ELEPHANT (the PUZZLED one of the Daves) TO 3RD WAVE:
I really enjoyed your posting. It's done a lot to refesh my memory and to
make me think about James again in a new light. It has really confirmed
what I've been thinking for some time now, which is that the Plato's world
veiw... (consisting of on the one hand THE FORM OF THE GOOD AS THE SUN and
on the other hand THE FLUX or continuous stream of experience) has an
under-remarked sympathy with the 'radical empiricist' point of view (which
also invokes the good as that (perhaps also metaphorically a sun) in the
light of which true statement are true, and which also talks about
continuity and flux).
Prisig is one of the few people who have noticed this and talked about both
James and Plato in the same context (although I don't think his reading of
Plato quite goes all the way to the truth of it). Maybe Iris Murdoch was
another who had noticed this: she too talks about James occasionally. From
what you've said, the notion of continuity or 'flux' which in my Masters
thesis I argued to be the cheif motivation for Plato's theory of Forms
(http://website.lineone.net/~david.robjant/thesis.html). I'm planning a
second research thesis, this time on Iris Murdoch, and you've given me new
ideas about how to approach radical empiricism for the purposes of
comparison here. The thought that Murdoch, an avowed Platonist, might also
be a kind of radical empiricist is a new one, and I intend to pursue it for
all it's worth (a doctorate, I'd say). There are points of difference here,
too, which I'd like to think about:
3WD:
> In "The Present
> Dilemma in Philosophy" James lists two extremes of mental make ups,
> "tender minded" and "tough-minded."
>
> The Tender Minded The Tough Minded
> Rationalistic (going by principles) Empiricist (going by the facts)
> Intellectuallistic Sensationalistic
> Idealistic Materialistic
> Optimistic Pessimistic
> Religious Irreligious
> Free-Willist Fatalistic
> Monistic Pluralistic
> Dogmatical Skeptical
>
> James quickly goes on to say "Pray postpone for a moment the question of
> whether the two contrasted mixtures...are each inwardly coherent and
> self consistent or not-" and then goes on to point out that these
> extremes are set up for his purpose of showing the merits of pragmatism.
ELEPHANT:
Indeed, as I remember it this is James constructing something like a moral
research methodology, a virtue-epistemology, where he says for example that
it's necessary to be pretty tenacious with a hypothesis (otherwise you can't
uncover any supprting 'evidence'), but not too tenacious (otherwise you've
given up on needing 'evidence' at all). Iris Murdoch also is pretty strong
on this kind of virtue epistemology: one has to be the right kind of honest
and courageous enquirer to get at the truth, and to really get to know
something you have to kind of cherish it - hence her expression "loving
attention". She's extracting it from Plato though, not James. It would be
good to come to a worked-out idea of where the two virtue-epistemologies
meet and part.
3WD:
> Or as Pirsig restates it:
> " Truth is a species of good" That was right on. That was exactly what
> is meant by the Metaphysics of Quality. Truth is a static intellectual
> pattern within the larger entity called Quality" Lila pg 364
>
> So that radical empiricism need not exclude rationalism, optimism, free will,
> monism, or any other BELIEF provided that it follows a pragmatic
> method of selection.
ELEPHANT:
Yes, right on indeed - but one question. What is the "pragmatic mode of
selection" by which the idea that "truth is a species of good" is reached?
If you can answer that, then your answer will serve as an explanation for
"The Sovereignty of the Good" over other concepts (a phrase of Murdoch's).
On the other hand, if we can't answer that successfully, should we say, as
Plato would, that we can talk about two kinds or degrees of truth here: one
relating to truth in what he calls "opinion" (pragmatic truth, where truth
is a species of good), and one relating to what he calls "knowledge" (i.e.
the philosophical knowledge that pragmatism is true, and knowledge of truths
about The Good itself, rather than about what possesses that Quality)?
You quote Prisig on James:
> "To put philosophy in the service of any social
> organization or any dogma is immoral. It's a lower form of evolution
> trying to devour a higher one."
- does this mean that Philosophy is a different (higher) kind of enquiry
than the everyday one? If so, does it support Plato's point about there
being another (higher) kind of truth that might result from this other
(higher) kind of enquiry?
3WD:
> PURE EXPERIENCE AND DYNAMIC QUALITY
> In his early work (Principles of Psychology) James talks about
> experience as "streams of though" later as "streams of consciousness" and
> in later work all of reality as continuous ,ongoing, undifferentiated
> flow of "stuff" out of which we can and do at any point in time attend
> to only a very small portion . What he objected to in the British
> empiricists was the "tendency to do away with the connections of things
> and to insist most on the disjunction's. Berkley nominalism, Hume's
> statement that whatever things we distinguish are 'loose and separate'
> as they have no manner of connection." For James the "connection of
> things" are crucial , " the relations that connect experiences must
> themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation
> experienced must be account as 'real' as anything else in the system"
ELEPHANT:
Absolutely! - And this is really Murdoch's point against Wittgenstein on
following a rule, much as it was Plato's point against Protagoras on
perception as a relation between a disjoined perceived and perceiver. The
point is that we need to have the right kind of faithful account of what we
actually experience - hence Murdoch's concentration on the concept of
"experience" in her discussion of the philophy of language. (See the
chapter on Wittgenstein in Murdoch: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
3WD
> JAMES
> "Pure experience is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which
> furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
> categories" (The Thing and Its Relations)
> PIRSIG
> " Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on for ever and
> ever, always the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of this
> cutting edge are static patterns of value" S.O.D.V. pp 12.
ELEPHANT:
Static, yes, but only so long as we value them in their stability.
3WD:
> Pirsig on page 365 of Lila then says:
>
> "In his last unfinished work, "Some Problems of Philosophy", James had
> condensed this description to a single sentence: " There must always be
> a discrepancy between the concepts and reality, because the former are
> static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing" Here
> James had chosen the exactly same words Phaedrus had used for the basic
> subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality.
ELEPHANT:
-And isn't this also the same as the necessary falsification of the flux by
our use of concepts, which Plato expresses here:
"nor ought we to admit 'something', 'someone's', 'my', 'this', 'that', or
any other word that brings things to a standstill. We ought, rather, to use
expressions that conform to the nature of things, and speak of them as
coming to be, undergoing production, ceasing to be, and altering; because if
anyone brings things to a standstill he'll be easy to refute in doing that.
[Theaetetus 157b5]"
This idea of flux takes us beyond mere change, which requires something
constant as its hinge. Plato says that anyone who "brings things to a
standstill" will be "easy to refute", and so cannot allow a 'this' or 'that'
which changes. Not even, indeed, the identity of the perceiver. This flux is
not change, but an altogether more RADICAL restlessness. We are left with
something dizzyingly indescribable: "becoming".
3WD:
> THE ZEN CONNECTION
> A quick close. "Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to the
> facts of personal experience".. "Zen abhors anything coming between the
> fact and ourselves"... "that we ought to make a great difference between
> the acts of understanding and those of will: That the first were
> comparatively of little value, and the others, all" (D.T Suziki) Saying
> things like this, Zen has a long history and ongoing practice which
> agrees more closely with both radical empiricism, pragmatism, and the
> MoQ than most other religious practices currently in vogue.
>
ELEPHANT:
Yes, and Iris Murdoch thought of Zen as carrying on Plato's thought on this
point. The Zen thinker she refers to most constantly is Katsuki Sekida, and
his emphasis is on "pure perception": a state where one divests onself of
all the (pragmatically) constructed world of objects, events, relations and
causes, to reveal that pure clear continuous all-connected stream which our
constructed world of self, of subject, of objects, falsifies.
You need not apologise for your posting's length, 3WD. It was inspired and
inspiring.
Puzzled Elephant
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