[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

Dan said to dmb:
What is a "concrete" experience? ... The acting agent seems independent from the world as a thing experienced. ... The intellectual structures seem to emerge from the (material) world; this is not what the MOQ says. 

dmb says:
Well, no. You're reading James as if he subscribed to subject-object metaphysics but quite the opposite is true. The central point of his pure experience theory is to oppose that. It's been a long time since I quoted from the end of chapter 29 and now seems like a good time. As Pirsig describes it, James's radical empiricism says...
"...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 proceeds this distinction. 
In his last unfinished work, Some Problems in Philosophy, James had condensed this descriptions to a single sentence: 'There will always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous, while the latter is dynamic and flowing.'  Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality.
... The metaphysics of quality says pure experience is value. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession. ... It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegellian absolute. It is direct everyday experience. ...Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the metaphysics of quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with."  (Lila 364-6)

dmb:
This is the basis for my contention that when James is talking concrete experience and abstract thought, he's basically talking about DQ and sq. As you can see, it is Pirsig himself who thinks he and James are using the terms in the same way. Exactly the same terms, he says. I don't think Robert Pirsig adopts James's ideas or adds them to his own. It more like they both arrived at the same conclusions independently but WE can use James to further explore the meaning of the MOQ. This is going to be helpful because people have been writing about and thinking about James's work for a hundred years. 

So anyway, concrete experience is just the immediate flux of life, the basic flux of experience, direct everyday experience, as described above. That is the Dynamic reality, which is distinguished from secondary static concepts. There are differences, of course, but in this respect, Pirsig tells us, they are on the exact same page.