[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

marsha said to dmb:
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.

dmb says:
Yes, it takes concentration. There's no doubt about it. And even Matt, who reads about as seriously as anyone around here, is at a loss when it comes to radical empiricism. But I gotta say that listening to the essays from Librivox (thanks again for that) has paid off in a way that reading never did. The richness of it led me to scrutinize small sections, especially the one's that looked like the MOQ. But listening to the essays forced me to see them differently and I realized for the first time what he was saying about "conjunctive relations". It felt like a major breakthrough.

Those first two essays are key. As the editor's preface points out, these are constantly referred to in James's subsequent writings. The editor also discusses the development of James's own attitude toward radical empiricism. At first, he considered it to be separate from his pragmatism, as Pirsig mentions in Lila. But later he began to think it was the best way to get pragmatism to work and then he came to see it as even more important than pragmatism. This would be at the very end of his life, when he starting using "static" and "dynamic" as key terms. Here's a chunk of my term paper...

“A World of Pure Experience” is one of the most important articles in the series and the only one included in Stuhr’s anthology. In it, James says the following:
 
“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” and “a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation” (PCAP 182). 

This is radical empiricism in a nutshell but it requires some unpacking, as they say. The first thing to notice here is James wants experience to define the limits of what can and cannot be included in a philosophical system. In that sense it is not the experience that is “pure” but the world is “pure experience”, which is to say nothing but experience. Again, in this view reality and experience are not two different things. On the other hand, James describes “pure experience” or “the instant field of the present” as “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 someone’s opinion” (PCAP 189). Both hands work together, if you will, against the same Cartesian problematic. Insofar as pure experience itself is “only virtually classifiable” as thought and thing, we are not taking the subject-object distinction as a metaphysical foundation but as a product of reflection and insofar as we exclude extra-experiential entities from our “constructions” the subjective self and objective reality are excluded again. Unlike the traditional forms of empiricism, radical empiricism does not limit experience to sensory experience because it flows from those prior assumptions and the concept of sense experience is itself a product of reflection.
     The second thing to notice is what James says about “the relations that connect experiences”. James thinks that “conjunctive relations”, which is to say the way things are connected in experience, have been overlooked by traditional empiricism and that this oversight is what creates the gaps between terms, especially terms such as subjects and objects. For this reason, he wants us to pay special attention to “the most intimate of all relations”, “the conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy” (PCAP 182 and 183). To put it simply, James is saying “the passing of one experience into another” is itself “a definite sort of experience” (PCAP 183).  James wants us to notice these connecting experiences because it is a way to offer an alternative explanation as to the nature of the subjective self and of objective reality. Or rather, it explains how they came about in the first place. The failure to account for these relations generated the need for a subjective self as the agent that connects experience. The continuity of experience was explained by the existence of a thinker that has the thoughts or does the thinking, as something separate and distinct from the thinking itself. When we say, “it is raining”, to use a classic example, there isn’t actually an “it” that does the raining. The raining is “it”. That’s what James is saying about the Cartesian self and the objective reality that goes with it. “On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit together by different transitions” (PCAP 190). The re-conception of “objective” realities is similarly achieved by the connections between experiences. In his main example, the walk that terminates at Memorial Hall, the connection between the idea and the building itself is known in experience through a continuously developing progress and “objective” knowledge goes no deeper than this (PCAP 185). “Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept ‘had in mind’” (PCAP 186). “The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous ‘epistemological’ sense, but in the definite practical sense of being its substitute in various operations” (PCAP 186). That’s why James wants us to notice that most intimate of all relations, to notice the experienced connections between experiences. James says, “to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy” (PCAP 183). The error common to materialists and idealists, mistaking the products of reflection for existential realities as Stuhr put it, came in through that hole.

If nothing else, this will give you something to look for next time you're in the mood to listen.
dmb





 
   
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