John --
OR we could call it the "Quality of Appreciation" as in appreciating
the congruency here between Royce and the MoQ.
I think your twisting of semantics obscures the "appreciative" meaning of
Quality. (This may be intentional for one who doesn't acknowledge the
subjective nature of experience.)
Quality, as I understand it in the epistemological sense, is perceived
Value. It is what we individually (subjectively) sense of Reality
(appreciatively or revulsively) and intellectualize as objective phenomena.
As Kuklick states: "Appreciation is the reality of what is infinite and
could not exist without its higher corollary."
Except I would say that Appreciation is "the emotional sensibility" of what
is infinite, since that is our "reality". Royce is right that "description
presupposes appreciation." But history and evolution are the existential
(time) perspective of human experience. The teleology lies in the relation
of being-aware to its Absolute Source. Insofar as Value is the subject's
link to that Source, its appreciation by the subject represents our
"metaphysical teleology". (And it's not Biocentrism, its Essentialism.)
Human beings apprehend the world valuistically; we are value-sensible
creatures. Any attempt to remove Quality or Value from the context of
subjective perception is self-defeating and fallacious. In short, as I've
said many times, there is no such thing as "unrealized value".
Thanks for the quotes, John.
Regards,
Ham
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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.
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