John --
Why would experience deceive us? What is its motive?
Perhaps you rather meant, "we are deceived in our relationship
with experience". But still Ham, deception on a metaphysical
level is a rather serious charge and usually implies some sort of
agency. The only agency that could be responsible for the
deception you posit, is the self itself. Which gets kinda gnarly,
don't you think?
The self and its experience is deceptive from the gitgo. It acquaints each
of us with a world of beingness in which 'I the observer' am the central
focus. My joy, my pain, my desire are what respond to this world, and they
are as real to me as its physical objects. The only reality I know is my
individual role in the universe; everything else is hearsay or second-hand
experience. From my subjective POV everything happens to Me, exists for Me,
and depends on Me. I am, in fact, the center of all reality, and if I
should cease to be, just as assuredly so would my universe. Gnarly,
perhaps, but deceptive as well. My intellect alone sees through this
deception, but intellect is in many ways alien to the self -- a composite of
deductive and analytical skills acquired from my social environment as a
means of reflecting on the values of my objective reality.
"Reflect" on value. Yes, that is intellectual. But the apprehension of
Value/Beauty in the moment is pre-intellectual. We like to play this
analytic game, and it is valuable no doubt. But I certainly don't have to
conclude from recalled experience that my daughter's unguarded smile or a
rose is beautiful.
All experience must be recalled in order to reflect on it. What we
apprehend "in the moment" is raw sensory data. This disparate data has to
be assimilated and integrated by the mind before it can leave an impression
of the reality external to us. In truth, we live in the present through our
impressions of the past. What we value today is maningful only insofar as
we can associate it with what we valued yesterday. Such is the serial
nature of experiential existence.
And I can't call that preintellectual apprehension "undifferentiated
value"
because by god, I sure am differentiating in the moment. This moment of
artistic revelation is different from all other moments by its unique call
on my soul from a more harmonious dimension.
And finally, the selective differentiation is not any act of my
experience,
it resides not in the act but the experience of my experience. It is what
comes to me, presents to me, inspires me and makes me respond in some way.
When I'm very happy with my response, I call it "art".
Your "experience of experience" is memory recall. Even what you consider to
be instantaneous or "direct" experience is a deception. All awareness is
reflexive. Value-sensibility itself is timeless, but we are not aware of
value as experience until we have processed it neurologically in terms of
space/time events. It could well be that "art" attempts to capture this
process on canvas or in music in one fell swoop. I'm not enough of an
artist to know, since my enjoyment of beauty is sensual rather than
analytical.
[Ham, previously]:
I know this "subjective" epistemology is strange and illogical as compared
with the common notion of emotional value as reactive rather than
"effective". But if you believe, as I o, that Value (i.e, Quality) is
primary
to objects, and forget about the time sequence of human perception,
it is clear that Value -- at least our sense of it -- must actualize
(create)
our objective reality. Doesn't this also explain why "the quality of the
modern world is no good"?
[John]:
I don't quite follow you there Ham, except strange and illogical is
a pretty good descriptor. After that I get lost in stranger and
illogicaler.
"Reactive rather than effective" fer instance. Whew. I don't even think
I wanna know. I sorta react ineffectively to statements like that.
And then there's:
"forget about the time sequence of human perception" Why? How?
I agree that our objective reality is created by Value, but I don't see
how that explains the quality of the modern world is no good.
You'd think the quality of the modern world would be a subset of
the value of objective reality and thus no disconnect at all. I do see
different. I don't see an explanation for the phenomena.
My point was that how we feel about the world depends on our value
sensibility. Since postmodernists have trashed most of their traditional
values, what they create in rap music, "pop" art, and new age philosophy
tends to be sensationalistic rather than beautiful. The world is as good as
we experience it. When we lose our sense of value, the world becomes less
appealing (in Pirsig's terms, "low-quality"). It's not that the world is no
good. It's that we are no longer able to sense goodness.
Back in my community college days, I was taking the romantic poets
while studying the philosophy of deep ecology and the juxtaposition
was enlightening to me. I was immensely attracted to Wordsworth
for his critique of intellectual values and ever since thinking through
the lens:
"To me the meanest flower that blows, brings thoughts to deep for tears"
focuses upon the idea that Nature is our ultimate teacher of Value - it is
in natural relations we can contemplate the truly pre-intellectual Quality
in all objective reality.
True enough. But then, what in existence is not "natural relations"?
Thanks for your insight, John.
Ham
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