[MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.

[david buchanan]

Mark said:
According to Sartre, there are three forms of consciousness. ...  I bring in Sartre just as an example, not because I necessarily agree with him (which I do not).   ...James is a bit dated in his revelations, imo.  He is stuck in that "good ol' psychology of the stone age. ...


dmb says:
Sartre is hardly relevant while this description of James's thinking is a good detailed explanation of the difference between DQ and sq. It's hard to imagine what could be more relevant to a proper understanding the MOQ.
And no, I don't think James is particularly dated. If scholars like Eugene Taylor are right, James was about 150 years ahead of his time and we've still got some ways to go before we catch up with him. 


May I suggest a more careful look at a smaller piece of that little Wiki article? I'll add MOQ terms in brackets...

"...Everyone assumes that we have direct introspective acquaintance with our thinking activity as such," James said, "with our consciousness as something inward and contrasted with the outer objects which it knows. [SOM] 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 [subjective self] were rather a postulate [concept] than a sensibly given fact, the postulate, namely, of a knower [subject] as correlative to all this known [objects]; and as if "sciousness" might be a better word by which to describe it.  ... Then thirteen years later, writing solely as a philosopher, James returned to his "parenthetical digression" of sciousness that "contradict[ed] the fundamental assumption [SOM] of every philosophic school." James had founded a new school of philosophy, called "radical empiricism," and nondual sciousness [DQ] 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," [DQ] in which there is "no self-splitting ... into consciousness [subject] and what the consciousness is of" [objects]. Pure experience sciousness [DQ] 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.