Mark said to dmb:
...When you bring in the psychological concepts of feelings and motives, you
are straying from philosophy and really discussing psychology, not philosophy.
This seems more like the psychology of philosophy. I could just as easily say
that that philosophical visions play a role in feelings and motives. The
question is, which do you put as the primary endeavor? Do we explain
philosophy in terms of psychology or psychology in terms of philosophy? Which
one is more important to you? It would seem that you are trending towards the
discipline of psychology. There is no need to reduce philosophy using
psychological terms. This method of encapsulating philosophy denies the whole
purpose of philosophy.
dmb quotes Pirsig and James:
In Zen and the Art, Robert Pirsig says:
"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping,
rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been
necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the
emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's
order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of
nature's order by re-assimilating those passions which were originally fled
from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness,
are a part of nature's order too. The central part."
As William James puts it - I think this is almost exactly the same sentiment,
although he is speaking to the Hegelians in particular:
"Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the
question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of
the pale. Still seeing a that in things which Logic does not expel, the most I
can do is to aspire to the expulsion. At present I do not even aspire.
Aspiration is a feeling. What can kindle feeling but the example of feeling?
And if the Hegelians will refuse to set an example, what can they expect the
rest of us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel
Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the
personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of
us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic
and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so
than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and
settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common gro
und; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our
faculties, emotional as well as logical, help us, and the truest of which will
at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose
faculties on the whole had the best divining power?"
See, traditionally, philosophers have repudiated and rejected the personal and
aesthetic factors in the construction of our philosophies. Scientific
objectivity and it's ideal of disinterested observation is just one form of
this tendency. This tendency, as James and Pirsig, is the main reason that
philosophy needs to be radically reconstructed. Re-integrating the affective
domain is part of the solution to this problem.
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