dmb says:
Instead of concepts shaping what's "given" to the senses, concepts are "taken"
from the stream of experience they way one would "take" a bucket of water from
a river. The bucket of water does not get in the way of the river. It does not
represent the river or correspond to the river. It's derived from the river.
You captured something from the river and in some sense it's not something
ontologically distinct from the river. But it sure ain't moving like a river
and in some sense you can't even compare them. In this analogy, pure experience
is the river and concepts are the buckets of water.
Steve replied:
I think this analogy punches up the notion that concepts take one out of
reality, while I can't see how that could be. I don't think this switch from
give to take is what James was doing at all. For James experience is a
give-and-take as well as a creative transcendence of what was previously
given/taken in a bringing something new into experience, and it's futile and
pointless to sort out where "given" begins and ends and where "created" begins
and ends.
dmb says:
"The history of the theory of knowledge or epistemology would have been very
different if instead of the word 'data' or 'givens', it had happened to start
with calling the qualities in question 'takens'." (John Dewey, 1929;22-3)
Actually, the river-bucket analogy is James's and it does oppose the myth of
the given in, as in the quote from Dewey, who was also a radical empiricist.
And James certainly didn't think it was futile and pointless to sort out the
difference between the stream and the buckets.
"The immediate experience of life solves the problems which so baffle our
conceptual intelligence". (Pluralistic Universe, p.116)
"James does not denigrate, reject, or scorn what conceptual understanding can
achieve. ..There would be no science and no philosophy. Concepts, then, play an
essential practical and theoretical role in human life. But Bergson helped
James to see more clearly that we are on the very brink of misunderstanding if
we think that our only access to reality is through conceptual understanding.
In addition to conceptual understanding there is also direct acquaintance and
experience. ...Conceptual thought, despite its practical or theoretical
efficacy, stays only on the surface of things. It is knowledge ABOUT things; it
does not penetrate the inner life of things and reality's continuously changing
character." (Editor's intro to PU, p.xxiii)
"...James wants to turn us upside down. He wants us to see that what is
ontologically primary is a genuinely continuous, active reality [the stream]:
'the real units of our immediately-felt life are unlike the units that
intellectualist logic holds to and makes its calculations with'. The depth of
James's criticism of the intellectualist tendency in philosophy should not be
underestimated. It is nothing less than critique of Western philosophic
thought. 'I saw that philosophy had been on a false scent [this is James
talking] ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that an intellectual answer
to the intellectualist's difficulties will never come, and that the real way
out of them, far from consisting in the discovery of such an answer, consists
in simply closing one's ears to the question'" (Intro to PU, xxiv)
I think it's pretty cool that James traces it back to Ancient Greece and for
the same essential reason as Pirsig too.
Also, Steve, this thing you think is futile to distinguish. We're talking about
the first cut in the MOQ, static and dynamic. The river is flowing and dynamic,
the bucket is discrete and static. I think you're missing something very big
here, Mr. Peterson.
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