[MD] From Psychology to Empiricism

[david buchanan]

DMB quoted Robert Richardson on William James:

"In 'Does Consciousness Exist?', which Bertrand Russell claimed 'startled the world', James says the answer is no. 'Consciousness is the name of a non-entity'. As we generally conceive of it, consciousness is the 'faint  rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy'. If we were to speak precisely, James says, consciousness is 'only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experiences IS KNOWN'. ..."


Ham replied:
James' assertion that consciousness does not exist because it is "the name of a non-entity" certainly can't mean that there is no consciousness.  If that were true, why would we, as conscious organisms, be trying to define what consciousness is?  Likewise, I fail to see the reasoning in Andre's assertion that "a 'knower' without anything 'known' is a contradiction in terms."  I submit that "the existence of things without a knower" is just as contradictory a proposition.  The Knower has the "potential to be aware".  If that potentiality is not primary to consciousness, there is no knowledge...and I should add, no value either.


dmb says:

As I understand it, Andre was re-phrasing the same idea we see in the Richardson quote. "If we were to speak precisely, James says, consciousness is 'only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experiences IS KNOWN'." See, this is an attack on the very notion that you can have a knower without a known, that knower and known are two different kinds of things. But James (and Andre) are denying a distinction between consciousness and content. The content IS the consciousness.

He is denying the notion that the subject is a distinct entity. In fact, the Richardson quote has been chopped off at a crucial point. After denying that consciousness is an entity, the Richardson quote goes on to say, "James argues that instead of dueling entities there is only process. 'I mean only to deny that the word (consciousness) stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function'." ..."James's own conclusion is that 'consciousness' is fictitious while thoughts in the concrete are fully real," he says. 



Ham said:
It is clear to me that subjectivity/objectivity characterizes the duality of existence.  The reason philosophers like Pirsig want to dismiss duality is not that the concept makes metaphysics fuzzy, or that Descartes and the dualists were "intellectually challenged".  Rather, it's because they believe existence is all there is; that existence therefore must equate to Reality.  From this belief system (existentialism) comes the notion that mind and matter, consciousness and patterns, are unified by Value which is then posited as the "true" Reality.  But, as I have pointed out previously, even "value" requires a conscious subject.



dmb says:

The idea that subjectivity/objectivity characterizes the duality of existence is what we call SOM. Subjects and objects are the dueling entities that James and Pirsig are criticizing. The reasons for rejecting this dualism are philosophical, not because they think Descartes was an idiot or because they're pushing some prior belief system. 

In the essay titled "A World of Pure Experience", James says, "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. Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full."


See, he's saying that SOM has created this fake problem of how to get our subjective ideas to correspond with the objective reality that they supposedly represent. The various schools of philosophy have invented all kinds of solutions, but they're all just as fake as the problem. In other words, everybody has been operating with the assumptions of SOM for a long time. 17th century philosophy has become our common sense and so it's only natural that this duality of existence would seem so clear to you. This is what we're handed when we put on those cultural eye-glasses. But philosophers have generally come to the conclusion that SOM is simply incoherent. It's so futile that the neo-pragmatists have given up on truth theories and epistemology altogether. In any case, radical empiricism says that SOM is NOT the duality of existence. It says that "subjects" and "objects" are not two different kinds of substances that make experience possible, that they are not the starting points of experience. Instead, they are secondary concepts derived from experience. We believe in these concepts because they work, because they function in experience. And that's what James and Pirsig are looking at, the ongoing process of experience. They both want to alter the attitudes of objectivity that results from SOM and instead "admit feelings to full standing ..as aspects of rationality".


As Richardson puts it, "The result of James's radical empiricism is to move the modern mind away from seventeenth-century Cartesian dualism and toward what we might call process philosophy; to wean us away from falling back on conceptions and to encourage us to trust our perceptions; to admit feelings to full standing, along with ideas, as aspects of rationality."