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Religion and philosophy

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Re: Religion and philosophy

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I just lost (again) a longer and more detailed reply. It doesn't matter. The only thing I really care about responding to here is the claim that all references to Jesus in the flesh stem from Mark. I'm sure you know this is highly controversial. There are several references in Paul, and though Carrier claims to find their interpretation as references to a fleshly Jesus implausible, his arguments are neither impartial nor well considered. There are references in Tacitus and Josephus that, despite some clear later fraudulent interpolations in Josephus, still many historians find sufficient to infer a real person. And there is the obvious question why a mythical Jesus would need "appearances" as Paul is intent on referencing, whereas it is clear that a claim of resurrection of the crucified (human, earthly) Jesus is a very different claim without such appearances.
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Ranging here from philosophy to religion to climate politics… all fascinating. I have found my copy of Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity and will look at the chapter on oral history.
Harry Marks wrote: whether "thought", i.e. logical processing, is more fundamental than "caring" or vice-versa. When thinking about the world, or for that matter about the self, is consciously in service to caring, then it does not derail caring from its job to give life meaning even if it uses risky dualistic distinctions, including between subject and object.
That point about logic and care summarises the main argument made by Heidegger in Being and Time, the great original source-book for existentialism. Such ideas percolate through the zeitgeist, in recognition that the theories of identity in traditional logic are defective as descriptions of human existence.

Heidegger held that we have two ways of encountering reality, describing and relating. Describing uses the objective methods of scientific factual measurement and logic, while relating is immersed in spiritual values of involvement and engagement, working out what we value as important. I discussed such distinctions in my MA thesis on The Place of Ethics in Heidegger’s Ontology, but have not been able to engage other philosophers much, perhaps because I read Heidegger against a bigger natural paradigm of the structure of time, and because the ethical dimension of these ideas is immensely complex in the way it integrates philosophy and religion.

These themes for an existential theory of value mean that authentic existence is grounded in relationships of care, concern and conscience. Scientific knowledge has a secondary supporting role to the primary framework of care as the meaning of being in the construction of human identity.

You suggest to put “thinking in service to caring”. Part of the challenge in developing such ideas involves agreement on social values. Such values are riven with wordless disagreement, due to the difficulty in answering questions and defining assumptions around human identity in individual and community dimensions. What is a human being? Modern western culture tends to assume an individual exists as a separate entity, but this individualism neglects the social construction of identity.

So it is helpful to look at questions like the meaning of care against social philosophy and psychology. Jung’s framework of the collective unconscious and its archetypal symbols is one way to recognise that our individual surface logic conceals hidden connectedness.
Harry Marks wrote: The coherent unity of the universe may be proposed to exist materially, for example in the functioning of physical laws which are the same in every time and place, but this is mere symbol because it does not address the values issues raised by caring.
Describing coherent unity of physical law as ‘mere symbol’ raises the problem in philosophy and religion of how material facts relate to values that we care about. Religion, in its conventional popular mythology, tends to hold that values emerge organically from revealed facts about God. The trouble with that belief is its tendency to treat our descriptions of God as literal truth, when they are really symbolic metaphors.

The scientific worldview has a real problem with values, due to the positivist arguments that no description of facts can ever logically entail a decision of what we should do, and the absence of scientific evidence for God. Our sense of values comes from some other source than our factual knowledge, instead involving axiomatic beliefs about what is important and good. The scientific belief that evidence and logic are good is a great example of a creative value judgement that rests ultimately on assumptions about what is important and valuable to human beings.

What you call “the values issues raised by caring” are central to all human identity that is not pathologically isolated. Caring establishes networks of relationships and importance. Where we start to see how this impinges on the fact/value and is/ought questions in philosophy is wen we recognise that networks of care are most effective and sustainable when they properly incorporate factual knowledge, and are not grounded in fantasy. In politics this emerges when policy is grounded in evidence. For example, climate policy is best set in the framework of science.

The problem is that the religious sentiment of care is too often grounded in false fantasy and fable. Literal belief in myth wrecks the structure of what we should care about and why, giving religion feet of clay and foundations of sand.
Harry Marks wrote: Apparent dualisms (i.e. artificial simplicities created by misleading appearance), such as Descartes' mind/body split, are just distractions from the important dualisms like those between good and evil or clarity and muddle. The important dualisms are real, from the perspective of thought. But they are nevertheless part of a fundamental unity from the perspective of caring, and when this fundamental unity is perceived/experienced, the revolutionary perspective causes vital spiritual awakening.
Heidegger presented the deconstruction of the solipsistic myth of the individual in Cartesian philosophy as the core argument for existential care. He dismantled the assumptions behind the philosophy of “I think therefore I am” by asking ‘who else other than human existence as being in the world with others could be a thinking thing?’ So the whole modern enlightenment claim from Descartes that our isolated intellectual existence can provide the basis of systematic logic is cast into radical doubt by recognition of care as the meaning of being.

Descartes remains an immensely important philosopher for his influence on the rational framework of secular science. I view his ideas as a tactical winning of deist space for science, invoking God as the guarantor of existence in order to get religion out of science. Cartesian mind/body dualism updated the Pauline dualism of spirit and flesh into a scientific framework. Descartes’ core ideas were the theory of clear and distinct ideas and mathematical measurement as the criterion of truth. The dynamic power and productivity of Cartesian method in modern imperial empirical expansion conceals its psychological damage to the relational nature of human identity.

Your description of the conflict between good and evil shows the essential issue in discussion of duality is more moral than factual. The point seems to be that good clarity is in harmony with the unity of all things, whereas evil muddle sows chaos and confusion, preventing vision of unity as ground for a transformative social perspective.
Harry Marks wrote:The taoist way of putting these things together is very helpful… The perceiver is an essential part of the unity
This sense of engaged unity in the Taoist vision of the one way of nature illustrates a key difference between traditional eastern and western mentalities. Western philosophy, as illustrated by Descartes, assumes the separation of the perceiver from the perception.

I think there is immense value, even if the model is oversimplified, in seeing eastern thought, especially the high philosophy in Buddhism, as having retained important insights that overcome the alienation from nature in western thought. It is helpful to consider western philosophy as grounded in the events described in religion with the myth of the fall from grace into corruption, as seen in the pathologies of Christendom and its scientific successor culture.

Belief in the Historical Jesus is part of that western depravity. But Eastern thought is not some panacea; it can be criticised for being too stagnant and passive. Part of the integration of the metaphysical duality of east and west therefore involves the reconciliation of the values of activity and passivity.
Harry Marks wrote: The world being part of myself is just paradox if it is rendered as objective "observation", but the experience that makes it meaningful is the awareness that my self includes not only objectively verifiable "influences" from the outside but a participation-by-caring in the larger projects undertaken by others, by the common experience of finding meaning in life, and thus, by all of nature.
Careful precision can help in use of such oceanic amorphous language. Hesse’s Siddhartha opened this discussion. A key theme in that book is the call to resist simplistic assertions of the unity of all things when such unity conflicts with lived experience and cannot be explained.
Harry Marks wrote: My relationship to life and the universe is part of my caring, which is constitutive of my self.
One way to see this sense of the world as part of myself is in the Biblical idea that man is made in the image of God. Seeing God as nature, and human thought as where nature reflects itself as concept through scientific knowledge of the laws of physics, is a good example of the whole appearing in the part. Any effort to reconcile philosophy and religion has to give such mystical universality some precision.
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Harry Marks wrote: you fail to recognize that the stream that is my self is more fundamentally about caring than about distinction from other selves.
It is not so much that I “fail to recognise” than that I am pointing out the paradoxical fractal complexity in this idea you are raising that for human existence the whole is in the part.

Donne put this well in his famous poem ‘No Man is an Island’, with the great line ‘any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’. The “me” that is diminished by things that happen to others is constituted by care, not physiology. That even inspired Hemingway to see that some things should matter for everyone.

Ordinary language assumes the part is in the whole in spatial terms. A segment is in an orange. The whole fruit is not in the segment, except as metaphor, genetics and potential. But the whole world is in every person’s soul, in Donne’s sense of mattering.
Harry Marks wrote: , and so includes the universe not ontologically but existentially,
This distinction you are presenting between the ontological and the existential is confusing. It involves too narrow a concept of the ontological, equating it with the material. Ontology is the study of being, and human being is constituted by care, not matter. That means that authentic personhood contains the world. A clearer statement would be that a human body does not physically contain the spatio-temporal universe.
Harry Marks wrote: This was opened to me by an exercise I have used with students. "Define yourself, as best you can, in four words." Like most people, I chose my four words to distinguish myself from others. That's the dualistic mind at work. The person who presented it to me recalled someone who had said, "to start I'd have to say I'm a human being." The flash of insight I got from that illustration is as close as I have come to directly perceiving that "All is One."
So we could imagine a continuum of short definitions of the self from something like “reflection of the universe” through “child of my parents” to “cyclist and book collector”. This movement from universality to specificity illustrates a movement from who you really are to what you usually do. The universal focuses on what is the same or identical about you and everyone, while the specific focus is what marks you out as an individual. As Plato said,
essence precedes existence.
Harry Marks wrote: You are imposing by the ways you imply betterness that "better" understanding is measured in ways which are most objective, which are most independent of our caring about them. That's fine for description of the workings of nature, but, once again, it subtracts out the element of caring which actually defines "better" understanding.
Here the continuum stretches from the distinct clarity of objective facts to the emotional resonance of subjective values. Facts tell us what matter is and values tell us what matters. Your mileage may vary on how much matter matters. The quantitative tendency in science is to see emotional feelings as just word salad, lacking rigorous meaning. But with religious care grounded in emotion, this exclusion by science has a nihilistic and solipsistic quality, like Wilde’s cynic who could see the price of everything and the value of nothing. As the great nihilist philosopher Freddy Mercury famously argued, nothing really matters.
Harry Marks wrote: "looks more like metaphorical poetry than like serious philosophy": perfectly captures the mistaken dualism of the mind's analytical blindness. "Serious philosophy" is taken to impose the objective independence from caring, rather than engaging with life as it is lived. As if the perfect ontology would somehow perfectly exclude caring. Bollocks, as the Brits say. By contrast, metaphorical poetry engages caring directly, to find the music in the many and varied elements of caring.
Never mind the bollocks. That was how Johnny Rotten famously expressed the philosophy of punk rock with its sense of the social disintegration of care into nihilism. There is very much a problem with this equation between care and engagement. Caring too much is perceived as leading to biased and corrupt conflict of interest. If I care passionately about something, I am liable to distort the information pertaining to it. Christians care passionately that God intervened in the world in the person of Jesus Christ, and as a result their comments on the topic tend to lack the dispassionate ability to consider evidence objectively. There is scholarly value in rigorous objectivity, in refusing to accept claims that lack solid evidence.
Harry Marks wrote: a real Bodhisattva helps a person orchestrate their caring in such a way that their own individual process of caring is in harmony with the give-and-take process that the universe offers to them.
This Buddhist theme of harmony contrasts with the Christian idea of the way of the cross, that the world is so dominated by evil that the path of harmony involves transformation through suffering and sacrifice of self. The Bodhisattva is seen in Buddhism as one who has “a spontaneous wish to attain enlightenment motivated by great compassion for all sentient beings, accompanied by a falling away of the attachment to the illusion of an inherently existing self.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhicitta
Harry Marks wrote: To put the matter a different way, accuracy matters because of the reasons we care about accuracy, not because it has some divine status of imperialistic rule over our lives. Our caring is fundamental to accuracy's mattering. Or anything else's mattering: there is no objective mattering.
The importance of accuracy varies with context. Yet the counterpoint here is that someone can say, if no one cares then accuracy does not matter. And many people do think that way, especially in demoralized bureaucracies that lack any incentive for performance. Care serves as a primary impetus for values such as accuracy. Atul Gawande explained in his Reith Lectures a few years ago that as a surgeon he was shocked by the contrast between hospitals in India and in the USA, due mainly to his perception that the Indian health system lacked values of care that are just assumed in western culture. When no one cares, you can get away with anything. They just letcher...
Harry Marks wrote: these trees are prayers.
Tagore
Beautiful poem, imagining the earth as conscious, with trees as its ideas. I have been thinking a lot about the nature of prayer, as expression of intention. So in this image from Tagore, when the earth intends complexity as the goal of evolution, trees are important bearers of this natural prayer.

Here is a nice video of my daughter Diana (in pink) singing the famous Flower Duet from Lakme.
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Robert Tulip wrote:Heidegger held that we have two ways of encountering reality, describing and relating. Describing uses the objective methods of scientific factual measurement and logic, while relating is immersed in spiritual values of involvement and engagement, working out what we value as important.
I think the difference between encountering instrumentally and encountering in openness will prove to be more fundamental neurologically. Describing is pretty basic, but it can be a matter of open relation, as when awe is the primary response rather than calculation of possible usefulness.

Philosophy tends to see description as basic. I disagree. We learned, over millennia, to describe "objectively" and this still involves suppression of value processing in order to move to "important" processing of information. When my chemistry teacher asked the class to describe a burning candle, few could do it with any thoroughness, as they ran out of observations quickly because either they thought in terms of the main, most obvious attributes or they got lost in the minutiae of details and could not identify the facts worth mentioning. Description is a learned, (and to a large extent social), process.
Robert Tulip wrote:You suggest to put “thinking in service to caring”. Part of the challenge in developing such ideas involves agreement on social values.
Why agreement? Rather I think philosophy is still getting over the Thomist assumption that values must be the right values in order to be admissible as organizers of thought. I am arguing that the mode of thinking will impose error when it comes to the understanding of our spiritual self, if it begins with caring being for purposes defined by some ontology.
Robert Tulip wrote:Such values are riven with wordless disagreement, due to the difficulty in answering questions and defining assumptions around human identity in individual and community dimensions.
And this creates error? Only if the subjective process of caring is somehow artificially objectified (as in Shaw's "a barbarian is a person who thinks the customs of his tribe are the laws of the universe.")
Robert Tulip wrote:So it is helpful to look at questions like the meaning of care against social philosophy and psychology. Jung’s framework of the collective unconscious and its archetypal symbols is one way to recognise that our individual surface logic conceals hidden connectedness.
One of the articles of faith (if you will) of modern psychology is that if we uncover the subconscious (or collective unconscious) values we have been repressing, it liberates us from dysfunctional thought processes. This has to be revised somewhat in light of neurological discoveries of the last 45 years. Yet it remains true that culture can get away with repressing matters like connectedness "right under our noses." Setting aside the imperative of objectivity is a good start on liberating us from that particular dysfunction.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: The coherent unity of the universe may be proposed to exist materially, for example in the functioning of physical laws which are the same in every time and place, but this is mere symbol because it does not address the values issues raised by caring.
Describing coherent unity of physical law as ‘mere symbol’ raises the problem in philosophy and religion of how material facts relate to values that we care about. Religion, in its conventional popular mythology, tends to hold that values emerge organically from revealed facts about God. The trouble with that belief is its tendency to treat our descriptions of God as literal truth, when they are really symbolic metaphors.
That insight needs to be mined much more than it has to date. Nevertheless, I want to clarify that my claim is that the unity of material reality is not the unity of mattering nor does it deliver that unity as a side effect. As such it is, at best, a symbol of why "All is One." The harmony of values implied by a construction like "shalom"(or, if you prefer the modern lingo, "flourishing") is the basis for the perception of unity experienced by mystics and the ontological unity of life as it is lived.
Robert Tulip wrote:Our sense of values comes from some other source than our factual knowledge, instead involving axiomatic beliefs about what is important and good. The scientific belief that evidence and logic are good is a great example of a creative value judgement that rests ultimately on assumptions about what is important and valuable to human beings.
I don't understand why we should use either "beliefs" about what is important or good, or "axiomatic". We are referring, I think, to Haidt's elephant, the internal, unreflective sense of what is good and beautiful and valuable. These are not beliefs until someone asks us to put them in the form of propositions, and they are not axiomatic in that we can and do question and revise them.

I think there is a very subtle process (Ursula LeGuin, in one story, referred to it as "working magic") of allying instinctive values with cultural constructions. This can be as well-intentioned as a parent urging their child, "You want to stand on your own two feet, don't you?" and as nefarious as a racist ad arguing that a political candidate doesn't take crime (by "those people") seriously.

The scientific value placed on evidence and logic is based on the long experience with evidence being replicable and the principles evolved from it by logic being dependable. Note that when logic fails in the face of evidence, as with quantum mechanical processes, evidence is given the priority. A kind of illogical logic was created (in some sense like non-Euclidean geometry that way) to deal with it, and it deals well with it, even if Einstein is still rolling over in his grave about it.

The cultural co-opting of instinctive values (working magic) is part of the process of integrating our value-formation process with "reality." Philosophy may be thought of as an effort to ground value-formation on "objective" criteria, but my view is that this must be subjected to the process of values-formation itself, in that we should be familiar with the reasons for preferring objectivity (e.g. avoiding the barbarian's confusion) and thus the limits of the preference (e.g. avoiding the pitfall of "objective" relativism in values by avoiding the absolute priority of the process demands of objectivity).
Robert Tulip wrote:Caring establishes networks of relationships and importance. Where we start to see how this impinges on the fact/value and is/ought questions in philosophy is when we recognise that networks of care are most effective and sustainable when they properly incorporate factual knowledge, and are not grounded in fantasy. In politics this emerges when policy is grounded in evidence. For example, climate policy is best set in the framework of science.
Yes, this is very good. A social process which sets the sacred status of symbols above factuality and evidence is pathological. It will lack some degrees of "effectiveness" and "sustainability" as you put it. That doesn't mean it is a simple matter to integrate sacred symbolism with complex sources of knowledge about the world. But academics have more responsibility than most to make the effort, and I don't agree with the cop-out that whatever they choose to engage as problems is valuable in itself, much less the evil notion that whatever interpretations they put on their findings must be endorsed, even if it directly sabotages the networks of value and care.
Robert Tulip wrote:The problem is that the religious sentiment of care is too often grounded in false fantasy and fable. Literal belief in myth wrecks the structure of what we should care about and why, giving religion feet of clay and foundations of sand.
Tillich analyzed the unbroken myth as idolatrous, that is, he identified the error on the values side as more fundamental than the error on the factual side. This is very useful in dealing with myths that modernity leads to, such as "science will save us," or "markets allocate resources efficiently" or "the state will wither away."
Robert Tulip wrote:Cartesian mind/body dualism updated the Pauline dualism of spirit and flesh into a scientific framework.
And as such they were even more misleading than Paul's dualism, which is, after all, very helpful if not taken too literally. Life according to the spirit is life with spiritual values as organizing principle, and life according to the flesh is the fundamentally chaotic process of validating whatever emotions we feel and whatever motivations those emotions manage to attach to.
Robert Tulip wrote:Your description of the conflict between good and evil shows the essential issue in discussion of duality is more moral than factual. The point seems to be that good clarity is in harmony with the unity of all things, whereas evil muddle sows chaos and confusion, preventing vision of unity as ground for a transformative social perspective.
I think you are trying too hard to make a clarity of my muddle. What I had in mind is that dualism in values has some usefulness, like the distinction between yin and yang does, but that we must actively search for a synthesis which accepts that both principles are present for a reason, and therefore must not be artificially repressed. Sometimes evil (e.g. having a nuclear arsenal) can be used for good, and sometimes a muddle (e.g. the feelings of a grieving person) can be more informative than an artificial clarity imposed on such a situation.
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: you fail to recognize that the stream that is my self is more fundamentally about caring than about distinction from other selves.
It is not so much that I “fail to recognise” than that I am pointing out the paradoxical fractal complexity in this idea you are raising that for human existence the whole is in the part.

Donne put this well in his famous poem ‘No Man is an Island’, with the great line ‘any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’. The “me” that is diminished by things that happen to others is constituted by care, not physiology. That even inspired Hemingway to see that some things should matter for everyone.

Ordinary language assumes the part is in the whole in spatial terms. A segment is in an orange. The whole fruit is not in the segment, except as metaphor, genetics and potential. But the whole world is in every person’s soul, in Donne’s sense of mattering.
I think that captures the point very well.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:, and so includes the universe not ontologically but existentially,
This distinction you are presenting between the ontological and the existential is confusing. It involves too narrow a concept of the ontological, equating it with the material. Ontology is the study of being, and human being is constituted by care, not matter. That means that authentic personhood contains the world. A clearer statement would be that a human body does not physically contain the spatio-temporal universe.
Well, yes, you are correct. I don't know a term for "using ontological thought processes" and took the short-cut of contrasting our material inability to contain the material universe with our existential inability to fail to consider the concept of the entire universe to be one among many concepts which matter. Your way of putting it is fine.
Robert Tulip wrote:So we could imagine a continuum of short definitions of the self from something like “reflection of the universe” through “child of my parents” to “cyclist and book collector”. This movement from universality to specificity illustrates a movement from who you really are to what you usually do. The universal focuses on what is the same or identical about you and everyone, while the specific focus is what marks you out as an individual.
I think I was attempting to communicate poetically, like John Donne or William Blake (but not nearly as beautifully). The specific person that is me is more fundamentally universal than differentiated.
Robert Tulip wrote:As Plato said, essence precedes existence.
Now I suspect you of teasing me, since Sartre based his whole philosophical system on "existence precedes essence." One way to put the two together is to recognize what is the "essence" of a person in the universal potential to shape one's specific essence. We exist as a soul.
Robert Tulip wrote:Here the continuum stretches from the distinct clarity of objective facts to the emotional resonance of subjective values. Facts tell us what matter is and values tell us what matters. Your mileage may vary on how much matter matters. The quantitative tendency in science is to see emotional feelings as just word salad, lacking rigorous meaning. But with religious care grounded in emotion, this exclusion by science has a nihilistic and solipsistic quality, like Wilde’s cynic who could see the price of everything and the value of nothing. As the great nihilist philosopher Freddy Mercury famously argued, nothing really matters.
Okay, I see you understand your existentialism very well, and apologize if I have implied otherwise.
Robert Tulip wrote:Johnny Rotten famously expressed the philosophy of punk rock with its sense of the social disintegration of care into nihilism. There is very much a problem with this equation between care and engagement. Caring too much is perceived as leading to biased and corrupt conflict of interest. If I care passionately about something, I am liable to distort the information pertaining to it.
Bravo! And fair enough.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: a real Bodhisattva helps a person orchestrate their caring in such a way that their own individual process of caring is in harmony with the give-and-take process that the universe offers to them.
This Buddhist theme of harmony contrasts with the Christian idea of the way of the cross, that the world is so dominated by evil that the path of harmony involves transformation through suffering and sacrifice of self.
The contrast may be illusory, or at least too categorical. Jesus did not overturn the Roman Empire, he overcame it. He did not address himself to the disharmony that was empire, but to the submission by the Jewish power structure and culture to that disharmony. They thought the Messiah would be like Judas Maccabeus! (Or Menachim Begin.) But yes, accepting physical suffering and pursuing social self-emptying are not the same as the process of overcoming attachment advocated by Buddhism (though they are remarkably related.)
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: To put the matter a different way, accuracy matters because of the reasons we care about accuracy, not because it has some divine status of imperialistic rule over our lives. Our caring is fundamental to accuracy's mattering. Or anything else's mattering: there is no objective mattering.
The importance of accuracy varies with context. Yet the counterpoint here is that someone can say, if no one cares then accuracy does not matter. And many people do think that way, especially in demoralized bureaucracies that lack any incentive for performance. Care serves as a primary impetus for values such as accuracy.
Yes, absolutely. One way to see integrity is that it recognizes that things matter even if everyone around you has given up on them (or never learned to care about them.)
Robert Tulip wrote:Beautiful poem, imagining the earth as conscious, with trees as its ideas. I have been thinking a lot about the nature of prayer, as expression of intention. So in this image from Tagore, when the earth intends complexity as the goal of evolution, trees are important bearers of this natural prayer.
Nice. I am not sure I would even go so far as to assert that nature "intends" complexity as the goal of evolution. Evolution does give rise to complexity, interestingly enough, and blossoms are one expression of that, but one can see "motivation" and "fulfillment" in a process without insisting on consciousness or intention.
The lovely Diana has a beautiful voice. Thanks for this.
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Harry Marks wrote:If our ego, or consciously aware thinking mind, is constituted by objectivity,
Now some readers here may be wondering Harry how you and I have time and interest to engage such abstract ideas. It is a great opportunity to share ideas I have ruminated on for a long time, casting them out into the wide blue yonder. My view is that our discussions are touching on some big and timeless topics, as well as some that are very timely, and on the interaction between the timeless and the timely. As they say in the classics, under the eye of eternity.

In philosophy, the meaning of objectivity is a core topic. I see objectivity in a different way from how you have characterised it here. Firstly, the ego is generally not constituted by objectivity but by subjectivity, with people seeing the world from their own personal point of view conditioned by their interests and prejudices and opinions.

Perhaps what you mean is that the ego imagines its opinions are objective, in the sense that no one can ever coherently say “I believe my opinion is false”. The fact a claim is my opinion generally means I believe it is true, leaving aside topics where we do not hold strong opinions. And if I think something is true, I think it is objectively true, by analytic extension, even if I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
Harry Marks wrote: [ego] is committed as a matter of self-protection to the illusion that mattering is objective,
That could almost serve as a definition of the religious mindset, the assumption that the mythology of what matters in our cultural tradition has an absolute eternal objective status. Conventional religion sees mattering as handed down by God through objective stable revelation. The subtleties of seeing claims as symbol or metaphor remove this objective quality in religion, and therefore do not cut it for the mass market which demands simple absolute secure verities that believers can set and forget.
Harry Marks wrote: then [ego] will suffer by attachment.
This is precisely the problem with false claims of objectivity. Incorrectly assuming that symbolic language is literal is a prime miscreant in this caper. Attachment to the literal claim blinds us to its symbolic multivalence and ambiguity, producing a narrow dogma of exclusive and intolerant bigotry.

One thing I like about science is its ability to generate a detached sense of objectivity. For example, Einsteinian relativity, even if it does not offer a complete theory of everything, does a very good objective job of explaining major questions such as the apparent motion of galaxies and the structure of deep time. Where even science suffers from attachment is not in its scientific claims but in the associated metaphysics, the claims about what science really means.

In Freudian terms, it seems claims about objectivity operate at the level of the super-ego.
Harry Marks wrote: The ego co-opts some parts of the id to resist impulses which undermine its stranglehold on the type of awareness that is admissible. Those are "the limitations of the ego." Fundamentally, they rely on repression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego says “According to this Freudian model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.” Trying to understand your statement against this framework, you are saying awareness uses instinct to repress desire. That repressive function was assigned by Freud not to instinctive id but to the super-ego, the cultural sense of duty that sublimates chaotic animal desires into orderly spiritual discipline and creativity.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:But how can such an enlightened self find motive for action, given the role of ego in motivation?
Ego is free to find reasons, but if it goes about this in a way that represses our identity in common with the larger "water" of motivation, then it becomes a barrier to enlightenment.
Hesse in Siddhartha uses this “water” metaphor to say the cosmos is like a river and we are like drops of water flowing along in it. That image has some tension with how the ego is constituted by resistance, by swimming against the flow. Common identity, drifting with the tide, often believes deluded myths, which must be identified and challenged to achieve enlightenment. You seem to be using common identity to mean an underlying shared objective reality, as distinct from prevailing subjective cultural beliefs, opening the problem of the relation between real and perceived identities.
Harry Marks wrote: Hindu thought is often seen in the West as denying motive for action, and it has at times imposed a quietism or detachment which resisted the ego's restless search for new and better ways.
A key problem is fatalism, seen in the Islamic beliefs in ‘Inshallah’ and ‘Kismet’ or the Hindu belief in Karma as reincarnation. Part of the greatness of modern western capitalist culture has been its assertion of individual freedom of the will as able to escape the bounds of determinism.
Harry Marks wrote: Better is to embrace the search but be humble about the "betterness".
Yes, the search for new knowledge and methods is the basis of innovation and productivity, but often brings an arrogant disdain toward fate, where humility is needed to consider all the impacts of productive freedom.
Harry Marks wrote: After all, science is very useful, and may already have set in motion extinction of the human race by outpacing our ability to harmonize motivations. In my experience, people who cannot find any humility to have about their regard for science are in the grip of attachment, usually subconscious and mythological.
I don’t think the fatalistic idea that science and technology will kill us all is right, but it does indicate potentials from nuclear war and climate change that need to be taken seriously and addressed as security threats. This is where the subconscious myths need to be analysed, especially the conflicting memes of progress and fall.

The psychological attachment to scientific progress is like any paradigm, where its anomalies need to be explained away by believers, as seen most vividly in the absurd pernicious denial of climate change, which makes as much sense and has as much moral value as denial of the Jewish Holocaust, ie less than none. Climate denial is like saying acceptance of climate science challenges our core mythological identity as modern secular homo economicus, which people find more comfortable than any upsetting facts.
Harry Marks wrote: One does not escape from the world, one escapes from illusion-based attachment to the world. If you cannot see that escape as fundamental to kenosis, to the turning to Jerusalem, then you have missed the main points in non-dualism.
Kenosis is one of those beautiful paradoxical theological terms that are worth knowing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis Kenosis means the renunciation of the divine nature by Christ in the Incarnation, as explained by Paul in Philippians 2:6-11: “Christ, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

This idea of kenosis introduces a dualistic ambiguity about the nature of the world, between reality and imagination, description and construction, matter and idea. Our attachment is to the world as imaginary constructed idea. Renunciation or escape from such attachment recognises a higher reality, which in my view needs to be compatible with the scientific vision of real described matter. Gnostics see and saw the socially constructed world as the source of evil, but their tormentors in the church twisted this to the false claim that Gnostics regarded matter as evil.

Kenosis, the ‘self-emptying’ of Christ, constructs an ethical epistemology of the hypostatic union of matter and spirit in the person of the messiah, the last as first, seeing the king of glory as manifest in the least things of the world. ‘What you did to the least of these you did to me’, in the words of Christ in the Last Judgement in Matthew 25.
Harry Marks wrote: The line between description as process and construction as process is at least fractally intricate, if not altogether illusory.
Yes, and there is a respectable line of scientific thought that constructs epistemology around the concept of “Mind Dependent Reality”, recognising that all linguistic discussion depends on mental construction, even while it aims to describe a reality that may be theorised as independent of mind.

Kant opened this with his argument that knowledge is about phenomena as they appear to us, while the thing in itself, the noumenon, is strictly speaking unknowable.
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Robert Tulip wrote:Now some readers here may be wondering Harry how you and I have time and interest to engage such abstract ideas. It is a great opportunity to share ideas I have ruminated on for a long time, casting them out into the wide blue yonder.
This discussion is giving me a thrill, similar to taking on board some of the deep ideas that a person would never have gotten for themselves (like Dedekind cuts, to use a really basic example, or non-Euclidean geometry, or, in a kind of big fail, "God behind God" - fail because I didn't get it sorted out before turning in my essay and the prof accused me of an existential cop-out). In philosophy class, and even in math classes, I never have the feeling that I "get" an idea until I put it to use. I have to get it clear enough in my own mind to ask questions of it and confront it with issues outside the original framework in which I find it. Teachers sometimes got tired of me asking, "Could you give an example?"
But I have had the quadrangle of Objectivity/Subjectivity crossed with Facts/Values lurking in the back of some discussions I considered very important, many of them here. This has been my first effort to really put them together, and I doubt I could have gotten even this far if not for meeting up with you, as someone who also has some familiarity with existentialism and Jungian psychology. So I hope this has been even half as fun for you as it has for me.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:If our ego, or consciously aware thinking mind, is constituted by objectivity, [that is if it is committed as a matter of self-protection to the illusion that mattering is objective, then it will suffer by attachment.]
In philosophy, the meaning of objectivity is a core topic. I see objectivity in a different way from how you have characterised it here. Firstly, the ego is generally not constituted by objectivity but by subjectivity, with people seeing the world from their own personal point of view conditioned by their interests and prejudices and opinions.

Perhaps what you mean is that the ego imagines its opinions are objective, in the sense that no one can ever coherently say “I believe my opinion is false”. The fact a claim is my opinion generally means I believe it is true, leaving aside topics where we do not hold strong opinions. And if I think something is true, I think it is objectively true, by analytic extension, even if I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
I requoted the second part of my statement so the context would be a bit clearer. I was dealing with your definition of ego, which I took to be more Jungian in its approach than Freudian, but still approximately the same concept.

My use of "constituted" was sloppy. Sorry. I am trying to think in terms of process, rather than entity. The thinking process can be, maybe must be, trained. (My example of describing the candle in another context is very relevant: what we are able to take and use even in a simple observation exercise is shaped by mattering - by being able to assess what level of detail, of generality and example, actually matters. I find it to be the most important skill we teachers try to teach, and the most difficult to teach.) And if the thinking process always insists to itself that it is being objective, then it is repressing something vital.

Consider the implications for a moment. We train our thinking to be as objective as possible, and yet at the heart of thinking there is the subjectivity - the absolutely inescapable subjectivity - of mattering. So what are we doing when we "try" to be objective? How can that process be conceptualized without actually being in denial? It's a tough problem.

Now consider the paradox at the heart of "The fact a claim is my opinion generally means I believe it is true," as you put it. On matters of factuality I have no quarrel with this. Obviously there are degrees of conviction and of verification, but those are not critical to the problem. On issues of values, we run into the nub of the problem. The "truth" of saying an action is right is intrinsically subjective, not because "it is just my opinion", but because the whole concept of "right" is mattering through and through.

I have argued many times that some things are objectively wrong, but that depends on making rigorous the meaning of the terms right and wrong. The wrongness is in the meaning of the term, not in some provable external process to which we can compare the issue. "Right" is much more likely to be undecidable. It is not contradictory to say "equality of my wife's career with mine is the principle which is right for me" without saying that must be true for every (heterosexual, cis-gender) couple. For that reason the notion of "true" being applied to issues of right and wrong is misleading. Not because I am a committed relativist, but because the term "true" presupposes a process of comparing the concept to some external reality, and that objective comparison process is a fatally flawed one to use for thinking about right and wrong.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: [ego] is committed as a matter of self-protection to the illusion that mattering is objective,
That could almost serve as a definition of the religious mindset, the assumption that the mythology of what matters in our cultural tradition has an absolute eternal objective status. Conventional religion sees mattering as handed down by God through objective stable revelation.
Two observations raised by this point. The first is that I have taken to referring to "authority-based" religion for the social process which works like this. And, like the authoritarian mindset toward life, it seems to be a response to a deep need for that solidity and stability. I even know a psychologist on Facebook who simultaneously believes that the authoritarian mindset in general is a symptom of poor mental health and that her beliefs about what is right and wrong are objectively correct. That is, even though her training has pointed out to her the nature of the problem, she cannot resist it internally.
The second is that this version of the matter seems to have a very strong mythic presence for people in the grip of the social process. I have even seen very rational people argue that there must be a "mind of God" in which right and wrong are objectively defined, otherwise the muddle of relativism would be true. Since, for one or two of these, it was their proof of God's necessary existence, then one could say that is who God is for them. Not a spiritually healthy approach.
Robert Tulip wrote:The subtleties of seeing claims as symbol or metaphor remove this objective quality in religion, and therefore do not cut it for the mass market which demands simple absolute secure verities that believers can set and forget.
And again, if a person recognizes that they are setting and forgetting for good reason (because the alternative might be to sit through philosophy classes, and who has time for that?) they can also be appropriately humble about them. "True for me" works for a lot of people. But the social process of fundamentalism refuses to allow this solution, and quite deliberately stokes the fear that if their verities are not absolute then the person cannot have faith in them. It wallows in that fear. And it is directly analogous to the attachment generated by imposing the forms of objectivity on the intrinsically subjective process of valuing.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:then [ego] will suffer by attachment.
This is precisely the problem with false claims of objectivity. Incorrectly assuming that symbolic language is literal is a prime miscreant in this caper. Attachment to the literal claim blinds us to its symbolic multivalence and ambiguity, producing a narrow dogma of exclusive and intolerant bigotry.
So, I don't know how to say this without sounding rude, but have you considered the possibility that you may be imposing the idea that only the nature-based symbolism in religion has any validity, in order to recover some absoluteness of its authority? I have a sense that you are not comfortable with the "poetic" validity which I perceive in so much of religious insight. I don't know that that is the case, but I think you would benefit from considering it if you haven't already.
Robert Tulip wrote:Where even science suffers from attachment is not in its scientific claims but in the associated metaphysics, the claims about what science really means.
I think this makes sense, as an insight into the current debates and the larger social context.
Robert Tulip wrote:In Freudian terms, it seems claims about objectivity operate at the level of the super-ego.
Harry Marks wrote:The ego co-opts some parts of the id to resist impulses which undermine its stranglehold on the type of awareness that is admissible. Those are "the limitations of the ego." Fundamentally, they rely on repression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego says “According to this Freudian model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.” Trying to understand your statement against this framework, you are saying awareness uses instinct to repress desire. That repressive function was assigned by Freud not to instinctive id but to the super-ego, the cultural sense of duty that sublimates chaotic animal desires into orderly spiritual discipline and creativity.
Yes, but more generally the "super-ego" works by a different neurological process from either the id or the ego. Both of those work by forging connections between neurons, connections which are mainly constructive and responsive to re-inforcement.
The id is the pleasure principle which goes after the stuff we like. The ego is reinforced by effective conscious processes: by planning, deciding, calculating, checking intuitions, and following through on a plan, for example. When any of these "System 2" processes go to work, (in Kahneman's terms), if they get anywhere, they are reinforced.

But there are also moderating connections, famously prominent in the cerebellum where they turn conscious processes into smooth processes operating beneath the level of consciousness. You don't have to attend to the process of walking, for example.

Negative reinforcement apparently works by those moderating connections. Pain or punishment literally sets up connections which, when the neurons are firing, inhibits other neurons from firing. Opposite to the more typical arrangement. So when I avoid raising my voice to my boss, the inhibition process is strongly kin to the one that keeps children away from electrical sockets because their parents were ferocious about it. (Okay, I am seriously oversimplifying, but that is an important part of the picture of how these forces interact.)

There are two problems with super-ego, which represents the priorities of society to us. The first is that it shortcuts understanding. That is, it comes to us as absolutes (as "fact", one might say - like "if you lie to me you are worthless") rather than as if-then propositions about how things actually work ("if you lie to me I will have trouble believing you in the future.") That can be remedied. In fact most of modern positive discipline takes that task seriously, trying to build in a process of helping the child come to understand the reasons.

The second problem is that it works mainly by inhibition rather than by construction, so that it sets up internal tension in the individual (the primary goal of positive discipline is to "catch them being good" and use positive reinforcement.)

All this to get to the point that a sense of duty based on actual understanding of duty is meaningful, while a sense of duty based on pressure from others is at best using the tools of chaos to limit the effects of chaos. It is undermining shalom even as it attempts to bring shalom.

And from there, to what I meant about reason co-opting repression: yes, if we try to impose objectivity without a sense of why objectivity is good and thus of when it is appropriate, then we have allowed one of the structures of the reasoning mind to use repression, not against desire per se, but against the naturalness of our valuing. It is like sticking a goad into the elephant (of our immediate perceptions of good and bad and right and wrong) to order it around rather than teaching the elephant how to find the right path.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote:Ego is free to find reasons [for action], but if it goes about this in a way that represses our identity in common with the larger "water" of motivation, then it becomes a barrier to enlightenment.
Hesse in Siddhartha uses this “water” metaphor to say the cosmos is like a river and we are like drops of water flowing along in it. That image has some tension with how the ego is constituted by resistance, by swimming against the flow. Common identity, drifting with the tide, often believes deluded myths, which must be identified and challenged to achieve enlightenment.
Well, that puts the dilemma of the human condition very nicely. To achieve the intellectual enlightenment of science, and of the academic enterprise in general, we have to bypass, if not necessarily resist actively, many social processes which are imposed, and thus even come with a powerful admonition not to question them.

Such processes are fundamentally part of chaos rather than part of ordering life, and yet much of the order in our lives employs them. The military is the quintessential example of these chaotic processes in use against chaos: it is based in a tradition in which obeying orders was literally more important than life itself, in that the entire construct would fail and thus the society be overwhelmed by enemies if soldiers could not be induced to stay and fight despite likely death.

The direct opposite is the Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire to protest an unjust system - which looks an awful lot like Jesus riding into Jerusalem as Messiah in full knowledge that he would be tortured and executed for it.

What is being suggested by the non-dual tradition of mystical religion is that there is a larger enlightenment which needs to enfold and encompass the intellectual enlightenment you refer to. We have to fully embrace the thought processes of valuation, which means at some level we have to acknowledge that what really matters is not about what personally promotes my individualized welfare, as a basis for giving order to intellectual processes. If all I can see in science is what's in it for me, I will get its meaning wrong, and as a result my mistaken ideas of its meaning will distort my values. The grossly obvious example of that is the hack paid to obfuscate some issue of fact because, well, someone is paying him or her.
Robert Tulip wrote: You seem to be using common identity to mean an underlying shared objective reality, as distinct from prevailing subjective cultural beliefs, opening the problem of the relation between real and perceived identities.
Well, if you allow "underlying shared objective reality" to include the fundamental and inescapable subjectivity of what matters, yes. The subjectivity at the heart of values is objectively demonstrable, as follows: if you are only responding to a value because others will "enforce" it, then it cannot be said that it is your value.
That can get messy in practice: I agree that the system of speed limits is valid and I value it in itself, but just as it is right for the ambulance to break the speed limit (and so the law allows) I may actually value cheating on the speed limit a bit because objectively, I am not adding enough danger to the system to outweigh the pressure I am under to meet some other goal. Obviously this cheating can easily get out of hand, and so we don't "allow" it, but while I endorse such an enforcement system, I don't conclude that the question of whether or not I was right depends on how likely I was to get caught. My practical issue of avoiding the enforcement is distinct from the moral issue of how much cheating on the speed limit I should allow myself.
I would agree that this gets us into issues of real vs. perceived identities. I agree with the mystics metaphysically that there is a fundamental unity deeper than the constructions (of our identity) which we create for purposes of instrumental effectiveness. To the extent that I perceive my advanced degree to make me a better person than a less educated person, I violate that fundamental unity and do violence to my soul. But there is no escaping the subjective nature of that "reality" about identities. It is true for me, and I am constantly in a process of holding that truth out to myself in aspiration of fully embracing it, but I can only use persuasion to help others see it. No process of social enforcement can make it true for them.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: Better is to embrace the search but be humble about the "betterness".
Yes, the search for new knowledge and methods is the basis of innovation and productivity, but often brings an arrogant disdain toward fate, where humility is needed to consider all the impacts of productive freedom.
Toxic knowledge is beginning to be a significant problem.
Robert Tulip wrote:I don’t think the fatalistic idea that science and technology will kill us all is right, but it does indicate potentials from nuclear war and climate change that need to be taken seriously and addressed as security threats.
Yes, the U.S. military has ignored the prevailing political mythology on climate change, for example, and gone ahead to do realistic analysis. I don't know, really, whether science will kill us all, but it is possible, which is all I claimed.
Robert Tulip wrote:Climate denial is like saying acceptance of climate science challenges our core mythological identity as modern secular homo economicus, which people find more comfortable than any upsetting facts.
It's hard to pin down a single root cause of denialism. There are probably a number of mythologies at work, some of them downright chthonic (in the sense of much more strongly instinctive and "animal" than intellectual and aspirational).
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: One does not escape from the world, one escapes from illusion-based attachment to the world. If you cannot see that escape as fundamental to kenosis, to the turning to Jerusalem, then you have missed the main points in non-dualism.

Kenosis is one of those beautiful paradoxical theological terms that are worth knowing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis Kenosis means the renunciation of the divine nature by Christ in the Incarnation, as explained by Paul in Philippians 2:6-11: “Christ, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

This idea of kenosis introduces a dualistic ambiguity about the nature of the world, between reality and imagination, description and construction, matter and idea. Our attachment is to the world as imaginary constructed idea. Renunciation or escape from such attachment recognises a higher reality, which in my view needs to be compatible with the scientific vision of real described matter.
I think its "higherness" is entirely in the realm of mattering. Renunciation of attachment because you believe 36 virgins will attend to your every desire in Paradise after you sacrifice yourself is not redemptive of yourself or of the great river of life. But the problem is not that the virgins are illusory (well, that might be a problem as well, but it isn't the main one,) the problem is the use of selfish imagery to try to conjure up a selfless motivation. That zombie don't walk.

So, while I am implacably in favor of remaining compatible with science and matter, and it guards against some dangers, the redemption to be found in kenosis (which applies to anyone, not just to Jesus) has to be seen and understood by the one emptying self, and that is extremely difficult while in the grip of attachment to the materiality of the world as a value.
Robert Tulip wrote:Kenosis, the ‘self-emptying’ of Christ, constructs an ethical epistemology of the hypostatic union of matter and spirit in the person of the messiah, the last as first, seeing the king of glory as manifest in the least things of the world. ‘What you did to the least of these you did to me’, in the words of Christ in the Last Judgement in Matthew 25.
You have nicely captured the reasons why incarnation is fast becoming a central pillar of progressive Christian theology. As God's incarnation in the Christ (whether or not you believe he was a fleshly, historical person) reveals the nature of God, so the role of Christ in our relationships reveals the nature of God's intention of salvation for us. The least of these symbolize the Christ to the extent that we can see Christ incarnated in them.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: The line between description as process and construction as process is at least fractally intricate, if not altogether illusory.
Yes, and there is a respectable line of scientific thought that constructs epistemology around the concept of “Mind Dependent Reality”, recognising that all linguistic discussion depends on mental construction, even while it aims to describe a reality that may be theorised as independent of mind.
That sounds like my kind of epistemology.
Robert Tulip wrote:Kant opened this with his argument that knowledge is about phenomena as they appear to us, while the thing in itself, the noumenon, is strictly speaking unknowable.
That doesn't sound like my kind of epistemology. We don't just theorize that there is a reality independent of the mind, we replicate and test that theory so that we have considerable basis for confidence in it. "Strictly speaking unknowable," however, doesn't seem to matter.
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Harry Marks wrote:Though I haven't read much Heidegger, I worry that his project was undertaken from an "objectivity" framework which proposed to submit existential process to the demands of ontology. If so, then it was built on sand.
You are again using the word ‘ontology’ too narrowly. Ontology is the study of being. Heidegger’s project in Being and Time was to analyse the relationship between human existence and being. He starts off with Plato’s observation that ‘we used to think we understood the meaning of being but now we are perplexed’.

It is a perfectly reasonable method in philosophy to enquire about the relation between being and existence, or between being and ‘existential process’, whatever that means. As to ‘submitting to the demands of ontology’, it is not clear what that means. Specific ontologies make demands, such as belief in the Judeo-Christian God as the ground of being. Heidegger presented an existential ontology, grounded in care as the meaning of being in the world, temporal finitude, authenticity, being with others, rejection of herd thinking and what he calls the open anticipatory resolve of our being unto death. That whole mode of thinking was new and original, and its precise relation to earlier thinking has been the subject of much debate.

It seems the demand you think Heidegger assigns to ontology is objectivity. Given his status among the progressive movement of continental philosophy as a father-figure of postmodern relativism and deconstruction, through writers like Derrida and Rorty, Heidegger cannot easily be tarred with the brush of asserting that objectivity is the ground of thought. That is an idea more associated with how analytic philosophy subordinates thought to science. Instead, Heidegger’s focus on existential relationships as the ground of being, an idea that strongly influenced Tillich and Bultmann, places the objectivity of science in a subordinate though essential position, arguing that being in the world is primarily a matter of care rather than measurement.

The problem with a house built on sand rather than rock, as Jesus famously argued, is that sand will shift whereas rock is stable, so sand does not provide stable foundations. To say that Heidegger builds his house on sand has layers of irony. Rorty and Derrida used his ideas for their relativistic postmodern critique of what Rorty calls “foundationalism”, the idea of systematic universal logic. But Heidegger’s great achievement in Being and Time was entirely foundational and points to an existential system.

This objective of an existential system comes through firstly in his use of the core argument at the origin of Greek logic, from Parmenides, that there is one reality and we should cleave to the way of truth rather than the way of appearance, aiming to ground philosophy in knowledge rather than belief. Secondly, Heidegger’s deconstruction of Descartes turned on Heidegger's view that systematic thinking must be grounded in the existence of human being in the world as care, not in the logical isolation of the individual thinker from the world. That focus on the world did not make Heidegger unsystematic, although it did involve a recognition of the irrational, especially how moods are revelatory of being.
Harry Marks wrote: In my experience the dialogue between construction and description is fundamental to life. Letting the process demands of either one of them define the terms of engagement for the relationship is a mistake.
Yes, this point about how process swamps dialogue refutes the major prevailing ideologies of scientism, relativism and faithism. Scientism asserts that meaning is pure description. Relativism asserts that meaning is pure construction. Faithism asserts that a specific mythological model of reality combining description and construction is literally true. Each of these errors involves a failure of vision of the deeper integrating unity possible as an ideal goal of the synthesis of description and construction.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Your theme of self as intrinsically with others is reflected in the core idea in the Bible that we should love others and God as we love our self, producing the ethic of compassionate solidarity that is the dream of the kingdom of God.
That's helpful. As an insight, or guideline, it can trigger recognition of the artificiality of my individual self, and thus invite the pouring in of actual compassion that is needed by so many withered, stunted lives.
The problem that you call “artificiality” is one that Christianity has sought to analyse as resulting from the trauma of the fall from grace into corruption, with the deluded and alienated power of sin causing an enduring withered stunting of the soul as societies seek to justify their own constructed fantasies. The dilemma here includes problems such as how progress rests upon artificial foundations, as the basis of business confidence. The mentality of linear growth can be resistant to analysis of its use of artifice. That resistant attitude creates a rather spectacular tectonic political pressure that must eventually give, either in a managed way or by collapse.

The kenotic idea we discussed earlier of self-emptying has a strong therapeutic transformative potential to encourage recognition of the damage caused by selfish greed and delusion. The ethical framework of the last as first, grounded in love, is essential to find a way out of the problem of artificiality.
Harry Marks wrote:
Our duty to God, our "absolute relation to the absolute" in Kierkegaard's terminology, is not a duty per se because it comes in the context of grace. That is, it is not created by obligation, but rather is offered as a possibility (a "free gift") by the relationship at the heart of meaning.
Duty is precisely about absolute demands. When absolute demands of duty have a sound ethical and epistemic foundation, they acquire the character of the mandate and will of God. If we consider God as the stable orderly fecund power sustaining the cosmos, the duty for human life is to harmonise with this absolute. The value of such harmony is in its ability to support sustained flourishing, since without the harmony of grace we face the peril of collapse.
Harry Marks wrote: To seek the good, to find harmony in all things meaningful, is to defeat death and the perception of isolation of the individual from others.
Enduring stable flourishing is good. In evolutionary terms, organised complexity is resilient, generating dynamic harmonic equilibrium to exploit available niche resources. Death stalks the situation when harmony is disrupted, introducing chaos and catastrophe into the order of cosmos.

The victory of life over death is not at the individual level but at the ecosystem level. As with flocks of birds and schools of fish, an isolated individual becomes a target so evolution has trained our genes to cooperate to form harmonised social identity. When the grace-filled basis of ecological harmony breaks down, disruption and extinction soon follow. So humans have to harmonise with our planet to survive.
Harry Marks wrote: objectively nothing we do matters except as people find it meaningful
In some senses that is true, that mattering and meaning are human constructs, but as a claimed doctrine of objectivity it carries the paradox and risk of a relativising of meaning, making ‘man the measure of all things’ as Protagoras argued to Socrates, whose response was that relativism is illogical and wrong.

If we think it ultimately matters that humans reflect nature in thought, then we claim an absolute objective meaning that transcends other things that people ordinarily perceive as important.
Harry Marks wrote:, but when our sense of meaning is drawn from the eternal, our lives (not just our thought constructions, but the meanings which actually motivate us) are able to transcend these limitations imposed by an objective frame of reference.
This distinction you describe between the eternal and the objective is difficult. I may have explained my thoughts on eternity before, but will quickly do so again. Mathematics and logical knowledge is eternal in the sense that it is outside time and cannot change. The laws of physics are eternal in that they are permanent stable features of material reality. Moral principles are eternal in a more ambiguous way, that adherents see them as absolute, as timeless truths in the domain of values.

So the moral example of Jesus Christ is eternal in the sense that he is seen as the universal symbolic archetype of how faith works for good against evil. These three meanings of eternity equate to the three subjects taught in Plato’s Academy, logic, physics and ethics. I consider it important to combine them in defining eternity.
Harry Marks wrote: But if we seek objective validation for our meaning, we impose these limitations and we crash into them and find ourselves sitting on the ground shaking our head with confusion.
Introducing the concept of “validation” illustrates that prevailing concepts of objectivity are governed by the consensus of mainstream opinion. Given the power of modern science, the mainstream consensus deserves great respect, including for how its formal processes require a level of humility in efforts to discover new objective knowledge. But you spoke of “validation for our meaning”, which seems to mean validation of what we think matters as important. An intersubjective validation always provides some sort of objectivity, but is prey to groupthink and intolerance, with potential to be objectively wrong.
Harry Marks wrote: Yes, the tribal God of nation or religion (speaking of the sociological entities), will cripple our ability to respond to longing for the harmony of all things.
One of the most interesting things about Christianity, in my opinion, was that its original construction sought a path for humanity to evolve from instinct to reason as its primary driver. So for example, we instinctively love our friends, but the command of Jesus to love our enemies demands a higher rationality that overrides our natural instinct.

This model of the relation between reason and instinct sees spirituality as the primary locus of human evolution, grounded in a vision of universal harmony, which naturally requires a slow incubation, with the creation groaning in travail in the words of Romans 8, in view of the fallen fissiparity of the world.

As the world evolves toward global unity, seen in the slow aggregation from bands, clans, tribes, towns, cities, nations, empires, these higher levels of organisation bring threats that are difficult to engage since our brains have evolved to respond at the clan level.

The core kenotic idea I mentioned earlier, the last as first, provides a good imperial rubric. The God of nation is conceptually similar to the God of the clan, scaled up to a universal level, but without the essential ethic of harmony.
Harry Marks wrote: Tillich talked about false gods, about ultimate concerns which were not truly ultimate (in that they could not acknowledge the larger quest for shalom, in my reading).
Glad that you have mentioned Tillich again, who as I just noted drew strongly from Heidegger as the primary systematic thinker of existentialism, primarily in the concept of God as the ground of our being.

Shalom, as the Jewish concept of just peace, is central to the Gospel vision of a transformative liberation of forgiveness and reconciliation in truth. The false Gods of Christendom have tended to place religion in service to the state and prevailing culture, whereas the emerging post-Christendom vision imagines a more messianic and transformative function for religion, a role of prophetic courage to imagine the construction of shalom for the world.
Harry Marks wrote:As such they are like a king who will not stand up in the presence of the King of Kings, but of course such an image must never be made into a duty. It is an opportunity. A king can be more than Caligula, and a life can have more meaning in it than flopping back and forth in response to pleasure and pain.
The Old Testament book 1 Samuel tells the story of how ancient Israel first establishes monarchy with Saul, seen as a failed experiment whose only redeeming feature was how it led to the subsequent Kingdoms of David and Solomon, which became such an inspiration for Christianity. The key theme is the king’s obedience to God as the source of mandate and legitimacy and blessing, as the ground of morale, stability and security, with Saul failing on these measures.

To stand in the presence of Christ has routinely been imagined as the duty of the king, as representing the community to God, recognising a vision of goodness, as the basis of anointed monarchical power to limit the tyranny of the barons on behalf of the poor, aiming to achieve social harmony and cohesion.
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Harry Marks wrote:I would agree that fighting climate change is a duty, and that's one reason why I agree with you that subtracting carbon is at least as important (because we have delayed too long) as reducing carbon emissions. But I don't agree that it is the best way to look at either the quest for the good, or our relationship to the physical requirements of our culture.
Considering your point about the dangers of artifice in psychology, there is good reason to see the dangers of climate change as a direct result of our all too human tendency to place comfort above evidence as a guide to action, creating an artificial world that is not sustainable. Essentially, climate change is about the willingness of humanity to shit in our global nest, with the risk of eventually making the planet uninhabitable.

That heedless attitude involves a resort to artificial subterfuge, and raises the biggest question of the relation between culture and physical requirements. If our duty is to maximise the good of the future, then this problem of climate indifference shows how undutiful our species has become, a problem traditionally explained in the categories of salvation and damnation.

On your point about the balance between carbon removal and emission reduction, I think that emission reduction is a pointless wild goose chase, a distraction from the real duty of carbon removal.
Harry Marks wrote: Duty is a partial, fragmented part of the life of faith.
Fragmented? Surely that would imply that duty can be avoided with good conscience? I see it differently, that duty is fundamental. So Jesus says take up your cross and follow me. That is a very hard teaching of duty to God, as the rich young man reflected. My sense is that we are on a species trajectory to extinction, and our Christian duty is to reverse this trajectory through a resolute focus on facts and values.
Harry Marks wrote: A person of faithfulness will shudder at the possibility that they have failed in meeting a duty.
Conventional faith provides ample escape hatches to avoid Christian duty, through the cheap grace of kicking Jesus upstairs from earth into heaven. The costly grace of planetary transformation implied by the incarnation can be ignored in favour of supernatural nonsense.
Harry Marks wrote: In traditional, supernaturally-explained religion, our duty to God represents to us the opportunity to participate in eternity by working for shalom, which is the harmony of all things. When face-to-face with duty, our obligation to it is inescapable.
My experience of traditional religion is rather different, that it avoids discussion of shalom because this union of peace and justice implies a messianic transformation of the earth. The traditional goal is more to claim God’s blessing upon existing society and its stability, putting off all thought of shalom to the second coming. The way faith escapes obligations in this realm of social transformation is to sow confusion so duties are never encountered directly, and so that duty is conceived in a primarily individual moral way, concerning personal moral conduct rather than shared vision of the world.
Harry Marks wrote: Grace doesn't remove the obligation, but it does put it in context of a relationship of love: the Absolute reaches out to us (in an actual, not metaphorical, process) to reassure us that our obligations come to us in the context of the love that humanity and the good have for us, holding out to us the possibility of living in proper quest for shalom rather than feeling we must retreat to our bank accounts and our ethnic identities as if these will save us from the great and terrible Day of Reckoning.
To discuss the Day of Wrath, the Dies Irae, when by tradition David and the Sybil testify the earth will dissolve in ashes, is hardly a popular topic in philosophy, since such talk of doom and judgement is more associated with crazy religion than liberal secular rationality.

And yet this old idea of doom and reckoning could be helpful in seeing the phenomenological relation between grace and fragility. If our society holds systemic false beliefs, then we are living in a hollow state of brittle fragility, not sustainable and facing necessary change. That need for change is essentially what is meant by your phrase “the great and terrible Day of Reckoning.”

My view is that such a transformation need not involve collapse. If there is clear headed strategic planning, a managed gradual transition is possible, seeing the allegorical language of the Bible as a coherent and helpful warning message.
Harry Marks wrote:
The entrepreneurial class sees individual (or corporate) competition for money as the ultimate source of all benefit in society, but I am sorry to say we must drop the curtain on them. They are now a distant third to social processes of empowering the excluded and integrating the costs of externalities into monetary incentives. That's not to say I am in favor of disempowering competition and enterprise. But the movement for selling governmental power to the donor class has to stop. It has gone too far already.
The traditional conservative economic line in response to your comment here is that we can only distribute wealth that has been created, and that competitive markets are the only thing that creates wealth. So encouraging entrepreneurs will lead to more money that can then trickle down for inclusion and externalities.

Unfortunately, as you intimate, trickle down theory is subject to failure, since the payment for inclusion and externalities depends on government regulation and decision, which is prevented by the plutocratic corruption of policy when money buys votes. This big lie that the market needs no regulation is a primary cause of social conflict and unrest.
Harry Marks wrote:If you are going to insist on the requirements of objective analysis as non-negotiable requirements of the formation of the story, then you have sabotaged the possibilities for caring to bring the elements in harmony.
“Sabotage” of possibilities is putting it too strongly, although that question again raises the complex problem we have been discussing about the relation between construction and description in our attitudes to reality. In the paper that I mentioned earlier, I am analysing the description of earth’s objective orbital situation and movements as a basis for the construction of myths. I think such cosmic analysis is the most promising way to reconcile care and evidence.

While the impetus for care may emerge more from constructed values than from described facts, care is also usually most effective when it is grounded in fact rather than fantasy, meaning our relationships are honest and open. Exceptions to the primacy of fact include the placebo effect in medicine, or the healing power of faith and prayer. A comforting constructed fantasy can have more healing power than cold descriptive facts delivered with no bedside manner, although the best healing and care comes from the combination of faith and evidence.

It is not right to say that search for objective evidence “sabotages” care, although it is important to note care cannot be held hostage to evidence. Insistence on proof can undermine the potential for learning by doing. We should care for people and things based on intuitive response where objective information is thin. Someone recently said to me that we should only care about the possible extinction of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef when we can prove it is definitely happening. While that proof actually already exists, this mentality of denial illustrates how proof is often too late for cure.

The greatest level of care operates at the social level, where evidence and objectivity come more into the picture than in personal relationships. Objective evidence has strong power to sway policy, encouraging government and business accountability, although facts are often not adequate to overcome the power of money.
Harry Marks wrote: The "unified nature of reality" is not "objective" when it comes to reconciling spirit and matter, or many of the other supposed dualities-from-illusion which you identified.
Given the world is so far from reconciling spirit and matter, and exists with uneasy contradictions and tensions between spiritual beliefs and objective facts, I think this question of the relation between objectivity and reconciliation, aiming for a unified theory of reality, can’t be so easily dismissed.

Restorative justice, finding unity through forgiveness and dialogue, sees an intimate connection between truth and reconciliation, with shared acceptance of objective facts seen as having an important spiritual power for peace with justice. Transparency and accountability are all about disclosure of objective information to the public.

An even bigger dimension of this problem of objective spirituality is its relation to what you raised as the ‘day of reckoning’. The tradition of judgement, as in the story of the writing on the wall that says you are weighed in the balance and found wanting, asserts that the will of God has an objective power, emerging as the divine justice of fate. So the messianic image of Jesus Christ as King of the World involves just this just combination of sword and scales, or sceptre and orb, weighing the facts to deliver judgement of an objective spirituality, with the moral force of equity, mercy and the power of God.
Harry Marks wrote:apocalypse, in the form of planetary catastrophe, implies some all-at-once disaster. Climate change is a creeping, glacial-paced process and people are very subject to the boiling frog illusion.
I have heard that frogs are actually smart enough to jump out of a pot when it starts to warm up, putting that popular illusion story into the class of myth. Be that as it may, if we accept the meme, there comes a point of catastrophe, of no escape, where the frog discovers it is cooking but lacks the strength to jump.

So with climate, the better analogy than a glacier is an earthquake. Glaciers advance or retreat slowly, with no sudden disasters involved. But with plate tectonics, pressure slowly builds until a sudden catastrophic movement at the moment of release. It is entirely possible that we are storing up tectonic-type problems by adding so much carbon to the air, which could, for example as my scientist friends say, cause main ocean currents to suddenly stop, with immense unrepairable extinctive damage.

Security theory teaches that we should consider risks against likelihood and impact. Even if such extreme impact oceanic risks might seem a few centuries away, we do not know where the systemic tipping point sits, so should avoid playing the fool at the precipice.
Harry Marks wrote: We have already had a year from Hell in the climate, and the last few years were not that much better even if you restrict yourself to U.S. climate costs. The handwriting is on the wall, but you seem to put your faith in stories of human extinction which are both harder to verify and much less tangible than Hurricanes Harvey, Katrina, Irma, Maria and Sandy.
It is not about faith but, as I just explained, risk analysis. Ongoing severe storm damage is very likely, but could be a precursor to even worse impacts, illustrating the urgency of removing dangerous carbon from the air and sea as a global security priority. The problem is that the climate lobby claims the writing on the wall says we have to shut down fossil fuels, whereas the better science is saying we should remove carbon, and this is generating a debate about moral hazard, while the climate burns.
Harry Marks wrote:you are in denial about externalities
No, I am not in denial about externalities. The debate is whether carbon should be removed before or after it is added to the air. The IPCC say before, and the climate removal geoengineers say after, on the model of sanitation. The externalities of random shitting are obvious, but no one says that the cure is to induce mass constipation instead of sewered toilets, which is what emission reduction equates to.
Harry Marks wrote:, yet if anything was revealed in facing apocalypse, it was that they need to be addressed collectively.
Sure, and the UN committee is giving us a camel when we need a horse, while ensuring the real policy debate is ignored in mass media. This “collective action” furphy has led to a very deluded meme, that addressing climate change has to model itself on past “collective” strategies, notably the popular front. I was reading about the candidacy of Henry Wallace for the Progressive Party in the 1948 US Presidential election, an episode that illustrated how “collective” action can be steered by motivated groups who control a popular front.

Carbon removal is more on the side of John Galt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a model for how to address climate change, through finding new big ideas that no one has thought of before.
Harry Marks wrote: see how bad things would be if we had not addressed [the main lesson of the previous round of environmental confrontation]
You are saying that government regulation of air pollution at point of source provides the model to address climate change. I disagree. The climate problem is completely different from air pollution. It requires that we physically remove the dangerous carbon, and find profitable ways to do so, preferably in cooperation with major industries such as insurance and energy.

Posing the problem as a war against fossil fuels, as the climate lobby does, generates political polarisation and reaction that delays urgent response, where the goal should be a win-win answer, forgetting about emission reduction and focussing on carbon removal.

All the Paris commitments only address 1% of the carbon problem, showing the emission reduction paradigm is broken.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:Nietzsche suggested the effort to prove the existence of God through theology was the main cause of the death of God in culture.
I was not aware of this. It should be more widely known.
Heidegger picked up on this idea from Nietzsche about the limits of proof of God through analysis of how theology and philosophy have ‘forgotten the meaning of being’. Proof operates on the objective empirical model of knowledge that is suited to analysis of entities and systems. As you alluded earlier, by contrast, in the “I-Thou” relationship between us and God, any modelling of God as an entity commits a category error. Heidegger and Husserl framed this problem through analysis of what they called the “representational theory of truth”, the tradition from Aristotle where truth is defined as the adequacy of our concepts in their correspondence to referents.

Heidegger argued the old Greek word for truth, aletheia, means uncovering or disclosure, revealing something already there, bigger and more mysterious than all our ideas, impinging upon us as fate.

A discussion of Death of God theology is at http://mb-soft.com/believe/txn/deathgod.htm
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Re: Religion and philosophy

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Robert Tulip wrote: You are again using the word ‘ontology’ too narrowly. Ontology is the study of being. Heidegger’s project in Being and Time was to analyse the relationship between human existence and being. He starts off with Plato’s observation that ‘we used to think we understood the meaning of being but now we are perplexed’.

It is a perfectly reasonable method in philosophy to enquire about the relation between being and existence, or between being and ‘existential process’, whatever that means. As to ‘submitting to the demands of ontology’, it is not clear what that means. Specific ontologies make demands, such as belief in the Judeo-Christian God as the ground of being.
I quote from Wikipedia, with some amusement,
ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. A very simple definition of ontology is that it is the examination of what is meant, in context, by the word 'thing'
Is caring a "thing"? If so, I would argue that it cannot be understood properly by analytical methods and replicable observations. Because its nature is subjective, introspection is inherently required and to some extent definitive about caring.

The demands of ontology may include specific requirements imposed by specific approaches, but more fundamentally its requirements are created by trying to use the methods of objectivity to understand being. These are methods such as description and classification, as well as meta-methods like logical validity and separation from purely personal goals. All of those can be helpful to clearing away misunderstanding, but some distortions are hidden from its view by the inherent subjectivity of the subject. Maybe Heidegger managed to escape those traps, maybe not. Perhaps I shall try to read his magnum opus.

My use of "existential process" just means being as process, rather than as a "thing." We live in time, with memory, anticipation and intention. My statement of what my intention is may be bad faith, but we do not yet have objective ways to demonstrate that. In a real sense, only I know whether I am acting in bad faith. And even I may not know, since that is much of the nature of bad faith. We can give a person a set of criteria and ask her to use introspection to decide about her own motivations. We may make inferences based on the difference between actions and declarations. But the epistemology at work is fundamentally subjective: I can persuade others that someone is acting in bad faith (or is not) but I cannot demonstrate it objectively. To investigate it as though it was something that in principle could be demonstrated objectively would be a fundamental error.
Robert Tulip wrote:It seems the demand you think Heidegger assigns to ontology is objectivity. Heidegger cannot easily be tarred with the brush of asserting that objectivity is the ground of thought. That is an idea more associated with how analytic philosophy subordinates thought to science. Instead, Heidegger’s focus on existential relationships as the ground of being, an idea that strongly influenced Tillich and Bultmann, places the objectivity of science in a subordinate though essential position, arguing that being in the world is primarily a matter of care rather than measurement.
That all sounds like it is on track, and I am happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wonder, though, if the language and traditions of philosophy do not impose a kind of puppeteering by objectivity which does not operate in any formal, logical way. When we wanted to understand existential relationship as fundamental to being, we were sent to Buber's "I and Thou" which is ridiculously elliptical because he asks first that the reader think about the different kinds of relationship internally, and subjectively. Kierkegaard used stories to convey the existential nature of the phenomena he wanted to analyze.
Robert Tulip wrote:This objective of an existential system comes through firstly in his use of the core argument at the origin of Greek logic, from Parmenides, that there is one reality and we should cleave to the way of truth rather than the way of appearance, aiming to ground philosophy in knowledge rather than belief.
The contrast between knowledge and belief is insufficient. Knowledge in the sense of the Spanish "saber" (to know facts) is not the same as the existential knowing, which corresponds to the Spanish "conocer" (to know people). It's all very well to avoid being fooled by superficially persuasive appearances (with people even more than with facts). But to pretend to "knowledge" (saber) of being, in any universal sense, is a bit foolish. I am even quite dissatisfied with Tillich's use of "ultimate concern" because I am not sure it really applies to everyone.
Robert Tulip wrote:Secondly, Heidegger’s deconstruction of Descartes turned on Heidegger's view that systematic thinking must be grounded in the existence of human being in the world as care, not in the logical isolation of the individual thinker from the world. That focus on the world did not make Heidegger unsystematic, although it did involve a recognition of the irrational, especially how moods are revelatory of being.
Yes. For example we are loved into existence, not, primarily, educated into it. What I would call pre-rationality is integral to our learning to get along in the world - we don't do things rationally for rationality's sake, but because someone has realized there is good reason to care about the rationality of our approach to particular issues.

The isolation of the individual was an Enlightenment fiction (myth?) which helped with imposing a (pretend) "veil of ignorance" to do a better job of ethics. Since the signal achievement of the Enlightenment was the overthrow of feudal nobility by democracy (the Marxists would say, by the capitalist bourgeoisie) that tends to look like a triumph of sorts, but I don't think we have gotten far yet on what Humpty-Dumpties may have been shattered by adopting that individualist perspective.
Robert Tulip wrote:The kenotic idea we discussed earlier of self-emptying has a strong therapeutic transformative potential to encourage recognition of the damage caused by selfish greed and delusion. The ethical framework of the last as first, grounded in love, is essential to find a way out of the problem of artificiality.
I like to think of the needed transformation more in terms of "even the least of these" rather than "the last shall be first." While we no longer lock people into such rigid structures that nearly everyone finishes their life at the position in which their parents started it, so that hierarchies are not such obsessions as they once were, there are still social categories of ranking and exclusion that create fault lines in our selves as well as in society. Kenosis needs to be a thorough process of replacing all the ways we "try to impress people" as some put it. Get rid of all the fakery and all the one-upmanship. All the focus on fitting in and gaining approval. Obviously that is not as simple as deciding it should be so.

That's one reason I am getting enthused about a new perspective on Christianity that focuses on vocation rather than sin and redemption. It is easier to steer a moving vehicle, as someone once said. If we are engaged in forward progress toward a vocation that is structured by caring, we do not have to obsess on enumerating our failures but can focus on how better to actually do things that help, and in which we can see ourselves caring about others, "even the least of these." Call it caring with legs and hands.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: Our duty to God, our "absolute relation to the absolute" in Kierkegaard's terminology, is not a duty per se because it comes in the context of grace. That is, it is not created by obligation, but rather is offered as a possibility (a "free gift") by the relationship at the heart of meaning.
Duty is precisely about absolute demands. When absolute demands of duty have a sound ethical and epistemic foundation, they acquire the character of the mandate and will of God. If we consider God as the stable orderly fecund power sustaining the cosmos, the duty for human life is to harmonise with this absolute.
Well, no. A doctor has a duty to "first, do no harm." But that doesn't get the job done. She must understand as well as possible how to do some good.

The context of relationship to God transcends the absolute nature of duty without destroying it, very much the same way that ethical obligations transcend esthetic evaluations without eliminating them. Because the absolute reaches out to us with a caring process that is forgiving from its higher perspective, our failures (and our successes!) ethically are in a context which gives them meaning. And the meaning is not absolute obligation. We do not have to commit seppuku when we have failed God, because God is not using us. God cares more about us than about our performance of duty.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: To seek the good, to find harmony in all things meaningful, is to defeat death and the perception of isolation of the individual from others.
The victory of life over death is not at the individual level but at the ecosystem level. As with flocks of birds and schools of fish, an isolated individual becomes a target so evolution has trained our genes to cooperate to form harmonised social identity. When the grace-filled basis of ecological harmony breaks down, disruption and extinction soon follow. So humans have to harmonise with our planet to survive.
All very relevant, but not properly central to meaning. I would like to think you don't believe that when humanity succeeds in eliminating all threats of extinction (other than the ultimate end of the universe itself in entropy) that then all meaning also is gone. While threat of extinction gives urgency to the social process of responding to what is meaningful, it doesn't create that meaning.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: objectively nothing we do matters except as people find it meaningful
In some senses that is true, that mattering and meaning are human constructs, but as a claimed doctrine of objectivity it carries the paradox and risk of a relativising of meaning, making ‘man the measure of all things’ as Protagoras argued to Socrates, whose response was that relativism is illogical and wrong.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all paths seeking shalom are the same path, but every departure into relativism is a departure in its own idiosyncratic way. Because relativism is a dodge - a cover, a denial. It is an attempt to rationalize the choice of convenience or pleasure over obligation and the good. That is paradox enough for me.
Robert Tulip wrote:If we think it ultimately matters that humans reflect nature in thought, then we claim an absolute objective meaning that transcends other things that people ordinarily perceive as important.
Well, that sounds persuasive, but not so accurately analyzed. The priority on harmony with nature (not just sustainability of our economy, but responsiveness to truth and evidence in general) can be said to transcend the ordinary whithers and thithers of our everyday life. But "objective" meaning? I would leave that out. Mattering is subjective.
Robert Tulip wrote: Moral principles are eternal in a more ambiguous way, that adherents see them as absolute, as timeless truths in the domain of values.
That "more ambiguous way" is what I am trying to capture with the difference between "objective" and "eternal". If they come from attempts to "get the better of" life, to use life for some other objective, then values are temporal. If they come from the honest quest to understand what life is for, what purposes matter in the most honest, comprehensive and reasoned framework of meaning, then their values are from the eternal. Yet it is possible for people to differ radically on which principles best answer this quest. One person sees social ownership of the means of production as indispensable to shalom, while another sees maximization of the liberty of individual autonomous agents as the best path to shalom. They are both honest, both working from framework of eternity, but cannot both be objectively correct.
Harry Marks wrote: But if we seek objective validation for our meaning, we impose these limitations and we crash into them and find ourselves sitting on the ground shaking our head with confusion.
Robert Tulip wrote:Introducing the concept of “validation” illustrates that prevailing concepts of objectivity are governed by the consensus of mainstream opinion. Given the power of modern science, the mainstream consensus deserves great respect, including for how its formal processes require a level of humility in efforts to discover new objective knowledge. But you spoke of “validation for our meaning”, which seems to mean validation of what we think matters as important. An intersubjective validation always provides some sort of objectivity, but is prey to groupthink and intolerance, with potential to be objectively wrong.
I think the prevailing concepts of objectivity are just fine for doing science, and in general for adding to knowledge of how the universe works. I think the problem is that our use of language has led people to think that the same criteria and even the same epistemological methods will give the same result in matters of value. And so, since I am surely not wrong in my values, my values must be objectively true. Or else it's all a matter of opinion, and whatever you think is right is right for you.

In the case of either extreme, the error of insisting that "truth" behaves like scientific investigation of an objective nature of things will prevent proper contemplation of the difficulties in searching for understanding of what is good.
Robert Tulip wrote:One of the most interesting things about Christianity, in my opinion, was that its original construction sought a path for humanity to evolve from instinct to reason as its primary driver. So for example, we instinctively love our friends, but the command of Jesus to love our enemies demands a higher rationality that overrides our natural instinct.
The original step toward reason was the recognition of law. Whether Solon or Moses or Hammurabi, the lawgiver dislocates the individual from valuing "what I like" to valuing "what I would perceive as fair if I were an impartial observer."
The radical ethics of Jesus move us even further to ask "by what process can I become an agent of love's message, that meaning can only be found in pursuit of shalom?" The processes of judging and condemning do not answer. In some sense even self-defense does not answer, at least for an individual.
Robert Tulip wrote:This model of the relation between reason and instinct sees spirituality as the primary locus of human evolution, grounded in a vision of universal harmony, which naturally requires a slow incubation, with the creation groaning in travail in the words of Romans 8, in view of the fallen fissiparity of the world.
Well said.
Robert Tulip wrote:Shalom, as the Jewish concept of just peace, is central to the Gospel vision of a transformative liberation of forgiveness and reconciliation in truth. The false Gods of Christendom have tended to place religion in service to the state and prevailing culture, whereas the emerging post-Christendom vision imagines a more messianic and transformative function for religion, a role of prophetic courage to imagine the construction of shalom for the world.

To stand in the presence of Christ has routinely been imagined as the duty of the king, as representing the community to God, recognising a vision of goodness, as the basis of anointed monarchical power to limit the tyranny of the barons on behalf of the poor, aiming to achieve social harmony and cohesion.
Seeking shalom is the duty of everyone. And the opportunity available to everyone. The example of a king is useful in that the king's obligation is not one that will be enforced upon him. Our response is more a part of the message of love if we are honestly caring than if we see it as simply a matter of everyone's duty, just as duty is ethical in a way that responding to enforcement is not. In both cases it is a question of what kind of whole the act is a part of.
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