[MD] now it comes

[david buchanan]

Krimel said:
It truly is hard to see how you think this wiki advances your case. You are the one that has suggested that James is schizophrenic. Either there are two Jameses, one old and one young or two Jameses, one a psychologist and one a philosopher. My suggestion is that like any prolific author there are inconsistencies in body of his work but on the whole it all hangs together. Or if we find inconsistencies they must be treated individually and specifically rather than through lumping his work together in levels: old/young, psychologist/philosopher.

dmb says;
You think I'm making a case that James is schizophrenic and inconsistent? Not at all. The Wiki page explains exactly what I've been saying all along, namely that psychology raised some questions for James and those questions were answered later in his philosophical phase. The Wiki page shows how "Sciousness" was refined and developed into what would become the starting point of his radical empiricism. It shows how "Sciousness" became "pure experience", which Pirsig equates with his own DQ. 


Krimel said:
You are seriously suggesting that a philosophy written by a psychologist can't be understood in terms of psychology.


dmb says:
I'm saying that YOU need to understand that his psychology was based on some fundamental assumptions that are rejected and replaced by the time he switches to philosophy. I'm talking about subject-object metaphysics, of course. He begins with the assumption that psychology studies subjective experience, that the subject is a primary reality. By the time we get to radical empiricism the subjective self is seen as secondary, as a concept that derives from a more primary experience, a non-dual experience.  Pirsig, in the SODV paper, says: "Northrop's name for Dynamic Quality is "the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum." By "continuum" he means that it goes on and on forever. By "undifferentiated" he means that it is without conceptual distinctions. And by "aesthetic" he means that it has quality." See, if DQ is without conceptual distinctions and subjects and objects ARE conceptual distinctions, then we are NOT talking about the experience of objects by a subject. That is the sense in which the primary experience is non-dual. But "perception" as it is generally used in the context of psychology is understood as the experience of objects by a subject.

Here is how John Stuhr puts it. I started quoting him on this point a couple years ago. (Stuhr is the editor of an anthology that was assigned reading in a grad school course on pragmatism.)  He says:
"At the outset, it is vital to distinguish Dewey's theory of experience and his empiricism' from the philosophical traditions and theories which he seeks to overcome and abandon. Dewey's major criticisms of traditional empiricism are neatly summarized in 'The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy". Here Dewey rejects the traditional view of experience as something subjective and psychical, as 'particularistic' or composed of discrete sense data assembled by the understanding, as primarily an affair of knowing, as directed primarily at the past, and as something separate from and opposed to thought.How, then, does Dewey positively characterize experience? In the beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word 'experience' in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in terms of the experiencING subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from the interaction. Instead, Dewey's view is radically empirical: experience is an activity in which subject and object are unified and CONSTITUTED as partial features and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity. Dewey warns us not to misconstrue aspects of this unified experience-activity: distinctions made in reflection. If we do confuse them, we invent the philosophical problem of how to get them together.The error of materialists and idealists alike - the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection - is the result of neglect of the context of reflection on experience."

Krimel said:
 It is hard to call someone "non-dual" when they chop the world into continuous/discrete, static/dynamic, percept/concept. Or see unity in the notion of many all at once.

dmb says:
Chopping the world into opposed concepts is secondary, a subsequent act of reflection. This is NOT what characterizes non-dual awareness. Those concepts are differentiations whereas the primary experience is undifferentiated.  


Krimel said:
BTW, Attaining some non-dual state of awareness sound great but so what? Abandoning all conception and freed from the chains of some separate reality... Zowie, sign me up?  ... Once again, tell me as what privileges this particular kind of awareness over others? Why should evidence of this alleged non-dual state be regarded as providing a higher quality or more reliable form of conception than any other?


dmb says:

Well, as I've already explained, the point and purpose of all this is to solve an age-old philosophical problem. As the Dewey quote above shows, when we confuse these distinctions made in reflection (subjects and objects) with the starting point of experience "we invent the philosophical problem of how to get them together". The attempts to get them together have so plagued the field of epistemology that Rorty would come to the conclusion that we ought to give up on epistemology altogether. James, Dewey and Pirsig come to a different conclusion, namely that the problem is a fake problem generated by flawed assumptions.  

"By this he (James) meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.' In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, as as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction. 

The status of subjects and objects is hereby reduced from the starting points of experience to concepts derived from experience. so it's not exactly the case that non-dual experience is privileged so much as the privileged status is taken away from those concepts and balanced with the non-conceptual. In the MOQ, DQ and sq are both necessary. Without DQ nothing can grow or change and without sq nothing can last or be preserved. But, as radical empiricists, we also maintain that all concepts and all abstractions are derived from experience and are true and good only to the extent that they function within the ongoing process of living. (This is very much what James means when he talks about the way percept and concepts are always working together in such a way that we can hardly tell where one ends and the other begins.) But again, it's about solving a philosophical problem.

"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome."

See, THAT is the assumption they are attacking, that subjects and objects have been treated as "absolutely discontinuous entities" "throughout the history of philosophy". James says this treatment has generated "an artificial conception of the relations between knower (subject) and known (objects)". This is exactly what the quote on Dewey says. "We INVENT the philosophical problem of how to get them (subjects and objects) together" precisely by committing "the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection". 

Another good reason to really get your head wrapped around this problem is that it'll give you a proper understanding of what subject-object metaphysics actually is. And then you're much less likely to fall for all that nonsense wherein SOM is equated with intellect. If Ham understood this, he'd see how and why his participation is so completely irrelevant. It's the key, in many ways, to understanding everything that follows. It's the key to understanding the whole thrust of the MOQ.


Krimel SHOULD HAVE said to dmb:

I have to admit it. You've answered my questions directly, concisely, clearly and your answers are well supported by some exceptionally relevant pieces of textual evidence from both primary and secondary scholarly sources. You have been as patient as a saint, despite the fact that I have been an arrogant, condescending prick. Sorry, now I can see that you don't deserve to be treated with scorn after all. My bad. 


dmb WOULD HAVE replied:

Oh, look. Hell just froze over. I would've noticed it sooner but I was watching pigs fly by.   ...You're welcome.