[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[John Carl]

dave,

taking on the correction...


> dmb corrects what he just said:
>
>
> No, Pirsig was NOT surprised and pleased by Bradley's Absolute Idealism.
> It's precisely because Bradley - for a moment - was talking like a
> philosophical mystic and an advocate of the perennial philosophy and not
> like an Absolutist.
>


John:

Well isn't there a more generous construal possible dave?  Could it be that
at a certain level of understanding and definition, the two things are the
same thing?  There's a way of describing "absolutism" in a quality way.  And
it takes patience and time to work out what another philosopher's meaning
and language are.  They are not "given" as you (and Pirsig, honestly)
sometimes seem to make them out to be.  There is a matter of strenuous
interpretation needed, when approaching the thought of any truly deep
philosopher.  And man, these guys... In the supplementary essay I mention
further on, Royce describe's Bradley's writing as around 650 pages of very
dense and technical writing.  And says that thusly, "some reformulation is
needed in critiquing"...

yeah, I'd say so too.



>
> And you're glossing over the fact that James saw both Royce as Bradley as
> philosophers with a fundamentally different temperament than his own.
> Schiller, James's English bodyguard, attacked Bradley so mercilessly that
> James had to tell him to cool down. Repeatedly.
>


John:

 Well then, you should understand a bit when I  plead with you too, to cool
down a bit, mr. overzealous body guard.  :-)

Jorge Borges offers a very tantalizing take, on Royce's supplementary essay
to the World and Individual, which is entirely devoted to a rejection and
refutation of Bradley's main point.  Even though, Royce admitted a great
deal of gratitude to Bradley, and claimed his refutation of Realism (SOM)
was entirely derived from Bradley's line of argumentation, Royce was just as
much loyal to James vs the British Bradley, as a guy who wrote a philosophy
on loyalty, knows how to be.  And in his attack, he came upon such a highly
admirable parable which demonstrates the logical possibility of
conceptualizing the infinite, that it became one of Borge's favorites.  Even
though Borges was closer in tempormental outlook, to James.

dmb:


>
> Schiller wrote hilarious and scathing parodies of his scholarly papers and
> mockingly attributed them to "F.H. Badly", for example. In any case, it's
> certainly NOT evil or slanderous to say James was "furiously against" his
> life long friend and sparring partner Royce. It's just a relatively strong
> way to characterize the fundamental differences between rationalists and
> empiricist, between romantic and classic styles of thought.
>
>
John:

First of all, let's not conflate Bradley's Absolute Idealism with Royce's.
Another very positive thing about Royce, was that he kept growing with age,
developing better understandings and formulations.  He eventually ended up
himself, turning away from Absolute Idealism to what he termed, largely
because of the critiques of Peirce, Absolute Pragmatism.

But since you bring up Bradley so scathingly, I have to wonder at your
interpretation of the words in Copleston as "talking like a mystic" and this
being that which seemingly pleased Pirsig so much in the text.

But that practically begs, begs I say,  a thread of its own, at the very
least.

But I know you're not very interested and I'm unqualified to even enter the
arena with the all time moq champion of the world.


Pirsig and James want to fuse these two modes and so they are NOT simply
> picking one side over the other. With the MOQ you get empiricism AND
> mysticism at the same time but this is accomplished by being radically
> empirical. The mysticism is IN the empiricism, not despite it or even along
> side it. They're fused.
>
> But I think you are not fusing them. You're just confusing them. Big
> difference.
>
>
>
Nice one -  Confusion fusion - I like it.

I think I know where you are coming from.  I think.  I'm just starting to
get a bit of an idea, from recent reading but it's hard for me to tell.
I've never found anything at all of interest in the terms and ideas of
radical empiricism.   I've always been scornful of pure experience ( I like
my experience like I like my women, just a bit im-pure (which in the case of
a woman means "experienced")) and I still don't get the pragmatic value of
any realization of "pre-conceptual".

I mean, why go there?  We deal in the conceptual, my friend.  Like Clint
Eastwood deals in lead.  Why talk about what we can't talk about?  What's
the good?  Where's the fun in that?  Like sitting around and going "ommmm"
or positing randomness or nothingness as the fundament of being.  I don't
see any pragmatic use in such ideas.

Royce, tho, I love...

We shall reach indeed in the end the conception of an Absolute Thought, but
this conception will be in explicit unity with the conception of an Absolute
Purpose. Furthermore, as we have just asserted, we shall find that the
defect of our momentary internal purposes, as they come to our passing
consciousness, is that they imply an individuality, both in ourselves and in
our facts of experience, which we do not wholly get presented to ourselves
at any one instant. Or in other words, we finite beings live in the search
for individuality, of life, of will, of experience, in brief, of meaning.
The whole meaning, which is the world, the Reality, will prove to be, for
this very reason, not a barren Absolute, which devours individuals, not a
wilderness such as Meister Eckhart found in God, a*Stille Wüste, da Nieman
heime ist*, a place where there is no definite life, nor yet a whole that
absorbs definition, but a whole that is just to the finite aspect of every
flying moment, and of every transient or permanent form of finite
selfhood,—a whole that is an individual system of rationally linked and
determinate, but for that very reason not externally determined, ethically
free individuals, who are nevertheless One in God. It is just because all
meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which
the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment,
of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of
individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the
Absolute Meaning of the world. This, I say, will prove to be the sense of
our central thesis; and here will be a contrast between our form of Idealism
and some other forms.