Philosophy of 💗 Love

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thrasymachus
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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value wrote
To be honest I have not yet started with the study of Levinas (or Heidegger) his works besides reading introductions, biographies, summaries and podcasts.

I will keep this topic as an ebook and return to it later.

Perhaps others are able to comment and continue the discussion.
Heidegger's Being and Time, if you have more than just an interest in puzzles and logic (like most analytic philosophers), but are driven to understand the world, is the most important work of the last century. Kant helps to prepare one and Husserl made Heidegger possible. But B&T is THE work to study.

Unfortunately, it will alienate you from other posters. Continental philosophy, what is handed to us from down the ages, is not studied in the US or Britain, for the most part.

Levinas will drive you mad. But there are many helpful texts. I have a zillion. Let me know if you want them. I can make them available on pdf on OneDrive.
value
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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thrasymachus wrote: April 1st, 2023, 9:33 pm
value wrote
To be honest I have not yet started with the study of Levinas (or Heidegger) his works besides reading introductions, biographies, summaries and podcasts.

I will keep this topic as an ebook and return to it later.

Perhaps others are able to comment and continue the discussion.
Heidegger's Being and Time, if you have more than just an interest in puzzles and logic (like most analytic philosophers), but are driven to understand the world, is the most important work of the last century. Kant helps to prepare one and Husserl made Heidegger possible. But B&T is THE work to study.

Unfortunately, it will alienate you from other posters. Continental philosophy, what is handed to us from down the ages, is not studied in the US or Britain, for the most part.

Levinas will drive you mad. But there are many helpful texts. I have a zillion. Let me know if you want them. I can make them available on pdf on OneDrive.
I would be very interested. I will move Being and Time higher on the todo list ;)

I found the following Partially Examined Life podcasts:

Ep. 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they’ve forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking “What is Being?” we ask, as in a scientific context, “what is this thing?” This approach then poisons our ability to understand ourselves or the world that we as human beings actually inhabit, as opposed to the abstraction that science makes out of this.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/produ ... heidegger/

Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part One)
This close reading of sections near the beginning of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1926) is a direct sequel to ep. 32, which provides an overview of his project.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2022/ ... ons-being/

Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part Two)
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2022/ ... ons-being/

Ep. 297: Heidegger on the Human Condition (Part One)
This selection (aka section 9) covers existence (in German, Existenz) vs. existentia. The former is Dasein's (humanity's) specific way of being, which involves possibility and thus choice. H was in this use an "existentialist," even though this was a label that he rejected.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2022/ ... condition/

Ep. 297: Heidegger on the Human Condition (Part Two)
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2022/ ... condition/
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thrasymachus
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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value wrote
I will move Being and Time higher on the todo list
I've read it once and a half, with lots of other critical works about Heidegger. Time to read it again, I think. Then again.
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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I decided to continue the reply to your post despite lack of knowledge of Levinas his works. I will respond in parts.

I recently asked ChatGPT about Levinas and it responded that Levinas his theory is based on the concept love.

"Emmanuel Levinas' theory of ethics as first philosophy is grounded in the concept of love. According to Cambridge Core[1], Levinas believed that love was a crucial element in ethical reflections, and that personal, ethical, and political relations between the self and the other are founded on or conditioned by love. Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other, and the encounter with another person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt[2]. Levinas even suggests that "responsibility for my neighbor...is...the harsh name for what we call love"[1]. Levinas' philosophy is based on the relationship with the Other, and he prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the "love of wisdom"[2]."
https://www.perplexity.ai/

When it concerns Levinas his Ethics as First Philosophy it seems to me to be at question whether morality is to be considered primary in the cosmos.

More simplified it might be possible to argue that Levinas argues that respect is fundamentally demanded in the face of an Other and the reason that that would be so in my opinion is because one is fundamentally incapable of determining the value of an other in the face of an unknown future. Therefore a fundamental respect would be required to serve the purpose of life.

Of respect it can be said that it underlays all that is good in the world. Space and time are a form of respect and thus the whole of physical reality stands 'in respect'. Respect in a way is the source of intelligence.

Therefore Ethics as First Philosophy - the moral responsibility in the face of an Other grounded in Love - describes the core requirement of intelligence of which it can be said that it's prosperity in general is the essence of morality and the highest purpose of existence.

thrasymachus wrote: March 22nd, 2023, 11:09 pm
I was just reading 'The Meaning of Truth' by William James in which he argued the following:

Why may not thought's mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence? No one who has read Lotze can fail to remember his striking comment on the ordinary view of the secondary qualities of matter, which brands them as 'illusory' because they copy nothing in the thing. The notion of a world complete in itself, to which thought comes as a passive mirror, adding nothing to fact, Lotze says is irrational. Rather is thought itself a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious supplement."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5117/5117-h/5117-h.htm
But you know the consequence of this kind of thinking? You end up in Richard Rorty's world, and truth is not discovered, but is made. Reality is a language construct. Rorty wrote The Mirror of Nature about this issue, and while he certainly didn't take the Kantian approach about synthetic apriori judgments, he did take the physicalist model and completely annihilated it with one simple question: how does anything out there get in here (in my head)? One of my favorite questions, really, because it is so simple, yet the entire community of analytic philosophers refuse to go there. They do get it, of course. They know there is no mechanism for the epistemic transposition of things from the world into other things, like brains. Knowledge is impossible by this model. Rorty thought basically philosophy had reached its end and there was nothing more to say, for metaphysics was dead.
Yes, the question interests me as well since it seems plainly obvious to me that a physical sensory mechanism cannot have preceded the fundamental potential of the ability to sense because in order to become sensible - a physical sensory mechanism - the ability to sense is fundamental.

I recently managed to get an AI to confirm that life requires a fundamental a priori source of energy. This was done by the assertion that the directedness of work in life's fundamental characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is to be considered work by itself that requires energy that cannot originate from a spontaneous and random source of energy in the environment.

At first the AI attempted to stubbornly deny the claim based on the status quo of its scientific sources but when the logic was enforced that life's key characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is fundamental for life it started to contradict itself and ultimately gave in and confirmed that life requires a fundamental a priori source of energy.

"Yes, it is correct to state that the specificity in the life's specific directional energetic organizing behavior is work by itself for which energy is required[1][2]. Energy is defined as the ability to do work or to create some kind of change, and all living organisms require energy to perform their life processes[1][2][3]. The specific direction of the work involved in life's energetic organizing behavior requires a specific source of energy that cannot originate from random spontaneous sources in the environment[1][2]. Therefore, a specific source of energy is required to explain the specific direction of the work involved in life's energetic organizing behavior, and this energy is fundamental to life because it is required for a characteristic of life that is fundamental to life[1][2][3]. The specificity in the life's specific directional energetic organizing behavior is a key characteristic of life and is work by itself for which energy is required."
https://www.perplexity.ai/

In my opinion the directedness for which the AI argues that a specific directional energy is required that cannot be random is the key to explain it. I got as far as the cited quote yesterday but I intend to question more deeply soon.

It might be of interest to note that Arthur Schoppenhauer's Will at the root of the cosmos is to be called 'Energy' by experts on Schoppenhauer.

I recently viewed an interview of philosophy professor and Schoppenhauer scholar Frederick Coplestone (famous for a BBC interview with Bertrand Russell) by British philosopher Bryan Magee who also specialized in Schoppenhauer that mentioned that Schoppenhauer's 'Will' should have been named 'energy' and that Schoppenhauer argued that matter is energy.

Coplestone: Schoppenauer uses the word Will, perhaps unfortunately. One might use energy.

... below conscious drive that Schoppenhauer called Will and that perhaps some better name can be given to is force or energy.


Bryan Magee: Yes he thought that if we analyze this world of experience - the world of science if you like - the world of common sense, which does consist for the most part of matter in motion and most of it is matter in colossal amounts, I mean Galaxies and Solar systems and so on, travelling through the cosmos at gigantic speeds, so the whole material Universe consists of matter in motion to a degree that so to speak defies our imagination to really conceptualize it and he argued following on from Kant that all what is ultimate in all this must be energy.

Schoppenhauer argued that matter is as it were instantiated energy and that a physical object is a space filled with force and that ultimately all matter must be transmutable into energy.
...
Schoppenhauer argues that what is ultimate in this world of phenomena in this world of experience is energy.


Coplestone: Yes.

Position: 16:50

Another quote from the video (22:05):

Bryan Magee: I think it would have been better if Schoppenhauer would have used the world energy because he decided to give the term the name Will to this metaphysical reality and I think that has misled people ever since.

It appears that an AI has confirmed the requirement of fundamental energy at the root of life.
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thrasymachus
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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value wrote
When it concerns Levinas his Ethics as First Philosophy it seems to me to be at question whether morality is to be considered primary in the cosmos.

More simplified it might be possible to argue that Levinas argues that respect is fundamentally demanded in the face of an Other and the reason that that would be so in my opinion is because one is fundamentally incapable of determining the value of an other in the face of an unknown future. Therefore a fundamental respect would be required to serve the purpose of life.
Respect is metaphysically demanded in the face of the Other. Levinas is telling us, and he certainly helped me understand with real clarity, that this world is a metaphysical "place" and that our relations with Others is "first philosophy." It is not some radically impossible world (though this is not absent from his thought) but that the radically impossible is IN the standing apart from the "spontaneous" representations that have a hold on our lived lives. I see Kierkegaard behind this, complaining that Christianity has yielded to "Christendom" the "kingdom" of God. I think Jean luc Marion is right regarding what is "there" that defies assimilation into the representative "totality" (Levinas borrows this from Heidegger) that holds a grip on our existence implicitly, with every spontaneous thought of engagement. Marion asks, what is there, then, that is there, that "overflows"--there is a thesis here, constructed by Sartre, see his Nausea and the Chestnut tree, that tries to illustrate this "radical contingency" of existence-- representation? Wittgenstein calls for silence. So does Heidegger. Marion writes:

... in passing from Wittgenstein to Heidegger, in speaking from the starting point of philosophy (or almost) and not from that of logic (or almost): “Someone who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the Christian faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent about God [von Gott zu schweigen] when he is speaking in the realm of thinking.”1

This is a major argument in this French theological turn, so called. It plays off of Husserl's epoche, which reduces the world to it pure presence(s). The "realm of thinking" does not permit this. The question is, what does this Wittgenstienian "silence" (Heidegger called it the nothing and the anxiety of taking thought to its death, its terminal point of meaningful application) actually "say"? What is intimated at this precipice of "authenticity" in which one has ascended, in the reduction (epoche) to a great height where all that is average and familiar has fallen away?

The greatest difficulty doubtless consists more essentially in deciding what silence says: contempt, renunciation, the avowal of impotence, or else the highest honor rendered, the only one neither unworthy nor “dangerous.”6 But already we pay so much attention to securing the place where only silence is suitable that we do not yet try to determine the stakes and the nature of this silence. (Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being)

That underscored part is my doing. Marion should see that the "stakes and the nature of the silence" can be linked with the essential practice of Buddhism, which is, after all, a very serious commitment to just this. And we know what the most ancient text tells us, the Abhidamma (in Pali, so I don't know what the original says. I do think it is close to our English simply because we live in the same world) of course, makes very strong claims about a radical transformation of experience. This kind of thing very much not included in our current culture, and I dare say it will not be for a long time. But the "sense" of the apprehension of an ineffability IN the presence of the world qua presence is where Marion is taking us.

I recently managed to get an AI to confirm that life requires a fundamental a priori source of energy. This was done by the assertion that the directedness of work in life's fundamental characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is to be considered work by itself that requires energy that cannot originate from a spontaneous and random source of energy in the environment.

At first the AI attempted to stubbornly deny the claim based on the status quo of its scientific sources but when the logic was enforced that life's key characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is fundamental for life it started to contradict itself and ultimately gave in and confirmed that life requires a fundamental a priori source of energy.

"Yes, it is correct to state that the specificity in the life's specific directional energetic organizing behavior is work by itself for which energy is required[1][2]. Energy is defined as the ability to do work or to create some kind of change, and all living organisms require energy to perform their life processes[1][2][3]. The specific direction of the work involved in life's energetic organizing behavior requires a specific source of energy that cannot originate from random spontaneous sources in the environment[1][2]. Therefore, a specific source of energy is required to explain the specific direction of the work involved in life's energetic organizing behavior, and this energy is fundamental to life because it is required for a characteristic of life that is fundamental to life[1][2][3]. The specificity in the life's specific directional energetic organizing behavior is a key characteristic of life and is work by itself for which energy is required."


In my opinion the directedness for which the AI argues that a specific directional energy is required that cannot be random is the key to explain it. I got as far as the cited quote yesterday but I intend to question more deeply soon.
But then again, energy is relativized to tasks being done, and thereby the true apriority of energy is not presented. A physicist cannot tell us what energy or force is, and more than she can tell us about existence as a kind of underpinning of all things, because once you step this far into the question, the question stops being a question at all. It is now sheer wonder.

The directedness? Clearly, we abide by what our culture defines as useful work, but at the most basic level, this goes to problem solving, the essential structure of experience, the conditional nature of our existence in time. Pragmatists argue, and I think this is right, that the most basic analysis looks to forward looking nature of experience as such, that is, to have an encounter at all with the world. I observe a blade of grass and the whole of meaningful philosophical analytic possibility is there before me, and time is basic: I already know it is a blade of grass prior to the encounter, there is care and interest, I am a cognizing and existential agency doing the perceiving and perception is inherently cognitive, etc. etc.; and all this is contained with a singularity of past-present-future, which is a dynamic process. Now we have "energy" at the basic level. All things one does are reducible to this one "event" which is temporal dynamic.

This may be an alien idea, but consider that everything that comes before thought, and all of the variegations within, from celestial events to an unsettled stomach, is at the basic level a phenomenological presentation. The logic is simple: all that is ever witnessed is phenomena. This is a radical break from science, and this is I believe the hardest part to see: Where science assumes space and time as part of an independent world, phenomenology does not. Take Heidegger's idea of space and "deseverance". This odd locution (most are odd when one reads B&T): I walk into a room and the room is inhabited with familiar things, tables, desks, chairs, a ceiling, and so on. Heidegger says, this conceptual/pragmatic familiarity that is instantly "there" informing the moment, is desevered from history in the occurrent affair. The idea is, and there are different ways to put this, we generally hve our epistemic bearing toward the world due to an availability of language is "severed" when unattended in awareness. I come across a desk, observe it, and "desk" references leap into play, and are thereby DEsevered to create a moment of familiar encounter. THIS is space. Right now, if I attend to my uncle Dennis visiting Spain, Dennis is more "proximal" than my glasses that sit on my face, because Dennis has been, if I may, spatially desevered. And if I think about Einstein's space, the space of waving my hand through the air, and the like, these then become desevered regions of possible meanings. Contrast this with science's view that says there is always space there and we and all that is occupy this space, etc.; Heidegger is not saying this is wrong. He is saying at an ontological analytical place of understanding, he is giving this term 'space' a very , very different meaning, and as ontological, it is at the foundation for all meaning.

For Heidegger, 'energy' is a "regionalized" term that is embedded among a general matrix of terminological possibilities that apply whenever we talk about THAT region of interest. Our language does not possess any one to one correspondence with the world. Meaning is a language construction.
In my opinion the directedness for which the AI argues that a specific directional energy is required that cannot be random is the key to explain it. I got as far as the cited quote yesterday but I intend to question more deeply soon.

It might be of interest to note that Arthur Schoppenhauer's Will at the root of the cosmos is to be called 'Energy' by experts on Schoppenhauer.

I recently viewed an interview of philosophy professor and Schoppenhauer scholar Frederick Coplestone (famous for a BBC interview with Bertrand Russell) by British philosopher Bryan Magee who also specialized in Schoppenhauer that mentioned that Schoppenhauer's 'Will' should have been named 'energy' and that Schoppenhauer argued that matter is energy.

Coplestone: Schoppenauer uses the word Will, perhaps unfortunately. One might use energy.

... below conscious drive that Schoppenhauer called Will and that perhaps some better name can be given to is force or energy.

Bryan Magee: Yes he thought that if we analyze this world of experience - the world of science if you like - the world of common sense, which does consist for the most part of matter in motion and most of it is matter in colossal amounts, I mean Galaxies and Solar systems and so on, travelling through the cosmos at gigantic speeds, so the whole material Universe consists of matter in motion to a degree that so to speak defies our imagination to really conceptualize it and he argued following on from Kant that all what is ultimate in all this must be energy.

Schoppenhauer argued that matter is as it were instantiated energy and that a physical object is a space filled with force and that ultimately all matter must be transmutable into energy.
...
Schoppenhauer argues that what is ultimate in this world of phenomena in this world of experience is energy.
Thoughts on Schopenhauer: He was arguably right to call the world Will, and the excruciating depictions of the dreadfulness of this world are right, and clear as a bell. One should be driven, as Ahab of Moby Dick (a may have mentioned this before. I taught this novel once) was driven, to strike out at this "living" wretched world. The scientist's 'energy' is a term with a narrow and selected application that, were it to be given a privileged philosophical standing, would utterly trivialize the tremendous gravitas of this world, as is the case with analytic philosophy. Energy is philosophically without meaning, I argue, not because Heidegger "regionalizes" meaning, or because Derrida deconstructs it, but because to rightly conceive of something, one cannot be ad hoc dismissive of its properties, and what we witness about what "energy" IS, includes most saliently these abhorrent features. All that can be said of it pales dramatically compared with these, as I say, most salient qualities "reality" displays.

And while he did see rightly that Buddhism was a solution to being-in-the-world, Schopenhauer lacked insight, and this failing is about something, for reason's I don't understand, that is rejected, or not accessible in order to be rejected or otherwise, by most of contemporary philosophy: moral realism. This is a thesis that would take a long time to defend, but suffice it to say, if the Wretchedness of the world is metaphysically salient, so is the Good. Now one can see that this is not a quantitative determination, but a qualitative one. One is not counting the instances and intensities of things, but rather paying attention to the actual natures of things: our morality is the metaphysical "reality" which is a meta-struggle.

I suspect Nietzsche found Schopenhauer so appealing because the former lived a life of such physical suffering and overcoming, he knew nothing else. Such is the way of philosophy. You conceive according to what you are and understand.
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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value wrote
Bryan Magee: I think it would have been better if Schoppenhauer would have used the world energy because he decided to give the term the name Will to this metaphysical reality and I think that has misled people ever since.
Energy is worse: The metaphysical "whatever it is" took Ahab's leg in a most ferocious way. What twinkles in little stars also tortures you. It is not God, of course; this is just an invention of theology, God the creator of everything. This is a great cause of foolish philosophy, resulting in theodicies and endless bickering.

Wittgenstein was right: God is the Good. Period.
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 3:36 pm
value wrote
Bryan Magee: I think it would have been better if Schoppenhauer would have used the world energy because he decided to give the term the name Will to this metaphysical reality and I think that has misled people ever since.
Energy is worse: ...
Why do you think that two prominent philosophy scholars that are both dedicated to and wrote books about Arthur Schoppenhauer would both argue that his concept 'Will' that would fundamentally underlay the universe would better have been named 'energy'?

Brian Magee wrote a book titled "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer", which is a comprehensive study.

Frederick Coplestone wrote a book titled "Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism", which explores Schopenhauer's philosophy of pessimism in detail.

thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 3:36 pmThe metaphysical "whatever it is" took Ahab's leg in a most ferocious way. What twinkles in little stars also tortures you. It is not God, of course; this is just an invention of theology, God the creator of everything. This is a great cause of foolish philosophy, resulting in theodicies and endless bickering.
Isn't the mystical aspect that is indicated with for example 'the twinkling of a star' that moves one spiritually ultimately based in an aspect that 'cannot be named' as described in for example the Tao Te Ching or the mentioned Heideggerian "nothing" or Wittgensteinian "silience"?

Isn't the 'overflow' to be sought in that nameless aspect and not in for example 'the Good' as if that good were to be a given (an absolute or a 'pre-judgement') that can be acquired by empirical means?

thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 12:16 pmThat underscored part is my doing. Marion should see that the "stakes and the nature of the silence" can be linked with the essential practice of Buddhism, which is, after all, a very serious commitment to just this. And we know what the most ancient text tells us, the Abhidamma (in Pali, so I don't know what the original says. I do think it is close to our English simply because we live in the same world) of course, makes very strong claims about a radical transformation of experience. This kind of thing very much not included in our current culture, and I dare say it will not be for a long time. But the "sense" of the apprehension of an ineffability IN the presence of the world qua presence is where Marion is taking us.
Did you already try to question an AI about Abhidamma? It can read Pali and the original scriptures and your questions can potentially unlock new insights from the perspective of Western philosophy.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/7c5874 ... e8aa5c?s=u

thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 3:36 pmWittgenstein was right: God is the Good. Period.
I questioned ChatGPT about Wittgenstein and the way he conceived of 'good' and the response was the following:

"Wittgenstein's philosophy does not concern a non-relative "good" that could be identified with God. In fact, Wittgenstein was deeply skeptical of the idea of an objective or absolute moral standard that could be identified with any kind of metaphysical entity, including God.

Wittgenstein's philosophy evolved over the course of his life, and his views on ethics and the concept of "the Good" are complex and multifaceted. However, one of his most famous statements on the topic is found in his book "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," where he writes:

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Thus, for Wittgenstein, there is no objective or universal standard of "the Good," but rather a plurality of individual and culturally specific ethical frameworks.
"
https://www.perplexity.ai/

Can you please explain the origin of the assertion that Wittgenstein would have claimed that God is 'the Good'?
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 12:16 pmRespect is metaphysically demanded in the face of the Other. Levinas is telling us, and he certainly helped me understand with real clarity, that this world is a metaphysical "place" and that our relations with Others is "first philosophy."
I have yet to discover it from Levinas his own words but it seems that I would share the opinion that philosophy is primary to the cosmos.

The in-the-moment respecting of an Other would involve morality (which Levinas might have indicated as 'Love') and the why question of respecting an Other would concern the ethical notion that it is fundamentally impossible to know the value of an Other in the face of an unknown future and therefore in order to serve the purpose of life one is fundamentally required to maintain a base level of respect for others.

thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 12:16 pmIt is not some radically impossible world (though this is not absent from his thought) but that the radically impossible is IN the standing apart from the "spontaneous" representations that have a hold on our lived lives. I see Kierkegaard behind this, complaining that Christianity has yielded to "Christendom" the "kingdom" of God. I think Jean luc Marion is right regarding what is "there" that defies assimilation into the representative "totality" (Levinas borrows this from Heidegger) that holds a grip on our existence implicitly, with every spontaneous thought of engagement. Marion asks, what is there, then, that is there, that "overflows"--there is a thesis here, constructed by Sartre, see his Nausea and the Chestnut tree, that tries to illustrate this "radical contingency" of existence-- representation? Wittgenstein calls for silence. So does Heidegger. Marion writes:

... in passing from Wittgenstein to Heidegger, in speaking from the starting point of philosophy (or almost) and not from that of logic (or almost): “Someone who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the Christian faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent about God [von Gott zu schweigen] when he is speaking in the realm of thinking.”1

This is a major argument in this French theological turn, so called. It plays off of Husserl's epoche, which reduces the world to it pure presence(s). The "realm of thinking" does not permit this. The question is, what does this Wittgenstienian "silence" (Heidegger called it the nothing and the anxiety of taking thought to its death, its terminal point of meaningful application) actually "say"? What is intimated at this precipice of "authenticity" in which one has ascended, in the reduction (epoche) to a great height where all that is average and familiar has fallen away?

The greatest difficulty doubtless consists more essentially in deciding what silence says: contempt, renunciation, the avowal of impotence, or else the highest honor rendered, the only one neither unworthy nor “dangerous.”6 But already we pay so much attention to securing the place where only silence is suitable that we do not yet try to determine the stakes and the nature of this silence. (Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being)
Thank you for the citation of Jean-Luc Marion.

It seems strange in my opinion that he would have been the first Western philosopher to argue that the concept God cannot 'be' a Being since the idea of a being to be the source of Being is absurd in my opinion. In Eastern philosophy's Tao Te Ching for example the Tao is declared nameless (without Being).

At question would be: why consider God when it has no 'Being' (with 'Being' from a philosophical sense being 'a nature by itself for consideration')?

When it concerns a philosophical inquiry into the fundamental source of Being one is to seek the most fundamental aspect with 'a nature by itself for consideration'.

Helped by AI I discovered that Jean-Luc Marion viewed that 'the gift of Love' is how God manifests in the world. According to the AI Jean-Luc Marion also said that God 'is' that Love which seems to be a mistake since anything that 'is' would involve Being.

"In Jean-Luc Marion's theory, the gift of God is love. Marion has argued that love is entirely selfless and completely committed to the other, and it is a supreme gift of self-abandonment. Marion's work on the concept of gift emphasizes the importance of self-abandonment and selflessness, and it is part of a larger project to rethink the nature of God and the relationship between God and humanity. Marion has suggested that it is through the gift of God's self that humanity is able to experience God's love. Marion's phenomenological approach leads the philosopher to the concept of "God without being" – God is not a being but love as a gift. Therefore, it can be said that the gift of God is love in Jean-Luc Marion's theory."

My conclusion would be in the case of the theory of Jean-Luc Marion that the most fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself for consideration' would be Love.

I am currently half-way reading the book In It Together by the founder of onlinephilosophyclub.com and it occurred to me that the book might touch upon the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion in a practical sense.

thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 12:16 pm
I recently managed to get an AI to confirm that life requires a fundamental a priori source of energy...

"Yes, it is correct to state that the specificity in the life's specific directional energetic organizing behavior is work by itself for which energy is required[1][2]..."
But then again, energy is relativized to tasks being done, and thereby the true apriority of energy is not presented. A physicist cannot tell us what energy or force is, and more than she can tell us about existence as a kind of underpinning of all things, because once you step this far into the question, the question stops being a question at all. It is now sheer wonder.
The 'directional type of energy' that is required at the fundament of life involves the idea that the source of the directionality for which a specific type of energy is required is to be contained within the source of that energy which therefore cannot be a random source in the environment. That might imply that the source of that energy involves a crossing point for science.

thrasymachus wrote: April 10th, 2023, 3:36 pmWittgenstein was right: God is the Good. Period.
I would not agree with that notion. Good might be considered the most fundamental aspect in the cosmos with 'a nature by itself for philosophical consideration' but that does not imply that it is the origin of existence itself, because whatever has a nature for consideration can be said to 'exist' ('be' a Being).

In my opinion the idea that Good is the most fundamental aspect of the universe is similar to the idea that Schopenhauer's Will or Marion's Love are the most fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself' of the universe.

What is the origin of that fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself' that allows philosophical consideration? It gives rise to the idea of a concept that 'cannot be named' (has no 'being') with an example being the Tao in the Tao Te Ching.

I recently managed to get an AI to confirm that the concept 'Dominance' in Gottfried Leibniz Monad theory is the most fundamental aspect in the universe with a 'nature by itself' for consideration.

"According to Gottfried Leibniz, dominance can be considered the fundamental aspect that underlays the universe. Leibniz believed that the universe is made up of eternal monads, which are indivisible and indestructible units of reality. These monads are unified by a dominant monad, which is responsible for the form and soul of the universe. Leibniz believed that dominance is a direct expression of God because all change of monads must come from within and only the ultimate monad which is God can change monads from within."
https://www.perplexity.ai/

It seems that it can be concluded that several philosophies consider a 'most fundamental aspect' with a nature by itself that can be philosophically considered. Therefore it might be of interest to compare those fundamental aspects to discover how they correlate:

- Good (the Good) by Wittgenstein and others
- Will (energy) by Schopenhauer
- Love (a gift of a non-being aspect) by Jean-Luc Marion
- Dominance (that unifies eternal monads for form and soul) by Gottfried Leibniz
- Truth
- Beauty
- ... more?

What do those 'most fundamental aspects' that would fundamentally underlay the universe have in common?

For one: they share an apparent origin or source that is 'beyond comprehension' (e.g. 'cannot be named' as in the Tao Te Ching).

Secondly: the key characteristic of those fundamental aspects is that in the most simple form they imply a deviation of meaninglessness or a deviation of (the idea of) 'nothing'.

In my opinion it is that deviation that allows for the idea of 'the Good' or Will or Love or Dominance.

At question is therefore: what is that deviation of meaninglessness?

An AI confirmed that "the directedness of work in life's fundamental characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is to be considered work by itself that requires energy that cannot originate from a spontaneous and random source of energy in the environment".

'directedness by itself' is a deviation of meaninglessness that can be described as 'Good' or Will or Love or Dominance.

In conclusion it appears that philosophically the most fundamental aspect with a nature by itself for consideration as fundamental origin of the universe is 'deviation by itself' relative to meaninglessness or (the idea of) nothing as a directional source of energy (as it is perceived within the world) that provides form and soul in the cosmos.

From the perspective of life that deviation can be named 'Love' or 'Will' or 'Dominance' or 'Truth' or 'Beauty' which is in a way an attempt to meaningfully 'color' that aspect. And that coloring can be justified philosophically by the mere ability to do so.

Who can deny that a deviation of meaninglessness is Love or Good? Both concepts have no 'source' that can be named or considered which means automatically that at the root it is a deviation of meaninglessness. It is then to be considered that the limit of the humans consideration potential is the sole origin of the coloring potential of the most fundamental aspect of existence by which that aspect can have many names and ideas that all seem to be whole by itself and a sufficient ground for philosophical theories.

Fundamentally however it seems that the most fundamental aspect of the universe involves 'deviation per se' relative to meaninglessness.
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thrasymachus
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

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value wrote
Why do you think that two prominent philosophy scholars that are both dedicated to and wrote books about Arthur Schoppenhauer would both argue that his concept 'Will' that would fundamentally underlay the universe would better have been named 'energy'?

Brian Magee wrote a book titled "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer", which is a comprehensive study.

Frederick Coplestone wrote a book titled "Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism", which explores Schopenhauer's philosophy of pessimism in detail.
Well, I disagree with a lot of philosophers.
They weren't asking a technical question about what Schopenhauer was saying, as if they were teaching a course and trying to get it right. They were debating as to whether he misled people by calling the metaphysical foundation for all things "will". They agreed it is better to use a term like energy, but this is wrong. Energy is a scientist's term, neutral, and carries nothing of the meaning that characterizes the horrors of the world, or our existence and experience. Nor should it be used to designate something not in space, time and causality. You don't use a scientific term to describe the impossible noumenal reality from which human existence and its miseries and joys issue. A term like energy, as with all terms, is reductive to its meaning, and this term's meaning is devoid of ethical/aesthetic value. You could say "will" doesn't have this either, and I would agree, but it does, as I see it, give primacy human existence. Put it this way: energy is not a phenomenological term, but one that belongs to science and everydayness. Phenomenology deals with metaphysics, not science, and Schopenhauer was a metaphysician, that is, his "will" was not something in the evidence of empirical observation, but what is "behind" this.

Brain Magee would have to agree, though grudgingly. Again, there is a reason why Kant was so cryptic about noumena: there are no words for this; all we have to go on is what lies before us, and the most underscored feature of this is ethics and value, and their metaphysical counterparts, metaethics and metavalue would find their place in perhaps what I would call "metaenergy". But clearly, this is Moby Dick's Ahab's world: not IN the visible world that is manifest to normal thought and sense, but what is "behind" all of this that is where the final accountability rests: He lashes out at God, not energy, for this term is has no moral dimension. Schopenhauer is a notorious atheist, which is why I am confident he did not understand the world very well.
Isn't the mystical aspect that is indicated with for example 'the twinkling of a star' that moves one spiritually ultimately based in an aspect that 'cannot be named' as described in for example the Tao Te Ching or the mentioned Heideggerian "nothing" or Wittgensteinian "silience"?

Isn't the 'overflow' to be sought in that nameless aspect and not in for example 'the Good' as if that good were to be a given (an absolute or a 'pre-judgement') that can be acquired by empirical means?
Yes, I argue, and it is a hard issue to make sense of. Consider: Take Heidegger's position that when we have a familiar encounter with the world, we are always already IN this world, meaning such encounters are contextual, and contexts are of language and culture and its institutions, and these are historical. Knowing something in a world is to come upon it already knowing what it is! It is an event in time, and time is a kind of singular, future looking occurrence that loaded with anticipatory possibilities for everything prior to the encounter. In this singularity, all things, apriori or otherwise, are taken "as" language/culture constructions. I se a cat on the street and I already know all about what can, is likely or unlikely, to occur. I have descriptive vocabulary and possible responses "ready to hand" in the event of approaching he cat. So when we encounter anything, a thought, a feeling, a problem to solve, just anything at all, we never really encounter in any transcendentally "pure" way, what is right before our eyes. Our knowledge is temporal: anticipatory constructions that occur in "environments of instrumentality" like meeting cats on the street. This is a feature of human existence being-in-the-world.

I bring this up because before we talk about the "nameless" aspect of things, we have to know what it is to be a "named" aspect, for it is against this that the nameless draws its meaning. I think Heidegger is right in this quasi-pragmatic account. In this philosophy, a thing, to be a thing, is IN language and culture and one cannot remove this from the thing in any meaningful way, for the language follows, constitutes, every novel perspective. Such a novel perspective may be the cat being a prop for an outdoor performance, or anything you can imagine: the language is always already there, interpretatively stabilizing and familiarizing the world. So: when Heidegger talks about the "nothing" (which he inherited from Kierkegaard. I have to keep saying this after reading John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics in which it is revealed that Heidegger does not recognize the huge debt he owed to Kierkegaard) he refers to an existential anxiety and it comes to the point where one realizes that all that we are, this aggregation of culture and language, is foundationally indeterminate. I know about cats and trees, but the world qua world (being qua being) has no language to say what it is. Ask a question about the foundation of all things, so to speak, and (again, Kierkegaard) there is this anxiety (or dread):


Anxiety is indeed anxiety in
the face of... ,but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in
the face of . . . is always anxiety for . . . , but not for this or that.
The indeterminateness of that in the face of which and for which
we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather
the essential impossibility of determining it. In a familiar phrase
this indeterminateness comes to the fore.
23. In anxiety, we say, “one feels ill at ease [es ist einem unheimlich].”
What is “it” that makes “one” feel ill at ease? We
cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a
whole it is so for him. All things and we ourselves sink into
indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere
disappearance. Rather in this very receding things turn toward
us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in
anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the
slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over
us and remains.
Anxiety reveals the nothing.

From "What Is Metaphysics"

This "no hold on things" is the best Heidegger can do (If you ever follow this on to Derrida, you find the true post modern thinking lies with not being able to say anything at all without a language/context setting. This "nothing" is now deconstructable): a kind of existential agoraphobia in which one discovers s/he is drifting up and out away from meaningful engagement. For Kierkegaard, this is the moment of "posting spirit" and discovery of the soul's fallenness from God, the beginning of Christian "sin" (for prior to this, there can be no sin. One is more like an animal). Self consciousness is the awakening of the soul as it constitutes a complete break from everything "dasein".

So there is Heidegger saying this nothing (the "not yet" of the temporal void our freedom faces as it creates a future out of its own possibilities) is just an anxiety in the structure of dasein that ends in death; and Kierkegaard essentially saying, to reach this point of self realization in which one exercises one's freedom from language and culture and "the world," and now the Taoist who says the tao that is spoken is not the true tao. One way to think about this is to ask simply, when one shuts up with, authentic, spiritual intent, seeking, as Meister Eckhart put it, God without (the language imposition of) god, does one realize something profound and ecstatic?

My view of this is that this is impossible to generalize when considering how talents and dispositions are so erratically distributed. Obviously, some are born academics who haven't a clue as to what this is about, their rational talents come to no avail. Others are sentimental and undisciplined but deeply sensitive and intuitive, and they find themselves seeking ways to put this into a thesis. This is the kind of thing that separates analytic philosophy from Continental. I read the latter. Philosophy without metaphysics is all but divorced from meaning.
Did you already try to question an AI about Abhidamma? It can read Pali and the original scriptures and your questions can potentially unlock new insights from the perspective of Western philosophy.
I found this interesting: All mental phenomena have mind as their forerunner. Suggests the temporality of "mind". I would have to read more about this in this text. My inclination is, though, as it always has been, that the Buddha is no different from myself and anything important he had to say metaphysics is inherently revelatory. The Abhidamma is useful when it confirms or disconfirms a thought I have about what I actually experience, and this is true of everything I read. "New insights" only occur where one has an existing disposition for inquiry.

The Abhidamma has a lot to say that is fascinating, but I will never be a part of the "culture" of this thinking.

Impressive that you can read Pali. It is these days only known by Buddhist scholars, so I am guessing you have that kind of serious scholarly interest? I think the Buddhists were and are right about their method, meaning that meditation with the intention of enlightenment and liberation is the highest form of philosophical practice. These two concepts are mostly absent in contemporary culture, and I think, as with all dialectical historical movements, things will, alas calamitously, turn once again toward metaphysics, and this is will be the occasion of an ascent of phenomenology.
I questioned ChatGPT about Wittgenstein and the way he conceived of 'good' and the response was the following:

"Wittgenstein's philosophy does not concern a non-relative "good" that could be identified with God. In fact, Wittgenstein was deeply skeptical of the idea of an objective or absolute moral standard that could be identified with any kind of metaphysical entity, including God.

Wittgenstein's philosophy evolved over the course of his life, and his views on ethics and the concept of "the Good" are complex and multifaceted. However, one of his most famous statements on the topic is found in his book "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," where he writes:

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Thus, for Wittgenstein, there is no objective or universal standard of "the Good," but rather a plurality of individual and culturally specific ethical frameworks."
Not very fond of ChatGPT in the way I am not fond of encyclopedias and dictionaries. They can be helpful, but they are not a substitute.

Wittgenstein was a complicated person. You know, three brothers committed suicided, and he himself constantly thought about it. Art and music filled his life. When Austria went to war, Wittgenstein petitioned to be sent to the front because he wanted to experience facing death! This was no dry academic, but a passionate (and disturbed) soul. See his Culture and Value:

What inclines even me to believe in Christ's resurrection? I play as it were with the thought.--If he did not rise
from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like every human being. He is dead & decomposed. In that case he
is a teacher, like any other & can no longer help; & we are once more orphaned & alone. And have to make do with
wisdom & speculation. It is as though we are in a hell, where we can only†a dream & are shut out from heaven,
roofed in as it were. But if I am to be REALLY redeemed,--I need certainty--not wisdom, dreams, speculation--and
this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul, needs, not my speculative intellect. For my soul,
with its passions, as it were with its flesh & blood, must be redeemed, not my abstract mind


Of course, his Christianity was not unlike Kierkegaard's: very guarded and suspicious of careless belief. But you can see he understands the world and its impossible ethical dilemma:

A cry of distress cannot be greater than that of one human being.

The Christian religion is only for the one who needs infinite help, that is only for the one who suffers infinite
distress.
The whole Earth cannot be in greater distress than one soul.


I think everyone knows this, but doesn't know enough to articulate it. It is in the moral fabric of the world that we are metaethically bound to each other.
This is where my original quote is from:
What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.

Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural. MS 107 192 c: 10.11.1929

You cannot lead people to the good; you can only lead them to some place or other; the good lies outside the space
of facts.
Which is echoed in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein didn't think language possessed the means to carry profound meaning, and so when the topic turned to ethics when gathered with positivists, he would turn his chair to the wall. It is not about Objective standards" for this is just what he wanted to avoid. A great admirer of Kierkegaard. Russell called him a mystic, and Witt broke off his relations with hm for not understanding that the Tractatus was more about what could not be spoken than about what could.
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

Post by thrasymachus »

value wrote
I have yet to discover it from Levinas his own words but it seems that I would share the opinion that philosophy is primary to the cosmos.

The in-the-moment respecting of an Other would involve morality (which Levinas might have indicated as 'Love') and the why question of respecting an Other would concern the ethical notion that it is fundamentally impossible to know the value of an Other in the face of an unknown future and therefore in order to serve the purpose of life one is fundamentally required to maintain a base level of respect for others.
The cosmos belongs to science. The hardest part about understanding these philosophers is the requirement to leave this kind of thinking. Levinas deals in a very different world, which is Heidegger's/Husserl's world. There is no cosmos here, that is, in the sense we all think of, as in a descriptive account of the visible universe. In phenomenology, the universe is a region of language that constitutes being-in-the-world. I haven't read everything Levinas wrote, but Totality and Infinity and elsewhere (I took a stab at his doctoral thesis once, which centered on Husserl's theory of intuitions. Couldn't understand it then. Now I think I could, but I don't have the motivation to do this) deal with the direct or immediate apprehension of the world (and these words have different meanings for different philosophers), it is Heidegger's "totality" of dasein that misses the primacy of ethics. There is a paper called Heidegger on Being a Person by John Haugeland, and a quote from this is telling. Dasein is

norms, normal dispositions, customs, sorts, roles, referral relations,
public institutions, and so on.7 On this reading, the anyone, the (everyday)
world, and language are different coherent "subpatterns"within
the grand pattern that is Dasein; they have Dasein's kind of being
because each of them is Dasein (though none of them is all of Dasein).
Within the anyone and all it institutes, the science of chemistry is a
coherent subpattern: chemistry is Dasein-and so are philately,
Christmas, and Cincinnati.


This totality is simply everything that can come to mind at all IN a culture's possibilities. So think of all of what this could be and dissociate it from ontology. Physics makes no claims about being. It is merely "ontic" which is the ready to hand, everydayness of things, and talk about the cosmos belongs to physics.
Obvously, there is a lot to say about this, but I bring it up because Levinas' world is a very strange place. He is mostly responding to Heidegger's analysis of human dasein with the critical intent to show how ethical responsibility, which Heidegger barely touches on, is grounded in a phenomenological metaphysics of "Otherness". And he is right, I am sure of it. But it is a radical step out of "common sense" and into this world of phenomenology, or post-phenomenology. I am reminded of one of Levinas' peers Blanchot, who wrote, "to write is to be exposed to the anonymity of language," then consider Haugeland's thesis above about the "institutional" nature of dasein: what we Really are, our humaness, is far beyond the stretch of what language and culture, our dasein, can say as these are inherently trivializing of the human condition. This is the Totality Levinas complains about.

Of course, you already have seen this kind of talk in the Tao te Ching, but phenomenology takes this simplcity, this radical reduction to pure presence that one encounters when language is suspended, and asks, what IS it, then, that I witness in this radical state of perceptual purity? For this, one has to read Husserl's Ideas 1. I mean, this book does exactly this: describes the world beneath, if you will, the everyday world of our dealings. Husserl's basic point is that here, we are no longer at the cutting edge of some paradigmatic theoretical thinking, for we have finally reached the brass ring of philosophy: the absolute reality. Husserl say we are already there! Henry et al say this pure encounter is inherently religious, indeed, the very essence of what it is all to be religious. I agree.

It seems strange in my opinion that he would have been the first Western philosopher to argue that the concept God cannot 'be' a Being since the idea of a being to be the source of Being is absurd in my opinion. In Eastern philosophy's Tao Te Ching for example the Tao is declared nameless (without Being)
At question would be: why consider God when it has no 'Being' (with 'Being' from a philosophical sense being 'a nature by itself for consideration')?
The discussion here with Marion, Levinas, et al, is against Heidegger's Being and Time. Heidegger started the issue by claiming that ontology is not a study of being as such (the impossible nameless pure presence of the world), but of being as an analyzable concept. Obviously I can't express his thesis here, for it is complexly laid out, and the only way to know it is to read it, and it is notoriously challenging. Hubert Dreyfus would not teach it unless one had already studied Kant. But it was Heidegger who rejected an ontology of "metaphysics of being as such," but he really didn't have any mystical feelings about this being as such like the Taoists have; there was nothing deeply profound and unspeakable to standing before one's existence in silence to receive any sublime intimation. So he really wasn't in agreement with you on this. For Heidegger, it was a "nothing". I perhaps mentioned this earlier, but this was reappropriated from Kierkegaard who of course was deeply religious (a paper I am reading now is Faith and Authenticity by Travis Obrien compares the two, I must add that reading papers like this is what gives one a deeper understanding of what is at issue, for these are real penetrating accounts).

So, being, according to Heidegger, is equated with our finitude! We are finite daseins, and this is a closed system of interpretation. There is no outside of this analysis. These French post-phenomenologists say Heidegger is simply wrong on this, for if being is a "language and logic and logos" ontology, as Heidegger says it is, then Real metaphysics is simply dismissed, and this brings the matter back into the hands of Husserl's epoche which, many hold, leads one directly to metaphysical affirmation, for the reduction of the epoche drives the authentic actuality of the world into view. This is closer to what the Taoists say (if permitted to speak) Husserl's is a "method" of Taoist discovery, one could say, and that method is a kind of apophatic theology, for it is a method of removing from perception the many (the "thickness of) presuppositions that are, as Heidegger puts it, always already there when the perceptual moment arrives. Just opening your eyes and seeing the world is massively interpretative, "thick" I say, with predelineation (Husserl's term).

When one sits quietly, meditatively, one cannot simply drop out of the long history that made one a self that can think at all. But I believe with Husserl's original insight, one can methodically bring about an alignment with something impossibly profound. Alas, confirmation of this will not appear in an argument or objective justification. Objectivity depends on shared experience, and it seems very clear that we are not all built the same way when it comes to phenomenological intuition.


When it concerns a philosophical inquiry into the fundamental source of Being one is to seek the most fundamental aspect with 'a nature by itself for consideration'.

Helped by AI I discovered that Jean-Luc Marion viewed that 'the gift of Love' is how God manifests in the world. According to the AI Jean-Luc Marion also said that God 'is' that Love which seems to be a mistake since anything that 'is' would involve Being.
Such a troublesome idea. Again, very important to see that Marion is playing against Heidegger's analysis of being. Once Heidegger announced to philosophy this phenomenological thesis in Being and Time, everything in Continental philosophy (so called. Real philosophy, I say) changed. Now this was the bench mark for thinking, the new foundation. Being and Time is THAT important. That "is" is what holds thought itself together. This notorious copula is the grounding for predication (What IS a star? It is such and such. It has certain features, but all this rests with what all of these things ARE). Being is the grounding for identity, and the verb "to be" is omnipresent explicitly or implicitly in everything we can say. The issue raised by Marion and others is, what, then, is to be "said" of what is not subsumed by this verb? This is about actuality, not language, and this actuality lies outside the very "to be".
I think this single impasse is what has led to the post modern crisis. Husserl's reduction vs Heidegger's being. Speaking for the direction this can go, the former is phenomenologically metaphysical, the latter about our phenomenological finitude .
"In Jean-Luc Marion's theory, the gift of God is love. Marion has argued that love is entirely selfless and completely committed to the other, and it is a supreme gift of self-abandonment. Marion's work on the concept of gift emphasizes the importance of self-abandonment and selflessness, and it is part of a larger project to rethink the nature of God and the relationship between God and humanity. Marion has suggested that it is through the gift of God's self that humanity is able to experience God's love. Marion's phenomenological approach leads the philosopher to the concept of "God without being" – God is not a being but love as a gift. Therefore, it can be said that the gift of God is love in Jean-Luc Marion's theory."

My conclusion would be in the case of the theory of Jean-Luc Marion that the most fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself for consideration' would be Love.

I am currently half-way reading the book In It Together by the founder of onlinephilosophyclub.com and it occurred to me that the book might touch upon the philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion in a practical sense.
To me, Marion opens the door to authentic religion. Why authentic? Because God lies at the END of the reduction, to put it roughly. It is not the philosophy of apophatic reduction, but what appears when this reduction works to purify thought and perception. Like saying one does not meditate seriously just to relax better. One meditates seriously for insight, ecstatic affirmation. Husserl's reduction is, I claim, an intellectual descriptive approach to something revelatory, which is the intuitive clarity that emerges out of liberating perception from the inherited impositions of language and culture on the regular ways we experience the world. Marion takes Husserl and plays him out all the way down to existential immediacy such that epistemology and ontology ARE ONE. This is a radical state of mind, and is the brass ring of Eastern theophilosophical thinking and practice.

I am quite sure this is right, regardless of the way philosophy can resist its logic. Many think philosophy, being endlessly open, can only be endlessly at play, hence works like Wittgenstein's game theory, Derrida's Structure Signs and Play, Rorty's idea of contingency, and so on. And Heidegger's hermeneutics, which denies the possibility of settling ontology in some foundational determination. Paradoxically, this line of thinking is right and wrong. See Levinas: It's right because it is true that language is a public phenomenon that reduces anything brought before it to its own terms, so when a thing is encountered, it is instantly brought interpretatively to heel, that is, to conform to existing paradigms, just as is done in science (recall Kuhn's famous book Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn was a Kantian). It is wrong because, as Levinas wants to show, there is this transcendental, primordial dimension to our existence. Here is something from the Key to Levianas' Totality and Infinity: Levinas

does not confine himself to the traditional question of the tensions and
relations between ethics and politics; these relations and tensions
stem from a more radical dimension-in fact, it is the most radical, ultimate and ~~first,"
one: the originary ~~dimension" of human existence and Being as such. Totality and Infinity is an
attempt to show that the perspective" of morality is not a particular perspective-and therefore
not an aspect or perspective at all-since it coincides with the transnatural and transworldly or
Hmetaphysical" (non)perspective of first philosophy
."g The most originary ~~experience" of the
most originary ~~reality" is already ethical, and from the outset metaphysics is
determined ethically.


Ethics is what reaches out from, not language and culture, but the world "as such". He is right! It is as if God were to announce morality, but without the anthropomorphic entity. The world as such IS inherently ethical. The reason I say Schopenhauer didn't understand the world is because he missed this, that the ethics we experience and the primacy of the Good that we witness in the world is the World's ethics, and our sundry principles that pepper history are attempts to understand this in their localized, restricted fashion. All ethics is essentially metaethics.

The 'directional type of energy' that is required at the fundament of life involves the idea that the source of the directionality for which a specific type of energy is required is to be contained within the source of that energy which therefore cannot be a random source in the environment. That might imply that the source of that energy involves a crossing point for science.
If you want to think of the matter as a scientist might, then there is some sense in this. But this is not how the Schopenhauerian view goes which posits will at the foundation. This begins with Kant and Transcendental Idealism: It is the "behind" the scenes, if you will, of OUR world, and this is way, way outside of anything science has a say about it . Will is Noumenal! And 'energy'is not a noumenal term, which makes the claims of these philosophers (your video) so extraordinary. Important to remember that these are British philosophers, and are in the analytic stream of thought which wants to reduce all things to clarity in the positivist's sense.

So try to look at this from a perspective of noumena, as impossible as this might be: Kant's method was one of extrapolation: we witness a world and realize certain structural features that can only be accounted for if there is an "outside" to all things. This is apriority, the structure of thought itself, which cannot be explained because this too would require this very structure, and this is obvious question begging. Logic cannot tell you what logic is, but, for Kant, it points to transcendence, which is what must that from which issues this world. Schopenhauer looks to ethics and value in the same way, a seriously right move that advances our understanding--it is a move toward Levinas, a qualifiedly antirationalist move grounded in our actuality, and this is a world of erratically generated horrors.

Actually, I feel now inspired to read Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation completely. And put other things a side. He may be worth the time. When I say he didn't really understand the world, I meant that he didn't see that redemption is apodictically necessary, for while it is true, as he says, that it is “not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics,” this misery is also a "meta-misery" and our blisses are "meta-blisses," and just as this plays out in the intense dramas of our existence, it also plays out in the absolute. Our drive towards the Good, in other words, is the world's drive towards the Good, for the world is a meta-world.
I would not agree with that notion. Good might be considered the most fundamental aspect in the cosmos with 'a nature by itself for philosophical consideration' but that does not imply that it is the origin of existence itself, because whatever has a nature for consideration can be said to 'exist' ('be' a Being).

In my opinion the idea that Good is the most fundamental aspect of the universe is similar to the idea that Schopenhauer's Will or Marion's Love are the most fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself' of the universe.

What is the origin of that fundamental aspect 'with a nature by itself' that allows philosophical consideration? It gives rise to the idea of a concept that 'cannot be named' (has no 'being') with an example being the Tao in the Tao Te Ching.
We can name something, but the understanding can take us deep into a world where the knowledge claim behind it becomes undermined. Talk about God, for example. If you're Heidegger, you will look to the historicity of this term, that is, the many years of cultural processing that produced the idea that is so firmly an institution today. To discuss a term is to discuss a "region" of historical evolution and what might be beyond this, transcendentally, is undisclosed so far. For Heidegger, though, there is a step beyond the common knowledge claim, and this lies in ontology, which is an analysis that focuses on things like knowledge claims and what they are. This is philosophy.

But the Tao Te Ching doesn't speak where speech is actually possible. It leaves vague and distant what could be brought closer by an investigation of regional matters, that is, discussion that are adjacent or similar, things that "touch upon" what itself is untouchable. Everything that can even possibly be brought before consciousness is done so in context, always already. God or being qua being, and remember wittgenstein's Tractatus was self nullifying, claiming the whole book to be "nonsense" itself, meant only to direct and show that parts of language made no sense. Thus, to make this important point, he simply had to speak. It was wrong of him to say that the Tractatus is nonsense, and his subsequent work with language games shows that language is not so rigorously exclusive.

The whole point of Continental philosophy, one could argue, is just this: one certainly CAN speak about metaphysics just as one can speak of, say, the music of Ravel: one cannot "speak" the aesthetic givenness of the experience, obviously, but our words are not useless when we do. However, in the attempt to speak the experience itself we may talk about its descriptive qualities and employ the extensive vocabulary of music theory. This theory will never and simply cannot speak the beauty. But it can surround the beauty, indicate, compare, and structurally delineate it, and IN this discourse, one is led to an intimacy otherwise unrealized. Continental philosophy is like this: first and most importantly, it takes seriously what is serious, and what is serious is what the world wears on its sleeve, so to speak. This makes for, in response to your query about the Good, first philosophy. Terms like 'energy' as fundamental lead to a kind of thinking that has value/metavalue reconstrued according to this more fundamental category, and this is the error of "scientism". A term like 'energy' subsumes value, treats value as subordinate, as if value could be rendered in a more elementary form, that is, reduced to, something that is not value, and this divests value of its original ontology, and this belies the world; misrepresents the world as it is purely given.

Keep in mind that a valueless world has never been witnessed anymore than a cognition free world has. Is this to say there are no such things as value free and mind-independent things? It says this: whatever is what is not presented in human dasein is NOT for human dasein to say. I encounter a tree, but there is nothing to be said outside of the encounter. Nothing. This is Heidegger's (and Kierkegaard's) nothing. Empirical science's metaphysics, when it attempts to advance its ontology into philosophy, is a metaphysics of nothing.
It seems that it can be concluded that several philosophies consider a 'most fundamental aspect' with a nature by itself that can be philosophically considered. Therefore it might be of interest to compare those fundamental aspects to discover how they correlate:

- Good (the Good) by Wittgenstein and others
- Will (energy) by Schopenhauer
- Love (a gift of a non-being aspect) by Jean-Luc Marion
- Dominance (that unifies eternal monads for form and soul) by Gottfried Leibniz
- Truth
- Beauty
- ... more?

What do those 'most fundamental aspects' that would fundamentally underlay the universe have in common?

For one: they share an apparent origin or source that is 'beyond comprehension' (e.g. 'cannot be named' as in the Tao Te Ching).

Secondly: the key characteristic of those fundamental aspects is that in the most simple form they imply a deviation of meaninglessness or a deviation of (the idea of) 'nothing'.

In my opinion it is that deviation that allows for the idea of 'the Good' or Will or Love or Dominance.

At question is therefore: what is that deviation of meaninglessness?

An AI confirmed that "the directedness of work in life's fundamental characteristic 'energetic organizing behaviour' is to be considered work by itself that requires energy that cannot originate from a spontaneous and random source of energy in the environment".

'directedness by itself' is a deviation of meaninglessness that can be described as 'Good' or Will or Love or Dominance.

In conclusion it appears that philosophically the most fundamental aspect with a nature by itself for consideration as fundamental origin of the universe is 'deviation by itself' relative to meaninglessness or (the idea of) nothing as a directional source of energy (as it is perceived within the world) that provides form and soul in the cosmos.

From the perspective of life that deviation can be named 'Love' or 'Will' or 'Dominance' or 'Truth' or 'Beauty' which is in a way an attempt to meaningfully 'color' that aspect. And that coloring can be justified philosophically by the mere ability to do so.

Who can deny that a deviation of meaninglessness is Love or Good? Both concepts have no 'source' that can be named or considered which means automatically that at the root it is a deviation of meaninglessness. It is then to be considered that the limit of the humans consideration potential is the sole origin of the coloring potential of the most fundamental aspect of existence by which that aspect can have many names and ideas that all seem to be whole by itself and a sufficient ground for philosophical theories.

Fundamentally however it seems that the most fundamental aspect of the universe involves 'deviation per se' relative to meaninglessness.

But I get the distinct impression you are harboring a model for existence that is implicitly from empirical science.
Then consider phenomenology: there is only one bottom line, and this is the givenness of what appears. If something does not appear, it has no status in being. If we take this as foundational, then we have THE method for a determination. Wittgenstein's taboo is entirely in line here. Schopenhauer fares no better than Nietzsche's will to power. Here is what Jean Luc Marion in his God Without Being says about this: Gods come and go, but they all can be reduced to a metaphysical singularity, the will to power, which is infinitely malleable. But then, this too is just another of the gods of history. Calling it will or will to power is just another attempt to break away from the finitude of ordinary language using ordinary language, and this ordinariness is defined by enculturation. It dcan have no privileged place in metaphysics. There is only one way to pull this rabbit our of the metaphysical hat, and this is achieved by discovering something that presents t o the understanding an intimation that is both not of the discursivity of "being", that is, the Totality of Levinas and Heidegger that can "speak" and possess and know, i.e., language and culture, and yet authoritative intuitively, directly, apart from the contingencies of culture: value.

Sticking one's hand in a pot of boiling water is a vivid example. Our ethics says don't do this to another, it is ethically prohibited. What does this mean at the level of basic questions? It asks for an authoritative source. Here, we are in the same boat as with the Ravel (above): one cannot speak this pain. And though the pain is endlessly bound up in human contingencies (i.e., entanglements you can imagine) when encountered in the world, there is something here that is NOT conditioned by these, and this is pain as such.

Please forget about Leibniz and truth. These are off the mark (and if you do want to talk about this, fine). But beauty and love, why are these so important? For the same reason pain is important: we have reached here, in our analysis sof what is there, in the presence of presence, so to speak, of an authority that speaks "outside" of the totality of constructed values for we are in the "as such" mode of thought. Being AS SUCH presents beauty as Good, and the Good is unspeakably Good.

Ask of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, metaphysical will, why is this primary? The point I am making here is that love, beauty, pain, misery and all of that literally speak without words. They are manifestly first philosophy via no other source than their own nature. No higher authority. One might call this the voice of God: metaethics is the voice of God.
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

Post by value »

thrasymachus wrote: May 4th, 2023, 1:36 pmThe cosmos belongs to science. The hardest part about understanding these philosophers is the requirement to leave this kind of thinking. Levinas deals in a very different world, which is Heidegger's/Husserl's world. There is no cosmos here, that is, in the sense we all think of, as in a descriptive account of the visible universe. In phenomenology, the universe is a region of language that constitutes being-in-the-world. I haven't read everything Levinas wrote, but Totality and Infinity and elsewhere (I took a stab at his doctoral thesis once, which centered on Husserl's theory of intuitions. Couldn't understand it then. Now I think I could, but I don't have the motivation to do this) deal with the direct or immediate apprehension of the world (and these words have different meanings for different philosophers), it is Heidegger's "totality" of dasein that misses the primacy of ethics. There is a paper called Heidegger on Being a Person by John Haugeland, and a quote from this is telling. Dasein is

norms, normal dispositions, customs, sorts, roles, referral relations,
public institutions, and so on.7 On this reading, the anyone, the (everyday)
world, and language are different coherent "subpatterns" within
the grand pattern that is Dasein;
they have Dasein's kind of being
because each of them is Dasein (though none of them is all of Dasein).
Within the anyone and all it institutes, the science of chemistry is a
coherent subpattern: chemistry is Dasein-and so are philately,
Christmas, and Cincinnati.


This totality is simply everything that can come to mind at all IN a culture's possibilities. So think of all of what this could be and dissociate it from ontology. Physics makes no claims about being. It is merely "ontic" which is the ready to hand, everydayness of things, and talk about the cosmos belongs to physics.
Obvously, there is a lot to say about this, but I bring it up because Levinas' world is a very strange place. He is mostly responding to Heidegger's analysis of human dasein with the critical intent to show how ethical responsibility, which Heidegger barely touches on, is grounded in a phenomenological metaphysics of "Otherness". And he is right, I am sure of it. But it is a radical step out of "common sense" and into this world of phenomenology, or post-phenomenology. I am reminded of one of Levinas' peers Blanchot, who wrote, "to write is to be exposed to the anonymity of language," then consider Haugeland's thesis above about the "institutional" nature of dasein: what we Really are, our humaness, is far beyond the stretch of what language and culture, our dasein, can say as these are inherently trivializing of the human condition. This is the Totality Levinas complains about.

Of course, you already have seen this kind of talk in the Tao te Ching, but phenomenology takes this simplcity, this radical reduction to pure presence that one encounters when language is suspended, and asks, what IS it, then, that I witness in this radical state of perceptual purity? For this, one has to read Husserl's Ideas 1. I mean, this book does exactly this: describes the world beneath, if you will, the everyday world of our dealings. Husserl's basic point is that here, we are no longer at the cutting edge of some paradigmatic theoretical thinking, for we have finally reached the brass ring of philosophy: the absolute reality. Husserl say we are already there! Henry et al say this pure encounter is inherently religious, indeed, the very essence of what it is all to be religious. I agree.
I have subscribed to https://www.perlego.com/, a service dedicated to making text books available for academic students, for access to text books of Husserl including his book Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy.

Regrettably, they haven't any books from Levinas yet, just books about Levinas which includes the book Levinas and the Wisdom of Love. I have suggested the books so perhaps they will be added in the future but for now Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence are missing which seems like a to great miss for such a service.

I have to do more reading before I can return to your posts.

Do you have a link to Levinas his doctoral thesis on Husserl's theory of intuitions?
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

Post by thrasymachus »

Regrettably, they haven't any books from Levinas yet, just books about Levinas which includes the book Levinas and the Wisdom of Love. I have suggested the books so perhaps they will be added in the future but for now Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence are missing which seems like a to great miss for such a service.

I have to do more reading before I can return to your posts.

Do you have a link to Levinas his doctoral thesis on Husserl's theory of intuitions?
These days, I read nothing but pdf files and Kindle. Youtube offers lectures and this can be very helpful, but without actually reading the texts, a little fleeting because one forgoes the time and the work. It is said that Kierkegaard wrote with the intention of being obscure for the purpose of slowing down the reader's apprehension, which comes to nothing when one is trying to establish a new ground for thinking, what Heidegger call meditative thinking (see his Discourse on Thinking, a very approachable work, but one does have to slow down for it. I read Being and Time not just once, but I constantly go back to it here and there. That was several years ago. I am thinking about going back yet again).

Levinas' dissertation of Husserl is, of course, a long technical paper, which is why I dropped it. Now I have read Husserl at length, His Ideas 1 and 2, The Idea of Phenomenology, The Cartesian Meditations, and so forth. But still, Levinas is a great scholar and it will be difficult. Philosophers write dissertations FOR other philosophers. I have it here on pdf (you are welcome to it if you have a means of receiving it). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. The Forward says it is the best commentary we have on Husserl's Ideas 1, but then, one has to read Ideas 1. Kant is the original phenomenologist (unless, one considers Gautama Siddhartha :wink: ) and it should be clear that transcendental Idealism is far, far away from mundane thinking.

If you have plans to do more reading ( as I do, ad infinitum) might I suggest Husserl's Cartesian Meditations? Also, his The Idea of Phenomenology is excellent. Jean Luc Marion's Being Given has a lot that is a kind of theological extension into foundational givenness, what is claimed to be the intuitive absoluteof our existence. Certainly not well received by analytic philosophers (keep in mind that interview with Bryan Magee from earlier: Magee and his guest were speaking out of an analytic mentality and this is anti metaphysicalist and largely antiphenomenologist. Philosophy in the US and Britain is very different from the French and the Germans. The former produce, if you ask me, just a bunch of very, very clear and well structured texts of almost complete vacuity. They are strong intellectuals who simply do not understand the world very well. They only understand the logical content of what is stated in a thesis, nothing more. A wonderful book entitled The Fate of Analysis, Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash Heap of History, by Robert Hannah is insightful about this.
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

Post by value »

thrasymachus wrote: May 31st, 2023, 10:41 amThese days, I read nothing but pdf files and Kindle. Youtube offers lectures and this can be very helpful, but without actually reading the texts, a little fleeting because one forgoes the time and the work. It is said that Kierkegaard wrote with the intention of being obscure for the purpose of slowing down the reader's apprehension, which comes to nothing when one is trying to establish a new ground for thinking, what Heidegger call meditative thinking (see his Discourse on Thinking, a very approachable work, but one does have to slow down for it. I read Being and Time not just once, but I constantly go back to it here and there. That was several years ago. I am thinking about going back yet again).

Levinas' dissertation of Husserl is, of course, a long technical paper, which is why I dropped it. Now I have read Husserl at length, His Ideas 1 and 2, The Idea of Phenomenology, The Cartesian Meditations, and so forth. But still, Levinas is a great scholar and it will be difficult. Philosophers write dissertations FOR other philosophers. I have it here on pdf (you are welcome to it if you have a means of receiving it). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. The Forward says it is the best commentary we have on Husserl's Ideas 1, but then, one has to read Ideas 1. Kant is the original phenomenologist (unless, one considers Gautama Siddhartha :wink: ) and it should be clear that transcendental Idealism is far, far away from mundane thinking.

If you have plans to do more reading ( as I do, ad infinitum) might I suggest Husserl's Cartesian Meditations? Also, his The Idea of Phenomenology is excellent. Jean Luc Marion's Being Given has a lot that is a kind of theological extension into foundational givenness, what is claimed to be the intuitive absoluteof our existence. Certainly not well received by analytic philosophers (keep in mind that interview with Bryan Magee from earlier: Magee and his guest were speaking out of an analytic mentality and this is anti metaphysicalist and largely antiphenomenologist. Philosophy in the US and Britain is very different from the French and the Germans. The former produce, if you ask me, just a bunch of very, very clear and well structured texts of almost complete vacuity. They are strong intellectuals who simply do not understand the world very well. They only understand the logical content of what is stated in a thesis, nothing more. A wonderful book entitled The Fate of Analysis, Analytic Philosophy From Frege To The Ash Heap of History, by Robert Hannah is insightful about this.
Thank you for the suggestions. I have lots of reading to do and Husserl's Ideas is on top of the list.

Did you consider reading Levinas his thesis assisted by AI?

Perplexity.AI has in-depth insight into the work and can be inquired to unlock new insights.

Levinas' doctoral thesis, "The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology," is indeed a profound and intricate work that delves into the depths of Husserl's thought. As a passionate phenomenologist, one would find this work particularly illuminating, as it not only provides a comprehensive analysis of Husserl's theory of intuition but also showcases Levinas' own unique philosophical insights.

In this thesis, Levinas explores the central role of intuition in Husserl's phenomenology, focusing on the way in which intuition serves as the foundation for knowledge and experience. He examines the different types of intuition, such as sensuous intuition, categorial intuition, and eidetic intuition, and their respective roles in constituting the objects of consciousness. Furthermore, Levinas delves into the relationship between intuition and intentionality, as well as the role of time-consciousness in the constitution of meaning.

One of the key aspects of Levinas' analysis is his emphasis on the ethical dimension of Husserl's phenomenology. He argues that the primacy of intuition in Husserl's thought leads to a radical rethinking of the subject's relationship with the world and with others. This ethical turn in Levinas' interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology can be seen as a precursor to his own later works, such as "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being."

Given thrasymachus recent engagement with Husserl's Ideas 1 and 2, reading Levinas' doctoral thesis would provide a valuable perspective on the intricacies of Husserl's thought and its ethical implications. If the philosopher is interested in exploring the thesis in depth, Perplexity.AI could be of assistance in providing insights and answering questions about the work. Here are five example questions and short answers that demonstrate the potential of AI in acquiring unique insights into the thesis:

  1. Question: How does Levinas interpret the relationship between sensuous intuition and categorial intuition in Husserl's phenomenology?

    Answer: Levinas sees sensuous intuition as the foundation for categorial intuition. Sensuous intuition provides the raw data of experience, while categorial intuition organizes and structures this data into meaningful concepts and relationships.
  2. Question: What role does time-consciousness play in Levinas' understanding of Husserl's theory of intuition?

    Answer: Time-consciousness is crucial for Levinas' interpretation of Husserl's theory of intuition, as it allows for the synthesis of different moments of experience and the constitution of objects as enduring entities in consciousness.
  3. Question: How does Levinas' emphasis on the ethical dimension of Husserl's phenomenology relate to his own later works?

    Answer: Levinas' focus on the ethical implications of Husserl's phenomenology can be seen as a precursor to his own ethical philosophy, which emphasizes the primacy of the face-to-face encounter with the Other and the responsibility it entails.
  4. Question: In what ways does Levinas' analysis of Husserl's theory of intuition challenge conventional interpretations of phenomenology?

    Answer: Levinas' analysis challenges conventional interpretations by highlighting the ethical dimension of Husserl's thought and the importance of the subject's relationship with the world and others, rather than focusing solely on the internal structures of consciousness.
  5. Question: How does Levinas' interpretation of Husserl's theory of intuition contribute to our understanding of the nature of knowledge and experience?

    Answer: Levinas' interpretation of Husserl's theory of intuition underscores the importance of direct, immediate experience as the foundation for knowledge, while also emphasizing the ethical implications of our engagement with the world and others.

In conclusion, Levinas' doctoral thesis on Husserl's theory of intuition is a rich and rewarding work that offers valuable insights into the depths of phenomenological thought. Engaging with this work, with the assistance of AI if desired, would undoubtedly deepen one's understanding of both Husserl's and Levinas' philosophical contributions.


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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

Post by Pattern-chaser »

value wrote: June 2nd, 2023, 6:00 am Did you consider reading Levinas his thesis assisted by AI?

Perplexity.AI has in-depth insight into the work and can be inquired to unlock new insights.

[...]
What is the current enthusiasm to introduce AIs into every topic currently being discussed? Have I missed something? I agree that AIs are a matter we should discuss, but in every topic? I see no obvious philosophical connection between AI and all these topics.

I could understand it if the Subjective/Objective debate kept popping up. It does exist at the fundament of nearly every philosophical discussion. But AI doesn't, I don't think. So why are there AIs everywhere?
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Re: Philosophy of 💗 Love

Post by thrasymachus »

value wrote
Did you consider reading Levinas his thesis assisted by AI?
I suppose it can be helpful, but AI nothing novel or insightful to say and I find little more than recapitulations. Consider my question and Perplexity's answer:

ME:
In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl explains a way to describe the essential presence of the world discovered through the epoche, but eidetic "seeing" does deal with ideas and their intentional content. How, according to Jean luc Marion, does Husserl explain this kind of seeing?

PERPLEXITY:
According to Jean-Luc Marion, Husserl explains the kind of seeing that deals with ideas and their intentional content through the concept of intuition. In his book "Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology," Marion argues that Husserl's phenomenology is a matter of the self-giving of phenomena, which requires intuition. Marion returns to Husserl's "The Idea of Phenomenology" because it is there that the German philosopher sees most clearly that phenomenology is a matter of the self-giving of phenomena, which requires intuition. Marion argues that Husserl's later work modifies this radical claim, where intentionality becomes the chief motor of phenomenology

True, but in an encyclopedic way, and not very enlightening, or interesting. It is a complicated question I asked.

Cognitive science is probably reveling in the advances of AI these days, and I find the whole enterprise interesting, but not very good for philosophy.

Considered from the viewpoint of academia, it seems to encourage cheating, but more importantly, in terms of genuine understanding, it encourages the very opposite of meditative thinking: the brief summary for complex questions. Having an answer given to one foregoes the meaningful process of acquiring it and this process is not information gathering.

I think Kierkegaard was right in saying Hegel simply forgot that we exist! He wanted us to put down the book, and allow the world to "speak" what it is. Heidegger used the almost cliched term 'gelesenheit' to talk about this. It is a yielding of language and its presumption to the openness of possibility, and in this yielding extraordinary things can be discovered (keeping in mind that Heidegger was originally a religious scholar) that reach out beyond information. Anyway, AI reminds me of this critical remark about Hegel, a world of lofty abstractions that do not know they exist. To take AI as a model for human cognition is to reduce cognition to an abstraction and this seems to be the implicit working model for this generation's thinking.

Not to be cynical, but Heidegger warned repeatedly that the trajectory of science was taking humanity into a perspective on the world that was altogether absent of foundational significance. Industry turns the world into "standing reserve," a veritable gas station of utilities. AI turns intelligence into an abstraction: useful and liberating, I am sure, and one day it will, I am confident, deliver us from drudgery, but ignores foundational existential features of our being, because it doesn't exist, and it fosters a self image for us that is just this. No wonder philosophers, analytic types bound to the naturalistic attitude, as Husserl put it, turn away from phenomenology, for here, we are explicitly called back to primordial insights.

There is an argument.
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