dmb said to Dan:
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. ...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... 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. ...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) 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.
Dan:
He says that James used the same words that Phaedrus used for the basic
division of his metaphysics but I don't think he believes James is using the
terms in the same way. ... He said the same words. Words can and do have
different meanings and I don't see that James meant dynamic in the same sense
that Robert Pirsig means Dynamic Quality. Can we at least agree on that?
dmb says:
Seriously???! I baffled by your denial. As far as explicit textual evidence
goes, this is as convincing as it gets and yet you seem to be denying for no
particular reason. I don't get that.
The author you quoted yesterday (Joel Krueger) has written an online article
titled "The Varieties of PUre Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on
Consciousness and Embodiment". Maybe that's where you got the quote. In any
case, Krueger says, "Nishida felt that James's idea of pure experience was able
to preserve some of the more important features of Buddhist thought that
Nishida looked to incorporate into his own system. Though he was only to
practice Zen meditation for a relatively short time, the distinctively Zen
concern with cultivating an intuitive, pre-reflective insight into the nature
of reality and experience was conjoined, in Nishida, with the Western emphasis
on logic and argumentative rigor in a somewhat unlikely alliance. Nishida's
life-long project was thus to wed the immediacy of experience as lived (what he
termed "concrete knowledge") with a more formal-rational analysis of the
structures of lived experience, an analysis utilizing the concepts and
categories of the western philosophical tradition as Nishida understood it.
Very simply, Nishida in this way believed that he was attempting to synthesize
the philosophical worlds of east and west into a new form of inquiry that would
prove mutually enriching to both traditions. And like James, then, Nishida's
understanding of pure experience came to occupy the center of his entire life's
work."
Add this to what David Scott says and add the scholar who says the Buddha was a
pragmatist and a radical empiricist and a whole batch of other secondary
sources and one begins to see that Pirsig's Dynamic Quality (pure Value) and
James's pure experience are two names for a mystic reality for which many names
have been used.
Dan said:
...I doubt they both arrived at the same conclusions. RMP goes further than
does James in formulating a metaphysics centered on value.
dmb says:
Why do you doubt it? Quality is the centerpiece of Pirsig's work. Pure
Experience is the centerpiece of James's work. And Pirsig IDENTIFIES pure
experience with pure Value. They both say reality is dynamic while concepts are
static. They both say subjects and objects are concepts rather than reality.
They are both rejecting SOM and reformulating a static-dynamic metaphysics to
replace it. I don't see any important difference. What difference do you see in
their conclusions? Can you think of anything important or relevant that they
disagree about?
Dan said:
Well, again, I think RMP has moved past James in ways that agree with James'
work. James (for one thing) never postulated that reality is composed of value.
He seemed to feel that experience HAD value but he didn't make the connection
that experience IS value. So, yes, they might well be on the same page but RMP
is further along in his thinking.
dmb says:
Well, yea he did actually. And that's exactly where he gets in trouble with so
many contemporary scholars. By 1904, when he was first writing the essays in
radical empiricism, he was adopting a kind of pan-psychism wherein mind and
matter are co-eternal aspects of the same reality so that the whole universe is
alive and responsive all the way down. Like Pirsig, he says we can't really
know if atoms do what they do because the want to (preferences) or because they
have to (causal relations) but the former is a better way to think about the
same facts, a better way to talk about the same data. Or as James put it, it is
the hypothesis that meets the largest number of requirements for pragmatic
truth.
As the Stanford Encyclopedia article explains, in A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
"James begins his book, as he had begun Pragmatism, with a discussion of the
temperamental determination of philosophical theories, which, James states,
“are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push … forced on one by
one's total character and experience, and on the whole PREFERRED — there is no
other truthful word — as one's best working attitude”. Maintaining that a
philosopher's “vision” is “the important thing” about him, James condemns the
“over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our
American universities…”.
James passes from critical discussions of Josiah Royce's idealism and the
“vicious intellectualism” of Hegel to philosophers whose visions he admires:
Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson. He praises Fechner for holding that “the
whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and
developments, is everywhere alive and conscious”, and he seeks to refine and
justify Fechner's idea that separate human, animal and vegetable
consciousnesses meet or merge in a “consciousness of still wider scope”. James
employs Henri Bergson's critique of “intellectualism” to argue that the
“concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our
conceptual substitutes are confined by. They run into one another continuously
and seem to interpenetrate”. In his Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)
"James's fundamental idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or
structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that
(despite being called “experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pure
experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the
material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories… a that which
is not yet any definite what, tho' ready to be all sorts of whats…”. That
“whats” pure experience may be are minds and bodies, people and material
objects, but this depends not on a fundamental ontological difference among
these “pure experiences,” but on the relations into which they enter."
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