David --
[Ham previously to DMB]:
> You're right in that what Pirsig and James call "pre-intellectual" or
> "pure" experience is experience of a different sort. In fact, it is not
> experience at all. Experience is always conceptual (i.e., intellectually
> and objectively perceived). As a psychologist, James should have
> been more precise in his epistemological terminology. This is why
> I refer to pure Value as pre-intellectual "sensibility" rather than
> experience.
[DMB]:
> That simply doesn't make sense. How can "sensibility" be counted as
> something other than an experience? And the assertion that all experience
> is conceptual defies the fact that infants have non-conceptual experiences
> every day. Contemporary psychologist will tell you that the subject-object
> distinction is formed in this period of life as the child acquires
> language.
> James was arguably the finest psychologist who ever lived and was way
> ahead of his time in indentifying these pre-intellectual experiences and
> taking them seriously. You're free to disagree, of course, but that
> disagreement has to make some sense. How can pure experience be
> an experience of a different sort and also not an experience at all?
> How can sensibility be known if not in experience? Your comments here
> are logically impossible, unsupported by facts or reason and is otherwise
> downright goofy.
[Ham]:
> I disagree only with your statement that Oneness can be known empirically.
> Only experience is empirical. The sense of pure Value is the essence of
> man,
> but it is not Oneness. The individual turns value into experience --
> actually
>"abstracting" it differentially for itself, thereby reducing (negating) its
>essential
> otherness (the essent) to objective being.
[DMB quotes Pirsig from ZAMM]:
> "In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit
> doctrine of Tat tvam asi, "Thou art that," which asserts that everything
> you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided.
> To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened." This is
> the
> experience of Oneness and this experience has been reported by people
> from all over the planet for thousands of years. We can debate the
> meaning of it, but simply denying that there is such an experience is the
> worst kind of ignorance, the willful kind. And if this is not an
> experience,
> then what would you be "abstracting" in order to turn it into an
> experience?
> Again, your assertions are logically impossible and just plain goofy.
Joel W. Krueger, in the Varieties of Pure Experience, points out that
"James's notion of pure experience was quickly appropriated by another
thinker who in fact did inaugurate a considerable rearrangement of his own
intellectual tradition: the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945),
the founder and most important figure of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese
philosophy."
In defining the concept of "pure experience" as postulated by two
philosophers, Krueger says:
"For both James and Nishida, the self simply is the continual modulation
between the expansive self-transcendence of
consciousness-as-selective-interest, and the contraction of the self
experienced as a corporeal body-a material entity over against other
material entities. James says that "our full self is the whole field [of
experience], with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious
possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving...."
-- Quoted from
http://williamjamesstudies.press.uiuc.edu/1.1/krueger.html
I call your attention to the phrase "consciousness-as-selective-interest",
which I submit is very close to
my definition of the self as "value-sensibility". Also note that Krueger
reserves the word "experience" only for the "self experienced as a corporeal
body", which is a relational (i.e., differentiated) awareness.
--Ham
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