On religion and suffering
If life is not a struggle with god, then such a life will never understand what it means to be human. Not a very careful way to put it, but sometimes it is best to put things forward abruptly, without such care, and deliver an impact. The well oiled path may discover many things, as with the gift for living successfully, but while we admire those who possess such gifts, a closer look reveals it is not the person we admire, but the talent and what it brings into the world. The person is a very different matter.
What I admire is the radical sacrifice given, that is redeemed only in the understanding of "holistic misery"--the "part" of any given misery refers to the single and complete question of one's existence. Stub a toe, and the pain is there, but what brings one above the triviality of the moment is the question that haunts all suffering: that of the ontology of pain itself; the kind of life thrown out of the Eden of ordinary assumptions and forced to rise up (the misery of the Old Testament apple is the question. This is what Adam and Eve learned: to put questions where there were assumptions. To question God {not to defy God; this only dismisses the nature of the tree itself. God put the question into their thoughts with his injunction They would otherwise have never conceived it. Only a simple minded exegesis thinks in terms of original sin and disobedience) that is, at the level of metaphysics, to ask "meta questions" and going where assumptions cannot go, is the final step of human freedom's self recognition, for here where relief is only won through hardship, what is outside of the complacencies of normal living announces itself. Ready to hand answers are not answerable to basic questions encountered in the troubles of what I call our life of sacrifice.
At any rate, there is an idea in this that is worthy for consideration for anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, not referring to the waste of time of college classes that go by that title. God, of course, is not meant in the naĂŻve way of general religion. It is rather the final questions that lie both inconspicuous but in plain sight of our existence and one hardly knows they are important or even meaningful until one is forced to notice them, the reason why churches are filled with old people worried about illness and mortality. They are not, I contend, merely grasping for hope, which is certainly part of it. They are thrown into (a borrowed Heideggerian term) something never experienced prior to going their merry way paying taxes and raising families. They are perhaps for the first time aware that they exist, for who thinks about this kind of thing in normal affairs? And here they face the primordial indeterminacy of their existence. Suffering, and its inherent sacrifice, insinuates itself between complacency and affirmation (I am reminded of Dickinson's poem I Heard a Fly Buzz), and one simply cannot ignore it any more. It now becomes a meta-suffering addressed by a meta-question of its existence. Religion takes its first step.
What I admire is the radical sacrifice given, that is redeemed only in the understanding of "holistic misery"--the "part" of any given misery refers to the single and complete question of one's existence. Stub a toe, and the pain is there, but what brings one above the triviality of the moment is the question that haunts all suffering: that of the ontology of pain itself; the kind of life thrown out of the Eden of ordinary assumptions and forced to rise up (the misery of the Old Testament apple is the question. This is what Adam and Eve learned: to put questions where there were assumptions. To question God {not to defy God; this only dismisses the nature of the tree itself. God put the question into their thoughts with his injunction They would otherwise have never conceived it. Only a simple minded exegesis thinks in terms of original sin and disobedience) that is, at the level of metaphysics, to ask "meta questions" and going where assumptions cannot go, is the final step of human freedom's self recognition, for here where relief is only won through hardship, what is outside of the complacencies of normal living announces itself. Ready to hand answers are not answerable to basic questions encountered in the troubles of what I call our life of sacrifice.
At any rate, there is an idea in this that is worthy for consideration for anyone interested in the philosophy of religion, not referring to the waste of time of college classes that go by that title. God, of course, is not meant in the naĂŻve way of general religion. It is rather the final questions that lie both inconspicuous but in plain sight of our existence and one hardly knows they are important or even meaningful until one is forced to notice them, the reason why churches are filled with old people worried about illness and mortality. They are not, I contend, merely grasping for hope, which is certainly part of it. They are thrown into (a borrowed Heideggerian term) something never experienced prior to going their merry way paying taxes and raising families. They are perhaps for the first time aware that they exist, for who thinks about this kind of thing in normal affairs? And here they face the primordial indeterminacy of their existence. Suffering, and its inherent sacrifice, insinuates itself between complacency and affirmation (I am reminded of Dickinson's poem I Heard a Fly Buzz), and one simply cannot ignore it any more. It now becomes a meta-suffering addressed by a meta-question of its existence. Religion takes its first step.
Comments (229)
Well, depends on what they have to say.
It's a song about an eco-terrorist vigilante that says the following:
So Arcane, there is a jot of connectivity. But here is a good place for an observation:
Conscience, mentioned in the lyrics: This appears when one second guesses one's position. What was at first confidence turns to inquiry, for what one was confident in has been undermined somehow. Think of this as a universal condition, that is, the condition of ALL one has confidence in, and all things have lost the absolute confidence one had in them. Earth crisis, or world crisis, is a crisis in everything, so there is no sanctuary since the world is all there is. Now you have encountered metaphysics. The question the OP asks, indirectly, is where IS one once conscience, the call, beckons, or insists (one can never go back) that all things, values and meaning is without foundation?
Why do you need to understand "what it means to be human"? You're already human; it doesn't have a meaning; it's just one of the facts about which you have no choice. Why set up a straw-god to contend against/ depend on/ fear/ venerate/ make sacrifices to?
What's your simply [and briefly, if possible] stated point?
... then its not "life".
Btw, why do you assume being human "means" anything at all?
All of this went way over my head. Can you explain it to me like I'm an idiot?
EDIT: You know what? I'll just link to a video, and you tell me if it is related to the OP of this Thread in any way. Deal? Here's the video, it's not by Earth Crisis, it's by another band called Brand Nubian:
Our existence is saturated with meaning. Never once has a human being witnessed meaninglessness, for such meaninglessness would have to lie beyond the boundaries of experience. It is nonsense to even imagine meaninglessness for a human being.
This statement doesn't make sense (e.g. birth defects, natural disasters, mass murders, vague utterances, discursive nonsense, random events ... are instances of "meaninglessness").
Well, I did say in the OP that the naive straw god was not what is in play here.
But understanding what it means to be human is to ask questions about our existence, and we ask these questions because the question is literally an expression of what we are. To question is part of the structure of perception: You see a rabbit on a fence post, a simple recognition, yet how is this possible? The presence of the rabbit does not intimate its rabbit essence to you, but rather, you encounter the rabbit already equipped with rabbit familiarity, so the issue turns to your rabbit familiarity--what makes something familiar? Past experience. Ah, but prior to this experience, long ago, there was no rabbit when you encountered a rabbit. There was, however, a perceptual openness, ready to receive language and the world. This openness is a structural feature of infantile existence, and it is the very nature of the inquiring business of a mature mind. The question (doubt, says Peirce. See his Fixation of Belief. I don't abide in all they say, but the pragmatists were qualifiedly right), is the residuum of the original, abyssal infantile openness of our early existence.
And philosophy is a rediscovery of this original primordiality.
No, I mean, you know this is wrong. Meaninglessness means without meaning, and all the things you mention are certainly meaningful. Meaninglessness would be an abstraction from reality, as with a proposition and its content, qua being a proposition. Or a truth table as a truth table, and entirely outside of any context in which people are talking, engaged, interested, and so forth.
Some of us have nothing better to do than ask questions to which there are no answers. Most of us, most of the time, are busy trying to survive. That doesn't make the underprivileged majority less human or the leisured minority more meaningful.
Quoting Astrophel
No, I don't. A woodchuck, maybe, if he feels threatened. Rabbits do not climb; rabbits run, veer and leap.
Quoting Astrophel
Okay. I hope it keeps you occupied.
There is here a lot that is extraneous to the issue. Underprivileged minority? At any rate, it does sound like you are a bit sour on metaphysics, but this entirely depends on what metaphysics you are thinking of. A lot can be said on this, but in the space of a post, I would say there is bad metaphysics, the kind of thing Christian theology has long held to, say, but there is also good metaphysics, and for this one simply has to take seriously real questions, that is, questions found in an honest assessment of the way the world is. Here metaphysics is no less valid than physics.
Consider this simple question for the "naturalist" where naturalism here says philosophy should occur in "the same empirical spirit that animates science." (Quine): you have two objects, one is a human brain and the other is a tree. The question is, how is a knowledge claim of the former about the latter possible? SImple as that. This is not some extravagant nonsense from deep in left field, but rather is a clear naturalist question, the kind of thing one has the right to ask because it is there, in the world. (Note: the accepted premise here is that one DOES indeed have knowledge of the tree. Knowledge here is not being denied, but affirmed. It is a question of its possibility.)
This leads directly to metaphysics, and by a naturalist's standard!
Well, let me ask you this, then. Let's replace "tree" with "this Thread". That being the case, I'll say the following. My brain is under the impression that this Thread has a Kierkegaard-ish tone. Is that impression accurate, yes or no? If yes (or no), is it entirely accurate (or inaccurate), or is it accurate (or inaccurate) to a degree?
A better question would be, why do you think only good things are meaningful? Meaning, and of course, this is not the dictionary sense of meaning, but the affective sense, referring to the pathos of one's regard for something, is about something affectively impactful, and this includes have an interest, being concerned, loving, hating and the entire range of value possibilities. A fatal birth defect is meaningful to the extent it occurs in the context of such engagements.
What does 'good' metaphysics add to good physics? And why is an addition required?
Quoting Astrophel
What 'knowledge claim'? Human brain processes information delivered to it through sensory input and names the things - objects, events, changes - that are relevant to its own and it's vessel's functioning. Quoting Astrophel
One has a right to ask any question that pops into one's head - unless one is devout and forbidden by his religion to ask a certain category of questions, or a slave with no rights at all, in which case one must keep one's own silent counsel. One, however, does not have a right to receive answers. One can always invent answers, which is what philosophers do.
Quoting Astrophel
Knowledge of the presence and description of a tree, yes. Knowledge of poplarhood and spruceness, no.
Quoting Astrophel
You can lead a jaundiced realist to metaphysics, but you can't make her drink.
Quoting 180 Proof Exactly.
Whether there is a God(s) or not isnt relevant to my view which follows.
In my view the Eden myth referred to in the opening, was designed to express that humanity's desire for meaning is its downfall. In a nutshell, its message was, although humans have the physiology to go beyond nature and construct a universe of make-believe, don't. Choose living over knowing.
Sure, the side effects have given us things like quantum mechanics and an ever increasing advancement of technology. And unsarcastically, I am generally not maligning knowledge.
But as a species, we definitely chose knowing over living, and that has lead to an insatiable desire to construct meaning.
It is only because we construct meaning that we have irresolvable suffering.
As an animal, I fracture a bone, or cannot sustain my group with adequate food and safety, and that leads to pain, which prompts my next actions. The pain may continue until I am able to heal or procure the necessities. Then I return to a stable bliss until the next painful trigger comes along.
As a child of so-called Adam/Eve, I take those pains, and construct meaning to attach: damn it, why did I have to climb that tree and sprain my ankle? Damn it, why are my kids worse off than my neighbor? Etc. I know why, because Im stupid, or a sinner, or that is the plight of humankind, etc. Now, with a narrative [made up meaning] to attach to the pain, it is able to linger as suffering.
See also Ecclesiastes: [finding meaning is] vanity and chasing wind. Reproduce, labor only for sustenance, and try to survive into old age. All meaning is not only vanity, bur goes against so-called God, or as I prefer to think of It, Nature; our nature.
Granted: anything may be meaningful to somebody to some extent in the context of some kinds of engagement... whatever that means.
However, it does not indicate that meaning is in any way inherent in anything; it only indicates that a mind not occupied with more pressing matters can assign some meaning to every thing and situation it encounters.
I notice you didn't assign any specific meaning to fatal birth defects, trees, brains or fence-sitting rabbits. In fact, one might consider "understanding what it means to be human is to ask questions about our existence, and we ask these questions because the question is literally an expression of what we are." literally meaningless.
Kierkegaard is an essential part of Heidegger, especially the former's Concept of Anxiety. Reading Concept, one finds Sartre here, Heidegger there, throughout. In the matter of metaphysics, there is K's notorious reference to nothing, which is the failing of language to speak existence. The book is devoted to a philosophical exposition of original sin and he essentially uses this idea, bound in myth and theology, to bring to light the human struggle with her own existence vis a vis eternity. One insight: rationalism (Hegel's, which was popular at the time) fails to affirm that we actually exist. Existence is deeply personal (subjective) and one has to discover this. K's argument with Christendom (Attack on Christendom) tells how the church as an institution has displaced the essential thinking and engagement of a authentic Christian. K is of course well aware of Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century Dominican Priest who was charged with heresy, and was aware of thinking like this: "The true word of eternity is spoken only in solitude, where a man is a desert and alien to himself and multiplicity." So much for the church! But more: so much for the world! For the world is the multiplicity Eckhart is speaking about. Kierkegaard gaveto the reader the hiddenness of our existence beneath the certainties of everyday living. To discover this hiddenness is the hard work of phenomenology. Some think like this: Here you are, there is a world of trees, people, and yes, even this post. It stands before you in a very, very different way if you allow yourself to withdraw from typical contexts of engagement, and move "out" of context all together. And witness the world as if for the first time.
Another insight: this relation we have with the world has analytic possibilities.
Well, this is a big question. It begins with seeing how physics cannot explain basic assumptions. Assumptions about knowledge and ontology. I know, for example, that the tides are due to the gravitational pull between the earth and the moon. But then, what can be said about the perceptual event that produces all of the basic data? This is a metaphysical question.
Quoting Vera Mont
I'll assume that existence of a knowledge claim is really not in dispute. You know something? That is a knowledge claim. Why is your brief description problematic? It isn't if you are thinking as a scientist does about such things. "Processes information"? You mean it takes something out there, a leaf, an organ tissue sample, a supernova, or anything, really, my shoe laces, and delivers what it is to the understanding of things one has, right? You perhaps see the trouble in this: Not how DOES, but how is it at all possible, that processing like this "delivers" anything at all? This is a metaphysical question.
Quoting Vera Mont
the fact that "information processing" cannot explain at all how a world is epistemically accessible did not pop up as, say, a question about the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. It is there, right before your eyes. Like asking what a bank teller is or an accountant or gravity. The question here is how in knowledge possible? Perhaps you have read a lot of bad metaphysics. Among the worst is the metaphysics of science, which is the ignoring of its own foundation of assumptions.
Quoting Vera Mont
Explain.
Quoting Vera Mont
Sorry, but what do you mean by 'metaphysics"?
:fire:
I.e. our "fall into time" (Cioran) ... "nostagia, or philosophical suicide" (Camus) ...
Quoting Astrophel
Strawman – I never claimed or implied that anything is (inherently) "meaningful".
Quoting Vera Mont
:100:
Quoting Astrophel
The victim of a fatal birth defect does not even have an "affective sense" of what's happens to her. Likewise, natural disasters do not happen because of our "pathos" (i.e. we want / don't want them to happen). Again, your equivocating (meaning with feeling) avoids ...
Quoting 180 Proof
1) Hegel was right when he suggested that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit.
2) If so, then Hegel is History's Last Philosopher.
3) If so, then there have been no philosophers since Hegel died.
4) But there have been philosophers since Hegel died.
5) So, Hegel was not History's Last Philosopher.
6) So, Hegel was wrong when he suggested that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit.
7) But (1) and (6) are contradictory.
8) So, Anything Goes (i.e., from a contradiction, any premise follows)
Now, that can't be correct, at least one of the premises must be false. I think that the first premise is the false one: Hegel was not right when he suggested that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit. Or perhaps it did, but only in the sense that Hegel's personal history ended when he died. In that case, either Hegel will reincarnate, or he will not. I say that he will not. There is no such thing as reincarnation. Therefore:
Theorem: Hegel could only have been right that History itself ended with the Absolute Spirit, if that means that his own personal history ended when he died.
That, is why Hegel was an existentialist, in the same sense as Kierkegaard. That's my theory.
Much can be said about the process of observation, taking measurements, hypothesizing, experimentation and testing. The 'basic data' is already there, in the physical world, to be noticed, recorded, studied and understood. There is no single 'perceptual event'. Conscious beings notice their environment and make sense of it to the best of their ability.
Quoting Astrophel
No, that is a question.
Quoting Astrophel
Wrong. The leaf or whatever exists outside and independently of the human organism. The organism has sensory equipment to inform the brain about various attributes of an encountered object. The brain is told what a leaf looks and feels like; its size, shape, colour, texture, temperature, tensile strength, pliability, flavour. The eyes may have recorded similar objects attached to a a large, hard, branching object and noticed that the small ones fall off the large one every fall and new ones grow every spring, suggesting that the thing named 'leaf' is a product of the living organism dubbed 'tree'. Other objects, small and large are observed to grow and shed 'leaves'. Putting all this information together, the brain forms an approximate understanding of deciduous vegetation. That understanding can be expanded and enhanced by further study. While some humans' understanding of 'leaf' remains rudimentary, others' may learn a great deal more about the varieties, forms and functions of leaves. We can all claim some knowledge, but certainly not the same knowledge.
Quoting Astrophel
That, too, can be studied. Just asking the question seems to me futile.
Quoting Astrophel
Okay, I'll bite. How? You're the metaphysician, tell us. What does life mean? Why is is is?
Quoting Astrophel
You can know what a tree means to you; you cannot understand what a tree is in itself.
Quoting Astrophel
That carpet bag you're waving about, without once showing its contents.
Not quite. It is saying that the myth reveals something about the nature of inquiry and discovery. A tree of knowledge, wasn't that it? Which bore apples that enlightened? Of course, God's injunction not to eat the fruit IS an inherent part of the problematic: no injunction, no disobedience. What is an injunction? A law, a principle. What is a question? It is a standing in the openness of what lies before one, rather than in the fixity of acceptance (obedience). A question is an openness to the world that defies closure (hence the hermeneutic circle: inquiry has no rest for nothing stands that is born of language that is beyond question). This defiance IS the defiance in the old story of the bible.
Make believe? This requires a standard of something that stands as an absolute, against which other things can be judged. "Make believe" is pejorative. This has to be put aside. Think like Rorty: truth is made, not discovered, not make believe.
Quoting ENOAH
Mostly pragmatic in nature. That is, we do make institutions and these are like fetishes as meaning gathers around them. Most of knowing lies in dealing with, coping, problem solving.
Quoting ENOAH
It is an interesting way to look at things. How is this narrative constructed? In time. To recall (and thus, to "know" one is stupid, a sinner, etc.) is to invoke the past, an integral part of a temporal sequence, but the past is no more (by definition), so the recollection is entirely devoid of any actual past, for there really is no such thing. To refer to yesterday's events, this mornings coffee and toast, the tidal wave the drenched Lisbon on 1755, is, and only can be, a present event about the past; the but the past is integrally produced AS a present event of recalling, but, the present event has no existence either, for it is ever fleeting into the future, and what is the future if not the "not yet" of a past possibility recalled (for what else is there to anticipate the future with?). Past, present and future are thus, on closer analysis, really a singularity that is utterly transcendental, for one cannot imagine what it is without recalling and anticipating. Time is the structure of our existence, yet it shows itself to be entirely other than the standard, vulgar, everyday, linear phenomenon.
The point I want to make about all of this is that here in this brief sketch of an analytic of subjective time (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger--they all have their version. Paul Ricoeur even wrote a book, Time and Narrative, that you might find interesting, given your thoughts above), leads, if one really follows through, to extraordinary existential insight. this vast language game we are in makes a lot of trouble, true, but it also possesses the dialectic possibilities for profound disclosure. Profound? There is the rub: one can only recognize them as such if one pursues them, and one only pursues them if one is possessed by the desire for the profound. Alas, this is how it goes. No one is going to take the time to read Augustine through Derrida unless one simply has to know this kind of thing.
But this is due to your failure to understand that no event has ever been witnessed that is without meaning, and no event has ever occurred unless witnessed. Ontology and epistemology are analytically bound. The witnessing is all that has ever been submitted as data for the construction of anything one can even bring to mind. Any "instance" can only be conceived in a meaning context of the instance itself.
If I take you rightly, you want to say, say, that it is raining (if it is) and this is entirely beyond the perceptual act that acknowledges it. I say you are living in a dream world, as if such an event could ever pass through the boundaries of perceptual conditions. No sense of this can be made at all. Pure nonsense.
Hegel never said he was the last philosopher. Kierkegaard certainly did not hold as Hegel did that one's existence was grounded an historical dialectic. If you are looking for someone who brought Hegel and Kierkegaard together, then Heidegger is who you should read.
I think that Heidegger is just a watered-down version of Kierkegaard, to be honest. It's Kierkegaard but without the Aesthetics and the Ethics.
So 'only what is known is real (happens)?' – that's idealist-solipsist / antirealist nonsense (pace G. Berkeley ... pace N. Bohr et al).
No one argues otherwise. Here, the argument is about the presuppositions of such things. To begin to philosophize is to ask questions about what is presupposed in science. Saying the basic data is already there in the physical world is true only if one really doesn't want to think about philosophy, which is an option.
Quoting Vera Mont
What??
You mean like presupposing that events have meaning? And that, without even a definition of 'meaning'.
Quoting Astrophel
Go ahead and ask relevant questions. Wake me when you have answers.
Quoting Astrophel
This:
Quoting Astrophel
Look, all of this is rudimentary. Trouble lies where least expected. It is about the assumption that there is an object outside of the reach of perception. This brain that is being "told" what is "over there" and entirely apart from the content of what the brain thinks and generates as experience: To affirm this, one must leave experience. That is impossible to even conceive.
Again, this is not to say flowers are not flowers and cats are not cats. All remains what it is and science goes its merry way. But what dramatically changes is the analysis of the relations and content of what is given in the world, for they are no longer reducible to abstract quantitative values that science takes for reality. Now the entire human presence is "present" in the here and there, the before and after. Affectivity, THE most salient feature of existence (even by a naturalist's standard) is now front and center IN the object, for what one encounters is an event of conscious apprehension and that which is apprehended.
Or did you really think a human brain was some kind of mirror of nature? A brain and its "sensory equipment"--a MIRROR? Let's see, the electromagnetic spectrum irradiates this grass, and parts are reflected while others absorbed, and what is reflected is received by the eye and is conditioned by cones and rods and sent down the optic nerve and....now wait. Have we not entirely lost "that out there" in this? And again, for the third time, it is not being said that perception is impossible. I am saying that what perception IS must be radically reconceived.
Quoting Vera Mont
This is absent from the discussion, the meaning of life. I am only asking about the matter above. It is a matter of epistemology and ontology. One basic, but ignored premise must come to light: there is NOTHING epistemic about causality.
A little less naivete, if you will. If you read what is written, then you will have noticed that the world remains the world, and science and everydayness is accepted in all of its objective verifiable and falsifiable conditions. No one is raising the absurd specter of solipsism, which is pure straw here.
Not "only what is known is real"; this is too ambiguous and carries the burden of ill conceived ideas. Rather, when an encounter with an object occurs, it is an event, and must be analyzed as such. What lies "outside" of this event requires a perspective unconditioned by the perceptual act, which is impossible. Unless you actually think that the world intimates its presence to a physical brain...by what, magic? Just waltzes into the brain and declares, here I am, a tree! I assume you do not think like this.
I would say a qualified yes to this. My view is found more in the vicinity of philosophers like Michel Henry and Jean Luc Marion. These are post neo Husserlian thinkers. Husserl argued that philosophy needed to ask the basic questions about what lies in the presuppositions of science and the "naturalistic attitude". To look this deeply into the essential givenness of the world, one had to suspend of "bracket" knowledge claims that otherwise dominate ideas. Just look at the world around you and try to "reduce" what you see to what is actually there in the perceptual content which constitutes the actuality of what is before you. Scientific categories are on hold, as are any of the usual associations. There is Kierkegaard in this, for when thought is reduced to a bare minimum, something startling happens (or can happen. Depends on whos is doing this): the actuality that has always been there rises to prominence, and one sees the world generally ignored in the "habits of the race" as K put it. He refers to the endless idle talk and cultural engagements that have come to rule one's world.
I take issue with his knight of faith. I do not think, and you find this is Meister Eckhart, that the world can be made at all compatible with the call to divinity, if you will. See his Fear and Trembling. He thinks the model of faith lies in a radical simplcity that can go about business, as a cobbler or an accountant, and the like, all the while possessed by god's grace. I think the two are quite antagonistically related.
I read that concept of his as the "gentleman of faith", comparable in some sense to Nietzsche's "over-man", at least in an existential sense.
Quoting Astrophel
He makes the case there that belief in the divine must be irrational by definition, since the divine (if it exists) transcends human reason.
They both declare war on Christendom and rationalism. But what happens when all that "structure" is removed from metaphysics? One faces existence without it, hence the term existentialism. But here is where the similarities end. N goes the way of the gladiatorial, while K follows an existential Christianity.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Hard to say this, for it is a performative contradiction: "the divine must be irrational by definition" is itself a construction of reason, a well formed proposition exhibiting logical features of predication, universals, modality, and others (see Aristotle's of Kant's logical categories). Better to be clearer: In the context of discussing existence, there appears a superfluity that is not rational in its essence at all, yet is discovered only in discursive thought. To understand this is simple: put your finger over a flame for a second or two. Now, that experience has no rational dimension to it, nor does the color yellow or any "quale" you can think of. Yet it is thought that brings it before the understanding so that it can be recognized; and without recognition, it would remain in the darkness, hidden (lethe).
One has to take a long hard look at this, because it is important.
This kind of talk leads one to Heidegger (who borrowed significantly from Kierkegaard without due respect, calling him a "religious writer"). What is it to "recognize" a truth? To know something to be the case? Heidegger thinks the Greeks understood this with truth as alethea, and to see the significance of this would take some serious reading. But in a post: consider the standard truth tables taught in logic classes, and see how abstract they, referring to propositional values only. What happened to actual world?? It simply does not matter, which is why ango american philosophy collapsed in on itself. Heidegger's alethea refers to the presencing of the world that issues forth in thought. Language is the house of being, he writes. It cannot be relegated to abstraction, for it is the dynamic of our very being (dasein) that lights up the world, so to speak. From whence does reason have its existence? Transcendence, just as the terrible pain of your finger in the flame. Truth as alethea brings us OUT of abstraction and into the world where metaphysics has its ground.
Kierkegaard knew very well about this problematic, for he had read Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and so on (he was, of course, literally a genius). One must know in the first place in order to acknowledge the "collision" between reason and existence. Reason cannot, keep in mind, understand what it is, cannot "get behind" itself (Wittgenstein). for this would take a pov outside outside of logic itself and this cannot be "conceived".
What discussion? You make incomprehensible statements about what you do not and can not know, and then double down on them with gobbledegook.
Done here.
Kierkegaard makes the point (in Fear and Trembling, precisely) that God told Abraham to do something irrational when he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Is it rational for a father to sacrifice his son? No, it isn't. That's why God's order was irrational. Still more irrational was Abraham's decision to obey God's order anyway. That, according to Kierkegaard, is true Christianity. Rational Christianity, he argues, is for the Thomist-minded masses. The gentleman of faith, or the knight of faith, if you will, it not Thomist, nor can he be Thomist, because Thomas Aquinas wanted to reconcile Reason and Faith. They cannot be reconciled, in Kierkegaard's opinion, because Faith must triumph over Reason. And while Aquinas himself concedes that point, Kierkegaard goes further, arguing that true Christianity is not for the masses, which is a point that brings him closer to Nietzsche than to Aquinas. Everyone can be a Christian, not everyone can be a knight of faith or an over-man. To be a knight of faith is to be willing to sacrifice rationality itself, not to merely subordinate it to faith. This, is the true moral lesson of the story of Abraham and God: the very core of Christianity is irrational, and necessarily so, because it is pure, unadulterated faith, uncontaminated by human reason. However, the existence of faith, of pure faith, does not demonstrate, by itself, that the object of faith (i.e., God) exists as well. What Kierkegaard is merely saying in that regard is that if God exists (and we don't know if he does), then we must irrationally believe in him, just as Abraham irrationally followed God's irrational order.
No, it's philosophy.
Well argued.
I don't think Kierkegard was a fideist. I do think that at times he errs by setting practical reason (the "subjective") over and against theoretical reasoning in a pernicious manner, abrogating the catholicity of reason (which is the first step on the road to misology). I don't think this is a road he wants to travel though. One of the things that cracks me up about Kierkegard is that he seems very much motivated by the same concerns as Hegel, his arch-rival.
He might have benefited from St. Augustine and St. Anselm's "believe so that you may understand."
No? Where exactly do you suppose we lost it?
Saying "we only see light that interacts with our eyes, so we never see things," is a bit like saying "it is impossible for man to write, all he can do is move pens around and push keyboard keys."
I already have a quote ready for this: "...every effect is the sign of its cause, the exemplification of the exemplar, and the way to the end to which it leads." St. Bonaventure - Itinerarium Mentis in Deum.
But since you are concerned with others' unattended to presuppositions, I will just point out a few I think I might be seeing on your end:
1. Representationalism and correlationalism are the correct ways to view perception and epistemology.
2. Truth is something like correspondence, such that not being able to "step outside of experience" makes knowledge of the world impossible (and, in turn, this should make us affirm that there is no world outside experience?)
3. Perceptual relationships are decomposable and reducible such that one can go from a man seeing an apple to speaking of neurons communicating in the optic nerve without losing anything essential (reductionism).
And then the old "view from nowhere" and "mind as the mirror of nature," which seems to get rolled out to create strawman and false dichotomies far more often then it is ever actually endorsed. "Oh look, it's impossible to know the world as one would know it [I]without a mind[/I]. If not-A, then B" (where B is variously anti-realism, pragmatism, deflationism, eliminativism, etc.). But we might reject the premise: "It is either A or B," C or D might be options open to us as well.
I don't even disagree with the idea that being and thought are two sides of the same coin, but I do think the empiricist assumptions behind "no events occur unless they are witnessed" might be off base.
It depends on how reason is conceived. Reason for the ancients and medievals is ecstatic and transcendent, "the Logos is without beginning and end." Often today it is not much more than computation. How it is conceived will determine its limits. Is reason something we do inside "language games?" Is it just "rule following?" Or is it a more expansive ground for both? Does reason have desires and ends?
Important considerations.
Kierkegaard didn't believe in the catholicity of reason, he was a protestant from Denmark. He was essentially a Christian Viking, from a theological POV. That's why he emphasizes irrationality (i.e., "berserk") and the knight of faith (i.e., "berserk-er"). I guess Kierkegaard's question here would be, what theological evidence is there for the claim that human reason has catholicity? For what you call "catholicity of reason" could very well just be the "secularity of reason", or perhaps even "the secular universality of human reason".
Not sure if you see my point here. If not, I can try to make it clearer. If not, then I would explain it with the following thesis: Kierkegaard, as an individual, transcended Protestantism, and he became an existential Christian instead. A true "gentleman of faith", in his own terms. He transcended the "knight of faith" and he became a "gentleman of faith" instead. That's why he tried to re-establish contact with Regina Olsen, but it was too late.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
For him, you mean? Or for anyone in general? If it's the latter, then I agree with Kierkegaard on this point: how do we even know that human reason has catholicity? It could just be secular universality for all we know.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, but my thesis (another one of them, anyways) is that Hegel was an existentialist, or at the very least a pre-existentialist, just as Kierkegaard was.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What do you think of Tertullian's (or whoever "really" said it): Credo quia absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd."?
If the answer to that last question has something to do with the catholicity of reason, then I'll just ask again the same question that I've been asking: perhaps what you call "catholicity" of reason is just the secular universality of human reason?
Quoting Vera Mont
Let me give it a try. Astrophel is basing his view of relations between subject and world in part on phenomenologist Michel Henry. Given the respect for HenryÂ’s work on the part of enactivist cognitive theorists, I think there are substantial compatibilities between Henry and these approaches in psychology of perception and related philosophy of science.
So letÂ’s take your comments about scientific observation and rethink them from an enactivist perspective:
Quoting Vera Mont
What is the relation between observation and knowledge?
You mentioned that we have to ‘make sense of’ what we observe. Let’s talk about what this ‘making sense of’ consists of. Notice that the development of human knowledge is not simply an internalizing of external facts. ‘There’s a leaf out there and here inside my brain is a representation of that leaf.’ We can instead track the development of knowledge in terms of a remarkable increase of complexity of organization in human brains, human social organization and our built technological environment. Every leap in knowledge is manifested by the construction of new devices, new apparatuses of observation and measurement. Put differently, knowledge evolution involves the construction of a biological niche that we inhabit , interact with and are changed by.
When we build such things as apparatuses of measurement , we don’t use them simply to passively observe an aspect of the external world, we bring together different parts of the world together with our devices and our devices together with our activities. Knowing what a leaf is ‘in itself’ is useless to us. What we want to know is how the leaf interacts with us and other other aspects of the world that we are actively involved with. This is not a passive observational mirroring or representing. , it’s a synthesizing. In coming to know the world we are building new webs of interconnections where there were none before. Saying that knowledge represents the world makes no more sense than saying that the evolution of more and more complex forms of life is a representing of the world. Human knowledge as biological niche construction allows us to actively manipulate our world in more and more complex and controllable ways. But doesn’t scientific knowledge depend on the fact that there are laws and properties intrinsic to the things of the world?
These laws and properties are what show up for us in the ways we interact with our world through our built
niche. The reality of the world shows up for us in terms of constraints on what works and what doesn’t. We can’t build that niche any way we want to, just as there are constraints on what will allow organisms to survive. But st the same time , the laws and properties that we ‘discover’ in nature are not external to the ways we arrange and rearrange our relations with that world as knowledge
develops. The properties we observe are not properties of the things in themselves but properties of our arrangements of interaction with them, and as these arrangements of knowledge evolve, the properties change. Not any old way, but not also not as fixed external ‘laws’.
It seems easy to agree with your enactivist precepts, agree with the critique of "the view from nowhere," and to agree on the importance of act ("act follows on being"), and on the error of focusing on "things-in-themselves," while not wanting to affirm this though.
Prima facie, does it make sense that scientific advances in understanding gravity change what gravity is and how it works? Did the coastline of North America change when men began to map it?
It seems other premises would be needed for this assertion. Something like: "things are defined entirely by their relations" (e.g. a bundle type theory). Being known is one such relation. Thus, when our knowledge changes, the thing known changes, and so "things' properties are not external to our knowing."*
But this would seem to indicate a further premise along the lines of: "Natures and essences do not exist," and following from that "all predication is per accidens, and no predication is per se." That is, nothing is said necessarily of any particular substance/thing. Whereas if any cat or tree necessarily interacts in certain ways (has certain properties) then our knowing cannot change this.
Yet these premises are seem harder to swallow. You mention constraints. The next question is, "from whence these constraints?" Well, one view that might recommend itself is that "things do what they do because of what they are," i .e., natures that explain why things interact as they do, and we might think the case for natures is particularly strong for those substances that are (relatively) self-determining, self-governing, self-organizing wholes (principle, organisms, although other dissipative systems might be lower down the scale here).
*Hegel gets close to this in the Doctrine of the Concept, but this is merely an "unfolding," and so avoids making all predication per accidens.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Scientific advances in understanding gravity, mass and energy from Newton to Einstein changed the meaning of these concepts in subtle ways. The notion of coastline doesnt exist independently of the actual processes of measuring it, and these processes conform to changeable conventions of measurement.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Complex dynamical systems approaches applied to cognitive intentionality explain how intentional stances produce specific constraints, constraints which do not act as efficient causes.
Sure, the concepts/notions might change (or we might say our intentions towards them). That seems fine. What seems implausible is that all the interactions mass should have changed because our scientific theories did, or that North America had no coastline, no place where the land met the sea, until someone measured it.
How so?
Anyhow, the fact that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby, that one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe, or that one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird does not seem the sort of things that should require recourse to cognitive science to explain.
Our scientific theories are not immaterial idealizations, they are intrinsic components of our material interactions with the world that we are trying to understand. When our theories change, a crucial aspect of those material interactions are transformed.
To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it. It is fine to use the word ‘coastline’ and imagine it has an independent reality, but whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interactions. We want to insist on the independence of ‘coastline’ at the same time that it is OUR word and OUR way of understanding how it is independent, which is a kind of dependent independence.
Measurement is built into the word coastline, even when we imagine a coastline prior to any human measuring of it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As Alicia Juarrero explains:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Nor should the meanings of these examples be reified as epistemological truths, as G.E. Moore tried to do when he attempted to demonstrate an epistemological certainty by raising his hand and declaring ‘I know that here is a hand’.
You’re doing the same thing by asserting with bold certainty ‘ a knife is a bad toy to give a baby!’ , ‘one can't mate a penguin and a giraffe!’ and ‘ one cannot take flight by flapping one's arms vigorously like a bird’! Are these certainties that need to be justified, and if so, is there an end to justification, a bedrock of belief underlying their sense and intelligibility? And what kind of certainty is this bedrock?
Thanks, but that's not what he said. I was objecting to responses like "You know something? That is a knowledge claim."
and found no virtue at all in the 'answer'
Quoting Astrophel
to the straightforward question:
Quoting 180 Proof
In fact, he has done good deal of appealing to authority, but no actual relevant discourse.
Quoting Vera Mont
HeÂ’s summarizing Henry here, whoÂ’s a tough nut to crack. What heÂ’s getting at is the association between objectively causal , representational models of nature and the accidental or arbitrary. The two would seem to go together due to the assumed affect and value-neutrality of objective causes. Forces of nature are not presumed to harbor any affective value in themselves. Henry argues that this externalistic way of thinking is a derivative distortion of the primary relation between subject and world.
Yes, but Kierkegaard believes in a transcendent orientation towards the Good in the same way that Plato, St. Augustine, or Hegel did. Our desire for—and to know—what is truly good is what allows us to transcend the given of what we already are.
IMO, Kierkegaard's problem is that he has inherited the deficient presuppositions of his era and leaves them unchallenged. For him, the desire for the Good cannot be the desire of reason (practical reason) because all desires relate only to the passions and appetites. This is the same presupposition that leads Hume to posit his Guillotine (the is-ought gap), and to declare that "reason is and ought only be the slave of the passions." (Lewis speaks to this in the passage quoted here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/956012)
Hence, reason is sterile and inadequate for Kierkegaard because his era has already deflated it into mere calculation, and so the infinite sought by the soul must be sought in passion, as set against reason.
However, even ignoring this, what I would also consider to be his error is to suppose that this transcendence could only apply to practical reason/passion (whose target is the Good) and not to theoretical reason. He essentially grants his opponents their deficient premises on theoretical reason, and in doing so sets the "subjective" against the "objective" in a sort of contest where one must prevail. Much of the prior tradition, by contrast, makes them both part of the same Absolute. The Good, the Beautiful, and the True are all equally Transcendentals, practical, aesthetic, and theoretical reason part of a unity. The desire to know what is "really true" is also a source of transcendence, pushing us beyond the given of current belief and opinion, just as practical reason pushes us beyond current desire.
Are there many sui generis, potentially contradicting truths or just one truth? Likewise, are there many unrelated, perhaps contradictory reasons? Can one give reasons for reason that are not circular?
Kierkegaard is a Christian, and so he should recognize that there is one "Way, Truth, and Light," (John 14:6) and one Logos (John 1). Yet he is also the inheritor of Luther, who told Erasmus:
"If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.”
...opening up an unbridgable chasm of equivocity between the "goodness of God," and anything known as good by man. Calvin does something similar with his exegesis of I John 4:8, "God is love," such that it is [for the elect, and inscuratble, implacable hatred for all else].
I already gave you a Dante allusion, so here is another. In Canto IX, Dante and Virgil are barred from entering the City of Dis by the demons. Virgil is a stand-in for human reason. The furies who taunt Virgil irrationally claw at themselves, as misologes also strike out without reason. Then they threaten to call for Medusa, to turn Dante to stone.
Virgil is so scared of this threat that, not trusting Dante to keep his eyes closed, he covers the Pilgrim's eyes himself. Then Dante the Poet bursts into an aside to the reader to mark well the allegory here.
There are a few things going on. The angel who opens the gates of Dis for them is reenacting the first of the Three Advents of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell (all three show up), but I think the bigger idea is that one risks being "turned to stone" and failing to progress if one loses faith in reason after it is shown to be defenseless against the unreasoning aggression of misology (D.C. Schindler's [I] Plato's Critique of Impure Reason[/I] covers this "defenselessness" well).
The very next sinners Dante encounters are the Epicureans, who fail to find justification for the immortality of the soul and so instead focus on only worldly, finite goods. It's an episode filled with miscommunication, people talking over one another, and pride—exactly what happens when reason ceases to be transcendent and turns inward, settling for what it already has. This is the Augustinian [I]curvatus in se[/I], sin as being "curved in on oneself." Dante himself was seduced by this philosophy for a time, and was seemingly "turned to stone" by it.
Anyhow, one would misread St. Augustine's "believe that you might understand," if it was taken to be some sort of fidest pronouncement of blind faith. In context, it is very practical advice. One cannot learn anything if one doubts all one's teachers and refuses to accept anything. This is as true for physics as theology. We can even doubt that our parents are truly our parents. We might have been switched at birth. But we will never understand, be it physics, or what it is to be a good son, if we do not transcend such skepticism.
Tertullian never said it. He said "prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est," "It is completely believable because it is unfitting," and the context is Marcion claiming that it would be unfitting for Christ to die a bodily death. The point is more that it makes sense because only God's radical, unfitting condescension can bridge the chasm between man and creature. As St. Athanasius says "God became man that man might become God."
Post-Reformation anti-rationalists glommed on to Tertullian because of "a plague on Aristotle," and "what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?" but fundamentalists would do well to note that two paragraphs after this part of [I]Prescriptions Against the Heretics[/I] he says: "no word of God is so unqualified or so unrestricted in application that the mere words can be pleaded without respect to their underlying meaning," and that we must "seek until we find" and [I]then[/I] come to believe without deviation. Also worth considering, the things they like most about Tertullian seem like they would be precisely those things that made him prey to the Montanist heresy.
No, it's to assume that there is a difference between land and sea and a place where the two meet. Words, concepts, models, I'd contend these are a [I]means[/I] of knowing, not [I]what we know.[/I] Hence, when a concept or model changes, it does not imply that what is known through them changes. This is for the same reason that if I light a photograph of myself on fire I don't suffer burns, or if I unfocus my telescope, the craters in the Moon aren't smoothed away.
Yes, a system of interaction where the ocean is not a cliff or a beach. But these interactions don't depend on us knowing about them.
"America did not have a coastline until it was mapped," and "penguins and cockroaches didn't exist until man experienced them," are prima facie implausible claims. Extraordinary claims require solid evidence. Yet as noted above, one can easily accept enactivist premises, reject the "view from nowhere," and recognize the epistemic primacy of interaction without having to suppose any of this. You seem to need additional premises to justify this sort of claim, not merely dismissing other views.
As it stands, this looks akin to saying "three and three doesn't make five, thus it must make seven." Well, the first premise is right. The conclusion is extremely counterintuitive though and it's unclear how it is supposed to follow.
Forgive me , but I am at a loss for how this is supposed to support the suppositions in question.
I didn't say anything about certainly, I said one could explain the nature of some constraints very well without recourse to cognitive science and dynamical systems.
But to the point, I would simply reject the unchallenged assumption made by many critics of Moore that all knowledge is demonstrative knowledge, or that knowledge is merely justified opinion. Yes, if all knowledge requires justification then one has to traverse an infinite chain of syllogisms to know anything, this was a going concern of the skeptics as far back as ancient Athens. But here is a syllogism:
P1: If all knowledge was demonstrative we would need an infinite chain of justifications to know anything and one cannot consider an infinite number of syllogisms in a finite lifespan (making knowledge impossible)
P2: But we do know things.
C: Therefore, not all knowledge is demonstrative.
If one rejects P1, they have rejected the grounds for complaining about "justification stopping somewhere." Either they affirm that we can consider an infinite chain of syllogisms or that we don't need to.
If they reject P2, then they are committed to the claim that they don't know anything, in which case they can hardly know that either P1 or P2 is false.
Also, is it supposed to be a vice to "assert with bold certainty" that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby?
Yes, I'm quite certain you shouldn't throw a razor sharp object into a baby's crib. Anyone whose philosophy has led them to think that they mustn't lean in too hard to the courage of their convictions on this has adopted a "philosophy" that seems to be a far cry from the "love of wisdom."
Are you sure this isn't Hegel's "fear of error become fear of truth?"
No doubt, it would be more acceptable to say merely that it "wouldn't be true [I]for me[/I] that razors are good toys for 6 months olds," and to allow that others might justifiably disagree. The ol' tyranny of bourgeois metaphysics I suppose—temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice all subservient to tolerance.
This small stretch of thought is meant to be an introduction to metaphysics , in a nutshell, an introduction to someone entirely convinced that no alternative to "the empirical spirit that animates science" (Quine, a confirmed naturalist) should be taken seriously. Getting lost is what happens with the naturalist assumptions are used to try to talk about epistemic relations.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Which sounds like you're saying we see with our understanding. But this isn't the issue. The issue is how the object is delivered into a knowledge claim. If one thinks a brain is a physical organ that generates perceptual events, then it has to be explained how it is possible that these events can be about objects in the world. If one is a naturalist, like Vera Mont, then there is going to be lots of complex talk about subtle organic systems of connectivity, but the trouble is, of course, such things are essentially grounded in causality, and, as Rorty once put it, if causality is the explanatory ground to epistemic relations with objects, then I no more "know" my cat is on the rug (and it is) than a dented car fender knows the offending guard rail. Simply because causality is entirely devoid of epistemic meaning.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If is far worse, than this. First, I only pointed out that causality does not make a knowledge connection just in response to the claim of a physicalist's metaphysics. But the above seems plainly false for the only way for an exemplification to exemplify is assume a particular causal series that demonstrates this. This is rare, and when it comes to a causal matrix of neurons and, synapses and axonal connectivity, well: my cat in no way at all "is exemplified" by this.
But I said it is far worse. If causality cannot deliver "knowledge about" this means ALL that stands before me as a knowledge claim--explicit or implicit, a ready to hand pragmatic claim or a presence at hand (oh look, there is a cat) claim, or just the general implicit "claims" of familiarity as one walks down the street---requires something entirely other than causality to explain how it is possible. Because the argument isn't that I really don't know the cat is on the sofa because I am solipsistically bound to an epistemically closed world; rather, it says I DO know the world and all things inner or outer, privately or publicly. It doesn't question that we have knowledge of the world. It asks what has to be the case given that we do have such knowledge.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Number one: representation and correlation are just ambiguous terms. Almost without meaning. Is it a Kantian representation? And the thing out there impossibly distant? Or is the thing something of primary qualities, space and time. I mean, what correlates with what?
Number two: Not being able to step outside of experience means either everything is IN experience, or experience is IN everything, in order to account for knowledge. Pragmatists fail to explain the phenomenological encounter. Only phenomenologists can address this. The cat is there. Undeniable. It is crowded by regions of associations that give it its full presence. Truth as alethea: A discovery in the affective, conceptualized object that is predelineated in the potentiality of possibilities of a finite historical totality, and so on. Language brings the object out of hiddenness, Heidegger; but Heidegger did not take, as far as I have seen, epistemology up at all, because phenomenology begins with description, and so, the object is there and this being there is primordial, an "inexorable" presence. Period.
I want to know how its being there before me, reaches me, or I reach it. What spans that epistemic distance?
Number three: I don't follow. A reduction moves from what is extraneous to what is essential, thus, A person's social troubles can be reduced to an account of his, say, unresolved infantile issues, the details being incidental. A decomposable perceptual relation? meaning one that can be constructed and ignored at will, no one having privilege over any other: is this yarn, or is it the sum total of a molecular aggregate? Both, depending on the context of the matter at hand. Derrida concludes that there is nothing outside the context. But, like early Wittgenstein, the point really is apophatic, a "reduction" that preserves what cannot be said.
:clap:
Quoting Astrophel
:clap:
Quoting Astrophel
'The eye cannot see itself, nor the hand grasp itself', says the Upani?ad.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:clap: In the ancient world, reason qua logos was that which animated the Cosmos. But then this becomes subsumed by theology as the literal 'word of God', which is what 'logos' came to mean. And this is what was said to be 'foolishness to the Greeks'. This tension, between reason and faith, has existed in Christianity ever since. We're still suffering from it, although there are those who say it can be reconciled. (Aquinas would be one, but notice that Luther was scornful of Aquinas' regard for Aristotle, and the mystical elements of Christianity, infused with Platonism, often flirts with or is accused of heresy by fideist Christians.)
Something should be said about the Buddhist approach to the question posed in the OP. It is often said in modern Buddhist circles, that the Buddha only teaches the cause of suffering and its end. While this has been questioned (ref) it is still true that Buddhism is almost uniquely focussed on the question of the nature of suffering and its cause. The 'Four Noble Truths' of Buddhism begin with the observation that embodied existence is dukkha, a word that is usually translated as 'suffering' or 'stressful'. But, the Four Truths go on to say, there is a cause to this suffering, and a way to the end of suffering (often overlooked by those critical of Buddhism's purported 'pessimism'.)
The philosophical point that should be made, is that the question 'what is the cause of dukkha' generates quite a different problematic to 'what is the origin of everything' which is implied by the Biblical belief that God created the world. Buddhism basically says that the cause of suffering is not some evil Gnostic demiurge that wants to torture mankind, or an indifferent God who lets the innocent suffer for no reason. No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. It nevertheless is the 'cause of sorrow' as the Buddha teaches it, radical though that might be (and it is radical).
It is of course true that Buddhism situates the 'problem of suffering' against a background of the endless caravan of birth and death ('sa?s?ra'), which is quite alien to Western cultural traditions (at least since the early Christian era.) Regardless, the Buddha's teaching is now part of global culture, and the perspectives it provides can be brought to bear on the question of 'religion and suffering'.
I think this idea isn't hard to understand. What does one make of a more complex and overt example of suffering wherein an innocent is the victim and desire apparently absent? I'm thinking of a 10 year-old kid in one of Pol Pot's death camps. What might such a Buddhist perspective make of the kid's relationship to their plight?
Buddhism, it is said, does not accept the idea of original sin, however, it is understood that beings are bound by a state of beginningless ignorance, which bears some resemblance. I understand that this is incomprehensible from the perspective of secular philosophy, for which this life and the amelioration of political, economic and physical conditions is the only meaningful aim. But it is relevant to the OP.
I think that's an interesting idea.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It depends on the system of convictions that underlie your beliefs concerning what is good and what is bad for a baby, just as what constitutes genital mutilation depends on such guiding assumptions. Archeologists found tiny tools and weapons dating back 1700 years.
I mention in my other post that I believe in truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. This goes for ethical truth as well. But I dont see this progress as conformity to pre-determined moral truths , any more than I see scientific progress as conformity to ‘the way things are’, except by understanding the ‘way things are’ in terms of an intricately intercorrelated order of development that transcends all fixed properties and laws. This means ethical progress is not a matter of finding fault on the basis of a pre-given knowledge, but of enriching understanding by presenting new dimensions of appraisal and construing.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The word ‘bus’ implies a system of interactions with the object ‘bus’ based on our understanding of what it is and what it does. Someone who doesnt know about automobiles or even carriages would see it as very different kind of object and interact with it in different ways as a result. If you want to see how different people interact differently with the same coastline ask them to sit down and paint a painting of the scene as accurately as possible. There will be similarities among the paintings, but none will look identical. This is not just due to different skill levels but to the fact that each person’s procedure for measuring and depicting it makes use of a slightly different process. Objective space is derivative of our subjective determination of space.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I should note that cartography is as much an art as a science. Is an authography projection more accurate than a mercator projection? Things exist in relation to what they interact with, and their properties are a function of that interaction. If a coastline existed prior to the arrival of humans, we have to ask who or what it existed for and in relation to. For instance, we could show what existed in terms of the ways of dealing with it of other animals . Birds have excellent vision and can scan a large area. They ‘see’ something like a coastline much better than we can with the naked eye, but what that coastline means for them is a function of what they do with it, how it matters to their activities and purposes. Just as the person who has no familiarity with vehicles ‘sees’ a bus differently from someone who knows what they are for, a bird sees a coastline differently from the way we do. If we remove all the animals, the coastline still exists , but now it has to be understood from the ‘point of view’ of the inorganic structures that interact with it. In each case, whether it is involved with humans, animals or non-living things, the coastline exists as ‘something’, but what this something is must be determined by what it does, and what it does is a function of its relations with the structures it interacts with. Nothing about a ‘coastline’ or any other thing pre-exists its interactions with other things. Things are nothing outside of their interactions. This is what it means to exist.
Having said this, you might be surprised to hear that IÂ’m a big fan of truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. Furthermore, I associate truth with achieving a knowledge characterized by stability, inferential compatibility, prediction and control, harmoniousness and intimacy. It might seem as though what I have said points to a relativism that eliminates the possibility of achieving these goals of truth, but I believe the universe is highly ordered. Its order is in the nature of an intricate process of self-development rather than in static properties and laws. We become privy to this intricate order by participating in its development through our sciences, technologies and other domains of creativity.
First, a bus is a poor example because it is an artifact.
Second, your claim is that the coastline changes because different people paint or think of it differently, and that it doesn't exist until painted, mapped, etc. Nothing you've said supports this claim; it doesn't follow from the premises. No one disagrees that different people will paint a coastline differently or that coastlines interacted with birds before men. However, most would disagree that the coastline didn't exist until it was painted. Again, you seem to need a premise like: "things are entirely defined by their relations and all relations and properties are essential." But I don't see why anyone would agree to premises like this because it implies things like: "you change when someone lights a picture of you on fire," and "ants didn't exist until people developed an abstraction of 'ant.'"
The ordering seems bizarre here too. Wouldn't it make more sense that people mapped a coastline or developed an abstraction of "ants" because they encountered coastlines and ants?
Let me give an example of why the idea that concrete particulars change when people's ideas about them change is ridiculous. Suppose that in the far future people have a very poor understanding of our epoch of history. Due to a loss of sources, they have come to conflate Adolf Hitler and George Washington. They know of the USA, and Germany, and they think America was founded by Hitler after he fled Germany after losing World War II and ordering the Holocaust. Is it now true that: "Adolf Hitler, perpetrator of the Holocaust, was the first President of the United States?"
But that's a patently absurd commitment, as is "mosquitos didn't exist until man experienced them." We have plenty of evidence to suggest mosquitos were around and interacting with things long before man.
A completely facile counter example, toys are not the real weapons. People today let toddlers have toy guns and swords too. They might even let them play with an unloaded gun. They don't load a revolver, cock it, and then throw it in a crib with a 9 month old unless they're trying to kill their child (or play a unique form of Russian roulette). Not to mention these are clearly for older children, who might very well be given duller knives to help prepare food even today. An infant isn't honing any skills besides basic grasping. This is another obvious constraint, you cannot teach a three month old to ride a bike or dress a deer.
Circumcision, scarification, tattooing, foot binding, etc. all have reasons, even if they might be abhorrent ones. Letting a child randomly maim themselves by accident doesn't fit the mold. And at any rate, absolutely none of that matters because its still the case that one wouldn't do it unless one [I]wanted[/I] their child to accidently slash themselves, which is the constraint in question. If one wants to give a baby a toy they will actually enjoy, a razor sharp knife will never be appropriate.
But a naturalist with a proper understanding of perception wouldn't say that. Brains don't generate experiences of objects by themselves. This is what I mean by inappropriate decomposition and reductionism. Take a brain out of a body and it won't be experiencing anything. Put a body in a vacuum and what you'll have is a corpse, not experiences. It's the same thing if you put a body on the surface of a star or the bottom of the sea. Nothing looks like anything in a dark room, or in a room with no oxygen, etc.
In physicalist explanations of perception the objects perceived and the environment are all essential.
Ok, but you haven't, as far as I can tell, done anything to justify the claim that we cannot know things through their causes or effects, you've just stated it repeatedly. Prima facie, this claim seems wrong; effects are signs of their causes. Smoke, for instance, is a natural sign of combustion.
If effects didn't tell us anything about their causes, or causes about their effects, then the main methods of the empirical sciences should be useless. But they aren't. Likewise, if pouring water into my gas tank caused my car to die, it seems that I can learn something about my car from this.
I'm sorry, I couldn't parse this. Nothing can exemplify anything?
I couldn't really understand the rest of the post either.
And how does one speak about brains and bodies and vacuums star and seas? One observes them, like anything else. And what IS an observation? THIS is the rub! Observations cannot be merely assumed any more than, say, gravity can with the claim that well, things fall down. Yes, they do fall down, and observing a star or a dna molecule does have this same simplicity about it, that is, one observes it and there it is. But gravity is perhaps the most difficult and elusive concepts in physics. Why, one has to ask, is observation allowed to be so simple?
Make the move to explaining what it means to observe something. Are you a scientist? You know where this leads: to a very complex account of the brain physiology. But note: how does one begin here? By observing. Surely you can see the obvious question begging here. Egregiously ignored, just because it is so obvious. It is what it means to observe at all that is in question, and one cannot simply assume it.
But then, clearly we DO have a world and science is certainly not wrong about everything. It is just not right when its assumptions are carried into this strange place we find ourselves, which is metaphysics. This impasse is real. One has to simply raise one's head, observe the lamp on the desk, and understand that this observation is an ontological and epistemic radical indeterminacy at the basic level of analysis.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You're living in a fantasy world if the discussion is about basic questions. Science and everyday observations do not ask basic questions. Analytically prior to smoke is perception itself.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There is nothing about causality that is epistemic. One has to look hard and clear at this. Nothing. But in this reasoning, it is worse, because every causal sequence has plain as day a causal beginning and an end. Rain washes open the rock, the rock is weathered down, becomes smooth and is dislodged from its place, falls and hits Odysseus on his head and kills him. Weathering then causal sequence then Odyseuss's concussion. But here, in this problematic, we have the OTHER side of a perceptual event, any event, for it is perception itself that is the object of inquiry, and to affirm what it is requires ... a perceptual event. There is no weathering, no smoothing or erosion, for this kind of thing merely assumes what in question. Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, if one is committed to a scientist's epistemology of brain events, then one has to explain knowledge of said events in science's terms. But these are established on observation. See the above.
Look, it is certainly NOT that the world falls apart, and I say this again for emphasis. I trust science as much as you do (in fact, the scientific method, pragmatists argue, is built into language itself, in the structure of a conditional modality). But the question raised was about metaphysics, and my point here is to show where is begins from a standing of everydayness and science. Metaphysics haunts, if you will, our entire existence because it is discovered everywhere. No? Try to think how not.
Is this what you call "the catholicity of reason"? What evidence do we have that this is not just the secular universality of human reason?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I would say: there are many truths, they are not sui generis, and they are not potentially contradicting truths. In Henological terms: There are Many Truths, and none of them contradict each other. Contradictions only arise in Opinion (Doxa), not in Episteme.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Kierkegaard also pointed out (and rightly so) that God gave Abraham a fideist order when he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Do you disagree with that?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Things cannot be poetry and figurative language all the way down.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Why? That's exactly what it is. Believe, so that you might understand. It's a conditional statement: if P, then Q. In this case, the antecedent is Believe, just that, Believe, and that is 100% fideist. It's absolute blind faith, without an ounce of reason to it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't know what this last paragraph means. Can you explain it to me in simpler terms, please?
Interesting. How is order an intricate process of self-development?
No, perhaps I should have specified since the word is uncommon. I mean it in the original sense, as in "all-embracing and unified, one." This is the sense in which the Orthodox and many Protestants still affirm: "I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church," at every service, when they recite the Nicene or Apostles' creed.
:up:
The catholicity of reason is just this, plus the assumption that this applies to the logos by which truth is known (although some might want to take the further step to claiming that the two are deeply related).
Yes, particularly your earlier point that the order itself was "irrational." That is not how the story has generally been read, either by the Patristics, later theologians, or Jews who say that God has a purpose in the command, or rather several. The most common purpose offered up is to test Abraham (e.g. St. Athanasius). Also popular is the idea that God is forcing Abraham to test Him, in a continuation of Abraham's pleading/testing of God re sparing any righteous souls in Sodom. Further, God's purposes in the Bible are not taken to be solely, or even mostly about those immediately involved in many cases. The Patristics tend to see Isaac as a type prefiguring Christ. That is, the purpose is also prophetic, and this includes God substituting the atoning sacrifice and sparing the children of men.
Here is a summary of early Christian accounts for instance:
Second, is Abraham blind at this point? God has been very active in his life, working wonders for his benefit. He only has a son because God worked a miracle that allowed his post-menopausal wife to bear him a son. He has seen God destroy cities. Does he have any reason to think that he can defend his son from God if God wants Isaac dead? Does he have any reason to think God is out to play a trick on him?
Is all deference to authority "blind faith," or is there proper deference to authority that is rational? We would balk if a random man on the street says he wants to crack open our child's skull and remove part of their brain, but might readily accept this if a neurosurgeon recommends it, despite having no relevant expertise in the matter ourselves. And yet sometimes doctors perform unnecessary, dangerous procedures to make money, and aren't acting for our child's benefit. Is God less trustworthy than a board certified physician though?
We might also consider that not all the acts of the Biblical heros are supposed to be good. Jacob is a deceiver. David is an adulterer who kills Bathsheba's husband to cover up his adultery, etc.
But it isn't, it's allegorical and anagogic.
St. Augustine says something like this in many places. The most famous quotation is from the Tractate on John (it is a paraphrase of Isaiah), however he makes the case for it more fully in Contra Academicos. There he is arguing against radical skepticism, the doubt of all things.
For instance, doubting the senses, and doubting that we can learn things from them. One must first believe in the reliability of the senses, at least tacitly, in order to take empirical inquiry seriously. But is trusting that what you see in front of you "blind" faith?
And the point is that one believes in order to understand, whereas fideism tends towards "you cannot understand, but you must have faith and obey." Yet Christ tells the Apostles: "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you," (John 15:15) and "the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend," Exodus 33:11.
We could also consider here how Plato has it that one must "turn the entire body" towards the Good before one can know it. The turning must come before the knowing, but it does not exclude the knowing.
It just means: "I believe because it is absurd," is a later invention loosely based on Tertullian, and that he has been rather selectivity read at times.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, this is not how I would phrase the issue myself, but I "get your point", so to speak. What I would say, is that if the catholicity of reasons exists (and if catholicity simpliciter exists), then it pre-dates the foundation of the Catholic church. Catholicity, if it exists, existed before the Catholic church existed. That's what I would say. And if this is so, then it follows that the Catholic church does not, and cannot, have a monopoly on catholicity. Which is why one can be a catholic outside the Catholic church. Agree or disagree? I feel like you disagree with me on this specific point, among others.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, it is. At the end of the day, it is. Or, as North Americans like to say: it is what it is. You can defer to authority for other reasons, though, for example if you fear punishment. But you only tolerate that punishment because you have blind faith in the idea that this is your best or even only option: to tolerate such punishment under those circumstances.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, there is. You can try to harmonize reason and faith all you want, since most of the time you will succeed. At least in trivial matters. For example, I have blind faith in my feet, in the sense that I completely trust them when I absent-mindedly step up and walk towards the kitchen. I don't need to think "now I place the right foot, and now I place the left foot, etc.". I just have blind faith that my feet work and that the part of my brain that controls my feet works as well. I fully trust them. Now, do I have philosophical reasons to justify this blind faith that I have in my own feet? Of course not, why would I need one? I'm a fideist about ordinary things like my feet, or this stone on the floor, or my hands. Why would I even doubt their existence? Because some philosopher said so in a book? That's not sound reasoning to me, that sounds like an appeal to authority. Suddenly I have to take Descartes' word "just because"? Sorry, I don't trust Cartesian philosophy as much as I trust my own two feet, or my hands, for that matter.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Doesn't solve the problem that Kierkegaard points out. It's still a problem even if Abraham is not a hero or even if his acts are not supposed to be good. The order itself is irrational. Even if God gives it. It is not rational for a father to sacrifice his son to a deity, even if that deity is the Christian God. It just isn't, it's not a rational thing to do.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I feel like that's not sound reasoning on your part. It seems like you are appealing to the majority. Kierkegaard is in the minority here, sure. But that doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong. Majorities can make mistakes, especially interpretative mistakes. That's why there is a literal use of the language to begin with: so that there are no interpretative mistakes, you just read what it says. Besides, even if the mainstream interpretation is in fact the following:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
then I would ask: What is God testing here in the first place, if not Abraham's faith? Do you see my point? Fideism, by its very nature, isn't exactly a difficult case to make, friend. I think you are having a much more difficult time articulating faith with reason. I have it much easier. When a fisherman catches a fish, how did he do it, if not because the fish had blind faith that the bait was organic instead of plastic?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is He? What do you think? I'll tell you what I think Kierkegaard might have said: he might have said that God is more trustworthy than a board certified physician, and this is precisely with the better Christian is the one who blindly believes, not the one who tries to rationalize what God is, or even if he exists to begin with. FYI, at some point this discussion sort of "degenerates" into the discussion about the literal interpretation of the Bible. And that is exactly the sort of discussion that I point to, when I say that things cannot be metaphors and figurative language all the way down.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Then why should anyone listen to Christ instead of Epicurus? For Epicurus also had a concept of friendship.
Once again thank you very much for your time and consideration, @Count Timothy von Icarus
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I didnÂ’t say a coastline or an ant didnt exist until painted. The word coastline implies a particular sense of meaning, and there are as many senses of meaning for it as there contexts of use. Animals who interact with a coastline produce their own senses of meaning for it , even though they donÂ’t perceive it in terms of verbal concepts. The development of knowledge of a coastline , or any other aspect of nature , is in the direction of an enrichment of sense. This is what I mean when I say that the meaning of the concept of coastline changes with the development of knowledge. The issue here isnÂ’t whether things exist outside of us, itÂ’s what kinds of constraints their existence produces in relation to their enrichment by the development of knowledge.
Knowledge produces material changes in the world not by nullifying existing things, but by integrating them in more and more complex and useful ways with respect to our practical uses of other things. The fact that a coastline exists in some sense outside of our growing knowledge of it is utterly irrelevant to anything that makes it scientifically important to us and gives us the power to control nature and get along with each other. If you want to assume there is some intrinsic content that defines the existence of natural things independent of our knowledge of them, I can go along with that, but I would argue that such content acts as barely more than a placemark in comparison to the processes of integration and correlation by which we know about them and do useful things with them. I think the independent existence of things is so important to you because you confuse intrinsic content with integrative processes of knowing.
Bruno Latour, as you already know, was not a realist. He was, quite literally, a philosophical relationist. Not a co-relationist, mind you, just a good, old fashioned relationist, at the end of the day. Like Hegel, in a sense. He was also a professional anthropologist, and he specialized in sociology of science. He was also a devout Catholic. How is that rational? It isn't. Therefore, Bruno Latour was a fideist.
Here's the question: in your honest, theological opinion: was Bruno Latour a good Catholic?
I agree, knowledge does not represent the world it presents the world, makes it present. More knowledge makes the world more present.
Quoting Joshs
Of course not, since we are not separate from nature. Do we have good reason to think that everything that goes on in the Universe is accessible to our cognition even in prinicple? I don't think so. So, our knowledge presents us with what is, at any given historical moment, accessible to us, and that is ever-expanding (or at least it has been up until now).
Quoting Joshs
The independent existence of things seems to be the most plausible conclusion—the inference to the best explanation for what we experience. From a practical, everyday life perspective whether things exist independently of our cognitions or not really doesn't matter unless we have some existential agenda that relies on thinking about it one way or the other.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
'Rational' doesn't seem the right adjective here. It's not a virtuous thing to do, even if one may have reasons to do it. Rationality is simply having reasons—following some axiom and then reasoning consistently on that basis. A failure of rationality is a failure to be consistent. Most of our starting presuppositions are not irrational, but a-rational—meaning they are matters of faith.
Uncontaminated by human reason. In that sense, they are matters of pure, unadulterated blind faith. It's uncompromising fideism, it is the complete sacrifice of reason. And as stupid as that may sound, that is exactly the sort of blind faith that I have in my own two feet. I don't need to think how to walk, I just walk. I trust my feet and my brain enough to do that on auto-pilot, it is strictly a-rational, as you call it. That, according to Kierkegaard, is what distinguishes the knight of faith from the Thomist-minded masses. And my argument is that Kierkegaard personally transcended Protestantism, and in the process of doing so, he became an existential Christian instead. What I'm try to prove to @Count Timothy von Icarus is that one can be an existential Catholic in the same sense. Just as Kierkegaard fought against the Danish Church, so too the existential Catholic can fight against the Catholic Church.
But it seems to me that he doesn't believe that my thesis holds up, for some reason. I could be wrong, though.
Sure, but North America has one coastline, not one for every species that experiences it.
If we only experience and know concepts and senses, our own "anticipations," how is this not recreating the very representationalism you were complaining about? It strikes me as very similar, just using different language. And representionalists never denied that we interact with things, or come to know things through our interactions with them. They also don't want to affirm the existence of any independent things (or at least anything about them, save your bare "placeholder"), since all we have access to are "mental representations." Yet as far as I can see your "notions/concepts" and "anticipations" seem to be filling the exact same role as "mental representations" here, and some sort of diffuse soup of "constraints" that is only known through concepts/notions looks to be something like a rebranded noumena.
I'm not sure what it means to "be a catholic." To affirm the catholicity of the Church? Then sure. I didn't intend to suggest anything about the Roman Catholic Church. I'm part of an Orthodox church, but we still recite the Creed, "one holy, catholic, and apostolic."
Same with "catholicity simpliciter." I'm not sure what you mean. It's a property, I don't think it can "exist simpliciter."
I just don't see it. Or your use of "blind faith," is perhaps anachronistic. I have a friend who is a very skilled mechanic. I know he's good with cars, I've seen the cars he's rebuilt. If I trust his authority on automobiles I don't see how this is necessarily "blind."
Presumably you have a lifetime of experience walking. Again, I am not seeing how this is blind. This is like saying it's "blind faith" to assume that you'll get wet when you jump in a pool.
Where does Kierkegaard ever say Abraham isn't being tested? I don't think he does.
In any case, this view is right in Scripture, you can't appeal to literalism and deny the interpretation.
Hebrews 11:17 [I]By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. 11:18 God had told him, “Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,” 11:19 and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead..."[/I]
If you're committed to the literalist view you're committed to Abraham reasoning in this case.
Sure, it's a test of faith. Even if it was a test of wholly irrational faith, that wouldn't make the test or the person giving the test irrational. The test is not given "for no reason at all."
And we might distinguish between "faith in," and "faith that." I hardly see how it is irrational and "blind" to ever have faith in anyone. I have faith in some of my friends because they are good friends, good people, and have always supported me. I fail to see how that is irrational. But the same is true for God.
Anyhow, fideism is not the view that faith is important, or even most important (although St. Paul puts love above faith). Lots of people affirm that. It's the view that religious beliefs are entirely based on faith alone.
But that isn't what most theology does. One cannot know God's essence, only His energies. That's all over the Church Fathers. One can only approach the divine essence through apophatic negation, the via negativa, or analogy. Which is what Kierkegaard also ends up affirming, he basically works himself painfully towards Dionysius (painfully because his blinders stop him from referencing all the relevant thought here).
Were the followers who abandoned Christ after he told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood because they thought he was advocating cannibalism in the right (John 6)? Why does Christ himself primarily teach in parables and allegory?
Or did Christ come to save livestock (the lost sheep of Israel) and will the Judgement really be of actual sheep and goats? Is St. Paul breaking the rule of faith when he interprets Genesis allegorically in Galatians 4?
"The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” John 6:63
"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” II Corinthians 3:6
The Gospels are full of references of Christ fulling OT prophecies, often in counterintuitive ways that would be completely lost in a literalist reading. So, to at least some extent, a hyper literalist reading is self-refuting.
On the Christian account, because those who have had faith come to understand, as the Apostles did, that Christ is God and Epicurus, if Christians are correct, is badly deluded.
If it exists, it cannot exist independently of a thing, of a res, precisely because it would be a property, like you said. I just don't think that it's a property of reason, because reason might not be a res to begin with. It makes more metaphysical sense to say that I am a res cogitans, I am a thing that has reason, so catholicity (if it exists) is a property of a thing (the thing that I am), not of the reason that this thing (myself) has. By "catholicity simpliciter", I meant "catholicity in general", not just the purported "catholicity of reason". For one could argue that there could be a catholicity of opinion (doxa), instead of just a catholicity of reason.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, then I don't know what to tell you, other than the fact that many goddesses are blind. Justice is blind, so is faith. That you can "mix it up" with reason doesn't mean that they're not fruits from different trees.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It is. When you assume that you'll get wet when you jump into a pool, that is blind faith. You could question it, philosophically, if you wanted to. But there's no point to that sort of questioning. Things cannot be philosophy all the way down, I would say.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
He doesn't. He just thinks that "having his faith being tested" is not the moral of the story here. The moral of the story is that Abraham made the deliberate, conscious choice to obey God's order, while fully understanding that the order in question was contrary to what any father would do if someone told such a father to sacrifice his son. In other words, deep down, Christianity is irrational, according to Kierkegaard. That's the moral of the story of Abraham and God. That particular story cannot be explained in a Thomistic way.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Am I? What language was that quote originally written in? If one is to be a literalist about this, then one has to take into consideration the fact that the passage in question was not really written in English. And whatever word was originally used there, it most certainly was not etymologically related to the Latin word Ratio.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But Abraham did not know why the test was given in the first place, he had no reason to believe it to be a benign order. He instead had every reason to believe that it was a malevolent order instead (i.e., how did Abraham know that he wasn't being fooled by an Evil Genius (an Evil Genie, for example, or a demon)? How does he know that the order is being delivered from God, and not his impostor, Lucifer? He doesn't. He has no reliable way of knowing that. All he has, is blind Christian faith. Or are we to say that Abraham was not a Christian? Someone born before Christ cannot be a Christian? Why not? Was Jesus not with God in the beginning (John 1:2)? If so, then why couldn't Epicurus be a Christian? No one will dispute the fact that Epicurus did not use the word Ratio. But he did use the word Logos. How is he not as holy as Jesus, then, if we are to believe John 1:1?
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And they are. Religious beliefs are, at the end of the day, entirely based on faith alone, not love.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Mystics would disagree.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That was a trend during the Middle Ages, I'm not sure it's the only path to the Christian God understood as that which, among other things, transcends human reason.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It's a legitimate way of doing Christian philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
One should be able to say, in all seriousness, that this ritual (consuming the flesh and blood of Christ) is indeed Holy Cannibalism. There is simply no other way to best describe it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Because Christ was a man. And he was a man even if he was also God. Men speak in parables and allegories, on account of the fact that they are men. But God requires no metaphor, nor figure. God is literal through and through, if He exists. Metaphors are for creatures, not for their Creator.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"Yes" to both questions.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, he is.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Humans need the concept of Spirit, because we are finite creatures. God, if He exists, has no need for Spirit, because he would be the Literal Truth. A hyper-literalist reading of the Bible is not self-refuting. It only places the word of the Bible at odds with the word of science. And in that conflict, I am on the side of science: I am an atheist. My atheism, however, does not mean that I cannot understand the Bible, or any other spiritualist reading of Biblical scripture specifically, and of any scripture in general.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Why? Was Jesus not with God since the beginning, as John (1:2) says?
Yeah.
It's in Greek like all of the NT. ?????????, logisamenos, it's the middle voice of logos, word/reason, from which we get "logic." It is used throughout the period to denote reasoning, philosophizing, or calculating.
Which ones? Anthologies of Christian mystics and spiritual guides for monks like the Philokalia are packed with the the essence/energies distinction. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Bonaventure, etc.
The author from which we get the term "mystical theology" is famous for clarifying this distinction.
And mystikos, and mystics, in the Christian tradition tended to be heavily involved in anagogic readings of Scripture. It first refers to the hidden/secret meanings; not exactly modern literalism (which is very much a modern phenomenon).
No, it also places it at odds with places where different Biblical authors interpret the Bible allegorically, including Christ.
But this has nothing to do with Kierkegaard's thought at all. Kierkegaard was not a fundamentalist.
Well now I can't take you seriously. :rofl:
So duality is not an illusion – 'samsara is nirvana' is ignorance? :chin:
Quoting Astrophel
... chasing its (fairy)tail.
Quoting Astrophel
"Object" presupposes (a) subject, or (an) actor of "the perceptual act", that is embodied (i.e. an aspect of nature). Mind is non/pre-mind-dependent (i.e. emergent-constrained by – entangled with – nature aka "non/pre-mind") and not the other way around as idealists (e.g. apophenia-biased¹ and/or egocentric-biased² and/or introspection-biased³ 'believers') et al assume.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia [1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentric_bias [2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion [3]
:up: :up:
Quoting Vera Mont
Apparently not.
The non-difference of sa?s?ra and Nirv??a has never been accepted by Theravada but is taught in Mah?y?na cultures. Once again something I read on Dharmawheel when I used to post there: ‘Sa?s?ra is Nirv??a grasped, Nirv??a is Sa?s?ra released.’ The aphorism expresses the Mah?y?na understanding that Sa?s?ra and Nirv??an are not separate realms but rather two modes of perceiving the same reality: one clouded by ignorance, the other illuminated by prajna.
Another way of putting it is that, for ignorance, Nirv??a is always somewhere else - ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ - whereas for enlightenment it is right here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience. I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.
A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities (visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources.
Most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.
You may respond to all this by observing that IÂ’m simply describing how the brain creates a representation of the world. But what I want to point out is that this is not a mere copy. The brain takes input spread out spatially and temporary and condenses it into a simultaneity. Features which originally belonged to different times and different places in the world are perceived at the same time and in the same space. But this isnÂ’t all the brain does. In tying disparate events together temporally and spatially, it can also construe patterns. It can perceive these events as related to each other, meaningfully similar on some basis or other and on the basis of which both events differ from a third.
But surely the brain couldnÂ’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, oneÂ’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. Yes, but the question is, how does the actual flow of events constrain the kinds of patterns we can construct to model them? Apparently the actual flow of events can accommodate an indefinite variety of construals. We can look at a landscape and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldnÂ’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.
We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us. Seeing it as a unity by synthesizing its temporally and spatially spaced out elements into an instantaneous whole in the brain allows us to do things with it like creating maps of it. And there are many other ways of construing the scene that are equally true in the sense that we can test out our knowledge in our actual interactions with it and validate our model.
But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former? Let’s say that it is indeed better in that it subsumes the features of the former into a more holistically integrated unity. In other words, we can always perceive a phenomenon in restrictive terms as ‘this and only this’ , or in terms that are permeable to alternative constructions. Is the latter way a more accurate representation of reality? I think it’s better than accurate. The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?
We can model physical phenomena in terms of efficient causality, where the behavior of interacting objects is described on the basis of fixed properties (mass, energy), and then declare that the physical world behaved according to the laws of objective causality before humans arrived on the scene. This approach validates itself perfectly well, but perhaps it can be subsumed as just one aspect within a more permeable model of nature, one that doesnÂ’t invalidate the causal account but reveals it as limited and restrictive, like seeing a coastline as disconnected segments. We can declare that dinosaurs existed before we discover them, and then in 50 years a new biological approach will discard names for living things in favor of a radically holistic ecological approach in which it no longer makes sense to talk about discrete objects moving through space we call animals , but instead a web of reciprocal relations within which we no longer need to tease out categorical entities we call animals. And they could then declare this ecology (but not dinosaurs) something that existed before humans arrived.
We can apply this subsuming account of knowledge to ethics as well. We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.
Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this seriously, you might as well say we only experience our experiences of our experiences, and so on, in some sort of infinite Cartesian theater regress. Having the Cartesian humonculus also move the body around doesn't really seem to fix the issues here for me.
Right, this strikes me as the Cartesian to Kantian expansion of the imagination, such that perception now occurs in the imagination, or sensation is just collapsed into imagination.
Nothing about contemporary neuroscience can answer the question "is sensation distinct from imagination." You could use the same neuroimaging studies to argue either point, because everyone agrees that both are involved in ongoing cognition.
The reason the two were proposed as separate is because they appear to be phenomenologically distinct. But, either this is confusion, or else if they are distinct it would imply some difference in the body.
Yet someone who wants to make the distinction could also easily appeal to neuroscience. For the most obvious examples, we can consider all the disorders where what you are describing re memory and association fails to hold. In agnosia, as near as we can tell, the visual field is fine. People can draw what they see, sometimes very well if they were skilled artists. But they cannot recognize everyday objects, which in turn affects interaction since they cannot figure out what a fork or can opener is for. Likewise, people with aphasia seem to have intact hearing and can respond to auditory stimulus, but cannot understand words, although they do hear them.
Similarly, not all information from sense organs is processed at once, but is rather prioritized, which is how we get blind sight, or how we can duck or run from something large before realizing what we've seen. Hence, someone wanting to making the distinction would point out that if recognition and association [I]was[/I] sight, then agnosia should be the same thing as blindness. But it isn't, which might explain why languages have different terms for these. Which is not to say there is some hard neurological distinction, but merely that there is a useful distinction, particularly when dealing with claims that we experience concepts, or experiences, rather than sensation [I]of[/I] things.
I'd argue that it's not a representation at all. Here is a suggestion, it's more like a lens, something seen through, then an image.
And crucially, neuroscience makes a very hard distinction between mentally picturing something and sensing it. When people are asked to imagine a sight or sound some of the same areas of the brain used in processing sense data are activated, but to two processes are in no way identical, not least because what is happening in the eye and ear are quite distinct. And they are phenomenologically distinct too, which is why people still listen to songs they have very accurate memories of.
One can experience a concept of a coastline anywhere. One can experience a coastline on the coast.
This is conflating existence and being experienced. Again, your soup of constraints just seems to be the Kantian noumena, and you only have to posit it because of the presupposition that all experience is of representations, and thus that whatever we refer to is our own representations and not their causes, not what is perceived. That is, "perception is what we experience, not a means of experiencing." But why would anyone want to presuppose this? It makes a mess of epistemology and on any naturalistic evolutionary account of sensation its function is to serve as precisely a [I]means[/I] of sensing, not something to be experienced.
I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions. And likewise, we'd have no grounds for chastising a police officer because they shot someone holding their wallet because they perceived it as a firearm. But a wallet isn't a firearm, regardless of how it is perceived by the police officer.
This seems like a strawman. It's a very narrow, particular sort of philosophy that sees everything bottoming out in brute fact laws. The claim that things are intelligible is not the claim that knowledge corresponds to arbitrary properties.
This is another strawman paired to a false dichotomy. "Either we have 'fiat-based' account built on "arbitrary laws" or we see more and bridge differences. Well, who wouldn't choose the latter if there were only these two options?
Can it be also applied to the experience of a movie viewer? Does this experience amount to a flow of images and perceptions, harmoniously coordinated by a unified perspective of integral representation?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
IÂ’m aware of two kinds of empirical accounts to describe perception, representational and enactivist, and versions that combine aspects of the two. I am not a representationalist, but just used that term for convenience. In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well. Does this mean you are questioning all contemporary psychological accounts of perception, or can you suggest a contemporary empirical alternative IÂ’m not aware of? ) Btw, the text photo you inserted was too blurry to read).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.
The concept of depression that replaced melancholia will eventually undergo the same fate as melancholia. You would deny that the word coastline could suffer such a fate, but on the basis of what criterion can we draw the line between that word and phlogiston or melancholia? You donÂ’t imagine any way in which ,coastlineÂ’ succumbs to the same process of having its underlying practices of understanding shift along with the evolution of culture and language use, such that coastline becomes a quaint expression harking back to a time when they thought about such aspects of nature in a different way than they do now?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another? CanÂ’t both ways of seeing lead to maps that can be validated? What happens to the components of one image, its lines, curves and contrasts, when we shift to the other image? DonÂ’t those components take on a different role? Is there any account-independent element of the images, something that is not vulnerable to a shift of the definition of its existence?
What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another? What happens to the components of one image, its lines, curves and contrasts, when we shift to the other image? DonÂ’t those components take on a different role? Is there any account-independent element of the images, something that is not vulnerable to a shift of the definition of its existence?
No, I like a lot of work using enactivism and phenomenology, in part because they avoid notions like "all we know are our own concepts" and "words don't have reference, only sense (or sense IS their reference)."
Again this seems to require the idea the concepts and words are primarily what we know—that when we read a book about botany we primarily learn about words, scientific terminology and practice, and concepts, but never about plants, only concepts of plants. Thus, when our terms change, what we have known also changes.
Well, this is a common position, and it seems to me to stem from two assumptions. First, knowledge is just justified true (or "validated") opinion/belief and all knowledge is thus demonstrative knowledge. Second, all knowledge is propositional and involves propositional truth. And from this it would indeed follow that when we discover that some terms must be changed or eliminated, all the propositions in our "knowledge-bank" related to some area might flip their truth values, giving knowledge a sort of radical instability. But I wouldn't want to affirm either of those suppositions. I'd instead say that knowledge is the adequacy of the intellect to being (and intellect is the flip side of being). We can know things more or less well. When we switched from Newtonian physics to QM and Relativity, we didn't come to know a new physical world, we came to know the physical world (presumably) better than we did before.
Phlogiston is a fine example. Did phlogiston have the same epistemic status as dogs and the ocean? If we have been wrong about anything must we doubt everything? Phlogiston was a [I]means[/I] of explaining combustion. It had a referent. That we understand combustion differently now is not evidence that we:
A. Never referred to combustion, but only our own concepts.
B. That combustion didn't exist prior to us refining our intentions towards it.
Rather, it suggests that our means of knowing can be refined, hopefully allowing us to know things better.
And this suggests to you that coastlines are not a real thing in the world? What about dogs or people?
That we can refer to things that don't exist is obvious. We have fiction. People also have mistaken fiction for history. We can be wrong. I will grant you that.
But I fail to see how: "we can refer to things that aren't real" would imply "we never refer to things that are real," or even "we should be skeptical as to whether we ever refer to anything that is real."
I'd just refer back to the example of some future conflation of Adolf Hitler and George Washington. If truth is dependent solely on concepts and relations of concepts/terms, then it seems possible that "Adolf Hitler became the first President of the USA after losing WWII" could be both validated and true. But I'd maintain this can never become true. Truth is the adequacy of intellect to being, not a function of how concepts related to one another, except accidentally.
Yes, like I said before, if I understand you right an implicit premise is that nothing is (more or less) intelligible in itself.
Wouldn't the view that it can be seen as both be more accurate than either? Likewise, "it's an optical illusion that gives the appearance of depth, but is on a flat surface," seems more accurate than "it has depth."
But it doesn't make sense to try to use the trickiest examples to answer questions, although this is how much philosophy is done now. Just look at the simple case. A Secret Service officer thinks he sees a gun in a protestors hand. He moves his scope around to validate his belief. He confirms it to himself and shoots them. Obviously, there is an important sense in which their perception was in error.
Why not? Think of the word "carnivore". It applies to some animals, and it also applied to some plants. Now think of the word "sheep". It applies to some animals, and to some humans. Just as it is possible to determine how carnivorous a certain diet is (i.e., how much meat does an animal or a carnivorous plant consume), it is also possible to determine how sheepish a certain life has been (i.e., how much does an animal or a human conform to a flock).
God communicates through dream i.e. metaphor in the Bible multiple times. These metaphors require interpretation. Go re-read Daniel's dream and come back and tell us that it was entirely literal.
It was.
Daniel's dream was a metaphorical representation of what was going to happen.
Read Genesis.
So do the sun and the moon really bow down to Joseph? Or does the dream, perhaps, represent something?
If the literal interpretation of the Bible is correct, then yes, they have to. However, no one says that it is indeed correct. That's what I'm trying to settle with @Count Timothy von Icarus. I'm making a case for Christian literalism. He is trying to find flaws in the case that I'm making. You are welcome to join our discussion, but you kinda need to catch up and be "on the same page" as us, to use a metaphor.
You're strawmanning biblical/christian literalism. The plain meaning of the text sometimes indicates allegory or metaphor.
Prove that I'm strawmanning biblical/christian literalism, othewise what you're saying here is just an opinion, not a fact.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Again, that's an opinion, not a fact. Prove what you're saying, if you're so confident in your understanding of Christianity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Could have fooled me. Every point I have made that you have shot down comes directly from either the phenomenologies of Husserl (the reference of sense is to other senses), Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger or the enactivist work of Gallagher, Varela and Thompson. And you dismissed as wrong or unintelligible AstrophelÂ’s reading of phenomenologist Michael Henry, whose work is closely tied to Husserl and enactivism. If you are a supporter of phenomenology or enactivism, it must be to a brand that IÂ’m not familiar with. Perhaps a pre-Husserlian form of phenomenology?Hegel perhaps?
I'm considerably more sympathetic towards your argument than is the Count. I will just make some additional observations.
Isn't what you're referring to here the subjective unity of perception? This is how the mind 'creates' or 'constructs' (both words have problematical connotations) the unified experience of the world which is our lived world ('lebenswelt'). Something I often mention is that neuroscience has no account of which particular neural system or systems actually perform the magic of generating a unified world-picture from the disparate sensory and somatic sources inputs - and that's a quote from a paper on it:
This is, of course, the basis on which I argue that cognitive science lends support to idealism - that experienced reality is mind dependent (not mind-independent as realist philosophies would have it.)
This kind of insight is native to Buddhist philosophical psychology, abhidharma, and also to the Mind Only (Yog?c?ra) school. It's far too complicated a model to try and summarise in a forum post (ref), but suffice to say, there's a very good reason that Varela and Maturana draw extensively on abhidharma in their writings on embodied cognition.
Quoting Joshs
But then, I think what your musings lack, is an overall sense of purpose. Isn't this the factor which Heidegger addresses through his writings on 'care'? The point being, consideration of what matters to us, why it is important. And on not kidding ourselves (something I myself am prone to, regrettably.) 'Seeing things as they truly are' is not necessarily a matter for scientific analysis, because we're involved in life, we're part of what we are seeking to understand. And that's what religions seek to provide - a kind of moral polestar, an over-arching purpose or meaning, towards which these questions, or quests, are oriented. (But then, I am mindful of the postmodernist skepticism towards meta-narrative, which is also a factor here.)
That's an interesting analogy. On what basis do I trust my own feet? Is it because they are yet to let me down, because they have proved to be, barring the rarest exceptions, competent? If so, would that be rational, but in the inductive, not the deductive, sense?
Hume says we have no reason to believe the Sun will rise tomorrow. I take that to mean that just because it has always, during the whole of human experience, risen and just because our science tells us it should continue to work for billions of years, that does not entail that there is any logical necessity in its rising. There seems to be a distinction in human affairs between practical and "pure" rationality.
It's the good ol' Problem of Induction.
Quoting Wayfarer
I should mention that what I had in mind with that quote was not neuroscience but HusserlÂ’s phenomenological analyses of perception. The fact that it could be taken for an empirical account shows how closely aligned contemporary empirical approaches to perception are to Husserl, up to a point. Husserl would say that where empirical accounts fall short is in remaining within what he calls the natural attitude, assuming an objectively causal ground for intentional processes. In this connection, you may be interested in the role that HusserlÂ’s notion of the noema plays with regard to the subjective intentional constitution of objectivity. The noema gets to the heart of the process of idealization. Derrida describes it this way:
Quoting Wayfarer
For Husserl, purpose is bound up with the anticipatory nature of intentional acts. A striving to know further along a a trajectory of sense projects itself forward into all acts of constitution. Husserl says “… the style, so to speak, of "what is to come" is prefigured through what has just past”. Both he and Heidegger critique the goal of scientific accuracy as a symptom of the elevation of an idiosyncratic method ( logic-mathemarical idealization) to the status of ultimate ground, which conceals its basis in more fundamental processes of self-world relations. While for Husserl, these primordial relations are processes of striving for knowledge, for Heidegger Being-in-the -world as care is a holistic being-in-relevance. But Care is not the same thing as living for a purpose. It is a living for the mattering of what Dasein is thrown into, how beings disclose themselves.
So here's my question, generally speaking. How is "blind faith" not an adequate response to the Problem of Induction?
Not what I had in mind. More a sense of purpose, not anticipatory processing. I'm not talking of scientific accuracy, either, but existential angst, which is presumably what both religion and existential philosophies seek to ameliorate.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Because philosophers are concerned with 'how can we know?' And, as causal relations seem utterly fundamental to scientific principles, then the suggestion that they ought to be simply accepted on blind faith is not an acceptable response. It was the substance of Kant's famous 'answer to Hume' but that is far afield of this OP.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is one reason Heidegger is not an existenrialist. For him, authentic angst is not something to be ameliorated, since it is the wellspring of transcendence and becoming.
I recall you saying you read Perl's "Thinking Being," but I forget exactly what you thought about it. I think Perl does a good job explaining the phenomenological side of ancient and scholastic thought (where terms like "intentionality" come from), and the idea that "if being is to mean anything, it must be that which is given to thought." There is a sense in which Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Eriugena, St. Maximus and Hegel are all "idealists," or even Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Dante, but I think they offer a path around some of the questionable conclusions of a lot of modern idealism, which opened it to the attacks of Moore, Russell, etc.
Actually, I think idealism (and not particularly of the sort I am favorable too) is back in a lot of ways, it's just that people don't like the lable, and equivocate on it because it is in such disrepute. Claims like "different cultures/language communities live in essentially different worlds and different things are true for them," have a sort of idealist ring too. Epistemic idealism seems almost mainstream. "All we know/experience is the mind, but yes there is some undescribable, dark noumenal ocean out there (at least probably) that the light of intellect can never penetrate. At best it can "see" it apophatically, from where the light stops."
Whereas, from the older camp you get principles along the lines of:
Which is not to convince anyone of these principles, but rather to suggest that later idealisms have often run into issues around the the trickiness of "the mind/brain creates or constructs the world," and "the Moon didn't exist until someone was there to see it," as well as some of the issues of merely epistemic idealism, precisely because God, the Absolute, the One/Good, the Prime Mover, Brahman, etc. is displaced, either as fiction or as one being among many (the univocity of being). So you no longer have a One, but a Many—intellects plural, and not Intellect. And since our intellects are finite, mutable, and passible, then what is dependent on them, which is everything, is mutable. Which creates problems of the sort Heraclitus' Logos or Anaxagoras' Nous get thrown in as ad hoc solutions for.
I guess it's the difference between "the world is Intellect," and "the world is my intellect," or "our plurality of intellects."
This is, of course, brilliant.
Philosophers chasing after propositional truth (logos) is patently absurd. It begs the question, Why do it (for it is assumed one does it for a reason)? No one wants this. The summum bonum is not a "defensible thesis."
We see regularities in nature everywhere. We have a coherent and vast body of scientific knowledge that tells us there is not any reason to think the Sun will suddenly cease working. The Sun has always risen throughout at least human recorded history, and we have good scientific reasons to believe it was shining long before life on Earth arose. So, I would not call our confidence in the Sun continuing to rise "blind faith". For me, blind faith is belief in something without any empirical evidence or logical justification at all.
Quoting Astrophel
Are you not proposing something? And do you not need some justification that can be intersubjectively assessed in an (hopefully) unbiased way? Let's say for the sake of argument that spiritual insight, even enlightenment, is possible—what one sees is not explainable, not propositional, and yet ironically it is always couched in those terms, and people fall for it because they are gullible and wishful.
If altered states of consciousness were explainable, we would have all long been convinced. So, your epiphany may convince you of something, but it provides absolutely no justification for anyone else to believe anything. If they do believe you it is because you are charismatic, or because they feel they can trust you or they believe you are an authority, and so on. If you could perform miracles that might give them more solid reason to believe what you say.
Very impressed with it, particularly the early chapters - the chapter on Plato is indispensable. It corrects the almost universal misconceptions around the nature of the Forms, showing that they are more like what we would today understand as intellectual principles, than the kinds of 'ghostly images' that most people seem to take them for. I'm still assimilating the remainder.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I said to @Leontiskos recently that it's said that Aquinas was a realist, not an idealist, but his realism is very different from today's. Why? Because the contemporary criterion of objectivity that underlies modern realism —the mind-independent object —would have been foreign to him. Aquinas' epistemology was based on assimilation, where the knower and known are united in an intellectual act:
[quote=Cognition in Aquinas;https://aquinasonline.com/cognition-identity-conformity/]The Aristotelian-Thomistic account... sidesteps indirect realism/phenomenalism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes. It claims that we directly know reality because we are formally one with it. Our cognitive powers are enformed by the very same forms as their objects [which are] the means by which we know extra-mental objects. We know things by receiving the forms of them in an immaterial way, and this reception is the fulfillment, not the destruction, of the knowing powers[/quote]
But by the time Kant arrives on the scene, the idea of the "mind-independent object of sense perception"—the modern criterion of objectivity—had taken hold, courtesy of the empiricists. Which is what Kant (and before him Bishop Berkeley, in a different way) was reacting against. I see that as the main motivation for what we now call idealism, and why we can retrospectively call Plato an idealist, even though it’s plainly an anachronism as the term itself was not devised until the early modern period.
Whereas for Aquinas', the notion of "mind-independence" in that modern sense would have seemed alien. And that's where "idealism" as the opposite of materialism originates - with the modern era and the "Cartesian divide". That phrase in the quoted passage "we directly know reality because we are formally one with it" is crucial. Notice the resonance with Hindu nondualism, although in many other respects they diverge (although nevertheless I noticed recently that one of Raimundo Pannikar's three doctorates was on a comparitive study of Aquinas and Adi Sankara.) It represents what Vervaeke calls "participatory knowing", which is very different to propositional knowledge.
Thank you, although whatever brilliance is there is of course the Buddha's. But apropos that particular point, it might be of interest to note that the great sage of Mah?y?na Buddhism, N?g?rjuna, maintained always that he had no thesis of his own, and that his only purpose was to show the contradictions inherent in the theses that were proposed by others.
Such as the above "propositional truth" you're "chasing" (Gorgias laughs).
:smirk:
Quoting Astrophel
Do you think itÂ’s compatible with the thoughts of Michel Henry below?
Yes, we might agree to "all men by nature desire to know," or that the first principle of science and philosophy is wonder, without assenting to "all men by nature want to achieve validation and assertibility criteria for the set of all true propositions." :rofl:
But if "to know" just is nothing but "affirming a 'true' proposition based on proper assertibility criteria," that's all it could mean. This is what happens when the first principle of philosophy is taken to be skepticism, the summmun bonum becomes "overcoming skepticism 'with certainty,'" where certainty is defined in such a way as to make it impossible.
I'll chime in that Henry's passage strikes me as entirely agreeable, depending on how it is read. My only concern would be: "is "drive" and "force of feeling" just the drives and desires of the appetites and passions? Just sentiment?
This is always a tough question, because in modern thought the idea that all desire purely either sentiment or appetite is strong (Hume assumes it) yet not universal. I was just discussing this with J re the word "desirable." To say something is "desirable" can be taken to mean merely that people desire it, or it is often taken to mean that it is what is truly best, most choiceworthy, regardless of whether people currently desire it. It's a tough distinction.
It's at the very least aesthetically relevant, as it makes much older poetry very lame on the later understanding. As C.S. Lewis puts it:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/956012
Nietzsche is more interesting because he leaves the desires of reason but has no proper authority of it. We might suppose here that there is a good answer to this in the way the tyranny of a strong appetite can make man miserable, e.g. the sex addict, the alcoholic, the person who cares only for fame, etc. Whereas, how often does the search for what is "truly best," lead us to ruin.
However, in his brilliant commentary on Hamlet in the Birth, Nietzsche suggests a sort of misery that comes from precisely this pursuit. Hamlet isn't so much paralyzed by doubt, as finds action humiliating. Wouldn't he be better served by doing what Hume recommends in the Enquiry and setting side such concerns to play billiards and enjoy good food?
Yet, I can't help the underlying assumption here is that there cannot be anything for the seeker to know. St. Augustine and St. Anselm's "believe that you may understand," seems perhaps appropriate here. After all, the drive to what is truly best only suggests despair if despair is what appears "truly best." Does it ever? The same is for total withdrawal into skepticism and an inability to accept any duty.
There is a reason why Evagrius Ponticus and St. John the Ascetic make acedia, despair/sloth, one of the 7/8 Deadly Sins. I believe Evagrius has it as the most powerful demon apt to torment the monk next to pride/vainglory.
Right, there is no need for any sort of sui generis "construction" of intelligibility because, if things are to be anything at all, they must be intelligible. Hence, language games, theories, the brain, etc. are not the ground of intelligibility, but Being itself.
Aristotle, and so St. Thomas, aren't naive realists, since Aristotle has sensation as being "of" the interaction of the sense organ, the object sensed, and the transmission of form in the ambient environment (Aquinas' "intentions in the medium," virtual perceptions existing even if not perceived because causes "contain" their effects and are made "causes" only through effects). But since everything is act to the extent it is anything at all, this is not to miss any "thing in itself."
I agree 100% that an implicit, pernicious dualism infects much modern thought, even ostensible "monisms." John Deely suggests semiotics is the key bridge across this divide, but then the Sausser inspired semiotics of the 20th century only seems to make the problem more acute, so I am not sure the general idea is a panacea so much as the assumptions underlying the earlier Doctrina Signorum semiotics.
Not about spiritual insight. And not an epiphany in the sense of something hiding in the discourse discovered as a surprise in the calculus. As with all philosophical problems, I argue, this matter is discovered in the simplicity of the world's manifest meanings. A proposition as such has no value, and this is true of anything I can imagine, a knowledge claim, an empirical fact or an analytical construction. States of affairs considered apart from the actuality of their conception sit there in an impossible abstract space. Never been witnessed, really, because to witness IS an actuality. I am reminded of Dewey's pragmatic analytic of experience: cognition and aesthetics are only divided in the pragmatic dealing with the world, but this makes for a "vulgar" (borrowing a Heideggerian word) ontology (certainly not vulgar in the everyday use). (See the way Heidegger talks about time in section 64 and onward of BT. I am leaning a bit on him here.)
NOT that the world has none of this divisional labor in its existence. I mean, that would be impossible to conceive; but rather that at the level of basic questions, we have to keep the foundational structures as they appear, and the essential "event" of an experience is a unity.
So my point is that in all the talk about truth, justification and knowledge, the foundational analytic goes missing; that truth apart from the aesthetic (or the affective or the pathos of engagement) that is, conceived in, say a mere propositional equation or as discursive complexities, belies the actuality in the world. It ignores affective meaning! And affectivity is the wellspring all meaning.
It is not an argument that says there is no such thing as propositional truth. The insight here asks, what IS a proposition? Look at it like this: there the prof is running through a logical proof on the board, and one is examining the way this makes sense. One can understand the tautological and contradictory relations in play in a very disinterested way, but the act of being engaged in the exercise is interesting to you, and being interested is the most salient feature of the engagement. Now ask, does logic have this free floating existence that yields truth independently of the interest of subjective engagement? Easy to consider, really, for what if there is NO such independence even imaginable? For logic cannot be conceived apart from the experience in which it is conceived. Now we turn to experience, and we find a full bodied actuality of engagement and the entire analytic of human existence, the prior knowledge of logic going into the affair, the concern, the anticipation, the opennes to what is there, the possibility of failure, and on and on.
This is the point. Propositions can never to removed from the existence in which they are discovered in the "first" place. .
Ontologically, Nietzsche was a monist realist, like Spinoza.
Theologically, Nietzsche believed in Dionysus, unlike Spinoza.
Biblical literalism is the approach to interpreting the Bible that takes the text at its most apparent, straightforward meaning. As stated, sometimes the most apparent, straightforward meaning of the text is that e.g. a dream sequence is metaphoric.
Says who? You? Wikipedia says something different:
Quoting Wikipedia
I'd rather accept Wikipedia's definition and characterization of Biblical literalism than the one offered by you, BitconnectCarlos.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Tell it to the judge, buddy.
From the wikipedia article:
"Biblical literalists believe that, unless a passage is clearly intended by the writer as allegory, poetry, or some other genre, the Bible should be interpreted as literal statements by the author."
And I'm not your buddy, guy.
Quoting Astrophel
:100:
Congratulations, Captain Obvious. So your point is, what, exactly?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Congratulations once again, Captain Obvious. So your point is, what, exactly?
Thank you for asking the most difficult question. As I see it, what makes Henry so difficult lies in his stand against Husserl's phenomenological ontology, which, he holds, is compromised by intentionality. Husserl holds that when an object is acknowledged, the universality of thought's grasp upon it is itself part of the essential givenness of the pure phenomenon. But for Henry, this entirely undermines the phenomenological purity, as "the singular is destined, in its ephemeral occurrence, to slide into
nonbeing" (Material Phenomenology) Husserl's pure seeing separates the seen from the seeing, and Henry thinks actual conscious life is lost.
I agree with Henry. The reduction takes one to the absolute palpable feels and experiences of the world entirely in what they are, and the "bracketing" of extraneous knowledge claims (I am calling them) is the method that delivers one to the manifestation itself. This is tricky. To me, Husserl was making a concession to Kant adn rationalism because after all, when one sees an obect, one knows one sees it and this spans the distance between the knower and the known; but note how this places the universal before the particular. The particular gets lost, and the vivid living experience gets lost, and this is what leaves philosophers all grasping to reconcile, like Husserl did, the subject and object with some epistemology. For Henry, the manifestation and the manifesting itself, the appearing and what appears, are one and the same.
So Buddhism I take to be a radical phenomenological reduction, an all embracing bracketing, a bracketing of intentionality as well, if done seriously. Desire is no longer ontic desire, and pain is no longer what it merely appears in the vulgar everyday sense. Now ALL is revealed in an impossible revelation that cares nothing for theoretical hindrances, for what appears is "restored" to its primordiality.
So what about Wayfarer's talk about clinging "to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying"? Pain is now an absolute manifestation ( I have tried to argue this before. Never brought Henry into it, but he was, among others, like Max Scheler, Karl Rahner), for everything is. And now the phenomenologist-Christian finds repose in God, but this is entirely the same thing as what the Buddhist is doing. Gautama Siddhartha, the quintessential phenomenologist! Both radically still the world/
That's not an idea of my invention, it is simply my paraphrasing of Buddhist lore - it is something any Buddhist would say. I can't say I understand anything of Henry's criticism of Husserl, or indeed much of that post at all.
My very sketchy grasp of the issue of desire and suffering is more like Schopenhauer's - that will is a primordial kind of thirst, from which the seeker must be de-coupled on pain of being driven into endless rounds of becoming. The 'old wisdom school' of early Buddhism was starkly dualistic, renunciation was severe and irrevocable, and the ordinary human condition poles apart from the enlightened state, never the twain to meet. The development of Mah?y?na radically changed that approach, enlightenment or liberation was seen as implicit within the human state instead of being radically different from it. This is subject of a lot of literature, I couldn't try and summarise it here, except to say that Mah?y?na nondualism dissolved the radical otherness Nirv??a found in the earlier schools (this is according to Edward Conze, Buddhism its Essence and Development).
There are many points of convergence between Buddhism and phenomenology. Buddhist culture has been phenomenological from the very outset, with its emphasis on attaining insight into the psycho-physical systems which drive continued attachment (and so rebirth). Their philosophical psychology ('abhidharma') based on the five skandhas (heaps) of Form, Feeling, Perception, Mental Formations and Consciousness, and comprising a stream of momentary experiental states ('dharmas') is utterly different from anything in the Semitic religions and even in ancient Greek culture (although there has always been some back-and-forth influence.) Here is a brief Wikipedia article on Husserl's reading of and reaction to the abhidharma literature.
The influential book The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson and Rosch contained many reference to Buddhism and was in many ways moulded by it (notwithstanding Evan Thompson's later re-evaluation of his relationship with Buddhism in his 2020 book Why I am not a Buddhist.) But again it emphasises the confluence between the Buddhist ??nyat? and the phenomenological epoch? and the primacy of skilled awareness and attention to the flux of experience.
I'm not sure what you mean by "manifest meanings". Do you mean to say that we are affected by how things appear to us? If so, that would be a truism. An empirical proposition has no inherent value to be sure. For example, take the proposition 'it is raining'—the proposition itself if assertoric is merely the expression of an observation and the only value, meaning or quality it has is that of being true or false, and it is the actuality of rain that may have some value, whether positive or negative.
States of affairs are concrete not abstract; it is propositions about states of affairs whose content can be considered to be abstract in the sense of being generalizations.
Quoting Astrophel
That well laboured old chestnut? It is also a truism. That we are subject to being affected by those things which we are attached to would have to be one of the most obvious observations regarding being human (or animal). That things are transitory, and that humans often wish they were not so are also simply obvious facts.
Quoting Astrophel
Reifiication / misplaced concreteness fallacy is implied in your assumption, Astro. "Propositions" are only truth-bearing ways of talking about aspects or features of "existence" and not the sort of things which can be "removed from" or "discovered in" "existence". Unlike sophists (or essentialists & idealists), most philosophers do not confuse their maps (or mapmaking) with the terrain.
As a metacognitive species we "suffer" from instinctive and/or learned denial of reality (e.g. change (i.e. pain, loss, failure, impermanence), uncertainty (i.e. angst)). As history shows, what greater reality-denial can there be than 'supernatural religion' (i.e. philosophical suicide) – a cure for suffering that frequently worsens suffering?
But what about the core Buddhist event?: the meditative act itself. Wordless, yet wondering, open, liberating. The essence of meditation lies in its radical simplicity. Do you agree?
I pursued Buddhist meditation for many years and attended several retreats, including the well-known 10-day Vipassana retreat. I learned a lot from that, and it’s an ongoing endeavour although I haven’t been able to maintain the same routine I did for many years. The ‘hindrances’ that the Buddhists mention are real, and overcoming them difficult. (See this old OP, Most Buddhists Don’t Meditate.)
So those states of spontaneous insight are real but rare. I attended services at a Pure Land sangha for some time just prior to Covid (not having another Buddhist association in the area.) I learned that according to Pure Land, meditation practices are discouraged. They are recognised as effective, but they’re said to belong to the ‘way of sages’ which is difficult (according to them, practically impossible) to bring to fruition. Instead their way is grounded in faith in the saving vows of Amida. I found this caused a kind of conflict for me, as it seemed very like the religion that I had declined to join - the interest I had in Buddhism was that it seemed to offer an alternative to mere belief. Yet, here we are again! (Although that said the core beliefs of Pure Land Buddhism and Christianity are completely different. It’s the psychodynamic of faith that is similar.)
This is all ongoing, I havenÂ’t come to any kind of conclusion about it. There were things I learned from those years of practice and contemplation that will always stay with me.
Manifest, or immanent, there, upon you, undeniable as modus ponens, the reduced phenomenon, pure presence, minus all one might be able to say about it. Is it possible to strip a living perception of all the presumptions of knowing so that all that remains before you is bare existence, free of the very finitude that language imposes upon it(including language about this very freedom)? Yet in this, one is still a language agency. This is what makes someone like Henry so offensive to philosophy, I think, but he is right about this. Take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Very pure, non conceptual, noncontextual, and as undeniable as modus ponens. Of course, one need nothing so dramatic to make the point. JUst the interest, the care, desire, satiation or deficit, disappointment, I mean, just noticing something is affectively qualified.
Quoting Janus
Well, I was thinking about early Wittgenstein's states of affairs, which are devoid of value. Nothing concrete about such a thing. We invest a thing with value when it is taken up in the perceptual act. Interesting thought experiment, I think, to imagine what a value-free encounter with an object would be.
Quoting Astrophel
As you know, itÂ’s not just HusserlÂ’s version of phenomenology that Henry objects to, but Merleau-Ponry and Heidegger as well. And one could imagine that, despite his never mentioning him, Henry would fault another thinker of immanent life, Deleuze, for the same weakness he finds in the others. That is, they are not true philosophies of immanence because they each slip into representationalism
by formulating thr self as an ecstatic relation with the world.
But I think Henry misreads these authors If the path to the elimination of suffering involves the deconstruction of the subject-object relation, this cannot be accomplished by holding onto the notion of a purely self-affecting subject. Henry rightly wants to get beyond representationalism and egoism, but to do so he must let go of the need for a notion of affect as present to itself.
That biblical literalists can understand a given part of the bible as metaphor and still be biblical literalists.
No one is arguing the contrary. You're accusing me of something, and I don't even know what you're accusing me of, to begin with. But it doesn't matter. If you think that you understand Christianity better than I do, then explain why the following anecdote is not a good explanation of the story of Adam and Eve:
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Frankly, the way of the sages is the only one that interests me. The "cultural milieu which facilitates those practices and insights" does not belong to the essential purpose, enlightenment and liberation. Thought (and cultural means of understanding) is both the binding that holds one to the habits of normal thinking, and the openness of being's possibilities that eventually turns to itself and makes itself the center of inquiry.
I have my own far flung thoughts about this. I haven't spent time like you have in meditation, but I have spent a galaxy of time doing what you could call jnana yoga, or meditative thinking. Very calm in the process standing before the world, and realizing that the world is not the world. There are times when I get close. Augustine said it like this:
[i]"'I am aware of something within me that gleams and flashes before my soul;
were this perfected and fully established in me, that would surely be
eternal life!' It hides, yet shows itself[/i]
There’s an article on SEP about ‘divine illumination’ which links back to Augustine. It is said to have been an idea that more or less died out in medieval times, but I think Augustine was right on the mark.
Henry thinks philosophy is done with itself at the point of phenomenological consummation. We have God's consciousness now.
I don't understand what you mean by "about". Not that it is wrong to say this, but it is a pivotal word.
Quoting 180 Proof
I quite agree, if by supernatural you mean, say, the long history of Christian metaphysics and theology or Harry Potter's magic.
But it is not as if what is natural wears its philosophical disclosure on its sleeve. True philosophical suicide comes from ignoring this analytic, the one that can begin with the question, how do "natural" objects get into knowledge claims when causality, the naturalist's bottom line (just ask Quine) for everything, has nothing epistemic about it? Or, if you prefer, how does any thing "get into" a brain thing such that the what is in the brain is "about" that thing?
Separating knowing a thing from what it is to acknowledge a thing is, as you say, supernatural.
But what is religion apart from the bad metaphysics? One has to clear the question before summary dismissal. And what is NOT a "denial of reality" and that is the true ground of religion? You mention suffering, but what is this?
I don't understand what you don't understand about how I use "about" in that sentence.
I don't understand the question or its relevance.
I have no idea what you are talking about, Astro.
A community of ritualized reenactments of an epic myth (i.e. folk anti-anxiety placebo-fetish aka "magic show") ... no doubt based on "bad metaphysics". :sparkle: :pray:
Uncertainty.
Useless hope (i.e. attachments) ...
There is something I want to add, which I think you will understand. It is that 'spending time' and 'making an effort' in meditation counts for nothing. There is nothing that can be accrued or gained through the conscious effort to practice meditation and any feeling that one has gotten better or gained something through such efforts is mere egotism. That is all.
I do find it interesting that suffering is sometimes equated as a kind of beatific edifice of religious faith. I think this can easily be seen as horrific too rather than a 'special gift' given to the few worthy.
Isn't Religion supposed to ease the human suffering? Or is human suffering the part of or requirement for religion?
I'm not a Christian nor do I claim to understand Christianity.
A better explanation of the Adam and Eve story might be that biblical writers borrowed from Mesopotamian literature (e.g. epic of gilgamesh) and adapted it (imho improved it.) If you're asking for the impetus behind the original I don't know ask the Mesopotamians or Francesca Stavrakopoulou has some work on a supposedly historical garden of eden but I haven't looked into it.
You're some variety of a naturalist or a physicalist, right? So, brain here, tree there: how does the latter get into the former as a knowledge claim? Seems clear to me. It is the simplicity that is striking.
Quoting 180 Proof
Well, there is a response to this, but you're not going to like it. It makes sense if you follow patiently.
Uncertainty makes sense in context where there is some certainty assumed. But what if no certainties can be assumed? At all. Take logic: I assume tautological truth is inviolable, but then such truth is wrapped in language and language is not inviolable; it is in fact radically contingent. That is, the way we understand the logicality that is so certain and free of accidents (as they say) is given to us in something that is nothing but accidents, for language itself is self referential and its meanings have no foundational stability, only stability conceived in the agreements and disagreements within a given context. The irresistible "sense" of, say, the principle of causality is indicative of something, but when I try to speak or write this I find this intra-referentiality of language-in-play steals away the certainty I thought was so inviolable. Something is inviolable, but if whenever I try to conceive it this inviolability slips away into a question, the we face the "inexorablity of an enigma," and this runs through every knowledge claim imaginable, and every epistemic relation.
The point is, when it comes to religious uncertainty, available contexts are useless because concern exceeds context, the desideratum exceeds any conceivable contextuality. Why? Because this is a structural feature of our existence. When any and all standards of certainty are of no avail, we face metaphysics, real metaphysics. Here, empirical science simply falls away because any such thinking implicitly holds to some set of "certainties," things assumed but stand themselves on uncertain grounds. The world as such becomes an epistemic and ontological vacuum, and it is HERE now one can ask about suffering, because suffering is not a language construction; it clearly has explanatory possibilities that come to mind when we think of it, but there is in this something which is ontologically distinct and imposing that stands outside of language's contingencies. This is really not some abstruse issue at all. Just imagine intense suffering: like the intuition of modus ponens' apodicticity, there is something THERE that language seizes upon, makes claims about, but cannot exhaust just because suffering is not a language phenomenon.
The word transcendence is now meaningful, but here, unlike logic which really is about form, merely, we are deep into meaning, the torturous, and, of course, delightful, trial and aspiration of being in the world. This is religion's territory, where language cannot go to "finitize," that is contextualize, the world. Suffering is being's suffering, not localized in a reductive context. But note: analysis has displaced faith. It has brought inquiry to the threshold of our existence, and suffering is now a stand alone existential presupposition that cannot be analyzed. It is an absolute, inviolable.
I see this as is a real insight. Meditation as "spending time" is no better than what my cat does on the window sill. Wonder must be in place. An openness that is not nothing but issues from the the ground of language itself as it stands open to the world as wonder, the primordial wonder about being here at all; and particulars, trees and computer monitors and ideas and emotions and anything that is particularized in some way or another in familiar affairs, yield to this open question of existence. Language cannot be made the enemy of meditation, even though language is exactly what clutters and congests understanding the world. Language does BOTH. It is the problem and the remedy. Even in silence, and thought is pushed down to nothing, thought is the seeking beneath it all, and a fascinating disclosure of something truly primordial can rise up.
The point I am making is that when Gautama Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi tree, he discovered something, and discovery is not something cats can do. It is a language phenomenon, but this does not at all diminish the nature of the discovery. It does elevate the nature of language.
Consider that the religious perspective raises this entire dimension of our existence, this affectivity, the vulnerability, the overwhelmingness of suffering and beatitude, to metaphysics. The question is, then, is there anything really real about metaphysics? We find this in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology.
Best to think analytically: when one observes the world, what does one find at the level of basic questions? As I move into this difficult area, I rediscover everything. The usual ways of thinking at put on hold, bracketed, and the unusual questions become the theme for inquiry. So what happens when suffering is no longer given to us in the reductive contextualities of talk about this and that, whether in science or everydayness? Suffering now simply appears, and I am asking about this, call it purified presence, made more pure by the process of eliminating all things extraneous to what it simply IS. It is a fascinating study of the world and takes one deeply into meaning that has been otherwise summarily dismissed by a busy and distracted mind.
To grasp religion, one has to do this. For religion is a metaphysical question of our existence. One has to ask seriously about metaphysics, and what it is. THEN the value dimension looms large. The easing of human suffering is an issue in ethics (it should be eased). And in religion ,it is about metaethics. Why is it metaethics? Because the world is a meta-world at this level of inquiry.
Quoting Astrophel
If one sticks to the view of language as representative symbol this is true, but in the approaches to language we find in such figures as Merleau-Ponty , Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida language isnÂ’t separate from the affective enacting of world, it is that enacting.
I don't see that. I think Gautama's discovery overflowed the bounds of what can be spoken. Hence the famous 'Flower Sermon' which is the apocryphal origin of Ch'an and Zen Buddhism. In the story, the Buddha gives a wordless sermon to the sangha by silently holding up a white flower. No one in the audience responds bar Mah?k??yapa, who's smile indicates his comprehension. It is said to embody the ineffable nature of tath?t?, the direct transmission of wisdom without words. The Buddha affirms this by uttering:
(Although it has to be acknowledged that Ch'an/Zen Buddhism, regardless, has an enormous compendium of 'words and letters' housed in extensive monastic libraries a part of its teaching repertoire, and indeed the various Buddhist canons exceed in volume by orders of magnitude the collected Biblical writings. But there is always a kind of awareness in Buddhism that the finger that points to the moon ought not to be mistaken for the moon.)
I am not sure if religion would have its ground for its existential justification without the concepts of afterlife, promise of savior from human sufferings, good fortunes, good health, possibility of the miracles and protection from God against the uncertain world. Like it or not, those are the elements of the attractions offered to the followers of religion in the mundane world, whatever religion it might be.
The OP title seems to be implying religion has close connection with human sufferings. No one would have taken the implication for intensifying, but wouldn't it be easing?
If it were not, then what would be the point of religion? For understanding the universe, we have metaphysics, epistemology, logic and semantics. Could religion offer better in understanding the universe? I am not sure.
They say in Tibet there is a dialog among masters of concepts those on the outside cannot even imagine. Ineffability is meaningful only relative to effability. If the ineffable (the extraordinary discoveries you mention) were a common experience in a culture, then THAT would be the standard of the effable. Language and reason care not.
Because language and reason is entirely open. God could actually appear to me and I would witness the depths of eternity, and then the next day I tell you and you think I am mad. Then you experience the same divine event of impossible dimensions, and now there is nothing at all preventing us from putting a language together, reappropriating the old through metaphorical and descriptive familiarities and similarities and differences, intensoties, possiblities for ironic play, and the communicative possiblities about it would be exactly the same as what exists now between us regarding chicken soup or a roller coaster ride. The original non-linguistic content never was "contained" in the words, just assumed because of this historical matrix of meanings and references that we share. This non linguistic dimension has always been, conceived in and of itself, transcendental. The world right now is always already transcendental, but we do not live in a culture that certifies this kind of thing.
There is more. I hold, and I think those you mention hold though they don't talk like this, that there is a point where simple familiar understanding turns to phenomenological understanding. One "sees" the phenomenon as a phenomenon such that the manifest and the manifested are one. A turning point.
Let's call those promises part of the culture of religion. And sure, I know what people believe. But this is philosophically uninteresting. Such things have their grounding in something else. One has to bracket the culture and its institutions and language, to see what lies beneath, perhaps something that is unassailable.
Quoting Corvus
Quoting Corvus
Tempting, but there is so much that needs saying, and this is a post. Ethics is the most salient feature of the universe. In religion, ethics becomes metaethics, the justification of suffering at the level of the pure phenomenon, the meta "what is it?" question and here we are supposed to find redemption, you know, meta-redemption, redemption that is built into the phenomenon of suffering itself. How? I argue, take flame and put your finger in it. What does this experience "tell" you? It issues forth an injuction NOT to do this, and injunction that is beyond law and duty conceived in a language to govern the consenting, or somethign like that. It is something as certain as logic itself.
Moral of the story: ethics is metaethics, and metaethics is where all of our ethical prohibitions have their genesis. This kind of analysis goes to foundations. So easing pain is a "principle" the world "tells" us we must follow. As good as any stone tablet, Better, because real, and not full of nonsense.
There is also an understanding of non-conceptual wisdom. In yogic terminology concepts are ‘vikalpa’, mental constructions. They are not necessarily erroneous, but there are domains of understanding, or so it is said, beyond the conceptual. In the same way that other skilled pursuits like acrobats or skiing might be, neither of which rely on or can be conveyed by concept.
I dare say within the Tibetan context, these types of non-discursive understandings can be shared amongst those who are similarly skilled in that sense.
But in the same way the thrill of a roller coaster ride is non discursive. See, I just think talk "beyond the conceptual" says too much. Nothing is beyond the conceptual because nothing is contained IN the conceptual.
And saying that the Buddha’s enlightenment is a ‘language phenomenon’ doesn’t?
I say a full bodied language "attends" enlightenment, allows the event to take place against what is not enlightenment, referring to everything one knows about the world prior. imagine if enlightenment were to appear in the mind of an infant. Could an infant be enlightened? No, I would argue.
Yes.
:sweat: It doesn't.
Well, then that would be a certainty.
Thus, a certainty ...
i.e. another certainty, no?
In contrast to 'unreal' (fake) metaphysics?
Ergo a certainty – a conclusion which contradicts (invalidates) the premise of your 'argument'. Another wtf are you talking about post, Astro?! :shade:
We are certainly concerned with our position in the universe. If such a concern is wholly a 'religious' one then the question has to be what you mean by religion? I am not trying to corner you here as I think we might share a similar view here. The problem is using mere words to convey what is meant.
Quoting 180 Proof
Let's see if we can flesh out a little the thinking of those who are truth relativists. I’m not saying that Astrophel is a ‘radical’ relativist, but I am. Let me throw out a hypothetical approach in this vein. Let's say that in my experience of the world and myself, I've discovered that anything I observe or imagine or think or see other people observe has a curious habit of constantly changing its meaning in subtle ways every moment . If i read or repeat the word 'cat' over and over, each time, each moment it has a slightly different semantic sense than the previous. And the same effect occurs when I perceive an object in my environment. I conclude form this that I have discovered something that others haven't noticed, but is there for them also. they just don't see it because it is a subtle effect.
So I then form an explanation of objective truth that goes like this:people believe that there is such a thing as an object that has a certain permanence to it, that can be pointed to or referred back to as the same over time. People believe that self-identity, self-persistence, self-permanence are features of our world. We can find such attributes in the physical world, in our language concepts, in our memory, etc.
But I believe that we only think that such attributes as self-persistence, self-identity over time and permanence are what we are experiencing. I surmise that what we are really experiencing is phenomena that , as I said before, are subtly shifting their semantic meaning every moment of time. So we just assume meaning permanence, self-identity,etc where there is instead very tiny shifts and transformations in the semantic sense of object, percepts, concepts. In practical terms this isn't a big deal. We can understand each other, point to what for the most part is the same reality, and agree on our empirical descriptions and physical laws.
So would I then be able to say that objective truth does not exist? Well, first of all, I could agree with Heidegger and say that truth for me is just the way that each new moment of time unveils a slightly new semantic meaning for me. Truth is just the unveiling of new experience, not its matching up to a standard. So there is truth, but what about objectivity? So does objectivity exist? AlI I can say is that every moment I have to test myself, ask myself the question again. Do I this moment experience a thing that persists identically, be it a concept, a percept, a law of nature, a norm of any kind? IF each time I ask the question the answer is still no, then I can say that as far as I can tell, this moment, for me and apparently for everyone else that I've observed or thought about, reality doesn't sit still even for a moment, such as to allow persisting semantic self-identity or the self-persistence of any object.
I can say that when someone claim's that objective truth exist, they are absolutely right. Every moment there is a truth about the meaning of an object. And every moment that meaning changes very slightly, for everyone that I've observed. So I would want to rephrase that question to: 'does the objective truth about anything stay exactly the same for more than a single moment? What about my claim that objective truth never stays the same for more than a moment? Is this an objective claim? Well, it is me saying, at this moment and from my recollection, I do not now nor ever remember having an experience of self-identity or self-persistence of anything, physical , conceptual or otherwise. But others are welcome to keep asking me the question. I can tell them that I have a theory about why others believe they are seeing objective truth as stable, and that it is possible to miss the instability of reality without it in any way jeopardizing one's ability to do formal logic or science.
So , based on this argument, the relativist isn't really stating a negative claim(objecivity does NOT exist) so much as a positive one, that they are seeing something beyond, within, underneath, overflowing what those who believe in the semantic stability of objects(logical, perceptual, conceptual) arew seeing. Their claim should be: 'objectivty exists, but does a lot more interesting things than the objectivist is able to see). They are seeing dynamism where others are seeing only stasis. Is this dynamism 'objective'? Is it a theory, a principle? It is certainly a general claim. But , and here's the most important point, its not an objective claim as long as it doesn't turn 'radical dynamism ' into a stable object. It has to be modest in its claim. It has to say simply that each moment the question must be asked anew, because the very nature of radical dynamism is that there is no horizon beyond the current moment for any assertion. I can say that I anticipate that the next moment I will generally believe something very similar to what I am now asserting, because in my experience so far the world not only changes every moment but preserves a certain overall stability in its ongoing transformations. Each new moment is not a profound semantic break with the previous but only a very subtle one.This is a post-objective claim, requiring a different method of test.
To test the claim of radical changeability in all objects of experience for everyone is to do two things:
1) it is to try to teach a believer in stable objectivity to see the underlying movement in supposedly static experience. How do you convince someone to see more than they see? Either they see it or they don't. Meanwhile, as relativist, you can leave them to their objectivism, knowing that it works for them, and isn't 'wrong' or 'untrue', just incomplete.
2)The believer in radical relativism must every moment of experience test their own perception(make it contestable) to see if this dynamism continues to appear very moment, everywhere for them.
But my thoughts run like this: There is in this sprained ankle attending thought, and this may be equiprimordial with the pain, but to conceive of the pain as a thoughtful event doesn't make sense. I understand that the basic distinctions drawn are our own analytical impositions, but the ontology of pain needs to be liberated from the presumption of knowing in order to stand apart from it and be acknowledged in its pure phenomenality, and this is not to say that human existence is a foundational body of divisions.
Sorry 180 Proof, but it is all just too glib and without argument or thought. I am not criticizing. It just doesn't appear you have anything to say.
I think my position here deserves to be cornered. The whole matter requires a sea change, if you will, in philosophical perspective, and a post is such a short thing. So I'll ask you if you agree: It it the case that all that is affirmed about the self or the world in which it finds itself, presupposes the conscious act that affirms its existence? If so, then this conscious act is antecedent to any talk about a universe, that is, at the basic (philosophical) level of analysis, we FIRST encounter the self in determining anything at all. After all, ontology cannot be conceived apart from epistemology, is one way to say it, as if what IS can be posited apart from the positing itself. The question begging is glaringly obvious.
This miniscule step puts the analysis of all that is on the perceptual act.
Does this sit well with you?
That doesn't sound like the work of Ethics. It would more sound like the work of inductive reasoning. You try something, if it hurts, you learn not to do it i.e. trial and error.
Ethics don't tell about these things. Ethics are the code of conducts between human beings while living on the earth i.e. Ethics will tell you what is morally good things to do, and what are not. If you do moral wrongs, then you will be judged as a morally corrupted by the other folks. If you do morally good things to others, then they will judge you a morally good guy.
If you lived in a desert by yourself with no one around you, Ethics wouldn't apply to you. Because you have no one to interact with. Ethics emerges when you do things to others, and others do things to you. It is a value judgements on the actions of folks to other folks in folks mind. Good and bad in Ethics don't exist in the universe.
In other words, if you tortured a bowlful of sands for no reason, or if you strangled a scabby cactus, there is no morality arising in these actions. Morality only matters when you are dealing with people on the way how you treated them, and how they treated you.
I agree religion has some sayings on Ethics and Morality such as in the form of the 10 commandment in the Bible, which still forms the underlying foundation of morality in modern times. But I am still not convinced if it could tell much about the world around us. Well they do, but all in their own terms and doctrines, which are not logical and not rational way.
Relativism (radical or otherwise), like nihilism, refutes itself insofar as it is self-subsuming; to wit: all contrary truth-claims are valid including that 'relativism is not true' (e.g. the meaning of deconstruction defers / is deferred).
I'm a 'radical pluralist' for whom it is logically possible (N. Goodman) that there is more than one way to express, or make explicit (R. Brandom), the world – with metaphors, maps, models (which presuppose it is ontologically necessary that there is more than one way the world could have been (re: actualism conta possibilism)) – and that different expressions convey different degrees, or approximations, of epistemic fidelity to – 'truth about' – the objective (i.e. subject / pov / language / gauge-invariant) world (Spinoza).
In other words, to my mind, relativism says 'in a maze there are only non-critical paths' whereas pluralism says in a maze there are critical and non-critical paths and that critical paths vary in length; ergo the latter rewards discernment and the former does not. IMO, the relativist sees 'many paths to many mountains and therefore arbitrarily choses between them' whereas the pluralist sees many paths up the mountain s/he (we) cannot escape from and seeks the shortest to the summit (C.S. Peirce ... D. Deutsch).
Quoting 180 Proof
The choice can never be arbitrary, precisely because our attitudes, values and actions must always conditioned from within a specific system of discursive practices which legitimate and make intelligible our ethical choices. The consequences of our decisions matter deeply to us in ways that we recognize as profoundly relevant in our lives as interpreted from the vantage of our involvement within partially shared ways of life. Nothing could be more arbitrary than this. It would be a mistake to separate our discursive practices from the ‘way the things really are’. Our practices are directly plugged into the world; they are the way that world shows itself to us, and there is no way to get beyond or above these practices to a non-discursive reality.
Most accused of radical relativism agree that it is self-refuting, and for that reason it is a straw man argument. Joseph Rouse puts forth a good explanation of the difference between ‘anything goes’ relativism and the non-sovereign, ‘normativity all the way down’ positions writers like Foucault actually espouse.
That sounds complicated and a lot like hard work. Is this exhausting to live by?
As a non-philosopher I find this hard to grasp or at least accept. Is it making too much out of too little change?
Even if meanings subtly shift from moment to moment, we can still reliably communicate, build technology, and make predictions about the world. This suggests that there’s a shared, stable structure to reality (note I am not sayign objective or certain) that doesn’t depend on momentary subjective fluctuations. For example, the laws of physics or the meaning of basic concepts like “cat” remain consistent enough for people across cultures and times to understand each other and cooperate. If everything were as fluid as this seems to suggest, such stability and shared understanding would seem not to be possible. What am I missing?
I edited my above post as you were responding. Note there "same' people and "different" people. Use of these expressions, where we all know what we are talking about, does not imply that any of us are exactly the same from one moment to the next.
Does that mean that he doesn't have fun playing?
If there are these micro deviations from moment to moment, and I think this right, then why does this indeterminacy not topple the very notion of objectivity altogether? After all, the macro level agreements only align in the agreements themselves (Quine and his indeterminacy of Translation). This reduces objectivity to a pragmatic notion, for agreement works, and micro disagreements work as long as they don't matter. But Quine stabilized the world with his naturalism, ridding the equation of pesky semantics. You affirm the pesky semantics, but deny naturalism. Your idea of objectivity is certainly different from his. Or is it? When you affirm the
No doubt, the "slightly different semantic sense" occurs from moment to moment, but does this really undo self persistence? How is it that I am the same person that I was a moment ago? Technically, you would say, I am not. But on the other hand, this belies the very concrete "sense" of my existence, whichi is not analytically reducible.
The absolute idealist conception that objective existence just is what we experience seems inadequate. It certainly seems to be true that our experience itself is objectively real, meaning that we experience just what we experience, but even here we don't seem to have full access to just what it is that we experience. Unknowing seems to be as important as knowing in human life. That doesn't satisfy those who are addicted to finding certainty.
I'm not sure about that. What do you mean by 'accommodate'. David Bentley Hart has said (and recently at great length) that the problem of suffering (the inherent cruelty of this world) is atheism's best argument and that there is no answer to it in religion which he finds plausible. And isn't death the end of suffering for secular types? In the mean time, I have worked in palliative care a lot over time and I can say that theists seem way more disturbed and distressed by suffering than secular people I've met. Anecdotal I know but there it is.
Secular philosophies certainly believe it is. Religious philosophies, on various grounds, do not. Maybe the religious patients you have tended are tormented by that possibility, whereas those who don't believe in an afterlife won't believe there's anything to dread.
Quoting Tom Storm
That couldn't be right, because if he didn't believe that his religion has a plausible attitude to suffering, surely he'd abandon the faith, which he hasn't. While Hart often says that the problem of suffering is a formidable challenge and "atheism's best argument," it doesn't mean he accepts atheism's perspective on suffering. He addresses the problem of suffering in this interview , conducted shortly after the 2004 tsunami catastrophe, which ends:
Have a look at Hart's recent interview on Youtube with Curt Jaimungal. He's pretty clear. It's a pretty staggering interview - perhaps because he is, these days, less cocky and self-regarding owing to his own sickness and pain. He has faith that there must be some kind of explanation for evil but he doesn't pretend to know what it is. I don't think it follows that people leave their faith just because it doesn't have all the answers. If that were the case most theists would be atheists by the morning. People generally believe that on balance secularism or theism makes more sense of the world they understand. The issue of suffering has nagged at Hart for decades. And he has certainly discussed that his faith is sometimes impacted by doubt. Isn't that how faith works?
I think Hart's views tell us that it's not so simple as theism having better responses or answers. If a theist and religious scholar as sophisticated as Hart comes to this conclusion, then the problem of suffering and evil can't be put down as an obtuse physicalist response.
I don't think he trivialises suffering or says 'have faith that it'll be OK in the end!' He deplores any kind of triteness, and he also takes a dim view of Calvin and Calvinism. It's obviously a problem he wrestles with. But I think he must believe that the 'life eternal' is free of suffering. ('There's no sickness, toil or danger in that bright land to which I go.')
Something that I've been mulling over is this. When I first became interested in Eastern religions, it is because they seemed to appeal to something other than belief. They seemed to promise something like a direct insight or an experience or realisation - the key word - which was superior to the stuffy Churchianity that was how I saw religion. But then life taught me that such realisations may be elusive - they can come and go without much apparent cause. There is also a lot of capacity for self-delusion in their pursuit. And the cultural context in which they were practiced and understood is vastly different to our own. So at this stage in life, 'belief' is no longer looking like the shibboleth that I once thought it was.
I'm not sayign that he does this. And nor would I. Suffering is serious. Probably the most serious and formative matter I can think of.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed, very interesting. You strike me as a sincere seeker of truth. I spent the first 18 years of my life among the extended Baptist community in inner Melbourne. Over the years, IÂ’ve also spent time with Theosophists, mystics, Jesuits, Buddhists, and others. Additionally, IÂ’ve engaged with secular humanists and the atheist community.
What IÂ’ve observed is that people are largely the same - the fears, behaviors, and relationships donÂ’t vary much, regardless of belief systems. However, some individuals are rare; they seem to possess an authenticity and integrity that transcend labels. These are the people I find interesting. Anyone can claim to be a theist or an atheist, but I donÂ’t think labels mean all that much.
:ok: :ok:
But also recall that Schopenhauer quote I included a few days back:
So the reason for the suffering of this world is that this is in its nature, and furthermore, we're only in it because of some primeval fault or flaw. So nobody is really innocent! If you were completely innocent, then you wouldn't have been born in the first place. That's the bad news! But according to the Christians, the good news is, that you really don't belong to this world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ha! It's what I call the prefect excuse. I don't buy it, but I know it has helped many people to sleep at night.
Quoting Astrophel
I deny QuineÂ’s version of naturalism, but I affirm Joseph RouseÂ’s naturalism, which doesnÂ’t force the normativity of scientific inquiry into the constraints of a sovereign view of physics.
Quoting Astrophel
Aren't there times when ‘being the same’ matters and other times when ‘being different’ matters? The point is that it is not the question of persistent self-identity which is primary but why it is important and for what purposes. There is relative ongoing stability in purpose and mood, and this stitches together continually changing moments of sense. We don’t need an unchanging world, we need a world whose changes we can navigate coherently, with some sense of familiarity.
Quoting Tom Storm
Every moment we are conscious our perceptual system translates a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sensations into stable meanings, and the way we tend to think about language accomplishes the same thing by ignoring the fact that every use of a word involves a subtle reinvention of its meaning . So if we typically normalize and stabilize our world without effort , what advantage is there in noticing the underlying variations?
Whenever you suffer negative emotions, you are presented with an opportunity to examine your taken-for-granted assumptions about the world, assumptions which failed to prepare you to anticipate the changes in your world which triggered your anxiety, fear , anger or guilt. My point is that the kinds of thinking which assume a world composed of sold, unchanging physical object, principles or laws is a world of violent polarization, because arbitrary, violent change goes along with such assumptions ThatÂ’s why fundamentalisms of all kinds are inherently cruel and unforgiving. The price you pay for a world of fixed and nailed down concepts is capricious oppositions and contradictions
By contrast, the incessantly changing universe I described in my earlier post is at the same time a flow of extraordinary self-intimacy and intricacy. Abandoning fixed truths, objects, concepts, laws and principles at the same time significantly reduces the perceived arbitrariness, violence and polarization of change, and allows for a more peaceful anticipation of what is to come.
Arbitrary doesn't imply 'unconditioned' so your point, sir, is a red herring / strawman. My point: a 'consistent relativist' forfeits all standards for deciding between competing or incommensurable truth-claims, ergo her preference is arbitrary.
When the meta religious thinkers have absolutely no experience on the practical side of the religion, or exclude the secular aspect of the religion, it is doubtful the meta religious reasoning could arrive at the knowledge they supposed to arrive.
Well said, I say. But foundational ethics is, alas, lost.
Speaking of strawperson arguments: The conditioned here IS NOT arbitrary. Nothing says it has to be this way, it just IS that way. This is entirely in line with a consistent relativist.
Quoting Astrophel
One can only hope. Henry never struck me as an ethical foundationalist.
Quoting 180 Proof
There are always standards to be consulted in matters of competing arguments, but these standards get their intelligibility from within some discursive system, rather than being external to all systems. Paradigm shifts in the sciences are neither arbitrary nor do they take place under the control of some extra-discursive standard of correctness.
I don't approve of the term 'idealist' to explain a description of the world that understands that the perceptual act that receives "the world" must be an essential part of the description. Saying it is all idea simply does not describe the way things appear to us. Trees and fence posts are still "out there" and not me, al this is an imposition on me and I have to deal with it. The idea is that all this has to be understood as an event, because to perceive is an event, and time and space are conditions we bring into the event, though, and this is critical, we do not merely invent in the event. We struggle with, we grapple with, this world, this often overwhelming existence, and this can only be apprehended IN this world. All that ever appears to us is appearance, BUT: To speak of something as an "appearance OF" is where the difficulty begins. I think this "of" is a false attribution, a misleading physicalist metaphysics, for to affirm something like this, one would have leave experience. I don't think leaving experience can be made sense of; but then, I do think experience is far more than plain thinking can give us, the rigors of science, notwithstanding. For me, the physicalist metaphysics (some version of, philosophically, at the level of basic assumptions, when all perceiving systems are removed from this room, there is still a "room") simply ignores the glaringly obvious issue perception. Ever heard of a physicist beginning her theory with an account of the perceptual act itself?? Of course, this is ignored. This is why we have philosophy.
"Unknowing seems to be as important as knowing in human life." To me, this is more important than it might seem. Knowing is built out of unknowing, for to know cannot be understood as a stand alone event. One cannot know the boat is in the water if there is no "that which is not a boat" in the region of the concept where the knowing has its genesis. This kind of thing makes knowledge claims problematic, I mean the simple ones. As I see it, this is the among the death throes of naturalist thinking. But consider: if argument shows that language cannot do this, capture or pin an an "existing thing," then what IS it that we stand before when we stand before a world? For this is certainly not something exhaustible in the language in the analysis of language. It is Other, and here, I hold, that we have entered proper metaphysics (obviously standing on the shoulders of others). "The world" is metaphysics, there, in your face, so to speak, not something impossibly distant at all, whether Kantian or physicalist in its conception.
Quoting Wayfarer
The awareness of the incessantly changing nature of experience is not a hinderance to, but the route of access into a robustly ethical involvement in the world. Dynamical changing life doesnt unfold as arbitrary disconnected moments but as a mesh of intertwined social practices. Currently, IÂ’m enjoying that work of Hanne De Jaegher, who clarifies the relation between ethics and enactivism.
Quoting Astrophel
Husserl noticed this, of course.
God is good. Though roughly put, this pretty much sets the apodictic ground for prima facie obligation.
Which "God" do you mean?
Btw, is this "God" all-good (loving) and all-powerful (just)?
If, however, this "God" is not both all-good (loving) and all-powerful (just), then why call it "God"? And what makes it worthy of worship?
Lastly, how do we know these things?
I PRAY GOD TO RID ME OF GOD. (MEISTER ECKHART)
Quoting 180 Proof
I have often wondered about this. The usual answer seems rooted in the definition of classical theism, which is considered rationally coherent - God as the source of all goodness, the ground of being, the essence of divine simplicity, or something along those lines. Still, I suppose you and I might question whether this transcends mere assertion and, if so, how it can be known.
An exception might be the Vatican's annals concerning the attested miracles that have been documented in cases of beatification. As is well-known, recognition of a saint requires that at least two bona fide miracles are documented which can be attributed to the intervention of the candidate for beatification. A panel is then set up to examine these claims and to try and discredit the purported miracles as a form of QA (from whence the well-known office of the 'devil's advocate' originated.) As a result of these processes there is a body of several thousands of such cases documented over many hundreds of years, which is, at least, a data set!
A haemotologist and medical writer named Jacalyn Duffin became interested in this as a consequence of being called as an expert witness in one such case. An atheist, she was nevertheless intrigued by the data, saying:
(You can read her story here, (NY Times gift link))
And yet it's only a "definition", not a publicly corroborating, sound argument that warrants believing "classical theism" is not just a (dogmatic) myth.
:pray:
As I see your position, after reading your thoughts here and there, you are indeed an open door, but a door in a closed room. How does one open a room?
Public corroborating? Is this what delivers belief from dogmatism???
You're the expert. Tell me.
I read, and so do you, only different books.
On religion, frankly, it would take a certain agreement on your part with what Michel Henry, my current muse, a "radical phenomenologist," says here:
Now, the systematic elucidation of appearing (not of things but of the way in which things offer themselves to us) presents us with what I would call the duplicity of appearing. This means that the mode of appearing, considered in itself, is twofold. On the one hand, there is the appearing that consists of a coming outside [venue au-dehors], of such a kind that here phenomenality is that of this “Outside”—which is also called the “world.”
Of course, the world here is the very familiar place of paying taxes, solving problems, socializing, working and so on. He calls this "outside" for obvious reasons. One stands apart from others, from things that are made objective and fit into a general scheme of habitual thinking. A world.
But,
On the other hand, there is a more original revelation that does not project outside of itself what it reveals, that does not divert toward anything external, anything other, anything different, whose phenomenality is not the visibility of any sort of “Outside,” of an ek-stasis. This original revelation reveals itself to itself, in other words, it is a self-revelation.
This would up front have to make some sense to you, just to stir toward further inquiry. Otherwise, just another lame bit of presumptuous philosophy. One might as well read the about the weather if this above makes no sense to you at all. (Though, I was surprised that you did agree with Joshs's thoughts about what constitutes the real. That was pretty out there. Maybe some of this does resonate with you.)
(Not that anyone would ever do such a thing.)
I have been particularly interested in @Joshs contributions and am often intrigued and/or sympathetic to the frames he brings here via post-structuralism and phenomenology. I have enjoyed bits of Evan Thompson's and Lee Braver's work.
But I have never pretended to be a philosopher or to have spent much time reading philosophy. In previous years philosophy didn’t capture my imagination. In the 1980's I read a lot of works available at the Theosophical Society, where I often hung out. I have no problem with Henry’s ‘duplicity of appearing’ as referenced. But I am not someone for whom the idea of god resonates. Whether that’s Paul Tillich’s ground of being or Alvin Plantinga’s theistic personalism.
Yeah, I find myself leaning toward this thinking because I, too, like, Henry, am a radical phenomenologist. The phenomenology of absolute self-affection brings the world of encounter right to immediacy of perceptual contact with things (meaning everything, form simple objects to thoughts, feelings). What stands between me and this presence? Nothing; nothing but, as Buddhists say, my attachments. But it is not the presence that becomes so intimately disclosed; it is myself, that is, when one makes the move away from the implicit hold of language and experience that are "always already" there in every glance, there is a transcendental "behind" the perception-of-everydayness that is allowed to step forward and the world is now seen as if for the first time. I think this is the where Buddhism takes one: to release our essential existence from a "world".
If you can sit there watching as the sun goes down, and understand what it was like for the ancient mind to believe the sun is a God, then you are close to Henry and radical phenomenology, I think. Of course, nothing is lost. You still know about fusion and whatever physics you are aware of. Nor do you become childlike (though I have read accounts of Zen monks talking to trees, screaming at them) or ancient minded. Rather, something has affirmed itself from "behind" this familiar world which is elusive to analysis. But it is as if all this time one has been ignoring, as Kierkegaard put it, that one exists, and suddenly there are, and you know you exist, and existence is radically Other than anything else because everything else belongs to the very familiarity one has to drop in order to understand.
My analysis (and it is analytic as distinct from mystical or symbolic) is that in the pre-modern world, we humans didn't have the same sense of 'otherness' as we now have. John Vervaeke (who's lectures I'm listening to and which I recommend) says there is a sense of participatory knowing in the pre-modern world, which he distinguishes from propositional knowing (see here. And notice here I"m using 'other' in a different sense to the way you've put it.)
Participatory knowing is the knowledge of how to act or to be in relation with the environment, as distinct from 'knowing about' (propositional knowledge) or know how (procedural knowledge). It is knowing through active engagement within specific contexts or environments (or in the case of religious ritual, with the Cosmos as a whole, per Mircea Eliade). Participatory knowing shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the person and the environment, influencing oneÂ’s identity and sense of belonging. Vervaeke associates it with the 'flow state' and a heightened sense of unity (being one with.)
This sense has been massively disrupted by the 'modern' state in which the individual ego is an isolated agent cast into an unknowing and uncaring Cosmos from which he or she is estranged, an alien, an outsider. So healing from that or overcoming it, is more than a matter of propositional knowing, but discovery of a different way of being. Which I think is expressed in phenomenology and existentialism in a non-religious way. But the point is, overcoming that sense of otherness or disconnection from the world is profoundly liberating in some fundamental way. I *think* this is what you're driving at.
I don't think I am convinced that this counts as knowing as such and is likely to be a symbolic connection or relationship emerging from contingent beliefs systems. Something doesn't have to be true for us to experince catharsis or other psychological satisfactions from it (ask any novelist).
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm sympathetic of the idea of overcoming a sense of otherness or disconnection and that this can feel liberating, but it might be worth considering alternatives to framing the experience in such binary terms as 'connected vs. disconnected' or 'otherness vs. unity.' We could also think in terms of degrees, layers, or even shifting perspectives. For instance, rather than aiming to dissolve otherness, we could explore the tension between connection and separation and how we might understand ourselves and the world better through this interplay. Personally I don't usually look at the world as 'other' or as 'unity' I tend to suspend or bracket my judgement and am reasonably happy with ambivalence and paradox - rigid categories seem unnecessary.
For me, it is the simplicity of philosophical issues that are striking. I put the question above: ever hear of a physicist studying, Jupiter's moon's or carbon dating or whatever, who decides to begin the study with an account of the perceptual act the produces basic data? No. This is extraordinary. Such neglect is unthinkable in science, like neglecting the sun in the study of moon light. One looks at, around, all over this simple question and it becomes very clear that according to science, such data being about a world is impossible. This point is, nothing really could be more simple, but it is entirely ignored.
Of course we know why it is ignored. Because to study perception itself requires perception. It is impossible to study empirically. Literally impossible. But this changes nothing in terms of the impossible "distance" that remains between claims about the world, and what those claims are "about".
Evan Thompson? Again, simplicity. Is it even possible for value, or affectivity or pathos, the pain of a sprained ankle, say, to occur without agency, one that is commensurate with the experience? Just a question. Momentous yet simple.
Sure. I had more in mind the passage I quoted from Michel Henry:
In that perspective the separation between subject and object is hard and fast, so much so that it actually becomes invisible as 'the blind spot'.
IÂ’m not sure. Those experiences may not be unified under a single foundational principle. Experience is interesting but contested space. I donÂ’t have the expertise to determine what it means. But I do consider that values and emotions are products of contingent factors and seem to exist in relation to other factors - a web of interactions. What is at the centre? Is there even a centre? The problem with ideas like this is that they flow readily and may not connect to anythingÂ…
Quoting Astrophel
ItÂ’s fortuitous that ThompsonÂ’s name is mentioned in particular, because heÂ’s the co-author of a book which explores the very fact that this post was about, namely, The Blind Spot. From an essay on that subject by another of the co-authors, Marcello Gleiser:
All of these reflections are variations on a single point: that while scientific method assumes the separateness of the knower from the object of knowledge, at some point, this breaks down, because reality is not something weÂ’re outside of.
All throughout the book that this essay is about, the seminal influence of Husserl and Merleau Ponty is continuously referred to. Because it is in them, that the importance of self-awareness within science itself becomes manifest.
And notice that Gleiser ties this directly to the ‘meaning crisis’ - which is rooted in that sense of ‘otherness’ or ‘outside-ness’ that I was referring to above.
Yes, and you do well note the "different sense, here.
First, just to remind: Verbaeke seems to be suggesting that this otherness is derivative of propositional knowing, One has to ask, is affectivity derivative? To smell, taste, feel, suffer, delight, and to THINK--are these derivative of the reflective act that recognizes them to be what they are? See, this is close to where Henry is. Such a question is NOT an inquiry into an historical sequence of befores and afters. Here at the primordial level of awareness is uncovered in the entire experience of events as a singularity, as thought, feeling, perception are not categorically divided, are outside of time. (Heidegger's analysis of time in B&T to find another way of conceiving this impossible unity. H doesn't talk about the transcendental finality as I think he should [but then ask Joshs for more on this. or perhaps read in Being and Time starting with section 64 and onward. tough to read, but worth the trouble] but the analysis is deeply insightful. Ecstatic time, time that cannot be conceived sequentially, is the only resolution of time's foundational analytic. All roads lead to a non sequential transcendental genesis of all things, as all things are given in phenomenological time). This may sound like a digression, but I only want to say that this "other" is not an historical event and not derivative. It is "discovered," as one discovers things in an observational analytic, like a geologist observing rocks and minerals, IN awareness as such, historical and otherwise derivative accounts aside.
Quoting Wayfarer
But now, more directly to your idea: of course, to "know" these, rather than to merely experience their existence, like a cat or a lizard, brings in the issue of propositional knowledge, but then all eyes are on what this is. Forget about pre-modern, and now consider pre-language. The cow sees better grass on the other side of the stream, then crosses over to get it. Did the cow think propositionally? No, but the essential structure of the conditional propositional form seems to be there: no explicit if....then; but a proto-conditional and prepropositional if ...then would be in place because the pragmatic situation itself is inherently conditional. The "recognition" that the grass can be obtained by moving legs in a certain way and direction has the basic propositional conditional form.
The point is that propositional knowledge is embedded in participatory knowing, the latter (conceived here as an historical stage of sequential development) cannot be conceived free of the structure of thought as we know it. And therefore, the "other" that eventually makes its way into awareness (again, conceiving of this whole affair outside of Henry and phenomenology) cannot be conceived as appearing with the propositional and therefore derivative of the propositional. Speaking like this, it seems better to say, this other has a much more ancient existence. Perhaps measured in geological time. Dinosaurs?? Trilobites?
But this connectivity is just the problem.
Put it like this: If you were to ask a geologist about some sedimentary rock, and were given a story about what caused it to be what it is, there would be a first assumption as to what it IS that this story is about. And also, if told how useful the rock for building something or as a weapon, the same first assumption would be there, that about what it IS that is being discussed. Asked about this, the geologist, or whoever, would then proceed to describe the rock and all of its features. The evolutionary history, the pragmatism, really makes no sense unless you have something that is in need of analysis in the first place. This is the way science works. It doesn't deal in fantasy. It begins with the basic descriptive givenness, from color and weight, to molecular structure and other descriptions in particle physics. You have to have what is there, in front of your observing, analyzing eyes. The "contested space" you talk about is there, of course, for science has its slow paradigmatic movement toward greater insight, but this goes with greater observation, as with the telescope of the microscope and observation deals with, of course, the content of what is given.
Contested space has its limits. Does modus ponens have contested space? Yes and no, I think is the answer. though logic cannot be imagined to be at fault in the way it shows itself, we know that the language in play through which modus ponens has its expression (symbolic or otherwise) can be imagined to be at fault, simply because language is historical and contingent, and the necessity "behind" the language construction is never really expressed, remains "hidden". Anything taken AS in language is conditioned or qualified by being taken AS (this on my lap, I take AS a cat). So how does one get beyond contested space? And on to true absolute certainty? (Important to keep in mind that a construction like "true absolute certainty" is is a language construct. nd such things can cause more trouble that they are worth.) One has to step out of language. Of course, one has be IN language as one does this, for language is always already there.
Which is not hard to do. Stick your finger in a fire. Nothing at all of language in this. One is not interpreting pain to be what it is as I interpret this cat to be a cat, because while the pain certainly can be talked about, the pain itself stands apart from this, and the same could be true of this cat if I allowed myself to "center" (your term) on the non language dimensions of the presence of this "cat", rather than the usual thoughts that attend thinking about the cat.
So there are two kinds of "centering" here. One is the usual, and this is contingent: it depends on what you are talking about, the context of the meaning of the situation, and this could be a scientific context where cats have genus and species, and so on, or a practical context--did I feed the cat? Or maybe the cat is a comfort, an alarm for intruders, whatever. The sec ond kind of centering is on the presence of the cat, as presence. Much easier to conceive that of a scorched finger: the pain so intense, pulls all attention from explanatory contexts and is allowed to stand as it own nonlinguistic context, if you will. When you have the pain stare at it, and ask what it IS, you are asking a question of phenomenology, and I argue, you have entered "the religious". Can you question pain as such? It is beyond foolish to do so, more foolish than to question the essential non-logical intuition of causality or modus ponens, simply because pain is IMPORTANT, a non contingent importance, you know, NOT important because of some deadline, or some other matter that is important because of some other matter (and the centering gets moved around, reconceived). This is phenomenological importance, importance IN the givenness of the pain.
So the "value and emptions" you speak of are now understood very differently. They come "uncentered" in language, because language really has no center: it has "centerS" but centered in the essential fabric of the world, so to speak. This is where religion begins being meaningful, that is, the examination of religion, as it is delivered from the many "centered" talks, now finds its "real" ground in the importance of pure phenomenality of pain, delight and the value dimension of out existence.
I said that affectivity cannot be conceived apart from agency. This requires further work.
Quoting Astrophel
I can see that, but my research has been very much shaped around the history of ideas, about understanding how philosophical themes emerge and change over time and in response to, as well as shaping, social and cultural circumstances. The book I read immediately before undergrad philosophy was Russell's history of Western Philosophy which, for its many shortcomings, does a good job at weaving the historical analysis. But I sense, reading your posts, you're much better read in recent Western philosophy and phenomenology than I am.
Quoting Astrophel
I've yet to tackle Being and Time and may never get to it. But I think perhaps there's some similarity to the Bergson-Einstein debate on objective vs 'lived' time.
If it is just a description of what was said and by whom , I suppose Russell can't do much harm. Informative, like an encyclopedia. But if he laces it with opinion, that is another story. Russell is to philosophy what popular religion is to living and breathing: keeps the faithful appeased, but really, has nothing to say about the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Consider Henry's possible answer to this.
[i]What we need to understand is what Kafka implies when he writes: “With each mouthful of the visible, an invisible mouthful is proffered us, with each visible article of clothing an invisible article
of clothing.[/i]
Well, the latter comes first, no? It is presupposed by the former, and therefore philosophically important and the latter is just physics. Objective time belongs to "vulgar" everydayness, Heidegger would say. Not that he is being insulting at all. We are all everyday people. But If the question of philosophy faces this everydayness, there is a radically different analysis to consider.
I vaguely remember Einstein winning that debate, and it was at the end of Bergson's career. Einstein said some unkind things about philosophy. I very much doubt he had read much, though I know he read Kant at thirteen or so. Ridiculous.