[MD] Essentials for target practice

[Ham Priday]

Hi John --

I can see you've had a busy week.  And it has been a troubled one for the 
MD's SOL faction.  (If only Pirsigians could understand that "intellect" is 
the reasoning that goes one in one's mind, and not a "domain" of Quality.)

[Ham, previously]:
> 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.

[John]:
> Makes sense to me. I like that last line, Value is the ghost
> that creates existence.  Nice.
> Are you sure you're not a Pirsigian?

Actually, John, it was YOUR metaphor:
> 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.

The point I was trying to make is the principle that existence = appearance, 
as distinguished from Essence = Reality.  You and I are 'existents', but we 
are not 'essential'.  To exist is to be as an "other".  What is the 
appearance of being for you is an object for another.  Essence has no 
otherness.  Thus, as I said, "If being  and nothing are the only true 
contingencies for you, then existence is your reality."  (My meaning here is 
that existence is not True Reality.)

> Not quite sure here.  If the whole doesn't have parts, then
> how can the self be cast off from it?

That's the two million dollar question, and it sure beats trying to overcome 
S/O duality.;-)  I think we've discussed this before, John.  For me, the 
only possible answer is that the individual self is a negate that exists 
only as a differentiated "reflection" of the essential whole.  Analogically 
speaking, if Essence is the "gem of reality", then we as its negated agents 
are the sparkle of that gem.  I cover this negation theory in more detail at 
www.essentialism.net/mechanic.htm#essence.

[Ham]:
> 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.

[John]:
> I think I mainly agree.  I think sensibility is the birth of being.
> Naming is fundamental to being.  Does that jive?

I would say differentiation or delineation is fundamental to being.  And it 
involves the appearance of both being and nothingness.

> I think the big point I'd make, is that its just as foolish
> to make the S/O dichotomy fundamental to Value, as you say
> it is foolish to make Value fundamental to the S/O.
>
> In fact, I'd say if I had to pin one or the other down as
> fundamental, I'd put Value first, since without valuation,
> the Self doesn't realize any Other.

Value is the primary relation of S to O.  It is "fundamental" inasmuch as it 
is the inextricable link between them.  We are bound to Otherness (being) by 
its value to us.  But this is a provisional relationship, for both self 
(subject) and other (object) are negated essents.  Value sensed is 
existential; value as "the absolute whole" is Essence.

> The late John
>
> 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.

Evidently this is "juicy and meaty" prose for you, but I haven'r read enough 
of Royce to know what it means.  He seems to equate "the world" with Reality 
in that ponderous first sentence.  If, instead, he's referring to existence, 
can it even have an "absolute meaning"?  Internal vs. external meaning? 
"Concrete" fulfillment?  "Essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world"? 
Isn't "essence of absolute meaning" a redundancy?

Just how do you interpret this statement, John?  I could always get an 
editor's synopsis of Royce's philosophy from Wikipedia, but I'm sure you 
could summarize it in a more understandable fashion for a non-academic like 
me.

Thanks for getting back to me.  It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

Essentially yours,
Ham