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

[John Carl]

john]


Ok then, I feel the need to wrap it up neatly and then go where I feel the
MoQ must go - the overturn of the 4 levels and Biocentricism as the root of
Value.  But we shall see what we shall see.  A few words.  First, I like
William James.  My intuitive view of his thinking is that too much static
attachment by Pirsig and others has been perpetrated upon the MoQ.  But I do
like W. James.  He is one baby I'm gonna be careful of when I analyse the
waters of our bath.  Furthermore, the similarity between James and Zen is
highly apropos - especially according to my reading of Allen Watt's
presentation of Zen as more of a psychotherapy than a religion.  My feel is
that James is more of a psychotherapist for intellectualism than a
metaphysician.  And lord know there is nobody on this green planet that
needs psychotherapy more than brilliant intellectuals caught in the trap of
their own intellects.  So all praise to the man, then, for finding the
courage to do what needs to be done.


Even as I attempt in my own feeble way to tear apart his philosophical
assertions and the reasonings behind his reasons, I offer respect for his
high intellectual attainment.


Besides, James is mainly responsible for getting Royce the cushy job as a
Harvard Philosopher, and so how could I fully disparage the loyal friend of
my hero?


 Kreuger]


    In this way, then, James was ultimately concerned with a holistic
appraisal of self and nature—including, it must be noted, a sensitive
consideration of the *felt* *sense* of life in its perpetual unraveling—that
emerges from the center of a life creatively engaged in everyday living.


John]


See what I mean?  Yay Willie.  That is a GOOD thing to do and promote.  Our
current cultural system which divorces man from nature had needed such
heroes to combat the evils of VFM.


 Kreuger]


Rather than begin a separate investigation of self *and* nature, a dichotomy
presupposed by his "intellectualist" opponents, James looked instead to
inaugurate a new brand of philosophy that had, as its goal, a harmonious
integration of self *in* nature.


John]


Excellent and worthy goal.  The only question that remains is the best way
to go about it.


Kreuger]


This consideration included the inarticulate (or again, non-conceptual)
dimensions of our lived existence that continually defy purely logical or
conceptual analysis.


John]


But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with logical and conceptual
analysis.  Those abilities are hardwired into man by Nature and they are
Good.  The problem is with  the OS. The intellectual software that is
guiding the conceptualization and logic.  If there is a genetic defect in
reason, the answer is not to turn away from Man's reasoning ability - it is
to fix the problem with the cultural OS - the genetic defect in reason - the
VFM.


Intellect has a special place in nature.  Nature evolved man's intellect for
a reason.  Reason is for a reason.  Nature isn't the servant of intellectual
patterns of value, Intellectual patterns of value are the servants of
Nature.  This is the ultimate reason for philosophy and metaphysics - to
deduce and analyze and make good things happen.


This is an issue I have at the outset with James:


If reason has problems, like a genetic defect as Pirsig postulates, then the
thing to do is fix reason's problems, not retreat into the self-deluding
worship of my own "ommmm".  This is one reason why I feel "pure experience"
is not something to be sought or held up to the world as a goal.
Non-conceptual thinking just isn't that useful in the task of analyzing and
eliminating the defect in reason.  You need big tools to fix big problems.
Reason is just about the biggest tool man has.


 Kreuger]


This feature was to be the cornerstone of his self-initiated "considerable
rearrangement" of the methods and aims of philosophy as classically
conceived. Moreover, it is an essential feature of his philosophy that sets
him very much at odds with the more austere, purely epistemological
characteristics of modern philosophical preoccupations.


John]


Yeah?  Well screw those guys.  Whatever "epistemological" means, it sounds
like "piss" to me.   And don't "the austere" just get right up your nose?
Go Willie boy.


 Kreuger]


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]


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.




Kreuger]


 Pure experience for James therefore grounds any phenomenology of human
experience.


John]


My only thought of this line of thinking being at all good, is when you are
so hopelessly scrambled by a VFM, or even worse than a Value-Free
Metaphysics, a NEGATIVE-Value Metaphysic, that reset-reboot-default carries
some hope of recovery.   And here is where Pirsig can come to the rescue.
By positing Good as the basis for all existence, reboot carries away the
dross of negative value  software systems and restores to a mind a primitive
Good that is apprehensible to those lost in confusion.


But if you are not lost in this confusion... if perchance you were raised in
an era where you were saved by dominance from VFM by the ready availability
of textual help in the form of books by men such as Robert M. Pirsig and
Allen Watts and William James and Jacob Needleman, then you want to keep
some of the Quality intellection you have absorbed and you don't want to be
going beyond certain static latches and there really isn't much utility in
contemplation of the navel's pure experience.


 Kreuger]


According to James, pure experience is the non-conceptual givenness of the
aboriginal field of the immediate, a phenomenal field prior to the
interpretive structures (and concomitantly, subject-object bifurcations or
conceptual discriminations) that we subsequently impose upon it.


John]


Right.  We sure do.  And that is bad because .... ????


 Kreuger]


Pure experience is prior to the reflexive thematizing of the cogito in
language and thought.


John]


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.


 Kreuger]


To use a Zen expression, pure experience is a pure *seeing*. It sees the
world but does not thematize it. Nor does it organize it by employing
various "teleological weapons of the mind." Rather, it simply bears mute
witness to the world in all its "blooming, buzzing confusion."


John]


Which can be a fun hobby.  Too bad James didn't discover psylocibin;  (I'll
show YOU teleological weapons of the mind, baby)



 Kreuger]


Refining this rather vague idea somewhat, James offers the operative thesis
of his "principle of pure experience" when he says that:


My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one
primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is
composed,


John]

Well I'm always grateful to be let off the hook, syllogismistically,  Let's
don't do that particular "IF".   We get a lot more creative possibility for
intellect if we start with the supposition that there is more than one fish
in the sea.   Sorry if it causes you epistemological pains in the neck.


Kreuger]


 James thus looked to locate a primordial experiential realm that undercut
the dichotomized metaphysical and epistemological poles of both subjectivity
and objectivity. His "pure experience" was in part a solution to the
immanence/ transcendence paradox this dichotomy engenders. The
intellectualist project of trying to reduce the objective world to
categorical distinctions, or a purely conceptual analysis, ultimately failed
due to the inability of human categories to adequately capture the richness
and pluralistic vivacity of how things are, and how they are experienced in
the phenomenality of their concrete becoming.



John]


Failed?  In what way "failed"?  Failed at convincing the world's austere
intellectuals to all hold hands and agree, "It Is Finished"?


Ok, but admittedly succeeded in providing a rich ground of scientific
breakthrough and play, and that's not an inconsequential result of
"categorical distinction and conceptual analysis".   Which is the baby and
which part the bathwater that the baby pissed in?


 Kreuger]


Conversely, the empiricist attempt to reduce the subjective world to the
objective world exhibited a kind of hermeneutic insensitivity, in that it
failed to adequately concede the inescapable presence of *mediation* within
our experience of the world,


John]


Now that I would consider an utter failure - to ignore mediation  is to cast
away DQ  - the all important "where the rubber meets the road."  The
empiricists can go join the austere in the reject corner.


 Kreuger]


 and the *perspectival* nature of this experience: the fact that our
understanding is filtered through the contingencies of differing
interpretive frameworks, conceptual filters as finite structures of human
subjectivity (such as categories of language, history, culture, art, etc.)


John]


And there is more to the human perceptual system than meets the eye
(chortle, chortle; man I crack myself up sometimes) - a whole 'nother issue
I have with the myth of "pure experience" is that the human perceptual
system always filters and conceptualizes the mediation between organism and
environment to some degree.  To cast away intellect and call the remnant
"pure" is a conceit that is ignorant of the big picture.



 Kreuger]


By locating his starting point within the realm of pure experience, James
found a point of departure prior to the subject-object polarity that
dualistic thinking posits as primary reality. And he does so without
appealing to a trans-experiential principle of unification, transcendental
"substances, intellectual categories and powers, or Selves" that belong "to
different orders of truth and vitality altogether," and that are
subsequently required to bind together the empiricist picture of discrete,
atomistic sense-impressions.


John]


Yay him.  There is a strong correlation with Zen.  It's always good to find
somebody able to cast off an aspect of SOM.  However, it takes more than a
slight cure to create a whole metaphysic.  I just can't see basing
"everything" upon the mere fact of "mainly pure experience"  Nope.  It's a
subjective solution to an objective problem and doesn't attack the root of
the issues.


 Kreuger]


Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness attention carves out objects, which
conception then names and identifies forever—in the sky "constellations," on
the earth "beach," "sea," "cliff," bushes," "grass." Out of time we cut
"days" and "nights," "summers" and "winters." We say *what* each part of the
sensible continuum is, and all these abstracted *whats* are concepts.

John]


Well at least I'm finally getting some definition of "concept" out of the
guy.  But notice that it's linguistic.  It was contraposed with linguistic
earlier.... ain't gonna get far with a metaphysic that ambiguates central
terms.  Nope.  Not with me you're not.  I like my metaphysical epistemology
like I like my women and my experience -  pure.



Kreuger]


    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.


John]


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 - those of the values transferred by the 2nd level.  Not the
differing societys and their differing cultures, not the intellectualist
philsophophologies spouted by various social entities all with various axis
to grind - but   rather turn to the purest experience of value within my
grasp, the way of Nature as pointed by the Taoists of old.  Nature as the
source of Value as claimed by Pirsig.  Nature as explication of Value in its
cosmic order as clarified by Deep Ecology  and Biocentricism lately.


I have more to say on this... in another thread.  But just to leave it off
with one question to whoever has had the patience to follow my wild
meanderings thus far:   when an academic strives to master his subject so he
can get the job so he can impress the girl and breed with her, which level
is dominating?  Who is really  in charge?


Think of it this way,  Lila was all about the longing every overlooked nerd
feels - to get the girl in the end.