value wrote
In my opinion philosophy is what UNDERLAYS the world fundamentally. This provides the basis for my assertion of the problem that it is a fallacy to consider the facts of science to be valid without philosophy (the dogmatic belief in uniformitarianism).
Then the question is, what is it about philosophy that has foundational status? Not that you're wrong on this, but if philosophy underlies everything, then what is it? Because this kind of thing is pretty much the brass ring of human endeavor.
It is Levinas his 'signification'. How can it be said that the essence of philosophy is other than signification or 'the act of valuing'? The idea that philosophy would be passive is absurd.
But the question is how affirm this as an absolute. Levinas pursues ethics "understood from within a recourse to experience itself," as Derrida put it; and "that which is most irreducible within experience: the passage and departure toward the other; and the other itself as what is most irreducible other within it: Others." He continues: "it is a question of designating a space...within naked experience" in which one finds the affirmation of ethics that transcends finitude. Levinas needs to counter the very strong philosophical trend that denies the possibility of discovery of something of God as such a discovery will be IN the Totality of language and culture that makes discovery possible. One can hear Wittgenstein's Tractatus in this, where he famously insists that ethics and its talk of value must be passed over in silence because value is an absolute and we cannot speak of such things. Heidegger put all meaning making in the hands of language, culture and its historicity. One, he says, is always, already IN a world, and ideas and possibilities are determined by this world, and this world is FINITE. It is a temporal finitude. Levinas wants to take this matter to issue: our finitude and the language possibilities take inquiry OUT of this finitude; that is, there is something there, in our midst that defies this "hermetism of the proposition" of the Totality of available and familiar thought.
This business Levinas sets himself into is frankly quite radical. Levinas is saying that before us in our experiences there is something of God that is directly apprehensible, and this is seen in ethics. Not in petty ethics and its rules; but in the confrontation with the face of the Other and the way this generates moral responsibility.
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I was just reading 'The Meaning of Truth' by William James in which he argued the following:
Why may not thought's mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence? No one who has read Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which brands them as 'illusory' because they copy nothing in the thing. The notion of a world complete in itself, to which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is irrational. Rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious supplement."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5117/5117-h/5117-h.htm
But you know the consequence of this kind of thinking? You end up in Richard Rorty's world, and truth is not discovered, but is made. Reality is a language construct. Rorty wrote The Mirror of Nature about this issue, and while he certainly didn't take the Kantian approach about synthetic apriori judgments, he did take the physicalist model and completely annihilated it with one simple question: how does anything out there get in here (in my head)? One of my favorite questions, really, because it is so simple, yet the entire community of analytic philosophers refuse to go there. They do get it, of course. They know there is no mechanism for the epistemic transposition of things from the world into other things, like brains. Knowledge is impossible by this model. Rorty thought basically philosophy had reached its end and there was nothing more to say, for metaphysics was dead.
Aristotle considers a state of philosophical contemplation (eudaimonia) the greatest virtue (highest human good). It is a strive to serve life: the discovery of "good" from which 'value' follows.
With regard the origin of Good. Wasn't it Plato that introduced the concept in philosophy?
"Form of the Good", or more literally "the idea of the good" (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα[a]) is a concept in the philosophy of Plato. The definition of the Good is a perfect, eternal, and changeless Form, existing outside space and time. It is a Platonic ideal."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good
But Plato was a rationalist and his forms were rational concepts and he didn't underscore the Good of the Good. The point I want to emphasize is the meta-good question: How can any sense be made of something that stands outside of the sense making?
Keeping in mind that Levinas is no Platonist. I mean, he is far weirder, more alien. Plato wanted to bring the world to heel in a system that makes all things intelligible, so to know a thing is to grasp something about its essence, and its essence lies in the Totality of what can be said (grounded in a metaphysics of ideas); I mean, one reaches for meaning to "speak" what a thing is, and one comes up with some "share" of the metaphysical absolute that is the thing's constitutive source. This is miles from Levinas. Just the opposite, literally. Levinas held that this Platonic tradition is "war". It is not about what is said, I mean the content of propositions made. It is about the affirmation of God and morality being altogether other than finite knowledge claims, even though, and especially when, those knowledge claims are about metaphysics, for once a metaphysical "claim" is laid out, as with, say, Christianity, it then must defend itself, deny the opposition, "strengthen" its argument, a rule over all (hence the term
totalitarianism) and so forth.
It is religion and philosophy's historical tendency to stand firm with a thesis, just as it is the political tendency. Levinas saw these "totalities" as the reason for our distance from God. God stands out of any thesis. This is a very difficult idea to defend in philosophy because here, God is not affirmed in faith, but in objective demonstration, which is the point of his Totality and Infinity.
I am reading Derrida''s Violence and Metaphysics right now and one can see why he likes Levinas so much, for Derrida exposes language to be entirely OTHER than the "world".
In my opinion the consideration of being in love (experience) as a facet grounded in an intuition of 'the good' is not the end of the road for philosophy.
It was already posed that the concept or idea 'pure good' doesn't intuitively feel valid.
I don't think one can reach beyond experience for the grounding of anything meaningful. Ask what the Good is, and I will refer you to its instantiations IN experience, for there is nothing else. The metaphysics of the Good is not something apart from what is evidently Good in our affairs; otherwise the Good is simply without meaning, some absurd construction of logic, as when we say God is omniscient or the greatest possible being. One invents such things, then proceeds to build arguments as if they were true and one thereby establishes an entire religion on what Kant called the logic of illusion.
Pure Good? Pure anything has big issues, considering that to posit at all is to do so in a language that itself is not pure, but very complex, and this is the usual approach taken by philosophers bent on disillusionment (like Nietzsche). But Husserl brings this to a startling departure: In the analysis of what IS, let's reduce the complexity of language that identifies, characterizes, categorizes, and so on; down to the simplicity of givenness itself. This is he calls pure phenomena. The position on this is truly a long, long argument and there is little chance that I could convince you by going over it. Suffice it to say that the only sense that can be made of the world must issue from examination of our being-in-the-world.
So, love and happiness and the Good. The Good is nothing apart from these, but Levinas' thinking takes this love and happiness, and its opposite, misery and wretchedness, and argues that this world IS metaphysics, and the grandeur and sorrow of our existence extends into eternity through the nothingness of the metaphysics discovered in the world. Our love reaches out, in a desire such that the desideratum exceeds the desire and in this the desire reaches to God:
The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely,
toward the absolutely other.....It is a desire that cannot be satisfied.
For we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual needs, or even
of moral and religious needs. Love itself is thus taken to be the
satisfaction of a sublime hunger. If this language is possible it is
because most of our desires and love too are not pure....
Metaphysical desire...is like Goodness--0the Desired does
not fulfill it, but deepens it.
When one values (signifies) one seems to require the concept 'pure good' (a good that cannot be valued). Levinas also seems to have concluded that 'goodness' is the origin of the cosmos because of the that apparent logical requirement.
"The creation of the world itself should get its meaning starting from goodness." (Levinas in film Absent God 1:06:22)
Remember that Levinas is a phenomenologist, not a scientist. The creation of the world "
gets its meaning" starting from goodness, so when we think about thr creation of the world, the world does not make sense unless this thinking is about goodness. What does he mean? He means that we have to step OUT of the language structure (where the meanings are) of the world that is so confident and knowledgeable and presumptuous, and INTO the the other/Other, which is the actuality of the pure phenomena of the givenness of things. Here, the most salient feature is ethics/aesthetics. This is not a scientist's world at all; we simply allow the appearances we face to be THE stand alone Being of the world, and here, we find the Value (in the way Wittgenstein talked about it: the Good is the divine) the value-meaning dimension of things far and away the most imposing; this dimension of things is the ground of what it means for something to be important AT ALL.
It is seen that one seeks a pure concept as ground for signification/valuing that must be described as goodness to be plausibly relevant to 'reality' but that when taken by itself cannot be 'pure' of nature because the idea of goodness is impure.
Perhaps a question that could provide leads for more insights is "is reason good?"
This is a trick question. Reason qua reason is an abstraction from the givenness of an experiential content, the "formal" structure of a judgment. So reason considered as such has, of course, no value, just as a pillow is not in the structural dynamics of an atom: two radically distinct contexts of meaning. But then, the "original" which is a full embodiment of affairs rich in content that is not rational is the very source of Goodness; it is "where" we witness goodness coming into existence when we love, have compassion and empathy, and so on.
The point is, if you consider reason as apart from all else, and this is what language and logic does in all cases in the making of categories of understanding empirical or otherwise, then then answer is no. But this is not a determination about the
world. The world is entirely "other" than this, and reason is a dimension of an original existential unity which cannot be spoken.
The idea that ethics (morality or 'philosophical reason') lays at the foundation of the world seems to be correct to me. In a way, (the natural inclination to) philosophy could be described as a form of love. It seeks to unlock among other things, (a path towards) truth, beauty and good.
As weird as it sounds, I think you are right. But it is not something that can be argued well. Philosophy in the analytic tradition cares little or nothing about archaic talk about "beauty and the good." However, I do argue the case, knowing full well it cannot be made "objective": The Good; two kinds: contingent and absolute. Contingent goods are like, this lamp is a good one, or, she does good work, and one can easily talk about these. Absolute goods refer to the meta-good of a thing being good at all, anything. She does good work because she is efficient, produces results, and so on. But what "good" are these? And the questions are endless, really, that is, until the final question is raised: what good is the good? A lamp emits a comfortable light, and this facilitates reading, and reading is interesting and taking interest is, well, enjoyable, and enjoyment and pleasure are Good! All contingent goods are reducible to absolute Good-inquiry, and this inquiry is the weirdest thing one can even imagine. What good is Good? The question refers us to no other question and all that is left is to say that the Good is intrinsically Good and this turns the matter over to the "pure presence" of the pure givenness of Good, and, of course, Evil. Why weird? I put my hand in boiling water. Now, what IS that, exactly, that makes this bad? Badness is not observed, but it is an intense and powerful "presence". One can describe this event in many ways, talking about the physiology of the nervous system, or the evolution of traits that were conducive to reproduction and survival, or the very popular, how this pain is grounded attitudes and circumstances of judgment that embeds the pain in culture and interpretative language. But the pain as such? Untouchable by analysis. It is a simple given.
And love? Consider the way Michel Henry talks about "the duplicity of appearing" in his phenomenological analysis: "Life reveals itself to itself, it experiences itself in such a way that in the experience there is neither an "outside" nor a "world"---nothing visible. The phenomenality of this experience is pure pathos."
When the mind withdraws from the particular affections of the world, you know, everything that makes the world interesting, and looks within, discovers the internal self that is the seat of all experience and allows this to show itself unattached, one experiences a
pure pathos. In the East they call this nirvana, though this concept is a radical one, for here, one has not simply turned away from the world, one has annihilated it, or, at least this is the way Buddhism is
supposed to be (take a look at the Abhidamma).
How can a 'something' 'be' outside the scope of what is empirical?
In my opinion the (status quo) acceptance of plausibility of the concept meaningful relevance allows philosophical consideration to pass the boundary imposed by the presumed 'empirical ground'.
Meaningful relevance is a weak concept. Not that this is a wrong idea; it just lacks substance. "Plausibility" begs the question, of course, for it is precisely what is plausible that is in question. Saying the earth is flat is not plausible, but no one really takes issue because the standards as to plausibility are firmly in place.
What it means for something to be empirical, of course, has a history. But, if I take your meaning here, I agree that this term imposes divisions on an analytic of experience that misrepresent. On the other hand, this is what analytic or categorial thinking (all thinking that is) is all about. There is no "pure reason" nor is there anything called value, or dog, cat, coffee table or anything else. There is the truth of propositions (categorical thinking) and there is the "world", and the latter is not reducible to the former. SUCH an interesting issue. It goes right to Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics and the infamous question of "the nothing". To grasp what this is about is to understand something deeply important about our existence, and Levinas is right in the middle of this. He responds to Heidegger, who "discovers" (though it is obvious that he gets this from Kierkegaard. See K's Concept of Anxiety, a difficult and idiosyncratic book, and one has to ignore the biblical references. It is altogether outside biblical exegesis) metaphysics right before our waking eyes, but fails to properly account for what is found there (says Michel Henry. I read his The power of Revelation of Affectivity
According to Heidegger just last night. Put simply, he argues that the affectivity of the encounter with metaphysics, that is, the infinite "distance" between me and the world when I inquire about being as such is revelatory. He writes
affectivity is not merely taken
as a power of revelation in the ordinary sense of the word, a power of
revealing something, this or that thing, but precisely the power of
revealing to us that which reveals all things, namely, the world itself as such,
as identical to Nothingness.
Henry is taking up where Husserl and Fink left off: one CAN go to "witness" the intuitive source of all existence! One must abandon scientific metaphysics to see this! This metaphysics, begun by Kierkegaard, is there, in the "fabric" of experience itself. Husserl's "epoche" is the
epistemic basis of this. It is important to Value, or better here, metavalue, because, as Henry tells us, and he is right, that the Husserlian reductive analysis of our existence leads us not just to the some vacuous assertion grounded in a phenomenological description at the basic level of analysis, but to a powerful affective revelation! I think this is what the Abhiddhama calls "ultimate reality" (in Pali, however the translation goes): the principle aspect of this is nibana. Nibana is not just being content with one's affairs. It is a profound intuitive disclosure of the world.
An extraordinary philosophical body of work, from Kierkegaard to Derrida, Levinas, Henry, et al. I am only just getting a hold of it. Like you, I am committed to understanding value and its philosophical grounding.
Wouldn't it simply consist of the difference of viewing love from a social relevant (qualitative) perspective, like 3017Metaphysician's example of 'The Art of Love' (the practice of love), versus a fundamental philosophical perspective, while the latter - the addressing of the concept 'Love' - seems to have been shunned in the history of philosophy, diverting the concept instead to poetry?
I look at it like this, borrowed from Michel Henry who responds to Heidegger: I fear a tiger's bite, and so I run. Now, we can take this for what it is and this is the basic lived experience that is presented in poetry and literature, and, doing what they do, is recontextualized in metaphor and irony and imagery (literary devices) to make the matter more poignant, to emphasize, perhaps, its mystery in the absence of an explanatory foundation for our suffering under tooth and claw of tigers and the everything else. BUT: this understanding that is taken up in these contexts are all still bound to the possibilities that are locked in side our finitude. The
Real source, thinking not unlike Ahab of Melville's Moby Dick, is the reality "behind" such lived affairs, the metaphysics of suffering! When Ahab strikes out at the whale, he is a symbol of our rebellion against God who imposes this world upon us.
Putting God aside, the world imposes itself upon us in our toothaches and broken relations, etc., etc. Moby Dick is an allegory for this. But for us here, it is not suffering; it is love, the other dimension of our existence-in-value. Phenomenologists like Henry take us where Heidegger takes us: to the nothingness of explanatory deficit and that is not simply an absence! but a foundational confrontation with our existence. One is released from the interpretative boundaries of physicalism, which has nothing to say at all (amazing how this assumption of physicalism is so implicit in our basic thinking, yet philosophically it is utterly without meaning). One can now witness Being as such IN the "pure" encounter with phenomena. Love is no longer a biological function, an evolutionary advantage, a neurological event (yes, of course, it is all of these things and more, but we are not IN these explanatory contexts of natural science. These are dismissed just as, say, the fine art of knitting is dismissed when talk about economics. Simply not relevant here); love is there, and (this is the hard part) the "thereness" is metaphysical. The poetry you mention, when it is insightful, as with Emily Dickinson or William Wordsworth or...so many, takes us to the threshold, and leaves us with a profound curiosity. From here, Levinas, Henry, et al, begin.
No, the meaningful relations that I would intend to indicate would be a priori and therefore span beyond the Totality of the individual's relating to the world. The origin of those relations would be a concept that can be described as 'pure meaning'.
Not that I disagree, but I would then inquire as to what you mean by pure meaning. I follow Husserl who talks like this, the "pure phenomenon" one faces which is the pure intuition of the givenness of the world. But it is a big issue: as I realize the purity of the phenomenon, all interpretative background "meaning" is suspended. Husserl sees us as a kind of "halo" of assumptions that gather meaning around each perceptual (that is, apperceptual) event. Remove these from their implicit effect on the understanding, and what remains is the "pure" phenomenological presence. This is, I argue, the end game of serious meditation: this halo of assumptions is not just cognitive, indeed, its most salient feature is affectivity/value. The question is, what happens when this halo is reduced to a residuum of phenomena?
I hold that to behold a tree IN the reductive attitude (as opposed to the naturalistic attitude) there is revealed, in what Heidegger calls "the nothing", a pure, and deeply profound affectivity. Philosophers like Rorty say there is no such thing. But they way this for one very good reason: they don't experience the world like this. What can I say? Most philosophers have this intuitive deficit. The claims about "the nothing" and the depths of human subjectivity can only be argued up to a point. If there is basic agreement lacking in what is IN the presence of the world, then the basis for discussion disappears.
Should philosophy prevent itself to cross the border of what can be said to be deductively Real? Isn't that proposed boundary the same as the boundary imposed by empirical Real?
In my opinion the Cartesian idea "I think, therefore I am" is merely utilitarian in nature and not evidence of anything Real. It results in a magical belief at most, in my opinion. The origin remains a mere 'feeling' (of being alive).
When one detaches from the idea of Real and considers that pure meaning fundamentally underlays the world, it would open a door to 'meaningful relevance' that can still be philosophically explored plausibly. It would be the same as letting go of 'space-time' to then consider that it shouldn't be 'the end of the road' for philosophy.
Deductively real? In this sense of deduction, the Sherlock Holmsian sense of drawing conclusions from empirical evidence, one is locked in a tautological play of meanings. If something is "given" then it is assumed, and the assumption is not questioned; and if it is questioned, it is replaced by another assumption (something assumed to be true). But dig deeper into epistemic issues about these assumptions, then the game changes, for no matter what is assumed, it can be questioned. Descartes thought he had reached rock bottom, underivative givenness, but he had not reached this, it has been argued, because the cogito, the "I am" is interpretatively bound just like anything else: when I say I am, I am IN a language context, and in language, no term is a true singularity! One term is the whole language in a very real way, referring here to Husserl's halo above: I see a tree and I know what it is by virtue of the implicitly attendance of a multiplicity of other knowledge claims. This is Derrida's response to Heidegger's "the nothing". For Heidegger, the nothing was a kind of foundation, the place where the truly basic presence of the world issued forth possibilities for all language constructions in the history of our dasein's existence. Derrida called this the metaphysics of presence.
On the utilitarian side, I agree, but this is sticky, and weird. If one takes Derrida seriously, and one really has to, one realizes that to speak at all, to think at all, is bound to a context, a "center" that is self has no foundational center. There is no Center for all centers (see Structure, Sign and Play). The nothing one encounters when one faces a tree as being-as-such is just a part of a language construction like everything else. *(Weird, I say, because to understand this thinking, one has to be, in an almost pathological way, severed from the familiar world. This RIGHT HERE is the basis for the philosophy of Levinas. Heidegger takes us to the out limits of meaning; Derrida takes us beyond this; Levinas takes us to this "impossible" division that remains, for Heidegger was right, the nothing is an encounter, not a vacuous idea. And again, to bring this back to the issue at hand: Value is the most salient feature of this nothing. In Levinas, borrowing from Henry, it is a "pure pathos" and I emphatically agree.
Meaningful relevance: I come back with the lived experience of love. It is like being happy. There is no object. Happiness I call a mundane nibbana (I intentionally avoid the Sanskrit nirvana due to its familiarity). It is in the "relevance" that such happiness is reduced to something mundane, .entangled with the world's affairs.
A
ccording to Kant space and time are a priori forms of intuition that provide the basis for apodictical certainty (apodiktische Gewißheit) that can provide the basis for the idea 'law as such' (intrinsic existence without mind) or 'the ground for empirical causality'.
"Kant's definition of apodictical certainty (apodiktische Gewißheit) is the certainty of a knowledge (Erkenntnis) in connection with the consciousness of its necessity."
It is nonsensical in my opinion to consider repeatable nature to be a necessity. It would only be so in the form of value (words) but not IN experience.
Kant's apodictical certainty is used as a foundation for the concept 'law as such' which is equal to the idea 'intrinsic existence' or the idea that reality is 'really real'. It seems to me that a foundation for that concept is completely lacking which means in my opinion that it is a magical belief.
Without Kant's apodictical certainty, while maintaining the idea of 'pure meaning' as fundamental ground of existence, how would the world look like?
The letting go of 'space-time' without losing meaningful relevance for philosophically plausible exploration seems possible to me.
I agree with this. Take something plainly apodictic, like causality: One cannot even imagine a thing moving all by itself, and this deserves a moment of reflection, for it is so strongly intuitive, I mean, one is inclined to see that Kant has a point, for in the experimental "repeatability" that gives evidence for justification for a principle, it is not just the regularity of empirical data, like the sun appearing each morning without fail, but that one cannot even imagine a causeless event. This is much stronger than induction, and this is Kant's point. You seem to side with Hume and his empirical "habit" of recurrence, but Kant points out that it is not the regularity, but the intuitive impossibility that is behind the principle of causality.
But i said I agreed with you. When we call a thing apriori, how does the word assignment establish knowledge? Sure, when I think of a causal relationship, there is this very strong insistence that something is up. But what is it?? Kant didn't know that even in the familiar empirical world, one faces foundational metaphysics. The "being" of causality is simply metaphysical or transcendental. And the same goes for love. Language itself is contingent. This is the point: when I face an object with full confidence of knowing what it "is", like a tree or a poodle, or a mathematical equation, that confidence issues from familiarity with the way language works in the world. One thing is really a manifestation, a kind of gestalt effect, of the many. What, for example, is the letter 'A' as a letter apart from an alphabet? The color red can mean danger. It can also mean seduction. Or rage. It all depends on context. All of our language events are like this, causality, love, also. If language's relation to the world is not absolute, then what is called absolute is not absolute.
My argument is that it is merely 'meaning' that qualitatively differentiates the experienced empirical world from what is actually experienced.
In my opinion value IS empirical of nature by definition since it concerns solely that of which it can be SAID TO BE experienced. The factor that would add an apparent mysterious aspect to value would be the 'meaning' that underlays value fundamentally (that preceded it or 'makes value possible').
Therefore, in my opinion, the 'value' involved in human social relations, in the experience of pain, is similar to any empirical value including Matter. It would be 'meaning' - that which apparently has no empirical ground while it cannot be said to be irrelevant - that would make a difference.
I see. But consider: What is the good and bad of the value experience (which really is any experience whatever)? I acknowledge, say, the pain of my hand in fire, but the pain, what make the pain "bad"? It is a odd question, but it is crucial to understanding why ethics is so hard to grasp philosophically. We all know the pain is there and we all know what pain is, and to describe the pain in an empirically exhaustive way would go into a great book of facts about pain-- biological, anthropological, evolutionary, linguistic, neurological, and on and on, facts and more facts. Facts have to be observable, and while you can clearly observe the pain you are in, there is IN the pain a mysterious unobservable: the badness of the pain. And, of course, the goodness of being in love, or pizza.
But we have touched upon this above: I agree that what is empirical, as a category, may make a division in experience that is not helpful at all, I mean, why is the "bad" nature of pain NOT empirical? After all, you do experience it. But it is not a question of your experiencing it, but one about what it is you experience. Most Anglo American philosophers insist that there is no inherent badness in the pain. Just pain. Of course, if one admits there is badness in the pain, then one would have to admit that not just pain, but value-badness is IN the fabric of the universe, and this would be admitting to a thesis of moral realism. And they do not acknowledge this. Philosophers want to have pain described as a local event: pain here, clouds there, my cat on the sofa, etc. The "bad" of pain is not in the usual empirical accounting of things, and if it were, if this pain over here were objectively to exhibit features of good and bad, and not just pleasure and pain, then one would have to say the world qua world is a moral place. Paradigms of science would have to accommodate to what sounds like a religious proposition.
But I argue good and bad are not only part of the descriptive account of the world, they are its most salient feature! Wittgenstein knew this. See his Tractatus. Big discussion here.
With that I would agree. But the good and bad that you are indicating simply implies 'valuing' or Levinas his 'signification' which is not a choice but by which one values (performs an act) on the behalf of which that Levinas assumes to be goodness or 'pure good'.
In my opinion the idea of goodness, while valid as a concept to provide the required ground for the act of valuing or 'signification', cannot stand on itself and be 'actually pure'. Philosophical exploration should not be allowed to stop at that concept and consider it primary in my opinion.
I take a different approach: it is not a concept of pain that issues from a phenomenological analysis of pain. Phenomenology is essentially descriptive at the basic level. It is rather a question of the metaphysics of pain. The good and bad of ethics and aesthetics cannot be "seen" in the way things are generally empirically seen, and so it is assumed there is nothing there is nothing to see by philosophers. But, and this is the critical point: IF it is the case that ethics is grounded in the "fabric of the world" it is NOT an empirical grounding. It is an absolute grounding! A priori, if you like, this is not about logic and its tautologies, nor causality's apriority in the empirical world; rather, it is about the ethical dimension of our existence raised to bibilical heights; as if God were to make the pronouncement, only without God.
"The creation of the world itself should get its meaning starting from goodness." (Levinas in film Absent God 1:06:22)
And I agree. Levinas would agree with what I just said. Ethics is first philosophy, he says. Why? Because ethics is a truly shocking presence in the world: empirical you say. But consider what religion's purpose has been all these millennia: to address the ethical issues of the world at the level of metaphysics, because empirically, there is no redemption. Ethics, I am saying, possesses the grounds for its own remedy; the remedy is inherent in the analysis of any given ethical affair. Why? Consider:
Take the contingent sense of the good, as in, This is a good knife. Note how this is contingent upon the conditions of context: I may want to use the knife for a stage production and then the sharpness of the knife would be bad, and the dullness good. See how the good and bad's of such things vary. But take badness qua badness: One may choose to be tortured an hour over an entire afternoon, but this latter in no way mitigates the hour of torture. Nothing can mitigate this! A bad couch is contingently bad; the "bad" of torture is absolute as it is impossible to for the bad to be what it is not.
The term pure when applied to good seeks to denote solely that it involves a good that cannot be valued since it is the grounding concept required for the act of valuing (of signification). What is actually the case in my opinion is that the origin of the world is 'pure meaning', a 'meaning' that cannot be valued (has no empirical ground), with pure being plausibly applied in the context 'actual pure' by the nature of meaning that can be conceptualized by exploring the simple nature (and fundamental requirement) of 'a pattern'.
Pure meaning would be a metaphysical, or metaethical, standing. I actually agree with this. A tough issue to discuss, really. Wittgenstein insisted that it should not be discussed, because it made no sense. Things can only make sense if one can imagine their contradiction being the case, and one cannot imagine, per the above, torture/pain being its contrary, good. Of course, one can recondition or reconceive the pain event, I mean, there are those who enjoy what I would call painful. But this changes nothing. It would simply cease to be pain.
Value is the only thing that survives the nothing of Heidegger's metaphysics (his What Is Metaphysics is seminal). It does not vanish in the finitude of our Totality (Levinas got this term from Heidegger who got it from Kierkegaard. Again, see Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety) when facing the being of being. This language may sound alien, but this is the way phenomenologists think.
astronauts have been reporting an extreme transcendental experience of 'interconnected euphoria' when they view earth from space. It is called 'Overview effect on Earth'. Yet, the concept remains unknown to most people.
- By Sy Borg