[MD] now it comes

[Krimel]

[Krimel]
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?

[dmb]
"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. 

[Krimel]
My real question was: where is this quote located? Pirsig says it is in
"Some Problems of Philosophy" but I cannot find it there. I can't find any
combination of the words in that sentence in that book. In fact, for
example, the word "discrepancy" does not appear at all in that work. I also
had no luck finding it in James' Essays on Radical Empiricism. Since Pirsig
is hanging quite a lot on this statement, saying, "James had condensed this
description to a single sentence..." it is a bit of a disappointment not to
be able to locate that single sentence in James' writing. Once again if you
can find it, I would love to know where exactly it is.

Likewise I don't find your analysis of Pirsig's talk about perception
located in the context of this quote. James on the other hand is at pains to
make his terminology clear. In a footnote on Page 48 in Chapter four he says
this:

"In what follows I shall freely use synonyms for these two terms. Idea,
thought, and intellection are synonymous with concept. Instead of percept I
shall often speak of sensation, feeling, intuition, and sometimes of
sensible experience or of the immediate
flow of conscious life."

It is a bit hard from this to support your reluctance to equate the
terminology.

[dmb]
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.

[Krimel]
I don't think the blanket label "traditional SOM empiricists" makes much
sense in the absence of some specific problem caused by some particular
empiricist's particular claims. But I don't see James saying anything like,
experience is not happening to some particular person at some particular
location. In fact in outlining some of the problems in philosophy he claims
that many of them stem from confusing and conflating continuous experience
with discrete concepts describing that experience:

"Although, when you have a continuum given, you can make cuts and dots in
it, ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will not give you your
continuum back. The rationalist mind admits this; but instead of seeing that
the fault is with the concepts, it blames the perceptual flux." 

Among the problems generated by this confusion is the one you cite:
"Personal identity is conceptually impossible." The trust of James work in
this book is to overcome such problems.

Nor is he denying the existence of a "real" world outside of perception. "So
philosophy, in order not to lose human respect, must take some notice of the
actual constitution of reality."

Nor is he, while writing what he characterizes as metaphysics, seeking
distance from science:

"In its original acceptation, meaning the completest knowledge of the
universe, philosophy must include the results of all the sciences, and
cannot be contrasted with the latter. It
simply aims at making of science what Herbert Spencer calls a "system of
completely unified
knowledge." In the more modern sense, of something contrasted with the
sciences, philosophy means 'metaphysics'. The older sense is the more worthy
sense, and as the results of the sciences get more available for
coordination, and the conditions for finding truth in
different kinds of question get more methodically defined, we may hope that
the term will
revert to its original meaning."

James acknowledges that perception does not supply meaning but it strains
any interpretation of his writing to claim that there is nothing outside of
our perception or that our perceptions are not the result of our biological
interactions with an external world. Rather he says that our concepts and
the meaning we ascribe to our experiences arise from this interaction.

"It is possible therefore, to join the rationalists in allowing conceptual
knowledge to be self-sufficing, while at the same time one joins the
empiricists in maintaining that the full value of such knowledge is got only
by combining it with perceptual reality again. This mediating attitude is
that which this book must adopt."

It seems especially difficult to claim that James' use of perception "is too
strong a word" in light of this:

"The problem convenient to take up next in order will be that of the
difference between thoughts and things. 'Things' are known to us by our
senses, and are called 'presentations' by some authors, to distinguish them
from the ideas or 'representations' which we may have when our senses are
closed. I myself have grown accustomed to the words 'percept' and ‘concept'
in treating of the contrast..."

"The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of
a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience
originally comes."

"Each concept means just what it singly means, and nothing else; and if the
conceiver does not know whether he means this or means that, it shows that
his concept is imperfectly formed. The perceptual flux as such, on the
contrary, means nothing, and is but what it immediately is. No matter how
small a tract of it be taken, it is always a much-at-once, and contains
innumerable aspects and characters which conception can pick out, isolate,
and thereafter always intend."

[dmb]
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)

[Krimel]
This just looks like another of the problems James claims arises from
confusing and conflating concepts and percepts. I fear it also jibes with
your romantic notion that 'the immediate flux of life' is "better" and not
equivalent term for perception because it sounds all vague and touchy feel,
new agey; or perhaps some irreducible concept. Whereas perception actually
is a meaningful and specifiable term, we wouldn't want that since that would
mean taking seriously the vast literature on the subject that in many
respect originates with James. Least you start your usual rant about young
and old James let me note that James cites his own Principles of Psychology
throughout both Some Problems... and in Essays... The older James hardly
seems to be repenting of his earlier work.

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

[Krimel]
He also says this:

"I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at
large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things
experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the
answer is always the same: 'It is made of that, of just what appears, of
space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not.'"

James argues that concept and percepts work together so intimately that they
may at times be indistinguishable. Perhaps that is what he claims is
happening in "pure experience". But he is at pains to show that concepts are
derived from and secondary to percepts and that percepts are composed of
sensation and feelings which are essential purely biological events.

But let me restate my original questions: 

Where is that quote Pirsig cites in Lila? Has he just confused his own notes
on James with actual writing by James? Please note the recent brouhaha over
Arlo's use of quotes. This seems far worse so I really would be grateful if
you can find the actual quote.

Given that "Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or
sensation." (from Essays...) And that, "Instead of percept I shall often
speak of sensation, feeling, intuition, and sometimes of sensible experience
or of the immediate flow of conscious life." (From Some Problems...) Why are
you reluctant to use the terms percept and perception as more precise
substitutes for the fuzzier terms used by Pirsig?