Krimel said: ..But James is very clear that concepts are derived from perception. He is also clear on a point I have tried to make to dmb, many times: perception is the synthesis or summation of different sensory experiences. Perception is a process of smoothing over the rough spots and imperfections in our sensory systems. But the real point is that concepts (the objective) derived from precepts (the subjective). I include S/O not as an endorsement, but as markers for the outmoded concepts. There is no duality in James. His aim is to show the superiority of percepts, (empiricism) over concepts (rationalism). dmb says:Firstly, I'll remind you that the book recommended to you by the panelist (Some Problems of Philosophy) is the same one named by Pirsig in chapter 29 of Lila as the place where he finds that James was using exactly the same terms found in the MOQ. Pirsig quotes from it there. " 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the MOQ." This would be a dualism in the simple sense that it subdivides the monism into two sides. Then, of course, the static side is subdivided even further into four categories. James calls his view a monism too, but that doesn't mean we are supposed to erase or ignore the distinctions made within that monism. Secondly, I really don't know where you get the impression that the difference between perception and conception is lost on me. This distinction is common sense, something everybody knows. The way you construe this, however, James would be doing nothing more than re-stating what Hume had already said. You seem to read this as if James was a traditional empiricist, a sensory empiricist. Radical empiricism doesn't deny the senses but rather it expands upon traditional empiricism. In that sense, James and Pirsig are more empirical than the empiricists. "The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption." (near the opening of chapter 8) Thirdly, I think it's pretty weird to claim that concepts are "the objective". There are some other confused notions in there too, like "smoothing over the rough spots" but I'd rather fry bigger fish.
Krimel said:...James does not suggest that it is at all a good idea to kill all of our conceptual patterns and kill them completely. I think he would find such a notion as nonsensical as I do. But he does advise us to regard them with a healthy degree of caution and suspicion. I whole heartedly agree. But his chief point is that real understanding must involve both, percepts and concepts. dmb says:I think that's about right. Neither Pirsig nor James were saying that concepts are worthless. It's a mistake, I think, to take the "kill them completely" idea literally. Radical empiricism says that concepts are derived from experience, that abstractions are always abstracted from experience and part of what this does is to undermine the various rationalist notions that turn these abstractions into something more real than the experience from which they were abstracted in the first place. Krimel said:...Concepts, ideas, are static representations of perception. Perception is the dynamic flow of the present. We need them both and we need them to be in balance and to complement each other. They are yin and yang. If the goal of mysticism is to be free of static concepts that is a bit like saying that we would all be better off to remove half of our brains. Dave has pretty much endorsed this with his lauding of Jill Bolte-Taylor's nirvana-like stroke experience. Enlightenment through pathology, if you will. dmb says: Are you saying yin is static and yang is dynamic? That's weird. I think yin and yang are the two sides of all dualistic pairs and that Pirsig never intended any such comparison. But more importantly, the case of Jill Bolte Taylor was not presented to suggest that we ought to use just one half of our brains. Quite the opposite. It reveals the ignored half, the half that experiences reality as an undifferentiated, undivided whole. The other half, the half that selects elements from that first half and categorizes them in terms of words and concepts, dominates so overwhelmingly that something extraordinary has to occur for us to notice it. Meditative techniques that quiet the analytic side will allow us to see that too, but Taylor's stroke did the trick too. She experienced reality as undivided as the analytic side of her brain began to fail her. This experience provided an insight that changed her life quite dramatically. In that sense, yes, it is "special". On the other hand, under normal circumstances the side of the brain that experiences reality as undivided is always involved. It's a feature of direct everyday experience even though we Westerners very rarely notice this. It's a blind spot in our culture such that we go around with half our brains tied behind our backs. In that sense, the mystic is NOT saying we should remove the analytic side but rather add the other side to it. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Groups: Create an online spot for your favorite groups to meet. http://windowslive.com/online/groups?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_groups_032009 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/
