Dear John --
Your epistle has scored a lot of points with me. In fact, this may be the
kind of analysis needed to bridge the gap between the orthodox Pirsigians
and the free-thinkers of this group. (Rather than identifying 'who's who',
I'll let everyone decide which side he or she belongs to.)
Let me add some thoughts of my own in support of your argument.
Acquiring a personal philosophy is more than tacitly accepting an author's
worldview and adapting the tenets he's constructed to justify it. It has to
be a concept of reality that you've examined independently and that has the
confidence of your convictions. A philosophy serves no purpose unless it is
accepted as a belief system you can live by. Since it has "belief" in
common with religion, there is no such thing as a nihilistic philosophy (or
philosopher, for that matter). And while one may claim to reject theism or
spiritualism, or profess agnosticism, it is improbable that anyone can deny
his own beliefs.
You have correctly identified pantheism as the belief system that equates
God or divinity with "the whole of nature." The pantheist is clearly not an
atheist. But by the same token, existentialists and objectivists equate
Reality with "being", yet many are considered atheists specifically because
they reject a deity. This may be a non-theistic belief system (i.e.,
philosophical nihilism), but is it really atheism?
If you remove the word "god" or "gods" from the standard dictionary
definition of Theism, it reads like this: "the belief in a creative source
of man and the world which transcends yet is immanent to the world."
Doesn't this "creative source" describe the function of Quality in the MoQ,
Essence in essentialism, and Being in existentialism? If so, then these
philosophical persuasions are no less "theistic" than pantheism (which is
also regarded as a religion).
In the last analysis the value of any philosophical doctrine lies in the
satisfaction and self-fulfillment it offers the believer. In many ways the
life-experience is a continuing search for Knowledge, Wisdom, and Truth. We
all have access to knowledge, we can aspire to wisdom, and we can even
define truth as "what works" or gives meaning to our experience. But what
we're really seeking in this life is to identify ourselves with the
"uncreated source" of fulfillment from which we are estranged as human
beings. We sense this source as a desire for "value", although we know it
is something far greater and more powerful than human experience can ever
reveal.
At least that is my understanding of what drives mankind in his quest for
philosophical meaning.
Essentially yours,
Ham
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Before you splutter your soup all over the floor, I better define
"atheistic" as I mean it. But to give a concrete example, I'll take Arlo.
Arlo can't be a pantheist AND an atheist. Believing that the whole of
nature is the source of being and the source of value is what a pantheist
does. Atheist has practically come to mean "non-christian deists" but
it
really means there is no god at all, or no good at all. It's all just
random. Bob Dylan said "ya gotta serve something" and by this he means,
every person must have a source of values. Where a person imagines his
values coming from, is his god. If it's all just cosmic randomness, then
cosmic randomness is your god. Cosmic randomness is your good.
It seems to me that people posit the good of cosmic randomness, in order
to
free themselves from imposed moral restraint. To be free is a moral
choice.
But how it works out, is that to such people, the self becomes the source
of values. It's easy and tautological. I value what I value. It's
complete and irrefutable on its own terms. Trouble comes in when you
actually start in and asking questions like "who's this *I* you talkin'
'bout white man" and learn that your source of self-value is on a very
shaky
foundation.
Ultimately, *I* is a social construct, therefore the source of values to a
self-valuer is the social matrix into which they are born and raised.
duh.
That's always the way it's always been.
But social matrices evolve and change. That's historical. And today we
have a culture and society that brings children into a maze of social
matrices, and say to them, "choose one". Without any over-riding way of
choosing, except for parental preference - but usually they don't really
have a clue.
And to my mind, most conspicuous of all is that they are never given in
training in how to do this choosing, how to figure out the kind of
thinking
it takes to even make such a decision, or analysis, and we let them wait
until they get to college and try and be reprogramed according to the
best
thinking of the Academy there and then.
The MoQ is opposed to all that. The MoQ says there are ultimately values,
the source of value is undefinable, but the realization of value is
possible
in pure experience. This is a value, realized in individuals, that
obviates the atheistic assertion that there is no ultimate source of
values.
Thus the MoQ can be anti-theistic, if it wants to, but it can't be
atheistic without contradicting itself in the most blatant ways.
Not that that's ever stopped anybody before....
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