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[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

Yes, we can leave theism and atheism out of the picture. But then I worry about this "unassailable foundation". Religion obviously means a lot to a lot of people. But are they not mistaken about its ultimate, underlying reality, it's ultimate truth value? Did Mahommed really ascend to heaven on a winged horse? Did Jesus really come back to bodily life after his Crucifixion? Did God really conjure up the universe in six Days and take a break on the seventh? If we take the quote from Marx about religion being the opium of the people, which I think contains a lot of truth, then can we not ask whether the people need or should want this opium? Is there not something better for them than this sort of opium? Or does all this not matter? And let's say people all came to see religion from a phenomenological POV. How would that change things for them? Yes, we can accept the inerrancy of what is given in consciousness, but then what?

I think for this one has to understand that when a person is plugged into a world her thoughts are going to issue from that world and not stand somehow outside of it. So understanding all this talk about God, Jesus, Mohammed and al the bad metaphysics, it is important to see that these issued forth out of an historical frame of evolving ideas (Hegel, Heidegger). True of everything, even science. Have you read Thomas Khun's Structures of Scientific Revolutions? I can send it along if you don't have it (remember, I paid nothing for these pdf's myself), but Kuhn was a Kantian, of sorts (I also have his Copernican Revolution) and argued that science really has no grasp of the world beyond its own paradigmatic evolving thinking and any claims about what Really Is are mistaken.

Anyway, the point I would make here is this: when you see all those arm waving Chirstians and genuflecting Muslims and hear about their extraordinary claims, you are witnessing an interpretation of things that have to do with what I am (derivatively) calling our foundational indeterminacy. How doe one sort this out? Are they just a bunch of foolish people who have been raised to think badly? Yes. I think that is the way it is. But note: this is not at all to say there is nothing substantive going on there. It is merely to say the way they think about it is not grounded in simple, straight forward observation and description, I mean to refer to responsible thinking that wants to understand the world for what is there only, locked into the rules of justification. What I am saying about religion is that if you take this attitude and apply it to the4 phenomenon of religion, you penetrate the historical bad thinking and discover its essence. By essence I mean what is there such that were one to suspend this, take it away from what it is, then what it is would vanish as well, like, errr, like taking the concept of sweetness out of the idea of what dessert is. If something is not sweet at all, cannot it qualify as dessert? No, it could be argued reasonably, for then it would be something else. Jesus is not a part of the essence of religion, nor is the entire bulk of scriptures, prayers, hymns, and theologies. Not that IN these there is no responsible thinking at all; there is, but it is always so interpretatively embedded that the essence gets lost or distorted and one finds oneself in a dogmatic justification, which is no justification at all.

The strength of my thesis (and I always have bow low to people I read. One IS what one READS, as one moves to incorporate this into one's private enterprise to figure out what is going on) rests with this idea that there is indeed an essence that can be isolated from the nonsense and understood with some clarity. This inquiry looks to problems in epistemology, in order to see the impossibility of knowledge given the scientific models when taken as a metaphysical materialist realism. Why is this bad metaphysics? The term "material" (or physical, if you like; matters not) is contextually meaningful in many ways as we all know; but apart from these, it has no meaning at all. This is Derrida and Heidegger's hermeneutics. So talk about material things out there independent of perceivers is just fine in the modality of a physicist, or a botanist or me, grocery shopping. This IS the default setting of ordinary, preanalytical living. But to think of material bodies apart from these contexts in nonsense. This is Wittgenstein. We receive the world IN the confines of what we are, our radical finitude. Finitude is not simply the opposite of infinity. Finitude is IN the observation of the river stone on my desk: I see it, know it, experience it. But what it IS lies in the potentiality of possiblities that can be brought forth, and these lie with language and its interpretative openness to givenness. This "openness" is where finitude meets infinity. It is there, in the analysis of the stone. It takes a bit to see how our observing something is inherently interpretative because interpretation occurs so spontaneously, as with the arm waving and participations in the ritual institutions of a long affiliation with a practiced religion. Analysis, that is, The Question! that sets us free. Heidegger calls the question the piety of thought. An extraordinary statement: Thought is existential! In exists, that is, and it is IN our relations in all we do and believe. And thought is inherently OPEN. Human dasein stands in an openness to everything that it witnesses, and when one pulls away from particular engagements and into the broader philosophical perspective, this openness IS part of the essence of religion. This openness is the indeterminacy of everything, ourselves and our world.

And it gets, heh, heh, infinite. Infinity is IN the encounter of the stone. One has to see this, not merely acknowledge the logic of the proposition.

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks Hereandnow

I have Khun but will need to reread. I put him down long ago in favor of Popper who is not going to help me with phenomenology, LOL.

Lagayscienza wrote

Yes, we can leave theism and atheism out of the picture. But then I worry about this "unassailable foundation". Religion obviously means a lot to a lot of people. But are they not mistaken about its ultimate, underlying reality, it's ultimate truth value? Did Mahommed really ascend to heaven on a winged horse? Did Jesus really come back to bodily life after his Crucifixion? Did God really conjure up the universe in six Days and take a break on the seventh? If we take the quote from Marx about religion being the opium of the people, which I think contains a lot of truth, then can we not ask whether the people need or should want this opium? Is there not something better for them than this sort of opium? Or does all this not matter? And let's say people all came to see religion from a phenomenological POV. How would that change things for them? Yes, we can accept the inerrancy of what is given in consciousness, but then what?

I think for this one has to understand that when a person is plugged into a world her thoughts are going to issue from that world and not stand somehow outside of it. So understanding all this talk about God, Jesus, Mohammed and al the bad metaphysics, it is important to see that these issued forth out of an historical frame of evolving ideas (Hegel, Heidegger). True of everything, even science. Have you read Thomas Khun's Structures of Scientific Revolutions? I can send it along if you don't have it (remember, I paid nothing for these pdf's myself), but Kuhn was a Kantian, of sorts (I also have his Copernican Revolution) and argued that science really has no grasp of the world beyond its own paradigmatic evolving thinking and any claims about what Really Is are mistaken.

Anyway, the point I would make here is this: when you see all those arm waving Chirstians and genuflecting Muslims and hear about their extraordinary claims, you are witnessing an interpretation of things that have to do with what I am (derivatively) calling our foundational indeterminacy. How doe one sort this out? Are they just a bunch of foolish people who have been raised to think badly? Yes. I think that is the way it is. But note: this is not at all to say there is nothing substantive going on there. It is merely to say the way they think about it is not grounded in simple, straight forward observation and description, I mean to refer to responsible thinking that wants to understand the world for what is there only, locked into the rules of justification. What I am saying about religion is that if you take this attitude and apply it to the4 phenomenon of religion, you penetrate the historical bad thinking and discover its essence. By essence I mean what is there such that were one to suspend this, take it away from what it is, then what it is would vanish as well, like, errr, like taking the concept of sweetness out of the idea of what dessert is. If something is not sweet at all, cannot it qualify as dessert? No, it could be argued reasonably, for then it would be something else. Jesus is not a part of the essence of religion, nor is the entire bulk of scriptures, prayers, hymns, and theologies. Not that IN these there is no responsible thinking at all; there is, but it is always so interpretatively embedded that the essence gets lost or distorted and one finds oneself in a dogmatic justification, which is no justification at all.

So, when we strip away all that is inessential what, for the phenomenologist, is the essence of religion? Is there anything left? What is it?

The strength of my thesis (and I always have bow low to people I read. One IS what one READS, as one moves to incorporate this into one's private enterprise to figure out what is going on) rests with this idea that there is indeed an essence that can be isolated from the nonsense and understood with some clarity. This inquiry looks to problems in epistemology, in order to see the impossibility of knowledge given the scientific models when taken as a metaphysical materialist realism. Why is this bad metaphysics? The term "material" (or physical, if you like; matters not) is contextually meaningful in many ways as we all know; but apart from these, it has no meaning at all. This is Derrida and Heidegger's hermeneutics. So talk about material things out there independent of perceivers is just fine in the modality of a physicist, or a botanist or me, grocery shopping. This IS the default setting of ordinary, preanalytical living. But to think of material bodies apart from these contexts in nonsense. This is Wittgenstein. We receive the world IN the confines of what we are, our radical finitude. Finitude is not simply the opposite of infinity. Finitude is IN the observation of the river stone on my desk: I see it, know it, experience it. But what it IS lies in the potentiality of possiblities that can be brought forth, and these lie with language and its interpretative openness to givenness. This "openness" is where finitude meets infinity. It is there, in the analysis of the stone. It takes a bit to see how our observing something is inherently interpretative because interpretation occurs so spontaneously, as with the arm waving and participations in the ritual institutions of a long affiliation with a practiced religion. Analysis, that is, The Question! that sets us free. Heidegger calls the question the piety of thought. An extraordinary statement: Thought is existential! In exists, that is, and it is IN our relations in all we do and believe. And thought is inherently OPEN. Human dasein stands in an openness to everything that it witnesses, and when one pulls away from particular engagements and into the broader philosophical perspective, this openness IS part of the essence of religion. This openness is the indeterminacy of everything, ourselves and our world.

I'm having trouble understanding the sentence in red and what follows it. You say the openness [to givenness] is the essence of religion. Can you explain this in everyday language? If I look at religion as a phenomenologist, if I strip away all that is inessential, what do I see? Openness? The indeterminacy of everything? But does that mean? Am I to take it that religion = indeterminacy? If so, how can religion mean anything at all?

And it gets, heh, heh, infinite. Infinity is IN the encounter of the stone. One has to see this, not merely acknowledge the logic of the proposition.

I think I need to understand the proposition before I can acknowledge it's logic, much less see what you allude to here. That is probably an indication of my own deficiencies rather than just a result of the stylistic turgidity of phenomenological discourse. But I really am doing my best to get to grips with phenomenology.

Thanks again for all your help.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

And how would science go about "setting its mind to "discovering" through "empirical" observation the intentional cord of epistemic possibility"? If we are talking about epistemology we are talking about how we find stuff out. But isn't that what science does already in its own way? How might science get in touch with this "existence that reaches beyond itself"? Do you think that to achieve this scientists would first need to become phenomenologists?

I don't really know. I did say that this was pushing the envelop a bit. But when I let inhibitions go a bit, I have to say that when I observe this river stone, I really am "in touch" with the transcendent object. How else could I know it to be there such as it is? The epistemic impossibility I keep repeating, does not mean we do not have knowledge because we never really encounter the stone. We do encounter it, and this is what has to be explained. Who knows, perhaps "everything is connected" and one day an instrument will be able to detect this connection. There is the theory I believe Leibniz followed by Kant considered, which is a preestablished harmony, and that causality was not a principle but the inevitability of things predestined to do what they do--see his theory of monadology that say internal events are mirrored to external ones. Or, perhaps we really are immaterial souls that are not bound by physical delimitations, and thus "connect" in ways unseen empirically.

One has to admit we have this epistemic connectivity and solipsism is patently absurd. Causality has nothing of this in its nature. This is the problem and you can "do the math" as well as I can. Consider alternatives to causality. There is a new paradigm, I am confident, waiting for discovery.

Speculative, and a step down from responsible thought, granted. But the world of the reduction firmly in place really is very a different world with the standard caveats conceived by exacting science's quantitative obsessions altogether suspended. The world becomes more primordial and free. Not free to think foolishly, but to realize that a foolish scientific rigidity is no better than religious dogma.

[Lagayascienza]

Lagayscienza wrote

And how would science go about "setting its mind to "discovering" through "empirical" observation the intentional cord of epistemic possibility"? If we are talking about epistemology we are talking about how we find stuff out. But isn't that what science does already in its own way? How might science get in touch with this "existence that reaches beyond itself"? Do you think that to achieve this scientists would first need to become phenomenologists?

I don't really know. I did say that this was pushing the envelop a bit. But when I let inhibitions go a bit, I have to say that when I observe this river stone, I really am "in touch" with the transcendent object. How else could I know it to be there such as it is? The epistemic impossibility I keep repeating, does not mean we do not have knowledge because we never really encounter the stone. We do encounter it, and this is what has to be explained. Who knows, perhaps "everything is connected" and one day an instrument will be able to detect this connection. There is the theory I believe Leibniz followed by Kant considered, which is a preestablished harmony, and that causality was not a principle but the inevitability of things predestined to do what they do--see his theory of monadology that say internal events are mirrored to external ones. Or, perhaps we really are immaterial souls that are not bound by physical delimitations, and thus "connect" in ways unseen empirically.

I admire your honesty here. If we did "know" then maybe we wouldn't need science or philosophy.

One has to admit we have this epistemic connectivity and solipsism is patently absurd. Causality has nothing of this in its nature. This is the problem and you can "do the math" as well as I can. Consider alternatives to causality. There is a new paradigm, I am confident, waiting for discovery.

Speculative, and a step down from responsible thought, granted. But the world of the reduction firmly in place really is very a different world with the standard caveats conceived by exacting science's quantitative obsessions altogether suspended. The world becomes more primordial and free. Not free to think foolishly, but to realize that a foolish scientific rigidity is no better than religious dogma.

Yes, as much as I admire science, it certainly does not have all the answers. There are things it may never be able to tell us. If that is the case, then I wonder whether philosophy will not be in the same position. I am unable to think of any alternative to causality. Not for science, anyway. For phenomenology, I think thee biggest risk, and what a lot of its critics like to mention, is a slide into solipsism. But I think Husserl deals with this in Chapter 5 of the Meditations and papers I've seen recently lead me to think the risk may not be too great.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

So, when we strip away all that is inessential what, for the phenomenologist, is the essence of religion? Is there anything left? What is it?

A bit like asking the Zen Buddhist what enlightenment is. The fan would come flying across the room toward your head, and that fan would actually make the point: Ouch! What about Belgian chocolate? Yummm! Ask, What .IS. This?? Caring nothing at all for the gastronomical, biological, neurological , and so on, answers, for no one is asked about this. The question is directed exclusively to this occurrent content. All of those alternative accounts I refer to ALL beg the question until just this phenomenological foundation of givenness is reached. Then questions cease for one has arrived at the primordiality of consciousness itself.

I suspect I shall go a bit beyond what is tolerable here.

Getting to this is transformative, or can be. Depends on the individual. Prior to the fan flying across the room at you is the question, what were you doing in that room in the first place? Is must have been that curiosity exceeded, as Heidegger put it, the potentiality of possibilities of one's finitude. The reason phenomenology failed to survive in anglo american philosophy is that the reduction leads one to yoga, not intellectual entertainment and certainly not to respect in the rigors of the "age of reason" and its postmodern devotion to technology.

What is left is the unnamable presence of consciousness-in-the-world and the astounded inquirer that confronts it. Try, one day, reading Emanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity. This astonishment is the reaching out to discovery, redemption and consummation. Discovery is based on seeing that happiness/love (same thing, really) have a far greater extent and intensity that can be realized in the ordinary affairs. There is, generally ignored, a yearning toward affirmation of the pathos that drives our existence that has no determinacy, that is, is open. The more one understands the potential of the reduction, the more one sees this. Redemption is negative. How is it possible that a single insignificant girl's tragedy could bear so much meaning? This question haunts me, frankly, and one has to kind of stare at it. Meaning is not measured in terms of, say, Mills utility and countable by Bentham's hedonic calculator. Meaning like this, the long frigid nights of hunger and thirst, is stand-alone, and this means suffering is an absolute: there is no conceivable way to modify the meaning of this suffering, or undo it, for suffering is not contingent, it cannot be recontextualized to change its meaning: In every conceivable context, suffering remains what it is. The reduction take's one to an encounter with the radical or metaphysical indeterminacy of our own self but what reigns here is the indeterminacy of our suffering, and there is no way to leverage her suffering against the suffering of a multitude of others' suffering and thereby diminish its meaning. Again, one cannot even imagine suffering to be anything but what it is. It is in this like logic, apriori, apodictic, necessary. But note ( I think I might have mentioned this) this is existential, not merely logical. An absolute that is existential. See? Kant's synthetic apriority is still just plain logic. Who cares for logic qua logic has no caring in tis nature, so what does it matter that it is somehow IN existence as Kant says? But suffering-- this value experience, this suffering is inherently important. This is the point. Religion searches for just this in its God. God is the embodiment of this ethical apriority.

So hard to see this. Philosophy, Simon Critchley writes, begins with "religious disappointment (that) provokes the problem of meaning, namely, what is the meaning of life in the absence of religious belief?" But disappointment is on our side, we are thinking and inquiring into this impossible existence into which we are thrown and think so little of this girl and indeed, the whole dramatic affair of being human. Consider this by Baudelaire extraordinary allegory:

Under a vast grey sky, on a vast and dusty plain without paths, without grass, without
a nettle or a thistle, I met several men bent double as they walked.
Each one of them carried on his back an enormous Chimera as heavy as a sack of
flour or coal or the paraphernalia of a Roman infantryman.
But the monstrous beast was no inanimate weight; on the contrary, it enveloped
and oppressed the man with its elastic and powerful muscles; it clutched at the
breast of its mount with two vast claws; and its fabulous head overhung the man’s
forehead like one of those horrible helmets with which ancient warriors hoped to
add to the terror of their enemy.
I questioned one of these men and asked him where they were going like that. He
replied that he did not know and that none of them knew, but that they were evidently
going somewhere since they were driven by an invincible need to go on.
A curious thing to note: none of these travelers seemed irritated by the ferocious
beast hanging around his neck and glued to his back; one might have said that they
considered it part of themselves. All these tired and serious faces showed not the
least sign of despair; under the spleenful dome of the sky, their feet deep in the dust
of the earth as desolate as the sky, they continued along with the resigned physiognomy
of those who are condemned to hope forever [SC’s emphasis].
And the cortège passed by me and disappeared in the atmosphere of the horizon,
where the rounded surface of the planet is concealed from the curiosity of the
human gaze.
And for a few moments I persisted in trying to comprehend this mystery;
but soon irresistible Indifference descended upon me and I was more
heavily overwhelmed than they were by their crushing Chimeras.
(Baudelaire, ‘Chacun sa chimère’, Le spleen de Paris, Armand Colin,
Paris, 1958:10–11


THIS is what is missing from anglo american philosophy, which is now little more that a word game. Religion is essentially our response to this throwness (Heidegger's geworfenheit) into this outrageous world (see, of course, Schopenhauer. No one can match his pessimism). Religion strains to understand this, then collapses in, as Critchley puts it, disappointment and despair.

But it collapses because it never really understood itself. This is where I begin, understanding religion. As I wrote earlier, our ethics IS Ethics! And because ethics reaches for redemption and consummation of our affectivity, this is true for metaethics, which means it is a metaethical insistence, as if God were to declare it, only without the mythical being.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

Yes, as much as I admire science, it certainly does not have all the answers. There are things it may never be able to tell us. If that is the case, then I wonder whether philosophy will not be in the same position. I am unable to think of any alternative to causality. Not for science, anyway. For phenomenology, I think thee biggest risk, and what a lot of its critics like to mention, is a slide into solipsism. But I think Husserl deals with this in Chapter 5 of the Meditations and papers I've seen recently lead me to think the risk may not be too great.

I simply go back to basics: no one has ever experienced anything but phenomena. It is impossible to do so. I mean, this is just emphatically true. And the brain is not a mirror of nature. I mean, put two and two together, and you have an absolutely devastating blow to any kind of philosophical physicalism/materialism.

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks, Herenadnow
Baudelaire hits a bullseye with that one. And what Critchley says about philosophy beginning with religious disappointment also hits the mark. This burden we have, it's part of being human. Without it, without our suffering, we would not know ourselves.

I think what's important is to at least try to relive the everyday sort of suffering where we can. Whether it's relieving hunger and poverty, providing and medical care and promoting medical science ... But, when it comes to the existential sort of angst, well... most of humanity has enough to worry about, just finding food and shelter, for example. They have neither the time nor the energy to be worried about the is/ought gap , conceptual analysis or the phenomenological reduction. Science does not have all the answers, but it is what is needed to solve the sort of practical problems humanity faces. When we all have enough to eat and somewhere to live, that's when the existential angst will really bite and, with the decline of religion, philosophy will come into its own.

[Lagayascienza]

Lagayscienza wrote

Yes, as much as I admire science, it certainly does not have all the answers. There are things it may never be able to tell us. If that is the case, then I wonder whether philosophy will not be in the same position. I am unable to think of any alternative to causality. Not for science, anyway. For phenomenology, I think thee biggest risk, and what a lot of its critics like to mention, is a slide into solipsism. But I think Husserl deals with this in Chapter 5 of the Meditations and papers I've seen recently lead me to think the risk may not be too great.

I simply go back to basics: no one has ever experienced anything but phenomena. It is impossible to do so. I mean, this is just emphatically true. And the brain is not a mirror of nature. I mean, put two and two together, and you have an absolutely devastating blow to any kind of philosophical physicalism/materialism.

Yes, at the most basic level, all we have are phenomena. Understanding this, though, is a luxury.

[Lagayascienza]

Hereandnow, I hope you won’t mind but have another question about phenomenology. This time, a concrete one about phenomenology as it relates to science.

If, as a phenomenologist, I have done the epoché correctly, then phenomena given in pure consciousness are inerrant, I cannot doubt them, they are, in terms of Husserlian metaphysical idealism, foundational. Unlike the numerical data of the sciences. Correct? The data of the sciences are said by phenomenologists to rest on an unsound metaphysical foundation. But let’s say I am a scientist, a biologist of a phenomenological persuasion, who wants to study an agar plate on which bacterial colonies have been growing. I do the epoché: I banish from my conscious all the scientific knowledge I have learned about bacteria, indeed, all of the scientific knowledge of biological science that I have acquired over years of study, these are all removed from my consciousness. I don’t speculate about the species of bacteria, the nutrients in the agar etcetera. All that is bracketed.

The phenomenon that presents to pure consciousness is as follows: a shallow, round transparent vessel containing a transparent, slightly yellow coloured substance on whose surface are patches of various colour, size and shape. This is all that presents to consciousness once I strip away all else that is not essential. I cannot be mistaken about these. I will know what the phenomena that I observed in pure consciousness were like for me and I will, presumably, be able to relate to others, albeit imperfectly, what the phenomena observed were like for me in my state of pure consciousness. The phenomena studied phenomenologically were unassailably real and inerrant. However, others cannot know what my experience of the phenomena was really like for me. And I cannot imagine what practical use my phenomenological experiment will be, but this is just a thought experiment so that won’t matter. So far, so good, right?

Now suppose I am another sort of scientist, one who studies gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are invisible to humans. We just don’t have the biological equipment to experience them. All I have is my very large, highly complex, super-finely engineered apparatus and the numerical data that flow therefrom. What can I do with this data as a phenomenologist-scientist? How can I do the epoché? Looking at the apparatus will tell me nothing. I can look at a printout of the data, but this is not observing the gravitational waves themselves which are the subject of my study. So how is a phenomenologist-scientist to proceed? Given my limited human sensorium, the data supplied by my apparatus are the closest I, or anyone, can get to observing gravitational waves on earth. Are the data to be discarded because they are not the phenomenon of gravitational waves themselves that would be given purely and immediately in consciousness if we could experience them? Are the data to be discounted because they do not rest on an inerrant metaphysical foundation? Do the data not present to my consciousness, in some way, albeit indirectly, the real phenomenon of gravitational waves? It may be true that I have not experienced the phenomenon of gravitational waves themselves, but this is the best that science, or any of form of knowledge gathering, can do. Even if scientists do some inter-subjective comparing of their individual experiences of the data, there is no experience of gravitational waves qua gravitational waves experienced in pure consciousness.

So, my question is, in circumstances like this, if we want our knowledge of gravitational waves to rest on a solid metaphysical foundation, where can phenomenology take us?

[Sy Borg]

... religion being the opium of the people, which I think contains a lot of truth, then can we not ask whether the people need or should want this opium? Is there not something better for them than this sort of opium?

I laughed when I read this. Hey man, can you get me some of the good stuff? The old stuff is rubbish.

Now for the sensible response :)

This burden we have, it's part of being human. Without it, without our suffering, we would not know ourselves.

I think what's important is to at least try to relive the everyday sort of suffering where we can. Whether it's relieving hunger and poverty, providing and medical care and promoting medical science ... But, when it comes to the existential sort of angst, well... most of humanity has enough to worry about, just finding food and shelter, for example. They have neither the time nor the energy to be worried about the is/ought gap , conceptual analysis or the phenomenological reduction. Science does not have all the answers, but it is what is needed to solve the sort of practical problems humanity faces. When we all have enough to eat and somewhere to live, that's when the existential angst will really bite and, with the decline of religion, philosophy will come into its own.

But will it help? In dealing with life's torments and grief, it is impossible to come up with a more comforting story than Christianity - life continues, much better than before, and it goes forever. That's as maximally positive as Hell is maximally negative. Still, that sweet lie must have provided great comfort, but also disappointment when believers dared to explore what they had been told.

Given that HAN has the philosophy side covered, I'll relate personal experiences. To start, science gave me much more than brute facts, as is often the claim. Firstly, I was extremely superstitious as a child. Demons, ghosts, I was scared of it all. Science gave me the "courage" to actually walk into a dark room without lights, without beings scared of anything but tripping over. Learning that the supernatural was not real was a huge load off my mind. I also used to worry that my thoughts would influence outside events.

There was another, more subtle, issue. When I was young, I was surrounded by polemic. People were always making very certain claims about things while others made equally certain opposite claims. That made me extremely uncomfortable. What turned it around was reading Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. The content itself made many things clear to me - that many of the problems philosophers wrestle with can be explained via evolutionary biology.

Just as important was the method of delivery. For the first time I was reading work by a rigorous scientist. I was delighted when he would raise points made by scientists who disagreed with him and, instead of rubbishing them, he looked at their ideas positively and was prepared to concede that either might be right. I loved the lack of ad hominem - no dirty fighting. I'd not seen that before.

For context, at the time, my sister was sending me her Awake! and Watchtower magazines (Jehovah's Witnesses), hoping to convert me. I noted how the articles would be interesting to start and then there would come a point where the writer seemed to give up on analysis and leant into God Dunnit, complete with Biblical quotes. It was manipulative and intellectually dishonest.

Perhaps, most importantly, learning about space, the Earth and nature has helped me feel less hostile towards others. When you see us as tiny parts of a larger dynamic through various phases of geology and biology - from molten basalt to today's milieu - then how can you see others as "evil" from a philosophical standpoint (easy to do from a social and political standpoint, of course)? No, the evil are not much different to volcanoes, storms, earthquakes and the like - just entropic forces breaking stuff down before it will be reassembled into something that is usually more complex.

How can I worry unduly about death when 100 billion people have died before us, and countless sentient animals too? They all died, but the Grand Growth continued.

So, I've had some useful spiritual lessons from science - reducing my fear and increasing my honesty. I just wanted to point out that the lines between spirituality, science and philosophy are far more blurred than they may seem at times.

Still, I am not at peace and I know why. Self-mastery and control, or their lack. I am pretty sure that these are key to personal peace and happiness - perhaps the missing link that you seek. (Consider the internal work needed to achieve self-mastery). I've always been a bit chaotic and undisciplined. It's not bad for the creative process, but diabolical for personal peace. Without self-mastery - control over the brain and body - the only respites are humour and distraction. If one is a dimwit who cannot control oneself, then one best not take oneself too seriously.

[Lagayascienza]

I agree with all of that, Sy Borg. Well, said! And it mirrors my own journey so well.

I was raised in strictly religious environment. Religious texts and fundamentalist exegeses thereon were the only reding materials in our house. I ended up very confused. None of it seemed to fit or explain the world I saw around me. But, eventually, Dawkins did it for me, too. Things started to make sense at last. And as Darwin said The Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This, and all of science, to me, speaks to a scientific spirituality. Awe and respect at the universe as we have been able to understand it and the amazing processes that built structure and eventually mind from stardust.

[Sy Borg]

Still, there remains the challenge of self-mastery - being able to drive this vehicle. I don't know about you, but my vehicle drives like a supermarket trolley.

I think this is religion's strength; its rules encourage self-discipline. On the downside, this can lead to religion's rather famous public virtue associated with private sleaze. Further, religion's insistence on belief of obvious myth is not workable for those who value reason. It's the traditional tool for shaping lives, but it's a fairly primitive one.

Like you, I would also like to see philosophy come up with life tools that bolster self-discipline and self-mastery, that can fill the voids left by religion.

[Lagayascienza]

Yes, once we let go of traditional religion, it's up to us. As you say, it can be a bumpy ride. I've got to the stage where I take an ironic view, as if all the noise and fury is some sort of cosmic joke. As Nagel says, if nothing really matters, then that doesn't matter either. It's all ok. So, on with the show.

[Count Lucanor]

The point is that one cannot even imagine how the being of my cat can be known in the basic scientific paradigms of what relationships are between objects. I mean, relationships between objects: this is paramount in the way science does business.

If the issue was what it is like to be a cat, or your cat, in terms of their first person experience, there wouldn’t be much for science to say, but neither philosophy. Now, if the issue is what there is in the cat and in their relationship with other objects, what makes it an object within human experience, once the exteriority of objects, their ontic independence from the subject, as well as the exteriority of the bodily experience itself, has been acknowledged. For that, science and philosophy have many things to say.

This is why we need something that is not confined to scientific paradigms to discuss this.

That demarcation line is highly disputable. What exactly we don’t need science for? Philosophy cannot say why after drinking alcohol I start tumbling. I saw a video of a cat doing that the other day. I certainly want to know why, what and how the cat is and I cannot longer do that without science. OK, you might want to speculate on what a cat means to a human, and you can say that’s a task reserved for the philosopher, but right off the bat he will have to take into account not only the manifest image of the cat and the world it lives, but the scientific image too, which inevitably has permeated society. I’m not saying either one or the other, but both, the synoptic view. What should I do with a cat? Why? Is it a guardian sent by the gods or just a simple mammal that showed up contingently? You have to know something about what the cat is and why it’s there. How do you do that, stepping out of the narratives of everyday living, without using the facts provided by science?

Not Kant. Remember that Heidegger's thinking was about human existence not the form of judgments, making him a philosopher of existence.

I’m aware such phenomenologists are not mere Kant scholars, but do problematize on the legacy of the unsurpassable Kantian philosophy, to paraphrase Sartre, and have a tendency towards antirealism. Phenomenology needs not to be married to idealism, as the work of Merleau-Ponty demonstrates, so I don’t have a quarrel with phenomenology per se, but I do find problematic the doctrines of the “phenomenalist phenomenologists”. Add to that Kierkegaard’s theology and we have the recipe for disaster, the decadence of philosophy.

Well...grrr. Please note that all of this talk about destroying distinctions and attacking science and epistemic correlationism possesses not one iota of analysis. Just vague generalities. What ever happened to: Can you even begin to make sense of science's knowledge claims apart from the perceiver's contribution? I'm listening...

I’m not sure what you mean there. I’m not making a detailed analysis, that would take endless paragraphs, but I’m pointing to where the analysis has taken me. Surely we can make lots of sense of science claims about things apart from the perceiver’s contribution, such as things that existed before there was even any perceiver (the issue of ancestrality) and the fact of contingency.

It is not that there is no truth in this above here, but these would be partial truths at best. Phenomenology doesn't deny science. It denies that science is foundational philosophy. I would think this to be crystal clear.

Science is not philosophy, right, but science has philosophical foundations, which means every time science produces verifiable results, they have philosophical implications that cannot be simply dismissed by pure introspection. If science is not denied, its implicit realism and materialism cannot be denied either.

Phenomenlogy simply wants to talk about the presuppositions of science. It wants to discuss the internal temporality of knowledge claims, the apperceptive nature of knowing, the inability to extricate material objects from conscious events,

There’s no such inability, and ironically, it takes some presuppositions of philosophy to make such claim.

Think of something prima facie here as a kind of default setting of the way we experience and think about the world. The mail comes, dinner's ready, time for school, etc., and in this setting there are assumptions in place about what the world is. There indeed ARE letters, dinners, and of course, particle physicists and and neuroanatomists. Everything in this default setting of our existence, is epistemically defeasible, to use their jargon, which means any given proposition is "defeatable" and not absolute. Of course, you are right to say that science steps apart from this everydayness to make more disciplined discoveries, but it remains mostly true to what Husserl calls the naturlalistic attitude,

Science is portrayed here as if it was just a little more refined version of the naive inductive attitude of sense-making after first-hand impressions, which is sort of an inversion of what really happens: when it comes to thinking about how the world is, philosophical reflection has been for ages in a dark room making guesses. Science is not about ordinary life, it makes no use of ordinary language, and it is definitely not playing in the default setting, what one might call the manifest image. That’s why science has been able to revolutionize the common worldview that for ages depended on the kind of reflection inherent to religion and contemplative philosophy.

Science is NEVER undermined! Scientific metaphysics, well, that is quite another thing. Again, the only thing anyone has every witnessed is the phenomenon. It is IMPOSSIBLE to witness anything else, for to witness at all is a phenomenological event.

The phenomenon IS the witnessing of the event, the correlation between thinking and being, not what actually is, that is, the witnessed. Then there’s the question of whether both terms of the correlation are real, if they exist independently on their own, that is, if the event exists in a realm exterior to the phenomenal, witnessing world or not. Any phenomenologist denying that such exteriority can be affirmed, is denying science.

Solipsism occurs, and this is important, only when one weds physicalism with idealism, as if idealism contained experience within the shell of a skull.

Nope. Solipsism is strange to physicalism, it is a stance exclusive to idealism. When you deny the exteriority of objects, even the surface of your skull, you’re in for a ride on the slide to solipsism.

Please review the many times I explained why this is not the case. Phenomenology clearly acknowledges the exteriority of objects. It simply tells us that these objects cannot be conceived apart from the conceiving. Any attempt to do so would be self refuting. Try it.

“Conceiving” of exterior objects goes only to knowledge, how they appear in my experience, which we can all agree, without embracing the main currents of phenomenology, implies that our first-hand apprehension of reality is filtered by our senses, we can’t get all of it right away. But that does not say anything about the objects themselves and whether they actually exist on a realm (the physical world) that is contingent and not created by the conceiving mind. Once the exteriority of objects is acknowledged, including other subjects and other experiences which are not mine, realism takes in and there’s no escape back to denying their existence as objects and their relationships in themselves.

I do take issue with calling the subject a thing. I do a once over on myself and find many things, but no objects. That lamp is an object. Me? I am thinking, feeling, intending, liking, disliking, agreeing, offended, and so on. It is indicative of the way your perspective has been influenced by physicalist reductive thinking. You see how this breeds nonsense.

Explain then how what you call another subject and you acknowledge their exteriority, is not an entity alongside and in the same terms as what I call things or objects. Not you, but other people, what are they?

To say that "there is something", that an object "is there", means that it exists, which could be just the same as saying "the subject has the experience" of that thing that is claimed to be there, without any commitment to a "thing in itself".

Did you just say the object being there is the same thing as the subject having the experience of the thing (putting "thing in itself" talk aside)?

No, I’m just taking the first-person perspective, I’m accepting it, I’m conceding to the phenomenologists that it is the right attitude to start with. What goes after that is another business.

…there are only two attitudes that the subject can adopt when facing this "world", as it appears configured before his eyes: 1) to assume that this "reality" is entirely structured by his own mind. There's no point in investigating anything of it, because there's no knowable, intelligible world to start with, only the structure of the subject's own mind, the only mind that could exist. Since this reality appears as if talking back to him, as if it were independent, as if there were things outside of his experience, the structure of that mind can only make sense as hallucination, a dream at best. Or 2) To assume that this "reality" has a structure of its own, an intrinsic nature that is not only decodable, interpretable, intelligible, but that also requires the participation of other subjects to figure out how it works, by contributing with the telling of their own knowledge and experiences. This second attitude is the only one that allows for the establishment of philosophy and science, it's the only one that allows the world to be intelligible.

Phenomenology subsumes both 1 and 2.

Now, talk about breeding nonsense. That’s simply impossible, and such contradiction goes to show the absurdity of the phenomenologist views that you defend.

[Hereandnow]

Lagayscienza wrote

So, my question is, in circumstances like this, if we want our knowledge of gravitational waves to rest on a solid metaphysical foundation, where can phenomenology take us?

I think it takes time for this single insght to set it: Philosophy is not about what we see and think every day AS it is seen and thought. If that were the case, then what would be the point? Science is an extension, an intensive quantification and classification of every day life. I see a stone and want to know more about it so I get closer, use a microscope, and a whole new world opens up about the structures of crystals and the differences of these structures and the content of what is not crystalline, and go further in and molecular differences are discovered, and all of these are named and given quantitative designations of varying kinds. And molecular differences have organizational features that are different, and there a thousand ways a scientist quantifies and distinguishes and talks about dynamic features that I can't begin to talk about, but science is, as you know, massively complex because it SEES MORE, whether it is a microscope or a telescope or a computer enhancing the seeing (and I would not consider that matter of the "unseen" gravitational object at issue here. No one has seen an atom, or a distant start either. One "sees" in the latter the light, not the star! The star is not the light, science wants to say, but it will never wrap its head around the fact that all one ever sees is light, no matter how distant. The star itself is inferred from t he consistency of the light's presences and the predictability of what it will do and where it will do it and how much and in what, and this is not materially different, vis a vis the "reality" status of the inferred object, from the "super-finely engineered apparatus" that is used to detect gravity...right? And this applies to my cat sitting here on the chair. And note, just to remind, how outrageously removed a good faith materialist's cat is from perceptual possibility: light goes through the lens of the eye, is taken up by rods and cones for modification and is sent via the optic nerve to the brain...but wait, the brain? We know this because we observe brains via the light that goes through the lens, is taken up by rods and cones and is delivered the optic nerve to the brain. BUT: I do in fact encounter that cat, and certainly not light waves and their neurochemical "counterparts" and I do encounter brains and their neuro physiology, and all the rest. The trouble does NOT lie in the the overt encounter, and this is something phenomenology wants to insist: We DO encounter these things, they are not reducible to anything else like talk about more basic substrata of perceiving. Materialistic accounts weave a web of physical contingency that has NOTHING in it of the original givenness because it ignores the fact that inquiry begins with givenness.

Anyway, now that little sketch about science is an introduction to a very meaningful conversation, but what it is not is philosophy. Philosophy is about the presuppositions of what it is to observe at all. Not unlike the presuppositions of a magnified or otherwise modified image have to do with the premodified state of the object, as all this talk about molecular structures in stones presupposes that there is a stone there in the first place. So what if we ask about the presuppositions of something being a stone, this scientifically unproblematic thing that is simply axiomatic for science? You could start as a scientist would and discuss its manifest classificatory features, the weathering that rounded its surface or the mass determined by gravity and pressure; but what about the language that makes calling something what it "is" possible? What about the time structure of the dynamic of perceiving at all? What about the rules that make classification possible? The understanding that takes up the world? And so on. These are not nothing, but are simply not to be talked about as if one is talking about a stone because enhanced seeing is not possible and there are no more details to be revealed (which is why everyone is disillusioned with philosophy and why analytic philosophy clings to science--there is nothing left to say! I say I follow Michel Henry, Levinas, and the rest, but in truth, the only reason I fond them so fascinating is that they are revealing philosphy's true end, it telos, and it is not more theory. You might say phenomnelogy's attention to consciousness is philosophy's last stand: its "instrument" of enhanced analysis is the world's apriority, this intense self examination that does not look outward, but inward revealing, if you will, the world that takes up the world perceptually, affectively, cognitively. This world IS the world at the basic level. What is outside is a there that is prohibitively transcendental. Nothing. NOt, certainly that science is nothing, which is insane. But that science is really about the phenomenological play8ing field IN WHICH we discover an imposition of events that are not us. These events are the way the world is given to us, not the world in an impossible out theresness.

What are those microbiological things you mentioned? All I can talk about is how they appear in a world of appearances. Outside this one would have to step out of phenomena. This cannot be made sense of. Talk about transcendence, consider "out there" to be beyond the margins of experience, and "in here" to be our finitude: Is it that what is prohibitively out there and what is in here in thoughts, feelings and the rest, makes any sense? This "out thereness" as a concept conceived in here, and so out there, when conceived, is never free of the the in-here's conditions of apprehension, so when we speak of out there, we are really speaking of in here. This is not solipsism at all, remember, because there are no brain interiors we are hopelessly inside. The in earnest positing of an out there is not upended. It is simply that it is not as if one can reach beyond the margins of experience and thought into something else and declare it out there. Here is nothing beyond phenomena, no "out there" of science in this philosophical analysis, and this makes out there not simply transcendent but NONSENSE! NOT that microbiology is nonsense! But the givenness of microbiology in our world IS a givenness. This is a critical point, and what Wittgenstein was on about. He was not saying there is this grid of logic (Tractatus) which we live in against transcendence. He was saying every metaphysical idea we have of the world is self-world-referencing, contained within finitude, and this is exactly what Heidegger said! So again, transcendence and metaphysics don't vanish in a puff of logic; they are now frontiers of finitude and our finitude and no longer finitude at all.


But always back the the OP: the matter here is about religion, and religion is about ethics, and ethics, in light of the above, is metaethics, the infinity, if you will, that is part and parcel of, or in the essence of, our finitude. This is not about spatial or temporal infinity, but the openness of all concepts, and the concept of ethics has an existential dimension: suffering and happiness and everything possess therein. IN the examination if microbes on a dish, what is this event's analysis? We speak here of the full analytical breadth of the event which is always an event, never "things out there" removed from the event. And the analysis includes the observer, the interest, the historicity, the temporal setting of anticipating prior to sitting before a microscope what microscopes are and what they do, and the background of "regionalized" thinking that makes interpretation rich and complex, and so on; as well as the physicality of affairs and the explcit theories applied.

Something like this would be a fair response to your question., perhaps.