Hereandnow wrote: ↑June 18th, 2019, 10:21 am
But it is not just a vacuous postulate. It is, loosely speaking, the very foundation of religion, not the incidental claims in historical documents, the myths, the legends, and so on, but the nature of human religiosity: suffering.
Being the foundation for religion is not inconsistent with it being a vacuous postulate. And I'm not at all clear as to why you would consider suffering to be the "nature" of "religiosity," or how the postulate of a transcendent reality alleviates that presumed suffering, other than by imagining it to have properties and powers of which we cannot possibly have knowledge (and not only the powers to alleviate suffering, but the sentience and will to do so).
As Levinas said, Desire of this kind intensifies with engagement, and the true frontier of our existence is our inwardness.
Perhaps. But desires --- wishful thinking --- do not constitute knowledge.
It [the transcendent] is "responsible" for our sufferings, and our joys. The argument you seem to make is that transcendence is trivialized as it is accountable for all that is trivially true, "all other experienced phenomena".
Yes; all propositions asserting the transcendent to be the the cause of something are trivially true, because the transcendent is
postulated precisely to serve that purpose. We're merely repeating what we already asserted in that postulate. The actionable causes of suffering do not require knowledge of, or reliance upon, the transcendent. E.g., a tornado rips through a town, causing much destruction and suffering. The perceived tornado is, of course, a phenomenon. We can postulate a transcendent reality that is the cause of that phenomenon, but that will not help us in the least to relieve the suffering caused by the tornado.
But nothing is trivially true, because there is no thing without value. All we have before us is phenomena, but this puts the objects in the sphere of the self, that is, our intentionality stands as a constitutional part of the object. I never have, nor has anyone, witnessed a world of things abstracted from the value invested in them . . .
Well, that is a personal observation, and I can only respond with another. I encounter things every day to which I attach no value, neither positive nor negative. Thousands of them, e.g., the weeds and gravel at the edge of a road, the stones and dead leaves along a path, the clouds passing in the sky, etc. To say that something has value is to say that someone desires it, wishes to gain or retain it, or in the case of disvalue, wishes to avoid it or be rid of it. The measure of its value is given by what the desiring agent will give up to gain that thing (or rid himself of it). What value something has, if any, varies from valuer to valuer. To most of the things I encounter on a daily basis I assign no value whatsoever, either positive or negative. I.e., I would give up nothing either to gain them or be rid of them. Their presence in the world is a matter of indifference to me.
. . . therefore, to talk of objects as if they were trivial amounts to an abstraction from the Jamsian stream of consciousness, a postulate.
I think you're confusing yourself there. What we have been speaking of as trivial is the transcendent, not the phenomenal objects --- the objects of experience --- to which we assign values. Nothing prevents us from assigning a value to the transcendent, of course --- we can assign it to anything we want --- but such an assignment will be entirely arbitrary, frivolous, since we know nothing of it.
I think of absolutes as an ethical dimension of our being here in which there is an intimation of an existential, not logical, absolute . . . But ethics is very different. In ethics there is an intimation of an absolute. Color qua color, taste qua taste" these have no acknowldgable inherent features; that is, we cannot acknowledge them for what they Really are.
I agree that "qualia" (color qua color, etc.) are ineffable. That is because qualia terms are the linguistic primitives from which all description is constructed; they cannot be resolved into simpler components. As Frank Jackson noted in his famous paper, no one can tell color scientist Mary, who knows everything about the physics of light but has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room, what
red will look like when she leaves that room and perceives a red rose for the first time. She can only discover that for herself, and when she does she will learn something new about light, something no one could describe to her.
(Here is a decent discussion of Jackson's "knowledge argument"):
https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Did_Mary_Know
But you seem to be assuming that qualia are "really" something other than what they appear to be. What is the rationale for that assumption? Why ignore Occam and multiply entities needlessly? The fact that we cannot describe a qualia does not entail that it is something other than the phenomenon we experience, or requires anything beyond itself, other than some kind of cause --- of which we can know nothing.
Ehics is just like this, of course. Our ethical terms are just as theoretical as 'cow and 'cloud';but here is the rub: in ethics, there is value, and value is not a contingent "phenomenon" (I like Moore's non-natural quality). It is not even a phenomenon, for it is not seen or qualitatively experienced. It is there, mysteriously, the "badness' of air hunger. It is the badness in the ethical and aesthetic sense, not the contingent sense, that puts into our world(s) something profound.
Well, such concrete terms as "cow" and "cloud" are not normally considered "theoretical." And I'm mystified at your claim that value is "not a contingent phenomenon." It is not a phenomenon at all; it is a judgment applied by agents to phenomena, and is contingent upon the thing being considered, the circumstances, and especially the agent making the judgment. "Badness" is not a perceived property of things, even painful or harmful things. It is a judgment most of us apply to most painful or harmful things --- but how "bad" pain is depends upon who is suffering it and who is making the judgment. There is nothing transcendent about either the pain or the judgment.
I agree, however, that value assigments are similar to qualia in that they are unanalyzable and ineffable. One can no more explain to someone why chocolate tastes "good" than he can explain what it tastes like. Each person will have to make that discovery for himself, and will thereafter assign his own value to it. (This is true only of "primary satisfiers," things deemed "good in themselves," not things deemed good for instrumental reasons, i.e., because they are useful for obtaining some primary good).
By trying to tie values to the transcendent you're introducing a superfluous complexity that mystifies the subject and contributes nothing to our understanding of it.
The point is that reason, while certainly essential for all you say, cannot encompass the world of actuality. A word is not a thing, to put it plainly.
I agree. But words are the only tools we have for communicating about "actuality" --- which consists of our experiences, not postulated realms beyond experience.
Ethics is value,and value is sewn into our possibilities for experience. All experience is inherently ethical, that is, valuative; that is, that which is in play, at risk, in ethical interaction. No value in play, no ethics. Value is an essential feature of ethics, though not a sufficient one, forthis requires the entanglements with others in the world. But these entanglements are value entangled. How value is played out is where your accounts begin. I am looking at the the underpinning assumptions of this. I mean, in any given ethical system, there is the assumption of value in the world. I am asking (along with those I read) what IS this? It turns out, value is nothing short of miraculous.
I agree that value is essential to ethics. But not any particular values or value judgments. What is inescapable is that all persons assign values to things, which differ from person to person, and that the quality of each person's life is a function of the extent to which he is able to realize his own values. In a social setting, however, it is possible for agents to act in ways that prevent other agents from attaining the things
they value. Hence ethics: rules of interaction which allow all agents to realize their own values, whatever they may be, as far as possible, without favoring any agent or any values.