OR we could call it the "Quality of Appreciation" as in appreciating the congruency here between Royce and the MoQ.
and Deep Ecology AND Biocentrism... just love the guy. from Kuklick's Intellectual Biography of Josiah Royce (explaining Royce's philosophy to us) --------- The criterion of the objective or real is our ability to verify experience in common, i.e., to have shared experience. We have heretofore taken the eternal objects which we describe as characteristic of what is real or objective. But description presupposes that we attribute an appreciative reality to others. If appreciation is real, however, it cannot in actuality be private, momentary, and fleeting , although is is from our perspective. We can make this state of affairs intelligible only if we assume that the World of Description does not characterise the real; and we must also suppose that our seemingly isolated and momentary appreciative consciousnesses do share in the organic life of one self in which everyone experiences the consciousness of everyone else. Appreciation is the reality of what is infinite and could not exist without its higher corollary: Real objects are not the cause of my thoughts. A thinker assumes that his thoughts first agree with their object, where "agree" means something like "intend". As we have seen, causation presupposes this agreement and cannot explain it. That is, we can never formulate our theory of knowledge by means of the categories of the World of Description (here Causality). We must understand the connection between thought and object in terms of purpose, a teleological notion which Royce says is "logically appreciable". The relation of causation exists among certain objects of thought but is not adequate to express the intentional relation of idea and referent; once again description presupposes appreciation. History and evolution are telelological--they embody purpose, meaning, and significance--and particularly with his last two arguments Royce has an answer to the problems of his 1889 paper. The evolutionary and the historical are ultimate and represent the appreciative reality which the World of Description presupposes. He accepts with equanimity the Darwinian hypothesis which threatened so many other religious thinkers. More than any other contemporary scientific advance, the theory of evolution is explicitly genetic, and Royce uses it as a primary example of the real status of science: ------- I know many who regret the tendency in our day to apply the doctrine of the transformation of species to humanity, who fear the apparently materialistic results of the discovery that the human mind has grown. For my part there lies in all this discovery of our day the deeply important presupposition that the transition from animal to man is in fact really an evolution, that is, a real history, a process having significance. If this is in truth the real interpretation of nature, then the romantic philosophy has not dreamed in vain, and the outer order of nature will embody once more the life of a divine Self. --------------- 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/
