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

[david buchanan]

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

John replied:
... 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.

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. That "felt sense of life in its perpetual unraveling" is the sort of thing that would be dismissed as scientifically irrelevant emotional content. The traditional empiricists would admit that people have emotions, feelings, instincts and other powerful inner experiences but they'd insist that such things must not pollute the search for truth. Once you think about, that's a pretty crazy idea. We don't want to live like dogs, of course, but the whole idea that the felt quality of experience is somehow invalid is just weird. It's different from a so-called scientific fact, but that's real information and if you ignore it you're not only going to be mixed up about what's real and what isn't, you're also likely to be an unnecessarily numb, unengaged person. If Pirsig is right, this is the route cause of our alienation from nature and from ourselves. You know, Darth Vader, Mr. Spock, The Borg, Newark. These are images of an inhuman humanity and they're always highly scientific and technological in their whole aesthetic feel. By re-integrating the affective domain, the felt quality of experience, some of the things that have been dismissed in our scientific age start to look a lot less weird...
"Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. The allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal is an easy and natural one to make. Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.I want to talk now about Phædrus' exploration into the meaning of the term Quality, an exploration which he saw as a route through the mountains of the spirit. As best I can puzzle it out, there were two distinct phases.
In the first phase he made no attempt at a rigid, systematic definition of what he was talking about. This was a happy, fulfilling and creative phase. It lasted most of the time he taught at the school back in the valley behind us.
The second phase emerged as a result of normal intellectual criticism of his lack of definition of what he was talking about. In this phase he made systematic, rigid statements about what Quality is, and worked out an enormous hierarchic structure of thought to support them. He literally had to move heaven and earth to arrive at this systematic understanding and when he was done felt he'd achieved an explanation of existence and our consciousness of it better than any that had existed before.
If it was truly a new route over the mountain it's certainly a needed one. For more than three centuries now the old routes common in this hemisphere have been undercut and almost washed out by the natural erosion and change of the shape of the mountain wrought by scientific truth. The early climbers established paths that were on firm ground with an accessibility that appealed to all, but today the Western routes are all but closed because of dogmatic inflexibility in the face of change. To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn't because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn't mean that the mountain is no longer there. It's there and will be there as long as consciousness exists."

John has an issue 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.

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". 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. Even so-called intellectual activity is full of "feeling". As you read this, as you read the Pirsig quotes, the meaning of it causes actual physical feelings in your body even before you really even have time to reflect on it. That's real information. There is no sense in which that feeling is unreal. Even if you dreamed that you had a nightmare in which you hallucinated, it is still REAL in the sense that you actually suffered through the experience. I recommend a glass of warm milk for that, by the way. 

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.

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. 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. I mean, the idea can be explained in terms of perceptual and cognitive processes when one is talking to a behaviorist or somebody who understands things in those terms but this is also about the nature of enlightenment and the direct experience that gave rise to all the world's great religions. It's about the needs of our culture. It's about living right. It's about a lot of things.
Kreuger said:
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 replied:
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.

dmb says:
Well, if "James found a point of departure prior to the subject-object polarity", then I don't think it would be valid to criticize his solution as subjective. By finding that point of departure, he did attack the root of the issue, the issue being SOM's empiricism.   

Kreuger said:
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 replied:
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.

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. 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? If the earth, sky, sea and our days and nights are all concepts, then the whole world is made of ideas. 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. Experience keeps us honest because Quality is not subjective or capricious or anything like that. Quality is the reason I like your women pure too. Tell them I said hello, will you? 

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.



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