[MD] atheistic and content

[david buchanan]

Ham said:

All experience -- including its relative Quality or Value -- is dependent on the cognizant subject of our relational world.  WE are the agents who bring Value into being.  Without awareness there is no experience, hence no being and no knowledge.  ...I can appreciate that this concept is mind-twisting to a staunch Pirsigian. But if you understand what I'm saying, and reflect on it for a moment or two,...



dmb says:

That concept wouldn't confuse a Pirsigian. What you're maintaining here is what Pirsigians call SOM. That stands for subject-object metaphysics. SOM says that all experience is a matter of the cognizant subject being aware of the objective world, just as you said. But this is exactly what the radical empiricists denies. I think you really need to understand that the MOQ begins by rejecting this view that you're insisting upon. I show you once again. Please, please, please listen and understand what Pirsig is saying here....

"The second of James' two systems of philosophy, which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he 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 which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make of them. Pure experience cannot be called physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction.
In his last unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy, 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.
What the MOQ adds to James' pragmatism and his radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is VALUE. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The MOQ says pure experience is value. Experience which is not valued is not experienced. The two are the same. This is where value fits. Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession." 


The hardest thing to grasp here is the notion that it is NOT the subject having the pure experience. Since the claim here is that subjects and objects are CONCEPTS derived from experience that's more primal and fundamental, logic doesn't allow this pure experience to be the experience of a subject. You can't derive the subject from the subject. The idea here is that the value at the cutting edge of experience is neither not to be found in the objective reality nor in the subjective evaluation of that reality but rather the quality of the whole situation before any conceptual sorting has occurred. Subjects and objects emerge only in the sorting process. They're great ways to sort things most of the time. As secondary concepts, they're fabulous. But as when they are taken as the ontological realities that make experience possible, that constitutes SOM. As you can see in the quote above, radical empiricism means rejecting that basic metaphysical assumption. 





 		 	   		  
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