[MD] David Hildebrand's Dewey

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Steve,

Steve said:
It looks like we are getting to the point of departure for you and the classical pragmatists. In the above it is clear that you don't like Pirsig's distinction of an unconceptualized reality "leading edge of experience" or James' "Pure experience' [as] the name [he] gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories." But I'm not at all clear on why you think we can despense with radical empiricism in favor of panrelationalism (or what the latter term means). Can you say more?

Matt:
I think the core of radical empiricism is holism, which is a more general term for a strategy of which panrelationalism is a more particular form.  I began talking about atomism and holism and radical empiricism in my post to Marsha ("Empiricism for Dummies") so I won't repeat that.  I will repeat two things from my Intros to Pirsig and Rorty from my website:

>From my Introduction to Pirsig:
"The importance of the connection between Pirsig's Quality thesis and
his historicism is that the move from knowing to valuing moves us from
essentialism to relationalism. No longer do we have objects with an
essence that we can know. Instead, we have 'objects' that are
constituted by the layerings of value placed upon them. And since any 'subject' doing the valuing is also a collection of these layers of
placed value, we invite a kind of panrelationalism in which any 'object,' or 'subject,' or more generally, any 'thing' we differentiate
from any other 'thing' is defined by its relations to every 'thing'
it's being differentiated from (including what's doing the
differentiating)."

>From my Introduction to Rorty:
"What follows from this is the second slogan, 'a world without essence.'
When one renounces the correspondence theory of truth, one also
renounces the idea that there is an essence to reality (or any other
particulate). The existence of essences are what produced the idea that
we should correspond to them. So with the failure of correspondence, we
should redescribe our situation without the use of essences. Rorty says
that philosophers like James, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Foucault are 'trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical
dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the
Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and
appearance and reality. They are trying to replace the world pictures
constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions with a picture of a
flux of continually changing relations. One effect of this
panrelationalism is that it lets us put aside the distinction between
subject and object, between elements in human knowledge contributed by
the mind and those contributed by the world, and thereby helps us put
aside the correspondence theory of truth.' (PSH, 47. This is the same
panrelationalism I talked about with Pirsig
and Pirsig also begins to show how the Eastern philosophical tradition
can help us shrug these dualisms off, connections that Paul Turner has
continued to make explicit, particularly here, here, and here.)"

There is something more complicated about distinguishing what I mean about "conceptualization."  Dewey's distinction between direct and indirect is based on a naturalized sense of reflection.  In this sense, direct experience is regular life, and indirect experience is a specific activity (i.e. reflection) in which we think about regular life.  For the most part, when James and Dewey talked about direct and pure experience, it was in this commonsensical sense of experience.

But there is no distinction between language and reality here, of the kind that Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty start having seizures over.  The classicals were concerned with protesting in favor of what the masses usually do, as opposed to all the gymnastics that philosophers had been doing for years (now reread James on pure experience).  Putnam and Davidson, however, should be thought of as concentrating wholeheartedly on the gymnastics and figuring out the best way to tear that shit down.  Ultimately, on my view they end up in the same place.  But we don't need an experience v. conceptualized-experience distinction.  On the Deweyan view, after we reflect and start playing with concepts abstracted from particular moments of our lives, we return to our lives with better ways to live them.  But on the Deweyan view, this would mean that all of our experience since we learned how to reflect has been infected, reinfected, and reinfected again with "concepts," every time we reflect and go back to life (which we must do, like, thousands of times a day).  And this would make the experience v. conceptualized-experience distinction completely useless.

I have nothing in particular against the general program of radical empiricism.  I do, as a persnickety academic with specific views on the best argumentative strategies for avoiding problems and negotiating my peers, have specific things to say about specific passages in Peirce, James and Dewey--but every academic should be able to point to specific areas where they are apt to choose amongst an array of responses like "I totally agree," "That was kinda' silly," "Well, what he really meant," "Okay, that was dumb, but he said it because...."   Academics are supposed to be able to do that, it is important for them to be able to differentiate like that.

A good academic should be able to balance, however, the trees with the forest.  We shouldn't get lost in the trees, but neither should we fear pointing out a few rotted ones.

Matt

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