[MD] James v. Dewey v. Pirsig w.r.t. "Free will"

[david buchanan]

Steve said:
That idea agrees with what Putnam said..."Yet James also believed that the question of whether we have free will cannot be settled on intellectual grounds. Consequently, it is the sort of question one is entitled to answer on passional grounds; James asserts he has free will."  ...surely we don't have a forced choice between abandoning either science or morality. These "devastating logical consequences" are only possible under SOM where either one metaphysical belief or the other can be true.  ...After we have abandoned SOM, what "passional grounds" even remain for choosing one over the other? What is left to get all passionate about once we view free will and determinism as intellectual patterns that can be used for whatever purposes they may be good for rather than as competing claims about the ultimate nature of reality? It seems to me that if someone claiming to have abandoned SOM can still be driven into an existential funk while contemplating free will versus determinism, then that person has not completely abandoned SOM.



dmb says:
You seem to be saying that once we drop SOM ideas don't really matter. You seem to think that being logically consistent or believing one thing instead of the other just doesn't matter anymore. That strikes me as absurd in the extreme. For the pragmatist, the truth of an idea is measured in terms of its consequences in experience. This has nothing to do with what's absolutely true or metaphysically true or the really real. It's just about what happens when you put the idea to work. If an idea is a logical train wreck, then it clearly won't work. If an idea renders your actions inert and your life meaningless, then that's a very bad idea, a destructive idea that does not serve life. Quite the opposite. If think you can hang determinism in this pragmatic gallery of truth, then you probably can't discern good art from bad art. 

One of the central reasons for attacking SOM is that it breeds attitudes of objectivity. It denies the passions as meaningless and irrelevant to the truth. James and Pirsig both attack the whole history of philosophy on these grounds, if fact. (The Hegelians under attack in the James quote, by the way, were determinists, the same sort of determinists he attacks in "The Dilemma of Determinism.)

"In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part."  (ZAMM p. 294)
“Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians. …The ‘through-and-through’ philosophy …seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.…Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale.  …To speak more seriously, the one fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as prophetic and anticipatory as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose faculties on the whole had the best diving power?" (William James in ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM, p.96)

Do I need to explain how and why these quotes count as evidence for my claim? Do I need to explain what the quotes mean? I sure hope not.