[MD] The Level of Intellectual Quality

[david buchanan]

Ron said:
The absolute, depends on what you mean by the term.  In its Latin origin absolūtus which means "loosened from" or "unattached." Implies a separation. 


dmb says:
That's right. This separation is just like the "isolation and separateness" in the "essential dualism of the theistic view", as James puts it. But this similarity is unremarkable because absolute idealism is basically a kind of cryptic theology. 
 
John said to dmb:
What do you think Pirsig's Quality is David, if not an indefinable Absolute? And he already made a better case for it than I can.




dmb says:

Wiki says that Royce, "conceived the Absolute as a unitary Knower Whose experience constitutes what we know as the 'external' world", which is not much different from the general definition: "an unconditional reality which transcends limited, conditional, everyday existence. It is often used as an alternate term for a 'God' or 'the Divine'". 


Pirsig says, "The MOQ is a continuation of the mainstream of 20th century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience".


It's also worth noting the basic rules of radical empiricism because they practically tailor made to preclude the Absolute. James wants to reconstruct all of philosophy on the back of two simple restraints. If it IS known in experience, your philosophy can't ignore it. If it is NOT known in experience, you can't use it in your philosophy. James and Pirsig both call themselves radical empiricists and it's no accident that they both oppose this transcendent Divine Knower. If it transcends experience, then philosophers have no business making claims about it, let alone making claims about the ultimate nature of reality.

In his essays, James calls things like the Absolute "transexperiential entities" and his aim there is to get rid of them all. He wants philosophy to proceed only on the basis of experience. But, like Pirsig, he also insists that traditional empiricism has defined experience too narrowly so that it's not empirical enough. Both of them want all experience to count, to be accounted for, and that includes religious and mystical experiences of all kinds. Even as it closes the door on those transexperiential entities, it opens another on spirituality as it is actual known in experience. I find that stance to be quite sane, reasonable and even-handed. The Absolute, on the other hand, strikes me as completely unbelievable and how could anyone ever know anything about it even if there were such a thing? 

My point? The difference between his idealism and their pragmatism is huge. They are even opposed to each other on some of the most central issues, even have an opposed temperaments. It's like mixing Mozart and Tom Waits. Ok, maybe that's an exaggeration but you've got the idea.



Thanks,
dmb





 		 	   		  
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