This thread began with passages from William James biography and they were
posted to contradict Krimel's misconceptions about the radical empiricism of
James and Pirsig.
As Robert Richardson says, there was a "serious discrepancy between his account
of experience in THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY and his ..new doctrine of 'pure
experience'". James's biographer says that in the PRINCIPLES James had
"believed that there was an objective world 'out there' that we as individuals
could never know" but with this new doctrine of pure experience "James had
dropped the old dualism of subject and object and was arguing that experience
is all there is." (pp. 465-6.) In other words, he was a SOMer when he wrote
his psychology book but dropped that outlook when he wrote his essays on
radical empiricism. "In 'Does Consciousness Exist?', "James argues that instead
of dueling entities there is only process. ...The result of James's radical
empiricism is to move the modern mind away from seventeenth-century Cartesian
dualism and toward what we might call process philosophy; to wean us away from
falling back on conceptions and to encourage us to trust our perc
eptions; to admit feelings to full standing, along with ideas, as aspects of
rationality". (pp. 448-51)
Since Pirsig's "Quality" is the same as James's "pure experience", this is
important to understand for anyone who's interested in the MOQ but it also
happens to serve as knock-down evidence against the notion that James's
empiricism is not different from James's psychology.
"James put forth the doctrine because he thought ordinary empiricism, inspired
by the advances in physical science, has or had the tendency to emphasize
'whirling particles' at the expense of the bigger picture: connections,
causality, meaning. Both elements, James claims, are equally present in
experience and both need to be accounted for.
The observation that our adherence to science seems to put us in a quandary is
not exclusive to James. For example Bertrand Russell notes the paradox in his
Analysis of Matter (1927): we appeal to ordinary perception to arrive at our
physical theories, yet those same theories seem to undermine that everyday
perception, which is rich in meaning.
Radical empiricism relates to discussions about direct versus indirect realism
as well as to early twentieth-century discussions against the idealism of
influential philosophers like Josiah Royce. This is how Neo-realists like
William Pepperell Montague and Ralph Barton Perry interpreted James.
The conclusion that our worldview does not need transempirical support is also
important in discussions about the adequacy of naturalistic descriptions of
meaning and intentionality, which James attempts to provide, in contrast to
phenomenological approaches or some forms of reductionism that claim that
meaning is an illusion."
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