[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[LARAMIE LOEWEN]

>Dewey and James were very close on this view. Dewey's "immediate empiricism" 
>and the "radical empiricism" of William James may not be identical, but 
>agree that the subject-object metaphysic is the cause of the gap between 
>ourselves and the world. They don't want to say that its easy and natural 
>cross this epistemic gap or that its impossible to cross it. (They don't 
>call him Kan't for nothing.) They don't want to build a new bridge between 
>us and the things in themselves or discover the reality behind its 
>appearance. They are saying that there is no such gap. They're saying that 
>the assumptions of SOM have created the gap and that these assumption are a 
>fiction, are made of hot air. Here is James again in the first essay on 
>radical empiricism...


"This was perfectly prefigured in the "Dharma Bum" period of the sixties, when
an influential number of otherwise highly intellectual people, incapable of supporting
rational and egoic responsibility in a culture clearly stressful and drifting, began 
championing typhonic, narcissistic, regressive freedom from the ego level, through 
preegoic license, while intellectually claiming to be actually pursuing the transegoic
Zen of spontaneous freedom.  As general cultural malaise spread, many other people
began to share the "Dharma Bum" attitude, turning narcissistically upon themselves, 
damning culture per se, championing Marxist dogma (religion is not always the "opiate 
of the masses" as Marx thought, but it is true that "Marxism became the opiate of the
intellectuals," as a French critic put it), and in general withdrawing to the preegoic abode.
They often took as their leaders a handful of truly transpersonal souls and, confusing 
prepersonal with transpersonal, pointed to Krishnamurti and Ramana and Zen, and thus
managed to front an otherwise undeniable rationalization for their regress to Eden."
[Ken Wilber, Up From Eden; Pg. 344]

I'm sure this is not your intention, Dave, but we need to be careful not to support 
evolutionary regression.  The "assumptions of SOM" are necessary if we are to evolve
from prerational to transrational.

Laramie