[MD] Step One

[david buchanan]

Mark asked Andre:
Where does SOM come from?  I am not asking for a definition, I am asking for a process.  What are the causal events that bring about SOM?


Andre:
I have answered this, hopefully to your satisfaction, in my recent reply to Platt. Phaedrus is much better at a proper formulation regarding this issue (in ZMM, including the roles of Plato and Aristotle) which, among other things was further developed in LILA...


Andre also quoted from Lila's Child, Annotation 144:
'There has been no an academic category called “subject-object” metaphysics for the same reason that before Columbus discovered America there was no such geographical category as an “Old World.” Columbus discovery created the “Old World” as that entity which Columbus left behind. In the same way the MOQ has “created” subject-object metaphysics as that system of thought which the MOQ has left behind'.


dmb says:

Right, SOM is not caused by some particular event. In ZAMM, the author traces the origins of our contemporary attitudes of objectivity and value-free science. He traces the problem all the way back to the very beginnings of philosophy, as Andre points out, and takes sides with the Sophists. But Aristotle and Plato were lost to the West for centuries and their rediscovery roughly co-incides with the beginnings of the early Modern Period, when science and philosophy were re-born in the West. That's where we get SOM proper, rather than its ancient precursors. Descartes is building upon the ancient philosophers the way the inventor of electric car depends on the first steam engine, our electrical grid and countless other pieces of technology that make it possible. In other words, Descartes' mind-body dualism grows out of a particular cultural situation. It makes sense within the whole body of inherited beliefs that constituted his 17th century French culture. In our own time, scientific objectivity has all but eliminated the subject, the mind. Some contemporary philosophers and scientists equate the brain and the mind so that you get a kind of physicalist monism, rather than a Cartesian dualism. That kind of scientific materialism is the hardest on values and morals. It's objectivity and value-free science that leads to the paralysis of relativism. 

By contrast, radical empiricism says, "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 [William James] 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, as as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience [DQ] cannot be called either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction. 
The status of subjects and objects is hereby reduced from the starting points of experience to concepts derived from experience. Radical empiricists maintain that all concepts and all abstractions are derived from experience and are true and good only to the extent that they function within the ongoing process of living. But this rejection of SOM is also about solving philosophical problems.

"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome."
See, THAT is the assumption they are attacking, that subjects and objects have been treated as "absolutely discontinuous entities" and "the starting points of experience". James says this assumption has generated "an artificial conception of the relations between knower (subject) and known (objects)". As the Dewey scholar John Stuhr says. "We INVENT the philosophical problem of how to get them (subjects and objects) together" precisely by committing "the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection". 
That last line is about the conceptual error known as "reification". Reification is the mistake of confusing concepts with actual things, of taking abstract ideas and turning them into actual entities. That's what radical empiricism does NOT do to subjects and objects. Pirsig, James and Dewey all insist that subjects and objects are just abstract concepts, inherited philosophical ideas, and NOT the primary structure of reality. The MOQ de-reifies or un-reifies subjects and objects.