[MD] Taking Words Seriously

[MarshaV]

 Who is David Scott?  
 
 
On Oct 4, 2011, at 12:17 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> Matt said:
> ... The problem might be best put in terms of the indeterminacy of DQ/degeneracy thesis: if I want to always be following DQ as much as possible, how do I know whether I'm dimly apprehending Dynamic Quality or apprehending dimly with static patterns? ... The thesis suggests there's going to be no answer, but what does it mean to say, then, that DQ is the Good?  Well, I guess just that it is a placeholder necessary to fully explain the evolutionary paradigm of Deweyan evaluative experience.  So that, sometimes our experience of good is an implicit rejecting of past-evil, but sometimes it's an implicit rejecting of now-good.  And we won't know the difference in our own experience until much later, for the experience of dimness, we might say, is a necessary condition, but definitely not sufficient.
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> dmb says:
> Okay, gents. Let me try this another way. We can see DQ from a slightly different angle by looking at James's pure experience. David Scott lays it out quite nicely and, quite helpfully, also frames the point in terms of Buddhism. I'll add Pirsig's terms in brackets...
> 
> David Scott said:
> ...All of these techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the tyranny of ‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization’.Yet where did language [sq] come from? James considers that ‘when the reflective intellect [sq]. . . in the flowing process [DQ] . . . distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names[sq] . . . The flux of it [DQ] no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted [sq]; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions’ (1912, pp. 292, 294). Or again, ‘the essence of life is its continuously changing character [DQ]; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed [sq], and the only mode of making them coincide with life [DQ] is arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein [sq]. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent’. These categories are still arbitrary or secondary since they ‘are not parts of reality, not real positions taken by it, but suppositions rather, notes taken by ourselves, and you can no more dig up the substance of reality with them than you can dip up water with a net, however finely meshed’ (1909, p. 253). There are parallels here to the Buddhist sense of inherent anitya, or ‘change’. Both the Ma ̄dhyamika and Vijn ̃a ̄nava ̄da view language and concepts, as a secondary vikalpyate, or ‘construct’ used by an individual’s ‘mind’ (manas).
> Before or underneath this secondary conceptualisation and discrimination [sq] comes what James dubs primary, or ‘pure’, experience [DQ]. As James explains, ‘pure experience [DQ] is the name I give to the immediate flux of life [DQ] which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories’ [sq] (1912, p. 93). What is pure experience [DQ]? In a sense for James it is not the right question to ask, for it is ‘an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what [undifferentiated], though ready to be all sorts of whats’ (1912, p. 93). Being pre-conceptual and pre-categorising, ‘experience’ in its original immediacy [primary empirical reality] is not aware of itself. It simply is. It is a ‘that’ rather than a ‘what’ object. Compare the classical Maha ̄ya ̄na Buddhist focus on the tathata ̄ ‘thusness, suchness’ of things, amidst a Buddhist ‘rejection’, particularly in the Madhyamika foundations of Maha ̄ya ̄na, of ‘holding’ onto of any Absolutist positive or negative ‘thing-ness’ or ‘what-ness’. James’ ‘pure experience’ [DQ] is like the Zen Buddhist sense of a natural pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting [DQ], which Zen traditionally calls one’s ‘original face’ [DQ] and which Suzuki calls ‘no-mind’ [DQ]. The sacredness of the mundane in Zen also compares with James’ view that ‘pure experience’ is nothing ‘but another name for feeling or sensation’ [direct everyday experience] (1912, p. 94).James was at the time concerned that his term ‘consciousness’ would be misunderstood. For ‘to deny that [individual] ‘‘consciousness’’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it—for undeniably ‘‘thoughts’’ do exist—that I fear some readers would follow me no further. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity [Cartesian self], but to insist that it does stand for a function’ (1912, p. 3). In turn, ‘function’ also echoes the Buddhist core functionalist orientation.James acknowledges that: Although for fluency’s sake I myself spoke earlier in this article of a stuff of pure experience [DQ], I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made, there are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the thing experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same. ‘It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness or what not.’ Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures and save for time and space (and if you like for ‘being’) there appears no universal element of which all things are made [It is neither physical nor psychical, which are secondary concepts]. (1912, p. 26)It is this dynamic, flowing, relational character [DQ] of ‘consciousness’ that seems closer philosophically to Buddhism than to Hume (see Mathur 1978). James himself distinguishes this Buddhist-like ‘shifting of consciousness’ from what he sees as the blanket, perhaps static, ‘super consciousness’ of monistic Hindu Veda ̄nta (1902, p. 491 n. 1). On this point James and Paul Carus enjoyed courteous but ongoing disagreement. Carus veered towards the Veda ̄nta monistic framework expounded by Viveka ̄nanda during the 1890s in America, despite Carus’ and James’ otherwise common convergence and overlaps with Buddhism’s approach to ethics and on the changing fluctuating nature of the ‘soul’ or ‘self’ (see Bishop 1974).
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