Dave said to dmb:
The bigger and more important question is, Would James embrace Pirsig? Pirsig
claims there is one and only one foundational stuff in the universe, Quality.
And it is neither thought nor thing but some third (or actually all kinds) kind
of stuff. Mystical stuff, in the philosophical sense in that it is ultimately
unknowable and indefinable. Everything from quarks to Quixote is a
manifestation of this ultimately unknowable and indefinable stuff. Is not this
stuff the holy grail that reductionists everywhere seek?
dmb says:
Reductionism and foundationalism? No, I really don't think so. Since Quality
and pure experience both refer to same thing, it seems to me that Pirsig
embracing James is not any different from James embracing Pirsig. Without a
time machine we can't get a statement from James on that but their ideas match
and thereby support each other. Both of them would say that Quality or pure
experience is indefinable and it is in that sense that it is "unknowable".
They're both talking about immediate, undivided experience which is known
directly rather than conceptually. In other words, as Dewey would put it,
Quality or pure experience is HAD rather than KNOWN in a conceptual sense. This
does not serve as a foundation, however, because foundations are those basic
beliefs that get all your other beliefs off the ground. They are the basis on
which intellectual certainties are sought. Because Quality or pure experience
is pre-conceptual experience or pre-intellectual experience it cannot serve as
a foundation. More generally speaking, that kind of certainty flies out the
window under the pragmatic theory of truth, which says truth is what happens to
an idea within the process of experience, that truths are plural and
provisional and that truth is like health. It's a certain kind of good. This
view embraces contextualism, which says our knowledge and beliefs are
context-dependent, not to mention situational.
This Quality or pure experience is mystical in a non-theistic Zen sense, in a
philosophical sense. The idea here is simply that the cutting edge of
experience is undivided in the sense that it is pre-conceptual. And since
subjects and objects are conceptualizations, this pre-conceptual awareness is
prior to the distinction between knower and known. In this immediate
experience, then, knower and known are one and the same. It sounds grandiose to
say we are at one with the universe, but it's actually just experience without
concepts.
Dave said to dmb:
As Krimel has pointed out James was a bottom-up, not a top-down guy. Whole
bunches of different stuffs conjoin to build other stuffs. Not one stuff makes
all stuff.
dmb says:
I think Krimel and you have confused or conflated two entirely different
things. One the one hand there is James's claims about pure experience, as I
just explained above, and on the other hand there is James's characterization
of the two main schools of philosophy, namely empiricism and rationalism.
Rationalism is the top down, tender-minded approach while empiricism is the
bottom up, tough-minded approach. As a radical empiricist, of course, he was
far more sympathetic to the latter. The claim that pure experience is
undivided, however, has nothing to do with rationalism. In fact, radical
empiricism and the notion of pure experience are meant to address SOM, which he
saw as a problem for both the rationalists and the traditional empiricists. In
"A World of Pure Experience" James says:
"Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been
treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the
latter to the former, or the ’apprehension’ by the former of the latter, has
assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented
to overcome. Representative theories put a mental ’representation,’ ’image,’ or
’content’ into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Commonsense theories left
the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending
leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite
knowers, and brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the
while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required
to make the relation intelligible is given in full."
It was the empiricists who put mental representations into the gap and the
rationalists put the Absolute in there to bridge the gap. James is saying that
both schools have had to make stuff up in order to get from knower to known. In
that sense, radical empiricism differs from both of them. Both schools
struggles with this paradox because they both were operating with the same
metaphysical assumptions, namely SOM. That's why it is so important to
understand what SOM is and why it's a problem, because James and Pirsig are
offering a solution to that problem.
Dave said to dmb:
He further claims that all need for "faith" is stricken from his system. Please
explain to me how this, ultimately unknowable and indefinable quality, does not
require just as much faith as belief in any God. I'm not saying that it might
not be a good thing to do, just you must have James' "will to believe" and
ultimately this boils down to faith.
dmb says:
Well, it's true that people of faith have adopted James to support their
beliefs there are plenty of scholars who insist this is an abuse and/or
misunderstanding of James. The kind of faith that James endorses in his work is
faith of a highly qualified kind. Basically, he says that you have a right to
make a choice between two equally plausible beliefs IF the choice cannot be
decided on the basis of evidence and IF the choice cannot be avoided. He
remains a good empiricist even in this context.
Quality or pure experience is not something you can believe or disbelieve
because you know it directly. In the Copelston annotations Pirsig says that
Quality is spiritual to the extent that sausages and motorcycles are spiritual.
This is a reference to passages in ZAMM. Maybe you remember that section where
he says Quality is the reason we pay more for the finer cuts of meat.
Similarly, there is a passage where he conducts a thought experiment to see
what happens when Quality is removed from the world and part of that includes a
trip to the grocery store, which is drastically altered by the removal of
Quality. The point being that our reality doesn't function properly without
Quality and the world gets very weird without it. That's why no faith is
required. Like the hot stove example in Lila, it simply doesn't involve any
leaps of faith just an immediate leap off the stove and into a better
situation. The sausage is tasty and nutritious or it's not. As with pudding,
the "proof" of its Quality is in the eating, is in the experience itself.
For some reason, I'm feeling kinda hungry.
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