[MD] The Heinous Quadrilemma

[david]

Tuukka said:

Consider this statement: "The experience itself contains no logic and
no distinctions but it 'furnishes the material for our later
reflections'"

If so, how can one say that "Pure experience" or Quality "logically
precedes this distinction", if logic doesn't exist at that stage but
instead begins to exist only after we start thinking or writing
logically? Shouldn't the citation read that "Pure experience" or
Quality "metaphysically precedes this distinction" or simply that
"Pure experience" or Quality "precedes this distinction"?


dmb replies:

One say that "Pure experience" or Quality "logically precedes this distinction" just as one can say sleeping logically precedes waking. In both cases, logic doesn't exist in that first stage but logic does obtain when we start thinking about it or talking about it. The logic can also be expressed as a little argument: Since concepts are derived from experience, the experiential material from which they are derived must come before the concepts.



> The second of James two main systems of philosophy, which he said
>  was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this
>  he meant that subjects and objects were not the starting point 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 either physical or psychical: It logically
> precedes this distinction. (Pirsig 1991, 364-5).




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