Excellent paper! This is how philosophy can be
seen and lived as a way of life. How to walk this
way/path? This was a question for me over ten years
ago. I was so used to dictations about what is life,
and the why's of life. Yet, I realized, what about
the 'how' of life. I found the stories of Jesus to be
close to answering the 'how' of life. With the fruits
of the spirit found in Galatians, such as love, peace,
meekness, longsuffering, goodness, etc... this was a
more active or practiced approach to life. I see this
as saying, if one tries to practice eating these
fruits, and as food becomes ones body, then these
fruits will generate ones spirit along the good way.
I see spirit to mean in the sense of 'How is ones
spirit today?', 'Is your spirit high or low?', and
'That horse has spirit.' It is the aliveness of ones
character. This approach of mine eventually put me
at the doorstep of Zen, which teaches more intimately
(I like this word dmb) the 'how' of living life, the
'what to do in order to help generate a more
fulfilling life'.
Also, the conduct aspect does activate an
intimacy with those around oneself. Is one open to
others, seeing the intimacy of ones surroundings and
therefore not dividing or separating oneself from ones
surroundings, but instead practicing a conduct and
characteristic that unleashes ones aliveness, reality,
and real self, whichever word one chooses.
You also mentioned how truth is a species of
good. This is how I see honesty, which I kin with
Pirsig's plain-spokeness, to be another intimate
detail. To conduct oneself honestly is to not shield
ones inner qualities away from this world or vice
versa. It is not a closing off from the world in a
separation, but a conduct one may live to expose
quality, ones quality in a generative way that is
fruitful, real, and trustworthy.
At work, the residents taught me the language of
'being fake' and 'being real'. Those that are fake
can stab you in the back, and are not very
trustworthy. Those that are real you can trust more
often, because they always lay it out on the table
through thick and thin. They let you know what's on
their mind. They don't hold back and hide things.
Those people that are real, when they say something,
they mean it, and that takes courage and is respected.
Again, it is this 'aliveness' or wildness being
shown. When somebody is real, they are not hiding
from fear. When people relate with those they find to
be real, they can ask them the hard questions and you
can share back with them difficulties and know they
will not go and talk behind your back.
Thanks. This is was thought provoking.
SA
[dmb]
> Matt, Bo, Ron, all MOQers and Ham too:
> Here's a little paper I did for my pragmatism class.
> You've already seen sections of it, it hasn't yet
> been graded and it is a bit of a mess in this format
> (Although I tried to clean it up a bit). If you can
> manage to see past all that it might provide a clear
> picture of how all three of James doctrines (pure
> experience, radical empiricism and pragmatism) work
> together as a whole. I could have used a dozen
> Pirsig quotes to show the parallels but the assigned
> length wouldn't allow that. You can probably imagine
> well enough without the explicit references.
> Why the will to believe, all by itself, isnt good
> enough.
> TEMPERAMENT IN GENERAL
> William James said, a mans vision is the great
> fact about him (John J. Stuhr Editor. Pragmatism
> and Classical American Philosophy: Essential
> Readings and Interpretive Essays. Oxford University
> Press, 1999, page 156). He depicts the history of
> philosophy as a battle of temperaments, as a series
> of competing worldviews. A philosophy is the
> expression of a mans intimate character, he tells
> us in The Types of Philosophic Thinking, and the
> various systems of thought are just so many
> visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing
> the whole drift of life, forced on one by ones
> total character and experience, and on the whole
> preferred (PCAP 156). This is a recurring theme in
> his essays. In the The Will to Believe he says,
> it seems as if our passional and volitional nature
> lay at the root of all our convictions (PCAP 231).
> In The Dilemma of Determinism he says that all
> beliefs operate on a certain kind of faith. All our
> scientific and philosophic ideals are alters to
> unknown gods (PCAP 216). He is not defending the
> faith of the schoolboy, who said, faith is when you
> believe something that you know aint true (PCAP
> 241). He is not dismissing philosophy as mere
> opinion nor granting permission to think with ones
> gut. Instead, hes stressing the importance of the
> vision that precedes and is given expression by our
> thought systems. Robert Pirsig analogy speaks to
> this idea of truth. He says we should examine
> philosophies the way we examine works of art, like
> paintings in a gallery, not with an effort to find
> out which one is the real painting, but simply to
> enjoy and keep those that are of value, adding that
> our tastes and preferences are the result of our
> history and current patterns of values (Robert
> Pirsig. Lila. Bantam Books, 1991, page 100).
> Following Pirsigs analogy, my aim here is simply to
> examine what James has painted by way of his essays,
> which, in this case, can all be found in Stuhrs
> anthology. Ill start with the notion of temperament
> and then sketch the elements of his philosophy,
> namely pure experience, radical empiricism and the
> pragmatic test of truth. If James is right about the
> relation between temperament and philosophy, his
> philosophy will give us a certain picture that suits
> his temperament.
>
> JAMES'S TEMPERAMENT
> In The Dilemma of Determinism he describes two
> rival philosophies, determinism and indeterminism of
> course, as the expression of two basic types of
> temperament. What divides us, he says, is
> different faiths or postulates (PCAP 218). Here he
> uses his own temperament as an example, telling us
> that determinism violates his own sense of moral
> reality through and through (PCAP 227). Because of
> the doctrines perfect chain of causality,
> determinism does not admit chance into the scheme.
> He tells us that one of his determinist friends
> confessed to being sickened by the thought of a
> world with chance in it. But James thinks chance
> is just an unflattering word for freedom and the
> chance James is most concerned about is the chance
> that in moral respects the future may be other and
> better than the past has been (PCAP 229). This, he
> says, is the vital air which lets the world live
> (PCAP 228). For James, the world of the determinists
> is a claustrophobic place where our efforts, hopes,
> choices and regrets are foolish illusions. In The
> Types of Philosophic Thinking James looks at rival
> philosophies in terms of their level of intimacy,
> eliminating various options along the way for their
> lack of intimacy. 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 (PCAP 157). 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 (PCAP 158). At this point, the two
> most intimate and worthy options are the philosophy
> of the absolute and Jamess own radical empiricism.
> Both of them, James says, bring the philosopher
> inside and make man intimate and both identify
> human substance with the divine substance (PCAP
> 159). 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 (PCAP 160 and 161
> respectively). At this point we have our champion,
> so to speak. Jamess own pantheistic monism is left
> standing in the field and the most intimate picture
> of the world. His temperament demands a world that
> is free and open and with which we are deeply
> connected or rather identical.
>
> PURE EXPERIENCE
> So what is the substance that man shares with the
> divine? As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
> (http://plato.stanford.edu/) says in their article
> on James, he 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 (SEP 2). The stuff
> that serves as the ontological ground is what James
> calls pure experience. As he describes 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
> someones opinion. This is as true when the field is
> conceptual as when it is perceptual (PCAP 189). 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 (SEP 8).
> 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 doesnt have to be classified in any
> particular way and our habits dont exhaust this
> reality. The infinite possibilities and radical
> freedom implied by this ontological ground gives
> James the intimacy and freedom he seeks, but it is
> limited. It is limited by experience rather than an
> objective reality in the materialist sense.
>
> RADICAL EMPIRICISM
> In A World of Pure Experience James lays out the
> rules of his empiricism. 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 (PCAP 182). This doctrine seems
> exceptional in its even-handedness and 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 determinist
> and idealist 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 (PCAP 184).
> 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 abstractions that are
> arent 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 (PCAP 183). 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 (PCAP 186)?
>
> PRAGMATISM
> This is where the rubber meets the road. In his
> essay titled What Pragmatism Means James provides
> the central idea of pragmatism when he says, truth
> is one species of the good, and not, as is usually
> supposed, a category distinct from good, and
> co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of
> whatever
=== message truncated ===
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