value wrote
I have yet to discover it from Levinas his own words but it seems that I would share the opinion that philosophy is primary to the cosmos.
The in-the-moment respecting of an Other would involve morality (which Levinas might have indicated as 'Love') and the why question of respecting an Other would concern the ethical notion that it is fundamentally impossible to know the value of an Other in the face of an unknown future and therefore in order to serve the purpose of life one is fundamentally required to maintain a base level of respect for others.
The cosmos belongs to science. The hardest part about understanding these philosophers is the requirement to leave this kind of thinking. Levinas deals in a very different world, which is Heidegger's/Husserl's world. There is no cosmos here, that is, in the sense we all think of, as in a descriptive account of the visible universe. In phenomenology, the universe is a region of language that constitutes being-in-the-world. I haven't read everything Levinas wrote, but Totality and Infinity and elsewhere (I took a stab at his doctoral thesis once, which centered on Husserl's theory of intuitions. Couldn't understand it then. Now I think I could, but I don't have the motivation to do this) deal with the direct or immediate apprehension of the world (and these words have different meanings for different philosophers), it is Heidegger's "totality" of dasein that misses the primacy of ethics. There is a paper called Heidegger on Being a Person by John Haugeland, and a quote from this is telling. Dasein is
norms, normal dispositions, customs, sorts, roles, referral relations,
public institutions, and so on.7 On this reading, the anyone, the (everyday)
world, and language are different coherent "subpatterns"within
the grand pattern that is Dasein; they have Dasein's kind of being
because each of them is Dasein (though none of them is all of Dasein).
Within the anyone and all it institutes, the science of chemistry is a
coherent subpattern: chemistry is Dasein-and so are philately,
Christmas, and Cincinnati.
This totality is simply everything that can come to mind at all IN a culture's possibilities. So think of all of what this could be and dissociate it from ontology. Physics makes no claims about being. It is merely "ontic" which is the ready to hand, everydayness of things, and talk about the cosmos belongs to physics.
Obvously, there is a lot to say about this, but I bring it up because Levinas' world is a very strange place. He is mostly responding to Heidegger's analysis of human dasein with the critical intent to show how ethical responsibility, which Heidegger barely touches on, is grounded in a phenomenological metaphysics of "Otherness". And he is right, I am sure of it. But it is a radical step out of "common sense" and into this world of phenomenology, or post-phenomenology. I am reminded of one of Levinas' peers Blanchot, who wrote, "to write is to be exposed to the anonymity of language," then consider Haugeland's thesis above about the "institutional" nature of dasein: what we Really are, our humaness, is far beyond the stretch of what language and culture, our dasein, can say as these are inherently trivializing of the human condition. This is the Totality Levinas complains about.
Of course, you already have seen this kind of talk in the Tao te Ching, but phenomenology takes this simplcity, this radical reduction to pure presence that one encounters when language is suspended, and asks, what IS it, then, that I witness in this radical state of perceptual purity? For this, one has to read Husserl's Ideas 1. I mean, this book does exactly this: describes the world
beneath, if you will, the everyday world of our dealings. Husserl's basic point is that here, we are no longer at the cutting edge of some paradigmatic theoretical thinking, for we have finally reached the brass ring of philosophy: the absolute reality. Husserl say we are already there! Henry et al say this pure encounter is inherently religious, indeed, the very essence of what it is all to be religious. I agree.
It seems strange in my opinion that he would have been the first Western philosopher to argue that the concept God cannot 'be' a Being since the idea of a being to be the source of Being is absurd in my opinion. In Eastern philosophy's Tao Te Ching for example the Tao is declared nameless (without Being)
At question would be: why consider God when it has no 'Being' (with 'Being' from a philosophical sense being 'a nature by itself for consideration')?
The discussion here with Marion, Levinas, et al, is against Heidegger's Being and Time. Heidegger started the issue by claiming that ontology is not a study of being as such (the impossible nameless pure presence of the world), but of being as an analyzable concept. Obviously I can't express his thesis here, for it is complexly laid out, and the only way to know it is to read it, and it is notoriously challenging. Hubert Dreyfus would not teach it unless one had already studied Kant. But it was Heidegger who rejected an ontology of "metaphysics of being as such," but he really didn't have any mystical feelings about this being as such like the Taoists have; there was nothing deeply profound and unspeakable to standing before one's existence in silence to receive any sublime intimation. So he really wasn't in agreement with you on this. For Heidegger, it was a "nothing". I perhaps mentioned this earlier, but this was reappropriated from Kierkegaard who of course was deeply religious (a paper I am reading now is Faith and Authenticity by Travis Obrien compares the two, I must add that reading papers like this is what gives one a deeper understanding of what is at issue, for these are real penetrating accounts).
So, being, according to Heidegger, is equated with our finitude! We are finite daseins, and this is a closed system of interpretation. There is no outside of this analysis. These French post-phenomenologists say Heidegger is simply wrong on this, for if being is a "language and logic and logos" ontology, as Heidegger says it is, then Real metaphysics is simply dismissed, and this brings the matter back into the hands of Husserl's epoche which, many hold, leads one directly to metaphysical affirmation, for the reduction of the epoche drives the authentic actuality of the world into view. This is closer to what the Taoists say (if permitted to speak) Husserl's is a "method" of Taoist discovery, one could say, and that method is a kind of apophatic theology, for it is a method of removing from perception the many (the "thickness of) presuppositions that are, as Heidegger puts it, always already there when the perceptual moment arrives. Just opening your eyes and seeing the world is massively interpretative, "thick" I say, with predelineation (Husserl's term).
When one sits quietly, meditatively, one cannot simply drop out of the long history that made one a self that can think at all. But I believe with Husserl's original insight, one can methodically bring about an alignment with something impossibly profound. Alas, confirmation of this will not appear in an argument or objective justification. Objectivity depends on shared experience, and it seems very clear that we are not all built the same way when it comes to phenomenological intuition.
When it concerns a philosophical inquiry into the fundamental source of Being one is to seek the most fundamental aspect with 'a nature by itself for consideration'.
Helped by AI I discovered that Jean-Luc Marion viewed that 'the gift of Love' is how God manifests in the world. According to the AI Jean-Luc Marion also said that God 'is' that Love which seems to be a mistake since anything that 'is' would involve Being.
Such a troublesome idea. Again, very important to see that Marion is playing against Heidegger's analysis of being. Once Heidegger announced to philosophy this phenomenological thesis in Being and Time, everything in Continental philosophy (so called. Real philosophy, I say) changed. Now this was the bench mark for thinking, the new foundation. Being and Time is THAT important. That "is" is what holds thought itself together. This notorious copula is the grounding for predication (What IS a star? It is such and such. It has certain features, but all this rests with what all of these things ARE). Being is the grounding for identity, and the verb "to be" is omnipresent explicitly or implicitly in everything we can say. The issue raised by Marion and others is, what, then, is to be "said" of what is not subsumed by this verb? This is about actuality, not language, and this actuality lies outside the very "to be".
I think this single impasse is what has led to the post modern crisis. Husserl's reduction vs Heidegger's being. Speaking for the direction this can go, the former is phenomenologically metaphysical, the latter about our phenomenological finitude .
"In Jean-Luc Marion's theory, the gift of God is love. Marion has argued that love is entirely selfless and completely committed to the other, and it is a supreme gift of self-abandonment. Marion's work on the concept of gift emphasizes the importance of self-abandonment and selflessness, and it is part of a larger project to rethink the nature of God and the relationship between God and humanity. Marion has suggested that it is through the gift of God's self that humanity is able to experience God's love. Marion's phenomenological approach leads the philosopher to the concept of "God without being" – God is not a being but love as a gift. Therefore, it can be said that the gift of God is love in Jean-Luc Marion's theory."
My conclusion would be in the case of the theory of Jean-Luc Marion that the most fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself for consideration' would be Love.
I am currently half-way reading the book In It Together by the founder of onlinephilosophyclub.com and it occurred to me that the book might touch upon the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion in a practical sense.
To me, Marion opens the door to authentic religion. Why authentic? Because God lies at the END of the reduction, to put it roughly. It is not the philosophy of apophatic reduction, but what appears when this reduction works to purify thought and perception. Like saying one does not meditate seriously just to relax better. One meditates seriously for insight, ecstatic affirmation. Husserl's reduction is, I claim, an intellectual descriptive approach to something revelatory, which is the intuitive clarity that emerges out of liberating perception from the inherited impositions of language and culture on the regular ways we experience the world. Marion takes Husserl and plays him out all the way down to existential immediacy such that epistemology and ontology ARE ONE. This is a radical state of mind, and is the brass ring of Eastern theophilosophical thinking and practice.
I am quite sure this is right, regardless of the way philosophy can resist its logic. Many think philosophy, being endlessly open, can only be endlessly at play, hence works like Wittgenstein's game theory, Derrida's Structure Signs and Play, Rorty's idea of contingency, and so on. And Heidegger's hermeneutics, which denies the possibility of settling ontology in some foundational determination. Paradoxically, this line of thinking is right and wrong. See Levinas: It's right because it is true that language is a public phenomenon that reduces anything brought before it to its own terms, so when a thing is encountered, it is instantly brought interpretatively to heel, that is, to conform to existing paradigms, just as is done in science (recall Kuhn's famous book Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn was a Kantian). It is wrong because, as Levinas wants to show, there is this transcendental, primordial dimension to our existence. Here is something from the Key to Levianas' Totality and Infinity: Levinas
does not confine himself to the traditional question of the tensions and
relations between ethics and politics; these relations and tensions
stem from a more radical dimension-in fact, it is the most radical, ultimate and ~~first,"
one: the originary ~~dimension" of human existence and Being as such. Totality and Infinity is an
attempt to show that the perspective" of morality is not a particular perspective-and therefore
not an aspect or perspective at all-since it coincides with the transnatural and transworldly or
Hmetaphysical" (non)perspective of first philosophy."g The most originary ~~experience" of the
most originary ~~reality" is already ethical, and from the outset metaphysics is
determined ethically.
Ethics is what reaches out from, not language and culture, but the world "as such". He is right! It is as if God were to announce morality, but without the anthropomorphic entity. The world as such IS inherently ethical. The reason I say Schopenhauer didn't understand the world is because he missed this, that the ethics we experience and the primacy of the Good that we witness in the world is the World's ethics, and our sundry principles that pepper history are attempts to understand this in their localized, restricted fashion. All ethics is essentially metaethics.
The 'directional type of energy' that is required at the fundament of life involves the idea that the source of the directionality for which a specific type of energy is required is to be contained within the source of that energy which therefore cannot be a random source in the environment. That might imply that the source of that energy involves a crossing point for science.
If you want to think of the matter as a scientist might, then there is some sense in this. But this is not how the Schopenhauerian view goes which posits will at the foundation. This begins with Kant and Transcendental Idealism: It is the "behind" the scenes, if you will, of OUR world, and this is way, way outside of anything science has a say about it . Will is Noumenal! And 'energy'is not a noumenal term, which makes the claims of these philosophers (your video) so extraordinary. Important to remember that these are British philosophers, and are in the analytic stream of thought which wants to reduce all things to clarity in the positivist's sense.
So try to look at this from a perspective of noumena, as impossible as this might be: Kant's method was one of extrapolation: we witness a world and realize certain structural features that can only be accounted for if there is an "outside" to all things. This is apriority, the structure of thought itself, which cannot be explained because this too would require this very structure, and this is obvious question begging. Logic cannot tell you what logic is, but, for Kant, it points to transcendence, which is what must that from which issues this world. Schopenhauer looks to ethics and value in the same way, a seriously right move that advances our understanding--it is a move toward Levinas, a qualifiedly antirationalist move grounded in our actuality, and this is a world of erratically generated horrors.
Actually, I feel now inspired to read Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation completely. And put other things a side. He may be worth the time. When I say he didn't really understand the world, I meant that he didn't see that redemption is apodictically necessary, for while it is true, as he says, that it is “not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics,” this misery is also a "meta-misery" and our blisses are "meta-blisses," and just as this plays out in the intense dramas of our existence, it also plays out in the absolute. Our drive towards the Good, in other words, is the world's drive towards the Good, for the world is a meta-world.
I would not agree with that notion. Good might be considered the most fundamental aspect in the cosmos with 'a nature by itself for philosophical consideration' but that does not imply that it is the origin of existence itself, because whatever has a nature for consideration can be said to 'exist' ('be' a Being).
In my opinion the idea that Good is the most fundamental aspect of the universe is similar to the idea that Schopenhauer's Will or Marion's Love are the most fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself' of the universe.
What is the origin of that fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself' that allows philosophical consideration? It gives rise to the idea of a concept that 'cannot be named' (has no 'being') with an example being the Tao in the Tao Te Ching.
We can name something, but the understanding can take us deep into a world where the knowledge claim behind it becomes undermined. Talk about God, for example. If you're Heidegger, you will look to the historicity of this term, that is, the many years of cultural processing that produced the idea that is so firmly an institution today. To discuss a term is to discuss a "region" of historical evolution and what might be beyond this, transcendentally, is undisclosed so far. For Heidegger, though, there is a step beyond the common knowledge claim, and this lies in ontology, which is an analysis that focuses on things like knowledge claims and what they are. This is philosophy.
But the Tao Te Ching doesn't speak where speech is actually possible. It leaves vague and distant what could be brought closer by an investigation of regional matters, that is, discussion that are adjacent or similar, things that "touch upon" what itself is untouchable. Everything that can even possibly be brought before consciousness is done so in context, always already. God or being qua being, and remember wittgenstein's Tractatus was self nullifying, claiming the whole book to be "nonsense" itself, meant only to direct and show that parts of language made no sense. Thus, to make this important point, he simply had to speak. It was wrong of him to say that the Tractatus is nonsense, and his subsequent work with language games shows that language is not so rigorously exclusive.
The whole point of Continental philosophy, one could argue, is just this: one certainly CAN speak about metaphysics just as one can speak of, say, the music of Ravel: one cannot "speak" the aesthetic givenness of the experience, obviously, but our words are not useless when we do. However, in the attempt to speak the experience itself we may talk about its descriptive qualities and employ the extensive vocabulary of music theory. This theory will never and simply cannot speak the beauty. But it can surround the beauty, indicate, compare, and structurally delineate it, and IN this discourse, one is led to an intimacy otherwise unrealized. Continental philosophy is like this: first and most importantly, it takes seriously what is serious, and what is serious is what the world wears on its sleeve, so to speak. This makes for, in response to your query about the Good, first philosophy. Terms like 'energy' as fundamental lead to a kind of thinking that has value/metavalue reconstrued according to this more fundamental category, and this is the error of "scientism". A term like 'energy' subsumes value, treats value as subordinate, as if value could be rendered in a more elementary form, that is, reduced to, something that is not value, and this divests value of its original ontology, and this belies the world; misrepresents the world as it is purely given.
Keep in mind that a valueless world has never been witnessed anymore than a cognition free world has. Is this to say there are no such things as value free and mind-independent things? It says this: whatever is what is not presented in human dasein is NOT for human dasein to say. I encounter a tree, but there is nothing to be said outside of the encounter. Nothing. This is Heidegger's (and Kierkegaard's) nothing. Empirical science's metaphysics, when it attempts to advance its ontology into philosophy, is a metaphysics of nothing.
It seems that it can be concluded that several philosophies consider a 'most fundamental aspect' with a nature by itself that can be philosophically considered. Therefore it might be of interest to compare those fundamental aspects to discover how they correlate:
- Good (the Good) by Wittgenstein and others
- Will (energy) by Schopenhauer
- Love (a gift of a non-being aspect) by Jean-Luc Marion
- Dominance (that unifies eternal monads for form and soul) by Gottfried Leibniz
- Truth
- Beauty
- ... more?
What do those 'most fundamental aspects' that would fundamentally underlay the universe have in common?
For one: they share an apparent origin or source that is 'beyond comprehension' (e.g. 'cannot be named' as in the Tao Te Ching).
Secondly: the key characteristic of those fundamental aspects is that in the most simple form they imply a deviation of meaninglessness or a deviation of (the idea of) 'nothing'.
In my opinion it is that deviation that allows for the idea of 'the Good' or Will or Love or Dominance.
At question is therefore: what is that deviation of meaninglessness?
An AI confirmed that "the directedness of work in life's fundamental characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is to be considered work by itself that requires energy that cannot originate from a spontaneous and random source of energy in the environment".
'directedness by itself' is a deviation of meaninglessness that can be described as 'Good' or Will or Love or Dominance.
In conclusion it appears that philosophically the most fundamental aspect with a nature by itself for consideration as fundamental origin of the universe is 'deviation by itself' relative to meaninglessness or (the idea of) nothing as a directional source of energy (as it is perceived within the world) that provides form and soul in the cosmos.
From the perspective of life that deviation can be named 'Love' or 'Will' or 'Dominance' or 'Truth' or 'Beauty' which is in a way an attempt to meaningfully 'color' that aspect. And that coloring can be justified philosophically by the mere ability to do so.
Who can deny that a deviation of meaninglessness is Love or Good? Both concepts have no 'source' that can be named or considered which means automatically that at the root it is a deviation of meaninglessness. It is then to be considered that the limit of the humans consideration potential is the sole origin of the coloring potential of the most fundamental aspect of existence by which that aspect can have many names and ideas that all seem to be whole by itself and a sufficient ground for philosophical theories.
Fundamentally however it seems that the most fundamental aspect of the universe involves 'deviation per se' relative to meaninglessness.
But I get the distinct impression you are harboring a model for existence that is implicitly from empirical science.
Then consider phenomenology: there is only one bottom line, and this is the givenness of what appears. If something does not appear, it has no status in being. If we take this as foundational, then we have THE method for a determination. Wittgenstein's taboo is entirely in line here. Schopenhauer fares no better than Nietzsche's will to power. Here is what Jean Luc Marion in his God Without Being says about this: Gods come and go, but they all can be reduced to a metaphysical singularity, the will to power, which is infinitely malleable. But then, this too is just another of the gods of history. Calling it will or will to power is just another attempt to break away from the finitude of ordinary language using ordinary language, and this ordinariness is defined by enculturation. It dcan have no privileged place in metaphysics. There is only one way to pull this rabbit our of the metaphysical hat, and this is achieved by discovering something that presents t o the understanding an intimation that is both not of the discursivity of "being", that is, the Totality of Levinas and Heidegger that can "speak" and possess and know, i.e., language and culture, and yet authoritative intuitively, directly, apart from the contingencies of culture: value.
Sticking one's hand in a pot of boiling water is a vivid example. Our ethics says don't do this to another, it is ethically prohibited. What does this mean at the level of basic questions? It asks for an authoritative source. Here, we are in the same boat as with the Ravel (above): one cannot speak this pain. And though the pain is endlessly bound up in human contingencies (i.e., entanglements you can imagine) when encountered in the world, there is something here that is NOT conditioned by these, and this is pain as such.
Please forget about Leibniz and truth. These are off the mark (and if you do want to talk about this, fine). But beauty and love, why are these so important? For the same reason pain is important: we have reached here, in our analysis sof what is there, in the presence of presence, so to speak, of an authority that speaks "outside" of the totality of constructed values for we are in the "as such" mode of thought. Being AS SUCH presents beauty as Good, and the Good is unspeakably Good.
Ask of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, metaphysical will, why is this primary? The point I am making here is that love, beauty, pain, misery and all of that literally speak without words. They are manifestly first philosophy via no other source than their own nature. No higher authority. One might call this the voice of God: metaethics is the voice of God.
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