[MD] subject/object: pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB, SA,

You brought up your problems with Rorty and how he supposedly rejects radical empiricism (which, under certain specifications, I deny) and the notion of "pure experience," so I thought I might return briefly to the subject.

The reason I've gotten in the habit of regarding Rorty as much of a radical empiricist as James or Dewey is because I take the thesis to be the collapse of the metaphysical/epistemological divide between subject/object, knower/known.  The question then becomes, "What of pure experience?  What role does it play?"

SA answered that pure doesn't contrast with impure, that DQ and static patterns are both pure, just different.  This is a standard move (one that Paul Turner and others have taken in dialectical response), but it doesn't bode well for the adjective "pure," for if nothing then counts as "impure," you might as well just drop the "pure" and stick with "experience."

Another answer is that it is more direct, but what does that mean?  Dan Glover once explained that distinction on analogy with being at a baseball game and watching the game on TV.  But once we become radical empiricists, aren't the two separate experiences, an experience of watching a baseball game on TV and an experience of watching a baseball game at Wrigley Field?  I question what the metaphysical import is of calling one direct and the other indirect.  Certainly we _should_ make a distinction between the two and the distinction is wildly important in discussing the changes in our culture and which directions we should be going, but it eludes me how this gives us a foothold, at least one without sliding away from being radical empiricists.

The most important answer that Pirsig, James, and Dewey give is the one you, DMB, gave, which is that pure experience is more basic. One version of "basic" is on the analogy with the experience of a baby.  A baby experiences everything freshly and from there accumulates the patterns of experience that are less basic to the first experiences.  The question: why do we want to become more like babies?  If "basic" means "first" or even just "new," it makes sense, but it doesn't explain what the metaphysical import is--why make such a big deal out of it if it's simply the first shit you've been hit with and/or the most recently new shit you've been hit with?

Another sense of basic is the one Dewey used when he defined metaphysics in Experience and Nature as the search for the most generic traits of existence.  But we can name a lot of generic things.  The trick with being general is to say something both generic and _interesting_, i.e. controversial, but that is next to impossible without reifying the subject material--doing "bad" metaphysics.  There's a lot of really general, really abstract stuff that's all true, but entirely banal.

Still another sense of basic is the one that Kantians like Northrop use, which is the one Pirsig uses when he gives the example of touching a hot stove.  The low valuation comes before, is more basic, than the pain or the "ouch" uttered.  In this case, it is not just "first."  If it was, we'd still need that explanation of import ("Yes, of course, I agree that some stuff happens before I consciously identify the experience as pain or say 'ouch!'  What's your point?").  Basic in this sense is more like the distinction between concepts and experience.  We have experiences, and _then_ we carve them up with words and concepts.  But as far as I can tell, that exactly is the Kantian notion of a scheme/content distinction.  Using Northrop's language, I have no idea how one can say that they've given up the Myth of the Given and still use "pure experience" in the same breath.

Pure experience aside, I think most of our haggling still consists over this notion of the "linguistic turn."  As I see it, you are taking it far too seriously, the converse of the seriousness with which the logical positivists took it (which is what you keep accusing me of).  Your stance looks to me like a pro-experience-talk position, and you then paint me as being pro-language/anti-experience.  With regards to radical empiricism, this isn't quite right.  As I see it, once we become radical empiricists, it _doesn't matter_ whether we talk about what we experience or we talk about what we talk about.  It simply doesn't matter.  The position of the pragmatist should simply be that we need to stay away from metaphysical/epistemological problems/dualisms.  It doesn't matter whether we are professed radical empiricists or psychological nominalists--what matters is the collapse of dualisms: appearance/reality, subject/object, accident/essence, knower/known, scheme/content, fact/convention, analytic/synthetic, etc., etc.

The stance that Rorty ended his life with was basically that the linguistic turn had been useful for Anglo-American philosophers because it had helped work the dialectic of modern philosophy to its end point.  That's about it.  "Experience" as it had been used at the beginning of the century was still being used ambiguously between something like a "sense impression" and an "idea".  But working our way out of the ambiguity in philosophical discourse and ditching the dualisms is just as possible with "experience" as with "language," it just so happens the historical record (for the most part, barring the philosophers driven underground by the analytic establishment) shows philosophers turning from talk about experience to talk about language.

(And just a note, Quine did aggressively take the linguistic turn, and though he did take the first huge swing at the structures of the logical positivists, he could easily be accused of having remained too positivistic (which is, roughly, what I accused him of). Kuhn is another matter.  To my knowledge, Kuhn wasn't influenced by the positivists much at all, and saying he was an analytic philosopher is like saying that Wittgenstein was a Continental philosopher--he was from Europe, but his way of philosophizing didn't have much similarity with Heidegger or Sartre.  To my mind, Kuhn is one of your biggest allies--as, indeed, he was first taught to me, side by side with Pirsig.)

Matt

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