[MD] What is SOM?

Mon Dec 17 21:16:34 PST 2007

Greetings David,

For me the James stuff is still too 
difficult.  I'd like to try to explain why.  I 
started the mp3 version of his 'Essays on Radical 
Empiricism', but quickly realized it required 
total concentration.  It felt like I walked in on 
a very interesting discussion on an unfamiliar 
topic.  I listened to the first two chapters and 
was just beginning to get some sense of the 
rhythm and meaning of his language.  I stopped 
because I realized this was going to require 
listening to the book twice and with more time 
and energy than I had available.  I certainly 
want to pursue understanding Radical Empiricism 
to his depth, and I plan to get back to it after 
the holidays.  Hopefully others are doing better than I.

Marsha

At 09:54 PM 12/17/2007, you wrote:

>Bo, Steve and all MOQers:
>
>Maybe you'd like to hear from some other 
>pragmatists on the topic of SOM. John Stuhr is 
>the Editor of "Pragmatism and Classical American 
>Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive 
>Essays. (Oxford University Press, 2000.) He 
>says, “In beginning to understand his view, it 
>cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using 
>the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense. 
>For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in 
>terms of the experiencing subject, or as the 
>interaction of a subject and object that exist 
>separate from their interaction. Instead, 
>Dewey’s view is radically empirical” and 
>“experience is an activity in which subject and 
>object are unified and constituted as partial 
>features and relations within this ingoing, 
>unanalyzed unity” (PCAP 437). Or, as Dewey 
>himself explains SOM in “The Need for a Recovery 
>of Philosophy”, “the characteristic feature of 
>this prior notion is the assumption that 
>experience centres in, or gathers about, or 
>proceeds from a centre or subject which is 
>outside the course of natural existence, and set 
>over against it” (PCAP 449). This “prior notion” 
>is what radical empiricism is rejecting. It is 
>seen as a mistake and as the source of many fake 
>problems in philosophy. As Stuhr puts it, “the 
>error of materialists and idealists alike” is 
>“the error of conferring existential status upon 
>the products of reflection” (PCAP 437). This is 
>a matter of treating our “products of 
>reflection” as if they were ontological 
>realities instead of parts of a conceptual 
>scheme. In this case, subjects and objects are 
>our primary example. When these abstractions are 
>taken from the realm of practical doings and 
>then asked to do work metaphysics or 
>epistemology, it creates many problems and 
>questions. Most of these have to do with how 
>subjects and objects relate, how the former can 
>know what the latter "really" is, for example. 
>“The problem of knowledge as conceived in the 
>industry of epistemology is the problem of 
>knowledge in general  of the possibility, 
>extent, and validity of knowledge in general” 
>but, Dewey says in “The Need for a Recovery of 
>Philosophy”, this problem only “exists because 
>it is assumed that there is a knower in general, 
>who is outside of the world to be known, and who 
>is defined in terms antithetical to the traits 
>of the world” (PCAP 449). Or, as William James 
>puts it in “A World of Pure Experience”, “the 
>first great pitfall from which a radical 
>standing by experience will save us is an 
>artificial conception of the relations between 
>knower and known. Throughout the history of 
>philosophy the subject and its object have been 
>treated as absolutely discontinuous entities” 
>and their relations have “assumed a paradoxical 
>character which all sorts of theories had to be 
>invented to overcome” (PCAP 184). I think all 
>this fits quite neatly with Pirsig's attack on 
>SOM. Not only does he explicitly align the MOQ 
>with James's radical empiricism, he attacks SOM 
>for the same reasons. He calls it a 
>"metaphysical assumption" or "concepts derived 
>from experience" instead of the "products of 
>reflection" but the complaint is about mistaking 
>intellectual abstractions for existential 
>realities. And I suppose one of the reasons the 
>abstraction seems so hard to shake is that we 
>can't shake the practical doings of life from 
>which they are drawn. The experience from which 
>they are abstracted remains even when the abstractions are seen as such.
>
>“The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what 
>is called empiricism. It claims that all 
>legitimate knowledge arises from the sense or by 
>thinking about what the sense provided. Most 
>empiricists deny that validity of any knowledge 
>gained through imagination, authority tradition, 
>or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard 
>fields such as art, morality, religion, and 
>metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of 
>Quality varies from this by saying that the 
>values of art and morality and even religious 
>mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past 
>they have been excluded for metaphysical 
>reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been 
>excluded because of the metaphysical assumption 
>that all the universe is composed of subjects 
>and objects and anything that can’t be 
>classified as a subject or an object isn’t 
>real.  There is no empirical evidence for this 
>assumption at all. Its just an assumption” (LILA 99).
>
>“The second of James’ two main systems of 
>philosophy 
was his radical empiricism. By this 
>he meant that subject 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 of psychical: it 
>logically precedes this distinction” (LILA 365).
>
>Hope that answers some questions.
>
>Thanks,
>dmb
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