Hi John --
I can see you've had a busy week. And it has been a troubled one for the MD's SOL faction. (If only Pirsigians could understand that "intellect" is the reasoning that goes one in one's mind, and not a "domain" of Quality.)
[Ham, previously]:
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.
[John]:
Makes sense to me. I like that last line, Value is the ghost that creates existence. Nice. Are you sure you're not a Pirsigian?
Actually, John, it was YOUR metaphor:
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.
The point I was trying to make is the principle that existence = appearance, as distinguished from Essence = Reality. You and I are 'existents', but we are not 'essential'. To exist is to be as an "other". What is the appearance of being for you is an object for another. Essence has no otherness. Thus, as I said, "If being and nothing are the only true contingencies for you, then existence is your reality." (My meaning here is that existence is not True Reality.)
Not quite sure here. If the whole doesn't have parts, then how can the self be cast off from it?
That's the two million dollar question, and it sure beats trying to overcome S/O duality.;-) I think we've discussed this before, John. For me, the only possible answer is that the individual self is a negate that exists only as a differentiated "reflection" of the essential whole. Analogically speaking, if Essence is the "gem of reality", then we as its negated agents are the sparkle of that gem. I cover this negation theory in more detail at www.essentialism.net/mechanic.htm#essence.
[Ham]:
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.
[John]:
I think I mainly agree. I think sensibility is the birth of being. Naming is fundamental to being. Does that jive?
I would say differentiation or delineation is fundamental to being. And it involves the appearance of both being and nothingness.
I think the big point I'd make, is that its just as foolish to make the S/O dichotomy fundamental to Value, as you say it is foolish to make Value fundamental to the S/O. In fact, I'd say if I had to pin one or the other down as fundamental, I'd put Value first, since without valuation, the Self doesn't realize any Other.
Value is the primary relation of S to O. It is "fundamental" inasmuch as it is the inextricable link between them. We are bound to Otherness (being) by its value to us. But this is a provisional relationship, for both self (subject) and other (object) are negated essents. Value sensed is existential; value as "the absolute whole" is Essence.
The late John 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.
Evidently this is "juicy and meaty" prose for you, but I haven'r read enough of Royce to know what it means. He seems to equate "the world" with Reality in that ponderous first sentence. If, instead, he's referring to existence, can it even have an "absolute meaning"? Internal vs. external meaning? "Concrete" fulfillment? "Essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world"? Isn't "essence of absolute meaning" a redundancy?
Just how do you interpret this statement, John? I could always get an editor's synopsis of Royce's philosophy from Wikipedia, but I'm sure you could summarize it in a more understandable fashion for a non-academic like me.
Thanks for getting back to me. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. Essentially yours, Ham 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
