Immanuel Can wrote
I am discussing what I think of it, O. I'm saying "I see no justification for believing it." And I'm asking you to provide that justification.
It looks to me like you're doing an "end run" around a genuine Atheist comeback, and saying, "the meta ethical justification problem just solves itself because evil 'feels' bad." And no, no it doesn't just "solve itself." And no, you can't just bump it back to the "meta ethical" level and hide it there. You still owe your critics an explanation of what grounds your ethical judgments: they do not ground themselves.
You can say nothing is achieved in this, but most who say this are not looking clearly, as the phenomenologist would say, at the thing itself. This takes some doing, for one has remove one self from the presumptions of
apperceiving. This is language borrowed from Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation in an attempt explain the much forgotten phenomenological reduction, which has found new life in post Heideggerian thought in theorists like Jean luc Marion and Michel Henry.
I say, the atheist must follow the argument, first, before claiming such a thing. First, self grounding, as you put it, does not at all provide an answer as to what to do in moral decision making in any detail. It simply looks to the foundation of ethics and gives analysis in an attempt to determine is "parts". There are the contingent parts, to be sure, the "facts" of a case. But there is more, and we all know this: once one has exhaustively accounted for the observable facts of an ethical case, there is more: On the one hand, a typical contingent proposition like "the leaves are falling" or "earthquates are due to tectonic activity" in their factual content are exhausted, which may be seen as what a scientist might say these matters all about. Nothing else "there" in the facts once empirical content, deductive paradigms and all the rest that goes into the presuppositions of statements like these. On the other hand, their is the ethical statement, like "one shouldn't bludgeon one's neighbor." this is, of course, a defeasable or prima facie rule, difficult to apply in the contingencies of actual events.
At this point in the comparison, once these contingencies are all accounted for, the facts are exhaustively identified (though such matters have contingent underpinnings that are impossible to delineate) , on the ethical side, the physical descriptions, the scientific details, the historical details, the screaming in agony as an observable event ,and everything else, there is this unknown X (and it is proper here to entertain a connection to Kant, but this is an entirely other issue which can be taken up elsewhere, if you like). I said that we all know this, above, and to affirm this does require one, my atheist opponent, to look plainly at what is left unaccounted after the removal of contingent content. One has to do, and actually has already done, the phenomenological reduction: the pain of the bludgeoning, qua pain, in itself now isolated, not in a manner unlike the way Kant isolated pure reason form ordinary rational affairs, has a non empirical dimension, which underlies the ethical "should not" of the case. And this is self evident: take a lighted match, apply it to your finger and observe. The contingent analysis does NOT exhaust where is there, in plain sight. The pain possesses in its phenomenological presence AS SUCH (forget about Dawkins. That is not the kind of argument this is about) the "should not" of the pain.
If you disagree, then I would invite you to reexamine the event in question. Imagine someone putting that match there and keeping it there and ask, What IS this? It is a question of ontology. It is not saying anything at all about anything else. It gives no description as to how this is remedied, it provides no metaphysical details, nor does it interpret nature's activities to reveal that things are really moral in their massive contingent entanglements. NONE of this. Indeed, it is very much OUT of these considerations, for the world in all its everydayness (this is borrowed form Heidegger adn includes what science tells us as well as "common" sense) does not behave morally at all. This argument knows this. It is not where it looks any more than Kant would look at the irrationalities of the world in determining the structure of reason.
This is a rather routine thing, though, O. After all, one can do many such transformations. One would be to see the world from the thoroughly Atheistic perspective, as Nietzsche attempts to do in "The Madman's Tale": to conceive of an utterly Godless universe, with all the unsavoury consequences of that intact. And the result, though "upsetting" to the "applecart" of ordinary moral reflection, is not actually justified by anything. Nietzsche just generates the "God is dead" experience out of imagination, then asks us to go with him on his "trip."
That's what you're doing, it seems to me. You're asking us to plunge ourselves into a radically "present" moment to "upset" the "epistemic applecart," then you're drawing debatable, contentious conclusions from your own experience of that, and saying, "You guys all have to experience/feel the same." But whereas Nietzsche provides us reasons for his conclusions, you've really given us none for preferring your conclusions or insights, or thinking we ought to have them.
Nietzsche, the arch Atheist, gives his justification: what's yours?
Atheists tend to look at reasons for dismissing the idea of God, and they are entirely right, that is if you construe God in any of the ways they bring up, including Nietzsche's resentment against the elite (and so on. He says lots of things, but this is at the center), then it falls apart very quickly. But what I defend here is not addressing popular conceptions. I consider these rather pre-analytic. This here is, I suppose, a rather technical argument that insists on a move from what Husserl called the "naturalist attitude" into phenomenological analysis.
No, I don't think so. I see why you think that, but I know too much about the Eastern traditions to think that's right. They don't proceed from a moment of private existential "presentness," I think, but from other issues. And you can see that they do, because whereas you are being highly private in your analysis, they are highly collectivist or communal in their religiosity.
The privateness in the Eastern tradition is a secondary step, not the primary one. Theirs is a retreat from the world because of what the collective, social world is seen to be, not a personal reflection on the nature of private experience or presentness.
Can't say I understand this about Eastern traditions. It is not the "from other issues" part that defines what yoga is all about. sounds like you are alluding to historical causative conditions. But this doesn't define what yoga is at all.
Now, that's closer to what the Eastern traditions actually tend to do, it seems to me. But it's more a social than a personal reflection with them.
Social? Nor is it personal reflection.
THAT'S the vexed question! You can't beg it. If Atheism is right, "suffering" is of no "importance" at all. Listen to Dawkins:
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find a rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” – Richard Dawkins, River our of Eden
It is the vexed question. But then, I may agree with everything Dawkins says, and still the matter here will not be broached.
Oh, but it does matter. For Heidegger was not "unable" to do any such thing. He was "able," as others did; but he was "unwilling." That's the truth. One thing we learn from Heidegger is that a big head is no safeguard against a black heart.
Yeah, I've read about it. Heidegger was a seminal philosopher. His Being and Time is genius, profound.
Nope. The mere fact that somebody can feel the need for a "what"," or more pertinently, a "why," only creates a NEED for redemption: it does not assure us in any way that such a redemption is available.
The Atheist has his own revelation from this fact: he says it leads him to believe there is no God, no redemption, no meaning, no hope, and no future in this indifferent world...just as Dawkins says. So what makes his conclusion wrong, and yours right?
That, you need to show.
This idea of redemption is, as with all terms, all language, contingent. When I use language above to make my case, I do not have access to the the foundational state of affairs that dictates its nature into some divine language. This argument deals only with what is there, in our midst. It says that suffering (the horrible kind makes a poignant case) is not stand alone,like explaining what a bank teller is or what a geologic age is, or any contingent facts that have their explanatory references available in some text. The meaning, redemption, hope and the rest are simple the only language wheels that roll. What is intimated in suffering cannot be said, BUT:
the injunction to do no harm can be said, though is gets entangled instantly in real cases. As well as the injunction to promote good, that is, joy, love, pleasure, happiness. These are value words, and they "roll" for us.
Oh, heck...yes, there is.
Anybody who does not examine his affective experiences is setting himself up for disaster, disappointment and failure.
Such an examination would simply be about how to interpret one's experience, and can say nothing as to the actuality. Granted, interpretations do come to issue, no doubt, and emotions are notoriously interpretatively ambiguous. And this is why experiences of value in the world are complicated: entanglement in the contingencies of language-in-the-world. But the idea here is to give analysis , to separate parts and examine. I hold that what turns up is something NOT contingent at all. Love is interpretatively ambiguous, but the experience, to be love at all, must have something we call with our language-at-hand, absolute: that happiness, the glow of the emotion that raises all things into a joy. (This kind of flowery talk is really why poetry is so important.)
God is a concept that, when reduced to its essence, is just this, ethical absoluteness.