Greetings, David --
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.
I pose the question of "agency" because I now consider it the cardinal
problem in Pirsig's philosophy, including (for what is is worth) the
confusion over intellect that has obsessed Bo and led to a rift among the
acolytes. Rejecting the subjective self as the locus of awareness not only
contradicts epistemology, it forces the MoQist to replace human agency with
hypothesized domains that are allegedly responsible for organizing/guiding
conscious thoughts, ideas, morality, and intellectual enlightenment as
functions of evolutionary process.
By positing everything as "interrelating patterns of Quality", we reduce the
individual to a mere pawn controlled by the forces of a physical universe.
Rather than fighting chemotherapy (which poisons the patient), I'm trying to
eliminate the cancer without that alternative.
[From Wikipedia's summary]:
"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. . .
"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….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." James had founded a new
school of philosophy, called 'radical empiricism,' and nondual sciousness
was its starting-point. ..."
I confess that my reading of James has been limited to "The Varieties",
which deals mainly with religious conversion, and I was never impressed with
the philosophy of this experimental psychologist. Does "nondual
'sciousness'" add anything meaningful to ontology or metaphysics? It seems
to me that any quality ending in 'cious' -- "precious", "delicious",
"malicious", "fallacious", etc. -- may be categorized as a type of
"ciousness", if one wishes to hide the meaning of the prefix. James
obviously sought to "broaden" the scope of human consciousness in order to
encompass its various experiential states (as RMP did with his levels and
patterns); but this doesn't alter the fact that cognizant awareness is
proprietary to the individual. It only obfuscates the knowing agent that is
self-evident to all of us.
Again, the role of the individual in existence is to realize its own
value-sensibility in relational terms and to "actualize" reality as its
representative beingness. This presupposes a free agent. If the
individual's sensibility is fixed by nature or predetermined by natural or
metaphyical law, he/she loses personal autonomy, along with the capacity to
exercise free choice. By almost anyone's standard of western culture
(ardent collectivists excluded), the usurption of individual freedom by
dogma, authority, or the state is immoral.
I suggest that you think about this, David, before lauding the praises of
anyone whose main claim to fame is being a "radical empiricist".
Thanks for putting the research info on William James in proper perspective
for me.
Essentially speaking,
Ham
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