William James’ pure experience, the central idea in his radical empiricism,
The most common objection is to simply to deny that there is any such thing as pure experience. “All awareness is a linguistic affair” or “it’s text all the way down”. Even our basic sensory perceptions are structured by concepts or categories of thought we inherit from language. There is no way to peel back the human contribution, they say. These slogans represent perfectly good objections against positivism, against traditional sense-data empiricism and against the kind of phenomenology that sought the pure essence of things. These objections rightly push back against any claim that says we can gain direct, untainted access to objective reality or somehow peel back our own subjectivity to get at the things-in-themselves. When educated critics hear phrases like “pure experience” and “pre-intellectual experience” or sometimes even just the word “empiricism”, lessons from thinkers like Sellars (or Quine) spring to mind and immediately there are flags down all over the field.
The problem with using this objection against Pirsig or James is that they are not making any such claims to a pure, untainted view. In fact, they debunk the same myth and they undermine the same ambition with pithy little slogans of their own. “We carve out everything,” James says, and “the human serpent is coiled over everything”. Similarly, Pirsig says, “we are suspended in language,” and, slightly modifying Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things, he is a participant in the creation of all things”. As if to drive this point all the way home, Pirsig says that we even constructed the idea that reality is not a construction.
Like the linguistic slogans, these slogans from James and Pirsig also represent a move against the myth of the given, against traditional empiricism and against the correspondence theory of truth. They too represent a rejection of the Modern quest for a single objective (usually scientific) truth and the express the postmodern realization that reality is fundamentally interpretive, that we don’t exist in a world of things but a socially constructed world of meaning.
Sellars’ slogan is actually about our awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, abstract entities and particulars. In other words, making distinctions and otherwise sorting things into conceptual categories is necessarily a linguistic affair. To claim that verbal or conceptual awareness is the only kind of awareness, one would have to claim that animals and human infants can have no awareness at all and it would mean that reflective self-consciousness is a very lonely gift that sprang, fully developed, from nowhere. Right now there are trillions of living creatures that have various degrees of awareness and are getting along just fine without the benefit of words or concepts.
Pure experience is the centerpiece of a larger, radical empiricism, one that rejects the assumptions that created the epistemic gap between experience and reality in the first place. This gap is predicated on “an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known,” James says, and this fake problem is his first target. The history of philosophy has shown that all sort of theories have been invented to overcome this gap, he says. Some theories put a mental representation into the gap, common-sense theories left the gap untouched, believing that our minds could just make the leap and, he tells us, and the Transcendentalists brought their Absolute in to perform this epic task. James and Pirsig, on the other hand, say that subjects and objects are not the conditions that make experience possible. Instead, they have been carved out. As James puts it, inner and outer are just names for the way we sort experience. They are linguistic affairs, products of reflection, concepts derived from experience. To supposed that these terms mirror Nature’s own divisions or otherwise correspond to pre-existing ontological categories is to reify these concepts. Under our radical empiricists, subjects and objects are stripped of their metaphysical, ontological status and otherwise demoted to the rank of mere concept – thereby eliminating Cartesian dualism and replacing it with an experiential monism. For the radical empiricist, experience and reality amount to the same thing. This is the context in which James and Pirsig make their claims about pure experience or the pre-intellectual cutting edge of experience.
There is an interesting little Wikipedia article on “Sciousness”. It briefly outlines the development of pure experience in James thinking from his work as a psychologist through his final philosophical stages as a radical empiricist. Even there, we see that the question is far from settled: “Pure experience sciousness was mostly attacked when first presented. With some notable exceptions, such as Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, Western philosophers rejected James’ view. That rejection continues to this day.”
–David Buchanan
James never really fleshed/cashed out “pure” experience (tho a whole Japanese school of philo grew out of filling in that gap) for us, Evan Thompson and co. might be a nice bridge from this line of thought to the upcoming(?) secular buddhism show:
James never “fleshed out” the idea of embodied consciousness? Nice pun. James died before he was really done and in fact his essays in radical empiricism were published posthumously. (Almost exactly 100 years ago.) And of course he never had access to brain imaging technology but if scholars like Eugene Taylor are right, James was about 150 years ahead of his time and we are still catching up with him. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/TaylorWoz.htm
The most recent neurological studies are lending support to the observations James was making back in 1890, in his psychology book, and it increasingly makes guys like Plato, Kant, Freud look pretty bad. Researchers like Antonio Damasio have shown that we literally can’t think right without emotion, affect, instinct and the like. Have you heard about Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”? He seems to be making a big splash for saying what James said a long time ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html?pagewanted=all
From Jonah Lehrer’s pop-science book, “How We Decide”:
“One of the first scientists to defend this view of decision-making was William James, the great American psychologist. In his seminal 1890 textbook The Principles of Psychology, James launched into a critique of the standard ‘rationalist’ account of the human mind. …the Platonic view of decision-making, which idealized man as a purely rational animal defined ‘by the almost total absence of instincts,’ was utterly mistaken. …According to James, the mind contained two distinct thinking systems, one that was rational and deliberate and another that was quick, effortless, and emotional. The key to making decisions, James said, was knowing when to rely on which system.”
“It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part. …We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.” (Robert Pirsig in ZAMM)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/#PurExp
Just the other day there was a discussion on the facebook page about “Heidegger’s Hidden Sources”. As it turns out, Kitaro Nishida was the leader of the Kyoto school of philosophy, and several members of the Kyoto school went to Germany during the ’20s to hang out with Heidegger. Some scholars suggest that he wasn’t entirely forthcoming about how much he was “borrowing” from the East. The connection between Kitaro Nishida and William James is mentioned briefly in the Wiki article linked above: “The 20th century philosopher Kitaro Nishida—introduced to James by D.T. Suzuki—compared James’s concept of sciousness and his phrase “pure experience” to tathata or suchness.”
http://iifb.org/journal/Vol_3/V3-No3_James_1185142690724.pdf
the historical accounts from both sides of those encounters show that there was a real gap between the thinkers involved so it’s more likely that the actual sources for Heidegger are folks like Meister Eckhart but there might still be things to be learned by comparisons, see Graham Parkes if you’re interested:
http://ucc-ie.academia.edu/GrahamParkes
Damn, dmf, you friggin’ nailed it with this find. Kitaro’s ultimate, which he calls “MI” (no-thing-ness) is Pirsig’s Quality. I’ll bet the Eastern scholar F C S Northrop was big on Kitaro, who was big on James/Husserl, as was Whitehead who taught Northrop who influenced Pirsig big time.
Most interesting
MU
(Which is also what the interrupting cow says during the knock-knock joke.)
“… it’s more likely that the actual sources for Heidegger are folks like Meister Eckhart but there might still be things to be learned by comparisons,..”
Another vague coincidence there. Pirsig names Meister Eckhart as one of his favorite mystics. Like Eckhart, Pirsig warns us against “low-grade yelping about God”. He also says that if you equate his own Dynamic Quality with mysticism “it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this religious mysticism is just low-grade ‘yelping about God’ of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don’t take the yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up.”
There is a relevant academic paper available for anyone interested in the Nishida/Eastern connections. “The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment.” Here is Joel W. Krueger’s opening paragraph:
“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.”
The rest of the essay can be found at http://williamjamesstudies.org/1.1/krueger.html
Just as relevant (but not as much focused on Nishida) is David Scott’s piece titled, “William James and Buddhism: American Pragmatism and the Orient”. Here is Scott’s abstract:
William James pursued far ranging enquiries in America across the fields of psychology, philosophy and religious studies between 1890 and 1910. Historical and comparative overlaps emerge between James and Buddhism from these pursuits. This article first sets out James’ own nineteenth-century American context. There follows James’ own more explicit references to Buddhism, which particularly focused on the meaning of the term ‘religion’ and on specific elements of Buddhist teachings. In turn comes a substantive comparative look at certain themes in both James and Buddhism, namely, ‘consciousness’, ‘integration’ and ‘criteria of truth claims’. The common functionalist tendencies in James and Buddhism are highlighted. Finally, the article attempts a wider look at the interaction between American thought and Buddhism during the twentieth century. This interaction is exemplified by John Dewey, Charles Hartshorne, Daisetz Suzuki, Kitaro Nishida and David Kalupahana, and also across the fields of psychology, pragmatism and process philosophy. In all of these areas James emerges as a model for studying American thought and Buddhism.
And the link: http://www.thescotties.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/james-buddhism.pdf
Dave wrote:
“Under our radical empiricists, subjects and objects are stripped of their metaphysical, ontological status and otherwise demoted to the rank of mere concept – thereby eliminating Cartesian dualism and replacing it with an experiential monism. For the radical empiricist, experience and reality amount to the same thing. “
O.K. In the James/Lange theory of emotion, a person sees an attacking bear and runs – the human’s physiological responses upon running from the bear is the emotion of fear (I think Damasio and Lehrer would agree), This is surely a Jamesian ‘pure experience,’ or am I getting this wrong?
If I am right so far, I will point out that before any knower and known abstractions come to the fore of, say, the human, there is a bear, a human, and their relationship. These three things are still pre-intellectual experience, and thus “reality itself.”
What then is the ontology of these three ‘things’ which exemplify pure experience – reality itself?
I meant to add this quote, too:
“Pure experience cannot be either physical or psychical: It logically precedes [the subject/object] distinction.” (Pirsig 1991, 364-5)
If the three ‘things’ I mentioned above are pure experience – reality itself – and thus not physical or psychical, then what are they?
David
I believe that Wes’s post about philosophy being better named Ontics is precisely what is at hand in your phenomenological analysis of James and Pirsig.
Once again, I ask you to clarify the ontology of ‘pure experience’. Animal, vegetable, mineral, or what?
The work that James did as a psychologist was finished about 15 years before his first essays in radical empiricism were published. The James/Lange theory of emotions comes from his psychology and so asking for radically empirical explanation is a bit like mixing apples and oranges. Basically, his work as a psychologist raised questions and doubts about subject-object dualism and those questions get answered in his philosophy.
More to the point, your question about pure experience doesn’t make any sense – mostly because you are conceiving it as exactly the opposite of what James and Pirsig say it is. You want the bear, the human and the fearful running to be pure experience but that’s exactly what they’re not. Those are the static concepts into which we sort pure experience. Those names are among the secondary concepts, among the differentiations of consciousness. Pure experience contains all that will later be identified as “things” like bears and people, objects and subjects, matter and mind. Pure experience is the full fact or the whole situation before it’s chopped up and sorted into these things, into these concepts. So these things do not exemplify pure experience but rather are contrasted with it. Pure experience, James says, supplies the material to our later reflection. It’s only afterward, upon reflection, that we look back and add the conceptual distinctions. We run from the bear and jump off the hot stove before we have time to think about it, but these are biological responses to pure experience or DQ.
You want to point out that there is a human and a bear before any abstractions about knower and known can come to the fore, but that’s exactly wrong. The human and the bear are just particular versions of the knower and the known. It seems that you are baffled by their rejection of subject-object dualism. I think you’re trying to understand pure experience in terms of the experience of the Cartesian subject, which is the very thing they’re rejecting. I mean, it would make no sense to say that subjects and objects are secondary concepts derived from the experience of subjects. That would be a bizarrely circular and contradictory claim. The secondary subject and object are derived from the subject and the object, which are pre-existing and primary? How would that work? It can’t work.
See, you’re trying to understand their view in terms of the very assumptions they are rejecting. You’re reading their solution in terms of the problem. They are insisting that subjects and objects are only conceptual, not ontological, and so your demand for an ontology of these things only shows that you’re missing the main point here. This is the crucial point made in all four pieces of the textual evidence (from James, Dewey, Stuhr and Pirsig).
Reification is a conceptual error wherein concepts are mistaken for realities, wherein secondary abstractions are wrongly taken as the primary starting points of reality. This is what Pirsig and James are saying about subjects and objects. They are NOT the pre-existing conditions that make experience possible, as is assumed under subject-object dualism. These guys are saying that’s just how we slice it up, that our culture teaches us to sort and classify experience that way. And the reason it’s so easy to confuse this way of sorting with reality itself is because it has been so amazingly successful and productive.
From the Wiki article on “Sciousness”, which is linked above…
“Then thirteen years later {After the last revision to his giant psychology book], writing solely as a philosopher, James returned to his “parenthetical digression” of sciousness that “contradict[ed] the fundamental assumption of every philosophic school.” James had founded a new school of philosophy, called “radical empiricism,” and nondual sciousness was its starting-point. He even wrote a note to himself to “apologize for my dualistic language, in the Principles.” James did not continue to use the word “sciousness” in later essays on radical empiricism, but the concept is clearly there as the “plain, unqualified … existence” he comes to call “pure experience,” in which there is “no self-splitting … into consciousness and what the consciousness is of.”
In “Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy”, Stuhr says, “it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word ‘experience’ in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is NOT to be understood in terms of the experiencing subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate from their interaction. Instead, Dewey’s view is radically empirical” (PCAP 437). On this view, “experience is an
activity in which subject and object are unified and constituted as partial features and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity”. Please notice that “unanalyzed unity” is another way to say that pure experience is an undifferentiated whole, an undivided continuum or pre-conceptual flux. All these phrases are descriptive labels and what they describe is experience prior to the intellectual distinctions we use when talking about it or reflecting on it.
William James says that radical empiricism is meant to save us from “an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities.” James goes on to show how they are neither discontinuous nor are they entities. Their relations come to life within the tissue of experience, James says, and the apparent discontinuity is a result of treating them as distinct entities rather than partial features within the stream of experience. If pay close attention to experience itself, James says, we see that there are transitional experiences that connect these supposedly discontinuous entities. Conjunctive experiences, he call them, and because of linking, conjoining relations go unnoticed, an artificial gap is created and then mistaken for the very structure of reality itself. Then you have a bunch of fake problems, not the least of which is the haunting feeling that reality is some mystery we can never solve, that we’re forever doomed to grope in the dark, the see through the glass darkly, to watch shadows on the cave wall. This is the kind of metaphysics they are NOT doing anymore. Whatever we say about realities and entities behind or beyond experience as such is always going to be a concept, a hypothesis, a posit and not reality itself. Reality itself, they say with humility, begins and ends with experience. Philosophers should include every kind of experience and every feature of experience and they exclude everything that can’t be experienced – except as a hypothesis, as a concept to be tested in experience, to be put to work in experience.
The Stanford encyclopedia puts it this way: “James’s fundamental idea is that mind and matter are both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff — pure experience — that (despite being called “experience”) is neither mental nor physical. Pure experience, James explains, is “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories… a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats…” (ERE, 46). That “whats” pure experience may be are minds and bodies, people and material objects, but this depends not on a fundamental ontological difference among these “pure experiences,” but on the relations into which they enter. Certain sequences of pure experiences constitute physical objects, and others constitute persons; but one pure experience (say the perception of a chair) may be part both of the sequence constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person.”
Thanks Dave
I really was not aware that James or Pirsig were (seemingly from your explanation) so akin to Eastern metaphysics when closely comparing pure experience and Quality with the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum (dependent co-arising – the lawful interconnectedness of all phenomena).
Your description of James’s pure experience, here, seems to closely mirror the phrase ‘The Tao spoken of is not the Tao.’ In your opinion, do we do justice to both concepts if we roughly equate ‘the immediate flux of life’ with the Tao?
This would satisfy my question of the intended ontology of J and P.
From ZAMM, end of chapter 20:
“Then, on impulse, Phædrus went over to his bookshelf and picked out a small, blue, cardboard-bound book. He’d hand-copied this book and bound it himself years before, when he couldn’t find a copy for sale anywhere. It was the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. He began to read through the lines he had read many times before, but this time he studied it to see if a certain substitution would work. He began to read and interpret it at the same time.
He read:
The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality.
That was what he had said.
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names.
It is the origin of heaven and earth.
When named it is the mother of all things — .
Exactly. [….]
Phædrus read on through line after line, verse after verse of this, watched them match, fit, slip into place. Exactly. This was what he meant. This was what he’d been saying all along, only poorly, mechanistically. There was nothing vague or inexact about this book. It was as precise and definite as it could be. It was what he had been saying, only in a different language with different roots and origins. He was from another valley seeing what was in this valley, not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from. He was seeing it all.
He had broken the code.
He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.”
I always loved that part of ZAMM in each of the six or eight readings I gave it.
But it seems that w/ time, or maybe in LILA (which I only read twice or so) and what others said of ZAMM, that the Zen was really a minor part. I gather you mean to correct this perception.
How involved was James w/ the Buddhists (dmf mentions and linked to a paper I read but forgot most details)? Can we roughly say James would similarly say pure experience is like the Tao?
fwiw
Excuse me, Burl, but how can you claim to be unaware that Pirsig and James were so akin to Eastern metaphysics or the equation to Taoism AND, at the same time, also say the equating passage is one you’ve always loved and have read 6 or 8 times? You are unaware of a passage that you love? After all the obnoxious hounding and rude insults, now you’re flinging obvious bullshit at me too? Dude, you’re just no good at this game and you cheat too. It’s not fun to play with you. Get a different hobby, will you?
I tried to clarify when I wrote that either from LILA, or from other people over the years, it had become my impression that the Eastern philosophy was not at all central to P’s philosophy.
This can easily occur. For example in the Ep 50 podcast, you really dismissed P;s mental breakdown as a trivial thing, which I was ready to accept until some other source after the fact made it fundamental. I do not follow P that carefully anymore.
Same for James – I have read and listened to lots of his works in relation to understanding Whitehead. That James’s thought was meant to be Eastern had never occurred to me, until dmf brought it up in the Kitaro link.
When I read your latest explanation of pure experience for my benefit in looking for its ontological makeup, what suddenly flashed in my mind was ‘the worde and concepts are not the reality they describe. This, I knew to be Eastern. But, to my recall, you have not been presenting James as promoting anything Buddhist (nor P, for that matter).
If it looks like I am playing games, the appearance is not reality.
But since I see now that what you say of James’s experience and P’s Quality are the same as Tao, I am no longer in need of an answer about ontology, since that weatern concept just doesn’t work w/ Tao.
I don’t bullshit. I may be in error, but it is not intentional obfuscation.
Hi , DMB.
I still like to read your Pirsig/James interpretations from time to time, but i’v never examined anything on the Moq-forum since i’v left.
Still miss you and Dan, Give him my regards someday..
Adrie