[MD] Food for Thought

[Ham Priday]

David --

Ham, previously:
> I have problems interpreting Heidegger.

DM:
> You, me and everyone.
> I don't know what the context of the above was,
> but that looks like dreadful writing to me.

Okay, here's some understandable writing on Value as conceptualized by
Heidegger and the existentialists.  I'll quote the most relevant statements.
They come from a website called "Bag of Worms Yet Words", and I quote them
because they don't conflict either with anything I've read of Heidegger or
anything I've said concerning Essentialism.

"As an academic ideology in America, post-modernism has its roots in the
European secular philosophical tradition of existentialism.  'Being and
Time' (1927), by the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and 'Being and
Nothingness' (1943), by the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, are
considered the major founding treatises of existentialism.  The concept of
values is central to their existentialism; but, curiously, neither
philosopher defines the concept in a straightforward way in these major
works.  Nonetheless, what they mean by values is quite clear and important.
We start with the simplest definition.

"According to these philosophers (but in my own words): Values are feelings
that accompany all experience.

"By experience, the existentialists mean all experiences of which we are
aware (that is, of which are conscious). These experiences include all
thoughts - each and every one of them, no matter how unemotional or
unfeeling our thoughts seemingly might be. ...

"By values, the existentialists ...mean that all our experiences of the
natural and social worlds come to us valued as to their worth, that is, how
attractive they are or how much something should be avoided.  Consider all
the objects, events, and processes that are in our experience: for example,
the noise of a jet airplane overhead, the face of a man, a baseball flying
toward our baseball glove, a large book, a plate of food, a sports car
travelling fast, ...the babble of crowds in Times Square, a flash of eyes in
a bar, doing the laundry, and so on.  If we would experience all these
things neutrally, we would experience each of them as having the same lack
of importance and lack of usefulness to us; but we experience none of these
elements of our experience with such neutrality.  Each item is experienced
by us as a complex of feelings.  These complexes of feeling distinguish one
experience from another as much as do the "objective" properties of the
objects (or events) we experience....

"What the existentialists say, about value, is that each of us lives within
a world of values.  There are values of many kinds, all of which are
feelings (in some sense), rather than perceptions or cognitive thoughts:
emotion (e.g., happiness, fright), expectation, alienation, conscience
(e.g., duty, guilt), and confusion are values.

"We never experience the world of objects, events, persons, and social
relationships in which we live as those items might be described and
measured by scientists.  We can never experience a fast sports car, as might
be described by a physicist or an engineer.  The engineer might describe the
sports car as a metallic object of certain physical dimensions, of unloaded
and loaded weights, with an engine that consumes 18 gallons of gasoline
while travelling 360 miles at an average of 55 miles per hour.  Such an
object can exist as a construct only within scientific theory and
engineering practice; but it cannot so exist within our experience, void of
feeling.

"We should conclude by mentioning that the values which we experience are
precognitive and determinative.  By precognitive, I mean values exist as
part of our experience before we are able to think about them or be
conscious of them. By determinative, I mean that values set up the structure
of our conscious experience (for instance, by separating some experience
from us as 'objective,' and some experience as 'subjective')."    [Source:
http://shroudedindoubt.typepad.com/bag_of_worms_yet_words/2005/01/values]

HP, previously:
> Because value is subjective, there is no
> "inter-subjective" value experience.
> No other person can sense my values.

DM:
I disagree.

Why? Are you a psychic or mind reader?  Do you not believe that your
subjective desires, pleasures, fears, tastes, attitudes, etc., are
proprietary to your self?  You won't convince me that these feelings are all
manifested in your behavior.

DM:
> I don't like: "the Absolute is finished and complete",
> because it seems at odds with the work in progress,
> struggling to evolve, that this cosmos seems to be.
> In the beginning was some 'lack'.

The 'lack' begins with negation.  Otherwise, you've described the cosmology
accurately, despite your dislike of it.  As you say, existence is a "work in
progress", as opposed to the stasis of the Absolute.  You are endeared to
existence because you are still struggling to become complete, as we all
are -- indeed, as the history of the cosmos is.  All of existence is in flux
because it lacks completion.  Anything reduced from Essence seeks to
complete the circle of existence in this way.  What drives this "struggle to
evolve" is the value of the Source.

I don't presume to comprehend the REASON (i.e., "teleogical necessity") for
actualized existence with its separation of an autonomous sensibility from
otherness.  Reason is an intellectual construct of the human mind that
interprets all events as cause-and-effect; it has no grasp of what is
"moral", perfect or complete in absolute reality.  I see man's "innocence"
as necessary for his freedom.  And, at least at my present state of
"evolvement", I've encountered no alternative thesis that has shaken my
belief in this cosmology.

Essentially yours,
Ham