Dave, First I would like to thank you for stimulating once again my interest in James. You are right one of us is reading him wrong and not surprisingly I am pretty sure it's not me. I think I have found a much cleared exposition of some the issues we have touched upon in his 1908 lectures "A Pluralistic Universe". It was aimed at a more general audience than the essays we have been discussing which were compiled for his students at Harvard. I believe you could open it to just about any random page and let James himself tell you more precisely than I can how your reading is misguided.
As to your response below I was a touch disappointed that you needed to hide behind Taylor and Wozniak but that is chiefly because I am interested in what you think not so much what you have read. Perhaps it might go better if I try to state what I think you are getting at. I think you hope to find in James an ally in your quest for the perennial philosophy. You believe that there exists in the grand scheme a higher consciousness or an implicit order in the universe out of which the world of appearances emanates. You believe, like so many others here, that the world ultimately has order meaning and purpose. You believe that thorough certain practices or mystical experiences you can be shed of the transitory nature of appearance and understand directly the ultimate nature of reality and commune with or become one with it. You believe that I have some kind of 18th century materialistic view of the world that is soul sucking and sterile. You believe that Dynamic Quality is Pirsig's name for the purposive order found in the perennial philosophy. Obviously I do not agree with any of the above statements and perhaps neither do you. In that case perhaps SA is correct and we are really just saying the same things in different tongues. Just one gloss on what you have been presenting though. Of it one might repeat Poincare's question, 'Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand?' It is though you want to substitute the knotty but precise language of math and science for the merely knotty language of philosophy. I would be delighted to return to our discussion of James but it would help if you could let me know if I have miscast your views. Krimel -----Original Message----- From: david buchanan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 3:20 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [MD] What is SOM? dmb disagreed with Krimel: The idea that mental events arise from physical substance is exactly what James and Pirsig are against. They assert that "mental" and "physical" are products of reflection, abstractions of the qualitative differences known in direct experience. Krimel replied: No where is James saying that physical substance does not give rise to mental events. dmb says: Since we BOTH quoted from "A World of Pure Experience" for support, one of us is misreading William James (and Robert Pirsig). First of all, look at one of the sentences we both quoted. James says, "On the principles which I am defending, a 'mind' or 'personal consciousness' is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions." As I see it, you're looking at 'mind' and 'objective reality' in this sentence and supposing that their use is an endorsement of SOM. But I'm looking at what he's saying ABOUT them. He says they are the names of experiences. According to SOM minds and objective reality are the requirements of experience, the prerequisites for or conditions of experience. The representational theory of knowledge assumes these metaphysical starting point and construes knowledge as the correct mirroring of the objective world in a subjective mind. James is saying it ain't so. Physical objects and the Cartesian self are names for experience, they are derived from experience instead of the other way around. He's saying that '"minds" and "physical" objects are practical, experiential realities, not metaphysical entities. That's how the sentence above leads to this one; James says, "The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous 'epistemological' sense, but in the definite practical sense of being its substitute in various operations". And this also goes along with the quote you posted... "'Representative' theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist. The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection; and similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room were a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing." Think of it this way. The "room" as "pure experience" is "a numerically single thing". The "room" being counted twice is the cognitive process in which the unity of experience is differentiated into the "physical" and "mental" rooms. Again, this is James explaining how subjects and objects arise from experience instead of the other way around. Just like Pirsig. To put it simply, yes, of course James is going to talk about subjects and objects because that is what needs to be reconceptualized. He's trying to show that they are the products of reflection and that mistaking them for existential realities is error of the materialists and the idealists alike. Without the continuity of experience, as you rightly point out, the traditional empiricists weren't being empirical enough. Thus the name for his alternative; radical empiricism. Here's a nice summary from a Paper titled "Pure Experience, the Response to William James: An Introduction" by Eugene Taylor and Robert Wozniak... The Basic Documents In September of 1904, in two closely related articles published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods,[7] James articulated a metaphysical perspective designed to provide a radical reformulation of certain fundamental problems of philosophy and psychology. Termed "radical empiricism," James's metaphysical arguments brought to mature formulation a series of ideas that had long been developing within his thinking.[8] Roughly speaking, these ideas can be grouped under three headings: a) the continuity of experience; b) the metaphysics of "pure" experience; and c) the epistemology of experienced relations. The continuity of experience. James's argument for the continuity of experience first appeared in 1884 in a seminal paper, "On some omissions of introspective psychology."[9] In an analysis that became the basis for his famous account of the stream of thought,[10] James criticized "orthodox" empiricism for reducing experience to a succession of stable, distinct, substantive elements-ideas, images, percepts, sensations-elements that can be held before the attention and introspectively examined. For James, this punctate, discontinuous view of experience, which overlooks and falsifies "immense tracts of our inner life,"[11] is completely at odds with the dynamic, flowing, stream-like quality of consciousness. Experience, in James's view, is every bit as much an affair of transitions and relations as it is of the substantive ideas and images on which empiricist analysis has traditionally focused: "...When we take a rapid general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness...our mental life, like a bird's life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings...The resting-places [substantive parts] are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations [transitive parts], static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest..."[12] James's argument for the continuity of consciousness in experienced relations lies at the very heart of his radical empiricism. In 1909, for example, in the preface to The Meaning of Truth, James characterizes the essence of radical empiricism in terms of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized conclusion that make the centrality of experienced relations abundantly evident. His postulate is "that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience." His statement of fact is "that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves;" and his generalized conclusion is that "the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience."[13] James's postulate places him squarely within the tradition of empiricism; but his statement of fact and his generalized conclusion take empiricism to its logical extreme. "To be radical," as James puts it, "an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system."[14] Without the argument for continuity grounded in the fact of experienced relations, as we will see, neither James's metaphysics nor his epistemology of pure experience would have made any sense. As he put it himself: "...continuous transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into philosophy."[15] The metaphysics of pure experience. James's metaphysics of pure experience is aimed directly at the dualisms of mind and body and knower and known (subject and object, thought and thing, representation and represented, consciousness and content). In its classical form, mind/body dualism dates from the appearance of Descartes' Meditationes de prima philosophia.[16] For Descartes, everything that exists is made of one or the other of two radically different substances-body and soul. The essence of body is extension; that of soul is thought. Body is spatial and tangible; soul unextended and intangible. Ever since Descartes posed the problem in this fashion, the issue of how spatial body can affect or be affected by unextended soul has bedeviled Western thought.[17] By the 19th century, however, the dualism of body and soul had been transformed into one of knower and known or consciousness and content. The essence of this dualism lay in a reification of consciousness and a separation of consciousness from its content. The phenomena of consciousness were viewed as entering consciousness as content and consciousness itself was construed simply as that within which the phenomena of consciousness occur, within which, as James puts it, "awareness of content" takes place (see, especially, James's analogy to the separation of pigment from the menstruum of paint).[18] It is this reified consciousness, separated from its content, whose existence James denies; and it was to transcend this dualism of consciousness and content that James articulated his doctrine of "pure experience." To deny the existence of "consciousness" is not, for James, to deny the existence of thoughts, but "to deny that the word ['consciousness'] stands for an entity," to deny that there is any "aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which our material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made."[19] In place of this substantial dualism, James proposes what might best be called a radically pluralistic monism of pure experience. There is, he says, "only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and...we call that stuff ' pure experience.'" For James, in other words, all that which exists is pure experience and pure experience is all that exists. In contrast to the dualism of consciousness and content, in other words, James argues for a monism of pure experience.[20] That this is monism in only the most limited sense, however, becomes apparent when James addresses the nature of this "pure experience:" "...there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced...Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures...there appears no universal element of which all things are made."[21] James's view, in short, is only monistic in the sense that "pure experience" is the only existent; it is radically pluralistic in that "pure experience" is infinitely variegated in its nature. It is, as James says, simply "made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not."[22] It is "the instant field of the present...plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that."[23] Pure experience is just exactly what it is, whatever it is that is experienced, in the here and now, in all its multiplicity, exactly as it is experienced. It is only in retrospect, when pure experience is "'taken,' i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience"[24] after the fact that the same indivisible portion of experience assumes the character of subject and object, knower and known. And for James, this reflective taking of experience in different contexts reflects the pluralistic nature of relations within experience rather than a dualism of substance. Section II of "Does consciousness exist?" is devoted to this analysis and there is no better way to make the point than to quote James directly: "Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition-the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds...a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play(s) the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once...dualism...is still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted...(as) an affair of relations...outside, not inside the single experience considered..."[25] In the immediacy of a given "bit" of pure experience, in other words, there is no inner dualism of knower and known. Separation of knower and known occurs when a given "bit" is abstracted from the flow of experience and retrospectively considered in the context of different relations, relations that are external to that experience taken singly but internal to the general flow of experience taken as a whole. For James, the dualism of knower and known is an external dualism of experienced relations not an inner dualism of substance. This is the fundamental metaphysical postulate of James's radical empiricism. The epistemology of experienced relations. Relations in experience also lie at the heart of James's epistemology. Since experience is all that exists and all that exists is experience, James faces none of the problems posed by representational epistemologies that must somehow bridge the dualistic chasm between knower and known. For James, "knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter...the relation itself...(being) a part of pure experience."[26] When knowing is perceptual, a kind of knowing that James calls "knowledge by acquaintance," the relation is one of identity. "The mind enjoys direct 'acquaintance' with a present object." To know is to experience-directly, immediately, and purely. There is no separation of knower and known. Indeed, in a real sense, there is no knower and known, there is only experience. Knower and known only separate out of the experience retrospectively, as we saw above, when "the self-same piece of experience (is) taken twice over in different contexts."[27] When knowing is "conceptual,"[28] a kind of knowing that James calls "knowledge about," the relation is one of corroborating continuity in experience. One experience (e.g., an idea, an image, a thought) knows another (e.g., its perceptual referent) when these "two pieces of actual experience...(exhibit) definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them."[29] One experience knows another, in other words, when there is continuity between them, when experience leads seamlessly from one to the other through a series of transitions in which later experience corroborates that which has gone before. As James summarizes it: "In this matching and corroborating, taken in no transcendental sense, but denoting definitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or signify. Wherever such transitions are felt, the first experience knows the last one. Where they do not...intervene, there can be no pretense of knowing...Knowledge thus lives inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known."[30] With this final stroke, James completes his reformulation of the problem of knowing. Knowing is nothing more nor less than a particular kind of relationship within the flow of experience; the epistemology of radical empiricism proves to be every bit as radical and empiricist as its metaphysics. dmb continues: See? _________________________________________________________________ Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_122007 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/
