Dan said to dmb:
What is a "concrete" experience? ... The acting agent seems independent from
the world as a thing experienced. ... The intellectual structures seem to
emerge from the (material) world; this is not what the MOQ says.
dmb says:
Well, no. You're reading James as if he subscribed to subject-object
metaphysics but quite the opposite is true. The central point of his pure
experience theory is to oppose that. It's been a long time since I quoted from
the end of chapter 29 and now seems like a good time. As Pirsig describes it,
James's radical empiricism says...
"...subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects
and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more
fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. In this
basic flux of experience the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those
between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter have not
yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called
either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds this distinction.
In his last unfinished work, Some Problems in Philosophy, James had condensed
this descriptions to a single sentence: 'There will always be a discrepancy
between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous,
while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the
same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of
Quality.
... The metaphysics of quality says pure experience is value. Value is at the
very front of the empirical procession. ... It adds that this good is not a
social code or some intellectualized Hegellian absolute. It is direct everyday
experience. ...Through this identification of pure value with pure experience,
the metaphysics of quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at
experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism
has not been able to cope with." (Lila 364-6)
dmb:
This is the basis for my contention that when James is talking concrete
experience and abstract thought, he's basically talking about DQ and sq. As you
can see, it is Pirsig himself who thinks he and James are using the terms in
the same way. Exactly the same terms, he says. I don't think Robert Pirsig
adopts James's ideas or adds them to his own. It more like they both arrived at
the same conclusions independently but WE can use James to further explore the
meaning of the MOQ. This is going to be helpful because people have been
writing about and thinking about James's work for a hundred years.
So anyway, concrete experience is just the immediate flux of life, the basic
flux of experience, direct everyday experience, as described above. That is the
Dynamic reality, which is distinguished from secondary static concepts. There
are differences, of course, but in this respect, Pirsig tells us, they are on
the exact same page.
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