Re: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic

From: Ron Winchester (phaedruswolff@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Feb 10 2005 - 04:10:29 GMT

  • Next message: Scott Roberts: "Re: MD Pure experience and the Kantian problematic"

    Ron said:
    I hate to join in with everyone else trying to bring you around to Quality
    thinking. Generally I like to side with the underdog, but I must offer my
    view as I see it. Three different individuals from varying backgrounds would
    see a redlight as a part of three totally different empirical systems.

    Scott:
    Then why do stoplights work to stop traffic? In this you are gutting the
    word "empirical" way beyond what Pirsig is doing. The whole *point* of
    claiming that some knowledge is empirical is that it is supposed to be
    readily sharable.

    Hi Scott,

    They work because we don't confine ourselves to any one individual's
    empirical definition. The manufacturer's, engineer's, instructor's and
    police's understanding of the 'Stoplights' enforces our views that it is
    necessary to stop ("why do stoplights work"). The system works because we
    understand "What works" to keep traffic moving in its highest efficiency and
    saftey. It has value; Quality. It is a system that took many different views
    to put together, and that is how it is with philosophy. We didn't deny other
    views.

    Scott;
    The rest of your post is simply not germane to my objection. In fact, it
    appears that you have simply no conception of what the word "empirical"
    means in modern philosophy, and unless that is agreed upon, there is no way
    to discuss the value of Pirsig's expansion of the term. Apparently you are
    treating the word "empirical" to mean "whatever I know". That way lies a
    breakdown in communication.

    I have a "conception of what the word "empirical"
    means in modern philosophy."

    But, as it disagrees with your prejudices, it is not valid. As I have
    admitted to being a 'Know-nothing philosopher', I have no reason to be right
    for 'Right's sake.' There is a way to discuss the value of Pirsig's
    expansion of the term.

    It is not 'Pirsig's expansion' of the term. Pirsig only builds upon an
    expansion that was already there. It just doesn't confine itself to
    Cartesian or Kantesian; less than modern views.

    I'm borrowing from Anthony McWatt's Thesis. I don't feel he would mind if it
    encouraged some to read it. I feel it could explain a lot of disagreements,
    or dmb's 'Blind Spots' that are holding us back;

    To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any
    element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element
    that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that
    connect
    experiences must themselves be experienced relations and any kind of
    relation
    experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.
    Elements
    may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting
    corrected, but
    a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term
    or
    relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (James, 1912, p.42)

    In a subject-object metaphysics, this experience is between a pre-existing
    object and subject, but in the MOQ, there is no pre-existing subject or
    object.
    Experience and Dynamic Quality become synonymous… Experience comes
    first, everything else [such as subjects and objects] comes later. This is
    pure
    empiricism, as opposed to scientific empiricism, which, with its
    pre-existing
    subjects and objects, is not really so pure. (Pirsig, 2002h, p.515)

    What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James’s pragmatism and his
    radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which subjects
    and
    objects spring is value. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and
    radical
    empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also
    the
    primary empirical experience. Pirsig (1991, p.372)

    Northrop (1947, p.195) expands on the definition of ‘concepts by intuition’
    elsewhere:
    ‘In other words, they are concepts the complete meaning of which is given by
    something which can be immediately apprehended. Such concepts we shall call
    concepts by intuition, where intuition means, not a speculative hunch, but
    the
    immediate apprehension of pure empiricism, which occurs in direct inspection
    or pure
    observation. Descriptive, natural history biology with its classification of
    genera and
    species constructed in terms of directly observable characteristics is an
    example of a
    science [using concepts by intuition].’

    Empirically, we immediately apprehend what we immediately apprehend,
    the image of the snake on the bedpost with the same vividness and purely
    factual immediacy as the image of the snake in the zoo. Nor does the former
    image come with a tag on it saying ‘I am illusory,’ or the latter image come
    with
    a tag reading ‘I am the image of a real public, external animal.’ Both
    images
    are equally factual, the one as real, so far as pure empiricism can tell, as
    the
    other. (1947, pp.43-44)

    The Orientals of the Far East, who brand all knowledge as illusory except
    that given as pure fact, or, to use their words, by intuition, arrived long
    ago at
    the… pure empiricist’s thesis that nothing but what we immediately apprehend
    is genuine knowledge. Their dialectic of negation forced them, therefore, to
    negate, i.e., reject, the common-sense man’s belief in the reality of a
    persisting
    determinate substantial self underlying the empirically given sensuous
    qualities.
    This happens in the realistic Hinayanistic School of Buddhism and
    corresponds
    exactly to the conclusion of David Hume following the latter’s acceptance of
    Bacon’s pure empiricism in the Modern West.

    "Everything real is experienced somewhere. Everything experienced is real
    somewhere." James (Possibly misquoted)

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