[MD] From Psychology to Empiricism

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
I do miss Bo.  Because he kept the discussion centered on the MoQ's being beyond SOM, and the MoQ's understanding transcending subject/object metaphysical thinking, and as Wikipedia clearly states: "Robert M. Pirsig's philosophy of the Metaphysics of Quality is largely concerned with the subject-object problem."  ...And surely you wouldn't expect my understanding to change because dmb, Arlo, Ron, Dan or the Pope think differently.  My mind doesn't work like that.  ...Intellectual Static Patterns of Value are reified concepts and the rules for their rational analysis and manipulation.  Intellectual patterns process from a subject/object conceptual framework creating false boundaries that give the illusion of independence, or 'thingness'. The fourth level is a formalized subject/object level (SOM), where the paramount demand is for rational, objective knowledge, which is free from the taint of any subjectivity. As far as I know intellectual patterns are as I stated above, and I have seen no evidence to the contrary.  ..Where is your evidence?  Let's see you demonstrate an intellectual pattern that does not reify concepts, that does not create a self involved in analyzing such concepts, or does not represent the rules for such manipulation?  You cannot do it, because the minute you've begun you have divided and formed an object and an analyzing self.


dmb says:

This thread began with the evidence you're asking for and those quotes from James's biographer were centered on going beyond SOM. Pirsig and James are saying that subjects and objects are secondary concepts that have been reified. (Where did you ever get the idea that intellectual patterns ARE reified by definition? Concepts are not the problem, reification is.) Reification is the whole difference between SOM and the MOQ. In the former subjects and objects are reified and in the latter they are not. In the former they are not just concepts but in the latter they are just concepts. Radical empiricism is already a demonstration of an intellectual pattern that does not reify concepts. I mean, everything you're asking for was already in the initial post. 
Maybe you should read it again, but much more slowly and carefully.


dmb quoted Richardson on James:
He could say this because he then believed that there was an objective world 'out there' that we as individuals could never know. Now, however, James haddropped the old dualism of subject and object and was arguing that experience is all there is." (pp.465-6.)


Adrie replied:
This is about completely congruent with the toughts of Pirsig, on direct experience, as i read it. I payed special attention to how it is phrased, the last words of the sentence; "arguing that expirience is all there is", remarkable.  It makes me think on som as entity trying to cover the intellectual level completely, which is not possible in this model.  som would in fact , rule out "expierience", i think....correct me if i'm wrong.  ..This all seems like the big-bang in philosophy, i was not aware that American philosophers are so wide-spektrum.


dmb says:
Yes, Pirsig quotes James on this point and he equates his own Quality with James's "pure experience". In his second book Pirsig explicitly identifies with James's radical empiricism but he was already saying the same thing back in ZAMM. 

"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy ..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 them. Pure Experience cannot be called either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction." (Lila, p.365)

‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that 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. 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. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies. (William James in THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS, p. 40)


"This Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant, But there's no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant...none whatsoever. The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phædrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects." (ZAMM p. 247)


"That one moment of it [experience] proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is ‘of’ the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past’s continuation; it is ‘of’ the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it." (William James in A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE, P. 37)


"I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional rationality's insistence upon ``objectivity,'' a doctrine that there is a divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be rigidly separate from each other. ``You are the mechanic. There is the motorcycle. You are forever apart from one another. You do this to it. You do that to it. These will be the results.'' This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we're used to it. But it's not right. It's always been an artificial interpretation superimposed on reality. It's never been reality itself. When this duality is completely accepted a certain nondivided relationship between the mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work, is destroyed. When traditional rationality divides the world into subjects and objects it shuts out Quality, and when you're really stuck it's Quality, not any subjects or objects, that tells you where you ought to go." (ZAMM, p. 282)


"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. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full." (A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE, p. 27)


"Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it's derived. …Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change. To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with, although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just ``intuition,'' not just unexplainable ``skill'' or ``talent.'' It's the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal."  (ZAMM pp 284)


"Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it's also reflected in modern street argot. 'Getting with it', 'digging it', 'grooving on it' are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks." (ZAMM, pp.290-91)