[MD] Keep on ...

[david buchanan]

Mary:
Another answer, more specific answer to one of your points...


Mary said:
I am struck that there is such concern over the difference between reifying a concept and denigrating 'actual' experiential reality since both have the same result.


dmb says:
Denigrating actual experience is not to be distinguished FROM the reification problem. It's a feature OF the problem. When ideas are reified, they are taken as MORE real than the empirical reality from which they were derived in the first place. The MOQ re-asserts the primacy of the experiential reality and says that concepts are always secondary, always derived from the primary empirical reality, from the experiential flux. 

As Charlene Seigfried puts it, paraphrasing William James, "abstractionism had become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)

In other words, the problem is taking ideas as something MORE than man-made concepts and forgetting that they were extracted from the flux of human experience in first place. The problem is NOT seeing that man is a participant in the creation of all things, NOT seeing that our reality is an evolved construction of our own making. Instead, says Plato and Kant and every viciously intellectual philosopher, reality is beyond our dirty old temporal, sensible life. We're all stuck in a cave and the real reality is beyond this world of appearances, beyond our experience. The MOQ gives that notion a big fat raspberry. It says experience IS reality. All that talk about forms and substances and essences is a bunch of nonsense. The ever-changing flow of experience is not a crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction, Pirsig says, it is reality itself. And our ideas function well in relation to that (and in relation to all other relevant ideas) or they aren't any good. It's really that simple.
"Is thought for the sake of life? or is life for the sake of thought?." (James 1000)
"I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it." (ZAMM 246)
"The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one." (James 508)