[MD] Essentials for target practice

[Ham Priday]

Hello John --

...and Happy Independence Day to you, too.


[Ham, previously]:
> "Appearance" relates to my third tenet: "Existence is the
> appearance of differentiated otherness."

[John]:
> Appearance relates to sight.  What about the blind men
> confronting the differentiated experience of the otherness
> of the elephant?
>
> Existence has to be more than appearance.  Appearances
> can be deceiving, but the fact of existence is not.

Do you prefer "image", "phenomenon", or "representation"?  Take your pick. 
Heidegger didn't limit the meaning of his "world of appearances" to visual 
impressions, and neither do I.  Existence presents itself to ALL of our 
senses to convince us of its reality or beingness.  Yes, appearances can be 
deceiving; but so is the "facticity" of existence, for it depends on how 
real "being" is to the subject.  If being and nothing are the only true 
contingencies for you, then existence is your reality.

> My life does depend on second-hand knowledge, Ham.
> Perhaps not that particular knowledge of the celestial spheres,
> but my whole life is composed of second-hand knowledge
> consisting of admonitions and rules that I got from others,
> and I could not possibly test myself.

> We only know what we know. True.  And sometimes not even that.
> But "knowing" is often synonomous with "guessing" and thus we can
> be wrong about so much that we think we know.  This "knowing"
> is a slippery thing to grasp and define and beat each other over the
> head with.

[Ham]:
> When we conclude that the universe manifests "intelligent design",
> where do you suppose that intelligence resides?  When Mr. Pirsig
> says that we inhabit a "moral universe", by whose standard is that
> morality measured?  When Bo speaks of SOM and intellect as one
> and the same, what is the source of that intellect?
>
> Do you catch my drift, John?

[John]:
> Here is my thinking on the issue you raise.  If there is any designer
> or creator that stands outside the universe, ex niliho nilo doesn't fit.
> For as part of the universe I can only see the universe, not what
> stands outside of the universe.  Thus I should just assume that its
> my job to think about what I find around me - the universe, rather
> than take on a hubristic assertion about things that are so far over
> my head that they make the very metaphor "over my head" silly.
>
> Which is also why I take as dim a view of atheism as I do religion.

We all need knowledge to manage our lives in a differentiated space/time 
world.  What you've written in elegant prose, however, is actually a 
personal testament to value realization:

> But evolution and the forward march of intellect, going in
> one direction, gives me the idea that the cosmos around me
> is directional.  Is intelligent.  I exist and am part of a Quality
> Cosmos that forms me and is, in a way, my only revelation
> of any "god".  The experience of this directionality, the pull
> on my compass, so to speak, is as immediately empirically
> evident as any "fact" produced by the evidence of my senses.
> And yet this directionality is NOT evident to my senses.  It is
> only evident to a certain idea about ordering the evidences of
> my senses.  It's a "ghost" in Pirsigian terms.

Your sense of the cosmos as "directional" and "intelligent" is your 
intellectual realization of its value.  That "pull on your compass" is your 
psycho-emotional orientation to its undefined source.  You feel its presence 
not as a specific image or impression, but as the power of its attraction. 
It is this power which orders "the evidences of your organic senses" so that 
what you experience objectively represents what you sense innately.  Once 
the tactile, visual, auditory, and olfactory sense organs are aroused by 
value-sensibility, you actualize value as beingness.  Value is the "ghost" 
that creates your existential reality.

> Well I've heard it before Ham, and it's an irreconcilable conflict
> with my worldview.  How can an individual be anything but a
> valued part of the whole?  There was a time I was not valued,
> and I was not.  There will be a time when I'm no longer valued
> as a biological entity and then part of me, the biological part,
> will not be.
>
> But if I'm valued intellectually, then that part of me could possibly
> live forever, even as part of Plato is still alive today.  That's where
> Pirsig's levels help us to understand something important about the
> levels of being, and how to deal with our mortality.
>
> What I fear you miss with your fundamentalistic individualism,
> is the proper attitude towards death and non-being.

What is a "proper attitude toward death and non-being"?  If it's still an 
"irreconcilable conflict with your worldview," then perhaps that worldview 
needs some adjustment.

For example, you ask: "How can an individual be anything but a valued part 
of the whole?"  The essentialist does not believe himself to be a "part of 
the whole" because the whole (Absolute Essence) has no parts.  Instead the 
individual is cast off from the whole to become the whole's "sensor"--a free 
agent that 'ex-ists' on the periphery of the whole so as to realize its 
value, much like the gnat that flits about a beam of light to absorb its 
energy.  Sensibility determines the individual's being, not its essence, and 
being is only provisional (as we discussed before).  Only the Value of 
Essence can be realized, and this requires an independent agent   The 
essence of an individual is the value realized in a lifetime.  It 
complements the value realized in all lifetimes which, in turn, is 
complemented by the Absolute Value of Essence.

I submit that Value is the individual's link to his eternal Source.  No 
"proper attitude" is prerequisite, only the nurturing of one's sensibility 
to the values that sustain this link. (Have you ever considered that 
possibility as a way out of your conflict, John?)

> You ever tune a guitar Ham?  And say to yourself when it sounds
> right, "ah, all is within systemic order."   I bet you have, now that I
> think about it.

I've tuned a piano, a synthesizer, a violin, and my wife's harp, never a 
guitar.  But I
do understand the relevance of systemic order to "being in tune" -- even in 
the mystic sense of being attuned with Nature.  Perhaps this is another way 
of expressing the optimized orientation of value-sensibility suggested 
above..

[Ham]:
> Of course, I say we set the "tune" that nature plays,
> and whatever "eros" Whitehead is referring to is man's,
> not nature's.

[John]:
> Uh Ham, you can't be that pathetic. You must understand
> that to have an erotic relationship, it takes two.
>
> Two that are fundamentally different, and fundamentally attracted.

Oh, I understand that perfectly, John.  In fact, Value would not exist 
without a Self/Other dichotomy.  It requires both sensibility (proprietary 
awareness) and desiderata (the otherness desired), which is why I'm opposed 
to dismissing or rejecting Cartesian duality.

But I'm mystified by the dissertation which ended your last post.  Is it 
yours or quoted from another source?  If it's yours, I'll  have some 
comments to make at a later time.

For now, enjoy the remainder of your holiday weekend.

--Ham

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

[John?]:

We shall reach indeed in the end the conception of an Absolute Thought, but
this conception will be in explicit unity with the conception of an Absolute
Purpose. Furthermore, as we have just asserted, we shall find that the
defect of our momentary internal purposes, as they come to our passing
consciousness, is that they imply an individuality, both in ourselves and in
our facts of experience, which we do not wholly get presented to ourselves
at any one instant. Or in other words, we finite beings live in the search
for individuality, of life, of will, of experience, in brief, of meaning.
The whole meaning, which is the world, the Reality, will prove to be, for
this very reason, not a barren Absolute, which devours individuals, not a
wilderness such as Meister Eckhart found in God, a*Stille Wüste, da Nieman
heime ist*, a place where there is no definite life, nor yet a whole that
absorbs definition, but a whole that is just to the finite aspect of every
flying moment, and of every transient or permanent form of finite
selfhood,—a whole that is an individual system of rationally linked and
determinate, but for that very reason not externally determined, ethically
free individuals, who are nevertheless One in God. It is just because all
meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which
the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment,
of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of
individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the
Absolute Meaning of the world. This, I say, will prove to be the sense of
our central thesis; and here will be a contrast between our form of Idealism
and some other forms.