Matt said to dmb: Yeah, and I was hoping that you would agree with my glosses on such (mystical) passages. But you didn't. Our problem is that our vocabularies are not hooking up. Our problem is that everything I say you seem to object to. And since everything you say is in a dialectically opposed position, half the time whatever "pure experience" is seems wrong. But you trot out James and Dewey and Mead--and we read the passages differently because when I gloss it, apparently I get it wrong. I like James and Dewey. I will continue to read James and Dewey and Peirce and Emerson. But there is a good chance we won't read them together because we are just not speaking the same language. All the names you love are names that I think primarily serve to obfuscate.
dmb says: The names I love obfuscate what, exactly? Please explain. Also, please explain what you mean by "vocabulary". I mean, I've offered explanations of the primary empirical reality in terms of mysticism, developmental psychology, the aesthetic experience, the method of inquiry, radical empiricism, direct everyday experience, the perennial philosophy, active engagement and even a bit of cognitive science. Even in terms of a simple label, I've dished up descriptions from Pirsig, Northrop, James, Dewey, Mead, Marx, Nietzsche, Campbell, Wilber and others. So I guess I don't understand what you mean by saying our vocabularies don't hook up. We're both reading pragmatism in english and looking at various approaches to the same basic idea. I don't understand how anyone could fail to find a way to connect with all that. Like a trip to Baskin Robbins, there are 31 flavors to choose from. Seems like even the pickiest fuss muster could find something to suit his tastes. As far as I can tell, your objection to pure experience is that it looks suspiciously like something Platonic but I do not recall a time that you actually engaged with the idea itself. Apparently, your suspicions have kept you at arm's length for years now. Seems that I am Sisyphus and you are Tantalus and neither of us is very happy about it. Also, what do you mean by "gloss it"? What does it mean to gloss a passage? I hope you don't mean that you "skim" or "glosss over" their writings. That would imply a deliberately superficial reading, a reading that is careless or even wreckless with respect to the author's point and purpose. I understand the Rortian idea that one should be able to extract this or that idea from a written work without having to swallow the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel but that's not a technique one should employ if the aim is to debate or discuss what these guys are saying simply because that be a case of rejection prior to any actual examination of pure experience. And the worst thing is that it is apparently being rejected for being the opposite of what these guys are saying about it, namely as a Platonic/SOMish claim. Its a bit like rejecting white because of its blackness. That's just not a legitimate basis for rejection because white has no blackness. Its strikes me as a very unsubtle misreading, it reads pure experience in terms of Platonic forms or in terms of an objective reality, in terms of the very opposite of what is actually being claimed in these doctrines. As you know, I'm presently reading the pragmatists with a group of people. This has its advantages. You know, it tends to inhibit idiosyncratic interpretations. Also, the required readings have gone through at least two selection processes. The editors of the two anthologies both insist that these hotly debated doctrines are essential to classical pragmatism. They say so in the introduction and in the materials selected. Hildebrand has assigned the readings from these anthologies to bring this out. And its no accident that by the time we get to Rorty, classical pragmatism fades a new version of pragmatism is easily discerned. And the difference centers on the abandonment of exactly those doctrines which are in dispute here. And of course this is why Pirsig's Dynamic Quality isn't going to fit into Rorty's kind of neopragmatism. Obviously, this is our oldest and most persistent disagreement. I don't think the MOQ is the MOQ without it. I don't think classical pragmatism is classical pragmatism without it. Its not that you MUST be a classical pragmatist or that you HAVE to accept everything they say, of course. But I suppose you'd at least agree that the ability to discern one idea from another is important for any kind of intellectual activity. And at this point it seems that the task is to distinguish pure experience from a Platonic claim about what's really real as opposed to an appearance. Other than the weight of philosophical history bearing down on words like "pure" what objection do you have. I honestly don't see anything except that objection, and that seems to be a case of objection to the style or mode of expression rather than the actual substance of the concept. That kind of suspicion seems both trivial and 180 degrees off the mark too. Can you think of a way to object to the substance of these ideas, to get your hands on it in a more specific way? Maybe respond to their words and ideas more directly, examine key passages in their own terms rather than sniffing around for Platonic sounding metaphors or whatever. And maybe keep in mind the fact that the Vienna Circle was formed after James was dead for a generation and Dewey was pretty much done too. I mean, an analytic philosopher is going to come at this stuff with an entirely different orientation than a Pirsig, who studied Northrop in Korea, Buddhism in India and Indians in America. For the former, values and morals are just unverifiable metaphysical nonsense but for the latter values and morals are pretty much literally everything. If nothing else, this is a clash of temperaments such that each rejects the other before they've even started. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Boo! Scare away worms, viruses and so much more! 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