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[Lagayascienza]

Hereandnow, If I try to distil what you have said in your responses to my requests for explanations of phenomenology, if I bracket all that seems inessential, I am left with this:

Phenomenology is a reduction down to "pure" phenomena, a non-empirical study of a priori value. Whatever we may say about a phenomenon we experience will always be an interpretation, not the phenomenon in itself.

Ok, fine. But is that it? And do you think that science and analytical philosophers deny this? Do you think they deny subjective first-person experience? They don’t. (But more on that later.) What I am trying to first discover is whether getting to subjective-first-person grips with phenomena, is really all that phenomenology is about? Is there not more?

Consider again our little girl. You ask us to understand that there is only the little girl’s subjective, first-person suffering, the palpable presence of value she subjectively experiences. Yes of course there is that. But I think we can have more than that. However, for now, I would say only that, to our little girl, uneducated, in rags, hungry and scavenging on a garbage dump in a society of vast inequality, all that Kant, Husserl and Mackie, and all that you or I might write philosophically about her subjective experience, would be to her just incomprehensible and useless verbiage. Only she knows the value AS value that is her suffering. Thus far, I think we would agree at least on this.

Mackie was a very decent and kind man, a deeply humane person. He would have been deeply moved by the little girl’s suffering and would have wanted to alleviate it. But the best way to do that was not the subject of his book on metaethics. I don’t think that phenomenology is concerned with that either. And nor can I see how phenomenology is any better placed or equipped to apprehend value than is analytic philosophy. Both are equally removed from the little girls suffering AS suffering. (Although, you may well have an argument of which I am unaware, demonstrating that a phenomenologist is in a better position to understand her suffering.)

However that may be, unless we are psychopaths, humans are all equipped to not only subjectively experience value AS value in the first person, they can also experience it vicariously. (And this is the "more" I mentioned above) We vicariously feel the little girls suffering and want it to stop. Taking a scientific/naturalist/analytic view of the world does not prevent us from experiencing value AS value, nor does it prevent us from experiencing it vicariously.

I am now an old man. If I were to lose my retirement pension and end up starving and scavenging on a garbage dump, I, too, even as an old naturalist, materialist, atheist, would feel its badness subjectively, and I believe my experience, although unique, would not be completely unlike that which our little girl experiences. In fact, as well as pleasant experiences, I experience the value BAD most days in the form of my arthritis. We all experience things subjectively. It simply does not seem to me to be the case that only phenomenology can understand it and that everyone else denies the first-person, subjective experience of value AS value. It’s simply impossible for us not to feel it and ridiculous to say we deny to it.

And that is not what Mackie does. In his book on metaethics, Mackie demonstrates only that there are no objective moral values and not that we don’t have moral values at all. Nor does he argue that we should deny our subjective experience of value. He says only that moral values, however we came by them (he hardly touches on evolution), must be experienced subjectively. This must be the case because there are no objective moral values. That is all. I believe he is right.

To reiterate, Mackie and science do not deny that we subjectively experience value. That would be a really stupid thing to deny. To say that analytic philosophy and science deny value is to misunderstand the motivations of, and to misrepresent the analytic and scientific approach. The intrinsic value AS value of pain, the BAD that we experience by putting our finger into a flame, is experienced by all of us. Access to this value qua value is no more available to the phenomenologist than it is to anyone else. Or, at least, I cannot see, and you have not explained, how it can be. Unless we are masochists, pain has the value BAD for all of us. And, again, as far as I can see from what you have written, phenomenology is in no better position to understand BAD than the rest of us.

Science does, however, go a long way in explaining what is happening when we experience pain. It has also found out how to alleviate pain. And, in broad outline, evolutionary science tells us where our subjective moral sentiments came from, why they were selected for, and what we are doing when we moralize. I do not see how phenomenology, as I understand it from what you have written, does any of that. As you have explained it to me, all phenomenology does is to attempt to subjectively experience value in its essence, while bracketing all that is inessential. Fine, I’m not saying that is a bad aim. But it doesn’t seem like much to me. It seems like very little, almost nothing. And, after we’ve done the bracketing and subjective experiencing, if we want to make a difference, don’t we then need to move into empiricism where science does its thing? Otherwise, isn’t it all just philosophical navel gazing?

None of this is meant to be offensive. If anything, it is another request for clarity, for an everyday-language account of phenomenology. It is quite likely that I have not understood it. If there is more to phenomenology than I have been able to glean from your explanations thus far, then I would very much like to know what I am missing.

[Hereandnow]

Sy Borg wrote

Why would you expect science to concern itself with ethics any more than Kant should have concerned himself with salinised H²O? As you said, focus is required.

Science doesn't speak about ethics for the same reason that ethicists don't talk about biochemistry.

Well, yes. I agree. The point made here is that philosophy, in this dominant anglo-american tradition outside of the continental tradition, has abandoned the metaphysics of ethics, metaethics, because it is so lost in arguments the principle concern of which is clarity in the play of existing meanings, the argument by analogy and comparison, extension of threshold issues in philosophy to matters that are clear, and the result is a reduction of what our existence is all about to the trivialities of mundane affairs.

Lagaya, as for a salve for the little girl, think of what acted as a salve for you as a child. Kindness. Connection. Sage advice. Distraction. Humour. It seems to me that phenomenology is about as well-equipped to help her as science because, like science, that's not its job.

Philosophy's job, I can say with confidence, is to examine everything at the most basic level of assumptions. The sage advice, the distractions, beg philosophical questions. To what end? to alleviate the suffering. What is suffering? This move brings philosophy closer to the essence of religion. As you said, it would be welcome to rid ourselves of religion, the foolish beliefs. But the metaphysics religion deals with is simply part of our existence. One has to deal with this intelligently, and this is phenomenology. Phenomenology is where religion ultimately goes. Buddhism, it has been said, freed of its nonsense as well, is the closest I've seen to a true reduction of religion down to the phenomenological core of existence. Even Heidegger in the Speigel interview, warmed up to Buddhism. The phenomenological reduction releases consciousness of the burden of the superstructure of interpretative dominance of the everyday world.Huserl writes:
[The principle of pure
evidence] signifies restriction to the pure data of transcendental reflection,
which therefore must be taken precisely as they are given in simple
evidence, purely 'intuitively', and always kept free from all interpretations
that read into them more than is genuinely seen.

"More than genuinely seen" is where the reductive razor makes its cuts. William of Ockham sought efficiency and simplicity, and here it is the same, but it is not alternative theories that are in competition. Here, it is theory contra givenness: what is simply, and radically even, given the dismissal of the entire superstructure of assumptions, THERE.

we need to reform philosophy and join it to science to recreate a modern version of natural philosophy; we need to do this in the interests of rigour, intellectual honesty, and so that science may serve the best interests of humanity. Modern science began as natural philosophy. In the time of Newton, what we call science and philosophy today – the disparate endeavours – formed one mutually interacting, integrated endeavour of natural philosophy: to improve our knowledge and understanding of the universe, and to improve our understanding of ourselves as a part of it. Profound discoveries were made, indeed one should say unprecedented discoveries. It was a time of quite astonishing intellectual excitement and achievement. And then natural philosophy died. It split into science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. This happened during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the split is now built into our intellectual landscape. But the two fragments, science and philosophy, are defective shadows of the glorious unified endeavour of natural philosophy. Rigour, sheer intellectual good sense and decisive argument demand that we put the two together again, and rediscover the immense merits of the integrated enterprise of natural philosophy.

This sounds like Quine! And it is typical of a science oriented pov, that is, when science looks at the world, thinks about philosophy, and makes a grand statement. Ask a scientist what she thinks about the phenomenological reduction, and you will get a blank stare. We all have had this education, since elementary school, of the primacy of science in understanding things, but on the other side of this there was simply religion and its bad metaphysics. It takes orientation, just like the scientific purview took years of education. Granted, it is difficult to read Kant through Derrida and beyond; it is another education entirely. But science is slowly making its way to the understanding that when we interface with the world in a knowledge relation, this relation constitutes the only ontology there can be. Without this relation, all you have is bad metaphsyics: the physicist's material or physical (distinctions notwithstanding) reality that is independent of this relation is a complete failure, and I mean this by a physicist's standards. This critical juncture in a scientific approach to examining the world...ignored?? Science, that dedicates itself to the minutia of variations in quantified relations while investigating star distances and atomic behavior completely ginores the act of what it means to know something at all?
This is certainly not to say, to repeat, that science has it wrong. It is to say with this question, one has entered metaphysics. This is why science cannot go there. Will science discover phenomenology? Eventually, it will move into phenomenology. No choice, really.

[Sy Borg]

Sy Borg wrote

Why would you expect science to concern itself with ethics any more than Kant should have concerned himself with salinised H²O? As you said, focus is required.

Science doesn't speak about ethics for the same reason that ethicists don't talk about biochemistry.

Well, yes. I agree. The point made here is that philosophy, in this dominant anglo-american tradition outside of the continental tradition, has abandoned the metaphysics of ethics, metaethics, because it is so lost in arguments the principle concern of which is clarity in the play of existing meanings, the argument by analogy and comparison, extension of threshold issues in philosophy to matters that are clear, and the result is a reduction of what our existence is all about to the trivialities of mundane affairs.

I would describe ethics as a subset of analytic philosophy. Ethics was one of my gateways to becoming a philosophy forum haunt. The others were science plus a keen interest in my earlier years in, dare I say it, metaphysical claims. To that end, Gandhi and Hesse were my main inspirations.

I'm rather more cynical today. I have believed and been found wrong so many times, I see little point to committing to ideas - rather just see how they play out. I am interested in the actual reality, the noumena. The more one tries to capture what is real beyond the convenient and easily recognisable mental symbols that we use in reality's stead, the more weird reality seems. The story of the universe is so odd, one can't help thinking that some strange carry-on is going on behind the scenes that we don't know about.

Lagaya, as for a salve for the little girl, think of what acted as a salve for you as a child. Kindness. Connection. Sage advice. Distraction. Humour. It seems to me that phenomenology is about as well-equipped to help her as science because, like science, that's not its job.

Philosophy's job, I can say with confidence, is to examine everything at the most basic level of assumptions. The sage advice, the distractions, beg philosophical questions. To what end? to alleviate the suffering. What is suffering? This move brings philosophy closer to the essence of religion. As you said, it would be welcome to rid ourselves of religion, the foolish beliefs. But the metaphysics religion deals with is simply part of our existence. One has to deal with this intelligently, and this is phenomenology. Phenomenology is where religion ultimately goes. Buddhism, it has been said, freed of its nonsense as well, is the closest I've seen to a true reduction of religion down to the phenomenological core of existence. Even Heidegger in the Speigel interview, warmed up to Buddhism. The phenomenological reduction releases consciousness of the burden of the superstructure of interpretative dominance of the everyday world.Huserl writes:
[The principle of pure
evidence] signifies restriction to the pure data of transcendental reflection,
which therefore must be taken precisely as they are given in simple
evidence, purely 'intuitively', and always kept free from all interpretations
that read into them more than is genuinely seen.

"More than genuinely seen" is where the reductive razor makes its cuts. William of Ockham sought efficiency and simplicity, and here it is the same, but it is not alternative theories that are in competition. Here, it is theory contra givenness: what is simply, and radically even, given the dismissal of the entire superstructure of assumptions, THERE.

we need to reform philosophy and join it to science to recreate a modern version of natural philosophy; we need to do this in the interests of rigour, intellectual honesty, and so that science may serve the best interests of humanity. Modern science began as natural philosophy. In the time of Newton, what we call science and philosophy today – the disparate endeavours – formed one mutually interacting, integrated endeavour of natural philosophy: to improve our knowledge and understanding of the universe, and to improve our understanding of ourselves as a part of it. Profound discoveries were made, indeed one should say unprecedented discoveries. It was a time of quite astonishing intellectual excitement and achievement. And then natural philosophy died. It split into science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. This happened during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the split is now built into our intellectual landscape. But the two fragments, science and philosophy, are defective shadows of the glorious unified endeavour of natural philosophy. Rigour, sheer intellectual good sense and decisive argument demand that we put the two together again, and rediscover the immense merits of the integrated enterprise of natural philosophy.

This sounds like Quine! And it is typical of a science oriented pov, that is, when science looks at the world, thinks about philosophy, and makes a grand statement. Ask a scientist what she thinks about the phenomenological reduction, and you will get a blank stare. We all have had this education, since elementary school, of the primacy of science in understanding things, but on the other side of this there was simply religion and its bad metaphysics. It takes orientation, just like the scientific purview took years of education. Granted, it is difficult to read Kant through Derrida and beyond; it is another education entirely. But science is slowly making its way to the understanding that when we interface with the world in a knowledge relation, this relation constitutes the only ontology there can be. Without this relation, all you have is bad metaphsyics: the physicist's material or physical (distinctions notwithstanding) reality that is independent of this relation is a complete failure, and I mean this by a physicist's standards. This critical juncture in a scientific approach to examining the world...ignored?? Science, that dedicates itself to the minutia of variations in quantified relations while investigating star distances and atomic behavior completely ginores the act of what it means to know something at all?
This is certainly not to say, to repeat, that science has it wrong. It is to say with this question, one has entered metaphysics. This is why science cannot go there. Will science discover phenomenology? Eventually, it will move into phenomenology. No choice, really.

I agree with you about Buddhism. I think its stories were intended as parables rather than reports, anyway. I suspect much of the same with the Bible too, but literalism continues to somewhat poison the well.

At it's heart, Buddhism looks to me like a study of subjectivity. Practitioners quiet the mind (or whatever esoteric thing they attempt) and they observe what happens. They record their findings and pass it on to others. That forms part of a body of knowledge about many meditator's experiences. That's science - experiment, report, accumulate findings, assess and look for patterns and stages, eg. emergence of siddhis and subsequent ego issues.

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions. This is a barrier towards unification and restoration of natural philosophy. I also agree with you that science will have to address metaphysics. How can it not when people need to know if AI can achieve sentience - a sense of internality - and, if so, how can anyone know? Technology, ethics and metaphysics collide.

[Pattern-chaser]

To the question: "does anything exist independently of our consciousness?" the antirealist answers: "no, nothing else exists" or "we can never know anything else exists". Another version is: "they do exist, but we can never know exactly how they are, because how they appear to us is caused by ourselves and not by the things in themselves".

Which one is the antirealist's answer? For there is a huge gulf between "no, nothing else exists" and "we can never know anything else exists". The former is an expression of certainty, while the second expresses doubt, and also aims inward, not outward. If there is such a thing as an 'antirealist', what are their characteristic beliefs? Non-existence or not-knowing-if-things-exist?

[Pattern-chaser]

Philosophy's job, I can say with confidence, is to examine everything at the most basic level of assumptions. The sage advice, the distractions, beg philosophical questions. To what end? to alleviate the suffering.

I wonder why you think that the purpose of philosophy is to alleviate suffering? I do not assert that it is not, I wonder what your justification is for thinking so?

[Pattern-chaser]

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions.

Really? That's weird. Scientific institutions generally do not acknowledge the subject(s) of metaphysics as being worthy of study. In general, at least, science cannot handle metaphysical questions. This is not because of any failing on the part of science, but simply that such questions lie its purview.

So I suggest that the reputation of metaphysics is not significantly affected by the views of scientific institutions.



As for the charge that religion has somehow devalued metaphysics, I can't see it. But I haven't followed every post in this exchange, so I freely admit I am not fully informed. This may be why I "can't see it".

[Sy Borg]

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions.

Really? That's weird. Scientific institutions generally do not acknowledge the subject(s) of metaphysics as being worthy of study.

Because it is associated with religion.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote
Ok, fine. But is that it? And do you think that science and analytical philosophers deny this? Do you think they deny subjective first-person experience? They don’t. (But more on that later.) What I am trying to first discover is whether getting to subjective-first-person grips with phenomena, is really all that phenomenology is about? Is there not more?

No, it is not the same thing as subjective first person; in fact, it looks like the phenomenological point of view is just the opposite of this kind of thinking if you take first person experience in the way a novelist writes a story. The first person here is relating a tale that is constructed out of a persona; world that is notoriously unreliable because there are distortions, exaggerations, etc., perhaps unintended, misrepresenting people and events. Phenomenology wants to free of just this. Science is plagued by its own narratives, a first person pov where the subject is the community of scientists and their, as Kuhn put it, paradigms of normal science that resist change when anomalies arise.

It is, however, the first person pov in the Cartesian sense, conceived in the attempt to find true certainty. Descartes understood the essential link between epistemology and ontology in the cogito--you know, I think, therefore, I am. Phenomenology takes this position, but finds Descartes fumbles where he fails to discover properly what 'being" is. I mean, the "I am" conclusion hardly follows from "I think" simply because "am" refers to 'being' and this term is entirely underdetermined by premise "I think". He thinks being is simply about the res extensa and res cogito, as if these categories mean something, but they are only pale reflections of the true depth and meanings of our existence. The impoverished and stricken girl you bring up rushes to mind. Phenomenology drops Descartes' vacuous ontology, and substitutes "the world of what is given" prior to theory and pragmatics, and science's paradigms, and so on. This perspective frees the affective dimension of our existence from science's silence, up to a new standard of being: a qualitative standard! Ethics is now, as Levinas put it, first philosophy.

Consider again our little girl. You ask us to understand that there is only the little girl’s subjective, first-person suffering, the palpable presence of value she subjectively experiences. Yes of course there is that. But I think we can have more than that. However, for now, I would say only that, to our little girl, uneducated, in rags, hungry and scavenging on a garbage dump in a society of vast inequality, all that Kant, Husserl and Mackie, and all that you or I might write philosophically about her subjective experience, would be to her just incomprehensible and useless verbiage. Only she knows the value AS value that is her suffering. Thus far, I think we would agree at least on this.

Pretty much. And true, only she knows her experiences, but we all know what suffering is, no? What we don't know, our pathos reaches out to in caring and empathy. Compare: Kant says that a true moral act is done for duty, and he does have a point, referring to the moral imposition lying in doing what you don't really want to do, but you should. Otherwise, morality is just an indulgence. My view is that while Kant is right about the sacrifice being a noble thing, he is wrong about motivation. Saving the girl would be a risk, and duty demands, but why comply with duty? The greater cause beckons, but in this is compassion, which is a "desire" to relieve, redeem, lift up and out. One has to care, and this is our pathos, a modality of affectivity, and this belongs to the analytic term value, which I think is where the essence of religion lies.

Mackie was a very decent and kind man, a deeply humane person. He would have been deeply moved by the little girl’s suffering and would have wanted to alleviate it. But the best way to do that was not the subject of his book on metaethics. I don’t think that phenomenology is concerned with that either. And nor can I see how phenomenology is any better placed or equipped to apprehend value than is analytic philosophy. Both are equally removed from the little girls suffering AS suffering. (Although, you may well have an argument of which I am unaware, demonstrating that a phenomenologist is in a better position to understand her suffering.)

Well, it's not about Mackie personally. The issue is about the nature of ethics, NOT about what to do or how to do it. Equally removed? I suppose, but I don't think we are so removed unless you mean in terms of intensity. Mackie's title refers to "inventing" right and wrong and this entails a denial that there is anything "in the fabric of things" as he says. To make this claim is ethical nihilism (but this gets tricky. Rorty is right there with Mackie, but he, too, insists he is not a nihilist, and one of his books makes this claim inits title: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Solidarity is about social cohesion. The worst thing a person can do, says Mackie, is cruelty (I think Judith Shklar said this); yet he opens his book saying truth is not discovered, but invented. Obviously, you can't have your cake and eat it, too, in this matter, for if ethics is "invented" then cruelty's opposition has no ground. This is where Mackie and I part ways. I am saying ethics most certainly IS invented, BUT it is also IN the fabric of things. Culture is an invention.

At any rate, the bottom line is this: Mackie and his ilk (analytic philosophers for the most part) are ethical nihilists, which means the girl and all the miserable details of her misery, let's say she is found dancing in a forest somewhere and is burned alive as a witch, is just tough luck for the girl. For there is nothing to redeem this misery, and anything religion might have to say is just a foolish rationalization. This is Mackie. Phenomenologists, like me and the people I read, take the "wrong" of this situation as an expression of something truly in the "fabric of the world" and this entails redemption, without putting too fine a point on it, which we cannot do since metaphysics, again, is not clear like plain categorical concepts, like bread and butter. It is, and the girl's problems are, radically, vis a vis our ability to say what it is, indeterminate. What is NOT indeterminate is this incessant pain in my sprained ankle. That is clear as a bell.

I am now an old man. If I were to lose my retirement pension and end up starving and scavenging on a garbage dump, I, too, even as an old naturalist, materialist, atheist, would feel its badness subjectively, and I believe my experience, although unique, would not be completely unlike that which our little girl experiences. In fact, as well as pleasant experiences, I experience the value BAD most days in the form of my arthritis. We all experience things subjectively. It simply does not seem to me to be the case that only phenomenology can understand it and that everyone else denies the first-person, subjective experience of value AS value. It’s simply impossible for us not to feel it and ridiculous to say we deny to it.

You know, you could be equally exasperated with Kant: Are you really trying to tell me that only if we read Kant do we understand what reason is, what it means to think? On the surface, it does sound absurd. But pretty much, this is what all philosophers are saying about philosophy because only here are beliefs and knowledge claims understood at the most basic level. People who don't read philosophy, don't examine things at this level, and exaniming things is what higher understanding is all about. I mean, the complaint could be leveled at a physicist as well, couldn't it? Only THEY understand physical substance? I see it, feel it, etc. every day of my life and I know it quite intimately.

Recall that this first person pov should be taken as a Cartesian first person pov, not just the first person reflective turn inward. What is Descartes asking in his Meditations? Is there anything that can be called absolute knowledge? Something that cannot be doubted? It is a method of discovery.

And that is not what Mackie does. In his book on metaethics, Mackie demonstrates only that there are no objective moral values and not that we don’t have moral values at all. Nor does he argue that we should deny our subjective experience of value. He says only that moral values, however we came by them (he hardly touches on evolution), must be experienced subjectively. This must be the case because there are no objective moral values. That is all. I believe he is right.

It's a tough issue. Weedy. To say there are no objective moral values is a blanket denial that there is any content revealed in the analysis of an ethical situation that is objective. This I disagree with, and the analysis goes directly to the essence of a moral situation, and this is value, the engine that drives ethics is value. No value in play, no ethics (hence the essence). So the whole question rests with what value is. Is there an issue with this?

To reiterate, Mackie and science do not deny that we subjectively experience value. That would be a really stupid thing to deny. To say that analytic philosophy and science deny value is to misunderstand the motivations of, and to misrepresent the analytic and scientific approach. The intrinsic value AS value of pain, the BAD that we experience by putting our finger into a flame, is experienced by all of us. Access to this value qua value is no more available to the phenomenologist than it is to anyone else. Or, at least, I cannot see, and you have not explained, how it can be. Unless we are masochists, pain has the value BAD for all of us. And, again, as far as I can see from what you have written, phenomenology is in no better position to understand BAD than the rest of us.

Well then, let's be scientists and existentialists. There is my stubbed toe that hurts like hell. I don't care about the brain, its systemic responses, nor do I care about how well these responses serves the interests of survival and reproduction over the millennia genetic mutation. I don't care about the causal accounts that say how it happened, or the politics of middle class people who are statistically less inclined to stub their toes than those from lower stratum of society. And I certainly am not interested in the fact that analytic philosophers cannot find a proper designation for this experience outside of the mundane. Phenomenology removes the pain of the stubbed toe from all contextual bearings. One literally stands before the cosmos, if you will, in a radical state of freedom from interpretive interference, and asks, what is this? Of course, pain qua pain is like the analytic's qualia, the pure phenomenon. Nothing to say, really. But this is not true! And my little paragraph can't convince you. I started reading Heidegger ten years ago and all I had was Kant under my belt in the continental genre. I came to realize that my attitudes and perspectives were cluttered with everything BUT the world as the world. And who cares, really. One starts to care when things turn to ethics and value:

Imagine you decide to go off, live off the fat of the land for a while in Nowhere, Montana, and you're chopping wood, miss your mark and bury the ax in your leg and fall into a deep crevasse. At first you are in the pragmatic mode working on a way out, but you eventually yield to your predicament, fully realizing this is the end, and the pain worsens, and before the darkness fully envelops, you come to understand that absolutely nothing avails you in this desperate moment. You are now, I argue, on the threshold of the essence of religion, for you are free from interpretative influences that would normally dominate your thinking. Your agony faces nothingness, true nihilism, not atheism which is a trivial thesis. There is nothing to placate or mitigate or rationalize, just you, the pain and the world. And perhaps your fist is raised to the cosmos and in your final act of sanity you cry out to no one, why!?

My phenomenology, again, with the help of brilliant writers like Michel Henry and Emanuel Levinas, sees that this describes the "human condition" at the level of basic question about ethics. Our "metaethical" situation: we are thrown into (geworfenheit, Heidegger calls it, lifted from Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety) a world, and we live on this "stage" as actors who don't know they are acting, simply going along, paying taxes, driving to work, having dinner parties, and so on. There are moments when we ask that impossible question, now the stale cliche of a Douglas Adams trilogy, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Husserl opens a door for the intellectual way to understand this. Philosophy is just a bunch of bs without this critical dismantling of all that we do and say to each other that covers up this foundation of nothing that is only realized when one, like Kierkegaard, truly loses sleep over it. You know the standard and tiresome proof that God does not exist lies in God's willingness to allow evil in the world. It comes from a naivete that works from and idea of God (all those omni-this and omni-that's), then unto the world, forgetting the scientific method of working from evidence, and then into a proof. God is not nor ever was, some idea cooked up in the mind of St Anselm or Aquinas. Only way for God to be at all meaningful is to start with the the world: observation, and phenomenology is essentially descriptive. Lying in a ravine bleeding to death and the questions that attend this are off the charts, so to speak, no man's land. This is IN the givenness of he world, and there is here a powerful moral deficit! This is what religion is about. The nothing of our existence, or, the radical indeterminacy, as I am calling it, of your existence.

But then we are scientists and it comes full circle: what is pain? Pain is a modality of value, so what is value and why wouldn't Wittgenstein talk about? Etc.

Science does, however, go a long way in explaining what is happening when we experience pain. It has also found out how to alleviate pain. And, in broad outline, evolutionary science tells us where our subjective moral sentiments came from, why they were selected for, and what we are doing when we moralize. I do not see how phenomenology, as I understand it from what you have written, does any of that. As you have explained it to me, all phenomenology does is to attempt to subjectively experience value in its essence, while bracketing all that is inessential. Fine, I’m not saying that is a bad aim. But it doesn’t seem like much to me. It seems like very little, almost nothing. And, after we’ve done the bracketing and subjective experiencing, if we want to make a difference, don’t we then need to move into empiricism where science does its thing? Otherwise, isn’t it all just philosophical navel gazing?

None of this is meant to be offensive. If anything, it is another request for clarity, for an everyday-language account of phenomenology. It is quite likely that I have not understood it. If there is more to phenomenology than I have been able to glean from your explanations thus far, then I would very much like to know what I am missing.

Probably the above is the best I can do. Frankly, one has to be INTO this perspective already, searching for answers the way as if they really mean something and not just for intellectual sport. And Mackie is one of the most disciplined minds one can come across. But the world is not a discipline.

Offended? Me? You're kidding. Every paragraph I write is an exploration into what I actually believe. I tell my daughter, you have to read, but this is not enough. Only through writing do you truly discover yourself. Why do you think I write all of this? My idea of a good time, really.

[Hereandnow]

I would describe ethics as a subset of analytic philosophy. Ethics was one of my gateways to becoming a philosophy forum haunt. The others were science plus a keen interest in my earlier years in, dare I say it, metaphysical claims. To that end, Gandhi and Hesse were my main inspirations.

I'm rather more cynical today. I have believed and been found wrong so many times, I see little point to committing to ideas - rather just see how they play out. I am interested in the actual reality, the noumena. The more one tries to capture what is real beyond the convenient and easily recognisable mental symbols that we use in reality's stead, the more weird reality seems. The story of the universe is so odd, one can't help thinking that some strange carry-on is going on behind the scenes that we don't know about.

What can I say, given what you say here, you were made for phenomenology. Like I have said elsewhere, my little paragraphs are not going to convince you that Kant through Derrida (and beyond) is really the only intellectually responsible way to philosophize about the world. We are not talking about the way ideas relate and define each other, but about this very "weird" intrusion into our normal affairs. I've read Hesse, some things Gandhi wrote as I recall, and portions of the Bhagavad-Gita--I taught literature once for three years in India, and we did Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan. I had to read about Hinduism to do this and I have to say, one is brought to the edge of understanding trying to deal with Hindu metaphysics, for there is in all this a shining simplicity which is prior to all analysis. I take a strong stand against analytic philosophy because there is a strain of denial that runs through its thinking that looks upon such a claim of "simplicity" that is utterly contemptuous and condescending. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for they way they handle ideas. Just reading Quine or Strawson and the like is an exercise in rigorous analysis.

But one has to choose: continental of analytic. This "behind the scenes" you speak of is the very thematic center of phenomenology, notwithstanding its complexity.

I agree with you about Buddhism. I think its stories were intended as parables rather than reports, anyway. I suspect much of the same with the Bible too, but literalism continues to somewhat poison the well.

At it's heart, Buddhism looks to me like a study of subjectivity. Practitioners quiet the mind (or whatever esoteric thing they attempt) and they observe what happens. They record their findings and pass it on to others. That forms part of a body of knowledge about many meditator's experiences. That's science - experiment, report, accumulate findings, assess and look for patterns and stages, eg. emergence of siddhis and subsequent ego issues.

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions. This is a barrier towards unification and restoration of natural philosophy. I also agree with you that science will have to address metaphysics. How can it not when people need to know if AI can achieve sentience - a sense of internality - and, if so, how can anyone know? Technology, ethics and metaphysics collide.

Subjectivity is term that doesn't last long in phenomenology, that is, the subject/object distinction comes to have ONLY descriptive in play. It is simply a different kind of engagement between entertaining a thought and riding an elephant, but there are no longer distinct ontologies. All is subsumed under that-which-appears. I find Buddhism fascinating. Most think it is a relaxing of the mind, but this really isn't the case at all. It is a dynamic engagement that turns the tables on ordinary experience. I try now and then to deal with the Abhidamma, which is, call it "existentially esoteric" as it gets. This passage strikes me:

(The adept) realises that everything
worldly, himself not excluded, is conditioned by causes
past or present, and that this existence is due to past ignorance
(avijjà), craving (taõhà), attachment (upàdàna),
Kamma, and physical food (àhàra) of the present life. On
account of these five causes this personality has arisen and
as the past activities have conditioned the present, so the
present will condition the future. Meditating thus, he transcends
all doubts with regard to the past, present, and
future (Kankhàvitaraõavisuddhi). Thereupon he contemplates
that all conditioned things are transient (Anicca),
subject to suffering (Dukkha), and devoid of an immortal
soul (Anattà). Wherever he turns his eyes, he sees nought
but these three characteristics standing out in bold relief.
He realises that life is a mere flowing, a continuous undivided
movement. Neither in a celestial plane nor on earth
does he find any genuine happiness, for every form of
pleasure is only a prelude to pain. What is transient is
therefore subject to suffering and where change and sorrow
prevail there cannot be a permanent ego.
As he is thus absorbed in meditation, a day comes
when, to his surprise, he witnesses an aura emanating from
his body (Obhàsa). He experiences an unprecedented pleasure,
happiness, and quietude. He becomes even-minded
and strenuous. His religious fervour increases, and mindfulness
becomes perfect, and Insight extraordinarily keen


Transcending doubt is Cartesian, Husserl's "method" of reductive analysis. The analysis of "subjective" time is a major theme of Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, Ricoeur (working on Ricoeur)et al. Note especially where " he sees nought but these three characteristics standing out in bold relief" referring to transience, suffering and soul. This is a reduction. The terms are translations from pali, so one has to ignore the religious connotation you and I bring to this: the "soul" is in pali to be understood as the Hindu "atman" (from what I''ve read). Citti, calm or rest fit this. Consciousness is our term, another major theme of phenomenology.

Aura?? well, if we take this seriously, we can't think of it as a kind of visible glow. More like an experience of the sense of self, the atman, extending outward. Consider: the self is no longer a physical locality, which I take to be patently true. It never was this, for this is the stuff of science based metaphysics. But ask, what is physicality? or a force? or energy, or any of the standard terms, and you will terms that simply contextualize these. Derrida has a lot to say about this.

[Hereandnow]

Sy Borg wrote

I would describe ethics as a subset of analytic philosophy. Ethics was one of my gateways to becoming a philosophy forum haunt. The others were science plus a keen interest in my earlier years in, dare I say it, metaphysical claims. To that end, Gandhi and Hesse were my main inspirations.

I'm rather more cynical today. I have believed and been found wrong so many times, I see little point to committing to ideas - rather just see how they play out. I am interested in the actual reality, the noumena. The more one tries to capture what is real beyond the convenient and easily recognisable mental symbols that we use in reality's stead, the more weird reality seems. The story of the universe is so odd, one can't help thinking that some strange carry-on is going on behind the scenes that we don't know about.


I agree with you about Buddhism. I think its stories were intended as parables rather than reports, anyway. I suspect much of the same with the Bible too, but literalism continues to somewhat poison the well.

At it's heart, Buddhism looks to me like a study of subjectivity. Practitioners quiet the mind (or whatever esoteric thing they attempt) and they observe what happens. They record their findings and pass it on to others. That forms part of a body of knowledge about many meditator's experiences. That's science - experiment, report, accumulate findings, assess and look for patterns and stages, eg. emergence of siddhis and subsequent ego issues.

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions. This is a barrier towards unification and restoration of natural philosophy. I also agree with you that science will have to address metaphysics. How can it not when people need to know if AI can achieve sentience - a sense of internality - and, if so, how can anyone know? Technology, ethics and metaphysics collide.

The above was meant to be addressed to you.

[Hereandnow]

Pattern-chaser wrote
I wonder why you think that the purpose of philosophy is to alleviate suffering? I do not assert that it is not, I wonder what your justification is for thinking so?

Did I say that? I do have a few odd ideas about this: You know, one could argue that the whole enterprise we are in is reducible to maximizing utility, which make producing the greatest balance of good over suffering. Not meant to be a way to quantify ethics, as with Bentham, but just a descriptive fact about what it is we actually do, for one cannot imagine choosing to do something apart from its value possibility, for without this, there would be no motivation at all, and an act without motivation would be nothing more than the motion of an inertial object.

I guess the point is that the affective dimension of our existence really defines our existence. It is the seat of meaning, the importance of importance itself. What does it mean for something to be important? Not in the contingent sense, to be important FOR something, but for something to be important at all? If our existence is about anything at all in a true foundational way, it lies in this question alone, for all else is contingent on just this.

Then to suffering: Suffering is a modality of value and this is where meaning lies. Philosophy is not so much the pursuit of truth and true propositions at the basic level; rather it is the pursuit of meaning, such that the truth to which philosophy aspires to is truth about this; not definitional meaning, but existential meaning, meaning not measured in quantitative terms (as with science), but qualitative terms, like how delicious something is or how exciting or beautiful. Truth is a pale reflection of meaning, it is the proposition (truth is a feature of propositions) that declares something to be the case, but what is the case? It is not just another proposition, as Derrida sort of said (truth, the "trace" of aggregate terms in play. See his Structure Sign and Play). Meaning is the case, or importance, if you like.

What can I say, there is at the end of this odd string of thought the idea that philosophy is really looking for more meaningful experience, not propositional soundness (true and about the world). Suffering's mitigation is a necessary part of this.

Best I can do.

[Sy Borg]

I would describe ethics as a subset of analytic philosophy. Ethics was one of my gateways to becoming a philosophy forum haunt. The others were science plus a keen interest in my earlier years in, dare I say it, metaphysical claims. To that end, Gandhi and Hesse were my main inspirations.

I'm rather more cynical today. I have believed and been found wrong so many times, I see little point to committing to ideas - rather just see how they play out. I am interested in the actual reality, the noumena. The more one tries to capture what is real beyond the convenient and easily recognisable mental symbols that we use in reality's stead, the more weird reality seems. The story of the universe is so odd, one can't help thinking that some strange carry-on is going on behind the scenes that we don't know about.

What can I say, given what you say here, you were made for phenomenology. Like I have said elsewhere, my little paragraphs are not going to convince you that Kant through Derrida (and beyond) is really the only intellectually responsible way to philosophize about the world. We are not talking about the way ideas relate and define each other, but about this very "weird" intrusion into our normal affairs. I've read Hesse, some things Gandhi wrote as I recall, and portions of the Bhagavad-Gita--I taught literature once for three years in India, and we did Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan. I had to read about Hinduism to do this and I have to say, one is brought to the edge of understanding trying to deal with Hindu metaphysics, for there is in all this a shining simplicity which is prior to all analysis. I take a strong stand against analytic philosophy because there is a strain of denial that runs through its thinking that looks upon such a claim of "simplicity" that is utterly contemptuous and condescending. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for they way they handle ideas. Just reading Quine or Strawson and the like is an exercise in rigorous analysis.

But one has to choose: continental of analytic. This "behind the scenes" you speak of is the very thematic center of phenomenology, notwithstanding its complexity.

How do you mean "a shining simplicity which is prior to all analysis"?

Your issues with analytic philosophy trike me as more related to the conduct of some practitioners than the concepts themselves. A new school in any endeavour tends to have an element that looks down its nose at those engaged in older methods. However, each progression results in another baby going out with the bathwater. There is always something lost.

At the heart of religion is death and its aftermath. And at the heart of that, we re left with just one question that may concern physics, metaphysics or both, that is - are there other dimensions of reality (behind the scenes) in which mentality of some kind may continue being after death? Related to that is the question whether consciousness is local or ubiquitous, eg. Hagelin's universal field and the existence of a non-physical souls.

You will, I expect, notice that the problem with the above (regardless of the physical reality) is attachment to this apparently temporal self. It hardly makes sense since we change throughout our lives without worrying too much about preserving our "former self". The idea of an immutable self is at odds with observed reality. Even if we ignore conditioning and consider the kernel of "youness" that would even be present if you were raised in the wild by wolves, that kernel would be basic, not much more sophisticated than the kernel of a garden snail. At core of each of us is just life blindly wanting to live - the "desire" that Hinduism identifies as a source of suffering.

I agree with you about Buddhism. I think its stories were intended as parables rather than reports, anyway. I suspect much of the same with the Bible too, but literalism continues to somewhat poison the well.

At it's heart, Buddhism looks to me like a study of subjectivity. Practitioners quiet the mind (or whatever esoteric thing they attempt) and they observe what happens. They record their findings and pass it on to others. That forms part of a body of knowledge about many meditator's experiences. That's science - experiment, report, accumulate findings, assess and look for patterns and stages, eg. emergence of siddhis and subsequent ego issues.

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions. This is a barrier towards unification and restoration of natural philosophy. I also agree with you that science will have to address metaphysics. How can it not when people need to know if AI can achieve sentience - a sense of internality - and, if so, how can anyone know? Technology, ethics and metaphysics collide.

Subjectivity is term that doesn't last long in phenomenology, that is, the subject/object distinction comes to have ONLY descriptive in play. It is simply a different kind of engagement between entertaining a thought and riding an elephant, but there are no longer distinct ontologies. All is subsumed under that-which-appears. I find Buddhism fascinating. Most think it is a relaxing of the mind, but this really isn't the case at all. It is a dynamic engagement that turns the tables on ordinary experience. I try now and then to deal with the Abhidamma, which is, call it "existentially esoteric" as it gets. This passage strikes me:

(The adept) realises that everything
worldly, himself not excluded, is conditioned by causes
past or present, and that this existence is due to past ignorance
(avijjà), craving (taõhà), attachment (upàdàna),
Kamma, and physical food (àhàra) of the present life. On
account of these five causes this personality has arisen and
as the past activities have conditioned the present, so the
present will condition the future. Meditating thus, he transcends
all doubts with regard to the past, present, and
future (Kankhàvitaraõavisuddhi). Thereupon he contemplates
that all conditioned things are transient (Anicca),
subject to suffering (Dukkha), and devoid of an immortal
soul (Anattà). Wherever he turns his eyes, he sees nought
but these three characteristics standing out in bold relief.
He realises that life is a mere flowing, a continuous undivided
movement. Neither in a celestial plane nor on earth
does he find any genuine happiness, for every form of
pleasure is only a prelude to pain. What is transient is
therefore subject to suffering and where change and sorrow
prevail there cannot be a permanent ego.
As he is thus absorbed in meditation, a day comes
when, to his surprise, he witnesses an aura emanating from
his body (Obhàsa). He experiences an unprecedented pleasure,
happiness, and quietude. He becomes even-minded
and strenuous. His religious fervour increases, and mindfulness
becomes perfect, and Insight extraordinarily keen


Transcending doubt is Cartesian, Husserl's "method" of reductive analysis. The analysis of "subjective" time is a major theme of Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, Ricoeur (working on Ricoeur)et al. Note especially where " he sees nought but these three characteristics standing out in bold relief" referring to transience, suffering and soul. This is a reduction. The terms are translations from pali, so one has to ignore the religious connotation you and I bring to this: the "soul" is in pali to be understood as the Hindu "atman" (from what I''ve read). Citti, calm or rest fit this. Consciousness is our term, another major theme of phenomenology.

Aura?? well, if we take this seriously, we can't think of it as a kind of visible glow. More like an experience of the sense of self, the atman, extending outward. Consider: the self is no longer a physical locality, which I take to be patently true. It never was this, for this is the stuff of science based metaphysics. But ask, what is physicality? or a force? or energy, or any of the standard terms, and you will terms that simply contextualize these. Derrida has a lot to say about this.

This final, tranquil stage looks like acceptance to me. One becomes less ignorant and desirous. Without an internalised sense of acceptance, that "unprecedented pleasure, happiness, and quietude" would later be replaced by suffering. It would be just one more pleasure that is a "prelude to pain". I suspect that a number of elderly, dying people reach a similar state of tranquillity, though it makes sense not to wait until one is dying to gain perspective.

I appreciate that, in terms of ontology, the subjective and objective logically make a seamless whole - reality. However, as with quanta and relativistic entities, there appears to be a divide, an inherent dualism, between the subjective and the objective. If there wasn't, we would know what it was like to be a bat, so to speak.

[Pattern-chaser]

Religion has damaged the reputation of metaphysics in the eyes of scientific institutions.

Really? That's weird. Scientific institutions generally do not acknowledge the subject(s) of metaphysics as being worthy of study.

Because it is associated with religion.

There's a bit more to it than just religion.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality. This includes the first principles of: being or existence, identity, change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity, actuality, and possibility.

Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.

Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions of: What is it that exists; and What it is like.

I think the objection of scientists and analytic philosophers to metaphysics is that it is often the case that metaphysical questions cannot be conclusively resolved, often because of a lack of 'scientific' evidence. Metaphysical questions are just so much more demanding than scientific issues. Uncertainty makes them difficult to deal with, compared to the simpler problems that science addresses.

I don't think it's about religion. Not just religion, anyway.

[Lagayascienza]

Hereandnow, thank you for all your responses to my questions so far. Apologies for having yet more question but I really want to understand phenomenology and how it is different from the analytic tradition which is all I know.

From what you have said, and from what I have been able to glean elsewhere, phenomenology asserts that science does not rest on a sound metaphysical foundation, and that phenomenology provides the correct foundation and can therefore provide a better way of apprehending reality.

If you are right that science does not rest on a sound metaphysical foundation, then I need to ask why science works so well? Or why it works at all? I’m wondering what science would be like if all scientists became phenomenologists and so gained, through phenomenological method, a correct understanding of metaphysics. If that were to happen, how would science be different?

Phenomenologists say things like: We are not searching for an answer to the question: How do we know there is cup on the table? We seek an answer to the question: How does it come about that consciousness can make contact with the cup on the able? How does what’s that out there (the cup) get in here (pointing to head)?

I’m wondering why someone could not reasonably inquire whether those three questions are, in fact, the same question? And also, what would the phenomenologist say if told that, even though science is based, as phenomenologists would have it, on a poor metaphysical foundation, we actually do already know quite a lot about how consciousness makes contact with the cup?

If the phenomenologist thinks that a phenomenological reduction will give a better, more reliable, more useful understanding of the cup in-itself, then could the phenomenologist not do the reduction and tell the rest of us what their better account of cup-ness is. If there is something that the rest of us, through our sensorium and technological extensions thereof, are missing about cup-ness, something that the phenomenologist has access to that we don’t, then that would be extremely interesting. If the phenomenologist cannot relate this special knowledge to others, then what will the phenomenologist do with this superior understanding of cup-ness?

If the phenomenologist says that it is not possible to relate this special knowledge to others and that each person must do their own phenomenological reduction to get their own answer, then won’t each meditator, even if the meditation (the reduction) is done perfectly as per Husserl’s instructions, have a different subjective experience of the cup, of its cup-ness? Our brains are, after all, all different. If we had all successfully done the reduction, what do we all then do with our different individual, better metaphysically grounded understandings of cup-ness? What useful knowledge will have been gained?

If everyone in the world did the phenomenological reduction, will the world finally understand cup-ness better than before? And how would this phenomenological approach lead to a better understanding of existence overall if we each applied the correct reduction to all phenomena? Religion for example. What would we all learn about the phenomenon of religion that we don't already know of cannot otherwise know?

Sorry again for the large number of questions. You have sparked my curiosity and I need to ask these questions if I am to understand phenomenology. I’ve been searching online for explanations and critiques of phenomenology so I can figure out what is bothering me about it, but there is very little out there. All I an find are papers on different interpretations of Husserl, Heidegger, et al but nothing foundational for the uninitiated. So, these questions are my own, the ones that are bothering me in my philosophical isolation, about phenomenology insofar as I have been able to understand it.

Thanks

[Hereandnow]

Sy Borg wrote

How do you mean "a shining simplicity which is prior to all analysis"?

Your issues with analytic philosophy trike me as more related to the conduct of some practitioners than the concepts themselves. A new school in any endeavour tends to have an element that looks down its nose at those engaged in older methods. However, each progression results in another baby going out with the bathwater. There is always something lost.

At the heart of religion is death and its aftermath. And at the heart of that, we re left with just one question that may concern physics, metaphysics or both, that is - are there other dimensions of reality (behind the scenes) in which mentality of some kind may continue being after death? Related to that is the question whether consciousness is local or ubiquitous, eg. Hagelin's universal field and the existence of a non-physical souls.

You will, I expect, notice that the problem with the above (regardless of the physical reality) is attachment to this apparently temporal self. It hardly makes sense since we change throughout our lives without worrying too much about preserving our "former self". The idea of an immutable self is at odds with observed reality. Even if we ignore conditioning and consider the kernel of "youness" that would even be present if you were raised in the wild by wolves, that kernel would be basic, not much more sophisticated than the kernel of a garden snail. At core of each of us is just life blindly wanting to live - the "desire" that Hinduism identifies as a source of suffering.

Shining simplicity? The atman is Brahman? Or, as they say, one already is the Buddha? What happens when one seriously meditates, in the manner described in the Abidhamma? In the Eastern tradition, the Hindu's have more than one yoga. There is jnana yoga, and I think Husserl's reduction is the West's jnana yoga, the yoga of philosophy that leads back to a primordial simplicity, the kind thing romantics like Wordsworth (Intimations of Immortality) or mystics like Walt Whitman poeticized (Heidegger adored Hölderlin) about. I am claiming, arguing, that it is important to remember that our education has almost nothing to say about this kind of thing. Typical: I know what the sun is, and it is not a god, but ths is a negative claim, for which I am grateful to telescopes for. But when I start talking about fusion and the release of atomic energy, is this really "knowledge" of the sun? Or is this rather just a massive quantification project? There is a reason physics quickly turns into math and other quantitative disciplines. But does this mean the sun (and "the world" which is dealt with in the same way) is a mathematical structure, or that mathematics is an imposition in the apperceptive engagement of dealing with what we call the sun? One always will, and there is no turning back on this, find Kant staring back at you when things turn to basic questions, for to observe is an event, and we are not mirrors of nature. The brain is not a mirror; it MAKES the world, but thsi doesn't at all mean we must therefore face idealism or solipsism, for nothing coud be more clear than the sun is "over there" and it is certainly not me but independent of me in a way that needs to be defined and understood. Hence, phenomenology.

But back to the point: The East, call it, says we live in illusion, so what can be mde of this? How about a lifetime of conditioning we receive as memory in any occurrent affair, whether it is buttoning my shirt or thinking about philosophy (writing these words). Memory tells me this is this and that is that and the self it captive to this. Meditation terminates memory. And the world is free of it. If the atman really is Brahman, then then question you asks is thereby answered.

Proof is in the pudding.

Your issues with analytic philosophy trike me as more related to the conduct of some practitioners than the concepts themselves. A new school in any endeavour tends to have an element that looks down its nose at those engaged in older methods. However, each progression results in another baby going out with the bathwater. There is always something lost.

There is something to this, I know, and you could argue that clarity really does have to be a priority in any thinking and analytic philosophers nothing if not devoted to clarity. But my objection lies in that most of what they have to say is trivial vis a vis the breadth and depth of being a human being, and this is because they ignore metaphysics, and therefore ignore the very REAL threshold of finitude's existence. Only those who straddle the fence, like Rorty, are helpful. I can't remember the name of the paper by Strawson, but it dealt with realism, and he argued very convincingly to the conclusion that, well, it sure does seem like accepting the proposition that there are, in a qualified way, real entities that science talks about. And he was right about that, and nobody argues otherwise, and phenomenologists would tend to agree. But pages and pages of thick prose...for that?? Again, I say, removing metaphysics from philosophy is like ...like removing color from sight, and all that is left is black and white clarity.

At the heart of religion is death and its aftermath. And at the heart of that, we re left with just one question that may concern physics, metaphysics or both, that is - are there other dimensions of reality (behind the scenes) in which mentality of some kind may continue being after death? Related to that is the question whether consciousness is local or ubiquitous, eg. Hagelin's universal field and the existence of a non-physical souls.

But then, what IS death? What IS the soul? What IS physicality? These terms need to be explored before being used to account for anything, otherwise, the question is begged. Non-physical? Is this a reference to Hegelian rationality that is "real"? Is it that we are in a historical framework that is dialectically conditioned for only certain possibilities (Slavoj Žižek, the renowned Hegelian, talks like this) and we cannot even imagine what reason will disclose about "the nature reason itself" in some future framework of thought? I respond with Kierkegaard, who said of Hegel that he simply forgot that we exist. K was saying that this teleology of historical rationality is itself conceived by reason now, and that if some future historical setting conceived better than ours, this woudl be because it yielded to the non-rational dimension of world. Reason is an empty vessel. The world fills this vessel, speaking loosely, disclosure of the world will not be a rational disclosure, or better: disclosure will be rational, for as they say, if there is anything superior to reason, reason will discover it, but progress will be irrational, for disclosure will have to be about the world and its existence, and existence is a rather useless term, like "matter" or 'reality" are useless, empty, nothing at all, really. What in the world makes the whole affair important? Value. The value dimension of the world, which is IN existence.

Kierkegaard thought Hegel simply forgot that value-in-existence is the true telos of philosophy. Science has never been able to talk about value because it is a metaphysical concept. Hence, Kierkegaard's leap to an affirmation of faith, existential faith that is.

You will, I expect, notice that the problem with the above (regardless of the physical reality) is attachment to this apparently temporal self. It hardly makes sense since we change throughout our lives without worrying too much about preserving our "former self". The idea of an immutable self is at odds with observed reality. Even if we ignore conditioning and consider the kernel of "youness" that would even be present if you were raised in the wild by wolves, that kernel would be basic, not much more sophisticated than the kernel of a garden snail. At core of each of us is just life blindly wanting to live - the "desire" that Hinduism identifies as a source of suffering.

Thinking about this, what, "feral self" raised by wolves is not the way this thinking proceeds. Nor is it Rouseauian as it believes we humans are good by nature. It begins with the Kantian idea of taking what lies before one there, in the current world, immediately in one's midst, to be treated like an object of scientific inquiry, a phenomenon. To get to this pov, one has to do a reduction, for when we encounter the world we face in the instant of the receiving of it, an already in place perceptual interpretative apparatus, and general science rushes in, like defining the sun in terms of fusion and energic quantifications. But this is not what sits there in the bare perceptual givenness of it. The givenness is there PRIOR to it being taken up AS this of that.
No one speaks of the "immortal soul" except perhaps Kierkegaard or Max Scheler, because eternity, that is time, now is a feature of phenomenological existence of the self; it is not in the self or a "when" the self is in. Time IS the self, a dimension of our very existence. This takes one to ask about subjective time. so called by Husserl. See his Phenomenology if the Consciousness of Internal Time. And of course, Heidegger's Being and TIme.
Long story short, immortality only makes sense if we understand time, and time needs to be removed from, what, things like the equational objectivity of Einstein, or the everyday sense of time, being late for buses and the like, as well as the religious concepts. A person. is. time. Fascinating study, Heidegger's Being and TIme.