[MD] now it comes

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
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. 


dmb says:

Why should I care if Taylor's work fails to support the notion that James abandoned psychology? I don't think he abandoned psychology and I never said that he did. I'm saying that his work in psychology raised questions about the basic metaphysical assumptions, namely SOM, and that his empiricism addresses those philosophical concerns. Also, I certainly don't think we out to "omit James' psychology in reading his philosophy". I'm just trying to get you to see the difference between psychology and philosophy, between the empirical science known as psychology and radical empiricism as a philosophical position.  


Krimel said:
... 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.



dmb says:

Well, that's the main thing right there. That little phrase "no world of objects" gets at the metaphysical assumptions that radical empiricism overturns. Pirsig and James are saying that "objects"(and subjects) are secondary concepts rather than the starting points of reality. They both say that these secondary concepts are derived from a more primary experience. James calls it pure experience and Pirsig calls it Quality. This is also what James was developing as a psychologist, which the Wiki article on "Sciousness" shows.  

Krimel said:
... 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.

dmb says:

Who ever said humans can thrive without concepts? Why is it a problem that we all draw from the same pre-conceptual experience? Look, I think you're still not quite getting what this means. Think of it in more ordinary terms. If SOM says that reality is fundamentally made of two separate realms, the mental and the physical, then we are strangely opposed to the planet on which we're supposed to thrive and find truths and all that. The radical empiricist are saying this dualistic assumption is flawed. And if you think about it even in the ordinary terms, this seems quite untrue. As evolved organisms we are a product of the earth and we are intimately interconnected with this planet's atmosphere, gravitational field and the whole web of life. We are different from or outside of the world. As Heidegger put it, we are always, already situated in the world. Concepts don't represent reality in the sense that they correspond with a physical reality. Instead, concepts are derived from experience and function within experience. See, the radical empiricist is not denying that there is a world of experience, they're just denying that dualistic picture of a subjective mind set over against an objective world. Or even simpler, instead of saying we (subjects) have a body (object), the non-dualist would say we are embodied. We are not opposed to physical reality, we are within it, part of it, a feature of it. You know, man is a participant in the creation of all things. Thou art that.



Krimel said:
...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.


dmb says:

They say Husserl was the founder of phenomenology in Europe and that he was the last of the great Cartesians. And they say that if it had taken off in the U.S., James would be considered the father of American Phenomenology. But James was explicitly anti-Cartesian and so was Heidegger and so is Pirsig and Dewey. Again, the difference between holding the assumptions of SOM or not is very much the key difference. 


Krimel said:
... 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.


dmb says:
Saying that subjects and objects are concepts does not support the notion of non-dualism. It's just what the notion means. Not being divided into those two ontological categories is the sense in which it is non-dual. 

And yes, of course we are now dealing in words and concepts. But in this case the concept to grasp is "non-duality". The central terms in radical empiricism and in the MOQ refer to this non-dual awareness, the pre-intellectual experience, because that's the non-dual awareness we're talking about.