From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jan 06 2003 - 14:15:37 GMT
Hi DMB, Matt,
Don't care to ingage in some fussin' and fightin', just a comment on
James.
> DMB said:
> Further, Pirsig does not
> abandon James or Pragmatism. He goes into some detail as to the
> differences
> between himself and James in chapter 29 of Lila.
I think Pirsig and James differ in their emphasis; James is interested
primarily in behavior, and Pirsig primarily in the intellect vs the rest
of experience (as he is trying to build an intellectual system that
values values primarily...). What they have in common, is that they both
reflect deeply on the nature of experience and the rest of reality.
One interesting observation of James is the following: People can hold
beliefs, motives, assumptions etc. that might be ultimately true or
false, but the fact that people have these beliefs does have an
influence on their behavior... the beauty of this observation is, that
you can consider the whole range of human experience in this light, from
religious experience to mathematics: e.g. Believing in an afterlife or
contemplating kinds of infinity... You can't see God, you can't see
infinity, but it does have an effect on your thinking and your behavior.
It even sheds a light on mystical experience: Noone having a Buddha-like
experience can explain this experience fully to other people, but the
mere fact that they do try leads to the conclusion that regardless of
the nature of mystical experience (including the notion that it might
somehow 'trancend' experience) it DOES have an effect on the mystic's
behavior, actions and choice of words etc.
Here I think is James in his pragmatic stance at his best.
It's relation to Pirsig? Well, Pirsig is I think more interested in
putting on another pair of glasses to view reality, and that contains
the implicit notion that this changing of viewing reality has a good
effect on thinking and thus behavior, but he doesn't make this notion
very explicit.
Greetings, Patrick.
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