Mary:
Another answer, more specific answer to one of your points...
Mary said:
I am struck that there is such concern over the difference between reifying a
concept and denigrating 'actual' experiential reality since both have the same
result.
dmb says:
Denigrating actual experience is not to be distinguished FROM the reification
problem. It's a feature OF the problem. When ideas are reified, they are taken
as MORE real than the empirical reality from which they were derived in the
first place. The MOQ re-asserts the primacy of the experiential reality and
says that concepts are always secondary, always derived from the primary
empirical reality, from the experiential flux.
As Charlene Seigfried puts it, paraphrasing William James, "abstractionism had
become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization
and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and
falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the
temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)
In other words, the problem is taking ideas as something MORE than man-made
concepts and forgetting that they were extracted from the flux of human
experience in first place. The problem is NOT seeing that man is a participant
in the creation of all things, NOT seeing that our reality is an evolved
construction of our own making. Instead, says Plato and Kant and every
viciously intellectual philosopher, reality is beyond our dirty old temporal,
sensible life. We're all stuck in a cave and the real reality is beyond this
world of appearances, beyond our experience. The MOQ gives that notion a big
fat raspberry. It says experience IS reality. All that talk about forms and
substances and essences is a bunch of nonsense. The ever-changing flow of
experience is not a crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction, Pirsig says, it
is reality itself. And our ideas function well in relation to that (and in
relation to all other relevant ideas) or they aren't any good. It's really that
sim
ple.
"Is thought for the sake of life? or is life for the sake of thought?." (James
1000)
"I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget
it." (ZAMM 246)
"The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite
difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if
this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one." (James 508)
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