Hi Joe --
As a member of the older generation I have experienced a World War, a Catholic monastery, a soup line in New York at The Catholic Worker, non-violent resistance to segregation in the South, by the time I was 33, marriage and family to now. I should be so jaded. Yet, Ham, I am still tilting at an approach to viewing reality. "Moral" is not what is favorable to mankind. I think it is foolish to try to "transcend experiential existence." I have an image of a noose around my neck. After studying Aquinas, Aristotle, etc I think it is foolish to leave myself open to a criticism that I am just speaking subjectively. I agree with Pirsig¹s assessment of SOM.
I don't understand the "noose around your neck." Is it the SOM perpective? And to what approach are you "tilting"? We all lean toward a new view of reality, because none of us knows what it is and we hope in vain that some authority can tell us. I see this quandary as built into the existential scheme. The truth of reality is left as a riddle to man.
I, too, am a senior citizen, having lived through WWII, served in the Korean War, majored in biology and chemistry, studied music, and read Plato, the Christians, and Sartre's Existentialism on my own. It was Sartre, not Aquinas, Augustine or Tillich, who finally convinced me that Existentialism was wrong. Existence does NOT precede Essence, and the notion that it does is the approach of Science and the humanities, as well as the avant-garde philosophies of our materialistic age. Nor does reducing subject/object existence to a monism, which Pirsig has attempted with his Quality thesis, reverse the existential premise. Existence cannot be primary to Essence because, as Parmenides discerned, something cannot come from nothing.
My philosophy is founded on Essence as the primary source. The Achilles heel in my hypothesis is that, unlike quality or value, Essence cannot be experienced or empirically validated. It is a logical proposition that defies description. It requires intuitive insight to conceptualize and a "leap of faith" to acknowledge. Nonetheless, it is the single, most fundamental reality for anyone who believes that existence did not occur as a cosmic accident or by way of some chaos probability. I am a devout believer -- not in a Divine Being or a Supreme Good, but in the absolute immutable source of all difference.
I would rephrase: "If man is to become a moral creature, he must understand why he exists and what his role in existence is" to "If a man is to become a moral creature he must understand how he exists, and how he can become more."
OK, "why" and "how" are two sides of the same metaphysical question: What explains this phenomenon that we call Existence? We know it only experientially -- as awareness of its being. There is no evidence, save for our intellection, that being exists in the absence of awareness. Yet human progress, indeed civilization itself, seems to hang on the precept of a structured continuum from which man emerges, relates to his peers, acquires knowledge, creates new things, and eventually makes his exit. We are all habituated to this perspective of reality. The "universality" of objective existence serves our pragmatic purposes, but it does not lead to metaphysical understanding. For that we need to profoundly revise our way of thinking about reality.
"Euphemisms, metaphors, analogies, and paradigms all have their place in philosophical discourse." I agree. As for sensing value? Whatever works! As for the rest of the paragraph, Ham, you are a poet!
No, I am a philosopher, Joe--a literalist. Too much of what passes for philosophy these days amounts to poetry. It has value as illiteration and metaphor, and sometimes as a practical guide to social interaction. Whatever works? Are you really content with pragmatism? Why do you disparage value sensibility? Pirsig didn't. He realized that only a valuistic ontology could get us beyond the practicality of subject/object existence. My philosophy of Essence simply goes the extra step by positing a primary source, that without which nothing can exist.
Essentially yours, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
