Greetings, Ant --
> David Buchanan has been contributing posts on MOQ Discuss
> of a consistent high quality for a number of years now. However,
> it is only recently that David has turned some of his thoughts into
> fully developed academic papers. I'm therefore very pleased to
> present one of the first of these ("Clash of the Pragmatists") at
> robertpirsig.org which argues that the neo-pragmatist Richard
> Rorty implicitly retains an SOM metaphysics by his overlooking
> of radical empiricism.
I note that David quotes this statement by Pirsig (from 1991, which would be
LILA, although I couldn't find it in my paperback copy). The statement
interprets James as saying that, since subject and object are secondary to
experience, "pure experience cannot be either physical or psychical."
"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).
Here is what William James wrote on the "pure experience" of Radical
Empiricism:
"So the notion of a knowledge still _in transitu_ and on its way joins hands
here with that notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried to explain in my
[essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist ?' The instant field of the
present is always experience in its 'pure' state, plain unqualified
actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought,
and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as some one's opinion
about fact. This is as true when the field is conceptual as when it is
perceptual. 'Memorial Hall' is 'there' in my idea as much as when I stand
before it. I proceed to act on its account in either case. Only in the later
experience that supersedes the present one is this naif immediacy
retrospectively split into two parts, a 'consciousness' and its 'content,'
and the content corrected or confirmed."
--[James: The Essays in Radical Empiricism; Chpt. 2: A World of Pure
Experience]
I think it's important to note that James talks about this "plain
unqualified actuality" as
"yet undifferentiated into thing and thought"; he did NOT say "object and
subject." Any experience presupposes both, and I doubt that James ever said
"pure experience cannot be either physical or psychical." In the preface to
his essay, he defines what he means by "radical empiricism":
"To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any
element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element
that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that
connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind
of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the
system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things
getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing
experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic
arrangement."
Later, James euphemizes this "pure state" of experience as a "mosaic" whose
pieces are bound together at their edges -- perhaps not "cemented in the
bedding" as he put it -- but still segmented, although not formed into
discrete objects of perception. So, the pre-intellectual "experience" James
theorized was "pure" only in the sense that subject and object were not yet
differentiated, as Pirsig also maintains, (although I find that rather
strange).
I disagree with Pirsig that this pre-intellectual phenomenon is not psychic,
or that it can epistemologically be called "experience". It is more
properly termed "sensibility", and it refers to the primary Value of the S/O
divide. Experience always relates the subject to an object; it is the
intellectual cognizance of differentiated otherness. In my view,
experience, intellect, relative value, and objective awareness are all
proprietary to the individual subject.
Anyway, this is my opinion, for what it's worth. Thanks for bringing
David's article to our attention.
Best regards,
Ham
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