[MD] Concepts & Reality

[david buchanan]

Ron said:
... Bob and Jimmy are talkin bout the distinction while Fred's talkin reification. [AND]  Where Bob states simply that the discrepancy has value, Fred seems to cast a rather dour atmosphere in regards to the rendering of one from the many and
doesn't really seem to value the disecrepancy as much as reacting to the monistic dominance of values of his day.  I see Bob employing the descrepancy in a useful manner while Fred's more of a deconstructionist.



dmb says:
It's pretty clear that they're all talking about the problem of reification. Fred complains about the "original model" of Honesty or the Leaf. But in other contexts we know that Fred, Will and Bob all take sides with the Sophists and otherwise oppose the "vicious intellectualism" of Plato and Socrates. Plato took the idea of the good from the Sophists and tried to encapsulate it in a "fixed and eternal" Form, the Form of the Good. He also did this with Justice, Truth, Beauty but not, apparently with things like leaves or hair. I guess they are noble enough to deserve their own Forms, or something. Anyway, in this particular context we can see that Will and Bob are talking about the reification problem with subjects and objects, which are more consequential examples of reified concepts. The sentence I originally posted from them ("There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality,..") is just a condensed version of the sentences that come before it, Pirsig says. Check it out...

As Pirsig describes it, James's radical empiricism says...

"...subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical. It logically proceeds this distinction. In his last unfinished work, Some Problems in Philosophy, James had condensed this description to a single sentence: 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous, while the latter is dynamic and flowing.'  Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality."

When concepts are reified, they are treated as MORE than concepts. They are taken as MORE real than the empirical reality from which they were derived in the first place. They are taken as the starting points of reality, as ontologically primary. The MOQ re-asserts the primacy of the experiential reality itself and says that concepts are always secondary, always derived from that primary empirical reality, from the experiential flux. This pre-conceptual experience is starting point of reality for all these guys. 

As Charlene Seigfried puts it, paraphrasing William James, "abstractionism had become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)

In other words, the problem is taking ideas as something MORE than man-made concepts and forgetting that they were extracted from the flux of human experience in first place. The problem is NOT seeing that man is a participant in the creation of all things, NOT seeing that our reality is an evolved construction of our own making. Instead, says Plato and Kant and every viciously intellectual philosopher, reality is beyond our dirty old temporal, sensible life. We're all stuck in a cave and the real reality is beyond this world of appearances, beyond our experience. The MOQ gives that notion a big fat raspberry. It says experience IS reality. All that talk about forms and substances and essences is a bunch of nonsense. The ever-changing flow of experience is not a crypto-religious metaphysical abstraction, Pirsig says, it is reality itself. And our ideas function well in relation to that (and in relation to all other relevant ideas) or they aren't any good.