[MD] Un-Pure Experience

[David Thomas]

All,

There has been much speculation about the relationship between James' "pure
experience", Zen's satori experiences, and Pirsig's axiom that, "Quality is
a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions."

Since both Pirsig and other Zen writers have pointed to James as the
possible bridge it would seem that his work is the key to solving this
dilemma. The sheer depth, breadth, and volume of his work coupled with its
changing nature over time makes this very challenging even for people who
have dedicated their lives to his work. "Ah, what the hell do it anyway."

All the quotes from James' work are from " The Writings of William James-A
Comprehensive Edition by Professor John J. McDermott 1977 edition. The title
"Comprehensive" should in no way be taken to mean the complete work of
James. But at nearly 850 pages with both complete and representative
selections of his work with introduction and commentary it should suffice
for these purposes.

Before trying to make comparisons the first task is to figure out what
Pirsig means by his axiom. Raw "Quality" of course is undefined and
indefinable by his fiat For "direct experience" let's turn to a "world
changing" Asian philosopher.

"All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience. But one cannot have
direct experience of everything; as a matter of fact, most of our knowledge
comes from indirect experience, for example, all knowledge from past times
and foreign lands. To our ancestors and to foreigners, such knowledge
was--or is--a matter of direct experience, and this knowledge is reliable if
in the course of their direct experience the requirement of "scientific
abstraction", spoken of by Lenin, was--or is--fulfilled and objective
reality scientifically reflected, otherwise it is not reliable. Hence a
man's knowledge consists only of two parts, that which comes from direct
experience and that which comes from indirect experience. Moreover, what is
indirect experience for me is direct experience for other people.
Consequently, considered as a whole, knowledge of any kind is inseparable
from direct experience. All knowledge originates in perception of the
objective external world through man's physical sense organs."
[Mao tse-tung from On Practice (1937)]

[Dave]
Despite being firmly under the sway of SOM this snippet pretty clearly
describes the nature of direct and indirect experiences with the only
possible quibbles being about "correct" way of interpreting those
experiences. Moving on to "intellectual abstractions" things become more
problematic. Here's a few Wiki snips to lay the ground:

[Wiki Leeks]
"Abstraction is a process by which concepts are derived from the usage and
classification of literal ("real" or "concrete") concepts, first principles,
or other methods. "An abstraction" is the product of this process‹a concept
that acts as a super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and
connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category.[1]"

"Chains of abstractions can therefore be constructed moving from neural
impulses arising from sensory perception to basic abstractions such as color
or shape to experiential abstractions such as a specific cat to semantic
abstractions such as the "idea" of a CAT to classes of objects such as
"mammals" and even categories such as "object" as opposed to "action".

"Carl Jung's definition of abstraction broadened its scope beyond the
thinking process to include exactly four mutually exclusive, different
complementary psychological functions: sensation, intuition, feeling, and
thinking. Together they form a structural totality of the differentiating
abstraction process. Abstraction operates in one of these functions when it
excludes the simultaneous influence of the other functions and other
irrelevancies, such as emotion. Abstraction requires selective use of this
structural split of abilities in the psyche."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

[Dave]
James', Jung's, and modern science's psychological take on "abstraction",
while differing in the details, in general follow Jung. Pirsig says all
"thinking" does not rise to the intellectual level. From that can we
concluded that the only type of "abstraction" that is excluded from the
direct experience of Dynamic Quality is the single type, "intellectual
thinking or abstraction?" This would certainly seem to agree with the Zen
emphasis of "suppressing," or "avoiding" or "killing the intellect" as a
necessary condition for satori experiences. But does this idea square with
James' "pure experience?"

Before we can even start to address that, we have to understand how James
views "un-pure experience" the everyday direct and indirect experience of
ordinary people. The psychological foundation of James philosophy lies in
his first book "Principles of Psychology" which was a culmination of his 17
year (1873 to 1890) teaching career at Harvard after which he switched his
focus to philosophy. In it he outlines "the stream of thought" which he
later would fully developed into "stream of consciousness" part of the
philosophical theory he called "radical empiricism."

He claims that if you examine your own personal experience you must allow
that,"The first fact for us, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort
goes on." He goes on to claim that these thoughts have these five important
characteristics:

1.Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2.Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
3. Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continous.
4. It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
5. It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of
others, and welcomes or rejects-chooses from among them, in a word-all the
while.

Later as he develops radical empiricism, to subsume the subject and object
split he uses words like "pieces and parts" instead of "objects" like he
does above. To these "stream of thought" he adds parallel streams of
sensations (seeing, hearing, etc) memory, and feelings which constitutes the
full "stream of consciousness" that is sum total of everyday personal
experience. Consciousness in this case is not an entity but just the name
for the awareness of these streams of experiences.

With this base and to further distance his theory from the primacy of a
subject/object dualism he develops the idea of "pure experience" about which
he in part says:

[James "Does "Consciousness" Exist? I"]
"My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one
primal stuff of material in the world, a stuff of which everything is
composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience.' then knowing can
easily explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into
which portions of pure experience may enter.

[Does "Consciousness" Exist? III"]
"The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the "pure
experience." It is virtually of potentially either subject or object as yet.
For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a
simple that." 

Does "Consciousness" Exist? V"
"Experience is only the collective name for all these sensible natures, and
save for time and space (and if you like 'being') there appears no universal
element of which all things are made." Does "Consciousness" Exist? V"

"A World of Pure Experience. V"
"So the notion of knowledge still in transitu and on its way to joins hands
here with that notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried to explain in my
[essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist?" The instant field of the
present is always experience in the 'pure' state, plain unqualified
actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought,
and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone's opinion
about fact."

As we read down this all kind of feels like what Pirsig is saying about
Quality until we read, "there appears no universal element of which all
things are made." Whoops, Pirsig names this univeral element "Quality."
And it is a mystical undefined entity. This is just what James is trying to
avoid! 

If experience is a ongoing process, multiple stream of experiences
consisting of pieces and parts that are loosely held together by their
relationships over some duration of time, and stopping it is an
impossibility other than by un-consciousness, then "pure experience" is not
in any real sense "experienced." And James says this in his "new born baby"
example, that Pirsig parrots, that "pure experience" is NOT "literally" an
experienced state. We are not aware of it because we "literally" cannot stop
time and examine the "instant field of the present." But theoretically it is
important because in trying to understand a ongoing dynamic process you have
to start at some point is time. So you the state of everything that is going
on in your personal consciousness and unconsciousness -NOW- is "pure
un-differentiated un-abstracted experience." With all the characteristics,
and more, posted above. With time running again, we experience, "pure
experience."

So how does this square with Zen's satori experiences. Well it doesn't at
all. Because both James and Zen allows that those experiences are "real"
personal experiences that have some duration. James classifies them as one
of the varieties of religious experience, Zen as a form of enlightenment
that opens one up to "reality" as it really is. They occur over time, "pure
experience" is a theoretical instant of time-NOW-, no duration.

How about does James idea of "pure experience" square with Pirsig's
following MoQ idea?

"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source
of all things, completely simple and always new." Lila pg. 133

In addition to the problems raised with Zen, Pirsig has bigger problems.
Here we run into the problem of multiple streams, both aware and unaware and
their abstraction processes, that James, Jung, and modern science posit
really exist, while Pirsig only speaks to the intellectual stream. The part
of the process starting with "semantic abstractions such as the "idea" of a
CAT to classes of objects [or patterns of static quality] such as "mammals"
and even categories such as "object" as opposed to "action" in the below
quote.

"Chains of abstractions can therefore be constructed moving from neural
impulses arising from sensory perception to basic abstractions such as color
or shape to experiential abstractions such as a specific cat to semantic
abstractions such as the "idea" of a CAT to classes of objects such as
"mammals" and even categories such as "object" as opposed to "action".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

But we all experience, all the time, streams of sights, sounds, tastes,
smells, touches, feelings, intuitions, simultaneous to, but most often quite
separate from, streams of thought, intellectual or not, and our attention
might shift or drift from any one of these streams to another at any
instant.  

So while James "Pure Experience" freezes all these streams in time, Pirsig's
Dynamic Quality is only prior to the single stream, intellectual thought so
they cannot be considered equivalent. Unless of course you claim that all
experience is intellectual or ideas and thus Absolute Idealism which James
is not very fond of either.

Dave






































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