[MD] The relativity of the MoQ

[Ham Priday]

Reconciling Steve and Platt --

On 30 Aug. at 11:34 AM, Platt wrote:


> For me Quality, beauty is there all the time, all around us,  in the 
> trees, the earth, the sky, the emptiness of space. It is there  waiting 
> for us to rejoin it. At death it is as if we move from
> one side of our senses to the other, from the highly filtered,
> highly processed world inside the brain to the true unbounded
> universe where subjective and objective coalesce.  We step out of the 
> dense fog of introverted human perception
> to  the clear air of reality. Where beauty is we will be.

At 12:06 PM Steve responded:

> If Quality=reality=experience then we don't need to be concerned
> with any "dense fog of introverted human perception" that stands
> between us and the world as it really is. The MOQ perspective
> as I understand it makes it impossible to imagine being out of
> touch with reality since experience IS reality, so we never need
> to worry about trying to get back in touch with it after death.
> On the other hand, Pirsig wrote bits about the possibility of
> "taking off the cultural glasses" that contradict this view, but I think 
> such passages are a step backward from the Quality
> postulate to a subject-object, appearance-reality picture where
> taking off the glasses as a philosophical goal makes sense.

Here are two elegantly articulated statements that seem to present opposing 
views of "the world as it really is".  But are they really in opposition, or 
simply descriptions of two different reality perspectives?

Platt is talking about aesthetic value that pervades the universe, and how 
we (as sentient subjects) seek to identify with it.  He speaks of "beauty" 
as an eternal 'Quality' that we perceive tangentially "from one side of our 
senses" but which is "waiting for us to rejoin it".  If Platt's description 
of subjective sensibility is a "foggy" suggestion of our "estrangement" from 
reality, the fog is dispelled in the next sentence where he speaks of death 
moving us (the "world inside the brain") "...to the true unbounded universe 
where subjective and objective coalesce."  In fact, this is one of the few 
instances where Platt has alluded to metaphysical reality.

Steve, on the other hand, is not talking about "ultimate reality" or 
esthetic appreciation but, rather, experiential existence.  Experience, for 
Steve, is "reality as it really is".  "Since experience IS reality," he 
insists; "we never need to worry about trying to get back in touch with it 
after death."  What he says is true insofar as we are subjectively "in touch 
with" reality through our experience of its objective values.  But he is 
confused by Pirsig's "cultural glasses" that "contradict this view" and, 
frankly, so am I.  Whether we wear such glasses or not, existence is "a 
subject-object, appearance-reality picture", whereas reality itself is not. 
And I, for one, have a problem with the equation "Experience = Reality".

I would submit that there is a world of difference (literally) between being 
"in touch with" reality, valuistically, as an observer "on the fringe" and 
being unified with it.  Platt has dared to speculate that the cessation of 
life may be a return to Oneness.  While this of course is a spiritualistic 
concept shunned by the MoQists, it has metaphysical validity in 
Essentialism.  For if the essence of man is value-sensibility, as I 
maintain, there is no logical principle or law of nature whereby Essence can 
be lost.  Indeed, it would seem that the created "agent of value" is 
inextricably linked with its uncreated Source.

Thanks, gentlemen, for your perceptive worldviews.

Essentially yours,
Ham