Hey Matt and all MOQers: Among other things, Matt said: What Pirsig and the pragmatists are calling for is not a tearing down of our culture or tools, but a sea change in _attitude towards_ the stable body of reason that has proven itself useful in the course of historical experience, e.g. science.>> So when we come to the idea of idealism and "do ideas actually come before matter?", the first thing to realize is that idealism and scientific realism/materialism are only options for those still living under the dichotomous poles of Subject and Object. Which is what everybody says. But what does that mean? I think it means is that 1) it is difficult to stop sounding like you're swinging between the two poles, but 2) it's a paradigm shift in thinking where you just stop seeing the problem of swinging back and forth.
dmb says: Right. I keep pointing to the radical empiricism of William James around here so that there is an alternative paradigm to which one can shift. Lately I've been reading about how James takes on the empiricist and the idealists, which basically represent the lovers of objectivity and subjectivity. His antidote to them both actually begins with his doctrine of "pure experience". As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, James “set out the metaphysical view most commonly known as ‘neutral monism’, according to which there is one fundamental ‘stuff’ that is neither material nor mental”. This ‘stuff’ is called pure experience and serves as the ontological ground for his empiricism and pragmatism. As James puts it, in “A World of Pure Experience”, “the instant field of the present is always experience in its ‘pure’ state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone’s opinion. This is as true when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual”. In this view, there is an objective reality but it is not a world of pre-existing physical things. Instead, an object is a group of qualities that we find interesting enough to notice and name. Pure experience itself is “only virtually classifiable”. This does not deny the reality of objects or cast them as merely subjective. He sees them as patterns or habits we form out of that undifferentiated field. Mind and matter, subjects and objects, man and god are among those habits. As Pirsig and others have pointed out, this underlying “substance” doesn’t have to be classified in any particular way. There's a radical freedom implied by the idea that this ontological ground can be carved up in what ever way works, but that's exactly what puts limits on it. It has to be tested against reality, but in this case that means it is limited by experience rather than an objective reality in the materialist sense. That brings us to radical empiricsm proper. I know you've heard this before but I've got a new angle this time. In the same essay, “A World of Pure Experience” James lays out the rules. “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced”, he says, and “a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation”. There is an elegant symmetry to its demand that nothing be ignored nor left out. It almost seems innocent and yet it serves as a direct attack on his rivals almost as soon as it is introduced. “Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities” and this gap “has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome”. Here he complains that the empiricists have been ignoring certain experiences in their constructions, namely the continuity of experience. His other rivals, the idealists, are guilty of trying to plug this gap by giving reality to metapphysical abstractions that are aren’t found in experience. The continuity of experience included in radical empiricism eliminates the need for such metaphysical glue. James says, “this is the strategic point …through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy”. The central demand of radical empiricism, that we should include all experience and add nothing to it is exactly what makes it so radically empirical. Experience is reality and reality is experience. “Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing”? Matt said: One way is to ask yourself what the practical consequences of a pure idealism are given successful communication between people. What are they, are there any rammifications towards how we live our lives if you think that its all in our minds? No. The theatrical effects of The Matrix are attained only by positing that there _is_ a reality that exists beyond that which our mind conceives. But a pure idealism doesn't do that--it just says that the only thing we can be sure of is not an independent realty, but that stuffs going on in our head. But if that's the case, then one of the ways stuff functions in our head is that you can't move rocks or tigers with your mind. The pure idealism of a Berkeley has no bearing on our practical lives, it is only a thought experiment. dmb says: I'll go to James again here. (Can you guess the topic of my lastest paper?) His complaints were about absolute idealism and I'm not sure if the radical subjectivity you suggest above is quite the same thing. Still, his moves shed some light. In “The Types of Philosophic Thinking” he looks at various philosophies in terms of their level of “intimacy”, eliminating various options along the way for their lack of intimacy. (He's also making a case that we're allowed to pick philosophies according to our own tastes as in Pirsig's art gallery analogy.) He rules out both materialism and theism for being too alienating, for example. “Theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God”. His quest for the most intimate type of philosophy leads him to conclude that, “the only opinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the general scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of vision”. At this point, the two most intimate and worthy options are the “philosophy of the absolute” and James’s own radical empiricism. Both of them, he says, “bring the philosopher inside and make man intimate” and “both identify human substance with the divine substance”. Despite this sympathy, James finds that the unity of absolutism is not so unified after all and so is not as intimate as his temperament would like. As James explains, the Absolute, “in its field of perfect knowledge” is very different from me “in my field of relative ignorance” and this leads to a “radical discrepancy …almost as great a bar to intimacy …as …monarchical theism”. At this point we have our champion, so to speak. James’s own pantheistic monism is left standing in the field and the most intimate picture of the world. (The crowd cheers and stomps its feet) So what is the “substance” that man shares with the divine? That bring us back to the ontological ground mentioned above, namely pure experience. Maybe this is a long way to go about it, but here I'm saying that James, and I think Pirsig too, does assert that there is something like "a reality that exists beyond" what our minds can concieve, namely pure experience. This is the 'stuff' around which we form the static patterns of beliefs. Its not objective in the usual, material sense, but it offers resistence in experience such that the idea of matter is quite workable. It makes sense to classify experience that way but the real reality check is experience and pure experience is definately part of that equation. Matt said: And the same goes for scientific realism. Even if you are a hard-core, Ayerian logical positivist who thinks that ought-statements are neither true nor false and are simply emotive assertions, that still doesn't sidestep the huge public fight for the triumph of your assertions in the court of public opinion. Emotivism doesn't make us feel more or less attached to our feelings about abortion, poor people, affirmative action, God, the Pope, Iraq, Blake, Yeats, Hollander, Pirsig, Rorty or DMB. It is an idle philosophical theses. The pragmatism of Pirsig desires a retiring of idle philosophical theses in the hopes of relaxing our minds of idle anxieties that mean quite little to problems that matter. dmb says: Right. Dewey thought people who like philosophy much more if it stopped asking stupid questions. Hildebrand used "How can I be sure of other minds?" and "How can I really know reality?" as examples. I guess they really are kinda stupid. Its easy to find out if other guy has a mind. Just ask him. And we gotta answer the second question with a question. In what sense is the reality you already know not real? Its so simple to equate experience and reality and it solves all kinds of problems. Its a beautiful thing. Thanks. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL100626971033 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
