Charlene wrote:
"...The pragmatic method includes directives for validating a belief, whereas
the principle of pure experience includes directives for formulating the belief
in experiential terms...He [James] calls on the principle of pure experience,
for instance, to demonstrate that if activity is to have any meaning at all, it
must be derived from 'some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely
pointed out' (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 81). The first step in the
investigation must be to seek 'the original type and model of what it means' in
the stream of experience." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical
Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 318.)
dmb comments:
Seigfried is explaining James and quoting James. And she is telling us that
concrete experience - as opposed to abstract thought - is the only place to
look for the meaning of our activity. To find out what words like freedom and
causality mean, the first thing to do is return to the stream of experience to
see what they are in the originally felt and lived experience. That is where
our concepts and abstractions come from and that's where they are tried and
tested. That's what our ideas are about; life as it's lived.
Charlene wrote:
"James then develops his concrete description of human activity; 'But in this
actual world or ours, as it is given, a part at least of activity comes with
definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes
complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the
efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex
experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as
opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal activity comes to
birth. (ERE, 81-2) James culls from experience original models for
understanding not only action, but causality and freedom. ...He goes into
detail about the 'ultimate Qualiia' of 'these experiences of process,
obstruction,, striving, strain, or release' and concludes that we cannot
conceive of it as lived through except 'in the dramatic shape of something
sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being
overcome'." (Cha
rlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy",
page 319.)
dmb says:
Here Seigfried makes good use of James's literary talents. The man really knew
how to choose the right words to express a kind of phenomenology of causality
and freedom. In other words, he's carefully describing what it's like to feel
the push and pull of the immediate flux of life, the perceptual flow, or as
Pirsig calls it, direct everyday experience and the primary empirical reality.
Notice what James says right off the top? "This actual world of ours comes with
a definite sense of direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal," he
says. Doesn't that sound a lot like the dim apprehension that leads us on, as
Whitehead is quoted in Lila? I think so. But more specifically, James is saying
the idea of causal forces comes from the lived and felt resistances offered by
concrete experience. He's saying that the idea of freedom comes from the
concrete experience of overcoming this through effort and striving. On this
view, the laws of cause and effect are abstractions that gr
ow out of the simple concrete fact that some events consistently follow other
events. Time is a fancy idea for the simple fact that one event follows another
without any such causal connection. Subjects and objects are also abstracted
from experience in this way. And so it is with all our conceptual categories.
We add them to experience for our own benefit. But, as Emerson said, Man should
not be subdued by his instruments.
Charlene wrote:
"...We want to know whether we are responsible for our activities or are
determined by events outside of our knowledge and control. The phenomenal level
cannot be superseded if we are even to ask the right questions or frame the
experiments correctly. The issue is precisely whether events which we
experience as ours are in fact so, or whether they should be reductively
attributed to brain cells. In returning to the metaphysical question James
defends the position that the nature, meaning and location of causality can be
determined only at the phenomenal level of concrete experience (Essays in
Radical Empiricism, 91). It it thus not a metaphysical question at all, but a
concrete one, or one answerable within the parameters of radical empiricism.
Not only does he show that the metaphysical question must be dropped as
unanswerable on its own terms, but taking activity at its face-value, or as we
experience it, we also discover 'the very power that makes facts come and be'. I
n arguing that facts are interactively constituted by us, he has finally
explicitly drawn the consequences of his break with the empiricist assumption
that our percepts passively mirror reality as it is in itself." (Charlene
Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 322.)
dmb says:
At this point it becomes very clear that she is talking about free will and
determinism. That's what we want to know about our activities; whether we are
responsible or determined. The metaphysical question must be dropped, she
quotes James saying, for the meaning of causality can only be found by
returning to actual, concrete experience. Causal relations are not built into
the fabric of the cosmos such that our conception corresponds to that objective
fact. Instead, The laws of cause and effect are answerable to the original
concrete experiences from which they were derived in the first place.
Charlene wrote:
"To the objection that our felt activity is only an impression and the facts
are to be found elsewhere he responds with the principle of the radically
empiricist philosophy according to which anything, to be considered real, must
be located within experience. If creative activities are to be found anywhere,
'they must be immediately lived' (ERE, 92). ...What we mean by causing, even if
we mislocate it, are activities of 'sustaining, persevering, striving, paying
with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intentions'. For
anything to be called a cause, it must be of the sort of activity that
resembles this 'creation in its first intention,' this 'causality at work.' To
call this phenomenal experience of activity a mere illusion is to prefer a
hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never
verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation. James,
therefore, concludes that 'real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, a
s a 'category', if you like, of reality is JUST WHAT WE FEEL IT TO BE, just
that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal."
"...Therefore, the nature of causality is not to be found in searching for such
a transcendental cause of causes, if this means a non-experiential source of
what is experienced or some 'more' real, 'unimaginable ontological principle'
mysteriously hidden from our investigations. Furthermore, the worth or interest
of our investigations of activity does not even consist in discerning the
elements of conjunctions of things empirically but 'in the dramatic outcome of
the whole process' (ERE, 94). The only reason for investigating activity and
causality is to help us understand the course and meaning of life. The
pragmatic stance is that we seek to know, not for its own sake, but to enable
us to live better." (Seigfried in "James's Radical Reconstruction", page 323.
Emphasis is James's in the original.)
dmb says:
To say that the feeling of free will is an illusion, she says, is to prefer
unknowable ontological principles over actual, verifiable experiences. This is
what James calls "vicious abstractionism", wherein the products of reflection
are taken to be more real than the empirical flux of reality from which they
were abstracted in the first place. Or, as Pirsig phrases this complaint, this
is the subordination of Quality to intellect. Pirsig and James both push back
against this other-worldly Platonism, insisting that the point and purpose of
our ideas is to serve life, not to unlock the secret riddle of the universe.
And that's why we want to know about responsibility and determinism, because of
the practical effects it has in human life. It's a human question, not a
metaphysical mystery.
Interestingly, Charlene was only using this issue to shed light on the
relationship between James's pragmatism and his radical empiricism. That's what
I was looking into when I found this analysis of the free will business. But
she goes on to apply these ideas to the issue of SOM and to the existence of
physical objects as such. In both cases James appeals to pure experience to
keep us from reifying these concepts. And it is applicable to any concept you'd
care to name. As concepts, they have been tried and tested and they've worked
well enough to get passed on generation after generation. As metaphysical or
ontological categories, however, they become the source of endless confusion.
Charlene wrote:
"It has been the traditional interpretive distinction between a world of
subjective experience and the world of objective reality that has generated
contemporary attacks on objectivity and verifiability. Such REIFIED
distinctions can be dissolved by drawing out the implications of the
perspective that 'The world is surely the TOTAL world, including our mental
reaction." (Seigfried, 356.)
"James appeals to pure experience to keep us from REIFYING these categories:
'We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of pure experience before the
hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux has been framed; and we can
play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different
hypothesis' (James, Meaning of Truth, 43). Imagining a state of pure
experience reminds us that the way the world appears to us, the self-evidenct
objectivity of objects, is actually the result of inventive categories by our
ancestors that have been found to be useful and therefore preserved and passed
on to us through our culture and language. However, we cannot remake the world
at our will. As a result of past choices, some possibilities cannot be realized
anymore..." (Seigfried, 358.)
dmb says:
I also wanted to post these quotes because the first one describes
subject-object metaphysics as a reified distinction and the second one says
that the objectivity of objects is also a concept - one that has become
reified. She also adds a cautionary note: these concepts can be demoted from
their metaphysical rank and recognized as the human constructs that they are
BUT that does NOT mean we can remake these concepts at will. If you want to
communicate with your fellow human beings, the commonly inherited language and
its thought categories are indispensable. Or, as Pirsig puts it, definitions
are the foundation of reason. The names Cain and Abel may have been decidedly
arbitrarily but now that they've been established, James says, we must not
confuse the two lest we cut ourselves off from the culture and the language.
Or, as Pirsig puts it, if you think you can go outside the mythos, then you
don't understand what the mythos is. To go outside the mythos is go insane.
That mi
ght be somebody's idea of fun but it doesn't work very well in a philosophical
discussion group. Or in rush-hour traffic.
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