[MD] subject / object logic

[david buchanan]

Ron Kulp said:
"I feel value is a function, that which happens when subject meets object. 
No subjects and objects, no value. I interpret most of you saying that MOQ's 
patterns of value are distinct from the subjects and objects it refers to 
and therefore subjects and objects can be "dropped" leaving only the value.  
...I contend subject/object value perception naturally eludes to dualism 
intellectually and that many in the past, set to resolve this by focusing on 
value between the two. An intellectual awareness interpreted as mysticism. 
..."

dmb says:
I'm not sure I follow you here but would like to offer some ideas on the 
topic from the Introduction of an anthology titled, PRAGMATISM AND CLASSICAL 
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. John Stuhr, the editor and author of the introduction, 
describes classical American philosophy in terms of seven main features; 1) 
The rejection of modern philosophy, 2) Fallibilism, 3) Pluralism, 4) Radical 
empiricism, 5) The continuity of science and philosophy, 6) Pragmatism and 
meliorism and 7) The centrality of community. None of these are irrelevant 
but the first and fourth features bare most directly on SOM.

Under number one ("The rejection of modern philosophy") Stuhr says, 
"Classical American philosophy confronted and largely dismissed the 
categories, language and notions central to earlier thought. This thought 
was fundamentally dualistic: ...reason/will, thought/purpose, 
intellect/emotion... mind/matter, appearance/reality, experience/nature, 
..and so on. Classical American philosophers did not refuse to use these 
terms; instead, their point was that these notions refer to distinctions 
made in thought rather than to different kinds of being or levels of 
existence. That is, these terms have a functional rather than an ontological 
status: they stand for useful distinctions made within reflection, and not 
for different kinds of being, discrete and separate prior to reflection. 
This is crucial because it is bound up with the wholesale rejection of the 
central problems of modern philosophy, problems which presuppose the above 
dualistic categories. Classical American philosophers, that is, did not 
attempt to provide better answers to traditional problems as much as they 
sought to dissolve, dismiss, and undercut these problems altogether by 
denying the metaphysical assumptions which gave rise to them." Page 3

And that brings us to Radical empiricism. The emphsis is the author's...

"The classical American philosophers reject traditional empriicism because 
it is not sufficiently empirical, not radically empirical. These concerns 
are developed most fully by James in ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM and by 
Dewey in "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" and EXPERIENCE AND NATURE, 
they insist that experience is an active, onging affair in whcih 
experiencING subject and experiencED object constitute a primal, integral, 
relational unity. Experience is not an interaction of separate subject and 
object, a point of connection between a subjective realm of the experiencer 
and the objective order of nature. Instead, experience is existentially 
inclusive, continuous, unified: it is that interaction of subject and object 
which CONSTITUTES subject and object - as partial features of this active, 
yet unanalyzed, totality. Experience, then, is not an "interaction" but a 
"transaction" in which the whole constitutes its interrelated aspects. 
Experience is primal or pure, and contains no "inner duplicity". Thus, the 
separation of it into knowing consciousness and known content can be 
explained, writes James, "as a particular sort of relation towards one 
antoher into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation 
itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject 
or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known". 
The implications of this view are many and profound. Negatively, radical 
empiricism is the basis for the rjection of modern philosophy described 
above: it demonstrates the artificiality of philsophical problems of somehow 
uniting mand and world, experience and nature, self and not-self, mental and 
physical, and so on. Positively, it points to a new direction for 
philosophy: philosophy myst examine the conditions under which the preceding 
distinction as are made and applied, and it must critially examine the 
values sered by these distinctns. It is this aim that motivates Dewey, for 
example, in his wtiting onethics, education, politics, and asesthetic and 
religious experience: today we are in desperate need of a philosophy that 
searates not experience from reality, but rather 'blind, slavish, 
meaningless action' from 'action that is free, significant, direted and 
responsible'." Pages 4&5

The phrase that really caught my eye here was, "Experience, then, is not an 
'interaction' but a 'transaction'." If I understand this rightly, this is 
what Pirsig means when he says that experience is not caused by subjects and 
objects but rather subjects and objects are caused by experience. They are 
derived from that primal, pure experience. They are a product of reflection. 
They're inventions of the intellect. Of course we don't have to re-invent 
this interpretation after every blink. This way of interpreting experience 
is given to us through language. This way of understanding the nature of 
experience has become common sense and we all do it so habitually and so 
automatically that most folks never doubt it for a moment. One need not 
become a mystic to overcome this inheritance, although I would welcome that 
route too. In a way its as simple as noticing that our thoughts and theories 
about experience are always going to come after the experience. And when we 
realize that subjects and objects are among those thoughts and theories it 
seems an obvious thing to say they are derived from experience. Saying that 
subjects and objects are the cause of experience, then, is a bit like saying 
books are caused by book reviews.

Thanks,
dmb

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