Ham said to DMB 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.
dmb says: Well, I hate to sound like such a know-it-all, but I already knew about the James-Nashida connection. It played a substantial role in a paper I did a few months ago. Apparently, James was the only Western philosopher that made a lick of sense to Nashida, at least when he was getting started. In fact, I found basically this same idea in quite a number of thinkers including Bergson and Heidegger. James and Bergson were pen pals and admired each other very much. But my question remains. How does it make sense to say that all experience is conceptual and then quote James talking about that which "we can only feel without conceiving"? How does it make sense to deny that this feeling is an experience? Maybe I should be more generous and take this as an admission that you already see the point, that you already see the logical impossibility of your previous claims. Despite Krueger's injection of the material self or corporeal body, which doesn't reflect James's explanations of pure experience as neither physical nor psychica, this fairly well make the same point I was making. In any case, if this is what your "value-sesibility" is supposed to mean, then it shouldn't be much of a trick to see what Pirsig's Quality is. _________________________________________________________________ Peek-a-boo FREE Tricks & Treats for You! http://www.reallivemoms.com?ocid=TXT_TAGHM&loc=us 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/
