[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Andre quoted Pirsig:
'Later Phaedrus felt that three-termed realities are rather unwieldly ( low quality) and rare in metaphysics, and tries to collapse them into one. He saw that if you collapsed them into the object you got a materialist metaphysics. If you collapsed them into the subject, you got an idealist metaphysics. But who had ever collapsed them into value? He tried and saw it could be done. As time went on, he saw that not only could it be done, but that it solved huge philosophic problems that had dogged metaphysics for centuries. It produced harmony where there had been disharmony. It had high intellectual quality.'( Annot.118 LC).



dmb quotes Hildebrand:

"Realists and idealists assume that subject and object are discrete and then debate which term deserves first rank. Dewey assumes that what is primary is the whole situation - 'subject' and 'object' have no a priori, atomistic existences but are themselves DERIVED from situations to serve certain purposes, usually philosophical" (Beyond Realism and Antirealism, p27).


"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is and artificial conception of the relation between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical nature which all sort of theories had to be invented to overcome" (James, A World of Pure Experience, p 27).


It probably goes without saying, but Dewey is rejecting SOM and conceiving the primary reality in terms of "the whole situation" rather than anything dualistic. The "whole situation" is whole precisely because it is as yet undifferentiated into thought and thing, knower and known, subject and object, etc.. Those kinds of intellectual distinctions or differentiations are derived from the whole situation, and this whole situation is what James calls pure experience or the immediate flux of life.


As James puts it, in the moment of pure experience "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 [aesthetic value]. 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 [static patterns].


If SOM and the intellectual level are identical, then how would it be possible for all four of these philosophers to reject it for intellectual reasons? Doesn't prove that Bo's position is untenable? I think so. SOL is RIP and Bo is a no go, bro.


 		 	   		  
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