Hello John --
...and Happy Independence Day to you, too. [Ham, previously]:
"Appearance" relates to my third tenet: "Existence is the appearance of differentiated otherness."
[John]:
Appearance relates to sight. What about the blind men confronting the differentiated experience of the otherness of the elephant? Existence has to be more than appearance. Appearances can be deceiving, but the fact of existence is not.
Do you prefer "image", "phenomenon", or "representation"? Take your pick. Heidegger didn't limit the meaning of his "world of appearances" to visual impressions, and neither do I. Existence presents itself to ALL of our senses to convince us of its reality or beingness. Yes, appearances can be deceiving; but so is the "facticity" of existence, for it depends on how real "being" is to the subject. If being and nothing are the only true contingencies for you, then existence is your reality.
My life does depend on second-hand knowledge, Ham. Perhaps not that particular knowledge of the celestial spheres, but my whole life is composed of second-hand knowledge consisting of admonitions and rules that I got from others, and I could not possibly test myself.
We only know what we know. True. And sometimes not even that. But "knowing" is often synonomous with "guessing" and thus we can be wrong about so much that we think we know. This "knowing" is a slippery thing to grasp and define and beat each other over the head with.
[Ham]:
When we conclude that the universe manifests "intelligent design", where do you suppose that intelligence resides? When Mr. Pirsig says that we inhabit a "moral universe", by whose standard is that morality measured? When Bo speaks of SOM and intellect as one and the same, what is the source of that intellect? Do you catch my drift, John?
[John]:
Here is my thinking on the issue you raise. If there is any designer or creator that stands outside the universe, ex niliho nilo doesn't fit. For as part of the universe I can only see the universe, not what stands outside of the universe. Thus I should just assume that its my job to think about what I find around me - the universe, rather than take on a hubristic assertion about things that are so far over my head that they make the very metaphor "over my head" silly. Which is also why I take as dim a view of atheism as I do religion.
We all need knowledge to manage our lives in a differentiated space/time world. What you've written in elegant prose, however, is actually a personal testament to value realization:
But evolution and the forward march of intellect, going in one direction, gives me the idea that the cosmos around me is directional. Is intelligent. I exist and am part of a Quality Cosmos that forms me and is, in a way, my only revelation of any "god". The experience of this directionality, the pull on my compass, so to speak, is as immediately empirically evident as any "fact" produced by the evidence of my senses. And yet this directionality is NOT evident to my senses. It is only evident to a certain idea about ordering the evidences of my senses. It's a "ghost" in Pirsigian terms.
Your sense of the cosmos as "directional" and "intelligent" is your intellectual realization of its value. That "pull on your compass" is your psycho-emotional orientation to its undefined source. You feel its presence not as a specific image or impression, but as the power of its attraction. It is this power which orders "the evidences of your organic senses" so that what you experience objectively represents what you sense innately. Once the tactile, visual, auditory, and olfactory sense organs are aroused by value-sensibility, you actualize value as beingness. Value is the "ghost" that creates your existential reality.
Well I've heard it before Ham, and it's an irreconcilable conflict with my worldview. How can an individual be anything but a valued part of the whole? There was a time I was not valued, and I was not. There will be a time when I'm no longer valued as a biological entity and then part of me, the biological part, will not be. But if I'm valued intellectually, then that part of me could possibly live forever, even as part of Plato is still alive today. That's where Pirsig's levels help us to understand something important about the levels of being, and how to deal with our mortality. What I fear you miss with your fundamentalistic individualism, is the proper attitude towards death and non-being.
What is a "proper attitude toward death and non-being"? If it's still an "irreconcilable conflict with your worldview," then perhaps that worldview needs some adjustment.
For example, you ask: "How can an individual be anything but a valued part of the whole?" The essentialist does not believe himself to be a "part of the whole" because the whole (Absolute Essence) has no parts. Instead the individual is cast off from the whole to become the whole's "sensor"--a free agent that 'ex-ists' on the periphery of the whole so as to realize its value, much like the gnat that flits about a beam of light to absorb its energy. Sensibility determines the individual's being, not its essence, and being is only provisional (as we discussed before). Only the Value of Essence can be realized, and this requires an independent agent The essence of an individual is the value realized in a lifetime. It complements the value realized in all lifetimes which, in turn, is complemented by the Absolute Value of Essence.
I submit that Value is the individual's link to his eternal Source. No "proper attitude" is prerequisite, only the nurturing of one's sensibility to the values that sustain this link. (Have you ever considered that possibility as a way out of your conflict, John?)
You ever tune a guitar Ham? And say to yourself when it sounds right, "ah, all is within systemic order." I bet you have, now that I think about it.
I've tuned a piano, a synthesizer, a violin, and my wife's harp, never a guitar. But I do understand the relevance of systemic order to "being in tune" -- even in the mystic sense of being attuned with Nature. Perhaps this is another way of expressing the optimized orientation of value-sensibility suggested above..
[Ham]:
Of course, I say we set the "tune" that nature plays, and whatever "eros" Whitehead is referring to is man's, not nature's.
[John]:
Uh Ham, you can't be that pathetic. You must understand that to have an erotic relationship, it takes two. Two that are fundamentally different, and fundamentally attracted.
Oh, I understand that perfectly, John. In fact, Value would not exist without a Self/Other dichotomy. It requires both sensibility (proprietary awareness) and desiderata (the otherness desired), which is why I'm opposed to dismissing or rejecting Cartesian duality.
But I'm mystified by the dissertation which ended your last post. Is it yours or quoted from another source? If it's yours, I'll have some comments to make at a later time.
For now, enjoy the remainder of your holiday weekend. --Ham _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [John?]: We shall reach indeed in the end the conception of an Absolute Thought, but this conception will be in explicit unity with the conception of an Absolute Purpose. Furthermore, as we have just asserted, we shall find that the defect of our momentary internal purposes, as they come to our passing consciousness, is that they imply an individuality, both in ourselves and in our facts of experience, which we do not wholly get presented to ourselves at any one instant. Or in other words, we finite beings live in the search for individuality, of life, of will, of experience, in brief, of meaning. The whole meaning, which is the world, the Reality, will prove to be, for this very reason, not a barren Absolute, which devours individuals, not a wilderness such as Meister Eckhart found in God, a*Stille Wüste, da Nieman heime ist*, a place where there is no definite life, nor yet a whole that absorbs definition, but a whole that is just to the finite aspect of every flying moment, and of every transient or permanent form of finite selfhood,—a whole that is an individual system of rationally linked and determinate, but for that very reason not externally determined, ethically free individuals, who are nevertheless One in God. It is just because all meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment, of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world. This, I say, will prove to be the sense of our central thesis; and here will be a contrast between our form of Idealism and some other forms. 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/md/archives.html
