[MD] Why the quality of the modern world is no good.

[Ham Priday]

John -- 



> Why would experience deceive us?  What is its motive?
> Perhaps you rather meant, "we are deceived in our relationship
> with experience".  But still Ham, deception on a metaphysical
> level is a rather serious charge and usually implies some sort of
> agency.  The only agency that could be responsible for the
> deception you posit, is the self itself.  Which gets kinda gnarly,
> don't you think?

The self and its experience is deceptive from the gitgo.  It acquaints each 
of us with a world of beingness in which 'I the observer' am the central 
focus.  My joy, my pain, my desire are what respond to this world, and they 
are as real to me as its physical objects.  The only reality I know is my 
individual role in the universe; everything else is hearsay or second-hand 
experience.  From my subjective POV everything happens to Me, exists for Me, 
and depends on Me.  I am, in fact, the center of all reality, and if I 
should cease to be, just as assuredly so would my universe.  Gnarly, 
perhaps, but deceptive as well.  My intellect alone sees through this 
deception, but intellect is in many ways alien to the self -- a composite of 
deductive and analytical skills acquired from my social environment as a 
means of reflecting on the values of my objective reality.

> "Reflect" on value. Yes, that is intellectual.  But the apprehension of
> Value/Beauty in the moment is pre-intellectual.  We like to play this
> analytic game, and it is valuable no doubt.  But I certainly don't have to
> conclude from recalled experience that my daughter's unguarded smile or a
> rose is beautiful.

All experience must be recalled in order to reflect on it.  What we 
apprehend "in the moment" is raw sensory data.  This disparate data has to 
be assimilated and integrated by the mind before it can leave an impression 
of the reality external to us.  In truth, we live in the present through our 
impressions of the past.  What we value today is maningful only insofar as 
we can associate it with what we valued yesterday.  Such is the serial 
nature of experiential existence.

> And I can't call that preintellectual apprehension "undifferentiated 
> value"
> because by god, I sure am differentiating in the moment.  This moment of
> artistic revelation is different from all other moments by its unique call
> on my soul from a more harmonious dimension.
>
> And finally, the selective differentiation is not any act of my 
> experience,
> it resides not in the act but the experience of my experience.  It is what
> comes to me, presents to me, inspires me and makes me respond in some way.
> When I'm very happy with my response, I call it "art".

Your "experience of experience" is memory recall.  Even what you consider to 
be instantaneous or "direct" experience is a deception.  All awareness is 
reflexive.  Value-sensibility itself is timeless, but we are not aware of 
value as experience until we have processed it neurologically in terms of 
space/time events.  It could well be that "art" attempts to capture this 
process on canvas or in music in one fell swoop.  I'm not enough of an 
artist to know, since my enjoyment of beauty is sensual rather than 
analytical.

[Ham, previously]:
> I know this "subjective" epistemology is strange and illogical as compared
> with the common notion of emotional value as reactive rather than
> "effective".  But if you believe, as I o, that Value (i.e, Quality) is 
> primary
> to objects, and forget about the time sequence of human  perception,
> it is clear that Value -- at least our sense of it -- must actualize 
> (create)
> our objective reality.  Doesn't this also explain why "the quality of the
> modern world is no good"?

[John]:
> I don't quite follow you there Ham, except strange and illogical is
> a pretty good descriptor.  After that I get lost in stranger and 
> illogicaler.
> "Reactive rather than effective" fer instance.  Whew.  I don't even think
> I wanna know.  I sorta react ineffectively to statements like that.
>
> And then there's:
> "forget about the time sequence of human perception"  Why?  How?
> I agree that our objective reality is created by Value, but I don't see
> how that explains the quality of the modern world is no good.
> You'd think the quality of the modern world would be a subset of
> the value of objective reality and thus no disconnect at all.  I do see
> different.  I don't see an explanation for the phenomena.

My point was that how we feel about the world depends on our value 
sensibility.  Since postmodernists have trashed most of their traditional 
values, what they create in rap music, "pop" art, and new age philosophy 
tends to be sensationalistic rather than beautiful.  The world is as good as 
we experience it.  When we lose our sense of value, the world becomes less 
appealing (in Pirsig's terms, "low-quality").  It's not that the world is no 
good.  It's that we are no longer able to sense goodness.

> Back in my community college days, I was taking the romantic poets
> while studying the philosophy of deep ecology and the juxtaposition
> was enlightening to me.  I was immensely attracted to Wordsworth
> for his critique of intellectual values and ever since thinking through 
> the lens:
> "To me the meanest flower that blows, brings thoughts to deep for tears"
> focuses upon the idea that Nature is our ultimate teacher of Value - it is
> in natural relations we can contemplate the truly pre-intellectual Quality
> in all objective reality.

True enough.  But then, what in existence is not "natural relations"?

Thanks for your insight, John.

Ham