Ron said:
... Bob and Jimmy are talkin bout the distinction while Fred's talkin
reification. [AND] Where Bob states simply that the discrepancy has value,
Fred seems to cast a rather dour atmosphere in regards to the rendering of one
from the many and
doesn't really seem to value the disecrepancy as much as reacting to the
monistic dominance of values of his day. I see Bob employing the descrepancy
in a useful manner while Fred's more of a deconstructionist.
dmb says:
It's pretty clear that they're all talking about the problem of reification.
Fred complains about the "original model" of Honesty or the Leaf. But in other
contexts we know that Fred, Will and Bob all take sides with the Sophists and
otherwise oppose the "vicious intellectualism" of Plato and Socrates. Plato
took the idea of the good from the Sophists and tried to encapsulate it in a
"fixed and eternal" Form, the Form of the Good. He also did this with Justice,
Truth, Beauty but not, apparently with things like leaves or hair. I guess they
are noble enough to deserve their own Forms, or something. Anyway, in this
particular context we can see that Will and Bob are talking about the
reification problem with subjects and objects, which are more consequential
examples of reified concepts. The sentence I originally posted from them
("There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality,..") is just
a condensed version of the sentences that come before it, Pirsig says.
Check it out...
As Pirsig describes it, James's radical empiricism says...
"...subjects and objects are not the starting points 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 called
either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds this distinction. In his
last unfinished work, Some Problems in Philosophy, James had condensed this
description to a single sentence: '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 Metaph
ysics of Quality."
When concepts are reified, they are treated as MORE than concepts. They are
taken as MORE real than the empirical reality from which they were derived in
the first place. They are taken as the starting points of reality, as
ontologically primary. The MOQ re-asserts the primacy of the experiential
reality itself and says that concepts are always secondary, always derived from
that primary empirical reality, from the experiential flux. This pre-conceptual
experience is starting point of reality for all these guys.
As Charlene Seigfried puts it, paraphrasing William James, "abstractionism had
become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization
and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and
falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the
temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)
In other words, the problem is taking ideas as something MORE than man-made
concepts and forgetting that they were extracted from the flux of human
experience in first place. The problem is NOT seeing that man is a participant
in the creation of all things, NOT seeing that our reality is an evolved
construction of our own making. Instead, says Plato and Kant and every
viciously intellectual philosopher, reality is beyond our dirty old temporal,
sensible life. We're all stuck in a cave and the real reality is beyond this
world of appearances, beyond our experience. The MOQ gives that notion a big
fat raspberry. It says experience IS reality. All that talk about forms and
substances and essences is a bunch of nonsense. The ever-changing flow of
experience is not a crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction, Pirsig says, it
is reality itself. And our ideas function well in relation to that (and in
relation to all other relevant ideas) or they aren't any good.
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