Krimel said to dmb:
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.
dmb says:
Why should I care if Taylor's work fails to support the notion that James
abandoned psychology? I don't think he abandoned psychology and I never said
that he did. I'm saying that his work in psychology raised questions about the
basic metaphysical assumptions, namely SOM, and that his empiricism addresses
those philosophical concerns. Also, I certainly don't think we out to "omit
James' psychology in reading his philosophy". I'm just trying to get you to see
the difference between psychology and philosophy, between the empirical science
known as psychology and radical empiricism as a philosophical position.
Krimel said:
... 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.
dmb says:
Well, that's the main thing right there. That little phrase "no world of
objects" gets at the metaphysical assumptions that radical empiricism
overturns. Pirsig and James are saying that "objects"(and subjects) are
secondary concepts rather than the starting points of reality. They both say
that these secondary concepts are derived from a more primary experience. James
calls it pure experience and Pirsig calls it Quality. This is also what James
was developing as a psychologist, which the Wiki article on "Sciousness" shows.
Krimel said:
... 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.
dmb says:
Who ever said humans can thrive without concepts? Why is it a problem that we
all draw from the same pre-conceptual experience? Look, I think you're still
not quite getting what this means. Think of it in more ordinary terms. If SOM
says that reality is fundamentally made of two separate realms, the mental and
the physical, then we are strangely opposed to the planet on which we're
supposed to thrive and find truths and all that. The radical empiricist are
saying this dualistic assumption is flawed. And if you think about it even in
the ordinary terms, this seems quite untrue. As evolved organisms we are a
product of the earth and we are intimately interconnected with this planet's
atmosphere, gravitational field and the whole web of life. We are different
from or outside of the world. As Heidegger put it, we are always, already
situated in the world. Concepts don't represent reality in the sense that they
correspond with a physical reality. Instead, concepts are derived from
experience and function within experience. See, the radical empiricist is not
denying that there is a world of experience, they're just denying that
dualistic picture of a subjective mind set over against an objective world. Or
even simpler, instead of saying we (subjects) have a body (object), the
non-dualist would say we are embodied. We are not opposed to physical reality,
we are within it, part of it, a feature of it. You know, man is a participant
in the creation of all things. Thou art that.
Krimel said:
...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.
dmb says:
They say Husserl was the founder of phenomenology in Europe and that he was the
last of the great Cartesians. And they say that if it had taken off in the
U.S., James would be considered the father of American Phenomenology. But James
was explicitly anti-Cartesian and so was Heidegger and so is Pirsig and Dewey.
Again, the difference between holding the assumptions of SOM or not is very
much the key difference.
Krimel said:
... 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.
dmb says:
Saying that subjects and objects are concepts does not support the notion of
non-dualism. It's just what the notion means. Not being divided into those two
ontological categories is the sense in which it is non-dual.
And yes, of course we are now dealing in words and concepts. But in this case
the concept to grasp is "non-duality". The central terms in radical empiricism
and in the MOQ refer to this non-dual awareness, the pre-intellectual
experience, because that's the non-dual awareness we're talking about.
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