[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

I think this is where other people become bored with our conversations, so since I am, too, I'll make this short.

DMB, you have the strangest habit of acting like a philistine.  I don't know why.

First of all, you inserted parenthetically a "(mystical)" in your brush up quote of me.  You needed a bracket, because parentheses look like I said "my glosses on such (mystical) passages," as if I was implying none to subtly that I think the passages you've been using are mystical.  Since you made a drop in my quote, you needed brackets.

Second, I apologize, but I haven't found your explanations very helpful.  They haven't helped me understand what this simple idea of "pure experience" is.  I understand many things, but I just don't get what "pure experience" is that is supposed to be so uncontroversial, yet so overlooked by the history of philosophy, particularly by 20th-century analytic philosophers.  It seems like you're trying to explain something simple with jargon, which is something I'm constantly accused of, which is why I've been amazed that I haven't been able to find the simple part--at least one that when I run it back by you with, you approve of.  I love reading James and Dewey.  I just don't understand how you're reading them, mainly because you seem to think they are at such odds with Rorty.  I don't think they are.  That's mainly it.

Third, a "gloss" is "an explanation or translation, by means of a marginal or interlinear
note, of a technical or unusual expression in a manuscript text."  You say one thing, then I repeat it back to you in different words that I think mean the same thing.  That way I can figure out if we are on the same page.  You read a Dewey passage, I read a Dewey passage.  You say one thing to sum it up, I say another thing to sum it up.  I think your summation means one thing, you think my summation means another.  We're just talking past each other.  It happens.  The world will be okay.

Fourth, I haven't rejected the substance of "pure experience," only the style.  I have been offering reinterpretations to you in a style I find more congenial.  I have reframed radical empiricism over and over in the idioms I prefer--using most of the time whatever definition of radical empiricism you most recently offered--and you say that my reframing eviscerates it ("eviscerates" means "to disembowel").  Except that I don't know why you think I'm destroying it.  As baffling as you find my "rejection" (which it isn't if you've been half-listening), I find your rejection of my reframes because it further and further evacuates the possibilities of what "pure experience" could be.

So, maybe we should start again:

If radical empiricism requires the rejection of the knower/known dualism and a replacement ontology/description-of-the-abandoned-terrain, then Rorty both rejects that dualism and has a replacement ontology/description.  If this replacement ontology requires us to be hooked to the world directly to count itself as an empiricism, then Rorty is an empiricist because he does not believe that we could be anything but directly hooked to the world.

If pure experience is the name of our direct connection to reality under radical empiricism, then Rorty believes that all of our experience is pure, because all of it is direct in the sense that nothing could get in the way of reality and us.

And for anyone who wants a different take on how Pirsig and Dewey pair together on the topic of primary and secondary experience, you might want to take a look at something I wrote a little while ago:

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2007/03/notes-on-experience-dewey-and-pirsig.html

Matt

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