Matt said:
... The problem might be best put in terms of the indeterminacy of
DQ/degeneracy thesis: if I want to always be following DQ as much as possible,
how do I know whether I'm dimly apprehending Dynamic Quality or apprehending
dimly with static patterns? ... The thesis suggests there's going to be no
answer, but what does it mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good? Well, I guess
just that it is a placeholder necessary to fully explain the evolutionary
paradigm of Deweyan evaluative experience. So that, sometimes our experience
of good is an implicit rejecting of past-evil, but sometimes it's an implicit
rejecting of now-good. And we won't know the difference in our own experience
until much later, for the experience of dimness, we might say, is a necessary
condition, but definitely not sufficient.
dmb says:
Okay, gents. Let me try this another way. We can see DQ from a slightly
different angle by looking at James's pure experience. David Scott lays it out
quite nicely and, quite helpfully, also frames the point in terms of Buddhism.
I'll add Pirsig's terms in brackets...
David Scott said:
...All of these techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the
tyranny of ‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization’.Yet where
did language [sq] come from? James considers that ‘when the reflective
intellect [sq]. . . in the flowing process [DQ] . . . distinguishing its
elements and parts, it gives them separate names[sq] . . . The flux of it [DQ]
no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient
parts become identified and fixed and abstracted [sq]; so that experience now
flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and
conjunctions’ (1912, pp. 292, 294). Or again, ‘the essence of life is its
continuously changing character [DQ]; but our concepts are all discontinuous
and fixed [sq], and the only mode of making them coincide with life [DQ] is
arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein [sq]. With such arrests our
concepts may be made congruent’. These categories are still arbitrary or
secondary since they ‘are not parts of reality, not real positions taken by it,
but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves, and you can no more dig up
the substance of reality with them than you can dip up water with a net,
however finely meshed’ (1909, p. 253). There are parallels here to the Buddhist
sense of inherent anitya, or ‘change’. Both the Ma ̄dhyamika and Vijn ̃a ̄nava
̄da view language and concepts, as a secondary vikalpyate, or ‘construct’ used
by an individual’s ‘mind’ (manas).
Before or underneath this secondary conceptualisation and discrimination [sq]
comes what James dubs primary, or ‘pure’, experience [DQ]. As James explains,
‘pure experience [DQ] is the name I give to the immediate flux of life [DQ]
which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories’ [sq] (1912, p. 93). What is pure experience [DQ]? In a sense for
James it is not the right question to ask, for it is ‘an experience pure in the
literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what [undifferentiated],
though ready to be all sorts of whats’ (1912, p. 93). Being pre-conceptual and
pre-categorising, ‘experience’ in its original immediacy [primary empirical
reality] is not aware of itself. It simply is. It is a ‘that’ rather than a
‘what’ object. Compare the classical Maha ̄ya ̄na Buddhist focus on the tathata
̄ ‘thusness, suchness’ of things, amidst a Buddhist ‘rejection’, particularly
in the Madhyamika foundations of Maha ̄ya ̄na, of ‘holding’ onto of any
Absolutist positive or negative ‘thing-ness’ or ‘what-ness’. James’ ‘pure
experience’ [DQ] is like the Zen Buddhist sense of a natural
pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting [DQ], which Zen traditionally
calls one’s ‘original face’ [DQ] and which Suzuki calls ‘no-mind’ [DQ]. The
sacredness of the mundane in Zen also compares with James’ view that ‘pure
experience’ is nothing ‘but another name for feeling or sensation’ [direct
everyday experience] (1912, p. 94).James was at the time concerned that his
term ‘consciousness’ would be misunderstood. For ‘to deny that [individual]
‘‘consciousness’’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it—for undeniably
‘‘thoughts’’ do exist—that I fear some readers would follow me no further. Let
me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for
an entity [Cartesian self], but to insist that it does stand for a function’
(1912, p. 3). In turn, ‘function’ also echoes the Buddhist core functionalist
orientation.James acknowledges that: Although for fluency’s sake I myself spoke
earlier in this article of a stuff of pure experience [DQ], I have now to say
that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made, there are
as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the thing experienced. If you ask what
any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same. ‘It
is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness,
brownness, heaviness or what not.’ Experience is only a collective name for all
these sensible natures and save for time and space (and if you like for
‘being’) there appears no universal element of which all things are made [It is
neither physical nor psychical, which are secondary concepts]. (1912, p. 26)It
is this dynamic, flowing, relational character [DQ] of ‘consciousness’ that
seems closer philosophically to Buddhism than to Hume (see Mathur 1978). James
himself distinguishes this Buddhist-like ‘shifting of consciousness’ from what
he sees as the blanket, perhaps static, ‘super consciousness’ of monistic Hindu
Veda ̄nta (1902, p. 491 n. 1). On this point James and Paul Carus enjoyed
courteous but ongoing disagreement. Carus veered towards the Veda ̄nta monistic
framework expounded by Viveka ̄nanda during the 1890s in America, despite
Carus’ and James’ otherwise common convergence and overlaps with Buddhism’s
approach to ethics and on the changing fluctuating nature of the ‘soul’ or
‘self’ (see Bishop 1974).
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