[MD] now it comes

[Krimel]

dmb,

Here is an article by your boy Taylor. You might enjoy it.

http://psychclassics.asu.edu/James/TaylorWoz.htm#f41

On the one hand it adds support to your notion that James actually did hold
to some very flakey beliefs but on that other you will find very little
support for the notion that James ever abandoned psychology. Not only are
the seeds of James philosophy scattered throughout his massive volume of
psychology. He refers readers back to that work repeatedly in his later
writing.

"Sciousness" is one such seed and as I pointed out in an earlier post, while
he abandoned the term, the ideas behind it changed almost not at all. His
description of the role of the "pre-intellectual" process changed hardly at
all. He located it that process at the intersection of sensory input and
motor output and claimed that his internal reflection revealed a close
connection between his mental states and physical sensations mainly in the
head and throat. He restates this in his later work as well. In fact in
Varieties of Religious Experience he makes use of the term psychology more
than 100 times and in the introduction claims: "Psychology is the only
branch of learning in which I am particularly versed."

So yeah, I think that if you omit James' psychology in reading his
philosophy you are missing a lot. Especially with regards to his notions of
"concept" and "percept". James agrees and refers readers of his "Essays..."
specifically to his chapters on perception.

But Taylor and Wozniak seem to agree that with you that James claimed that
there is "no world of objects". So I was wrong about that and apologize. On
a personal note I want to tell you that I have always enjoyed our exchanges.
You always force me to do some serious research and reflection. Our growing
personal animosity is no doubt a big part of that. After years of haggling,
your arguments more than anyone else have convinced me that Dave Thomas is
correct, much of want Pirsig says is irredeemably flawed.  

With regards to James thanks for pointing out his feet of clay. These clay
feet are especially obvious in his 1896 Presidential address to the Society
for Psychical Research which James helped to found in 1885. In fact, much of
James' actual psychological research was in this area where he investigated
mediums, hypnosis, automatic writing, and thought transference. One of the
reasons I suspect I have missed this in the past is that these experiments
produced diddlysquat. In his address to his colleagues after 12 years of
collaborative effort James presents a litany of failure to produce
convincing evidence of anything at all. Of course 100 years later that
verdict has changed not at all. He tries to put a positive spin on this but
it falls a bit flat. He says for example:

"...I should say that experimental thought-transference has yielded a less
abundant return than that which in the first year or two seemed not unlikely
to come in."

With regarded to the anecdotal evidence of a great many ghost stories he
says,

"Apart from the exceptionality of the reputed occurrences, their mutual
resemblances
suggest a natural type, and I confess that until these records, or others
like them, are positively explained away, I cannot feel (in spite of such
vast amounts of detected fraud) as if the case against physical mediumship
itself as a freak of nature were definitively closed."

"Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the romantic
and personal
view of Nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by impersonal rationalism, are
direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism in fact is one of unchecked
romanticism's fruits."

So thanks a lot for convincing me that James entertained some seriously
deluded ideas. I am, for my own part, still willing to overlook this
foolishness in light of his other notable contributions. After all we do not
throw out Newton because he dabbled in alchemy and thought the secrets of
the universe lay encoded somehow in the dimensions of Solomon's Temple. We
don't throwout the theory of evolution because its co-inventor Alfred
Russell Wallace, like James was enthralled by psychics, mediums and other
cranks.

Of course James was right to suggest that psychic phenomenon should be
studied within the realm of science but it is unfair to claim that the lack
of results stems from the prejudice of scientists. It could be that in fact
there is no such thing. Speaking from his vantage point early in the study
of such things perhaps James can be forgiven for his optimism. But I do
think this paper reveals some of the underlying flaws in James's deepest
presumptions, for example:

"I am not ashamed to confess that in my own case, although my judgment
remains deliberately suspended, my feeling towards the way in which the
phenomena of physical mediumship should be approached has received from
ghost and disturbance stories a distinctly charitable lurch."

It is also hard for me to see how an avowed anti-theist like yourself will
find comfort in any of this.

With regards to James asserting thing like, there is not preexisting
external world or that the things we perceive as "objects" cease to exist
when we are not experiencing them, I think he is not consistent and leaves
plenty of wiggle room. For example, as you rightly point out he claims that
subject and object are conceptual distinctions drawn from an aconceptual
"pure experience" or "siousness". The problem here is that anything we say
or any conclusions we draw from experience are rooted in the same
aconceptual realm. It  is perfectly possible for organisms to thrive on this
planet without concepts  of any kind. Humans however are not among them.

The superiority of the concept of nothing existing outside of experience is
hardly bolstered by this observation. The question have never been about
that nature of conception but rather about which concepts serve us best.
James was mainly arguing the mind/body problem from the standpoint of
rationalism versus empiricism. He was also concerned deeply with the issue
of the fundamental nature of experience as continuous versus the fundamental
nature of concepts as discrete. This is of course a philosophical problem of
greater antiquity than the mind/body problem. 

Part of the problem in James day was the idea that mental life is
essentially about consciousness, that inner light of awareness that seems to
constitute personal experience. James was among the first, like Freud to
begin an outline of the unconscious. Freud claimed that conscious experience
was the tip of an iceberg and that below the surface lay the massive
irrational animal nature of the unconscious. This Freudian vocabulary took
root and continues in some circle to this day.

I plan, in a future post, to delve into this in more detail. After all both
James and Freud were writing about these topic 100 years ago and it is not
as though time has stood still. 

To conclude the issues at hand I will concede that you are probably right
James entertained a number of ideas that I don't think have stood the test
of time very well. His personal belief in the supernatural; his belief, to
the extent that you interpret it correctly, that there is nothing external
to experience. With regard to the later James was anticipating phenomenology
and in this respect was a major influence on Bergson. I also think that
Pirsig is a phenomenologist in this respect. You too for that matter. Like
Descartes, as I understand it, phenomenology begins and end with first
person experience. Something I looked at recently spoke in terms of first
versus third person ontology. I find that a helpful distinction.

For James in this respect I think the problem is that he wants to be
empirical, he wants to build wholes out of parts from the bottom up
(something I think you ought to have a problem with). He wants to privilege
inductions over deduction and make concepts dependant on their conformity to
perceptual lived experience. From that perspective a third person ontology
is something inferred from our sensory experience. Our percepts point us in
direction of various kinds of description. Subject and objects, non-dualism,
scientific materialism and belief in the supernatural are all equally
criticizable in this respect. So I don't see how acknowledging that
"subjects" and "objects" are "concepts" derived from experience adds support
for something like say "non-dualism" which is also a concept derivable from
experience. "Pure experience" for that matter is nothing more or less than a
concept derived from experience.