[Krimel] As our resident James scholar I wonder if you could supply the reference for this quote of James. I don't find it. There is a great deal of similar language in Some Problems where James is clear that concepts and our sense of "reality" come from perception. In fact James' account of what Pirsig calls "the immediate flux of life" is "perception". Would you have a problem equating the two?
[dmb] "Perception" is probably too strong a word because that implies an awareness of specific things. In the quote from Pirsig, he uses the word "perception" to talk about pure Quality but then he backs off in a way that suggests he talking about an experience that's even more basic than "perception". Likewise, James uses "feeling or sensation" rather than "perception" to talk about pure experience. [Krimel] My real question was: where is this quote located? Pirsig says it is in "Some Problems of Philosophy" but I cannot find it there. I can't find any combination of the words in that sentence in that book. In fact, for example, the word "discrepancy" does not appear at all in that work. I also had no luck finding it in James' Essays on Radical Empiricism. Since Pirsig is hanging quite a lot on this statement, saying, "James had condensed this description to a single sentence..." it is a bit of a disappointment not to be able to locate that single sentence in James' writing. Once again if you can find it, I would love to know where exactly it is. Likewise I don't find your analysis of Pirsig's talk about perception located in the context of this quote. James on the other hand is at pains to make his terminology clear. In a footnote on Page 48 in Chapter four he says this: "In what follows I shall freely use synonyms for these two terms. Idea, thought, and intellection are synonymous with concept. Instead of percept I shall often speak of sensation, feeling, intuition, and sometimes of sensible experience or of the immediate flow of conscious life." It is a bit hard from this to support your reluctance to equate the terminology. [dmb] I think it's also important to realize that words like "perception" and "experience" are terms that are also used by traditional SOM empiricists, sensory empiricists. In that case, it is assumed that we're talking about the perceptions and experiences of a subject who is set over against an objective, pre-existing reality. Since these radical empiricists are rejecting that premise, it has to be understood that they do NOT mean the feeling or sensations of a subject. It wouldn't make any logical sense to say that subjects are derived from subjective experience, would it? The notion that there is experience without a subject is going to seem quite strange to a SOMer but there is no way to make sense of these quotes unless you can grasp that notion. [Krimel] I don't think the blanket label "traditional SOM empiricists" makes much sense in the absence of some specific problem caused by some particular empiricist's particular claims. But I don't see James saying anything like, experience is not happening to some particular person at some particular location. In fact in outlining some of the problems in philosophy he claims that many of them stem from confusing and conflating continuous experience with discrete concepts describing that experience: "Although, when you have a continuum given, you can make cuts and dots in it, ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will not give you your continuum back. The rationalist mind admits this; but instead of seeing that the fault is with the concepts, it blames the perceptual flux." Among the problems generated by this confusion is the one you cite: "Personal identity is conceptually impossible." The trust of James work in this book is to overcome such problems. Nor is he denying the existence of a "real" world outside of perception. "So philosophy, in order not to lose human respect, must take some notice of the actual constitution of reality." Nor is he, while writing what he characterizes as metaphysics, seeking distance from science: "In its original acceptation, meaning the completest knowledge of the universe, philosophy must include the results of all the sciences, and cannot be contrasted with the latter. It simply aims at making of science what Herbert Spencer calls a "system of completely unified knowledge." In the more modern sense, of something contrasted with the sciences, philosophy means 'metaphysics'. The older sense is the more worthy sense, and as the results of the sciences get more available for coordination, and the conditions for finding truth in different kinds of question get more methodically defined, we may hope that the term will revert to its original meaning." James acknowledges that perception does not supply meaning but it strains any interpretation of his writing to claim that there is nothing outside of our perception or that our perceptions are not the result of our biological interactions with an external world. Rather he says that our concepts and the meaning we ascribe to our experiences arise from this interaction. "It is possible therefore, to join the rationalists in allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-sufficing, while at the same time one joins the empiricists in maintaining that the full value of such knowledge is got only by combining it with perceptual reality again. This mediating attitude is that which this book must adopt." It seems especially difficult to claim that James' use of perception "is too strong a word" in light of this: "The problem convenient to take up next in order will be that of the difference between thoughts and things. 'Things' are known to us by our senses, and are called 'presentations' by some authors, to distinguish them from the ideas or 'representations' which we may have when our senses are closed. I myself have grown accustomed to the words 'percept' and concept' in treating of the contrast..." "The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes." "Each concept means just what it singly means, and nothing else; and if the conceiver does not know whether he means this or means that, it shows that his concept is imperfectly formed. The perceptual flux as such, on the contrary, means nothing, and is but what it immediately is. No matter how small a tract of it be taken, it is always a much-at-once, and contains innumerable aspects and characters which conception can pick out, isolate, and thereafter always intend." [dmb] Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it's also reflected in modern street argot. ``Getting with it,'' ``digging it,'' ``grooving on it'' are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. (ZAMM pp. 290-91) [Krimel] This just looks like another of the problems James claims arises from confusing and conflating concepts and percepts. I fear it also jibes with your romantic notion that 'the immediate flux of life' is "better" and not equivalent term for perception because it sounds all vague and touchy feel, new agey; or perhaps some irreducible concept. Whereas perception actually is a meaningful and specifiable term, we wouldn't want that since that would mean taking seriously the vast literature on the subject that in many respect originates with James. Least you start your usual rant about young and old James let me note that James cites his own Principles of Psychology throughout both Some Problems... and in Essays... The older James hardly seems to be repenting of his earlier work. [dmb quoting James:] Pure experience is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that dont appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies. (William James in ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM; "THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS", p. 40) [Krimel] He also says this: "I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: 'It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not.'" James argues that concept and percepts work together so intimately that they may at times be indistinguishable. Perhaps that is what he claims is happening in "pure experience". But he is at pains to show that concepts are derived from and secondary to percepts and that percepts are composed of sensation and feelings which are essential purely biological events. But let me restate my original questions: Where is that quote Pirsig cites in Lila? Has he just confused his own notes on James with actual writing by James? Please note the recent brouhaha over Arlo's use of quotes. This seems far worse so I really would be grateful if you can find the actual quote. Given that "Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation." (from Essays...) And that, "Instead of percept I shall often speak of sensation, feeling, intuition, and sometimes of sensible experience or of the immediate flow of conscious life." (From Some Problems...) Why are you reluctant to use the terms percept and perception as more precise substitutes for the fuzzier terms used by Pirsig? Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
