Ham said:
All experience -- including its relative Quality or Value -- is dependent on
the cognizant subject of our relational world. WE are the agents who bring
Value into being. Without awareness there is no experience, hence no being and
no knowledge. ...I can appreciate that this concept is mind-twisting to a
staunch Pirsigian. But if you understand what I'm saying, and reflect on it for
a moment or two,...
dmb says:
That concept wouldn't confuse a Pirsigian. What you're maintaining here is what
Pirsigians call SOM. That stands for subject-object metaphysics. SOM says that
all experience is a matter of the cognizant subject being aware of the
objective world, just as you said. But this is exactly what the radical
empiricists denies. I think you really need to understand that the MOQ begins
by rejecting this view that you're insisting upon. I show you once again.
Please, please, please listen and understand what Pirsig is saying here....
"The second of James' two systems of philosophy, which he said was independent
of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subjects and
objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are
secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he
described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our
later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of
experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between
consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet
emerged in the forms which we make of them. Pure experience cannot be called
physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction.
In his last unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy, James had condensed
this description to a single sentence: '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.
What the MOQ adds to James' pragmatism and his radical empiricism is the idea
that the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is VALUE. By
doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single
fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical
experience. The MOQ says pure experience is value. Experience which is not
valued is not experienced. The two are the same. This is where value fits.
Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions
that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of
the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession."
The hardest thing to grasp here is the notion that it is NOT the subject having
the pure experience. Since the claim here is that subjects and objects are
CONCEPTS derived from experience that's more primal and fundamental, logic
doesn't allow this pure experience to be the experience of a subject. You can't
derive the subject from the subject. The idea here is that the value at the
cutting edge of experience is neither not to be found in the objective reality
nor in the subjective evaluation of that reality but rather the quality of the
whole situation before any conceptual sorting has occurred. Subjects and
objects emerge only in the sorting process. They're great ways to sort things
most of the time. As secondary concepts, they're fabulous. But as when they are
taken as the ontological realities that make experience possible, that
constitutes SOM. As you can see in the quote above, radical empiricism means
rejecting that basic metaphysical assumption.
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