[MD] John Carl's Critique of Pure Experience INST04

[John Carl]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:09 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> dmb says:
> Right, the idea is to fix that defective value-free intellect. But that's
> exactly what Kreuger is talking about here. Those "inarticulate (or again,
> non-conceptual) dimensions of our lived existence" are exactly the values
> that "his 'intellectualist' opponents" were leaving out.


But by "non-conceptual" don't you actually mean "pre-conceptual"?  Man will
inevitably conceptualize, its in his nature.  So any dimension of life that
is permanently non-conceptual - well I just couldn't have any ideas about
that.  Since concepts are ideas.





> dmb says:
>
> I'll remind you that Kreuger mentioned how James's critics took him for
> some kind of anti-intellectual irrationalists. Likewise, you may have
> noticed that I recently tried to dispute some anti-intellectualist
> interpretations of Pirsig in this forum. But neither James nor Pirsig are
> anti-intellectual. They're trying to expand rationality so as to include
> "feeling".



Well with Pirsig, I'd say "value" rather than "feeling".  Quality is more
than "how something makes you feel".   Value can mean differentiation, but
in MoQ terms it means "Good".



> Like Nietzsche said, to exclude affect is to castrate the intellect.
> They're saying that it is irrational to exclude the irrational from our
> accounts and understandings of the world because they are very much at the
> center of the world as we experience it.


Hmmm...  I'm not sure how I feel about that... I'm not sure I value it much
either.  I can't agree that "the irrational is very much the center of the
world I experience".   Irrationality is more than "things don't fit together
perfectly".  Irrationality can be self-contradiction, it can be all kinds of
things that might be part of my experience, but saying "the center" takes it
too far.



>
> Kreuger said:
> This pursuit of concreteness and immediacy led James to begin his
> investigations with he termed "pure experience": reality understood as "a
> that, an Absolute, a 'pure' experience on an enormous scale,
> undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing."
>

> John replied:
> Then it has no utility.  An undifferentiable continuum is the same thing as
> nothing, and no matter how enormous your nothing is, it's still nothing.
>
> dmb says:
>
> Our mutual pal Alan Watts would point out that nothingness is no-thingness.
> See, if conceptualization is where we recognize all the objects, all the
> things in our perceptual field, then the pre-conceptual moment of awareness
> does not yet include "things" as such. Those things, the whole world of the
> ten thousand things, are concepts we immediately and habitually impose on
> this pure, undifferentiated experience. Pure experience is prior to the
> reflexive thematizing of the cogito in language and thought.
>

Ah but here again you are describing something that does make a certain
amount of sense, something un-differentiated, something un-conceived,
something "pre", whereas my objection centered uopn using terms which go
much further and make no sense - "undifferentiable" into thought and thing?
 If you wanna postulate the value in experience before the static traps of
intellect have done their categorization, I can follow.  But if you insist
upon the value of an experience that will never be categorized,
conceptualized, differentiated or thought about, then I have ask, "where's
the beef?"  Answer - there ain't any.


>
> John replied:
> Ah, it's all about sequence now?  That's the important thing?  Which came
> first?  As I basically complained to Dave once in a post on the same theme,
> "Are we just arguing about the size of a tiny slice of time?"  And would add
> now, "why?"  Sounds like something one of them dirty, stinkin', austere
> epistemologists would get into.
>
> dmb says:
>
> Well. okay but that tiny slice of time is the present moment.



What slice of time?  How big?  This gets into moments dancing on the pins of
your head type silliness.



> Since the past exists only in our present memories and the future exists
> only in our present plans, that tiny slice of time is the only reality we
> ever get.



Where?  Oops.  Missed it.  Dang, there goes my one shot at reality.  Wait a
minute!  Here it comes again!  Nope, missed it.

I'll catch it next time.



> dmb says:
> Dude, you're being kind of neurotic about this point. Your pretended
> bafflement over the term "concept" is getting old. It's just an ordinary
> word and you're a smart guy. If you don't know what a word means, look it up
> ferchrissssake.


Ok, I finally did do that.  And concept is not necessarily linguistic.  I
think I got that settled later on.  It's "usually" associated with words.
Nice neat philosophical term, eh?  "Usually".  Concept = Idea.  Or orderly
patterned information.  Pure experience is when there is no order imposed
yet.



> Then look again at what Kreuger is saying. There is a parallel in Lila. Can
> you think of it? I've quoted it. Need a hint?  ...From Chapter 29: "...he
> [James] meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of
> experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. The are concepts derived
> from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of
> life..."  This looks a bit like idealism, eh?


The cosmic order being of a primarily moral order is at the heart of how I
define idealism.  The immediate flux of life is idealistic if a moral
direction is imputed prior to intellect, and mechanistic if morality is
 applied subjectively.  We are getting into an area of investigation about
the primary metaphysical reality of Value which is unsettled and unsettling.


Do you believe it's possible to create a value free metaphysics out of the
MoQ?



> If the earth, sky, sea and our days and nights are all concepts, then the
> whole world is made of ideas.


And philosophically, that's not a bad idea.  Where does the cosmos reside?
 In a mind.



> Ah, but then there is Quality, the force that has caused us to create this
> world. That's what keeps us from making stuff up arbitrarily.



Well I make up stuff all the time.  Admittedly, it's not entirely
arbitrarily.




>
> Kreuger said:
> For James, therefore, the phenomenal world is both ontologically and
> epistemologically prior to the objective world and the subjective world.
> James's analysis led him to a primordial level of unified experience that
> arises prior to the subject-object distinction, and provided the ground for
> an ontology that harbors no aperture for any brand of metaphysical dualism.
> In doing so, he furthermore safeguards the irreducible primacy of our
> nonconceptual phenomenal experience, which emerges from the sensory
> modalities of an agent immersed and acting within a living world.
>
> dmb says:
> I hope Bodvar will take this as yet another piece of evidence for the
> existence of anti-SOM philosophers, of non-SOM philosophies.
>
>
> John replied to Kreuger:
> Yeah, I get that.  "Know thyself", in other words. Simpler words.  Purer
> words.  How about we drop the hubristic "pure experience" and just get James
> to be an advocate of "purer experience"?   That's how I'm gonna take him.
> And I'm gonna turn my attention from criticism  to the purest experience I
> can imagine...
>
> dmb says:
>
> I'll just remind you that Quality is another term for pure experience and
> that's kind of big deal in the MOQ.
>
>
I think I can buy that if it's shined up a little... but the experience has
to be really pure.  Not just 10% pure or even 99% pure but 110% pure PURE, I
mean really, really pure.




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