Joel Kreuger wrote: It is in concrete experience that the world as given, within the "aboriginal flow of feeling" that is the "much-at-onceness" of pre-conceptual phenomenal experience, that we discern the deeper features of reality—such as cause, continuity, self, substance, activity, time, novelty, and freedom. This "pre-philosophic" attitude through which we initially face the world is captured in James's development of the concept of "pure experience" as the foundation of his radical empiricism.
John responded to Joel: So the deeper features of reality are discerned in the pre-phenomenal experience. Cause is pre-phenomenal. Self is pre-phenomenal. Substance, activity, time, novelty and freedom are all "out there", waiting to be discovered and used. It's just asinine. Pirsig describes it that way exactly. dmb says: Firstly, I should say that main point in providing the link to Kreuger's article was to show that the concept of "pure experience" works in James's pragmatism as well as in Zen Buddhism. The idea was to show Marsha that James is quite compatible with Eastern philosophies. Now that she has found a book on the Dalai Lama that uses quotes from James, that assertion seems a lot less strange and a lot more believable to her. I think Kreuger's article serves that purpose pretty well. Since the purpose now is to get at the basic ideas in James's radical empiricism, I'm not so sure his article is the best we could do. But, especially since you've already done so much work on it, it's good enough. In the sentences you're responding to here, please notice that Kreuger is doing what I do so often, which is to use a variety of terms to refer to the same basic notion. In this case, "pure experience" is also called "concrete experience", the "aboriginal flow of feeling", "much-at-onceness" and "preconceptual phenomenal experience". Each of these terms are just different ways to refer to the same thing. Kreuger is saying that "the deeper features of reality" are discerned from this pure experience, but I would prefer to say they are derived from this preconceptual experience. In terms of the MOQ, Kreuger would be saying that static patterns of quality are derived from Dynamic Quality. The static patterns are things like causation, self, substance and time. To put it in ordinary language, this is just a way of saying that these are concepts drawn from concrete experience. One good way to think about this would be the contrast between the terms "phenomena" and "noumena", which mean "things that appear" and "things that are thought". This is very much like the contrast between perception and conception. These terms are generally used within SOM so one can find people like Kant (idealism) and Hume (empiricism) using them but they work pretty well anyway. Sorry for getting so basic on you here, but I couldn't help but notice that you converted Kreuger's "preconceptual phenomenal experience" into "pre-phenomenal experience". See, Kreuger is being a little redundant there because phenomenal experience is already contrasted with conceptual experience simply by virtue of the meaning of those terms. And since phenomenal experience is the first and most basic kind of experience, there is no such thing as a "pre-phenomenal experience". That phrase basically would mean "pre-experiential experience" and so the phrase is nonsense in the same way that the phrase "preconceptual concepts" would make no sense. Not that you said any such thing. John said: He (Kreuger) must be using "concept" differently than "brain wave pattern" the way I do. Which I think is a shame, because you can really get hung up on words if you don't differentiate between word-concepts (known intellectual patterns) and thought-concepts. (content of consciousness) dmb says: Yea, I think that this whole thing will be a lot less confusing if you just agree to use the standard meaning of the word "concept". As I understand it, James, Pirsig, Kreuger and myself use the term in the ordinary way. It just means "idea" and ideas are so intimately tied in with language that one can hardly separate the two. (If semiotics has it right, words and concepts are two of the three aspects in the total system of meaning.) Think of the way concepts have meaning and value only insofar as they can be defined, for example. Definitions and concepts are very nearly the same thing. As far as our present purposes go, the distinction between word-concepts and thought-concepts would be irrelevant. Then again, I'm not really even sure what you mean by that. Krueger said: James's brand of radical empiricism therefore looks to ground his empirical philosophy on the raw material of experience as given. Of this methodological principle he writes: "The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience." John replied: To a philosopher, it's all debatable - the definable and the indefinable alike. What's not experience? Just because it occurs only in my mind, is that not an "experience"? Perhaps the only "pure" experience we can realize is that purely in our minds. Thus "terms drawn from experience" can be shortened to "terms". True, albeit tautologically. dmb says: Krueger's sentence means the same thing as James's and "experience" is the operative word in both of them. The empiricists says that all knowledge must be grounded in experience and the radical empiricists says the same thing, only he says it louder and more emphatically. James is simply saying that philosophers have no business talking about things that can't be known in experience. James goes on to say that philosophers can't ignore ANY kind of experience, that they have to talk about whatever is known in experience. The radical empiricists literally goes so far as to say that experience and reality are the same thing. Or to put is as neatly as possible; experience IS reality. And yes, so-called subjective experience definitely counts as experience, as reality. Krueger wrote: James was suspicious of the idea that conceptual or propositional thought functions as the primitive—and thus irreducible—interface between self and world. On this conceptualist or "intellectualist" line, as James refers to it, all thinking and experience involves concepts. No concepts, no experience. John replied: guess I must be an "intellectualist" because that's the way I define "concept" - any thought or experience or brainwave pattern. dmb says: This is where the inadequacy of Krueger's article really starts to show. Not that there's anything wrong with what he's saying but a different writer might have highlighted the implied attack on SOM here. I mean, James isn't just disputing the idea that conceptual thought functions as the "interface between self and world", as we see in the quotes from chapter 29 in Lila, he's also saying that "self" and "world" are concepts. Krueger said: James instead argues that the phenomenal content of embodied experience *as experienced* outstrips our capacity to conceptually or linguistically articulate it. John replied: He's saying the we experience a lot that we don't consciously experience? Ok, I got no problem with that. Just don't call it a concrete foundation is all. dmb says: Yea, sort of. The idea here is simply that reality is too rich for words. Experience is so much bigger than our thoughts. When Krueger goes on to say "our experiences have a rich phenomenal content that is too fine-grained and sensuously detailed to lend itself to an exhaustive conceptual analysis", he's basically just repeating himself. But don't get me wrong. When one is trying to explain an unusual idea, repeating oneself in various ways with various terms is a very good thing. In ZAMM Pirsig expresses this same idea by way of sand. He says the world as we know it is just a handful of sand drawn from an endless beach. In Lila, he says there is always a discrepancy between concepts and reality. It all means the same thing. If just one of them works for you, the other ways of saying it will suddenly make a lot more sense. 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