Dear Marsha

There is something there, that makes you curious, isn't it? What is it that 
will eventually tell that you had enough? Someone's blowing a ....

best whistles

Jan Anders



8 jul 2012 kl. 16:08 skrev MarshaV <[email protected]>:

> 
> 
> dmb,
> 
> I agree that direct perceptual (the particular) experience is more immediate 
> than reflective conceptual (the generalized) experience, but direct 
> perceptions still cannot be Dynamic Quality or pure experience, which is 
> undifferentiated.  That is my point.  The paper you offer might reflect what 
> James thought, but I am interested in how these are best handled in the MoQ, 
> and if you cannot explain this I don't see the value to be gained by reading 
> it.  I also acknowledged that static (patterned) value represents all that 
> human being's can know.  But I still have a problem with connecting direct 
> perceptional experience with Dynamic Quality as I explained.  
> 
> 
> Marsha
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jul 8, 2012, at 9:13 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 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.
>> 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
> 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

Reply via email to