Quoting praxis
And there you have it for all things, save ethics. Ethics' injunction to do or not to do in the matter of a phenomenologically pure case is indeed, stand alone. The justification for this claim s lies solely on the evidence the issues form the pain itself. If you have an issue with this claim, take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Do you not "know," thereby, this injunction not to do thiszzzzzzzz/ to deny this would be disingenuous.
Quoting praxis
Legal matters are embedded matters, and the engine that drives ethics, value, is made ambiguous. Most of our moral thinking is ambiguous, but the issue here is God, and, as I said, God is a metaphysical idea, and so the embeddedness of the usual moral thinking is suspended, for this embeddedness is a construct of facts.
You seem to believe that sensations, like the sensation of pain, have a moral quality. Do believe that an unpleasant smell, for instance, is evil?
Careful about the connotative value of words. You say evil and we think we are in a dramatic moral conflict between God and Satan, and this is precisely what bad metaphysics does, the kind of thing that sends women to a fiery death and the spiritual sanitization of social rules. Rather, life goes on as it always has, and the sense of what is good, bad, right wrong, and everything in between continues as it is, for there are no stone tablets and God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law. God is the insistence that moral nihilism is impossible. On the positive end, God is love. Why love? Because being in love is a powerful affirmation of our affectivity; no better reason than this. Love is the summum bonum.
But on the other hand, there is a point in this: If value is now to be cast as an absolute, then what of the plain regularities of our moral lives? Closer to Buddhism than anything else. In the Abhidamma, there are methods for achieving detachment from desires that include eating terrible tasting foods, and subjecting the body to a variety of discomforts (reminds me of the self flagellating Christians in a ritual renouncement of the world's and its original sin). The kind of thing that drove Nietzsche crazy (literally).
You advise care in connotative phrasing and in the same breath demonstrate recklessness. "God is love" is rather emotive. Rules for thee but not for me, it seems.
How can you know God so well, btw, to know that "God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law"? Do you believe that you are a God?
Getting back to your beliefs about sensations, I think evil is the correct term to use because you seem to be saying that sensations like pain have inherent moral qualities. I'm curious where you believe the moral quality exists. Is it somehow in the sensation itself or in what causes a sensation? For example, is the sensation of an unpleasant smell evil or is what causes the smell evil? A rotten apple will have an unpleasant smell and the cause of that smell could be determined to be bacteria. So does that mean bacteria is inherently bad or evil?
Emotivity is reckless? This does move into another part of the thesis. You mentioned unpleasant smells and the suggestion that these are elevated to a level of ridiculous prominence, and I thought there was certainly something to this. After all, talk about the apodicticity of value draws no exceptions, and does this not make the trivial absurdly grand? this kind of question pushes thinking into a clearer look at value-in the-world. So what makes a smell less grand than, say, Ravel's Mother Goose suite or Brahms's second piano concerto? Or being in love? There are caveats all over this, and this is where arguing, which depends on shared understanding, will not find the desired traction, for emotivity's attachments are not the same for us all.
Arguing that love is a value "phenomenon" (is it this? Phenomena are there, in the appearances of the world, after all. Does the "good" appear?), the desideratum and worldly consummation of which has existential "properties" that far exceed olfactory "properties" (and here we refer to something like Moore's non-natural properties; the "good" of the experience) is something of a fool's errand, for if it is not manifestly true, then forget it. But then, thee is a reason love is sung about, poetized about, and has been for centuries. there is this sublime dimension to it, and the desideratum of love exceeds, as Levinas would say, the desire. But one has to witness this to agree. Alas.
Quoting praxis
Keep in mind that God has been reduced only what is evidenced here in the world. God is, I have said, the response the the radical metaethical indeterminacy of the world, and it is reduced out of the standard metaphysics that gives us these problematic features. God is not a person, a creator, a judgment, a principle, a kind old man, and should not be conceived in the traditional way as something impossible remote. God is an embodiment of the extrapolative possibilities built into the world at the level of meta-inquiry. I witness love and suffering (as terms of general subsumption) and these possess their own meta-dimension. I infer God from these, if you like.
So, when you ask, "Do you believe you are God," you are drawing upon what I call bad metaphysics, a medieval Christian (and other) ontology.
Quoting praxis
And so, if you take that rotten apple and rub it in someone's face, is this not by default (defeasibly) wrong?
It is easy to confuse categories of thought, so you have to be more careful. Bacteria being bad is not at all on the table. I won't review the argument already there. You see by now that such a thing is, frankly, remote from the discussion.
Exactly Constance. I ought to explain my choice of the word "Godly" you're right. The reason I use this word despite it being a heavily loaded term open to infinite and largely variable interpretations is that everyone worships something. Everyone has a "god".
What we worship - what we strive for, as in our personal "ideal" is a core value, some belief or set of beliefs that we hold as those of the greatest value to the self when we navigate and interpret the world and try to decide what it means and also what we ought to do to/for or through it (reality).
For some what they worship is capital/wealth (the purely capitalistic amongst us). For others it may be more humanitarian in nature, but really it can be anything: our partner whom we love at the deepest level, music, art, fame, knowledge. All very worthy pursuits in their own self contained directive.
But what some people value at their core is likely to face more issues - ethical and rationally arguable, than other possible gods - sources of reverence/worship/love. Generally the more strict, dogmatic and defined our object/concept of worship is, the more vulnerable it is to being logically or ethically/morally opposed by others, defeating our core values and thus purpose, agenda and means to form meaning in life. This is very unpleasant indeed as it leaves you in somewhat an existential crisis when others don't agree with nor condone what one worships, what one fundamentally values.
That leaves us with a simple question. What ought we worship that others can get on board with? What ideal is the most superior ideal that others can support and enjoy and accept as reasonable or ethical or preferably, both.
For me such an ideal/source of worship ought to be something self evident, its reason to exist is simultaneously why it exists - or as you said the precept (adjustment of behaviour in accordance with it) is its own presuppositions (inherent reason to do so).
For me the only thing that can justify itself as a source of worship is fundamental truth. Because to know it is to have vast knowledge of its applications, truth pertains to actual knowledge, not just falsity/delusion but something better - the relationship between the two, what's true is logical, its reasonable and it can be used to make the most potent arguments as to why it is indeed true.
Furthermore, to communicate it to others is to be ethical because telling the truth is a good thing, it leads to education instead of ignorance, and abolishes arrogance in place of understanding and empathy of one anothers point of view. To know the truth of how we individually perceive reality as well as what that true reality actually is - in essence to know everyone's individual hang ups (paradoxes and contradictions between them as well as the fundamental truth of it all) is a most useful tool/device to increase awareness of it.
And many in the past have with varying success described that dynamic - Buddhism with the cycle of samsara, karma and nirvana (the peaceful bliss of knowing that what you believe is both correct personally and in reality at large) etc, taoism with their universal "flow", abrahamic religions with their prophets and the word of god (the truth).
A fundamental truth would be flawless - both moralistically and rationally. If one worshipped say money instead - then they have to justify why they ought to be wealthier and more privileged than another. They have to justify every issue to arise from the personal acquisition of wealth and the impoverished which naturally arise as a necessary opposite.
This is why I used the term "God", the "logos", the fundamental principle/law behind science, spirituality, trial and error, change, free will, etc. Something with ultimate explanatory power. Now that is something worth pursuing regardless of what we name it. But I would call it God.
I don't think so, or rather I might think it is under particular circumstances.
Quoting Constance
There are all sorts of conceptions, I imagine. You seem to believe very strongly in your conception so naturally I'm curious how you could have such strong beliefs. I speculate that in order to believe that you know God this well is to believe that you are a God or Godlike yourself. Is that not a reasonable speculation?
Quoting Constance
As far as I can see the only way it could be wrong by default is if there were somehow an inherent moral quality to the sensation or specific actions involved, in which case it could not be possible for rotten-apple-rubbing-in-the-face to be right in any way. I can imagine several ways that rotten-apple-rubbing-in-the-face could be seen as good. Perhaps the apple is moldy, for instance, and contains penicillium which could act as an antibiotic to help prevent the infection of a wounded face. Or it could be part of a hilarious slapstick bit. I love slapstick. Or it could be a punishment and seen as good because it may help to correct poor behavior of some kind. I also imagine that it may be possible that someone could simply, and perhaps inexplicably, enjoy having a rotten apple rubbed in their face.
Dewey had a good argument against utilitarian ethics based on pain-pleasure, as explained by Hilary Putnam.
The assumption that people act only on self-interested motives was sometimes defended on the basis of the hedonist psychology of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, which held that everyone ultimately "really" desires only a subjective psychological quantity (called "pleasure" by Bentham) and that this "quantity" was a purely subjective matter. As John Dewey put it long ago,
"When happiness is conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homogenous in quality, different from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end."
This disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the agent's "happiness" is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for the utilitarian to speak of "summing pleasures, "maximizing" them, and so on. But if Dewey's alternative view is right (as I believe), and if
agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,"
then
"of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."
Dewey continues,
"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.
Of course, I have to nit pick a bit, you know, philosophy. How is it that the logos can confer value agreement? We can argue, and I think this right (in fact, I think philosophy's mission is to replace religion, and philosophical argument will replace religious dogma; and this is something of an inevitability ...in a few hundred years or so, if we're lucky) but a bringing people together will require either a very liberal attitude that accepts what is really not agreeable or appreciated in the comportment of others who are different; or an agreement in values, such that everybody lives comfortably with others because they are essentially the same. The former is a tall order. Really, nobody wants to live with others who are so morally and aesthetically remote.
The logos refers to ideas, and rationalists tend to hold that the world will unfold in agreement is we could only "discover" the logical foundation of all things. They think there is a fabric of reason(in one way or another) that binds all things together, an if we could just see this for what it is, it would be like a revelation!
But I don't think this is right, simply because the logos is generally not conceived as a value-bearing concept, and what really separates us is our value differences.
So, I agree, this dialectic process of reasoning things through to their conclusions is the way things should be; but I don't think the world is that Hegelian (not that Hegel was an abstract rationalist. I'd actually have to look at what he says on this. His idea the "the rational is the real" is more complicated than this. I need to put aside three or four months and do just Hegel), that it is in reason's agreement in the end that will bring all things and people together. I think, rather, that, instead of a kind of logical hierarchy (ideas yielding better ideas) of the world, there is a value hierarchy. Look at this from a point of view of evolution (which I generally don't do): Here we are, and have come a long way from the primordial soup of things. What is the most salient feature of this journey? All that can be said in response this will beg a significant question, which is the value question. We have arrived at a place where there is music and art and this thing called happiness and misery and culture taken up in a human agency that is intensely engaged.
Hume once said that if it were up to reason as reason, reason would just as soon wipe out all humanity, for there is here nothing of value-meaning-content in reason. Reason is an empty vessel of logical structure, and possess none of this dimension of ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts and rights and wrongs. But value, now there is something palpable: the feels and feelings of the world! But they are unwieldy to agreement.
I do agree that there is in all of our affairs there someting as you say, science, spirituality, and all the rest of what we are, but the "behind" is a very mysterious idea. Keeping in mind that, as Wittgenstein understood, the logos cannot apprehend itself; it cannot say what the logos is, for the saying presupposes the logos. This "behind" is elusive; and yet: what is elusive really is possessed [u]in[/, the existence we witness all the time. This is the key to penetrating into this mysterious "behind" of metaphysics. It is not to look behind or beyond and the like; rather, it is to realize that what is manifest IS the behind of things.
This is a very important point, and it should also be emphasized that knowledge of the world is not lived experience.
But this kind of thinking denies that there can be a category of aesthetics, denying that each occasion of aesthetic experience is a kind of sui generis. I can't say I understand this in light of his Art as Experience which makes the aesthetic into a generalized pragmatic consummatory event. Art is "wrought out" of the art object's coming to being in the pragmatic struggle to produce it, and so, it has been said that this makes the well placed punch in the boxing ring inherently aesthetic. This sound to me like an attempt to conceive of the aesthetic homogeneously under a pragmatic interpretation of experience.
Buddhists are certainly attached to their system of beliefs.
I was hoping the comment might inspire you to be less general. It seems to have failed.
Im not in a tooth pulling mood at the moment so if youd care to say more about the comment of yours that I responded to with my beloved generalizations that would be great, or you can just ignore me.
A tough cookie in that one: what is "knowledge of the world"? And what is "lived experience"?
Maybe the goal is to have maximal vitality of mind, which experiences helps nurture. Emotionalized rationality keeps us always moving forward. One drawback of Buddhism *seems* to be that the excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya. Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish?
I meant discursive knowledge; the point is that such knowledge is always in the form of subjects knowing objects, or knowers knowing what is known, or objects analyzed in terms of their predicates, Lived experience is prior to that and not given or apprehended in such terms.
Unless perhaps the state of peace (lack of desire/ lack of the pursuit of control/ of making demands on others and the self) is equal to a state where contradictions/paradox has dissolved away. A sort of ego death.
Maybe desire is a process of an ego. And ego wants. Selflessness does not want, it simply "is/be's"
Or...let's cut the limbic system off from the rest of the brain. Isolate it, and then atrophy the pathways there to other sections.
On the surface it can seem accepting (Buddhism) and training us to accept, not fight. But when it comes to emotions and desires, it cuts them off from expression and action. Buddhists may claim that they accept emotions and desires, since they notice them arise and dissappear in consciousness without judgment (supposedly). But in fact they practice (train) NOT allowing emotions to become sounds, be expressed. They train not acting on desires. They train discoupling natural impulses, and their practices and even texts implicitly and explicitly judge and attack them. Of course, Buddhism is not alone in doing this. However they aim to do this totally.
All very good points. Ideally philosophy would subsume religions, perhaps not all of them because religions differ in their degree of dogmatic beliefs. Some are strict, fundamentalist and at times very imposing, therefore very easily reasoned against, others on the otherhand are more intuitive like taoism and Buddhism perhaps and therefore more relatable or approachable because they aren't trying to assert specifics so much, but rather a general idea.
Afterall, all religions, all spiritualities and philosophy and science are all observing and interpreting the same thing - reality. The universe.
I doubt all religion or the concept of religion will ever be dissolved fully by philosophy. My reason for example is that people almost always make the assumption that belief in a God automatically means one is religious. I believe in a god but I'm not religious I'm spiritual. I think intuition and empathy have a place beside reason and objective accounts of logic (as science exemplifies).
But I continously get bombarded with shock and intense debate from people that assume I'm religious. When I said no such thing. Because the idea of a god that they have is not the same as the god I ascribe to so they falsely categorise me. They believe religion is the only mode to perceive a god.
As I said the word "God" is not that useful when it's heavily loaded with abundant assumptions and contradictions. When it means something different to everyone. Even atheists have a belief in a god - the concept which they reject in their minds as non-existent. But presumably that is a religious dogmatic interpretation of "God" that they reject. You can't be atheist towards all possible interpretation of gods both past present and future, because you don't know what they are unless you ask the people who hold those beliefs. Hence why the term seems to persist for eons in human societies - ancient and modern alike.
But my interpretation of the word is apt for me because it includes a basis for consciousness (self/ personhood/awareness) as well as the external reality (universe). Anyone can coin their own term whenever they wish and for whatever purpose.
How artfully expressed. I agree. Reason without ethics (something objectively unprovable outside of consciousness, emotions and feelings) is cold, callous and dangerous. It can get things done but without consideration for how it ought to be done to get there. It's robotic. I feel this is why we often consider Artificial intelligence as sinister.
For example perfect logic to solve the problems caused by humanity (climate change, poverty, inequality etc) is to destroy humanity. No humans, no human problems. Its entirely rational but it is not the logos (ultimate logic) because that would have to answer to ethical considerations and the value of that.
Similarly ethics by itself (pure emotion/moral urgency) without reason is emotive agency/motivation without a means to apply it. It is erratic, irrational and aimless. No vision for outcomes. Its pure impulse. Trying to do good without knowledge is equally dangerous. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So for me it comes down to the Logos (the ultimate logic) being a harmony between ethics and reason. Ethics and reason both address what ought to be done to reach a goal. But without the help of eachother they are both blind in their own ways. Nature shows us that equilibrium is the only way forward. Its the most stable set of affairs for emergent properties (goals).
And nature is built in cycles, frequencies, repetitions. And what is a cycle/circle but the combination of the irrational (Pi - wandering aimlessly ad infinitum and never repeating itself, erratic) and the rational (a discrete line that goes from A to B and is predictable along all of its points). Only when combined do we get something that can change - has the ability to do work/get things done, but ultimately stays the same/is regulated - a cycle.
Quoting Constance
Hmm. Well I'm not so sure. I think it cannot apprehend itself when it is biased (too reasoning/rational or too emotive/ethical/irrational). I think the logos perhaps only knows itself through its own inherent equilibrium, when it is balanced, when "all things are considered"). It can only have "revelation" of itself when it "is" itself, its true nature.
When you say, "excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya,"I think you've hit one the nails in this business squarely on its head. The thought that emotions keep us pushing forward is not just a description of motivational dynamic, it is one of the structure of thought itself. After all (borrowing here rather obviously from a lot of philosophical history), to experience at all is to experience in time, and it is not so much IN time as it IS time. For me, this is one of the most profound things a philosopher can discover about the world: in the perceptual act itself, thought is conditioning experience; it is "always already" there, in the glace, the gaze, in which something appears and is tacitly understood without explicit understanding of the terms of discovery, I mean, the fact that seeing at all in interpretative, and not at all a "seeing" what is before me, for the understanding that is engaged is bound in a temporal dynamic of past/present/future, and it is not as if there really "is" such a thing" as the past or the future. Really, is it even possible to affirm the past AS the past? It cannot be witnessed, for to witness at all is a "present" event; so the past is never the past, really; it is an adumbration (to borrow) of an impossible-to-conceive "real" past. This is a revelation, if you think about it. Past is neither an empirical nor apriori concept. In fact, it is a genuine fiction, as is the future. Rather, past and future are pragmatic terms, useful, obviously; but in an existential setting that is utterly transcendental. What of talk about the historical record of one's education, informing occurrent affairs to anticipate in readiness for the future? This is a staple in experience analysis across disciplines, and it certainly is right to talk like this, but not at the level of basic questions; not here, in the talk of foundations that underlie everyday existence. Here we go as far as analysis will go, and this temporal dynamic falls apart very quickly.
Nor does the present survive, for this is a contingent term, meaningless without the past or the future. As I see it, it is important to see that this is not an abstract discussion, for as I feel and think even now, as I write, I am not In this; I am this. So what does a Buddhist do if not literally annihilate the structure of time, what you are calling maya. To meditate is to stop time, but this is not meant as a metaphor. the difficulty in understanding such a thing lies in the abiding foundation of time itself, which is, to speak plainly, the world, or, the world of illusion: this living, and importantly, existential "going along with" the thrust of this past-present-future.
A major theme of existentialism is freedom, and behind this is Husserl's phenomenological reduction which is a "method" (as meditation is a method) of suspending knowledge claims that implicitly tells us what the world is, and the "naturalistic attitude" of the sciences is his primary concern, for antecedent to to such claims, is the intuitional underpinning that provides the givenness of the world that is presupposed by science. Husserl believed inquiry can isolate this horizon if intuitions, and there discover absolute "presence". He has been attacked by almost everyone for this strong claim.
But then, these doing the attacking are philosophers, and not, well, "spiritual" inquirers.
Anyway, time, at the basic level of analysis, is key to an analysis of what Buddhists and Hindus call enlightenment. I am quite clear on this.
I would agree, as long as it is clear that "prior to" is understood not to say that one can have an an experience the is free of language and its meanings. Rather, the "lived experience" must be discovered IN this. Language and culture have to suspended in the openness of freedom, and this can be a radical suspension, but it is not that to think (all thinking is inherently discursive) is to cancel its possibility. I recall James' "blooming and buzzing" infant: this is what it would be like to without language.
Not sure if I agree that Buddhism is absurd. Is karma - the idea that if you behave as a d*ckhead (selfish) you naturally precipitate hostility against you not true? Nice people don't like, endorse nor support unkind, self promoting behaviour.
And will make it their agenda not to propagate that - by not supporting those that encourage such poor behaviour. If you take advantage of someones good nature you may benefit temporarily/in the short term, but the next time you encounter problems and need help they will not be so forthcoming to aid you.
On "desire" in Buddhism, the more you want and the less you get the more you suffer. "Greed is the bottomless pit" - never satisfied by what it already has, always in anguish that it doesn't have yet more.
On the contrary, wanting very little material wealth and preferring to Foster/enable good relationships offers security in that your "like-ability" to others ensures that your suffering or lack of a resources is an emotive source for others to aid you/ help you to feel secure and free once again. Your kinship is returned with gratitude and acquisition of the necessary means to provide you basic comforts/sustain you - the sharing of provisions. Good karma.
If I desire everything there is nothing left for my friends/loved ones. It's Egocentric. But if I desire only for my loved ones to thrive, and they recognise that, the karma will be employed to carry me on their successes. A share of the benefits sought and received.
Contradiction and paradox are the same thing. Two assumptions that are irreconcilable with one another. For one to be true the other must be false. But there is always a third option - obtaining the knowledge as to why they are both correct based on their individual self-referential truth.
Imagine two people looking at the numbers 69 from opposite sides. One says its 69 the other says its 96. Both are correct from their individual perspective, the information that has been omitted is their ability to walk around the inscription and view it from one anothers perspective.
They can then realise that context (from what angle they apply meaning) is essential. But contexts can be changed.
Quoting Constance
Quoting Constance
For Husserl , the past, in the form of the retentional , and the future, in the form of the protentional phase, belong to the present. The immediate now is inseparably all three phases. This a priori tripartite structure of the now is no fiction.
Forgive my lack of nuance but all experience is lived experience and we're continually intuiting or perceiving and predicting subconsciously according to our conditioning.
Do you think it is like this for animals?
Quoting praxis
I haven't said all experience is not lived experience; so I wonder do you understand that you are disagreeing with something? As to the fact that we, in our ordinary state of mind, commonly anticipate the future, I'm not seeing what significance you apparently think that has to the discussion.
I'll say that when you wrote earlier that "This is a very important point" I wanted to know why and have been trying to discover that since. There are different approaches to discovery. Sometimes a trial-and-error approach works wonders. Sometimes trial-and-error only produces errors. :gasp:
I'm earnestly searching for the importance of the point. The search has led me halfway through a Bergson essay today, in fact, which seems to shed some light. Bergson is anything but stingy with his points, unlike others, who shall remain nameless, for the sake of civility.
But what is it that holds the three together? In the startled moment when one levels at the world a question that stops the past from freely and seamlessly producing a future, this is, I would argue (inspired by others, obviously), a temporal rupture. Just as when the hammer's head flies off and the hammering gives way to a pause, a wonder, here, taken to the level of basic questions where there are no alternatives that readily fill the space of momentary indeterminacy, and here, there are no possibilities that can retake the occasion with something familiar, and there is nothing to step in and affirm an existence, and one faces nothing: past is suspended. I think when a Buddhist seriously meditates, and has success, this experience is a sublime transfiguring of the "present" if there is such a thing in this. This is why they have the term 'nirvana'; and this is the essential experience that generates religious metaphysics in Hinduism.
Husserl's reduction is an annihilation of time as well, taken all the way down the rabbit hole. Students were known find religion studying his "method". Then, of course, there is the French "theological turn" that rigorously plays this out.
I do wonder about animals in this. What they do not have is a capacity for reflection, and it is reflection that generates the ability to stand apart from one's affairs. Interesting to imagine what it would be like not to be able to second guess what lies before you as a thought, an activity, a behavior. It would pretty much be instinct all the way through.
There is this tendency to think that language interferes with "liberation", but it is also true that language makes liberation possible. Language produces the conditions of our everyday acquiescence, but it also produces the question, and the question is the tool that cancels thought processes and autonomic existing.
This is not how phenomenologists understand past. You are thinking in terms of traditional notions of the past as a separate entity from the present, occupying a separate position in a sequence.
For instance, for Heidegger, the past, present and future don't operate as sequential modes which mark distinct states of objects. They interpenetrate each other so completely that they together form a single unitary event of occurrence.
Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something as' something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.(Heidegger 2010b)
The returning from a totality of relevance in the act of understanding something constitutes temporality not as a present object happening IN time but as temporalization.
Temporalizing does not mean a "succession" of the ecstasies. The future is not later than than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.(Heidegger 2010)
Gendlin(1997b) echoes Heidegger's unification of the components of time.
The future that is present now is not a time-position, not what will be past later. The future that is here now is the implying that is here now. The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past.......the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in(p.37 )
No, I really don't think like that. Saying the past-present-future is really "of-a-piece" actually reduces the problem for the Buddhist who faces the singular event of realization which is ideally out of time because
the production of experience is terminated? This means that there is nothing to deliver the perceptual event to in order to bring something "to mind" and for the meditator, this task is singular. Once the occurrent experience is reduced, there is a broadening of the purely perceptual horizon, and a new interpretative occasion, something "wholly other" presents itself.
This is trouble for understanding, since to be there at all, to be an agency that beholds anything at all, must be in the historical framework that comprises the self. So, while the, call is the "purity of the perceptual event" broadens, the temporal self that is this very of-a-piece event that is the witness and the receiver of it cannot be annihilated, for this would be annihilation altogether.
But as I see it, it has to be understood that this analysis of affairs is entirely "about" something that is indeterminate. What makes determinacy is open; all contexts are open, awaiting, if I may, something else. The experience of Buddhist liberation is this; it is the 'other" that so intrudes upon the totality's grasp (to borrow a term), but is, to the likes Caputo and others, impossible, for they take the apophatic course that leads to a weakness of God, and other things. They don't take the course of discovery.
Quoting Joshs
Aside from being right and fascinating to conceive, this being ahead of myself is a useful heuristic from meditators trying to understand what lies before them, as they face the dynamic of thought intrusion. It is the intrusion of the future and the past; but this, I think, annihilates time altogether, for one is left, ideally, with no interpretative stand at all, which is the point.
I have written a critique of Varela and Thompsons
understanding of mindfulness and their misreading of phenomenology. Your depiction of a subject awaiting the objects of experience seems to overlap theirs, as if the act of attention is distinct from what one is attending to , and as if there could be such a thing as a pure, pre-reflective , pre-intending, non-judging and non-willing mode of awareness, a bare feeling of being.
Heres the abstract:
Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela ground the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of intentional acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness? Aren't they motivated by a sort of 'will to goodness', a preferencing of one affective dimension over others? It would seem that groundlessness for Varela and Thompson doesn't apply to the thinking of affect and desire. Despite their claim that nihilism cannot be overcome by assimilating groundlessness to a notion of the will, they appear not to recognize that the positive affectivities they associate with meditative practice are, as dispositions of feeling opposed to other dispositions, themselves forms of willing. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty show that attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard. As auto-affection turns reflexively back toward itself, what it finds is not the normative sameness and constancy of a neutral positivity( blissful, self-less compassion and benevolence toward all phenomena) but a newly sensing being. Thus, the basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply compassionate, empathic relational co-determinacy, but the motivated experience of disturbing CHANGE in relational co-determinacy.
Fancy encountering a set of foundational values like these through a system of groundlessness. Surely values can only be 'accessed' if you put them there in the first place?
Do you have a view on the practice of meditation, Joshs?
One thing that doesn't make sense in this is how Constance refers to knowledge suppositions as both cultural artifacts and fundamental attachments. If they're fundamental then they're not cultural.
They're fundamentally culturally attached, don't you know anything! :razz:
I guess it could be argued that one informs the other, surely? May there not be something fundamental in how our neural system generates a matrix of gestalts which also has a multiplicity of cultural possibilities based on time, place, etc?
It seems important that it be cultural rather than fundamental because if it were fundamental then metaphysical intuition would be impossible.
Can you explain this simply? What's an example of metaphysical intuition?
I can start by saying what I think meditation does not do.
1)It does not bring us to a state prior to desire or will
2)It does not precede intention or reflection
3)it does not achieve a state of neutrality devoid of affective coloration.
As far as what it accomplishes, I think that depends on what one believes it will do for one. Ones
beliefs about it will have a lot to do with how it seems to provide benefit( sort of like chiropractics). In general meditation is a concentrated form of attention on a goal.
Quoting Constance
As Jim Morrison says (in a different context) " words got me the wound and will get me well if you believe it". Animals have no language and no need of liberation, so it seems that language creates both the need, and the means, for liberation. Language provides the technics, makes the technics communicable, but the act of liberation is a going beyond the limitations of language, a stepping outside of it.
The tendency to become attached is fundamental, the actual attachments are culturally mediated. You can't become attached to something that doesn't exist in your culture.
I don't have a good grasp of it, I'm afraid. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Henri Bergson makes the claim that metaphysical intuition is the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible In terms of actual experience, maybe something akin to aesthetic experience, I suppose.
He talks about change or movement and a key demarcation from intuition to analysis is when an object stops moving, so to speak, like when marking a point on a line of trajectory, or to put it differently, when making a multiplicity out of unity.
Quoting praxis
This sounds incomprehensible (to me). But I do understand an aesthetic experience - let's just say they are the same so we can feel a level of certainty about the matter. :wink:
I don't care for the phrasing but I know what you mean and yes, in fact, I'm the worst. Just today I drove a half-hour to a client's office only to realize upon arrival that I forgot my briefcase, so lost in thought was I.
That's always an auspicious start for discussion.
Quoting praxis
What is it about the phrasing that troubles you? How would you express it differently?
Quoting praxis
I've done such things myself, so I can relate. Whenever such things happened I told my partner it wasn't the "early onset Alzheimer's" she imputed, but a case of 'professorial absent;mindedness'.
In any case it wasn't really absent-mindedness I has in mind when I spoke of becoming blind to lived experience, it was more being stuck in certain conventional patterns of dealing with 'the world'.
I wouldn't draw a distinction like this.The entire experience in the world, replete with no exception, abandons nothing that is not "pure". As troublesome as an idea like this is, this "purity", it is not meant to stand apart from anything, but is inclusive rather than exclusive. The "error" (the snake that is really a rope, of the Vedanta) lies in the interpretative meanings of ideas "in play", and there is no escape from this, but here, there is no escape and any divisions between what the understanding understands and that which is understood is made moot.
The idea is not to draw up a metaphysics. It is phenomenological: a description of a disclosure of something that permeates all things, just as a person in love lives in a world in which all things radiate with love. And here, the purity is not "pre reflective" but a-reflective: reflection can help achieve this, as jnana yoga helps achieve Hindu spiritual ends, but the point is not to stop thinking, but to stop identifying thinking with "Truth" with a capital 'T': "What is Good is divine, too. That strangely enough defines my ethics," wrote Wittgenstein in Culture and Value.
Not pre intending but the intended object and the intentional act are both subsumed. As one judges the world in one way or another, the judgment is within the event of the disclosure. The "bare feeling of being" is not to be qualified within an explanatory setting of philosophical talk that is alien to the "bare feeling". And again, "bare" is not an exclusive bareness. Rather, what is rendered bare, is all things. And divisions within plain talk are not nullified; they are subsumed.
Quoting Joshs
But "groundlessness" is an imposition of a term that does not belong. The challenging encounter certainly is in the historical record, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Eastern spiritualism. The trouble is, this is not taken seriously. Is this the hubris of Husserl and Heidegger and others who think the Greeks were the true progenitors of philosophical thinking? At any rate, what is being discussed here is not a thesis so much as it is a revelatory insight. The problems that arise in accounting for it lie in its simplicity.
I defer to Dewey on knowledge and the aesthetic. For him, the two are of-a-piece, part of the process of acquiring knowledge is the "consummation" of the acquisition, which is the pragmatic thrill of successfully solving a problem. Language itself is just this: a body of tools, "scientifically acquired" meaning we, as infants and children were faced with models of language behavior and internalized these to the delight of others, and therefore, to our delight as well. We "tested" our knowledge with primitive utterances, and found successes in the way these became useful, and this was all imprinted in our young psyches. Now that is a fundamental attachment. Language is also a culture carrier. It is not just words rules; words are presented in a body of attitudes and idioms and ironies and countless entanglements with cultural institutions. One doesn't simply hear the term General Motors and realizes it refers to a company that makes cars. It is discussed in many contexts of value, economics, jobs and employment. and so on.
E D Hirsh wrote a book a while back called Cultural Literacy, and he believed that there were certain things every American knows AS an American, like the fact that Lincoln was born in a cabin what the three R's are. He thought this is the kind of thing Americans must know if they are going to live among Americans. Of course, he was a conservative that didn't much like immigrants, and I don't care for this kind of thinking, but he did have a point: the simple things that flow through a society's culture are freighted by everyday language use.
Just to note: to separate desire and the desired is a verbal confusion I never understood. If I have the desired, do i stop desiring it? I don't think so; I desire still, in the gratification. The Buddhist idea of nirvana, putting aside textual authorities, is a profound affective experience. it subsumes intention and reflection, just as Kierkegaard's knight of faith takes in the world's finitude and Walt Whitman's song of the self tallies the world in grandeur. These are but pale versions of the boast of nirvana. Affective coloration is the very meaning of nirvana, it has just been misrepresented by those who want to separate enlightenment from emotion.
I want to say language sits comfortably along side of anything at all, like my cat does when I am not thinking about it and it is just there. SUre, there is language attending implicitly in the comfortable absence of explicit thought, but my cat could suddenly reveal herself as an avatar of God, and language could still be there attending to the spectacle.
On the other hand: In my best meditations, when things settle into an odd intimation of something just there, beneath the skin of the familiar, and there is something there, in the givenness of things, that appears just on the horizon of things, and I give this its breadth and depth as I can, I do feel the world receding and the revelatory event issues from within, as if to fill all things. It is a very strange business, I have to admit, which is why I feel the need to step into this discussion. Language does yield in that identities of things weaken, and something steps forward. And it is like going home, but this is revealed as within subjectivity, as if, as the Buddhists' say, one already is the Buddha, and it is a matter of discovering this.
In that case wouldnt it simply be repatterning to what youre calling lived experience?
Wow. That is very poetic Constance. Beautiful painting with words. Language indeed has the power to be used figuratively, as a metaphor, in a non-literal/sense to describe multiple meanings at once. To have many levels of depth accessible to the audience through interpretation.
Is that not the true foundation of any good poets work? To be most thought provoking without committing to any specific defined line of thinking, in other words to express the most by permitting the expression to echo out into the audience in multiple forms, multiple understandings?
I look forward to your future musings.
As I do your insightful thoughts.
Quoting Constance
Yes, I think there is something to be said for the idea of anamnesis; the process seems to consist more in unlearning that it does in learning. The drive to knowledge can become more acquisitive than inquisitive. I don't think of anamnesis as knowledge remembered that was previously known in another realm of the soul, but as reconnecting with the forgotten inherent wisdom of the body.
Language is certainly more fundamental than culture. Knowledge does not require language, however, so the fundamental attachment must go deeper than culture or language.
It would probably be helpful to discuss the nature of this 'fundamental attachment'.
Worse, I think there's a strong tendency in Buddhism to devalue rationality in their promotion of intuition and it has led to all sorts of problems for them.
Nothing out of the ordinary. The same kind of problems that exist in all religions.
Reason is essential for moral development. Faith, or intuition without reason, is moral stagnation.
When I mentioned absurdism I was referring to Camus. Buddhist accept the paradox of life and so in a sense do have faith that things will make sense in the end. Christians are like this too. Vicarious redemption is of course a ridiculous doctrine, but Christians have said they believe *because* it is absurd. To them its worthy of faith and this opens an important question about reason.
All faith has its reasons, which are wrapped up in what motivates the faith in the first place. One could use a concept of reason to refer to the elaborative articulation of the framework of a faith ( in the form of theory) , but I wouldnt claim that neglecting this articulative reasoning process prevents development. All one needs in order to be able to overthrow a faith is the minimum level of articulation to recognize that ones belief has been invalidated.
On the contrary, it can win you a foot race with a faster opponent.
It was a rare setup, you could not expect me to resist a Zeno paradox joke.
I was suspended, hence the late reply.
Postmortem, does the tath?gata ...
1. Exist?
2. Not exist?
3. Both exist and not exist?
4. Neither exist nor not exist?
Perhaps unlearning and learning are one and the same? In that maybe if there is a fundamental truth it is both that which we depart from (unlearn) as well as that which we return to (learn).
Such is the magic of constancy - the permanence of truth.
Quite right Bylaw! Intuition is the great instinct that propagates the life it imbues. Intuition ought never be ignored but rather, enriched with reason, to amalgamate the "whole".
Well put, I think. And, in the nostalgia, it is no longer recollection, for the experience itself is occurrent. As I remember, as Wordsworth put it, childhood's "clouds of glory" what was intimated then is intimated now, and the recollective way of summoning it is incidental. But in those years prior to reflection, we had no knowledge of what was happening, no contexts for discussion, so was there an agency at all, there to experience? Yes, I would say, but agency then was vague: who was it that was so content if the matter of "who" is something augmentative, constructed out of historical acquisition? An infantile affectivity lacks identity.
Forgotten inherent wisdom of the body?
I don't think language is historically more fundamental than culture, but is it even analytically more fundamental? For the analysis of a particle of language has to refer back to the contexts in which meanings are generated, and these are the historical institutions that were early on in play in the generation of symbolic thinking. This is one fundamental difference between Heidegger and Kant, that latter dealing with logical abstractions of language, the former dealings with all of these as of-a-piece. Dewey idea of a "consummatory event" is similar: the aesthetic and the cognitive and the meanings in solving problems issue from "an experience", a foundational original.
I knew a philosopher once whose least favorite word was 'intuition', because people take this to mean some kind of non propositional knowledge, a yielding of something quasi magical from the world itself, like writing on stones tablets from a mountain top. The way this goes is, take any given intuition, and tell me what it is. The meaning of the intuition is now understood, but only when it is set in a context of spoken possibilities. Outside of this context, that is, any context of what language can say, there is, you know, nothing to say. So all intuitions are propositional in their nature, and not mysterious emanations with some stand alone meaning.
Consider a very strong intuition like causality: It is impossible to imagine an object moving by itself. We don't give this much thought, but it is about as close as one can get to an absolute (putting ethics and value aside) and it is a very curious thing to me because it is about actual things and not abstract logic (I think Wittgenstein claimed that the intuition was essentially logical, but I'd have to find that). But what IS causality? Say what you will, but it is the language doing the saying. Apart from this, there is nothing to say.
Spot on Constance.
Quoting Constance
Well for me "causality" must (as all things must) be put in context.
Causality is temporal is it not? It relies on the passage of time: A becomes B becomes C. That is causality.
But what about in the case where time doesn't exist? For example in a case where "change" is impossible?
For me the only instance in which change is not possible is offered by physics - the speed of light.
At the speed of light, no energy can interact with/change itself/impart information. Because to do so would demand that somehow that information travel faster than the cosmic speed limit "C". (the speed of light).
If two photons are hurtling along at the speed of light side by side, how does change occur between them when the information in both photons cannot reach eachother without exceeding the speed their currently travelling at?
Photons travelling at that maximum speed therefore cannot influence one another, time for a photon is dilated so much that all moments are instantaneous (past, present and future). In essence time does not pass (no change) at the speed of light nor distance.
It is only us (as objects) experiencing time (rate, because we are not travelling at C) that can observe the distance and time (speed) travelled by light.
That's relativity.
Because we are under the influence of change while light (energy at C) has no rate/is not, what does that mean for causality?
It means that light is not under the influence of causality because it is the source of causality. Change/ability to do Work/energy exerts change on the system around it (matter) but doesn't exert change on itself. Because when it does it is matter (E=mc2).
Energy can only cause change of itself when it decelerates from the speed light (ie. When it condenses into matter (as energy and matter are two form of the same thing, distinguished by the whether the passage of time, and thus causality, occurs).
In summary energy causes matter and time, but matter and time cannot cause energy, they can only propagate it at slower speeds than the speed of light.
I think you're right, now that I put more thought into it, and not just historically.
I still don't think the nature of this 'attachment' is explored enough.
Sure, that's another way to put it. Buddhists believe that we all have inherent wisdom (prana) which becomes obscured by the kleshas (defilements) brought about by attachment to ideas of substance.
So, the original prana wisdom would be the understanding of annatta or the non-selfness of all things. If there is no abiding identity in self or world, then there is no one to be attached and no-thing to be attached to.
Unlearning our attachment is infinitely easier said than done.
This all seems to resonate.
Quoting Constance
I should have written "body/mind" to make it clear that I'm neither proposing any kind of physicalism nor idealism.
Sure. No distinction between non-self and emptiness but a biggy big difference between understanding and realization. For instance, I understand a lot about life daununnda but I've never experienced it. It has never been made real for me, unfortunately.
I do so :heart: generalizing.
That would be one way of looking at it! :up:
Perhaps we need to make an appropriate distinction here, a distinction that would sort things out for us. Time simply can't be relative??? :chin:
Are you suggesting Einstein was wrong?
Time for us can be considered constant for the purpose of daily life, observations and newtoninan physics, because we all move at the same relative rate in space, we are all on earth travelling 200km a second around our galaxies center along with the rest of the solar system.
But acceleration has a limit (C). If an object were to continue accelerating their clock would appear to slow down relative to that of a person on earth's (time dilation) - as in from the perspective of someone on earth.
Meanwhile for the person accelerating towards the speed of light from their perspective their clock will run normally, a second will still seem like the same length - second while if they were to be able to somehow observe earth they would observe time contraction (everyone and all processes would speed up).
This only makes sense if we consider that somehow they can observe eachother at the same time which they cannot because of the vastly increasing distance (speed) between them. Information realistically would not be able to catch up and would take longer and longer to reach one another in order to observe.
However if the person were to return to earth after having travelled close to the speed of light their clock would be late, if they compared with a clock that was running simultaneously but stayed in earth.
This has been proven already using two atomic clocks (very very precise) one of which was put into orbit (hurtling along around the earth in just 90 minutes, while the other stayed on earth.
Another case is someone observing another falling into a black hole. To the person on the ship the person falling woukd appear to slow down to a standstill for thousands of years and never seem to reach the event horizon.
To the person falling into the blackhole on the other hand everything would have happened very quickly indeed as they accelerate down the gravity slope (falling).
Its worth noting though that objects cannot actually get close to the speed of light as their mass would have to be converted completely into light to get there. The theory is merely to demonstrate that time is definitely relative to motion.
There are some good videos explaining Einsteins famous equation E=mc2 in this respect.
Maybe although I've made a fool of myself to last a coupla lifetimes.
Quoting Benj96
Yep, I'm aware of that. Danke for the gentle reminder.
It just doesn't feel right to me. This of course is the reason why the theory of relativity is like quantum physics - if you understand it, you don't understand it (re Richard Feynman) - for folks like me. Anyway, I don't see a long queue of scientists outside my humble abode just because "it doesn't feel right" to me.
Haha I get you. Yes it is full of stumbling blocks and diversions and twists and turns. Hard for the mind to wrap itself around, but not impossible.
I myself have been grappling with einsteins theories, relativity, time, energy etc for years now. Ever since I started thinking about it as a teen.
And even now I often forget again. It's only in moments of clarity that I return to a better understanding of it.
Very interesting indeed. I agree. Attachment seems almost spontaneous and effortless when we are not thinking, we tend to drift back towards these kleshas unbeknownst to ourselves when distracted and re-enter that conflict between desire and the lack of the objects of desire that we attached to, and thus I suppose - the Samsara cycle.
I guess this is why so many faiths and Buddhism emphasise a great deal of focus on contemplation (meditation, prayer etc).
But if causality needs a context, so does time.
Quoting Benj96
Of course, physics. But when a physicist talks about causality or time, their observations look to the observable world and calculate its behaviors. Even abstract ideas like the ones you present above issue from empirical paradigms originally. But then, as the cosmologist reviews the theory and the data, she does this in a temporal event herself. and this is not going to be discovered through observation, because this concept of time is part of the structure of the perceptual moment itself.
What is required is a critique of the structure of time that is presupposed by an theories of a physicist's time.
Times context is the medium between that which causes (energy - in a timeless state travelling at speed C) and that which is caused (objects that have duration - exist in the realm of time).
Change itself has a Duality in that when it is understood not to experience time - it is cause (energy). And when it endures the experience of time it is "that which is changed - (matter).
These are the two polarities of change - one pole being causer (matterless/timeless), the other being physical - effect (matter with duration in time).
A relativistic spectrum.
But benj96, that is an answer a scientist would give. How about a philosophical approach?
Haha fair enough.
Kant, Augustin, Hume and Aristotle as far as I know believed time was an intuitive sense (perception only) and that an absolute/discrete/objective time did not exist outside of experience.
While Heidegger, Nietzsche believed time was dual - it has an internal sense and an external counterpart. (a view I propose also).
Plato was more reductionist on the matter considering time as explicitly independent of the observer.
However, I'm sure there are interpretations of what these philosophers believed that beg to differ as it seems there's a lot of conflicting analysis of what they all meant when they described their rational on time.
At this stage it is as much open to interpretation of their words as it is to actual know exactly what they believed.
This to me seems to purport the middle ground - Duality. As it encapsulates all opinions about time as being based on reference point.
Ironically, science too battles to grapple this seemingly inherent dualism, with the same conundrum as philosophy (newtonian standardising time as independent, Einsteinian purporting relative nature to an observer).
The argument is alive and well in both disciplines. As science one wound imagine the the direct attempt to establish definitive proof thought (philosophy).
Actually Benj96, the whole matter would rest with how willing you would be to go into this. Time, that is. Science and philosophy are completely different fields of inquiry. Science's "direct attempt to establish definitive proof of thought" is not what you think. After all, "direct" is arguably the most problematic term there is. But it opens up thought on the matter that is thematically unrelated to what science has to say.
The relation one has with the world in philosophy is about the presuppositions of science, not the usual assumptions, and these presuppositions are not in the usual sense, observable.
Are they? There's no overlap between the reasoning and ethics of philosophy in scientific pursuits then? If they are indeed completely different fields of inquiry.
Quoting Constance
What are the usual assumptions?
I agree in the sense that science has to pre-assume certain constants: energy, time etc. to make observable standardised measurements.
Philosophy on the other had doesn't have to pre-assume anything. But if it chooses to redefine the suppositions of science it must contend with the predictive value of scientific endeavours.
Either that, or reintegrate with science by highlighting what agreements can be made between philosophy and science.
I don't think theyre are mutually exclusive, but rather compatible. The key then would be to establish why science and philosophy are not in opposition but actually referring to the same thing
Quoting Gregory
Excellent point, and you are well justified to question this (apparent) contradiction, which indeed seems huge: on the one hand, the Buddhist doctrine of "non-self" says that that there is no unchanging, permanent self or essence that can be manifested in any phenomenon. One should recognize everything as impermanent. On the other hand, it talks about ethics, karma, rebirth, etc. which can only refer to a person, an individual, separate unit. Yet, we meet the word "person" repeatedly in Buddhist texts. But I have never seen defining what that person is. Theres no even an independent soul or spirit in Buddhism. The only thing I remember having read is that it is the consciousness that is reborn. Well, who is the carrier of that consciousness?
Now, I used the word "apparent" in parentheses, which means it is seems a contradiction only to the uninitiated. Although I have read tones of books and other texts in Buddhism and listen to a lot of lectures --but in the long past, when I had not yet matured in philosophy-- I never questioned what you are questioning in this topic of yours. I had found a lot of useful things and ideas that were enough for me to keep me happy with my acquaintance of Buddhism! (BTW, I still respect Buddhism a lot today and consider it the best bug religion in the world.) Yet, I have not studied it officially and in depth so that I can explain this apparent contradiction. Which, evidently, does not actually exist, and I am certain that those who have studied Buddhism can certainly explain it. Otherwise, Buddhism would not stand in time. (Christianity stands too, despite all its actual contradictions, but then it is a dogmatic religion.)
Quoting Gregory
Your second contradiction is also justifiable. But again, I believe that people who have "officially" studied Buddhism could easily deal with that too! :smile:
I agree Christiainty rests on contradiction. It is the opposite of what it claims to be. Such sure judgments I doubt we'll find with respect to Buddhism however
Compatible, but like knitting is compatible with geology; consistent, no contradictions arise, but simply because they are talking about different things. Heidegger does not oppose Einstein. His understanding of time in Being and Time just has nothing to do with him, not referring to the same thing. The one is grounded in quantitative measurements of compared observed phenomena, the other is an analysis of the structural features of the perceptual act.
Difficult to summarize something like this. One idea: From Husserl, Heidegger draws upon the insight that the act of cognition that apprehends something in the world is "pre-given" or predelineated, meaning what you see before you is a temporal whole, a unity that is always already conditioned by past and future, and so, the claim Heidegger makes is that the self and the world have to be viewed as a "unitary phenomenon". To me this phenomenological concept of time is just where thought needs to go, for it shows that when one meditates, or beholds the world in a thoughtless, accepting attitude, the disappearance of the past and the future in the perceptual moment is a reductive movement that liberates one from time itself; after all, time as singularity, asks, singularity of what? If the past and the future are just aspects of a unity, what unity could this be? Why, the original unity, out of which pragmatic abstractions like past, present and future issue. And this original unity is what has been called "nunc stans, or standing now, which is eternity. It is NOT that past, present and future simply disappear, but rather that they fail at the basic level of inquiry to hold up as foundational, as rock bottom certainties (axioms). Someone like Heidegger would say this analysis itself IS the rock bottomest that one can achieve. Buddhists and I, I argue, say the rock bottomest insight opens an intuition or revelation of a presentation of Being that is is that is a radically OTHER, considering that everything is absolutely other. My couch, e.g. But this goes on and on.
Now this gets complicated, and it always has to be said that I paraphrase others, I lift thinking from texts. I f you ask ME what I think, it is far less disciplined and far more interesting, because philosophy needs to be personal, and I am a just a middling, meddling philosopher, but I am good at synthesizing what I read into an interpretative "reading" of the world, which is NOT an academic, or shouldn't be, affair.
It does depend on what you read. If you read analytic philosophy, then this will not register as well as it really should. Analytic types want clarity over content, and so they dismiss whatever cannot be clearly stated (they desire respectability in an age of technological rigor). the trouble here is that the world at the level of basic questions is not clear at all like this. In fact, this imposing but unclear threshold position is hands down, THE most fascinating dimension of philosophical thinking.
Anyway, Kant through Derrida, then into the so called French theological turn; this is where the intriguing insights lie. One thing I try to emphasize: Philosophy actually has a single mission, I am happy to argue, and this is to replace popular, traditional religion. Alas, it will be a long time before this is accomplished; or maybe not. Things have a way of suddenly making themselves.
Bet you I could describe knitting and geologys similarities. If you'll welcome an attempt just for fun.
There's always a link. Every discipline carry with it the same basic skills. They may not be addressing the same task for sure in an objective sense but the understandings gained from a knitter can be applied to geology and vice versa. If they know the similarities as well as the differences, or in other words, the mental processes/skills required in both, and those that are not as transferable.