[MD] now it comes

[david buchanan]

Krimel:

"Perception" is probably too strong a word because that implies an awareness of specific things. In the quote from Pirsig, he uses the word "perception" to talk about pure Quality but then he backs off in a way that suggests he talking about an experience that's even more basic than "perception". Likewise, James uses "feeling or sensation" rather than "perception" to talk about pure experience. 

I think it's also important to realize that words like "perception" and "experience" are terms that are also used by traditional SOM empiricists, sensory empiricists. In that case, it is assumed that we're talking about the perceptions and experiences of a subject who is set over against an objective, pre-existing reality. Since these radical empiricists are rejecting that premise, it has to be understood that they do NOT mean the feeling or sensations of a subject. It wouldn't make any logical sense to say that subjects are derived from subjective experience, would it? The notion that there is experience without a subject is going to seem quite strange to a SOMer but there is no way to make sense of these quotes unless you can grasp that notion.


Phædrus 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)

‘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 ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM; "THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS", p. 40)

dmb quoted from Lila:
> "...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' ... James had condensed this description to a single sentence: 'There
> must always be a discrepancy between CONCEPTS and reality, because the
> former are STATIC and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and
> flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for
> the basic subdivision of the MOQ. ...Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is
> also the primary empirical experience. The MOQ says pure experience is
> value. ...Value is at the very front of the empirical procession."
> 
Krimel asked:
> As our resident James scholar I wonder if you could supply the reference for
> this quote of James. I don't find it. There is a great deal of similar
> language in Some Problems where James is clear that concepts and our sense
> of "reality" come from perception. In fact James' account of what Pirsig
> calls "the immediate flux of life" is "perception". Would you have a problem
> equating the two?
> 
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