Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Tue, 27 Jan 1998 12:15:30 +0100
Diana and squad
Diana, thanks for your kind reply to my charge on the 'value is quality'
issue.
>Hugo Fjelsted Alroe wrote:
>> I personally dislike the lumping together of quality, value and moral. To
>> me quality is a monad, a 'firstness', in Leibniz' or Peirce's sense, value
>> is a dyad, a 'secondness', and moral is a triad, a 'thirdness'. Value is
>> 'quality for some other' (someone, something .. some) and moral is 'quality
>> for some other, evaluated by some third' or simply 'value for some third'.
>> (This view follows Peirce's triadic structures of logic, - semeiotics. I
>> may diverge from Peirce in using them in an ontological/metaphysical
>> analysis.)
>
>I'm not sure that I really understand your objection. Perhaps it's
>because I'm not familiar with Peirce's work. I realize that quality,
>value and morality have different meanings in everyday terms but in MoQ
>terms they are precisely the same thing.
Yes, maybe my mariage of Pirsig and Peirce isn't a happy one. I believe I
can make it work, but perhaps Pirsig and the squad will withdraw after the
first really intimate meeting.
>
>In normal terms, a value is the result of an evaluation, but the whole
>point that Pirsig is trying to make is that it's actually the other way
>round. The evaluation is in fact the result of the value. Similarly
>morality isn't the result of a moral judgement, the judgement is a
>result of the morality.
Yes, I understand that, and I do not disagree; perhaps this slipped, in my
effort to describe my view in a common language. In my eyes, this concerns
the same issue as my saying that relations are primary to objects, not the
other way around. My use of the term evaluation in my mail was not the
ordinary, I was in need of a term for the becoming of a value, and my
choice of evaluation was probably a mistake. If we stick to the idea that
value is (nearly?) the same as relation, and work with dyadic and triadic
relations, the term evaluation can go. I took your wording in the value
principle: "Value encompasses what are usually known as causation and
substance" as an indication that you might agree somewhat on the connection
between the concepts of value and relation, but maybe I was wrong on that.
I have been thinking along this line for a long time (meaning - I am pretty
hooked on it), and if we do not agree on this (value~relation) connection,
then it might be be the source of some disagreance.
I should say, that I am still not at all clear on Pisigs term moral, and I
put it in a Peircean dress in an attempt to understand Pirsigs use. I was
trying to get to what one may mean by a morality that is not the result of
moral judgement, an ontological moral so to speak, and it occured to me
that the difference I sense between the concepts of quality, value and
moral, could be shown in a Peircean structure, value being dyadic quality
(or a quality-relation) and moral being triadic quality (the special
relation where the relation between two (the value) is *for* some third).
This may off course turn out not to be a good move.
By the way, is 'quality-event' a term for the becoming of value and moral
relations?
>Quality, value and morality are all monads, or rather they're all the
>same monad. They're just different terms for the same thing.
This may be what Pirsig is saying. It just seems wrong to me, and in my
mail I tried to give an argument of how they might be different in
'complexity' and yet of the same ground. I am aware that my arguments so
far are not adequate.
Regards
Hugo
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