dmb said:
...Nietzsche had said the same thing in his own pithy way. He said statements
like "I think" are misleading insofar as the "I" is conceived as the thing that
does the thinking. Compare that statement to statements like "it is raining".
Do we imagine there actually is an "it" that does the raining? No. The rain is
all there is to raining.
Ham replied:
Maybe so, David. But only the observing subject KNOWS it is raining and is
aware that he is experiencing the storm. Without that experience "thunder and
rain" would never be known, either as a concept or as a reality. So which do
you believe to be primary in this example: the phenomenon "raining" or the
subjective experience of it?
dmb says:
With all due respect, Ham, you have asked this same question many times. Do you
really want an answer? Let me simply re-quote the same Wiki article I posted
for Krimel, who also appears to be stuck within subject-object dualism every
bit as much as you. Read it. Think about it. Try to see that the assertion you
keep pressing is merely the "common sense" view that "everyone assumes". And
yet this is exactly the view James and Pirsig reject. You keep responding to
this rejection by simply re-asserting the very thing that's been rejected.
You're free to dispute what they're saying but trying to dispute it that way
only shows a lack of comprehension. Like I said to Krimel, you're trying to
fight chemotherapy with cancer. This only shows that you don't see what the
problem is.
"Sciousness, a term coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology,
refers to consciousness separate from consciousness of self. James
wrote:Instead of the stream of thought being one of con-sciousness, 'thinking
its own existence along with whatever else it thinks'...it might better be
called a stream of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of
which it makes what it calls a 'Me,' and only aware of its 'pure' Self in an
abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way. Each 'section' of the stream would then
be a bit of sciousness or knowledge of this sort, including and contemplating
its 'me' and its 'not-me' as objects which work out their drama together, but
not yet including or contemplating its own subjective being.[1]When James first
introduced "sciousness" he held back from proposing it as a possible prime
reality in The Principles of Psychology, warning that it "traverse[s] common
sense."[2]. He allowed that he might return to a consideration of sciousness at
the conclusion of the book, where he would "indulge in some metaphysical
reflections," but it was not until two years later in his conclusion to the
abridged edition of The Principles that he added:Neither common-sense, nor
psychology so far as it has yet been written, has ever doubted that the states
of consciousness which that science studies are immediate data of experience.
"Things" have been doubted, but thoughts and feelings have never been doubted.
The outer world, but never the inner world, has been denied. Everyone assumes
that we have direct introspective acquaintance with our thinking activity as
such, with our consciousness as something inward and contrasted with the outer
objects which it knows. Yet I must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure
of this conclusion. Whenever I try to become sensible of thinking activity as
such, what I catch is come bodily fact, an impression coming from my brow, or
head, or throat, or nose. It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity
were rather a postulate than a sensibly given fact, the postulate, namely, of a
knower as correlative to all this known; and as if "sciousness" might be a
better word by which to describe it. But "sciousness postulated as a
hypothesis" is a practically a very different thing from "states of
consciousness apprehended with infallible certainty by an inner sense." For one
thing, it throws the question of who the knower really is wide open….[3]Then
thirteen years later, writing solely as a philosopher, James returned to his
"parenthetical digression" of sciousness that "contradict[ed] the fundamental
assumption of every philosophic school."[4] James had founded a new school of
philosophy, called "radical empiricism," and nondual sciousness was its
starting-point. He even wrote a note to himself to "apologize for my dualistic
language, in the Principles."[5] James did not continue to use the word
"sciousness" in later essays on radical empiricism, but the concept is clearly
there as the "plain, unqualified …existence" he comes to call "pure
experience," in which there is "no self-splitting…into consciousness and what
the consciousness is of."[6]
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