[MD] Taking off the glasses?

[david buchanan]

Steve said to Andre:
The question I have about this quote is what would it mean for someone to take his glasses off? I take it you see it as referring to Buddhist Enlightenment, but how do we square Buddhism and pragmatism?


David Scott said:
..."Yet where did language [glasses] 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’ [glasses]. Or again, ‘the essence of life is its continuously changing character [DQ]; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed [glasses with rigid frames ;-)], and the only mode of making them coincide with life [DQ] is arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent’. These categories are still arbitrary or secondary since they ‘are not parts of reality [we add them], not real positions taken by it [don't correspond to THE truth], 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’ [concepts don't correspond to what's "really" real]. 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 [static glasses] comes what James dubs primary, or ‘pure’, experience [DQ or the primary empirical reality]. 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]. 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’. Being pre-conceptual and pre-categorising, ‘experience’ in its original immediacy [no-thingness] is not aware of itself. It simply is. It is a ‘that’ rather than a ‘what’ object.  ..James’ ‘pure experience’ [DQ] is like the Zen Buddhist sense of a natural pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting [undifferentiated aesthetic continuum], which Zen traditionally calls one’s ‘original face’ and which Suzuki calls ‘no-mind’. 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].  ...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...." 


dmb says:
Please notice what they are saying about "reality" with the glasses off. The pre-intellectual reality is what James calls feeling, sensation, a collective name for all these sensible natures, just what appears. It makes sense that Suzuki would this pre-conceptual experience 'no-mind'. Now compare this sensory flux as reality with the basic problem of appearance and reality. An encyclopedia article begins by saying "the chief question raised by the distinction is epistemological: How can people know the nature of reality when all that people have immediate access to are appearances?"


The MOQ does not fall into this trap because, as you just saw, the reality described by Pirisg, James and Buddhism is the appearances to which we have immediate access. From this point of view, there is no "reality" more real than "just what appears". The encyclopedia says "responses to the question fall into one of three classes: Those that argue that observers are unavoidably "cut off" from reality, those that argue that there is some way of "getting at" reality through the appearances, and those that reject the distinction." The MOQ takes the latter view; it rejects the distinction. The MOQ makes a different distinction, a distinction between concepts and empirical reality not between appearance and reality.


Think of it this way. The traditional distinction between appearance and reality is a distinction between empirical or phenomenal reality and that world of experience is contrasted with some kind of trans-experiential reality, a reality beyond what we can experience. For Plato this would be the world of Forms, for Kant this would be the world of things-in-themselves, for scientific materialism this would be "objective" reality. But the radical empiricist does not allow any such extra-empirical realities. Reality is limited to that which can be known in experience so that, in effect, appearance IS reality.


That is why we can NOT rightly take the MOQ to be making any claims about that one true account of The-Way-Things-Really-Are. The appearance-reality distinction presupposes an objective Way-Things-Really-Are to which subjective philosophical systems should try to conform. But the MOQ's central distinction does NOT make that pre-supposition. In fact, Pirsig and James both explicitly attack and reject SOM as their starting point and their distinction between concepts and reality is built on the lot where SOM used to stand before they knocked it down.