Mary said to dmb:
...What I would say is that it occurs to me that there are basically two ways
you can approach the MoQ. Either you take a Western road to get there via
James and the Pragmatists or Empiricists; or you come at it from the Eastern
Buddhist perspective. Both are valid. It seems to me that those who have an
Eastern appreciation are much more likely to see the Intellectual Level as SOM
than those who are approaching from the other road. I guess this makes neither
one wrong, but IMHO the MoQ has much greater explanatory power when the
Intellectual Level is viewed as SOM than when it is not. ... Much to my own
surprise, I find that I am becoming daily more and more in the Eastern
mysticism camp.
dmb says:
Well, I think that ZAMM is an East meets West kind of thing and so the trick is
to see that James's approach and the Zen approach are actually the same
approach. There is a paper on-line you might be interested in pondering. It
starts out like this....
The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on
Consciousness and Embodiment
Joel W. Krueger
1. Introduction The notion of "pure experience" is one of
the most intriguing and simultaneously perplexing features of William James's
writings. There seems to be little consensus in the secondary literature as to
how to understand this notion, and precisely what function it serves within the
overall structure of James's thought. Yet James himself regards this idea as
the cornerstone of his radical empiricism. And the latter, James felt, was his
unique contribution to the history of philosophy; he believed that philosophy
"was on the eve of a considerable rearrangement" when his essay "A World of
Pure Experience" was first published in 1904. While Western philosophy is still
perhaps awaiting this "considerable rearrangement," James's notion of pure
experience was quickly appropriated by another thinker who in fact did
inaugurate a considerable rearrangement of his own intellectual tradition: the
Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida (1870—1945), the founder and most important
figure of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy.1 Kitaro Nishida is
widely recognized as Japan's foremost modern philosopher. His earliest major
work, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), is generally considered to be the
founding statement of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Other
prominent Kyoto School figures, including Hajime Tanabe (1885–1962), Keiji
Nishitani (1900–1990), and Masao Abe (1915– ), each acknowledged the profound
influence of Nishida's work on their own intellectual development. Pluralistic
in his outlook and comparative in his methodology, Nishida was throughout his
life deeply influenced by a number of western thinkers and religious figures (a
trait shared by most other prominent Kyoto School figures). For instance,
Nishida speaks favorably of Augustine, Kant, Hegel and Bergson, and concedes
that these Western thinkers, among others, had a hand in shaping his thought.2
But it was with James's formulation of pure experience that Nishida first
believed that he had found a conceptual apparatus upon which he could ground
the characteristic themes and concerns that have since been designated "Nishida
Philosophy." Additionally, Nishida felt that James's idea of pure experience
was able to preserve some of the more important features of Buddhist thought
that Nishida looked to incorporate into his own system. Though he was only to
practice Zen meditation for a relatively short time, the distinctively Zen
concern with cultivating an intuitive, pre-reflective insight into the nature
of reality and experience was conjoined, in Nishida, with the Western emphasis
on logic and argumentative rigor in a somewhat unlikely alliance.
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