Hello everyone On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 6:59 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Dan: So I take that as a no. And I am not sure exactly what I'm denying. > > 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. Dan: Well, yes, it is. I posted the url so you could check it out. You must have missed that part too... dmb: 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: So you are saying that Dynamic Quality and experience as value and Quality as reality is and was common knowledge before Robert Pirsig wrote about it in ZMM and LILA... that he really isn't saying anything new at all... he is merely parroting what others have been saying for hundreds or even thousands of years. I have to say I am more than a bit disappointed in hearing this. Here I was thinking that he was an original thinker. > > 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: I don't believe that I claimed they disagreed although I see you've excised my comment about James postulating that ideas arise from matter. So I take it you feel that is irrelevant. Honestly, I feel you are more the authority on James than I am or ever will be. If you feel he and RMP agree on everything, okay. But then, I am unsure why you're wasting your time on the MOQ. > > 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." Dan: It appears to me that James is intent on labeling what pure experience is, while RMP is intent on keeping it concept-free. But I am probably wrong about that too. 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
