[MD] Correctness and Usefulness

[Ham Priday]

Hi Joe --



> As a member of the older generation I have experienced
> a World War, a Catholic monastery, a soup line in New York
> at The Catholic Worker, non-violent resistance to segregation
> in the South, by the time I was 33, marriage and family to now.
> I should be so jaded.  Yet, Ham, I am still tilting at an
> approach to viewing reality.  "Moral" is not what is favorable
> to mankind.  I think it is foolish to try to "transcend experiential
> existence."  I have an image of a noose around my neck.
> After studying Aquinas, Aristotle, etc I think it is foolish to
> leave myself open to a criticism that I am just speaking
> subjectively.  I agree with Pirsig¹s assessment of SOM.

I don't understand the "noose around your neck."  Is it the SOM perpective? 
And to what approach are you "tilting"?  We all lean toward a new view of 
reality, because none of us knows what it is and we hope in vain that some 
authority can tell us.  I see this quandary as built into the existential 
scheme.  The truth of reality is left as a riddle to man.

I, too, am a senior citizen, having lived through WWII, served in the Korean 
War, majored in biology and chemistry, studied music, and read Plato, the 
Christians, and Sartre's Existentialism on my own.  It was Sartre, not 
Aquinas, Augustine or Tillich, who finally convinced me that Existentialism 
was wrong.  Existence does NOT precede Essence, and the notion that it does 
is the approach of Science and the humanities, as well as the avant-garde 
philosophies of our materialistic age.  Nor does reducing subject/object 
existence to a monism, which Pirsig has attempted with his Quality thesis, 
reverse the existential premise.  Existence cannot be primary to Essence 
because, as Parmenides discerned, something cannot come from nothing.

My philosophy is founded on Essence as the primary source.  The Achilles 
heel in my hypothesis is that, unlike quality or value, Essence cannot be 
experienced or empirically validated.  It is a logical proposition that 
defies description.  It requires intuitive insight to conceptualize and a 
"leap of faith" to acknowledge.  Nonetheless, it is the single, most 
fundamental reality for anyone who believes that existence did not occur as 
a cosmic accident or by way of some chaos probability.  I am a devout 
believer -- not in a Divine Being or a Supreme Good, but in the absolute 
immutable source of all difference.

> I would rephrase: "If man is to become a moral creature,
> he must understand why he exists and what his role in existence
> is" to "If a man is to become a moral creature he must
> understand how he exists, and how he can become more."

OK, "why" and "how" are two sides of the same metaphysical question: What 
explains this phenomenon that we call Existence?   We know it only 
experientially -- as awareness of its being.  There is no evidence, save for 
our intellection, that being exists in the absence of awareness.  Yet human 
progress, indeed civilization itself, seems to hang on the precept of a 
structured continuum from which man emerges, relates to his peers, acquires 
knowledge, creates new things, and eventually makes his exit.  We are all 
habituated to this perspective of reality.  The "universality" of objective 
existence serves our pragmatic purposes, but it does not lead to 
metaphysical understanding.  For that we need to profoundly revise our way 
of thinking about reality.

> "Euphemisms, metaphors, analogies, and paradigms
> all have their place in philosophical discourse."  I agree.
> As for sensing value?  Whatever works!
> As for the rest of the paragraph, Ham, you are a poet!

No, I am a philosopher, Joe--a literalist.  Too much of what passes for 
philosophy these days amounts to poetry.  It has value as illiteration and 
metaphor, and sometimes as a practical guide to social interaction. 
Whatever works?  Are you really content with pragmatism?  Why do you 
disparage value sensibility?  Pirsig didn't.  He realized that only a 
valuistic ontology could get us beyond the practicality of subject/object 
existence.  My philosophy of Essence simply goes the extra step by positing 
a primary source, that without which nothing can exist.

Essentially yours,
Ham