[MD] What is SOM?

Tue Dec 18 23:16:39 PST 2007

DMB,

Thanks.  This helps.  I'll put it aside for when I get back to the essays.

Marsha

At 11:55 AM 12/18/2007, you wrote:

>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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>
>
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>
>_________________________________________________________________
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