[MD] The question WHY?

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, John --


> Ham,
>
> Sorry for only responding to the parts of your posts that I prefer
> ... but them's the rules.

Who's rules?  Yours?

> Interesting observation.  How many dialectics have we witnessed
> that are geared to resolving questions?
> As opposed to trying to convert.

Good question.  I for one would like to witness more of the former.

> [Royce]:
>
> Suppose we wish to deny absolutism, and stress our finite limitations,
> our ignorance.  We assert that only our finite fragments of experience
> exist.  But if that is a fact, then it must be experienced: on an assumed
> Berkeleyan analysis, whatever is, must be *for* a consciousness.
> The supposition that there is no experience beyond our finite experiences
> proves contradictory; in it['s?] entirety experience must constitute one
> self-determinend and consequently absolute and organized whole....
> The very effort to deny an absolute experience involves, then, the actual
> assertion of such an absolute experience."

I don't follow Royce's logic.  I know that he is an "absolutist".  But how 
does the supposition that there is no "absolute experience" constitute an 
"absolute whole"?  How does the "effort to deny absolute experience" involve 
"the assertion of" it?  Does he mean only that we can't deny something 
without imagining its existence? I accept that as a rhetorical or 
intellectual premise, but not as an experiential principle.  Perhaps you can 
explain the argument Royce is trying to make...and, while you're at it, what 
you mean by the following:

> And the absolute that is chosen unconsciously in such
> cases of overt denial of an absolute, is the self - the subject of SOM.
> Too bad that unconscious metaphysics tend to be bad metaphysics.

To be clear, I define conscious experience as the awareness of the 
individual.  No finite entity, nothing locked in a space/time framework, can 
be absolute.  This is what relates consciousness to a unique organic being 
and makes the self a free agent.  If you're suggesting that the self is 
absolute (within itself) -- in other words, that it is an integral whole --  
you would be misusing the term "absolute".  By definition only Essence, the 
Primary Source, is absolute.  No individual entity or created thing is 
absolute, not even the infinite universe.

Thanks for your thoughts, John.

Regards,
Ham