[MD] "100% confident"

[Ham Priday]

DMB --



Ham said to dmb:
 ...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]

> Look at that Krueger quote again, Ham. Again, you are defending my points
> and undermining your own. He's saying that "James is suspicious of the 
> idea".
> I'd say that a bit of an understatement of the case, but the point is 
> simply that
> James rejects the intellectualist line, which is your line about all 
> experience
> being conceptual. The part you added emphasis to is the suspicious part.
> He and Dewey both go into great detail about all the problems this
.> intellectualist line has caused.

I don't want to beat a dead horse and I can't do justice to this essay by 
quoting it in pieces.  But Krueger divides it into two relevant sections: 
(2) James on Pure Experience and (4) Nishida on Realizing Pure Experience. 
In discussing James's "pure experience"' he says:

"James's brand of radical empiricism therefore looks to ground his empirical 
philosophy on the raw material of experience as given.  Of this 
methodological principle he writes: 'The postulate is that the only things 
that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in 
terms drawn from experience.'  With his distinctive notion of pure 
experience, James looked to probe what he perceived to be the underlying 
experiential unity behind language and reflective or conceptual thought. 
Mirroring a basic Zen Buddhist presupposition that Nishida will later 
utilize for his own ends, James argued that conceptual analysis could never 
provide an exhaustive account of human experience in its phenomenal 
richness. And like Nishida and Zen, we can pinpoint a suspicion of concepts 
and conceptual analysis that underwrites James's formulation of pure 
experience. This suspicion led some contemporary critics to dismiss his 
claims on this point as endorsing a kind of undisciplined irrationalism and 
has contributed to a lingering caricature of James as anti-logical."

As I understand it, the author emphasizes that James is bound to the 
empirical position that conscious experience is relational and 
differentiated (i.e., conceptual), but his "suspicion of concepts" being 
analyzable in terms of "pure experience" gave him pause and also cast doubt 
on his logic.  It's clear to me that (like Pirsig) James wanted to develop 
an objective methodology, and that this prevented him from using any other 
term for the content of subjective awareness than "experience" (such as 
"intuition", "feeling", or "sensibility"), even though he realized that 
experience didn't quite cover it.

Krueger returns to this point at the conclusion of this section by saying 
that "James does not address the notion of non-conceptual content as 
explicitly as many contemporary philosophers of mind - and furthermore, it's 
not clear that he's entirely consistent on this point, as I discuss below - 
James does continually insist that there is a truth to our concrete 
experience of reality that conceptual analysis and the formal truths of 
logic cannot explicate."   In other words, there are some loopholes in this 
epistemology.

Nishida, on the other hand, expands James's halting stance into a holistic 
concept -- even using the terms "intuition", "undifferentiated plenum", and 
"consciousness-as-selective-interest" (Value-sensibility?):

"The phenomenal world, according to Nishida, and the epistemic attitude of 
thought that establishes it, is the realm of everyday "inauthentic" 
experience.  It is the world experienced from within the static cogito: a 
world of dualistic separations between self and world, subject and object. 
And therefore it is reflection that "carves up" the undifferentiated plenum 
of pure experience and, as James would put it, contracts reality to a 
limited number of aspects selected to meet some pragmatic concern.  Thought 
is what separates pure experience into functional fragments, objects for a 
consciousness-as-selective-interest. And Nishida says that reflection is 
thus a second-order experience 'adulterated with some sort of thought,' 
supporting the 'addition of deliberative discrimination.'  Thought 
establishes a binary structure within reality.  Reflection "fixes" the self 
into a static cogito, or ego-self, as the enduring pole within the stream of 
experience.  This is what pulls us out of the "quasi-chaos" of pure 
experience and introduces the existential separation between the self and a 
seemingly external world."

Concerning your assertion that Essence is "ruled out by radical empiricism", 
regrettably, this would seem to be the case.  The empiricists have 
effectively repealed spirituality, subjectivity, individual freedom, 
metaphysics, and teleology from our culture as "reified abstractions".  The 
only reality they acknowledge is experiential existence, and there is even 
some doubt about that.  I have a simpler word for what you academics like to 
call "reification".  Nihilism.

--Ham