Arlo and Platt --
May I chime in here?
On 4/23 Platt defined the "Quality Principle" as follows:
Quality is simultaneously an immanent and transcendent moral force.
It created and gave purpose to our world, motivated by the ethical
principle of the "Good" which is its essence. Quality is synonymous
with "morality" and "value." Thus, the world is primarily a moral order,
consisting not of subjects (mental things) and objects (material things)
but patterns of value.
Arlo asked:
Are you suggesting that Quality has "an integral intelligence"?
Platt responded:
Yes. Do you?
Arlo challenged the validity of this concept with a series of
intelligence-specific functions...
What does this mean? If Quality has "an intelligence", does it "think"?
Does it "plan"? Is it "self-aware"? If "no" to any of these, what does
it
mean that it has "an intelligence"?
Platt then restated the question, forcing Arlo to declare himself:
No, I do not think Quality has "an intelligence".
This Q&A exchange exposes a flaw in the fundamental "Quality = Reality"
premise. I was going to let the issue resolve itself in the ensuing
dialogue, but the conclusion is too important to be conflated by meaningless
metaphors.
Here is the problem, as I see it. Quality, like Virtue (Arête), Love, or
Goodness, is a subjective apperception based on comparative experience. It
is not a "creative force" or intelligent agent that exists independent of
man's sensibility. Keats expressed it best in his poem 'A Thing of Beauty
is a Joy Forever':
"Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits."
In a rare essay, Edgar Allan Poe waxes eloquently about the "rapturous joys"
of Beauty:
"We have still a thirst unquenchable... It is no mere appreciation of the
Beauty before us-- but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. ...We weep
then--not as the Abbate Gravina supposes--through excess of pleasure, but
through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp NOW,
wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys,
of which THROUGH the poem, or THROUGH the music, we attain to but brief and
indeterminate glimpses."
These poets were talking about Value--the affinity of the self for its lost
essence. It is our attraction to a "greater otherness" that we sense as
Value. Whatever "intelligence" is imparted to a thing of beauty, order, or
magnificence is our own realization, intellectually transferred to the
experienced object.
The potentiality to create an intelligent universe transcends self and
other. On that point Pirsig's ontology cannot be faulted. But the
REALIZATION of that potentiality resides in the sensible awareness of the
individual value agent.
Essentially speaking,
Ham
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