Hey Ham,
On 28 Aug 2009 at 1:04, Ham Priday wrote: > We view (i.e., experience) the world as pleasurable, beautiful, > moral, evil, or hopeless, depending on our value-sensibility. It is > universal and personal at the same time, because we are Nature's beings as > well as individuated selves. That values are "universal and personal at the same time" is the same conclusion Pirsig reached in his SODV paper: "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left one enormous metaphysical problem unanswered that became the central driving reason for the expansion of the Metaphysics of Quality into a second book called Lila. This problem was: if Quality is a constant, why does it seem so variable? Why do people have different opinions about it? The answer became: The quality that was referred to in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be subdivided into Dynamic Quality and static quality. Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on and on forever, always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of this cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are memories, customs and patterns of nature. The reason there is a difference between individual evaluations of quality is that although Dynamic Quality is a constant, these static patterns are different for everyone because each person has a different static pattern of life history. Both the Dynamic Quality and the static patterns influence his final judgment. That is why there is some uniformity among individual value judgments but not complete uniformity." As I see it, you and Pirsig are not so far apart as you might think. The major difference is that you emphasize the personal while he emphasizes the universal. Happily, however, when it comes to valuation, you both place the individual (intellectual pattern) above the collective (social pattern). So does the U.S. (at least until recently), which is why the U.S. has been so much more Dynamic than socialist Europe. If Obamacare becomes law, however, a return to the authoritarian Dark Ages with "death panels" is virtually assured. Warm regards, Platt 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/
