Greetings Krimel, David, Ian, et al --
For a while I thought Krimel might be Case's alter ego. (Please tell me
this isn't true ;-)
[Krimel]:
> The problem is that fitness or betterness can really
> only be determined after the fact. To then claim they
> are the driving force is naïve.
[DM]:
> Yet without hindsight all this has been created and
> do we not have to live our lives without such back-sight?
> What do we mean by intelligence other than making a
> good choice between our options? We judge the
> possible and select what will become actual and what
> is left unactualised.
Have you considered the possibility that what is "after the fact" in the
finite perspective may be timeless in the absolute sense? That "before" and
"after" may define the mode of human experience rather than the attributes
of ultimate reality?
I suggest that the term "fitness" in the context of "betterness" (Pirsig's
Quality) is a synonym for Value. Consider this stanza from a 2500-year-old
poem by Lao-Tzu, as translated from the Chinese by Witter Bynner.
Realized in one man, fitness has its rise;
Realized in a family, fitness multiplies;
Realized in a village, fitness gathers weight;
Realized in a country, fitness becomes great;
Realized in a world, fitness fills the skies.
I recently quoted this in one of my website essays, replacing "fitness" with
"value" because it seemed to make more sense from an essentialist viewpoint.
The point I'd like to make is that value is a "give-and-take" property of
existential experience. By this I mean that value is what binds us to the
whole of reality. We take from value our being in the world, and (at the
same time) we give to value our experience of that being. In the first
instance, undifferentiated value gives rise to proprietary awareness; in the
second, awareness differentiates value, giving rise to beingness. This is a
reciprocal process by which being is made aware of the value that represents
its essential source.
Value is the actualized "essence" of man. So that, while it is true that
value is the force that drives mankind, it is also true that man (in
hindsight at least) is the valuistic entity that determines the course of
history. Only in the timeless, unconditional sense are actualized events
"predetermined". Since the mode of human experience is temporal, and the
ultimate source is unconditional in every respect, man is the free agent and
decision-maker of this world.
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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
