DMB, SA,
You brought up your problems with Rorty and how he supposedly rejects radical
empiricism (which, under certain specifications, I deny) and the notion of
"pure experience," so I thought I might return briefly to the subject.
The reason I've gotten in the habit of regarding Rorty as much of a radical
empiricist as James or Dewey is because I take the thesis to be the collapse of
the metaphysical/epistemological divide between subject/object, knower/known.
The question then becomes, "What of pure experience? What role does it play?"
SA answered that pure doesn't contrast with impure, that DQ and static patterns
are both pure, just different. This is a standard move (one that Paul Turner
and others have taken in dialectical response), but it doesn't bode well for
the adjective "pure," for if nothing then counts as "impure," you might as well
just drop the "pure" and stick with "experience."
Another answer is that it is more direct, but what does that mean? Dan Glover
once explained that distinction on analogy with being at a baseball game and
watching the game on TV. But once we become radical empiricists, aren't the
two separate experiences, an experience of watching a baseball game on TV and
an experience of watching a baseball game at Wrigley Field? I question what
the metaphysical import is of calling one direct and the other indirect.
Certainly we _should_ make a distinction between the two and the distinction is
wildly important in discussing the changes in our culture and which directions
we should be going, but it eludes me how this gives us a foothold, at least one
without sliding away from being radical empiricists.
The most important answer that Pirsig, James, and Dewey give is the one you,
DMB, gave, which is that pure experience is more basic. One version of "basic"
is on the analogy with the experience of a baby. A baby experiences everything
freshly and from there accumulates the patterns of experience that are less
basic to the first experiences. The question: why do we want to become more
like babies? If "basic" means "first" or even just "new," it makes sense, but
it doesn't explain what the metaphysical import is--why make such a big deal
out of it if it's simply the first shit you've been hit with and/or the most
recently new shit you've been hit with?
Another sense of basic is the one Dewey used when he defined metaphysics in
Experience and Nature as the search for the most generic traits of existence.
But we can name a lot of generic things. The trick with being general is to
say something both generic and _interesting_, i.e. controversial, but that is
next to impossible without reifying the subject material--doing "bad"
metaphysics. There's a lot of really general, really abstract stuff that's all
true, but entirely banal.
Still another sense of basic is the one that Kantians like Northrop use, which
is the one Pirsig uses when he gives the example of touching a hot stove. The
low valuation comes before, is more basic, than the pain or the "ouch" uttered.
In this case, it is not just "first." If it was, we'd still need that
explanation of import ("Yes, of course, I agree that some stuff happens before
I consciously identify the experience as pain or say 'ouch!' What's your
point?"). Basic in this sense is more like the distinction between concepts
and experience. We have experiences, and _then_ we carve them up with words
and concepts. But as far as I can tell, that exactly is the Kantian notion of
a scheme/content distinction. Using Northrop's language, I have no idea how
one can say that they've given up the Myth of the Given and still use "pure
experience" in the same breath.
Pure experience aside, I think most of our haggling still consists over this
notion of the "linguistic turn." As I see it, you are taking it far too
seriously, the converse of the seriousness with which the logical positivists
took it (which is what you keep accusing me of). Your stance looks to me like
a pro-experience-talk position, and you then paint me as being
pro-language/anti-experience. With regards to radical empiricism, this isn't
quite right. As I see it, once we become radical empiricists, it _doesn't
matter_ whether we talk about what we experience or we talk about what we talk
about. It simply doesn't matter. The position of the pragmatist should simply
be that we need to stay away from metaphysical/epistemological
problems/dualisms. It doesn't matter whether we are professed radical
empiricists or psychological nominalists--what matters is the collapse of
dualisms: appearance/reality, subject/object, accident/essence, knower/known,
scheme/content, fact/convention, analytic/synthetic, etc., etc.
The stance that Rorty ended his life with was basically that the linguistic
turn had been useful for Anglo-American philosophers because it had helped work
the dialectic of modern philosophy to its end point. That's about it.
"Experience" as it had been used at the beginning of the century was still
being used ambiguously between something like a "sense impression" and an
"idea". But working our way out of the ambiguity in philosophical discourse
and ditching the dualisms is just as possible with "experience" as with
"language," it just so happens the historical record (for the most part,
barring the philosophers driven underground by the analytic establishment)
shows philosophers turning from talk about experience to talk about language.
(And just a note, Quine did aggressively take the linguistic turn, and though
he did take the first huge swing at the structures of the logical positivists,
he could easily be accused of having remained too positivistic (which is,
roughly, what I accused him of). Kuhn is another matter. To my knowledge, Kuhn
wasn't influenced by the positivists much at all, and saying he was an analytic
philosopher is like saying that Wittgenstein was a Continental philosopher--he
was from Europe, but his way of philosophizing didn't have much similarity with
Heidegger or Sartre. To my mind, Kuhn is one of your biggest allies--as,
indeed, he was first taught to me, side by side with Pirsig.)
Matt
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