Hi dmb, Thank you for your post, I found it enlightening. This existence in DQ is one of the topics that David H. and I are discussing. Some comments below:
On 2/17/12, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > William James’ pure experience, the central idea in his radical > empiricism,has been subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation for > 100 years. As I take Pirsig’s pre-intellectual experience (a.k.a. Quality or > Dynamic Quality) to be more or less equivalent to James’s pure experience, > objections that cut against James will make Pirsig bleed and vice versa. Mark: On problem that I see with radical empiricism (probably because I do not know much about it), which is in effect the scientific method as I see it, is the non-inclusion of the imagination. For example, if we were to imagine the moon as orbiting the earth, we strictly do not have any experience of such a thing. All we have are the writings of another. This is experience removed from experience and relies on the imagination. Another example would be the imagining of an emerald horse. We have the experience of an emerald and of a horse. From that we can imagine something outside of our experience, that being an emerald horse. Pure experience must therefore be suplemented with the human ability for imagination which is in a non-empirical arena, in my opinion. It could well be that this is what you are saying below. Pure experience must be molded with a capability which lies outside pure experience, just like a river is guided by the banks. > The most common objection is to simply to deny that there is any such thing > as pure experience. “All awareness is a linguistic affair” or “it’s text > all the way down”. Mark: Yes, this is the residue of the deconstructionalists such as Wittgenstein. As far as I can tell he drove himself mad with this idea. Have you read some of his later writings? Not the product of a sane man, in my opinion. Of course if one becomes bewitched by Tractatus, he does give you a way out, but why go there to begin with? Even our basic sensory perceptions are structured by > concepts or categories of thought we inherit from language. There is no way > to peel back the human contribution, they say. These slogans represent > perfectly good objections against positivism, against traditional sense-data > empiricism and against the kind of phenomenology that sought the pure > essence of things. These objections rightly push back against any claim that > says we can gain direct, untainted access to objective reality or somehow > peel back our own subjectivity to get at the things-in-themselves. When > educated critics hear phrases like “pure experience” and “pre-intellectual > experience” or sometimes even just the word “empiricism”, lessons from > thinkers like Sellars (or Quine) spring to mind and immediately there are > flags down all over the field. Mark: Yes, of course pure experience exists as part of our experience. I am not sure that positivist would deny such a thing. In fact the human organism is a sensory being. It is well understood by neuroscientist what is referred to as pure sensory experience. They make the brain the organ which converts such experience into objects. It does this for the purposes of memory and social interaction. To us, pure experience is something that we call DQ, although we cannot attribute any properties to such a thing since it exists prior to the allocation of properties. Our DQ is similar to the incoming information is seen by neuroscientist. Of course we have James to thank for this in part. It is also possible to exist in the pure realm of Quality, which exists underlying (if you will) the DQ experience. This would be pre-pure experience Quality can be analogized to the blank screen on which DQ plays. Many meditation techniques allow one to exist in that realm, which is outside of movement or objects. It is also the place of the "self", or Atman. I know from my experience that this is possible. What I have found, however, that such experience is not too useful, and not too meaningful, until the conceptual mind is engaged afterwards. In fact, memory is not constructed when one is in that state. In hindsight, the passage of time reveals that one was in such a state without being "asleep". Of course this sort of thing takes practice, so living in Pure Quality is not for everyone. Much of the criticism of this aspect of James' thoughts, would seem to me to come from the relegation of anything outside of the material world to the non-existent and therefore not worthy of discussion in modern intellectual circles. This is a modern day angst inherent in the academic field, and unfortunately depreciates in any spiritual understanding as one existing in the realm of nonsense. Of course nonsense is where it exists since it lies in the place before sq sense is formed. Unfortunately this nonsense is thought of in terms of low Quality, when essentially it is DQ. The modern academic circle therefore deems DQ to be of low Quality. It can be said that Plato's absolute form exists in DQ. That is, we cannot give it any attributes and only know such things through a conceptual extrapolation of what can be given body. In my opinion, this is one way in which Plato points towards Quality. Those who came later and read his thoughts were misguided in the same way that the Church was misguided in their interpretation of the original teachings. This is why Pirsig calls it the Church of Reason. We only have to look to Christianity to see where that leads. > The problem with using this objection against Pirsig or James is that they > are not making any such claims to a pure, untainted view. In fact, they > debunk the same myth and they undermine the same ambition with pithy little > slogans of their own. “We carve out everything,” James says, and “the human > serpent is coiled over everything”. Similarly, Pirsig says, “we are > suspended in language,” and, slightly modifying Protagoras, “Man is the > measure of all things, he is a participant in the creation of all things”. > As if to drive this point all the way home, Pirsig says that we even > constructed the idea that reality is not a construction. The use of the serpent is interesting here. Indeed the kundalini experience is expressed as a serpent coiled around the spine. As you know the serpent is a common metaphor for many things. The human serpent in the case above is more of an expression of static quality, I believe. In that sense it is used in a negative way. We are only suspended in language as we allow ourselves to be. I believe that Pirsig is alluding to that modern condition towards the end of ZAMM. Yes, constructions enclosing constructions, boxes within boxes. It is amazing that some cannot see through this self perpetuating situation. All knowledge is a human creation. We cannot uncover anything, we can only create something. I believe that MoQ is one attempt to provide a guide out. Of course MoQ is not alone here, and such a thing was taught by the Egyptians of old. See Thoth, who was the prince of sq. > Like the linguistic slogans, these slogans from James and Pirsig also > represent a move against the myth of the given, against traditional > empiricism and against the correspondence theory of truth. They too > represent a rejection of the Modern quest for a single objective (usually > scientific) truth and the express the postmodern realization that reality is > fundamentally interpretive, that we don’t exist in a world of things but a > socially constructed world of meaning. It is interesting to note that Mythology, is the application of logos to mythos. This is one example of sq providing meaning. However, when addressed by modern academics, myth is often relegated to fantasy, when that is not what it is at all. See Carl Jung and the archetype presentation, or any of the analytical writings of J. Campbell. As I see it, Truth is something we create. It can take many forms, some of better quality than others. We also create the reality that we impart to our children. Things are representations of meaning. It is the "representation" part that many erudite academics forget. The common man does not make these mistakes unless they are following some leader or trying to lead, themselves. Academics has created the very things that academics now seek to dispell. It is a trap of their own making. Most of the common man's daily lives exists outside of words. > Sellars’ slogan is actually about our awareness of sorts, resemblances, > facts, abstract entities and particulars. In other words, making > distinctions and otherwise sorting things into conceptual categories is > necessarily a linguistic affair. To claim that verbal or conceptual > awareness is the only kind of awareness, one would have to claim that > animals and human infants can have no awareness at all and it would mean > that reflective self-consciousness is a very lonely gift that sprang, fully > developed, from nowhere. Right now there are trillions of living creatures > that have various degrees of awareness and are getting along just fine > without the benefit of words or concepts. Right. I have analogized this temporary awareness for David H. "as the purpose of a gift". The analogy goes as follows: As a means for conveying "caring", we present somebody with a gift. The gift itself is not the actual caring, and this is understood. Words are the same way. We encapsulate awareness in the gift of words. However, these words which are transient packages between people should not be confused for what underlies them. Once they enter into your head they disappear until they are needed again as a gift in return. > Pure experience is the centerpiece of a larger, radical empiricism, one that > rejects the assumptions that created the epistemic gap between experience > and reality in the first place. This gap is predicated on “an artificial > conception of the relations between knower and known,” James says, and this > fake problem is his first target. Mark: The remark “an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known,” is a bit confusing here. Any conception is artificial. Perhaps he would be better served with the terminology of betterness from MoQ. In the same way, any problem is fake, in the sense that we make such a problem up. I do not think that even James can consider his words to be divinely inspired. However, I understand the purpose of such rhetoric, it is to set the stage for an argument or proof. It is a battle against the thinking of the time, which in many ways is trying to prevent war with war. For the tools that Jame's uses are no different from those he seeks to enlighten. The history of philosophy has shown that > all sort of theories have been invented to overcome this gap, he says. Some > theories put a mental representation into the gap, common-sense theories > left the gap untouched, believing that our minds could just make the leap > and, he tells us, and the Transcendentalists brought their Absolute in to > perform this epic task. James and Pirsig, on the other hand, say that > subjects and objects are not the conditions that make experience possible. > Instead, they have been carved out. As James puts it, inner and outer are > just names for the way we sort experience. They are linguistic affairs, > products of reflection, concepts derived from experience. To supposed that > these terms mirror Nature’s own divisions or otherwise correspond to > pre-existing ontological categories is to reify these concepts. Mark: Yes but to also suppose the knowledge that such a thing as "Natures own divisions" is actually something of substance is also misguided in my view. The whole concept of a gap between the subjective and the objective is only as good as it is presented. For many it brings great meaning. If this is to be a judge of Quality, then, I would say that James is misplacing his anger. For indeed, the idea of self and other comes from pure experience, such as bumping into a tree. To say otherwise is to begin the creation of an understanding which is somewhat removed from pure experience. I do not have a problem with this except if the thesis is about the merits of pure experience. We must realize that the way that the majority of people see things is the most accessable way, and people are not stupid. It is those who make a big deal about these things that could be stupid. The erudite philosophy which contrasts such personal awareness, is not one that can pretend to have the answer. Of course time is of consideration here. Many philosophies in the past have presented the same as James. Many of them are still around today. I believe the motive behind MoQ is to try to bend the Western cruise ship into more peaceful and responsible waters. Words are linguistic affairs, but NEVER are they the things that words represent. They are short hand for pure experience. As such, words are simply a convenient way for sharing this DQ. The human societal level depends on words. They are therefore a natural evolutionary progression of the tendency of Quality. As with any evolutionary species there is a problem with "overspecialization". This may be where we are at. If this is the case, the dominance of words is doomed to extinction. Under our > radical empiricists, subjects and objects are stripped of their > metaphysical, ontological status and otherwise demoted to the rank of mere > concept – thereby eliminating Cartesian dualism and replacing it with an > experiential monism. For the radical empiricist, experience and reality > amount to the same thing. This is the context in which James and Pirsig make > their claims about pure experience or the pre-intellectual cutting edge of > experience. Mark: I would not consider the human ability to form a concept to be something mere. This would be the road one would take in anti-intellectualism, which is something that I do not believe James was a soldier of. We can certainly say that the words "experience" and "reality" mean the same thing. However, it is clear that they do not. They do not represent the same thing in common language. So this statement is lacking any formal proof, unless the definitions of both words are exactly the same. One has to realize that the intellectual level also contains a cutting edge. This is not hard to see from the dominance of man on this planet. Also, it is aparent to me that sq interacts with DQ, and it is not a one way road. If it were, conscious choices could not be labeled as such. If indeed all of our choices stem from the pre-intellectual area, then there would be no purpose in studying in grad school. So I would be careful not to place the preintellectual (which I assume includes the instinctual) on too high a platform. Again we run the risk of being considered anti-intellectuals, as Mao was. His philosphy could be considered as keep people in the pre-intellectual phase. > There is an interesting little Wikipedia article on “Sciousness”. It briefly > outlines the development of pure experience in James thinking from his work > as a psychologist through his final philosophical stages as a radical > empiricist. Even there, we see that the question is far from settled: “Pure > experience sciousness was mostly attacked when first presented. With some > notable exceptions, such as Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, Western > philosophers rejected James’ view. That rejection continues to this day.” Well, I do not particularly like Wiki, but if you found it interesting I will give it a read. Of course the notion of pure experience has been around as long as man has been talking about such things. It underlies understanding through Mythos, and resulting conclusions that have little import from Logos often turn out to be more revealing than the intellectual answers. Indeed, paganism is much more real than monism, again based on radical empiricism. Yes, of course Sciousness was attacked because that is the way knowledge moves along. It takes a step and then enters into a plateau from which the next step is made difficult. "A body at rest tends to stay at rest". In this case, however, it is more of a remembering what has been said before, than in creating anything new. The barrier to re-learning things comes from the arrogant position that states we are so much wiser than we ever were. There is absolutely no evidence for that. All we have is more technology, and the human condition remains the same fat least for the last 300,000 years or so (if one believes what the anthropologists say, I have no experience of 300,000 years). Thank you for your well written post. It has provided me the opportunity to provide some of my own opinions on the subject. It is all pertinent to MoQ. I am happy to read any correction that you may have to such opinions. I always take these as a learning experience, Professor. Doctorate Mark > > > > 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 > 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
