Reconciling Steve and Platt --
On 30 Aug. at 11:34 AM, Platt wrote:
For me Quality, beauty is there all the time, all around us, in the
trees, the earth, the sky, the emptiness of space. It is there waiting
for us to rejoin it. At death it is as if we move from
one side of our senses to the other, from the highly filtered,
highly processed world inside the brain to the true unbounded
universe where subjective and objective coalesce. We step out of the
dense fog of introverted human perception
to the clear air of reality. Where beauty is we will be.
At 12:06 PM Steve responded:
If Quality=reality=experience then we don't need to be concerned
with any "dense fog of introverted human perception" that stands
between us and the world as it really is. The MOQ perspective
as I understand it makes it impossible to imagine being out of
touch with reality since experience IS reality, so we never need
to worry about trying to get back in touch with it after death.
On the other hand, Pirsig wrote bits about the possibility of
"taking off the cultural glasses" that contradict this view, but I think
such passages are a step backward from the Quality
postulate to a subject-object, appearance-reality picture where
taking off the glasses as a philosophical goal makes sense.
Here are two elegantly articulated statements that seem to present opposing
views of "the world as it really is". But are they really in opposition, or
simply descriptions of two different reality perspectives?
Platt is talking about aesthetic value that pervades the universe, and how
we (as sentient subjects) seek to identify with it. He speaks of "beauty"
as an eternal 'Quality' that we perceive tangentially "from one side of our
senses" but which is "waiting for us to rejoin it". If Platt's description
of subjective sensibility is a "foggy" suggestion of our "estrangement" from
reality, the fog is dispelled in the next sentence where he speaks of death
moving us (the "world inside the brain") "...to the true unbounded universe
where subjective and objective coalesce." In fact, this is one of the few
instances where Platt has alluded to metaphysical reality.
Steve, on the other hand, is not talking about "ultimate reality" or
esthetic appreciation but, rather, experiential existence. Experience, for
Steve, is "reality as it really is". "Since experience IS reality," he
insists; "we never need to worry about trying to get back in touch with it
after death." What he says is true insofar as we are subjectively "in touch
with" reality through our experience of its objective values. But he is
confused by Pirsig's "cultural glasses" that "contradict this view" and,
frankly, so am I. Whether we wear such glasses or not, existence is "a
subject-object, appearance-reality picture", whereas reality itself is not.
And I, for one, have a problem with the equation "Experience = Reality".
I would submit that there is a world of difference (literally) between being
"in touch with" reality, valuistically, as an observer "on the fringe" and
being unified with it. Platt has dared to speculate that the cessation of
life may be a return to Oneness. While this of course is a spiritualistic
concept shunned by the MoQists, it has metaphysical validity in
Essentialism. For if the essence of man is value-sensibility, as I
maintain, there is no logical principle or law of nature whereby Essence can
be lost. Indeed, it would seem that the created "agent of value" is
inextricably linked with its uncreated Source.
Thanks, gentlemen, for your perceptive worldviews.
Essentially yours,
Ham
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