[MD] Wanted: A proper foundation

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Michael --

...and welcome aboard!

I know you consider yourself a Christian, and was interested to see how well 
your exchange with the Pirsigians would progress before I made a comment. 
Let me say that your approach is exactly right; from the beginning you've 
adapted your perspective to Pirsigspeak with the willingness of someone who 
sincerely wants to present his views as compatible with the MoQ.  And you 
are to be commended for that.

You should know that I am a renegade in this forum, and there are some here 
who will attack anything I say.  I don't particularly enjoy their virulence, 
but it has afforded me some latitude to speak my mind on certain issues. 
Although you will find that Pirsig's philosophy is unashamedly 
anti-theistic, I've discovered that the label "nihilist" is more offensive 
to its acolytes than any criticism one can make.  So insulting is this word 
that antagonists have tried to construe my valuistic philosophy as a form of 
nihilism.

> Jumping into this discussion way late, I apologize. But
> reading it from the start, I am struck by two things.
>
> ham wrote:
> Value is the measure of a thing's relative worth or significance.

The Greek philosopher Protagoras said "Man is the measure of all things, of 
the existence of things that are and of the non-existence of things that are 
not."  That precisely expresses my position.  Of the things that we are 
aware of, man determines the value or quality of any one relative to all the 
others.

> mel wrote:
> [something Marsha IMO rightly described as A lovely symphony...]
>
> Pondering mel's words against ham's quest, I can't help
> but feel that "value" as understood by Pirsig is not "value"
> in the traditional comparative sense. Seeking to find a word
> to adequately describe it may be like asking a child to draw
> a picture of perfection. ...

That's a good analogy.  Not even an adult artist can illustrate perfection. 
Of course Pirsig himself didn't portray the universe as "perfect"; he only 
said it was a "moral" system evolving to "betterness".  Who or what, 
exactly, is the measure of that betterness?   And if Quality is the creator 
or source of the universe, why wasn't it created "perfectly good" from the 
start?  This doesn't seem to concern Mr. Pirsig who, perhaps because of his 
early readings on anthropology, is more interested in its biological and 
sociological evolution.  He has "overcome" the subject/object division of 
common experience by positing "man" as a collection of interrelating 
patterns, whereas I accept the duality and view man as the individuated 
locus of awareness with a unique sense of value and the intellectual 
capacity to think and act as an independent choicemaker.

> But the inability to fully understand or describe something
> using human intellect which is beyond the capacity of human
> intellect does not mean it doesn't exist.

I couldn't agree more.  But, you see, this would require metaphysical 
speculation which the author shuns because "definitions" would destroy his 
allegorical exposition.

> And back to ham's quest for a proper foundation;
> maybe there is no such thing because we are using the
> wrong tool (human intellect.)  Maybe we can only
> approximate it with that tool and have to let the rough edges
> be there. Put it another way; reality is doing *something*
> that we can (so far) only best describe as "Quality that needs
> no comparative to exist."  It makes no sense called that,
> but only because we can't make sense of it (yet?)

Maybe what we're all looking for isn't Quality or Value at all.  Maybe value 
is all that finite human beings can sense of something far greater -- say, 
an Absolute Source whose sensibility and value cannot be reduced to 
relational properties and attributes?

Is a theist any more open to such a concept than a Qualitarian?  We shall 
soon see.

Thanks for adding a refreshing new POV to the foray, Michael.

Best wishes,
Ham