[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?]

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Ham]
Even idealists like Socrates and Plato thought of ultimate reality as Being. 
Would you reject their view?

[Arlo]
I'm sure it worked for them.

[Ham]
My conception of Essence isn't Beingness, for example, and although I can't
precisely define it, I can give you a pretty good idea of what it is, what it
is not, and how I think it relates to the relational world -- even though I
resort to metaphor and analogy to do so.

[Arlo]
Well, this starts to get at the point. It provides some value for you to do
this. I, personally, am not troubled by an "undefinable undefined". As soon as
you say "being" or "awareness" or "Quality" or "God" you've started the
definition process. At that point, it all boils down to finding the best
metaphor for whatever ails you. 

[Ham]
Why are the Pirsigians so fearful of identifying their fundamental reality?

[Arlo]
If its un-expressible, its hardly identifiable. I don't speak for anyone else
here, of course. But I gather if your starting point is "all this is just an
analogy", laboring over "absolute reality" isn't very important. At any rate, I
think Pirsig does posit Quality as the fundamental reality, no?

[Ham]
Love and Value may be indefinable, but they're obviously expressible, judging
from the volumes of words that have been written about them.

[Arlo]
Yes, and which captures love better, a sonnet or a textbook? A rose or an essay
on "defining love"? I'm not being silly here, I'm saying that "love" may be
vaguely understandable "literally", but is that "love"? Here is a fundamental
"metaphor" question. Is "art" reducible to "literal words"? Can you take Bach's
"A Musical Offering" and "explain it"? Oh sure, you can offer this and that and
this and that, but ultimately whatever you offer falls short of the experience
of hearing it. Can you take "fill-in-your-fave-painting" and reduce it to a
"description"? Even if you had 1000 textbooks to do this?

Then consider language metaphor. Take "man is a wolf". Can you provide a
comprehensive, exact "literal" translation of this? You can say "man is
predatory, and fear-inspiring, and solitary, and pack-like, and carnivorous,
and ...", but can you ever exactly replace this metaphor with something
"literal". I say "no". Metaphor is the only conduit we have to the undefinable,
and while metaphysics and explanatory ontologies and the like are useful and
important ways to point in the right direction, they are never "it".

[Ham]
If you agree, how do you account for the existence of an aesthetic standard, or
a relative measure of worth, in the absence of a subject to appreciate or
measure it?

[Arlo]
Different levels of focus.

[Ham]
Cusa's First Principle was that which "cannot be other, either than an other or
than nothing, and likewise is not opposed to anything." What is yours? If you
believe this is an unfair question, tell me why.

[Arlo]
My first principle? How about "all this is just an analogy". :-)