Steve said:
Pirsig has described freedom as a matter of perception while every other
philosopher that I have ever read has described it as a matter of will. You
don't see that as interesting? That's not worth thinking about?
Matt said:
I've been accused of distorting "what Pirsig says" off and on for about a
decade, and as I have perhaps a more liberal sense of what it means to
legitimately appropriate a thinker, or extend their thinking, I thought I might
comment that everyone might pause and consider their own sense of what is a
legitimate mode of "translating" from "what Pirsig says" to "what Pirsig really
means." ...For example, I think the heart of Pirsig's philosophy might be more
massively augmented by taking the "care passages" of ZMM more seriously, in the
direction that Steve has marked out as the liberal viewpoint of extending
circles of concern, and for which he is currently concerned that Pirsig may not
approach enough. I am less concerned, and think Pirsig would fair well in an
extrapolation.
dmb says:
Yes, in a nut shell, I'd say that Pirsig's central term cannot rightly be
translated into Rorty's perspective. This would be a bit too simple, but it
summarizes the basis of my accusations well enough. Steve's question (above),
for example, strikes me as a confession that he does not understand what Pirsig
means by DQ. And since his formulation of free will involves following DQ, we
have been going round and round in circles. At one point in our free will
debate, in fact, he pulled out one of your old Rorty-inspired assertions
wherein DQ is a compliment we pay to sentences.
Leaving aside my particular accusations for a moment, wouldn't you agree that
misconstruing or misunderstanding a thinker's central term will almost
certainly preclude the possibility of producing any good interpretations? And
even if I agreed that you have a much more liberal sense of what counts as a
legitimate translation, wouldn't you still agree that there is a limit so that
some translations are not legitimate? And how would it work to say freedom is
following compliments we pay to sentences? I just don't see how to construe DQ
that way and still make sense of the MOQ in general or, for example, the way it
reformulates determinism and freedom.
If, on the other hand, we take DQ to mean the primary empirical reality, the
immediate flux of life, direct everyday experience, and the like, then of
course following DQ is going to be a matter of perception. As I tried to
explain to Steve in about a dozen different ways, we are not talking about
metaphysical entities or abstractions here. We're talking about being attuned
to the concrete and the particular, about life as it is felt and lived. If free
will has any meaning, that's where we're going to find it.
"...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)
"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. ..."The experience
of activity is then described as it is 'lived through or authentically known'
(ERE, 84-5). What activity is 'known-as' is taken from this 'complete activity
in its original and first intention.' H goes into detail about the 'ultimate
Qualiia' of 'these experiences of process, obstruction,, striving, strai
n, 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'." (Charlene Seigfried in
"William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 319.)
"...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.)
"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 Rad Recon", page 323. Emphasis is
James's in the original.)
"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.)
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
