Marsha asked: How can Dynamic Quality or 'pure experience', which is undifferentiated, include perceptions which are differentiated? There is, after all, a difference between sensual experiences - smell, sound, taste, sight, and feel; percepts require a spacial-temporal framework in which to exist; and they are dependent on human sense apparatus? This excludes them from being consider Dynamic Quality, the undifferentiated. This represents my puzzlement for the past year? And this is why I have a problem with a solely preconceptual description of DQ, or pure experience. It seems to me that percepts are in the static (patterned) value arena and a more appropriate description of DQ would be pre-conceptual and pre-perceptual. Dynamic Quality cannot be experienced in any way recognizable by human beings.
dmb says: If you're sincerely interested, there is a paper you might want to read. http://queksiewkhoon.tripod.com/varieties_of_pure_experience_joel_w_krueger.pdf Until then, here is a piece that'll probably help: To begin simply, James was suspicious of the idea that conceptual or propositional thought functions as the primitive—and thus irreducible—interface between self and world. On this conceptualist or "intellectualist" line, as James refers to it, all thinking and experience involves concepts. No concepts, no experience. James instead argues that the phenomenal content of embodied experience as experienced outstrips our capacity to conceptually or linguistically articulate it. In other words, James insists that many of our basic experiences harbor non-conceptual content. That is, many of our experiences have a rich phenomenal content that is too fine-grained and sensuously detailed to lend itself to an exhaustive conceptual analysis. For example, we can have visual experiences of colors and shapes of things for which we lack the relevant concepts (a previously unfamiliar shade of magenta or a chiliagon). And this ability holds for other sensory modalities as well. For our ability to describe or report a wide-range of tastes and smells lags far behind our capacity to actually have an experience of a nearly infinite spectrum of tastes and smells. In other words, the deliverances of our senses continually run ahead of both our descriptive vocabularies as well as our conceptual abilities. Though James does not address the notion of non-conceptual content as explicitly as many contemporary philosophers of mind—and furthermore, it's not clear that he's entirely consistent on this point, as I discuss below—James does continually insist that there is a truth to our concrete experience of reality that conceptual analysis and the formal truths of logic cannot explicate. Thus James is moved to write the following passage, which (not surprisingly) caused considerable consternation among many of his contemporary commentators: I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, expedience, concreteness, immediacy, use what words you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. > > Marsha said to dmb: > > It sounds like you are suggesting that when you drop concepts, the > > adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions, you get DQ? Is > > this correct? Is this what is being designated as direct experience? > > Where are percepts, the sensual stuff such as smell, taste, feel, sight, > > sound, in this explanation? These are experiences, are they not? What > > does James say about the sensual experiences? > > > > dmb says: > > Again you are asking for an answer that was already supplied. (SEE QUOTES > > BELOW) "Pure experience," James says, is "but another name for FEELING OR > > SENSATION" and "its purity is only a relative term, meaning the > > proportional amount of UNVERBALIZED SENSATION which it still embodies." > > > > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > >> On Jul 7, 2012, at 5:26 PM, david buchanan wrote: > >> > >>> > >>> Marsha asked: > >>> > >>> > >>> Direct experience of what? > >>> > >>> > >>> dmb says: > >>> Like the man said, "experience pure in the literal sense ...is NOT YET > >>> ANY DEFINITE WHAT, tho ready to be ALL SORTS of WHATs". There can be no > >>> WHATs because whats are all secondary products of thought and not the > >>> starting points of reality. There are not yet any whats because this > >>> immediate FLUX of experience is dynamic is always "changing throughout" > >>> such that "no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be > >>> caught.". To have the whats, you need to have distinctions and > >>> identities, which are static and secondary products of reflection - as > >>> opposed to undivided experience. > >>> As Pirsig and James both say together, "there must always be a > >>> discrepancy between concepts and reality" because concepts "are static > >>> and discontinuous" while the immediate flux of life is a "dynamic and > >>> flowing" continuum. To put it another way, there will always be a > >>> discrepancy between static concepts and dynamic reality, because static > >>> patterns are stable and ordered but the ongoing flux of experience is > >>> ever-changing and free of patterned habits or ordered structures. > >>> > >>> > >>> -------------------------------------------------------------- > >>> On Jul 7, 2012, at 3:43 PM, david buchanan wrote: > >>> > >>> “When Zen teachers introduce students to nirvana (which the MOQ > >>> translates as the world of pure undifferentiated value) they do not do so > >>> with books and thesis. They sit the students in a room until their > >>> clutter of intellectual knowledge is abandoned (especially values > >>> judgments!) and the pure vision of the newborn infant is regained” > >>> (McWatt 2004, 83). > >>> > >>> > >>> "Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, > >>> or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense > >>> of that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of > >>> whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't > >>> appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases > >>> interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or ofidentity, can be > >>> caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or > >>> sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill > >>> itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed > >>> and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with > >>> adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is > >>> only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized > >>> sensation which it still embodies." - William James - Essays in Radical > >>> Empiricism. > >>> > >>> " '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." > >>> > >>> 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 > > > > 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 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
