Hi dmb,
And the Eastern texts (Buddhist & Vedic) that James read and reread early in a
most difficult period in his life had a profound influence on his thinking.
This investigation is documented in his biography 'William James: In the
Maelstrom of American Modernism' by Robert D. Richardson (pp. 119 &126):
Here's a list of some of the Eastern books he read:
Modern Buddhist - Alabaster
Religion des Buddha (Vol.1) - Koeppen
Le Buddhisme - Taine
Weltauffas der Buddhisten - Bastian
Brahma Somej: Four Lectures - Sen
It seems obvious that James's idea of pure experience came from these texts.
Marsha
On Oct 29, 2011, at 2:09 PM, david buchanan wrote:
>
> dmb said to Matt:
> ...I can show you an example of what I'm complaining about, one that you
> posted this month and in this thread. You said to Steve, "I've always had
> difficulty seeing how the direct/indirect distinction doesn't reproduce the
> problems of the experience/reality distinction. " This is not a direct claim
> that the DQ/sq distinction simply is Platonism. It's more cautious and
> tentative than that, but it amounts to the same thing.
>
>
>
> Matt replied:
> ...I do not think they at all "amount to the same thing." ...in an earlier
> age (when I started writing at the MD) I began by parroting, e.g., the
> mantras that mirror imagery will lead inexorably to Platonism, I've come to
> think that the "inexorable" is exactly wrong. I've come to see, over the
> years through my experience here, and reading other philosophers, and reading
> more Rorty, that the importance of the pragmatist slogan that "beliefs are
> habits of action" is that metaphors can create fly-bottles, but it is
> philosophers who fly in them. Our concepts can create rice-traps, but its
> philosophers who stick their hands in. And, in fact, careful handling of
> rice-traps and fly-bottles can successfully avoid traps. ...I'd given off the
> impression that some metaphors and analogies are _inherently_ bad. Nothing
> is inherently bad, I've come to learn (Dewey tells us this).
>
> dmb says:
>
> I understand the difference between an outright accusation and the expression
> of "difficulty" or "doubt". But as far as I'm concerned the question is
> whether or not you "get" the direct/indirect distinction (DQ/sq. In that
> respect, the difference between an outright accusation of Plationism and an
> expression of doubt about how it escapes Platonism is only a difference in
> the level of commitment on your part. Either way, it would be my task to show
> you how and why it is wrong to treat Pirsig or James as if they were trapped
> in bottle like Wittgenstein's fly. Either way, it would be my task to show
> you that the direct/indirect distinction is itself a form of anti-Platonism.
>
> You're using the anti-Platonism of Wittgenstein (and Rorty) against the
> anti-Platonism of our radical empiricists, James and Pirsig. If Goodman is
> right, Wittgenstein got his anti-Platonism from James in the first place, at
> least in part.
>
> In "WITTGENSTEIN AND WILLIAM JAMES", Russell B. Goodman "argues that James
> exerted a distinctive and pervasive positive influence on Wittgenstein's
> thought. He shows that both share commitments to anti-foundationalism, to the
> description of the concrete details of human experience, and to the priority
> of practice over intellect", Amazon says. Simon Critchley says this book,
> "establishes categorically the influence of William James on Wittgenstein's
> work" and Wesley Cooper says, "this study ..reveals a more complex and rich
> relationship than has been supposed."
>
>
> William James was not the "fly" that Wittgenstein had in mind. He was
> thinking of super-Platonists like Frege, the founding father of analytic
> philosophy. The flies he had in mind were those who thought mathematics and
> logic were the royal roads to Truth. (He also happened to be a right-wing
> asshole, but that's beside the point.) Bertrand Russell took Wittgenstein to
> be inventing something like a logically pure language with which to
> philosophically examine the misleading metaphors contained in ordinary
> language and of course the Vienna Circle went round and round thinking they
> could scrub away all the metaphysical fictions and get down to the facts in
> this way. Those were the flies he had in mind, the various kinds of
> rationalists. The rationalists, going all the way back to Plato, were James's
> targets too. He talked about this kind of philosophy in terms of "vicious
> intellectualism" and his radical empiricism was essentially designed to rule
> out all metaphysical fictions
or
> trans-experiential entities. The notion that reality was logical through and
> through, James thought, was a kind of religious faith, an otherworldly
> pretense that denigrates the reality we actually live. Wittgenstein's fly in
> a bottle analogy is aimed at James's enemies, and cannot rightly be used
> against James or Pirsig. For one thing, neither one of them is guilty of
> using unexamined metaphors and it's not right to treat these artists as if
> they were simply "ordinary language" philosophers.
>
>
> ZAMM tells the tale of a rhetoric teacher who discovers that the Sophists
> were teaching Quality and rhetoric was the form they chose to teach it. He'd
> been doing it right all along, he realizes. I think it's very important to
> realize that Pirsig's use metaphors and analogies and his choice to present
> the MOQ in the literary form is directly related to the substance and content
> of the MOQ. Thanks to scholars like Charlene Siegfried, James's use of
> explosive metaphors and literary style is also designed to defy abstract
> logic-chopping in favor of a more human-centered approach. James and Pirsig
> both studied science as young men and they could do it well but people used
> to joke that Henry James's novels were better psychology than William's
> textbook and that William's philosophy was more literary than Henry's books.
> Everyone around here already knows how Pirsig mixes philosophy and
> literature, with plenty of side dishes in anthropology, history, science and
> religion. It hardly
m
> akes sense to treat these guys as if they were anything like the rationalist,
> the Platonists or the logical positivists. I think it's important to
> understand that the static/dynamic distinction (direct/indirect) is already
> opposed to all those flies in their bottles.
>
>
>
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