[MD] Quality is Appreciation in Value

[Ham Priday]

John --


> OR we could call it the "Quality of Appreciation" as in appreciating
> the congruency here between Royce and the MoQ.

I think your twisting of semantics obscures the "appreciative" meaning of 
Quality.  (This may be intentional for one who doesn't acknowledge the 
subjective nature of experience.)

Quality, as I understand it in the epistemological sense, is perceived 
Value.  It is what we individually (subjectively) sense of Reality 
(appreciatively or revulsively) and intellectualize as objective phenomena. 
As Kuklick states: "Appreciation is the reality of what is infinite and 
could not exist without its higher corollary."

Except I would say that Appreciation is "the emotional sensibility" of what 
is infinite, since that is our "reality".   Royce is right that "description 
presupposes appreciation."  But history and evolution are the existential 
(time) perspective of human experience.  The teleology lies in the relation 
of being-aware to its Absolute Source.  Insofar as Value is the subject's 
link to that Source, its appreciation by the subject represents our 
"metaphysical teleology".   (And it's not Biocentrism, its Essentialism.)

Human beings apprehend the world valuistically; we are value-sensible 
creatures.  Any attempt to remove Quality or Value from the context of 
subjective perception is self-defeating and fallacious.  In short, as I've 
said many times, there is no such thing as "unrealized value".

Thanks for the quotes, John.

Regards,
Ham

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


> from Kuklick's Intellectual Biography of Josiah Royce (explaining
> Royce's philosophy to us)
>
>
> The criterion of the objective or real is our ability to verify experience
> in common, i.e., to have shared experience.  We have heretofore taken the
> eternal objects which we describe as characteristic of what is real or
> objective.  But description presupposes that we attribute an appreciative
> reality to others.  If appreciation is real, however, it cannot in
> actuality  be private, momentary, and fleeting , although is is from our
> perspective.  We can make this state of affairs intelligible only if we
> assume that the World of Description does not characterise the real; and 
> we
> must also suppose that our seemingly isolated and momentary appreciative
> consciousnesses do share in the organic life of one self in which everyone
> experiences the consciousness of everyone else. Appreciation is the 
> reality
> of what is infinite and could not exist without its higher corollary:
>
>
> Real objects are not the cause of my thoughts.  A thinker assumes that his
> thoughts first agree with their object, where "agree" means something like
> "intend".  As we have seen, causation presupposes this agreement and 
> cannot
> explain it.  That is, we can never formulate our theory of knowledge by
> means of the categories of the World of Description (here Causality).
>
>
> We must understand the connection between thought and object in terms of
> purpose, a teleological notion which Royce says is "logically 
> appreciable".
> The relation of causation exists among certain objects of thought but is 
> not
> adequate to express the intentional relation of idea and referent; once
> again description presupposes appreciation.
>
>
> History and evolution are telelological--they embody purpose, meaning, and
> significance--and particularly with his last two arguments Royce has an
> answer to the problems of his 1889 paper.  The evolutionary and the
> historical are ultimate and represent the appreciative reality which the
> World of Description presupposes.  He accepts with equanimity the 
> Darwinian
> hypothesis which threatened so many other religious thinkers.  More than 
> any
> other contemporary scientific advance, the theory of evolution is 
> explicitly
> genetic, and Royce uses it as a primary example of the real status of
> science:
>
>
> -------
>
> I know many who regret the tendency in our day to apply the doctrine of 
> the
> transformation of species to humanity, who fear the apparently 
> materialistic
> results of the discovery that the human mind has grown.  For my part there
> lies in all this discovery of our day the deeply important presupposition
> that the transition from animal to man is in fact really an evolution, 
> that
> is, a real history, a process having significance.  If this is in truth 
> the
> real interpretation of nature, then the romantic philosophy has not 
> dreamed
> in vain, and the outer order of nature will embody once more the life of a
> divine Self.