[MD] Zen at War

[David Thomas]

dmb said before:
> It might interest some people to know that William James knew D. T. Suzuki and
> talked with him about "pure experience" (aka DQ) and Suzuki is considered to
> have been "the foremost explainer of Zen to the West". Alan Watts was his star
> student. 

[Dave]
I know Suzuki was aware of James' work, he worked with friend of James, and
married a women who had taken some classes with James. But you claim the
James "knew" Suzuki and "talked with him about "pure experience." I still
have seen nothing that you have posted and nothing in any of the James
online archives that there was direct face to face discussion(s) or direct
communications between them.  Are you just making this up?

The first source you quoted quite clearly indicates with, "Yet had he
[James] consulted D.T.Suzuki,..." that he doesn't seem think they consulted
with each other.  I know, I know, truth is a species of what is good to
believe, (as long as it supports your argument, position, biases, or
fantasies.) 

My point is that later Zen writers (Suzuki, Nishida, Pirsig et al) all
attached themselves to the coattails an internationally known American
philosopher with a broad, deep, subtle, well received, reviewed, and
criticized body of work. But, what would James say of their attachment of
their work to his, if he was alive? I suggest that he would be highly
critical on a whole range of issues, not the least of which was his nearly
complete distrust of "absolute monism's" such as Taoism, Zen, and the MoQ.

My guess is that your thesis strongly down played this oblivious conflict,
or had some very clever rhetoric to twist it, disguise it, or ignored it
completely. That my "friend" is "conformational bias" at its lowest.  I'm
working on a post which will address some of these issues. Don't get your
titties in a twist, it may take a while.


On 10/22/13 2:54 PM, "David Buchanan" <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Dave Thomas to dmb:
> May I suppose that this is where James meets Suzuki?  "Yet had he consulted D.
> T.Suzuki, destined to become the foremost explainer of Zen to the West, and
> employed at the time as a translator by a philosopher friend of James, he
> might have done otherwise." Or perhaps you have some other reference, because
> I can find no source suggesting direct talks or correspondence between James
> and Suzuki.
> 
> 
> dmb says:
> Yes, Eugene Taylor writes about their connection too.
> 
> "First, while working for Carus, Suzuki came into contact with the pragmatic
> American philosophy of William James and Charles S. Peirce. James and Carus
> were correspondents, while Peirce had published his pioneering series of
> cosmological essays in Carus' journal in the early 1890s. Pragmatism in
> James's hands was fast unfolding as the hallmark of the Progressive Era during
> the time Suzuki worked in Illinois. Thus, to have been introduced to this
> philosophy at the turn of the century was for Suzuki to have the key that
> would later give his ideas entrance into a more mature phase of modern
> American popular consciousness.
> In addition, Suzuki began to introduce his teacher Nishida to Jamesian
> philosophy, writing to him just after publication of James's Varieties of
> Religious Experience (1902). The Varieties contained a very important
> statement on the pragmatic test of mystical experience that Suzuki no doubt
> found attractive; namely, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." In addition,
> there is clear evidence that James's essay "A World of Pure Experience,"
> (1904), a cornerstone of James's metaphysics of radical empiricism, was read
> by Nishida. Nishida, in turn, incorporated James's ideas into Zen no Kenkyu
> (1911), a treatise on pure experience that marked a new era in modern Japanese
> philosophy. Suzuki was, in turn, inspired to increase his discussion of
> religious experience with Westerners by his own reading of James."
> 
> There is also this interesting bit of trivia: "Suzuki got married to an
> American woman. His wife was Beatrice Erskine Lane, a Radcliffe graduate and a
> Theosophist who had been a student of William James, Josiah Royce, and George
> Herbert Palmer."
> 
> And the paper's final paragraph concludes:
> 
> "There can be little doubt that the writings of Swedenborg and the Jamesian
> interpretation of pragmatism, built as it was on a Swedenborgian foundation,
> defined for Suzuki the standard by which he would first introduce zen to the
> west, namely, not as a religion but as a spiritual psychology that had obvious
> and practical consequences. It is but one example out of numerous others, from
> Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Dean Howells, to Helen Keller and Carl Gustav
> Jung, which suggests the important influence of Swedenborg's ideas, not only
> on the philosophy of pragmatism, but also on the larger spiritual history of
> American social thought."
> 
> 
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