[MD] "100% confident"

[Ham Priday]

[DMB says]:
> Well, I hate to sound like such a know-it-all, but I already knew about
> the James-Nashua connection. It played a substantial role in a paper I
> did a few months ago. Apparently, James was the only Western philosopher
> that made a lick of sense to Nashua, at least when he was getting started.
> In fact, I found basically this same idea in quite a number of thinkers
> including Bergson and Heidegger. James and Bergson were pen pals
> and admired each other very much.
>
> But my question remains. How does it make sense to say that all
> experience is conceptual and then quote James talking about that which
> "we can only feel without conceiving"?  How does it make sense to deny
> that this feeling is an experience? Maybe I should be more generous and
> take this as an admission that you already see the point, that you already
> see the logical impossibility of your previous claims. Despite Krueger's
> injection of the material self or corporeal body, which doesn't reflect
> James's explanations of pure experience as neither physical nor psychica,
> this fairly well make the same point I was making. In any case, if this is
> what your "value-sensibility" is supposed to mean, then it shouldn't be
> much of a trick to see what Pirsig's Quality is.

It makes sense to say that experience is conceptual because that's what it 
is.  Every experience is a conception of some aspect of beingness, whether 
it's a tooth that aches, a song that exalts, a dance that titillates, a 
lesson that motivates, a journey that excites, or a speech that inspires. 
In fact, Krueger notes that "James was suspicious of the idea that 
conceptual or propositional thought functions as the primitive-and thus 
irreducible-interface between self and world.  On this conceptualist or 
'intellectualist' line, as James refers to it, ALL THINKING AND EXPERIENCE 
INVOLVES CONCEPTS.  NO CONCEPTS, NO EXPERIENCE."  [My emphasis]

But pure, undifferentiated consciousness of the kind that intrigued James 
and Nishida is what we "feel without conceiving".  It is not "the corporeal 
body" as "a material entity over against other material entities," but the 
affinity of the self for its complementary essence.  Says Krueger: "Pure 
experience is thus normatively superior to any other mode of experience in 
which discriminations or distinctions of any kind have comprised the 
immediacy and spontaneity of an experience without dualistic bifurcations." 
...

"According to Nishida, the authentic or "true self" is only realized in pure 
experience: it is a mode of being-in-the-world in which ego-consciousness 
has been negated, and the 'emptied' self actively engages the world and 
others in a state of selfless openness and radical receptivity."

Philosophers can redefine common terms to designate or distinguish one 
concept from another.  So if the true self is only realized when 
"ego-consciousness has been negated," why call it experience?  It is not 
experienced as an "other"; it is not even experienced as a proprietary self. 
Nishida called it the "emptied "self".  I call it "sensibility" -- the 
primary state of "selfness" prior to any relational construct of identity or 
intellection.  Ergo: value-sensibility.  Of course value does relate 
(metaphysically) to the primary source, but this relationship is not a 
conscious one, nor is it experienced as such.  I suppose it's asking too 
much for you to accept my view that value is man's link to Essence.  But 
does this definition of fundamental selfness make no sense to you?

--Ham