Greetings, Platt --
Yes. It is highly amusing to witness someone denying the concept
of self while simultaneously invoking "I." The logic of self-contradiction
seems absent in postmodern thought, permitting such nonsense as,
"It's a fact there are no facts" and "There are no absolutes."
The terms "consciousness," "awareness," "experience," "sense," etc.
all presupposes a "knower" which in turn presupposes a knower of the
knower, ad infinitum. It doesn't take long to bump up against Godel's
Theorem whereby no logical system can validate itself. So then we
appeal to intuition, aesthetics and other such ineffable phenomena --
the realm of the mystic.
Pirsig describes mystic belief:
"Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because
when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to
thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something.
It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it
to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you
destroy real understanding. Thought is not a path to reality." (Lila, 5)
He goes on the say, " . . . a "Metaphysics of Quality" is essentially a
contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity."
At least he admits it.
I couldn't agree more. If the only path to reality is mysticism, why waste
our time on a "logical absurdity"? Because logic is a fun thing to do?
Because it makes us "feel good" to ponder the ineffable, to mastermind a
complex and misconceived hierarchical scheme of existential reality, even
though it's futile? What wisdom can we draw from that?
For a philosopher to posit things that we don't understand as "mystical" is
a cop out.
There's nothing mystical about self-awareness, if we acknowledge that it is
our primary reality. Selfness doesn't have to be an object, or an attribute
of physical existence, in order to be real. To question the reality of the
Knower is itself illogical. Without a Knower nothing would be known,
experienced, felt, or desired. What is mystical about that? Pirsig himself
said that Quality is our Reality. Does this not imply that Value is what
the Knower knows before he thinks about it? Isn't that what he means by
"pre-intellectual experience"?
There are some things we cannot know -- that much is certain. And what we
cannot know falls outside the human domain of space/time experience.
Ultimate reality is neither a subject-object duality nor a differentiated
relational system. It does not conform to the laws of nature or to man-made
logic. Yet, it does not exclude the essential Knower or the value of his
reality. If value-sensibility is our essence, then whatever is ultimate
reality is the absolute coalescence of these essential derivatives:
Sensibility and Value. Essence is the 'not-other'. There is no other than
what value-sensibility creates as experience.
You can call that "mystical", scoff at it as as "supernatural", or condemn
it as "theistic".
Or you can accept it, as I have, as the most reasonable ontology on which to
base a
metaphysical philosophy.
Thanks, Platt, for another breath of fresh inspiration.
Essentially yours,
Ham
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