Hi DMB I think the below is pretty good, it is clear how you are increasingly seeing how the MOQ relates to the wider philosophical tradtion. I think the concerns Matt has about avoiding essentialism,etc in our use of MOQ and pragmatic language is good advice, and we do need to ensure we make it clear that we are not using words like 'pure' in this way, but once we have done this, and you have done this below, I don't see that we have a problem and Matt should just accept that we can use the terms in this way if we want to and we are not taking all the baggage with us that he fears. I mean we have ti use words to mark our distinctions and they all have baggage. Otherwise we go German and start making up new words as only Germans can (which has its uses but do lead into obscurity).
Thanks David M Matt said to dmb: I've admitted over and over that I don't understand what "pure experience" is. I've said for years, over and over, that if my criticisms of Pirsigian rhetorical maneuvers, ...are not what Pirsig meant, or should mean, then ignore them and tell me what they do mean. But when you give me the same stuff, what am I to do? ...I'm just trying to get it spelled out. And every time I think I understand it, and try and hook it up to how I see the world working, you slap me down. Maybe I'm inherently missing something from my own outlook. That would seem to be it. I'm an anti-realist free floating in a conversation. Except that we both know that that's not an actual possibility, but only a philosophical fantasy created by a Platonic language. But if we both know that, then what else is there to know? What is pure experience? dmb says: I was hoping that you'd noticed my new explanations. The stuff on James, Dewey and Mead, for example. I'd hoped you felt a sense of relief at the absence of any talk about mysticism in relation to pure experience. I've been reading stuff that illuminates the concept for me quite a bit and I'd hoped it would show. Here's one that you may have heard but I have some fresh eyes on it by way of Nietzsche. Think of the way Pirsig traces the problem of SOM back to Plato, specifically the attempt to abstract the good out of actual lived experience and transform it into the good-in-itself, a permanent fixed form. And its part of a picture of reality such that the Good, the True and the Beautiful are elsewhere, in some transcendent realm. And its easy to see how this is just philosophy as a rationalism that refuses to get its hands dirty. It detests all that dirty, messy empirical sort of knowledge, the knowledge of slaves and women. You know, its world-hating elitist bullshit. That's the kind of anti-Platonism you see in the MOQ. Radical empiricism is a mighty fine antidote for such otherworldly snobbery. It deliberately grounds itself in the messiness of everyday life. And the sociology works too. Dewey, just for one, made no bones about connecting liberal democracy to his philosoply. Anyway, the doctrine of pure experience comes just a few paragraphs after radical empiricism is explained within the same essay. There is a separate piece devoted the latter, but the point is simply that the two go together. Pure experience serves as a name for the starting point of radical empiricism. Primary empirical reality is also a good name for that reason. You've heard them all by now; undivided reality, undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, etc, Thanks to my recently reading I can now add terms like original impetus, the felt situation, the primordial field of experience. As you can see, these terms convey a sense of what sort of experience they're refering to, each giving a slightly different connotation but all suggesting a vague sense, a general feeling, a basic impression. This starting point is then the first phase in a series of processes that transform the original quality into our ordinary conceptual understanding. Don't forget that James was a psychologists and there is also very recent science that backs this picture. I mean, this isn't a philosophical theory so much as an description of what is observed. The philosophical part comes in the decision to take this messy sort of experience as important to a coherent philosophical picture, as important to our descriptions of what goes on in life. Matt said My complaints about "pure" right now are that 1) it is rhetorically unwise given the weight of the history of philosophy and 2) why "pure experience" and not "experience"? That's the question I've kept forwarding that you have not stepped up to answer directly, though I've not said anything until now about that strange lack: Why "pure experience" and not just "experience"? What is the "pure" doing that needs to done? dmb says: I'm not very sensitive to the weight of history on this or that word. I generally just use the conventional meanings in trying to explain terms like "pure experience". I could make an educated guess that James used the term to distinguish it from the traditional meanings of experience, namely sensory experience or subjective experience, both of which were predictated on the subject-object dualism. In fact, in his description James says that pure experience is prior to the distinction between subject and object and the like. I suppose "pure" also connotes the undivided or undifferentiated charteristic found in those other terms. James says the content of this experience is "only virtually classifiable" into words, concepts, and definitions such as we need for dualisms even as basic as ass and stove. So "pure" designates this generally unnoticed and neglected experience and distinquishes it from SOMists definitions of experience. Its not exactly correct to think of this pure experience in terms of raw sensory data or some other biological level "cognition" but that would really put one back into an SOM framework. It serves to explain a counter-intuitive idea, but I think ultimately these classical pragmatists are saying something radical. I see Nietzsche's will to power in it. He and James, with the latter's emphasis on the temperment of the philosopher in determining his vision, seem to be saying that even the greatest artistic and intellectual achievements are ultimately an expression of those basic and primordial feelings about the world. They're the ones who successfully take that original impetus and let it guide them through all the subsequent phases of working out that creation so that the original somehow fiqure into the final products. And this happens in a thousand tiny ways to all of us every day. I'm just trying to orient you here and I'm too tired to be more careful anyway. I don't think its too tough to see how pure experience is an anti-dote to Platonic infection. Its certainly a thorough going rejection of cartesianism or SOM. At this point, showing you what its not seems about as important as showing you what it is, so I tried a little of both. Oh, and radical empiricism would rule out anything like the pure forms or thing-in-itself insofar as they are not known in experience. So if the "pure" bothers you for that reason, I think you can rest easy. Pure experience is more like formless and it is known in experience, constantly. There's nothing otherworldly or supernatural about it. Direct everyday experience and all that. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live Hotmail and Microsoft Office Outlook – together at last. Get it now. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx?pid=CL100626971033 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/ 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/
