dmb, Here is an article by your boy Taylor. You might enjoy it.
http://psychclassics.asu.edu/James/TaylorWoz.htm#f41 On the one hand it adds support to your notion that James actually did hold to some very flakey beliefs but on that other you will find very little support for the notion that James ever abandoned psychology. Not only are the seeds of James philosophy scattered throughout his massive volume of psychology. He refers readers back to that work repeatedly in his later writing. "Sciousness" is one such seed and as I pointed out in an earlier post, while he abandoned the term, the ideas behind it changed almost not at all. His description of the role of the "pre-intellectual" process changed hardly at all. He located it that process at the intersection of sensory input and motor output and claimed that his internal reflection revealed a close connection between his mental states and physical sensations mainly in the head and throat. He restates this in his later work as well. In fact in Varieties of Religious Experience he makes use of the term psychology more than 100 times and in the introduction claims: "Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed." So yeah, I think that if you omit James' psychology in reading his philosophy you are missing a lot. Especially with regards to his notions of "concept" and "percept". James agrees and refers readers of his "Essays..." specifically to his chapters on perception. But Taylor and Wozniak seem to agree that with you that James claimed that there is "no world of objects". So I was wrong about that and apologize. On a personal note I want to tell you that I have always enjoyed our exchanges. You always force me to do some serious research and reflection. Our growing personal animosity is no doubt a big part of that. After years of haggling, your arguments more than anyone else have convinced me that Dave Thomas is correct, much of want Pirsig says is irredeemably flawed. With regards to James thanks for pointing out his feet of clay. These clay feet are especially obvious in his 1896 Presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research which James helped to found in 1885. In fact, much of James' actual psychological research was in this area where he investigated mediums, hypnosis, automatic writing, and thought transference. One of the reasons I suspect I have missed this in the past is that these experiments produced diddlysquat. In his address to his colleagues after 12 years of collaborative effort James presents a litany of failure to produce convincing evidence of anything at all. Of course 100 years later that verdict has changed not at all. He tries to put a positive spin on this but it falls a bit flat. He says for example: "...I should say that experimental thought-transference has yielded a less abundant return than that which in the first year or two seemed not unlikely to come in." With regarded to the anecdotal evidence of a great many ghost stories he says, "Apart from the exceptionality of the reputed occurrences, their mutual resemblances suggest a natural type, and I confess that until these records, or others like them, are positively explained away, I cannot feel (in spite of such vast amounts of detected fraud) as if the case against physical mediumship itself as a freak of nature were definitively closed." "Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the romantic and personal view of Nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by impersonal rationalism, are direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism in fact is one of unchecked romanticism's fruits." So thanks a lot for convincing me that James entertained some seriously deluded ideas. I am, for my own part, still willing to overlook this foolishness in light of his other notable contributions. After all we do not throw out Newton because he dabbled in alchemy and thought the secrets of the universe lay encoded somehow in the dimensions of Solomon's Temple. We don't throwout the theory of evolution because its co-inventor Alfred Russell Wallace, like James was enthralled by psychics, mediums and other cranks. Of course James was right to suggest that psychic phenomenon should be studied within the realm of science but it is unfair to claim that the lack of results stems from the prejudice of scientists. It could be that in fact there is no such thing. Speaking from his vantage point early in the study of such things perhaps James can be forgiven for his optimism. But I do think this paper reveals some of the underlying flaws in James's deepest presumptions, for example: "I am not ashamed to confess that in my own case, although my judgment remains deliberately suspended, my feeling towards the way in which the phenomena of physical mediumship should be approached has received from ghost and disturbance stories a distinctly charitable lurch." It is also hard for me to see how an avowed anti-theist like yourself will find comfort in any of this. With regards to James asserting thing like, there is not preexisting external world or that the things we perceive as "objects" cease to exist when we are not experiencing them, I think he is not consistent and leaves plenty of wiggle room. For example, as you rightly point out he claims that subject and object are conceptual distinctions drawn from an aconceptual "pure experience" or "siousness". The problem here is that anything we say or any conclusions we draw from experience are rooted in the same aconceptual realm. It is perfectly possible for organisms to thrive on this planet without concepts of any kind. Humans however are not among them. The superiority of the concept of nothing existing outside of experience is hardly bolstered by this observation. The question have never been about that nature of conception but rather about which concepts serve us best. James was mainly arguing the mind/body problem from the standpoint of rationalism versus empiricism. He was also concerned deeply with the issue of the fundamental nature of experience as continuous versus the fundamental nature of concepts as discrete. This is of course a philosophical problem of greater antiquity than the mind/body problem. Part of the problem in James day was the idea that mental life is essentially about consciousness, that inner light of awareness that seems to constitute personal experience. James was among the first, like Freud to begin an outline of the unconscious. Freud claimed that conscious experience was the tip of an iceberg and that below the surface lay the massive irrational animal nature of the unconscious. This Freudian vocabulary took root and continues in some circle to this day. I plan, in a future post, to delve into this in more detail. After all both James and Freud were writing about these topic 100 years ago and it is not as though time has stood still. To conclude the issues at hand I will concede that you are probably right James entertained a number of ideas that I don't think have stood the test of time very well. His personal belief in the supernatural; his belief, to the extent that you interpret it correctly, that there is nothing external to experience. With regard to the later James was anticipating phenomenology and in this respect was a major influence on Bergson. I also think that Pirsig is a phenomenologist in this respect. You too for that matter. Like Descartes, as I understand it, phenomenology begins and end with first person experience. Something I looked at recently spoke in terms of first versus third person ontology. I find that a helpful distinction. For James in this respect I think the problem is that he wants to be empirical, he wants to build wholes out of parts from the bottom up (something I think you ought to have a problem with). He wants to privilege inductions over deduction and make concepts dependant on their conformity to perceptual lived experience. From that perspective a third person ontology is something inferred from our sensory experience. Our percepts point us in direction of various kinds of description. Subject and objects, non-dualism, scientific materialism and belief in the supernatural are all equally criticizable in this respect. So I don't see how acknowledging that "subjects" and "objects" are "concepts" derived from experience adds support for something like say "non-dualism" which is also a concept derivable from experience. "Pure experience" for that matter is nothing more or less than a concept derived from experience. 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
