Krimel and Dave:
"...James's radical empiricism is important. Bertrand Russell thought James
'was right on this matter, and would on this ground alone, deserve a high place
among philosophers'. Alfred North Whitehead attributed to James 'the
inauguration of a new stage in philosophy', and he explicitly contrasted 'Does
Consciousness Exist?' to Descartes' 'Discourse on Method'; 'James clears the
stage of the old paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting'.
James's radical empiricism was an integral part of the early 20th century
revolution that swept through politics, thought, and sensibility. Technical and
abstract though the two essays may be, they mark the modern abandonment of
certain aspects of classical Western philosophy. James transfers our attention
from substance to process, from a concept of self to the process of selving,
from the concept of truth to the process of truing (as a carpenter with a plane
'trues' or 'trues up' a board), from a trust in concepts to an i
nterest in percepts or perceptions. James is arguing that it is relations
among things that matter, not objects or subjects as such. If by relativism we
mean evaluating things by their relations to other things, then this is
relativism, though a better term is relationism. The result of James's
radical empiricism is to move the modern mind away from 17th-century Cartesian
dualism [SOM] and toward what we can call process philosophy; ..."
>From Robert Richardson's "William James: In the Maelstrom of American
>Modernism" (2006), page 450.
One of the thing I discovered in the process of researching James is that his
ideas are still very much alive. It would even be safe to say that he's just
now being fully appreciated. Taylor and Wozniak, for example, have compiled the
commentary on the two main essays in radical empiricism and their conclusion is
that the record show a century of misunderstanding. Even more specifically, I
have run across at least three different James scholars who say that James's
doctrine of "pure experience" is still widely misunderstood and that more work
is needed because it is so central to James's empiricism. Now, if Pirsig
equates Quality with pure experience and both of Pirsig's books are all about
that, then Pirsig's work could be used to do exactly what these scholars are
asking for. If that's not an opening, I don't know what one would look like. As
I read the literature, the world of pragmatism is begging for the MOQ.
There are also lots of books like "Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism" that make
a case that we are finally ready to hear what James and Dewey were saying, that
they were so far ahead of their time that their time is still just a little bit
in the future.
My point?
The idea that James's or Pirsig's ideas are antiquated would dissolve the
moment you looked into it. With google scholar, it would probably take less
than an hour to find out for yourself.
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