Greetings, Michael -- ...and welcome aboard!
I know you consider yourself a Christian, and was interested to see how well your exchange with the Pirsigians would progress before I made a comment. Let me say that your approach is exactly right; from the beginning you've adapted your perspective to Pirsigspeak with the willingness of someone who sincerely wants to present his views as compatible with the MoQ. And you are to be commended for that.
You should know that I am a renegade in this forum, and there are some here who will attack anything I say. I don't particularly enjoy their virulence, but it has afforded me some latitude to speak my mind on certain issues. Although you will find that Pirsig's philosophy is unashamedly anti-theistic, I've discovered that the label "nihilist" is more offensive to its acolytes than any criticism one can make. So insulting is this word that antagonists have tried to construe my valuistic philosophy as a form of nihilism.
Jumping into this discussion way late, I apologize. But reading it from the start, I am struck by two things. ham wrote: Value is the measure of a thing's relative worth or significance.
The Greek philosopher Protagoras said "Man is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are and of the non-existence of things that are not." That precisely expresses my position. Of the things that we are aware of, man determines the value or quality of any one relative to all the others.
mel wrote: [something Marsha IMO rightly described as A lovely symphony...] Pondering mel's words against ham's quest, I can't help but feel that "value" as understood by Pirsig is not "value" in the traditional comparative sense. Seeking to find a word to adequately describe it may be like asking a child to draw a picture of perfection. ...
That's a good analogy. Not even an adult artist can illustrate perfection. Of course Pirsig himself didn't portray the universe as "perfect"; he only said it was a "moral" system evolving to "betterness". Who or what, exactly, is the measure of that betterness? And if Quality is the creator or source of the universe, why wasn't it created "perfectly good" from the start? This doesn't seem to concern Mr. Pirsig who, perhaps because of his early readings on anthropology, is more interested in its biological and sociological evolution. He has "overcome" the subject/object division of common experience by positing "man" as a collection of interrelating patterns, whereas I accept the duality and view man as the individuated locus of awareness with a unique sense of value and the intellectual capacity to think and act as an independent choicemaker.
But the inability to fully understand or describe something using human intellect which is beyond the capacity of human intellect does not mean it doesn't exist.
I couldn't agree more. But, you see, this would require metaphysical speculation which the author shuns because "definitions" would destroy his allegorical exposition.
And back to ham's quest for a proper foundation; maybe there is no such thing because we are using the wrong tool (human intellect.) Maybe we can only approximate it with that tool and have to let the rough edges be there. Put it another way; reality is doing *something* that we can (so far) only best describe as "Quality that needs no comparative to exist." It makes no sense called that, but only because we can't make sense of it (yet?)
Maybe what we're all looking for isn't Quality or Value at all. Maybe value is all that finite human beings can sense of something far greater -- say, an Absolute Source whose sensibility and value cannot be reduced to relational properties and attributes?
Is a theist any more open to such a concept than a Qualitarian? We shall soon see.
Thanks for adding a refreshing new POV to the foray, Michael. Best wishes, 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/
