[MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.

[Joseph Maurer]

Hi David and All,

And?

Joe


On 2/2/12 5:36 AM, "david buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Joe said to Mark and all:
> If you look at the etymology of the word "consciousness" you see two roots
> "Con" "scious"  "With" "awareness" or "knowledge". ...
> 
> 
> dmb quotes Wiki:
> Sciousness, a term coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology,
> refers to consciousness separate from consciousness of self. James
> wrote:Instead of the stream of thought being one of con-sciousness, 'thinking
> its own existence along with whatever else it thinks'...it might better be
> called a stream of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of
> which it makes what it calls a 'Me,' and only aware of its 'pure' Self in an
> abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way. Each 'section' of the stream would
> then be a bit of sciousness or knowledge of this sort, including and
> contemplating its 'me' and its 'not-me' as objects which work out their drama
> together, but not yet including or contemplating its own subjective
> being.[1]When James first introduced "sciousness" he held back from proposing
> it as a possible prime reality in The Principles of Psychology, warning that
> it "traverse[s] common sense."[2] He allowed that he might return to a
> consideration of sciousness at the conclusion of the book, where he would
> "indulge in some metaphysical reflections," but it was not until two years
> later in his conclusion to the abridged edition of The Principles that he
> added:Neither common-sense, nor psychology so far as it has yet been written,
> has ever doubted that the states of consciousness which that science studies
> are immediate data of experience. "Things" have been doubted, but thoughts and
> feelings have never been doubted. The outer world, but never the inner world,
> has been denied. Everyone assumes that we have direct introspective
> acquaintance with our thinking activity as such, with our consciousness as
> something inward and contrasted with the outer objects which it knows. Yet I
> must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure of this conclusion. Whenever
> I try to become sensible of thinking activity as such, what I catch is come
> bodily fact, an impression coming from my brow, or head, or throat, or nose.
> It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a postulate than
> a sensibly given fact, the postulate, namely, of a knower as correlative to
> all this known; and as if "sciousness" might be a better word by which to
> describe it. But "sciousness postulated as a hypothesis" is a practically a
> very different thing from "states of consciousness apprehended with infallible
> certainty by an inner sense." For one thing, it throws the question of who the
> knower really is wide open...[3]Then thirteen years later, writing solely as a
> philosopher, James returned to his "parenthetical digression" of sciousness
> that "contradict[ed] the fundamental assumption of every philosophic
> school."[4] James had founded a new school of philosophy, called "radical
> empiricism," and nondual sciousness was its starting-point. He even wrote a
> note to himself to "apologize for my dualistic language, in the
> Principles."[5] James did not continue to use the word "sciousness" in later
> essays on radical empiricism, but the concept is clearly there as the "plain,
> unqualified ... existence" he comes to call "pure experience," in which there
> is "no self-splitting ... into consciousness and what the consciousness is
> of."[6]Pure experience sciousness was mostly attacked when first presented.[7]
> With some notable exceptions, such as Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, Western
> philosophers rejected James' view. That rejection continues to this day.One of
> the first to appreciate James's concept was the Swiss psychologist, Theodore
> Flournoy, a mentor of Jung. In a book about James Flournoy wrote:...while most
> philosophers conceive ... [a] primordial state, the origin of all psychic
> life, as a purely subjective state from which subsequent evolution draws forth
> (no one knows how) the idea of a non-self and the representation of an
> exterior world, for James, on the contrary, these primordial facts, these pure
> experiences are entirely objective, simple phenomena of 'sciousness' and not
> of 'consciousness.' This means that he holds that the distinction between self
> and non-self, implied in the word 'consciousness,' from which we are in a
> normal state unable to free ourselves, is not primary, but results from a
> conceptual sorting and classifying of the primitive experiences.[8]The 20th
> century philosopher Kitaro Nishida‹introduced to James by D.T. Suzuki‹compared
> James's concept of sciousness and his phrase "pure experience" to tathata or
> suchness.[9]Yet James scholars today still do not agree on how receptive James
> himself remained to sciousness. As psychologist Benny Shanon observed
> recently:Most pertinent ... is William James with his notion of sciousness
> which comes in contrast to consciousness. The former consists of pure
> experience only, the latter involves knowledge of experience. The crucial
> question is whether mere sciousness does in fact exist. In a most insightful
> scholarly discussion, Bricklin (Journal of Transpersonal Psychology [1], 2003)
> argues that basically the Jamesian position is positive in this regard.
> Natsoulas (Philosophical Psychology, 1993; Journal of Mind and Behavior [2],
> 1996) argues that James vacillated on this issue. I would say that the topic
> calls for much further examination.Karl Jaspers Forum          
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