[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Jon said:
I haven't followed the whole thread. But try to explain the connection with James and Pragmatism. How is James related to the Eastern approach?



dmb says:

Pirsig identifies his MOQ with pragmatism in general and with James's pragmatism and radical empiricism in particular. (Last few pages of chapter 29 in Lila.) Even more specifically, Pirsig equates his notion of Dynamic Quality with James's notion of "pure experience". Interestingly, radical empiricism and pure experience are both central in ZAMM even though Pirsig discovered these parallels only after he wrote it. He had come to the same conclusions as James, but independently and in his own way. Before he wrote ZAMM, he had dismissed James as theist who was trying to smuggle God in through the back door but a reviewer saw similarities and so he decided to give James another chance. Of all the thinkers that were compared by critics, this one actually worked. The parallels even came down to specific terms. James also used the terms "static" and "dynamic" in the same way Pirsig does.

The Japanese philosopher Kitiro Nishda, a contemporary of James's, saw how James's "pure experience" made sense within his own Zen Buddhist thought. As the article said, "Nishida felt that James's idea of pure experience was able to preserve some of the more important features of Buddhist thought that Nishida looked to incorporate into his own system. Though he was only to practice Zen meditation for a relatively short time, the distinctively Zen concern with cultivating an intuitive, pre-reflective insight into the nature of reality and experience was conjoined, in Nishida, with the Western emphasis on logic and argumentative rigor in a somewhat unlikely alliance." There are other articles and books in which such connections are made between James's work and mysticism. He wrote about it specifically, a whole chapter on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Plus his father was a mystic of the Swedenbourgian variety and Emerson was a friend of the family. But it's his non-theistic notion of pure experience that really connects it to the philosophical mysticism of the MOQ. This is the Zen of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's about "cultivating an intuitive, pre-reflective" awareness. Just sitting. Just fixing. 

Here are some quotes I've selected to show this parallel... 
PIRSIGThis eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go. (ZAMM, p. 282) 


JAMESThe instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this naïf immediacy it is of course valid; it is there, we act upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby, is just one of the acts. (William James in DOES ‘CONSCIOUSNESS’ EXIST, p. 16)


JAMES‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies. (William James in THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS, p. 40)


PIRSIGPhædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it's also reflected in modern street argot. ``Getting with it,'' ``digging it,'' ``grooving on it'' are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. (ZAMM pp. 290-91)


PIRSIGThis Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant...none whatsoever. The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects. (ZAMM p. 247)
 		 	   		  
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