Hello everyone On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 5:51 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Dan said to dmb: > The phenomenal level of concrete experience must refer to > inorganic/biological patterns of quality. Abstract ideas are not concrete! > And again, she seems to be saying experience is reduced to the activity of > brain cells. > > dmb says: > Oh, no. Please read that post again. But this time, as I should have pointed > out, think of the phenomenal level of concrete experience as equal to > Pirsig's "direct everyday experience" or "primary empirical reality". James > doesn't use "concrete" in any materialist sense of the word, like "cement".
Dan: I was referring to your use of reify: To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence. Material existence, to me, signifies materialism and the notion that all experience arises from the material that constitutes the grey matter that is our brain. So if James (and I got the distinct feeling from your post that we were talking more about Siegfried than James) isn't using reify in that manner, then it is my mistake. dmb: He means experience as it's actually felt and lived, and so he's talking about "concrete" experience as opposed to "abstract" thought. Dan: What is a "concrete" experience? I googled "William James concrete experience" and found this. I don't know if you've read it or if it holds any value but it seems to sum up what James is on about when he writes about concrete experience: "The starting point of James's thought is a deeply (though not exclusively) empirical concern. His work as a whole is founded upon a consideration of concrete experience: the world as experienced by an embodied, embedded, and acting agent. Explicating the lived structures that constitute our uniquely human way of being in the world, James insists, is the key to understanding the antecedent categorizations, conceptualizations, and other intellectual ways of organizing the world that are founded upon these experiential structures, and which emerge through our action within the world. These intellectual structures ultimately reflect the practical concerns of human beings as they simultaneously shape and are shaped by the world they inhabit and act within. His "concrete analysis," as he terms it, thus provides the methodological trajectory of his philosophical considerations. James writes that "concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious." [http://williamjamesstudies.org/1.1/krueger.html] Dan comments: I have concerns with this. The acting agent seems independent from the world as a thing experienced. I don't understand how James could know what constitutes the uniqueness of the human way of being in the world when he could never experience anything but the human way of being in the world. The intellectual structures seem to emerge from the (material) world; this is not what the MOQ says. Rather, intellectual patterns emerge from social patterns. And those intellectual patterns we call ideas come before the material world, not after. dmb: Please read that post again, but this time realize that when James is talking concrete and abstract, he's basically talking about DQ and sq. I think you'll find that it does address your original question. Where is the will? Dan: Reading the post again, I am unsure if I am reading James or Siegfried. I suspect the latter more than the former. So I found this from Essays in Radical Empiricism: "The dualism connoted by such double-barrelled terms as * experience, phenomenon, datum, Vorfindung* terms which, in philosophy at any rate, tend more and more to replace the single-barrelled terms of thought and thing that dualism, I say, is still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and defined." Dan comments: I suspect what James is saying is that when experience becomes verifiable and concrete, it is part and parcel of our cultural mores... it becomes social quality patterns that we all know and recognize. He seems to be saying there is no single experience, as such, which agrees with the MOQ. Experience is synonymous with Dynamic Quality. But I don't see James going that direction. He specifically states experience is an affair of relations. And it is, but only afterwards, after we categorize and intellectualize "it" into that which we can verify as concrete. I think Robert Pirsig goes beyond what James is saying when he states that experience (Dynamic Quality) is both undefined and infinitely definable. We are constantly defining experience yet it is never exhausted. >dmb: > Think about what James is saying in comparison to what Pirsig was saying > about Karma and the negative face of Quality. I'm saying the will is the name > for that striving and suffering and so the idea refers to something > concretely lived and felt. It's not meaningless at all. Dan: >From what I understand, the MOQ sees karma as evolutionary garbage... a set of patterns we carry around with us informing us on the (concrete) nature of the world. Suffering, or the negative face of Quality, forces us to evolve into that which is better. If there were no suffering, there would be no reason to be free. Social quality patterns evolved to free us from biological chains of necessity. Intellectual quality patterns evolved to free us from social bondage, where everyone was a slave to the state. We carry all these patterns with us as a stream of evolutionary garbage... our karma. And no, it is not meaningless at all. But I don't see a place for will in all this. dmb: And it's only an illusion, I think, to the extent that this idea stopped referring to actual experience and instead becomes some kind of metaphysical entity or ontological category. That's what reification is. You know, like when subjects and objects are taken as the starting points of reality rather than concepts derived from experience. For James and Pirsit, ideas can only come from experience. That's what ideas are about, that's where they are tested and tried and where they function. The abstract always has to come back down to the concrete, to experience as such. Dan: I don't see James and RMP using the term experience in the same way. I think Robert Pirsig adds to the meaning of how James is using it, however, and doesn't detract from it. >dmb: > I think you'll find that you mostly agree with James and Seigfried, if you > re-read that post with this stuff in mind. Dan: It is not that I disagree so much as I don't believe James (or Siegfried) go as far as Robert Pirsig in explicating and ordering experience in a usable metaphysical framework. He expands on James work in ways (from what I have read) most philosophers of today do not understand or appreciate. But I have read sparingly, so I am more than likely wrong. Thank you, Dan 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
