DMB --
Ham said to dmb: ...In fact, Krueger notes that "James was suspicious of the idea that conceptual or propositional thought functions as the primitive-and thus irreducible-interface between self and world. On this conceptualist or 'intellectualist' line, as James refers to it, ALL THINKING AND EXPERIENCE INVOLVES CONCEPTS. NO CONCEPTS, NO EXPERIENCE." [My emphasis] > Look at that Krueger quote again, Ham. Again, you are defending my points > and undermining your own. He's saying that "James is suspicious of the > idea". > I'd say that a bit of an understatement of the case, but the point is > simply that > James rejects the intellectualist line, which is your line about all > experience > being conceptual. The part you added emphasis to is the suspicious part. > He and Dewey both go into great detail about all the problems this .> intellectualist line has caused. I don't want to beat a dead horse and I can't do justice to this essay by quoting it in pieces. But Krueger divides it into two relevant sections: (2) James on Pure Experience and (4) Nishida on Realizing Pure Experience. In discussing James's "pure experience"' he says: "James's brand of radical empiricism therefore looks to ground his empirical philosophy on the raw material of experience as given. Of this methodological principle he writes: 'The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.' With his distinctive notion of pure experience, James looked to probe what he perceived to be the underlying experiential unity behind language and reflective or conceptual thought. Mirroring a basic Zen Buddhist presupposition that Nishida will later utilize for his own ends, James argued that conceptual analysis could never provide an exhaustive account of human experience in its phenomenal richness. And like Nishida and Zen, we can pinpoint a suspicion of concepts and conceptual analysis that underwrites James's formulation of pure experience. This suspicion led some contemporary critics to dismiss his claims on this point as endorsing a kind of undisciplined irrationalism and has contributed to a lingering caricature of James as anti-logical." As I understand it, the author emphasizes that James is bound to the empirical position that conscious experience is relational and differentiated (i.e., conceptual), but his "suspicion of concepts" being analyzable in terms of "pure experience" gave him pause and also cast doubt on his logic. It's clear to me that (like Pirsig) James wanted to develop an objective methodology, and that this prevented him from using any other term for the content of subjective awareness than "experience" (such as "intuition", "feeling", or "sensibility"), even though he realized that experience didn't quite cover it. Krueger returns to this point at the conclusion of this section by saying that "James does not address the notion of non-conceptual content as explicitly as many contemporary philosophers of mind - and furthermore, it's not clear that he's entirely consistent on this point, as I discuss below - James does continually insist that there is a truth to our concrete experience of reality that conceptual analysis and the formal truths of logic cannot explicate." In other words, there are some loopholes in this epistemology. Nishida, on the other hand, expands James's halting stance into a holistic concept -- even using the terms "intuition", "undifferentiated plenum", and "consciousness-as-selective-interest" (Value-sensibility?): "The phenomenal world, according to Nishida, and the epistemic attitude of thought that establishes it, is the realm of everyday "inauthentic" experience. It is the world experienced from within the static cogito: a world of dualistic separations between self and world, subject and object. And therefore it is reflection that "carves up" the undifferentiated plenum of pure experience and, as James would put it, contracts reality to a limited number of aspects selected to meet some pragmatic concern. Thought is what separates pure experience into functional fragments, objects for a consciousness-as-selective-interest. And Nishida says that reflection is thus a second-order experience 'adulterated with some sort of thought,' supporting the 'addition of deliberative discrimination.' Thought establishes a binary structure within reality. Reflection "fixes" the self into a static cogito, or ego-self, as the enduring pole within the stream of experience. This is what pulls us out of the "quasi-chaos" of pure experience and introduces the existential separation between the self and a seemingly external world." Concerning your assertion that Essence is "ruled out by radical empiricism", regrettably, this would seem to be the case. The empiricists have effectively repealed spirituality, subjectivity, individual freedom, metaphysics, and teleology from our culture as "reified abstractions". The only reality they acknowledge is experiential existence, and there is even some doubt about that. I have a simpler word for what you academics like to call "reification". Nihilism. --Ham 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/
