[MD] Bitterness over Betterness

[Ham Priday]

Hi Joe --


> Hi Ham and all,
>
> Thanks or your thoughtful response to my previous post.

My pleasure.

> When Substance is the only existing reality, then the faculty that
> apprehends Substance is the only real existent.  Pirsig rightly
> observed that Conception is not the only vehicle for knowledge.
> For conception to be all embracing everything has to be defined.
> That is not the way we apprehend reality.  There is something
> in our reality that perceived and indefinable yet still experienced
> by an individual, emotions.
>
> When you consider the use of a word, you expect everyone to
> have the same reaction to it. This is not possible with the word LOVE.
> There is something indefinable in LOVE.  There is an emotional
> LOVE that is used in the definition every word in reaction,
> while remaining indefinable.

Yes, Love or Desire is the emotional contingency of positive Value.  And, 
just as there cannot be objects without a subject to experience them, we 
cannot value something without loving or wanting it.  I don't know that we 
can say the same about (the noun) Quality -- somehow it lacks the emotive 
response that's intrinsically attached to Value.  All experience evokes some 
feeling of positive or negative value, unless we're merely treading water, 
which to me suggests that what we experience is 'valuistic' in nature.

As "SOMists", we are habituated to the belief that the essence of value 
resides in the thing experienced, that the object or personage of our 
experience is the value we seek.  The idea of a "higher, undefinable value" 
called DQ is a way of pointing to the essence of Value.  As Dan says, "... 
Dynamic Quality is always right here!  Right in front of us!"   But why is 
it not accessible to us empirically?  Why is it hidden from us 
intellectually?

My answer is that, although value always "points to" some greater essence, 
Essence is not our nature.  Instead, we have a "sense of Value" that is not 
experienced, but that drives experience to represent it objectively.  Value 
sensibility, like Pirsig says about Quality, is "pre-intellectual", whereas 
experience can be, and is, intellectualized.  So what passes for the essence 
of Value as things and events ("quality patterns") is our intellectualized 
synthesis of value-sensibility.

We actualize phenomena experientially from sensibility, rather than the 
other way around.  But because to know that the objective reality we create 
for ourselves is an illusion would disorient us, rendering us ineffective 
existents in this world, such knowledge imust be hidden from us.  This 
principle, as it turns out, also affords us the freedom to "test" or measure 
a wide spectrum of finite values experientially, which in effect makes us 
the existential "agents of value".

Anyway, that's my explanation.

Always appreciate your thoughts, Joe,

Ham