[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[David M]

Hi DMB

I think the below is pretty good, it is clear how you are increasingly 
seeing how the MOQ relates
to the wider philosophical tradtion. I think the concerns Matt has about 
avoiding essentialism,etc
in our use of MOQ and pragmatic language is good advice, and we do need to 
ensure we make
it clear that we are not using words like 'pure' in this way, but once we 
have done this, and you have done
this below, I don't see that we have a problem and Matt should just accept 
that we can use the terms
in this way if we want to and we are not taking all the baggage with us that 
he fears. I mean we have
ti use words to mark our distinctions and they all have baggage. Otherwise 
we go German and start making
up new words as only Germans can (which has its uses but do lead into 
obscurity).

Thanks
David M


Matt said to dmb:
I've admitted over and over that I don't understand what "pure experience" 
is.  I've said for years, over and over, that if my criticisms of Pirsigian 
rhetorical maneuvers, ...are not what Pirsig meant, or should mean, then 
ignore them and tell me what they do mean. But when you give me the same 
stuff, what am I to do? ...I'm just trying to get it spelled out.  And every 
time I think I understand it, and try and hook it up to how I see the world 
working, you slap me down.  Maybe I'm inherently missing something from my 
own outlook.  That would seem to be it.  I'm an anti-realist free floating 
in a conversation.  Except that we both know that that's not an actual 
possibility, but only a philosophical fantasy created by a Platonic 
language.  But if we both know that, then what else is there to know?  What 
is pure experience?

dmb says:
I was hoping that you'd noticed my new explanations. The stuff on James, 
Dewey and Mead, for example. I'd hoped you felt a sense of relief at the 
absence of any talk about mysticism in relation to pure experience. I've 
been reading stuff that illuminates the concept for me quite a bit and I'd 
hoped it would show. Here's one that you may have heard but I have some 
fresh eyes on it by way of Nietzsche. Think of the way Pirsig traces the 
problem of SOM back to Plato, specifically the attempt to abstract the good 
out of actual lived experience and transform it into the good-in-itself, a 
permanent fixed form. And its part of a picture of reality such that the 
Good, the True and the Beautiful are elsewhere, in some transcendent realm. 
And its easy to see how this is just philosophy as a rationalism that 
refuses to get its hands dirty. It detests all that dirty, messy empirical 
sort of knowledge, the knowledge of slaves and women. You know, its 
world-hating elitist bullshit. That's the kind of anti-Platonism you see in 
the MOQ. Radical empiricism is a mighty fine antidote for such otherworldly 
snobbery. It deliberately grounds itself in the messiness of everyday life. 
And the sociology works too. Dewey, just for one, made no bones about 
connecting liberal democracy to his philosoply. Anyway, the doctrine of pure 
experience comes just a few paragraphs after radical empiricism is explained 
within the same essay. There is a separate piece devoted the latter, but the 
point is simply that the two go together. Pure experience serves as a name 
for the starting point of radical empiricism. Primary empirical reality is 
also a good name for that reason. You've heard them all by now; undivided 
reality, undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, etc, Thanks to my recently 
reading I can now add terms like original impetus, the felt situation, the 
primordial field of experience. As you can see, these terms convey a sense 
of what sort of experience they're refering to, each giving a slightly 
different connotation but all suggesting a vague sense, a general feeling, a 
basic impression. This starting point is then the first phase in a series of 
processes that transform the original quality into our ordinary conceptual 
understanding. Don't forget that James was a psychologists and there is also 
very recent science that backs this picture. I mean, this isn't a 
philosophical theory so much as an description of what is observed. The 
philosophical part comes in the decision to take this messy sort of 
experience as important to a coherent philosophical picture, as important to 
our descriptions of what goes on in life.

Matt said
My complaints about "pure" right now are that 1) it is rhetorically unwise 
given the weight of the history of philosophy and 2) why "pure experience" 
and not "experience"? That's the question I've kept forwarding that you have 
not stepped up to answer directly, though I've not said anything until now 
about that strange lack: Why "pure experience" and not just "experience"? 
What is the "pure" doing that needs to done?

dmb says:
I'm not very sensitive to the weight of history on this or that word. I 
generally just use the conventional meanings in trying to explain terms like 
"pure experience". I could make an educated guess that James used the term 
to distinguish it from the traditional meanings of experience, namely 
sensory experience or subjective experience, both of which were predictated 
on the subject-object dualism. In fact, in his description James says that 
pure experience is prior to the distinction between subject and object and 
the like. I suppose "pure" also connotes the undivided or undifferentiated 
charteristic found in those other terms. James says the content of this 
experience is "only virtually classifiable" into words, concepts, and 
definitions such as we need for dualisms even as basic as ass and stove. So 
"pure" designates this generally unnoticed and neglected experience and 
distinquishes it from SOMists definitions of experience. Its not exactly 
correct to think of this pure experience in terms of raw sensory data or 
some other biological level "cognition" but that would really put one back 
into an SOM framework. It serves to explain a counter-intuitive idea, but I 
think ultimately these classical pragmatists are saying something radical. I 
see Nietzsche's will to power in it. He and James, with the latter's 
emphasis on the temperment of the philosopher in determining his vision, 
seem to be saying that even the greatest artistic and intellectual 
achievements are ultimately an expression of those basic and primordial 
feelings about the world. They're the ones who successfully take that 
original impetus and let it guide them through all the subsequent phases of 
working out that creation so that the original somehow fiqure into the final 
products. And this happens in a thousand tiny ways to all of us every day.

I'm just trying to orient you here and I'm too tired to be more careful 
anyway. I don't think its too tough to see how pure experience is an 
anti-dote to Platonic infection. Its certainly a thorough going rejection of 
cartesianism or SOM. At this point, showing you what its not seems about as 
important as showing you what it is, so I tried a little of both.

Oh, and radical empiricism would rule out anything like the pure forms or 
thing-in-itself insofar as they are not known in experience. So if the 
"pure" bothers you for that reason, I think you can rest easy. Pure 
experience is more like formless and it is known in experience, constantly. 
There's nothing otherworldly or supernatural about it. Direct everyday 
experience and all that.







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