Hi DMB/Matt Might we ask what is unpure experience or standard empiricism?
Full of SOM assumptions and projections, unpure experience takes all experience to be perceptions, impressions or ideas or sensations in our minds, cut off from reality and things-in-themselves. Pure experience takes experience to be full blooded reality, reality is change, and our reality is what we experience, and we experience change, and the value of that change for good or bad. Reality is what changes our experience, what moves it, reality is our interconnected and dynamic response to all that is. Only what brings about change enters reality. The static is that change that repeats. SOM imagines that experience occurs when a detached and unchanging substance has knowledge of a detached thing-in-itself substance. For pure experience there is change and its value from which we then derive our knowledge. Ta David M ----- Original Message ----- From: "david buchanan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 5:38 AM Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism Matt and all MOQers: Matt said: ...if we are both in agreement on the collapse of SOM (which as Pirsigians we always have; the new part is that we've agreed that whoever does so successfully counts as a "radical empiricist," which I consider a significant stride in bridge-building) and that knowledge is a linguistic tool (where there is no language, there is no thing called "knowledge"; I'm mainly restating the points to regain your assent on variations I would accept), then as I see it, we've accepted much, if not all, of what goes into Pirsig's concept of Quality and Rorty's "linguistified" version of Deweyan pragmatism. dmb says: I'm afraid the bridge has yet to be built on these points. Its pretty clear that Rorty is not a radical empiricist. Hildebrand answered some questions on this point for me the other day. I asked, "So that means Rorty has to dump James's radical empiricism and Dewey's theory of inquiry and the like?" Yep, he said in reply. As I understand it, Rorty is rejecting SOM based on its failure in logical positivism in particular and generally its failure throughout history to obtain what it sought. As he puts it, he reads the history of philosophy and draws a moral from it. And the moral he draws is that we should forget the whole mess and talk about something else. James and Dewey see that history too, but they formulated things like radical empiricism as a specific alternative to SOM. That's very different from simply changing the subject. And one of the most important implications of this classical approach is that linguistic or conceptual knowledge is not the only kind of knowing. In fact, Dewey's theory of inquiry spells out the realtionship between the various kinds of knowing and the pre-intellectual aspect is what gets the whole thing started and guides the entire process, including the intellectual aspects. Rorty doesn't mind just pulling stuff out from James and Dewey. He finds much to like there. But its not a coincidence that we disagree on these particular points because pure experience would be among the things Rorty wants to leave behind too. Matt continued: ...I'm wondering what role "pure" plays in describing the concept of experience. I don't know how to identify "pure experience," which is why I have difficulty getting a grasp on it, which is what I would need to first to affirm _or_ reject. ...The way I read them, I'm not sure how you unpack them without the notion of "directness" that seems to me Platonic. You went back to Dewey to unpack the analogies, and I can agree with the Deweyan spin, the distinction between having and knowing. I consider this distinction to be the same as the one Rorty deploys between being caused to think something and having a reason to think something.... dmb says: Rorty's distinction between "caused to think" and "reason to think" can't be relevant to the pre-intellectual experience insofar as it designates something that precisely is not thinking. And if the directness or immediacy of this experience were Platonic, then it would entail some kind of claim about the subject having perfect access to objective or ultimate reality. But as we all know, classical pragmatists are making these claims about pure experience as part of their rejection of exactly that. In fact, the rejection of SOM and Platonism (SOM's grandfather) is something all pragmatist share. I realize that you're suspicious that there is some inadvertent Platonism going on in the MOQ and that pure experience is the most likely place, but I'd ask you to suspend that suspicion for a while. Give Bob, John and Jim the benefit of the doubt just long enough to ponder what a non-Platonic version of the concept looks like. Matt said: So my view is this: you have two requirements in play to determine whether Rorty is a radical empiricist or not—1) reject SOM and 2) have a place for “pure experience.” We finally agree that Rorty rejects SOM, but you think this leaves us floating free without “pure experience” (you and many other professionals; professionals, I should add, that I have no doubt you can find many to back you up—I could even, and have on occasion, point the way to some of them—it is just that I have disagreements with them, too). However, on the construal of “pure experience” I’m seeing you use, I doubt that Rorty lacks such a component. If it counts as pure experience to think that there is a difference between causal chains and inferential chains, then Rorty has such a component. The way Rorty puts the point is that we could never become unanchored from experience/the world/reality because the distinction between anchored/unanchored is a Cartesian distinction—created when Descartes said that we might be radically wrong about the world because of the radical disconnect between subject and object. dmb says: Causal chains and inferential chains? Unanchored from experience? I also doubt that these concepts are relevant to the debate, but feel free to explain. As I understand it, Rorty would reject any kind of empiricism as Platonic and radical empiricism didn't impress him enough to make an exception. But I'd also like to point out that for every professional backer I could find, you could find 10 or 20 or maybe more. Hildebrand is saddened that people tend to read Rorty and simply take his word for it. His pragmatism is usually considered theee pragmatism. Many people know about James and Dewey only through Rorty's work. Matt said: In other words, I have no doubt that you protested when you read earlier that we agree that to reject SOM makes you count as a radical empiricist. It is more than that, I suspect you thinking. And you’d be right, but I think that after a thorough rejection of SOM, everything else falls into place. I think a thorough pragmatism is a thorough rejection, which makes for a radical empiricist, and you are right, a thorough rejection would require a place for the distinction between causal and inferential chains. Some philosophers have conflated the two, but Rorty has spent some time untying them. dmb says: Again, you'd have to explains what these chains are and what relevance they hold for this discussion. I honestly have no idea. But of course rejecting SOM can mean lots of different things. Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and others have done so with wildly different results. I didn't realize this until recently, but rejecting SOM has been a fairly regular feature of philosophy for a while. Matt said: The gist is that, once you reject the distinction between experience and reality, as Dewey did, you get to say that you could never be out of touch with reality as Descartes thought, and saying that has the force of meaning you never could swing free from the world and what’s in it. And that means that Rorty’s slogan of solidarity has the virtues of rejecting Objectivity while reaffirming the fact that every person themselves has their own connection to reality—and calling something true is what falls out when we mix everybody’s opinion together: no opinion is _dis_connected, as the Cartesian/realist tradition thinks, it’s just that not all opinions are true. dmb says: One can't swing free from the world? Not even with a really, really big swing? No? Darn! That sounds like great fun. More seriously, it seems to me that Rorty's emphasis on solidarity and intersubjective agreement is a relatively tepid form of what the classical pragmatists were shooting for, namely inquiry as active engagement. He's going to say that the claims we make are only constrained by language, in a community of people who know what they're talking about while the classical pragmatists will say our claims are constrained by experience more generally. On the role played by pure experience or Quality, Matt said: Again, it depends. If “pure experience” means “causally independent,” then it plays that role. It refers to how we can’t think the tiger from hurting us, at least without getting our hands into it. And in this case, I question the use of “pure.” Why not just “experience”? In the case of what role is played by Pirsig’s concept of Quality, that’s a much larger question because it plays many roles in Pirsig’s philosophy. But how about this: Quality is reality, there’s no difference, we couldn’t swing free of it if we tried, and we are constantly involved in valuing some parts more or less than others. dmb says: That's just it. Quality plays such a central role in the MOQ. That's what its all about. I guess that's why I'm so interested in getting you to see what role pure experience plays. Without that, Pirsig is only saying we like some thing more than others, which we already knew. Again, I really think that you need to suspend your suspicions about Platonic this and Cartesian that. Pure experience does not refer to raw sensory data from an external reality. This came up in class the other day, possibly because I brought it up. I asked Hildebrand if Dewey's descriptions of this primary experience in terms of an organism and its enviroment didn't just put him back into SOM. Isn't that just a subject and in objective reality dressed up in naturalistic terms? That's a problem with our language and conceptual equipment, he explained. The Germans who tried to write philosophy without SOM ended up with all sorts of weird hyphenated strings of words, or words with lines through them and other strange tatics to work around the difficulty. And so your complaints about the word "pure", as if that usage undoes all the anti-Platonic, anti-Cartesian, anti-SOM things that were spelled out in ZAMM and LILA, strike me as unfounded and even a little unfair. In any case, this way of looking at the idea is keeping you from seeing the idea. I looked at the blog entry where you express these suspicions of Platonism with respect to DQ. In every case you treat the idea as if it were Platonic and then condemn it for being Platonic. So much so that you take Pirsig to be saying we should become babies and give up the fruits of civilzation, that "pre-intellectual experience is better than intellectual experience" and "eating hot dogs is better than reading Proust". Dude, that is so not true and so not the point. Think of it this way. Moyers asks Campbell about the meaning of life. Right away, Campbell says something like... I don't think "meaning" is what people really want, even if they think they do. What they really want is to feel like they're alive, you know, really in it. ...And then he told a little story about a race he ran at a track meet. He'd been involved in the sport for years, he was well trained, experienced and feeling real good that day. Everything was working for him and he had that feeling. He felt totally alive because there was a certain quality of engagment with that activity such that it was excellent beyond words. I supposed he won the race too, but that's beside the point. The thing that he points to here is a certain quality of engaged activity, of really gooving on it, being deeply interested in the outcome and the process. Think motorcycle repair or sailing or writing or whatever. Intellectual activities are not excluded from this level of engagement. This roughly what Dewey means by an aesthetic experience and it figures into his theory of inquiry too. I imagine that conversations could be conducted with this quality of engagement too, but I suspect that's not exactly what Rorty's solidarity is all about. Later, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Help yourself to FREE treats served up daily at the Messenger Café. 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