dave, taking on the correction...
> dmb corrects what he just said: > > > No, Pirsig was NOT surprised and pleased by Bradley's Absolute Idealism. > It's precisely because Bradley - for a moment - was talking like a > philosophical mystic and an advocate of the perennial philosophy and not > like an Absolutist. > John: Well isn't there a more generous construal possible dave? Could it be that at a certain level of understanding and definition, the two things are the same thing? There's a way of describing "absolutism" in a quality way. And it takes patience and time to work out what another philosopher's meaning and language are. They are not "given" as you (and Pirsig, honestly) sometimes seem to make them out to be. There is a matter of strenuous interpretation needed, when approaching the thought of any truly deep philosopher. And man, these guys... In the supplementary essay I mention further on, Royce describe's Bradley's writing as around 650 pages of very dense and technical writing. And says that thusly, "some reformulation is needed in critiquing"... yeah, I'd say so too. > > And you're glossing over the fact that James saw both Royce as Bradley as > philosophers with a fundamentally different temperament than his own. > Schiller, James's English bodyguard, attacked Bradley so mercilessly that > James had to tell him to cool down. Repeatedly. > John: Well then, you should understand a bit when I plead with you too, to cool down a bit, mr. overzealous body guard. :-) Jorge Borges offers a very tantalizing take, on Royce's supplementary essay to the World and Individual, which is entirely devoted to a rejection and refutation of Bradley's main point. Even though, Royce admitted a great deal of gratitude to Bradley, and claimed his refutation of Realism (SOM) was entirely derived from Bradley's line of argumentation, Royce was just as much loyal to James vs the British Bradley, as a guy who wrote a philosophy on loyalty, knows how to be. And in his attack, he came upon such a highly admirable parable which demonstrates the logical possibility of conceptualizing the infinite, that it became one of Borge's favorites. Even though Borges was closer in tempormental outlook, to James. dmb: > > Schiller wrote hilarious and scathing parodies of his scholarly papers and > mockingly attributed them to "F.H. Badly", for example. In any case, it's > certainly NOT evil or slanderous to say James was "furiously against" his > life long friend and sparring partner Royce. It's just a relatively strong > way to characterize the fundamental differences between rationalists and > empiricist, between romantic and classic styles of thought. > > John: First of all, let's not conflate Bradley's Absolute Idealism with Royce's. Another very positive thing about Royce, was that he kept growing with age, developing better understandings and formulations. He eventually ended up himself, turning away from Absolute Idealism to what he termed, largely because of the critiques of Peirce, Absolute Pragmatism. But since you bring up Bradley so scathingly, I have to wonder at your interpretation of the words in Copleston as "talking like a mystic" and this being that which seemingly pleased Pirsig so much in the text. But that practically begs, begs I say, a thread of its own, at the very least. But I know you're not very interested and I'm unqualified to even enter the arena with the all time moq champion of the world. Pirsig and James want to fuse these two modes and so they are NOT simply > picking one side over the other. With the MOQ you get empiricism AND > mysticism at the same time but this is accomplished by being radically > empirical. The mysticism is IN the empiricism, not despite it or even along > side it. They're fused. > > But I think you are not fusing them. You're just confusing them. Big > difference. > > > Nice one - Confusion fusion - I like it. I think I know where you are coming from. I think. I'm just starting to get a bit of an idea, from recent reading but it's hard for me to tell. I've never found anything at all of interest in the terms and ideas of radical empiricism. I've always been scornful of pure experience ( I like my experience like I like my women, just a bit im-pure (which in the case of a woman means "experienced")) and I still don't get the pragmatic value of any realization of "pre-conceptual". I mean, why go there? We deal in the conceptual, my friend. Like Clint Eastwood deals in lead. Why talk about what we can't talk about? What's the good? Where's the fun in that? Like sitting around and going "ommmm" or positing randomness or nothingness as the fundament of being. I don't see any pragmatic use in such ideas. Royce, tho, I love... We shall reach indeed in the end the conception of an Absolute Thought, but this conception will be in explicit unity with the conception of an Absolute Purpose. Furthermore, as we have just asserted, we shall find that the defect of our momentary internal purposes, as they come to our passing consciousness, is that they imply an individuality, both in ourselves and in our facts of experience, which we do not wholly get presented to ourselves at any one instant. Or in other words, we finite beings live in the search for individuality, of life, of will, of experience, in brief, of meaning. The whole meaning, which is the world, the Reality, will prove to be, for this very reason, not a barren Absolute, which devours individuals, not a wilderness such as Meister Eckhart found in God, a*Stille Wüste, da Nieman heime ist*, a place where there is no definite life, nor yet a whole that absorbs definition, but a whole that is just to the finite aspect of every flying moment, and of every transient or permanent form of finite selfhood,—a whole that is an individual system of rationally linked and determinate, but for that very reason not externally determined, ethically free individuals, who are nevertheless One in God. It is just because all meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment, of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world. This, I say, will prove to be the sense of our central thesis; and here will be a contrast between our form of Idealism and some other forms. 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
