[MD] Food for Thought

[Case]

[Ham]
Whether Case fully understands Pirsig's ontology or not, he has the right
slant on William James, including the point that he was primarily a
psychologist.  James' use of the word "essence" in the statement "breath
...is the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity
known to them as consciousness" could just as well have been "basis",
"premise" or "canard".  It was not a metaphysical allusion.  That comes
later, when he says: "But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same
stuff as things are."

[Case]
I doubt if James uses essence in the same way that you do. But I think his
point is that thoughts are not supernatural acausal events.

[Ham]
Case is also right in "lopping off the TIT's" of Kant's transcendental
idealism, whether Pirsig has effectively succeeded in doing this or not.
The bottom line is that the "stuff" of reality is sensibility, not the
essence of "things-in-themselves".  Reality is the sensibility of an
undivided essence.  The confusion lies in equating absolute sensibility with
(individuated) consciousness or experience, which is being-aware -- a
subject/object dichotomy.  Without a source of sensibility there can be
neither being nor awareness, subject nor object.  The primary source is the
non-contradictory identity of both contingents, i.e., the potentiality of
sensibility to actualize difference.

[Case]
James is rooting this process in the 'real' world of sensation and
perception. He talks about what we experience and how we come to know. This
business about "absolute sensibility" and "undivided essence" would leave
James in the same state it leaves most of us: scratching our heads.