Hi Mark --
What a great word! A while back I was posting about
Venn Diagrams. When I looked up your word, for some
reason Wiki was at the top. And, what do you know,
it goes right into these Diagrams. I think it is a good way
to explain the creation of "other". The term also implies (I
think) that self and other arise independently which flies
straight in the face of determinism and Buddhism. ...
And so, how can I use it in logic to rephrase the tenants
of MoQ? DQ and sq must co-arise independently. That is,
the notion that DQ creates sq is only true if sq creates DQ.
This makes sense to me, and I see no contradiction there.
Additionally, the levels must arise independently. I have
always stood for the notion that all levels existed from the
beginning. The filling of the niches which Quality provides
for these levels does vary. Finally, Quality = Reality. Well,
I won't even go there for fear of stoking the wrath of Marsha.
You might be stoking my wrath as well, Mark, as that equivalency isn't an
axiom of Essentialism. Quality (Value) equals Reality only if the "reality"
in question is existence. Ultimate Reality is ESSENCE. And, while I make
no attempt to describe this ineffable source, can there be any doubt that
Sensibility and what appears as Beingness are both innate in its Oneness?
I expect the Pirsigians to refute this, since the official doctrine is that
Quality = Reality, as you say. But if Quality cannot exist unless it is
realized, neither can Reality. Which means that Quality cannot stand by
itself, cannot be the fundamental source of reality.
I suppose the only problem I see in terms of merging
Essentialism and MoQ together is the concept of negation.
Perhaps you could give a try at how this would work out.
This is like asking a Christian to merge Deism with Atheism, Mark. A
philosophy without Essence cannot be Essentialist by definition. I can talk
about the Value of Essence as a fundamental premise, compared with Pirsig's
Quality; but I can't with any integrity pretend that Value is the ultimate
reality.
Concerning negation, which seems to be an impediment for everyone I've
talked to, I can only repeat my argument that the creative potentiality of
an absolute must logically be exclusionary (i.e., negational) in nature. A
finite agent can create an "other" by adding an object to its experience;
what is already absolute, however, cannot add to its nature. Finitude,
therefore, is a self-imposed exclusion--a negation--of Absolute Essence.
Can you account for creation any other way?
Thanks, Mark
Ham
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Ham Priday <[email protected]> wrote:
Mark should be commended for his efforts to make Quality (or what I would
call Value) more understandable, and his ocean waves analogy is an
appropriate one. I also agree that the term "patterns" does not do justice
to this concept. Neither does "indefinable DQ".
I was trying to think of a better word than "differentiation" for the
state
of existence in which we all participate. The best I could come up with
was
"contrapositionality", which relates to antithesis as well as contrariety.
Webster's defines contraposition as "the relationship between two
propositions when the subject and predicate of one are respectively the
negation of the predicate and subject of the other." What does this mean?
Look at it this way: Value (Quality) only exists when it is realized.
Realized Value must have a Knower. That Knower is the sensible subject and
the actualized object (Being) is a valuistic expression of the knower's
sensibility. The "proposition" that we need to confront here is Oneness.
What we are really asking is: How does Oneness make its Value known? The
answer is that it creates a Knower (i.e., sensible agent) in
contraposition
to itself.
If we imagine Sensible Oneness (Essence) as the Being of Value, it becomes
clear that, in order for its value to be realized, Being and Knowing must
be
contraposed. The relation of Knowing to Being -- "what lies between" -- is
Value.
To get to this actualized state of differentiation, the subject ("I") and
predicate
("AM":) of Oneness are negated to create a new proposition; namely, the
subject > and predicate "I KNOW THIS IS". In between is the Value sensed
by the agent
who experiences "this is" autonomously and deals with it freely as he
will.
Does this paradigm make my ontogeny any more comprehensible? If so, how
much of it contradicts the MoQ thesis? I'll leave these questions up to
you
folks.
Valuistically speaking,
Ham
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