Ron quoted Willam James:
" the difference is that the empiricists are less dazzled. Unity doesn't blind
them to everything else, doesn't quench their curiousity for special facts
whereas there is a kind of rationalist who is sure to interpret abstract unity
mystically and to forget everything else, to treat it as a principle; to admire
and worship it; and thereupon to come to a full stop intellectually." William
James Pragmatism
Ron commented:
The majority of "Pragmatism" is a response to Monism, Monism he states is
useful in that it affords us a moral holiday. If MoQ is part and parcel of the
tradition of Pragmatism, stating that it is a monism departs from this
tradition. ...For MoQ to be a Monism and yet follow Pragmatic tradition would
require such a sophisticated explanation and a large re-working of both terms.
Don't you think? They are just about contrary in meaning. It would be better
to classify, if we must classify, MoQ as a pluralism that asserts Value as it's
first abstract principle of explanation. Then it sits comfortably without
contradiction in meaning.
dmb says:
It's not too tricky to untangle this, I think. You're right to characterize
Pragmatism as an attack on Monism - but there are two important points that
will make the apparent contradiction evaporate.
This first point is simply that James was attacking Hegelian monism, the
Absolute Idealism of Bradley and Royce in particular. When Phaedrus first
realized that Quality was "an absolute monism" wherein "Quality was the source
and substance of everything," the narrator tells us, a "whole new flood of
philosophic associations came to mind". "Hegel said the Absolute Mind was the
source of everything," he admits, but, "Hegel's Absolute was completely
classical, completely rational and completely orderly. Quality was not like
that."
The second point is that Pragmatism is a theory of truth and as such fits into
the MOQ as static intellectual quality. Pirsig and James agree that truth is a
certain kind of good, static intellectual good. To address the main question -
is Quality a monism? - we should be talking about James's Radical Empiricism
and especially his notion of "pure experience". This is where it makes sense to
compare Pirsig's monism (Quality) to James's monism (pure experience). John
Dewey was a radical empiricist too. On this view, says John Stuhr, “experience
is anactivity in which subject and object are unified and constituted as
partial features and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity”. Please
notice that “unanalyzed unity” is another way to say that "pure experience" or
"Quality" is an undifferentiated whole, an undivided continuum or
pre-conceptual flux. All these phrases are descriptive labels and what they
describe is undivided experience, experience prior to the intellectual
distinctions or static patterns we use when talking about it or reflecting on
it.
The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy puts it this way: “James’s fundamental
idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a
more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that (despite being called
“experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains,
is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later
reflection with its conceptual categories” (Essays in Radical Empiricism).
And then you hear this from Pirsig himself at the end of chapter 29 of Lila...
"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was
independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that
subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience. Subjects and
objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more
fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this
basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those
between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have
not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be
either physical or psychical: It logically precedes this distinction." (Pirsig
1991, 364-5)
So you see they both posit direct experience itself as what constitutes
reality. Their primary empirical reality isn't a unified whole but rather an
undivided stream of experience or, as Dewey puts it, an unanalyzed totality.
They're not saying unity is the essence or final goal of experience but simply
that experience itself is reality and that reality does not come divided into
parts. Quality or pure experience is "one" in the sense that it hasn't yet been
chopped up into words and concepts, definitions and distinctions. As Pirsig
says, "Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual
abstractions". This is what Pirsig means when he quotes William James again at
the end of chapter 29: " 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts
and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter
is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus
had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."
How's that?
dmb
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