This is an extract from a paper that describes an ontology within which we can comprehend our phenomenological experience as well as the scientific, philosophical, and other ideas/concepts we produce within our history, recognizing both the situatedness and limitations of our knowledge and the plenitude of experienced embodied being out of which we generate it. Note that by 'pure experience' James means prereflective experience, the understanding of which has plagued our discussion in general and in particular regarding
@Pharoah's paper.
"The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment"
Joel W. Krueger
1. Introduction
The notion of "pure experience" is one of the most intriguing and simultaneously perplexing features of William James's writings. There seems to be little consensus in the secondary literature as to how to understand this notion, and precisely what function it serves within the overall structure of James's thought. Yet James himself regards this idea as the cornerstone of his radical empiricism. And the latter, James felt, was his unique contribution to the history of philosophy; he believed that philosophy "was on the eve of a considerable rearrangement" when his essay "A World of Pure Experience" was first published in 1904. While Western philosophy is still perhaps awaiting this "considerable rearrangement," James's notion of pure experience was quickly appropriated by another thinker who in fact did inaugurate a considerable rearrangement of his own intellectual tradition: the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida (1870—1945), the founder and most important figure of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. 1 Kitaro Nishida is widely recognized as Japan's foremost modern philosopher. His earliest major work, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), is generally considered to be the founding statement of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. . . . Pluralistic in his outlook and comparative in his methodology, Nishida was throughout his life deeply influenced by a number of western thinkers and religious figures (a trait shared by most other prominent Kyoto School figures). For instance, Nishida speaks favorably of Augustine, Kant, Hegel and Bergson, and concedes that these Western thinkers, among others, had a hand in shaping his thought. 2 But it was with James's formulation of pure experience that Nishida first believed that he had found a conceptual apparatus upon which he could ground the characteristic themes and concerns that have since been designated "Nishida Philosophy."
Additionally, Nishida felt that James's idea of pure experience was able to preserve some of the more important features of Buddhist thought that Nishida looked to incorporate into his own system. Though he was only to practice Zen meditation for a relatively short time, the distinctively Zen concern with cultivating an intuitive, pre-reflective insight into the nature of reality and experience was conjoined, in Nishida, with the Western emphasis on logic and argumentative rigor in a somewhat unlikely alliance. Nishida's life-long project was thus to wed the immediacy of experience as lived (what he termed "concrete knowledge") with a more formal-rational analysis of the structures of lived experience, an analysis utilizing the concepts and categories of the western philosophical tradition as Nishida understood it. Very simply, Nishida in this way believed that he was attempting to synthesize the philosophical worlds of east and west into a new form of inquiry that would prove mutually enriching to both traditions. And like James, then, Nishida's understanding of pure experience came to occupy the center of his entire life's work.James's particular understanding of pure experience and its function within his thought is sharpened when contrasted with the distinctive nuances of Nishida's own development of the idea. Thus a comparative analysis is warranted.
In this essay, I develop several points of convergence in the notion of "pure experience" as formulated by James and Nishida. I begin with a brief consideration of James's formulation of "pure experience." I then move to an analysis of James and Nishida on the bodily self. I argue that both men offer similar models of selfhood and embodiment that challenge classical substantialist conceptions of the self, as well as the mind-body dualism generated by these substantialist models. Furthermore, I argue that their respective analyses of embodiment are meant to throw into high relief the intellectualist prejudices of western epistemology: that is, the persistent tendency to assume the human beings are first and foremost cognitive subjects. James and Nishida both offer a radically reconfigured picture of human reality, one which stresses not only the embodied character of our being-in-the-world but furthermore the volitional-affective character—in short, our active character—that is in fact our fundamental mode of existence. I argue that James and Nishida similarly contend that it is this embodied-active character that actually generates anterior cognitive structures. Put otherwise, body both precedes and shapes thought. This claim then leads both thinkers to search for an ontologically primordial dimension of experience intended to undercut traditional metaphysical dualism: hence, the centrality of pure experience within their respective systems.
Finally, I conclude by considering a number of important ways in which Nishida's utilization of pure experience extends beyond that of James, in that it grounds both his analysis of religious experience and his ethics. 4
2. James on Pure Experience
The starting point of James's thought is a deeply (though not exclusively) empirical concern. His work as a whole is founded upon a consideration of concrete experience: the world as experienced by an embodied, embedded, and acting agent. Explicating the lived structures that constitute our uniquely human way of being in the world, James insists, is the key to understanding the antecedent categorizations, conceptualizations, and other intellectual ways of organizing the world that are founded upon these experiential structures, and which emerge through our action within the world. These intellectual structures ultimately reflect the practical concerns of human beings as they simultaneously shape and are shaped by the world they inhabit and act within.
His "concrete analysis," as he terms it, thus provides the methodological trajectory of his philosophical considerations. James writes that "concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious. The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its use of the concrete way of thinking."2 And therefore all philosophical reflection, as an intellectual movement away from a more concrete analysis into abstract conceptual analysis, invariably must return "...back once again to the same practical commonsense of our starting point, the pre-philosophic attitude with which we originally confront the visible world" if it is to remain faithful to our lived experience.3 It is in concrete experience that the world as given, within the "aboriginal flow of feeling" that is the "much-at-onceness" of pre-conceptual phenomenal experience, that we discern the deeper features of reality—such as cause, continuity, self, substance, activity, time, novelty, and freedom.4 This "prephilosophic" attitude through which we initially face the world is captured in James's development of the concept of "pure experience" as the foundation of his radical empiricism. 5 James's brand of radical empiricism therefore looks to ground his empirical philosophy on the raw material of experience as given. Of this methodological principle he writes: "The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience."5 With his distinctive notion of pure experience, James looked to probe what he perceived to be the underlying experiential unity behind language and reflective or conceptual thought.
Mirroring a basic Zen Buddhist presupposition that Nishida will later utilize for his own ends, James argued that conceptual analysis could never provide an exhaustive account of human experience in its phenomenal richness. And like Nishida and Zen, we can pinpoint a suspicion of concepts and conceptual analysis that underwrites James's formulation of pure experience. This suspicion led some contemporary critics to dismiss his claims on this point as endorsing a kind of undisciplined irrationalism and has contributed to a lingering caricature of James as anti-logical.6 6 Why the suspicion of concepts in James? An analysis of this feature of James's thought will prepare us for this tendency as we find it in Zen and developed in Nishida, discussed below. However, I cannot do justice to James's important position on this point within the confines of the present paper's concerns. Therefore I will limit my discussion to a few salient quotes and a bit of analysis.
To begin simply, James was suspicious of the idea that conceptual or propositional thought functions as the primitive—and thus irreducible—interface between self and world. On this conceptualist or "intellectualist" line, as James refers to it, all thinking and experience involves concepts. No concepts, no experience. James instead argues that the phenomenal content of embodied experience as experienced outstrips our capacity to conceptually or linguistically articulate it. In other words, James insists that many of our basic experiences harbor non-conceptual content. That is, many of our experiences have a rich phenomenal content that is too fine-grained and sensuously detailed to lend itself to an exhaustive conceptual analysis.7 For example, we can have visual experiences of colors and shapes of things for which we lack the relevant concepts (a previously unfamiliar shade of magenta or a chiliagon). And this ability holds for other sensory modalities as well. For our ability to describe or report a wide-range of tastes and smells lags far behind our capacity to actually have an experience of a nearly infinite spectrum of tastes and smells. In other words, the deliverances of our senses continually run ahead of both our descriptive vocabularies as well as our conceptual abilities. Though James does not address the notion of non-conceptual content as explicitly as many contemporary philosophers of mind—and furthermore, it's not clear that he's entirely consistent on this point, as I discuss below—James does continually insist that there is a truth to our concrete experience of reality that conceptual analysis and the formal truths of logic cannot explicate. Thus James is moved to write the following passage, which (not surprisingly) caused considerable consternation among many of his contemporary commentators: I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, exped[r]ience, concreteness, immediacy, use what words you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.8
However, to understand James's basic contention here, it is important to note that he does not dismiss the instrumental utility of concepts. (This point is one which a number of his critics failed to see). And James is certainly not suggesting that we disregard the formal truths of logic altogether, of course. Rather, his insistence that logic can be "given up" is an insistence that the problem at stake is not with concepts and logical truths per se, but rather with the way that philosophers (especially, once again, those endorsing an "intellectualist" view) habitually relate to conceptual and/or logical analysis. James claims that concepts are merely "map which the mind frames out,"9 and which enable us to organize and cope with a particular aspect of reality making up the environment(s) with which we are concerned. He says elsewhere that "the only meaning of essences is teleological, and that classification and conceptions [are] purely teleological weapons of the mind"10—retrospective reconstructions of the portion of reality that demands our attention at any given moment. In this way, concepts have a clear instrumental necessity. They are invaluable in both organizing our experiences as well as enabling us to report, share, and discuss our experiences with other language users. But concepts, James insists, do not capture the irreducible essence of that which they purport to describe. There is always another aspect under which a thing can present itself, another way that a thing can be investigated and categorized.
Again, concepts pick out whatever properties of a thing that "is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest."11 In this way, concepts "characterize us more than they characterize the thing."12Problems arise, however, when the structures of our conceptual "maps" are thought to provide an isomorphic blueprint of the inner structure of reality itself. In Zen parlance, this presumption of isomorphism constitutes a "clinging" to thoughts and concepts. As long as we recognize the instrumental utility of concepts, which indicates both their necessity for human life and communication, as well as their intrinsic limitation when it comes to delivering over the reality of a life as experienced that forever exceeds comprehensive articulation, we can use them effectively. But James insists that when logic and concepts (both of which are a "static incomplete abstraction"13 of a more dynamic reality feeding our phenomenal experience) are taken to be a literal reflection of reality, our intelligence becomes distorted. The "static incomplete abstraction" is mistaken for the real, and the vibrancy of phenomenal experience is crystallized into static categories that fail to do justice to its lived richness. Thus James urges that "our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive" in logic and conceptual analysis, but must instead "at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it."14 This universe is the universe of pure experience.
In this way, then, James was ultimately concerned with a holistic appraisal of self and nature—including, it must be noted, a sensitive consideration of the felt sense of life in its perpetual unraveling—that emerges from the center of a life creatively engaged in everyday living. Rather than begin a separate investigation of self and nature, a dichotomy presupposed by his "intellectualist" opponents, James looked instead to inaugurate a new brand of philosophy that had, as its goal, a harmonious integration of self in nature. This consideration included the inarticulate (or again, nonconceptual) dimensions of our lived existence that continually defy purely logical or conceptual analysis. This feature was to be the cornerstone of his self-initiated "considerable rearrangement" of the methods and aims of philosophy as classically conceived. Moreover, it is an essential feature of his philosophy that sets him very much at odds with the more austere, purely epistemological characteristics of modern philosophical preoccupations.15 This pursuit of concreteness and immediacy led James to begin his investigations with [what] he termed "pure experience": reality understood as "a that, an Absolute, a 'pure' experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing."16
Pure experience for James therefore grounds any phenomenology of human experience. According to James, pure experience is the non-conceptual givenness of the aboriginal field of the immediate, a phenomenal field prior to the interpretive structures (and concomitantly, subject-object bifurcations or conceptual discriminations) that we subsequently impose upon it. Pure experience is prior to the reflexive thematizing of the cogito in language and thought. To use a Zen expression, pure experience is a pure seeing. It sees the world but does not thematize it. Nor does it organize it by employing various "teleological weapons of the mind." Rather, it simply bears mute witness to the world in all its "blooming, buzzing confusion." Refining this rather vague idea somewhat, James offers the operative thesis of his "principle of pure experience" when he says that 'My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff "pure experience," then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.'17
James thus looked to locate a primordial experiential realm that undercut the dichotomized metaphysical and epistemological poles of both subjectivity and objectivity. His "pure experience" was in part a solution to the immanence/ transcendence paradox this dichotomy engenders. The intellectualist project of trying to reduce the objective world to categorical distinctions, or a purely conceptual analysis, ultimately failed due to the inability of human categories to adequately capture the richness and pluralistic vivacity of how things are, and how they are experienced in the phenomenality of their concrete becoming. Conversely, the empiricist attempt to reduce the subjective world to the objective world exhibited a kind of hermeneutic insensitivity, in that it failed to adequately concede the inescapable presence of mediation within our experience of the world, and the perspectival nature of this experience: the fact that our understanding is filtered through the contingencies of differing interpretive frameworks, conceptual filters as finite structures of human subjectivity (such as categories of language, history, culture, art, etc.) By locating his starting point within the realm of pure experience, James found a point of departure prior to the subject-object polarity that dualistic thinking posits as primary reality. And he does so without appealing to a transexperiential principle of unification, transcendental "substances, intellectual categories and powers, or Selves" that belong "to different orders of truth and vitality altogether," and that are subsequently required to bind together the empiricist picture of discrete, atomistic sense-impressions.18
Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness attention carves out objects, which conception then names and identifies forever—in the sky "constellations," on the earth "beach," "sea," "cliff," bushes," "grass." Out of time we cut "days" and "nights," "summers" and "winters." We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstracted whats are concepts.19 For James, therefore, the phenomenal world is both ontologically and epistemologically prior to the objective world and the subjective world.
James's analysis led him to a primordial level of unified experience that arises prior to the subject-object distinction, and provided the ground for an ontology that harbors no aperture for any brand of metaphysical dualism. In doing so, he furthermore safeguards the irreducible primacy of our nonconceptual phenomenal experience, which emerges from the sensory modalities of an agent immersed and acting within a living world."
The whole paper is available at this link:
http://queksiewkhoon.tripod.com/varieties_of_pure_experience_joel_w_krueger.pdf
