Ron said:
The absolute, depends on what you mean by the term. In its Latin origin
absolūtus which means "loosened from" or "unattached." Implies a separation.
dmb says:
That's right. This separation is just like the "isolation and separateness" in
the "essential dualism of the theistic view", as James puts it. But this
similarity is unremarkable because absolute idealism is basically a kind of
cryptic theology.
John said to dmb:
What do you think Pirsig's Quality is David, if not an indefinable Absolute?
And he already made a better case for it than I can.
dmb says:
Wiki says that Royce, "conceived the Absolute as a unitary Knower Whose
experience constitutes what we know as the 'external' world", which is not much
different from the general definition: "an unconditional reality which
transcends limited, conditional, everyday existence. It is often used as an
alternate term for a 'God' or 'the Divine'".
Pirsig says, "The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of 20th century
American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says
the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code
or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience".
It's also worth noting the basic rules of radical empiricism because they
practically tailor made to preclude the Absolute. James wants to reconstruct
all of philosophy on the back of two simple restraints. If it IS known in
experience, your philosophy can't ignore it. If it is NOT known in experience,
you can't use it in your philosophy. James and Pirsig both call themselves
radical empiricists and it's no accident that they both oppose this
transcendent Divine Knower. If it transcends experience, then philosophers have
no business making claims about it, let alone making claims about the ultimate
nature of reality.
In his essays, James calls things like the Absolute "transexperiential
entities" and his aim there is to get rid of them all. He wants philosophy to
proceed only on the basis of experience. But, like Pirsig, he also insists that
traditional empiricism has defined experience too narrowly so that it's not
empirical enough. Both of them want all experience to count, to be accounted
for, and that includes religious and mystical experiences of all kinds. Even as
it closes the door on those transexperiential entities, it opens another on
spirituality as it is actual known in experience. I find that stance to be
quite sane, reasonable and even-handed. The Absolute, on the other hand,
strikes me as completely unbelievable and how could anyone ever know anything
about it even if there were such a thing?
My point? The difference between his idealism and their pragmatism is huge.
They are even opposed to each other on some of the most central issues, even
have an opposed temperaments. It's like mixing Mozart and Tom Waits. Ok, maybe
that's an exaggeration but you've got the idea.
Thanks,
dmb
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