[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

Hi DMB/Matt

Might we ask what is unpure experience or standard empiricism?

Full of SOM assumptions and projections, unpure experience
takes all experience to be perceptions, impressions or ideas
or sensations in our minds, cut off from reality and things-in-themselves.

Pure experience takes experience to be full blooded reality,
reality is change, and our reality is what we experience,
and we experience change, and the value of that change for
good or bad. Reality is what changes our experience, what moves
it, reality is our interconnected and dynamic response to all that is.
Only what brings about change enters reality. The static is that
change that repeats. SOM imagines that experience occurs when
a detached and unchanging substance has knowledge of a detached
thing-in-itself substance.

For pure experience there is change and its value from which we
then derive our knowledge.

Ta
David M






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 5:38 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] subject/object: pragmatism



Matt and all MOQers:

Matt said:
...if we are both in agreement on the collapse of SOM (which as Pirsigians 
we always have; the new part is that we've agreed that whoever does so 
successfully counts as a "radical empiricist," which I consider a 
significant stride in bridge-building) and that knowledge is a linguistic 
tool (where there is no language, there is no thing called "knowledge"; I'm 
mainly restating the points to regain your assent on variations I would 
accept), then as I see it, we've accepted much, if not all, of what goes 
into Pirsig's concept of Quality and Rorty's "linguistified" version of 
Deweyan pragmatism.

dmb says:
I'm afraid the bridge has yet to be built on these points. Its pretty clear 
that Rorty is not a radical empiricist. Hildebrand answered some questions 
on this point for me the other day. I asked, "So that means Rorty has to 
dump James's radical empiricism and Dewey's theory of inquiry and the like?" 
Yep, he said in reply. As I understand it, Rorty is rejecting SOM based on 
its failure in logical positivism in particular and generally its failure 
throughout history to obtain what it sought. As he puts it, he reads the 
history of philosophy and draws a moral from it. And the moral he draws is 
that we should forget the whole mess and talk about something else. James 
and Dewey see that history too, but they formulated things like radical 
empiricism as a specific alternative to SOM. That's very different from 
simply changing the subject. And one of the most important implications of 
this classical approach is that linguistic or conceptual knowledge is not 
the only kind of knowing. In fact, Dewey's theory of inquiry spells out the 
realtionship between the various kinds of knowing and the pre-intellectual 
aspect is what gets the whole thing started and guides the entire process, 
including the intellectual aspects. Rorty doesn't mind just pulling stuff 
out from James and Dewey. He finds much to like there. But its not a 
coincidence that we disagree on these particular points because pure 
experience would be among the things Rorty wants to leave behind too.

Matt continued:
...I'm wondering what role "pure" plays in describing the concept of 
experience.  I don't know how to identify "pure experience," which is why I 
have difficulty getting a grasp on it, which is what I would need to first 
to affirm _or_ reject.  ...The way I read them, I'm not sure how you unpack 
them without the notion of "directness" that seems to me Platonic.  You went 
back to Dewey to unpack the analogies, and I can agree with the Deweyan 
spin, the distinction between having and knowing.  I consider this 
distinction to be the same as the one Rorty deploys between being caused to 
think something and having a reason to think something....

dmb says:
Rorty's distinction between "caused to think" and "reason to think" can't be 
relevant to the pre-intellectual experience insofar as it designates 
something that precisely is not thinking. And if the directness or immediacy 
of this experience were Platonic, then it would entail some kind of claim 
about the subject having perfect access to objective or ultimate reality. 
But as we all know, classical pragmatists are making these claims about pure 
experience as part of their rejection of exactly that. In fact, the 
rejection of SOM and Platonism (SOM's grandfather) is something all 
pragmatist share. I realize that you're suspicious that there is some 
inadvertent Platonism going on in the MOQ and that pure experience is the 
most likely place, but I'd ask you to suspend that suspicion for a while. 
Give Bob, John and Jim the benefit of the doubt just long enough to ponder 
what a non-Platonic version of the concept looks like.

Matt said:
So my view is this: you have two requirements in play to determine whether 
Rorty is a radical empiricist or not—1) reject SOM and 2) have a place for 
“pure experience.”  We finally agree that Rorty rejects SOM, but you think 
this leaves us floating free without “pure experience” (you and many other 
professionals; professionals, I should add, that I have no doubt you can 
find many to back you up—I could even, and have on occasion, point the way 
to some of them—it is just that I have disagreements with them, too). 
However, on the construal of “pure experience” I’m seeing you use, I doubt 
that Rorty lacks such a component. If it counts as pure experience to think 
that there is a difference between causal chains and inferential chains, 
then Rorty has such a component.  The way Rorty puts the point is that we 
could never become unanchored from experience/the world/reality because the 
distinction between anchored/unanchored is a Cartesian distinction—created 
when Descartes said that we might be radically wrong about the world because 
of the radical disconnect between subject and object.

dmb says:
Causal chains and inferential chains? Unanchored from experience? I also 
doubt that these concepts are relevant to the debate, but feel free to 
explain. As I understand it, Rorty would reject any kind of empiricism as 
Platonic and radical empiricism didn't impress him enough to make an 
exception. But I'd also like to point out that for every professional backer 
I could find, you could find 10 or 20 or maybe more. Hildebrand is saddened 
that people tend to read Rorty and simply take his word for it. His 
pragmatism is usually considered theee pragmatism. Many people know about 
James and Dewey only through Rorty's work.

Matt said:
In other words, I have no doubt that you protested when you read earlier 
that we agree that to reject SOM makes you count as a radical empiricist. 
It is more than that, I suspect you thinking.  And you’d be right, but I 
think that after a thorough rejection of SOM, everything else falls into 
place.  I think a thorough pragmatism is a thorough rejection, which makes 
for a radical empiricist, and you are right, a thorough rejection would 
require a place for the distinction between causal and inferential chains. 
Some philosophers have conflated the two, but Rorty has spent some time 
untying them.

dmb says:
Again, you'd have to explains what these chains are and what relevance they 
hold for this discussion. I honestly have no idea. But of course rejecting 
SOM can mean lots of different things. Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 
others have done so with wildly different results. I didn't realize this 
until recently, but rejecting SOM has been a fairly regular feature of 
philosophy for a while.

Matt said:
The gist is that, once you reject the distinction between experience and 
reality, as Dewey did, you get to say that you could never be out of touch 
with reality as Descartes thought, and saying that has the force of meaning 
you never could swing free from the world and what’s in it.  And that means 
that Rorty’s slogan of solidarity has the virtues of rejecting Objectivity 
while reaffirming the fact that every person themselves has their own 
connection to reality—and calling something true is what falls out when we 
mix everybody’s opinion together: no opinion is _dis_connected, as the 
Cartesian/realist tradition thinks, it’s just that not all opinions are 
true.

dmb says:
One can't swing free from the world? Not even with a really, really big 
swing? No? Darn! That sounds like great fun. More seriously, it seems to me 
that Rorty's emphasis on solidarity and intersubjective agreement is a 
relatively tepid form of what the classical pragmatists were shooting for, 
namely inquiry as active engagement. He's going to say that the claims we 
make are only constrained by language, in a community of people who know 
what they're talking about while the classical pragmatists will say our 
claims are constrained by experience more generally.

On the role played by pure experience or Quality, Matt said:
Again, it depends.  If “pure experience” means “causally independent,” then 
it plays that role.  It refers to how we can’t think the tiger from hurting 
us, at least without getting our hands into it.  And in this case, I 
question the use of “pure.”  Why not just “experience”?  In the case of what 
role is played by Pirsig’s concept of Quality, that’s a much larger question 
because it plays many roles in Pirsig’s philosophy.  But how about this: 
Quality is reality, there’s no difference, we couldn’t swing free of it if 
we tried, and we are constantly involved in valuing some parts more or less 
than others.

dmb says:
That's just it. Quality plays such a central role in the MOQ. That's what 
its all about. I guess that's why I'm so interested in getting you to see 
what role pure experience plays. Without that, Pirsig is only saying we like 
some thing more than others, which we already knew. Again, I really think 
that you need to suspend your suspicions about Platonic this and Cartesian 
that. Pure experience does not refer to raw sensory data from an external 
reality. This came up in class the other day, possibly because I brought it 
up. I asked Hildebrand if Dewey's descriptions of this primary experience in 
terms of an organism and its enviroment didn't just put him back into SOM. 
Isn't that just a subject and in objective reality dressed up in 
naturalistic terms? That's a problem with our language and conceptual 
equipment, he explained. The Germans who tried to write philosophy without 
SOM ended up with all sorts of weird hyphenated strings of words, or words 
with lines through them and other strange tatics to work around the 
difficulty. And so your complaints about the word "pure", as if that usage 
undoes all the anti-Platonic, anti-Cartesian, anti-SOM things that were 
spelled out in ZAMM and LILA, strike me as unfounded and even a little 
unfair. In any case, this way of looking at the idea is keeping you from 
seeing the idea.

I looked at the blog entry where you express these suspicions of Platonism 
with respect to DQ. In every case you treat the idea as if it were Platonic 
and then condemn it for being Platonic. So much so that you take Pirsig to 
be saying we should become babies and give up the fruits of civilzation, 
that "pre-intellectual experience is better than intellectual experience" 
and "eating hot dogs is better than reading Proust". Dude, that is so not 
true and so not the point.

Think of it this way. Moyers asks Campbell about the meaning of life. Right 
away, Campbell says something like...  I don't think "meaning" is what 
people really want, even if they think they do. What they really want is to 
feel like they're alive, you know, really in it.  ...And then he told a 
little story about a race he ran at a track meet. He'd been involved in the 
sport for years, he was well trained, experienced and feeling real good that 
day. Everything was working for him and he had that feeling. He felt totally 
alive because there was a certain quality of engagment with that activity 
such that it was excellent beyond words. I supposed he won the race too, but 
that's beside the point. The thing that he points to here is a certain 
quality of engaged activity, of really gooving on it, being deeply 
interested in the outcome and the process. Think motorcycle repair or 
sailing or writing or whatever. Intellectual activities are not excluded 
from this level of engagement. This roughly what Dewey means by an aesthetic 
experience and it figures into his theory of inquiry too. I imagine that 
conversations could be conducted with this quality of engagement too, but I 
suspect that's not exactly what Rorty's solidarity is all about.

Later,
dmb




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