« The Polysemiality of the Concept of “Pure Experience” » (1999/2011)

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The Polysemiality of the Concept of

“Pure Experience”

In Whitehead’s Pancreativism—The Basics (2006), polysemiality, interanimation and style have been described as parts of a global convergent movement towards the bare factuality of experience. The point was to suggest how language can open itself to something that remains, to a significant extent, foreign or opaque to it. Asking how does language prismatize the ever-changing complexity of reality is to ask how its intentionality works, or: how, after all, can it be a prism—or a vector—rather than a screen? That latter question is not, as we shall soon see, purely rhetorical: language can be used in a mœbian, self-referential, way that short-circuits its constitutive intentionality.

1

The assertion of a primordial experience, both in the sense of a temporal primacy and of a semantic or existential primacy (“original or pristine character”—Perry II, pp. 386 sq.) is extremely important for the operationalization of “radical empiricism,” but when the Essays in Radical Empiricism introduced the concept of “pure experience,” they did so in the rough. And it is indeed a major characteristic of James’s works that they propose more willingly a cluster of convergent intuitions only roughly systematised rather than a full-fledged “theory of everything.”

The reception of the concept of pure experience has been rather negative and it is not difficult to understand why.

2 On the one hand, James’s vision

is “counter-intuitive”—better: non-rational. Its purpose is to draw all the onto-epistemological consequences of anti-foundationalism and of non-dualism. On the other hand, James’s style is quite surprising and it takes time to organise the intrication of the semantic layers involved.

1 This chapter expands the heuristics of “An Argumentation for Contiguism,”

Streams of William James, Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 1999, pp. 14-16. 2 Eugene I. Taylor and Robert H. Wozniak (Edited and Introduced by), Pure

Experience. The Response to William James, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1996.

92 Michel Weber

Before diving into the debated question—the polysemiality of the concept of “pure experience”—, it is worth to quickly refresh the philosopher’s overall perspective. According to the late James, what especially matters is the intrinsic unity of the World as well as its dynamic, variegated, character: there is no room for the inveterate dualism in a philosophy that champions an open universe. More precisely speaking, ERE is concerned with the status of consciousness—and its motto is: “consciousness” stands for a function, not for an entity. It is nothing less than a categoreal mistake to appeal to a “trans-experiential agent of unification” (ERE 43). The main speculative difficulty is to understand the withness of the subjective and the objective, to delimit the differences of degree that separates-yet-binds them. To do so, James devises “the principle of pure experience,” which claims that

nothing shall be admitted as fact […] except what can be

experienced at some definite time by some experient; and for every

feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found

somewhere in the final system of reality. In other words: Everything

real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing

experienced must be somewhere real. (ERE 160; cf. p. 42 and PU 372)

Merleau-Ponty, among others, will also later claim that experience has to be total.

1 Whitehead, for his part, insists:

the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart

from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing,

bare nothingness. (PR 167)

This is exactly what, in some other circles, has been called a “panexperientialism.”

2

4.1. Pure Experience—Definition

1 “L’expérience n’est rien ou il faut qu’elle soit totale.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, NRF Éditions Gallimard,1945, p. 299.

2 Griffin was the first to use the concept—which has been coined in conversation

with Cobb—in his “Whitehead’s Philosophy and Some General Notions of Physics and Biology,” in John B. Cobb, Jr. & David Ray Griffin (eds.), Mind in Nature. Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy, Washington D. C., University Press of America, 1977.

Polysemiality of the Concept of “Pure Experience” 93

In the lines that follow, we exploit a tripartite grid to organise the layers of meaning of the concept. By doing so, we take advantage of the very categories that need to be bypassed. James desperately seeks to avoid the subject/object dualism, not the distinction of the subject and of the object:

the bank can’t say, “I made the river,” any more than the river can

say, “I made the bank.” The right leg can’t say, “I do the walking” any

more than the left leg can.1

Here lies the fatum of process thought: to depict a radical onto-epistemological renewal—and thereby arouse a modification of consciousness—can only be achieved through the use of specialized everyday language, i.e., a language that is substantialistic-dualistic at heart (exactly what needs to be reformed—if not destroyed).

Wrestling with the status of the marrow of experience, James coins the concept of pure experience in order to name what cannot bear names, in order to point to what remains of the order of bare factuality, i.e., of pre-predication. Out of the intricacy of the various meanings he confers to the concept, three dimensions can be isolated for the sake of analysis, and articulated for the sake of synthesis.

The understanding of the implicated order of the panexperientialist working hypothesis necessitates the distinction of three complementary perspectives: subjective, objective and unitive. The analysis itself belongs to the domain of abstractions: for the sake of a wider understanding of the various levels of connexities every being enjoys with its environment, the philosopher wagers on the pulling apart of what is intuitively given to us as an immediate unity. By doing so, it is hoped that each layer of meaning will disclose fruitful speculative nuances.

4.1.1. Subjective Flux of Life

From the subjective, or “inner” point of view, pure experience is the “immediate flux of life” in which feelings inflame the whole experiencing being. It is the prepredicative penumbra of new-born babes (or intoxicated adults) who intuit a “that which is not yet any definite what.”

2 One could

1 Letter of James to Warner Fite, 1906, quoted by Perry II, p. 392.

2 Cf. ERE 92-94; cf. PP I 488 and II 32. Of course, James’s claims are to be read as

primarily metaphorical: developmental psychology has shown more or less convincingly that the new-born is not a tabula rasa; and the recent advances in the understanding of the status of hypnosis offer interesting complementary approaches to this question. (Cf., e.g., Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World

94 Michel Weber

speak, in other words, of a bare sense of presence characterized by a state of primordial innocence ignorant of (hopefully fruitful) distinctions. In the penumbra of “pure” or “direct” experience, experience is just as it is, without the least addition of deliberative discrimination, to say it with Nishida’s words.

1

What this perspective uncovers is twofold. First, it shows the centrality of the subject of experience in general, and of the subjectivity of the philosopher in particular: our own experience is the unavoidable ground of any speculation. This has been acknowledged, reluctantly or not, by every philosophy. Second, it sketches the construction of reality by language. Out of a perceptual chaos (a concept James is fond of), we bring forth a world: “when we conceptualise, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other.” It is another issue to understand how this world (my world or Umwelt, like etho-phenomenologists say) can overlap, as it factually does, with other worlds.

And here is the obvious conflict—exploited ad nauseam by deconstructive postmodernism

2—between the radical eventfulness of a

truly open universe, and the static profiles conceptual understanding cannot but provide. This apparent unreconciliabilty of the torrential kosmos with the necrosing conceptualisation process has led, for instance, the late Heidegger to advocate a “poetry of thinking.” Pushed to the hilt, such a philosophical approach claims only to utter eventful concepts, in the very same way reality is a weaving of never-recurring events.

4.1.2. Objective Primal Stuff

of the Infant. A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York, Basic Book, 1985; Léon Chertok, L'Hypnose. Théorie, pratique et technique. Préface de Henry Ey. Édition remaniée et augmentée, Paris, Éditions Payot, 1989; François Roustang, Qu'est-ce que l'hypnose?, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1994.)

1 Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good [Zen no Kenkyu, 1911]. Translated by

Masao Abe, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 3-4. See infra the remarks on the difference between James and Nishida.

2 Griffin makes a useful distinction between “deconstructive or eliminative

postmodernism” and “constructive or revisionary postmodernism.” See David Ray Griffin (ed.), The Reenchantment of Science. Postmodern Proposals, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1988, p. x.


From the objective, or “outer” point of view, pure experience is the “primal stuff” or “materia prima” of the world.

1 “Experience as a whole is self-

containing and leans on nothing” (ERE 193). Everything that is real is experiencing, full stop. James is not only saying that a non-experiencing or non-experienceable “something” would institute an awkward enclave in the uni-verse, but that such an ontological pocket is purely and simply impossible: it is logically inconsistent and totally incoherent with the key-categories of radical empiricism.

Basically, the question of the “primal stuff” is the one of (realistic) pluralism; without some “objective something” standing out there, we end up volens nolens with a form of solipsistic idealism; the “many” collapses, once and for all, into an all-embracing “one.” This is definitely not the case in the “normal” state of consciousness. James’s vision speaks for a pluralism that does not insulate the different actors of the ontological scene. There are co-dependant yet possess their intrinsic “weight.” Common sense does not claim anything else.

It is to be noticed that James uses the concept of “stuff” in various analogical ways: positively as well as derogatorily. Positive occurrences aim at the full thickness of the concrete, at its overall chaosmic structure;

2

derogative occurrences denounce the understanding of reality’s core as a permanent substance underlying changes (cf., e.g., ERE 3, 26).

4.1.3. Emotional Reconciliation

From the unitive, or “in-between” point of view, pure experience is the “ineffable union” (ERE 121) that sees the unison of the experiencing and the experienced. The immediate flux of life is intertwined, or even dissolved, in the universal experiencing tissue; one undifferentiated whole reaches meta-consciousness. In a typically Bergsonian fashion, James asks to put ourselves “in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing” (PU 263; cf. VRE 501). We should struggle to reach an “ontological intuition, lying beyond the power of words to tell of.”

3 The Will to Believe

has even more adventurous utterings (besides the fact that it still speaks of a “mind”):

1 Cf. the note 35 on Aristotelian hylemorphism.

2 See, e.g., ERE 4, 37, 78, 138.

3 William James, Review of “The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of

Philosophy,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1874, Volume 33, No. 205, pp. 627-628.

96 Michel Weber

The key-note of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense

of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in

depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the

logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to

which its normal consciousness offers no parallel […]. The center and

periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the

meeum and the tuum, are one. (WB 294)

The world of pure experience is the world in which there occurs an immense emotional sense of atonement and reconciliation; it is the world in which every opposition vanishes to the benefit of the law of togetherness of events in a common world. This emotional awareness embodies the fact that “there are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.” (WB 297) James exemplifies it with two main cases: religious rapture and chemical intoxication.

Pure experience names the radical eventfulness (i.e., the asubstantialism) of the inner and outer worlds, as well as their unison. What really matters here is James’s panexperientialism: every feature of the World is either an “experiencing” or an “experienced.” Experience is what actually holds the world together: not only are relations experienced, but they are themselves experience. Since everything is experience, there is no more dichotomy between, on the one hand, a substance that is experiencing and unextended and, on the other, a substance that is unexperiencing and extended (remember Descartes’ bicameral substantialism). Radical empiricism is first and foremost a radical constructivism.

It is now possible to rephrase our earlier question: how can a world conditioned by opposites be the surface effect of a reconciliated world? The fundamental law of sharing (if any such a law exists) must belong to a level of consciousness that has not been selected for everyday purposes, and various reasons can be put forward: from a “natural” perspective, the everyday level of consciousness is determined by the features of human beings’ habitat and embodiment; from a “cultural” perspective, it is determined by contingent habits of language and ritualization. On the one hand, the biological evolution of humanity has selected some particular ways of relation and awareness in a sharp competitive context with other species; on the other, sub-evolutionary processes have led groups of humans to adopt their own languages and rituals to “customise” the world. As a result, two complementary filters stands out of this quick analysis: sense perception and education. Any individual’s perspective is moulded by the peculiarities of his/her perceptual system and cultural interpretative grid. In conclusion, the obliteration of the unitive world by its partition into


a subject and various objects has proven to be a necessity for survival and for action purposes. And the link can now be made with a last difficulty: why should we “translate experience from a more concrete or pure into more intellectualised form”? (ERE 96)—and thereby install bifurcations in the natural tissue. The paradoxical answer is: to attain to dwelling.

A closer look at this third layer of meaning reveals that the concept necessitates furthermore a complementary analysis in terms of levels of consciousness. If “the principle of pure experience” holds, how is it, indeed, that it is totally denied by common-sense? In other words: if pure experience describes the ultimate feature of our world, if, per se, it is the awareness brought about by an ineffable union, why is it so foreign to everyday life? The very first thing to notice is that “pure or direct experience” does not mean direct sensorial experience. Buddhism has heavily insisted on this, but the question is not foreign to Western philosophy at all. Because of textual evidences, Plato’s concept of “theoria” can be said to be the starting point of a build-in contemplative trend in philosophy, trend that will be later exploited, through its Neo-Platonic interpretation, by the entire Medieval philosophy. But the problem these speculations face is the (ab)use they make of the metaphor of vision: Jonas has shown very straightforwardly the inevitable bias of the theoretic concept, mainly in terms of the neutralisation of time and causation. To say it in one word: the metaphor of vision imposes the idea of the spectator-subject, i.e., of a totally passive onlooker factually unaffected by the scenery.

1 Anyway, the XXth century has seen three major thinkers—James,

Bergson and Whitehead—clarifying the issue of experience, acutely distinguishing (but not bifurcating) sensory perception from its ontological roots. Sense perception is actually a very simplified (though sophisticated) projection established on the wealth of data in which the subject is immersed—better, that constitutes the subject.

We have used, explicitly or not, contrapunctic parallels with Nishida’s interpretation of James’s concept of pure experience. It is now time to define how far such a conceptual togetherness with the immediate envisioning of being in its “suchness” and “thusness” is fair. “Suchness” or “thusness” means viewing things as they are; the absolute experience is made of oneness and purposelessness, it makes plain that there was actually nothing to reconcile in the first place, just a seamless eventful tapestry.

2 To

go to the core of the matter, we have to acknowledge that experience is not 1 Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, op. cit.

2 Cf., e.g., Ames Van Meter, “Zen and Pragmatism,” Philosophy East and West 3,

n° 1, 1954, pp. 19-33.

98 Michel Weber

understood in the same way by the two philosophers: James understands it as a “plenum,” whereas Nishida sees it as a “vacuum.”

1 The fullness, full-

bodiedness, of the Jamesian universe is replaced by the emptiness of the latter. Now, from a speculative point of view, one could frame an argumentation bringing the two conceptual extremes closer, but it is to be feared that such an abstract exercise will never do justice to the idiosyncratic experience—in the strong sense of the term—of our protagonists. To take a more “concrete” exemplification: even when he understands consciousness as a function, James acknowledges some sort of egoity to the subject. Nishida, on the contrary, pushes as far as possible the negation of any dichotomies. It is the case indeed that “Zen does not teach absorption, identification, or union, for all these ideas are derived from a dualistic conception of life and the world. In Zen there is a wholeness of things, which refuses to be analyzed or separated into antitheses of all kinds.”

2

Having said this, let us go back to the tripartition of the concept of pure experience in order to close our discussion. The three steps used to depict the facets of pure experience highlight the epicentre of James’s symbolic space: his subjectivist method. The claimed ground of his speculations is his own experience, generalized first to other human beings, and second to the rest of reality—the trick being, naturally, to frame concepts elastic enough to endure such a stretching without installing gaps in the cosmic tissue. Furthermore, at the epistemological level, that method allows the dismissal of a conclusion for the very motive that it contradicts our intimate feelings and desires.

3 Quite obviously, this is a radical empiricism.

4.2. A Developmental Contiguism

1 Cf., e.g., David A. Dilworth, “The Initial Formations of “Pure Experience” in

Nishida Kitaro and William James,” Monumenta Nipponica, XXIV, 1-2, Tokyo, Sophia University Press, 1969, pp. 93-111.

2 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, “An Interpretation of Zen Experience,” in Charles

Alexander Moore (With the Assistance of Aldyth V. Morris), The Japanese Mind. Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (East-West Philosophers' Conference), Honolulu, East-West Center Press, University of Hawaï Press, 1967, pp. 122-142, p. 139.

3 “Repousser une conclusion par ce seul motif qu'elle contrarie nos sentiments

intimes et nos désirs, c'est faire emploi de la méthode subjective.” (James, “Quelques considérations sur la méthode subjective,” in EP 23)


The concept of pure experience constitutes the focal point of James’s radical empiricism while radical empiricism is itself arguably the very core of his works, both historically and conceptually.

1

Historically, radical empiricism was introduced in the “Preface” of the Will to Believe (1897) and unfolded in the Meaning of Truth (1909), but it clearly articulates earlier articles such as “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (1884). For its part, pure experience takes form in the articles published between July 1904 and February 1905 and posthumously gathered in the celebrated Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Conceptually, radical empiricism is the keystone of James vision in so far as he has always sought to take account of all experiences and especially of relations. I submit that James has always been a radical empiricist and that it is only the explicitation or thematization of this standpoint that can be more or less precisely pinpointed. Here is James’s mature statement with that regard:

Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement

of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion. The postulate is that

the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be

things definable in terms drawn from experience. [Things of an

unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of

the material for philosophic debate.] The statement of fact is that the

relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as

much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less

so, than the things themselves. The generalized conclusion is that

therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by

relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly

apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical

connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or

continuous structure. (MT xii-xiii)

If no experience should be excluded from the undifferentiated field of the present, we have to integrate disjunctive and conjunctive relations in our systematic attempts and these have to be understood with the same experiential categories.

1 For an historical review of the concept, see John J. McDermott’s first-rate

“Introduction” to the Frederick H. Burkhardt edition of ERE (Harvard University Press, 1978).

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So far, we have questioned the continuous-discontinuous dialectic in James’s works and organized the main semantic layers of his concept of “pure experience.” The attentive reader will have noticed that the various moments of these two separate arguments bear an intended family resemblance that is now expedient to exploit. We will do so in the following manner: first, the key points of our past twin arguments are contextualized; second we specify two epistemological questions underlying the threefold structure activated in both papers; third, we examine the announced synergy between the concepts of pure experience and of contiguism.

4.2.1. A Continuity of Inquiries

On the one hand, there is in James’s psycho-phenomenological inquiries an emphasis on the continuity of experience: from a subjective—or inner—point of view, each and everyone of us has the strong feeling that experience is a stream, i.e., that it has no breaches or cracks. Although the existence of “resting places” is granted as well as the existence of thresholds of perception, experience is subordinated to that all-embracing and everlasting flux.

On the other, when the late James digs further into the epistemological field and—especially—into the ontological one, he is ipso facto displacing his focus point from the weaving of phenomenological facts to the systematization of their rational requirements. Reason is the means by which one comes to a decision on the status of the objective—the price to pay for the intended level of “generality” or “objectivity” being precisely to sail away (carefully or not) from the evidences of personal experience. The continuity in the flux is then replaced by a tempered discontinuity: there are breaches, but no gaps. The “places of flights” have become the superficial effect of a temporal (or historical) trajectory of ontological drops.

The unitive moment sees the synergy of the phenomenological (psychological if you like) discontinuous continuity and the epistemo-metaphysical continuous discontinuity. Here again, the question of the possibility of the awareness of such a structure is profiling itself. What matters is that, out of the somewhat conflicting respective interests of experience and reason (or individuality and universality), the need for both continuous and discontinuous categories remains insistent. To lock a speculative system featuring only one of the two aspects would be to denaturate mundane eventfulness, and especially to undermine the very possibility of a meaningful existence. Authenticity or ethicality asks for the stability of the cosmic figures as well as for the possibility of revolutionising them.


Since the Greeks, it was commonly accepted that only one principle (“archè”) should be evoked to understand reality. The metaphor of the “source” was very explicit in that regard.

1 Through the insistent influence

of Scholastics2 in our culture, it the hydra of all possible heresies—and

especially of Manicheism—has been furthermore fought. Neither the regression ad infinitum nor the ambivalent counter-tension of two co-eternal principles are rationally acceptable. But is it reasonable to do so? The ananke stenai (“we have to stop”) envisioned by Aristotle in the context of a closed and strictly hierarchized world—a cosmos—, in order to prevent an infinite regress, has actually lost most of its relevance in a chaosmos that is so to speak infinite in all directions (spatial, temporal and consciential), it makes sense more than ever to treat any feud pragmatically. As James claims, pragmatism is but a new name for some old ways of thinking; to a certain extent, it is a return to Socrates.

4.2.2. Objectivity and Rationality

Before envisaging the mutual insemination of the two litigious categories, it is enlightening to linger over two interdependent logico-epistemological questions lying in the background of our respective arguments. We have repeatedly encountered the concept of bare factuality and its complementary, reason. As Kant saw very clearly, both poles are necessary to gain access to “objectivity”: on the one hand, there are raw sensory experiences, and on the other, rational categories that coat them, so to speak, with an understandable form. But there are three immediate problems from the perspective of radical empiricism: the subject creates its world less than it is created by it, categories are historical, and they are culturally tainted. It is rather obvious that what is rational from the perspective of a given system of thought, might not be from the perspective of another one—and hence, objectivity varies for different cultures and even for different subcultures: not only a Melanesian does not have the same “world” as a Bantu or an Asian-American, but among the latter, there are various Weltanschauungen.

3 A golf player does not work with the same

mental picture as a nuclear scientist; a Gymnasium kid does not sympathise in the same way with the world as a gardener or an agricultural engineer. What becomes apparent here is precisely the scattered worldview in the

1 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Delta.

2 The term is not used derogatorily.

3 Cf., e.g., Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Paul

K. Feyerabend, etc.

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“civilized” West: on the one hand the world of life, on the other, the world(s) of science. There is no mystery as to why meaning was given in “traditional” societies, and is pulled apart in “modern” ones: the process of individuation is now a process of conformization that provides only a fake form of solidarity. Atomism and the grand narrative of terror prevent common sense to exercise its political mandate.

To be as straightforward as possible: the way an individual cuts out reality depends on his/her way of positioning him/herself in front of the Totality. It depends, in other words, on a metaphysical decision that can be reduced, from the perspective of the history of (Western) philosophy, to “substance or flux.”

1 Needless to say that substance ontology has so far

installed itself as the paradigmatic worldview, more precisely setting into movement Modernity and its trail of pitiful bankruptcies. Hence the baffling claim that can be found in some “Nietzschean” thinkers—and especially in Nishida and Whitehead: the substance-predicate ontology is at the root of all evils, in the strong sense of the term.

The distinction between rational, irrational and nonrational enables us to name that relativity while preserving a healthy realism. We can see as well why non-rationality as total opacity finds a proper framework with the concept of pure experience. Since pure experience attempts to depict the original experiential plenum, it gives us a beautiful tool to make sense out of that “nocturnal and tactual” experience (“a touching in the night”).

2

Whereas the categories congenial with diurnal and visual experience break down, this limit concept still holds because it defines itself as the only asymptotical approach to the state of dissolutive relationality that is so characteristic of religiousness.

The paradox of the philosophical enterprise should be discussed at this point: by the very fact that it names what has always already escaped its discursive reasoning (the ineffable), philosophy puts some grip on it—and yet lets it go. Suffice it to say that that paradox—anexteriority—, which is as old as philosophical speculation, has never discouraged the quest for the holistic transfiguration. Better, it has been thematized as such in Plato’s Parmenides or with the Kantian difference between “Schranke” and “Grenze”). Anyway, the concept of pure experience gives us the minimal

1 More fundamentaly, the way the individual trusts the World should be pictured

with the help of the Husserlian concept of Urdoxa and its merleaupontian cartography.

2 “[…] in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power” (VRE 464

quoting Auguste Sabatier); “contact with the only absolute realities” (VRE 503).


polysemantic technicalities to deal with James’s impressive suggestions, such as this one:

Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a

kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical

significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if

the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make

all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. (VRE 388)1

“Total opacity” topples into “clear light” during the rapture because dualism is replaced by relationalism. When it ends, there only remains semantic lineaments with which it is quite difficult to make sense unless one accepts the reformation of our everyday categories.

Let us finally remark that the concept of pure experience reintroduces a form of onto-logism: of course, its ontology shapes only a (non-rational) chaosmos, but it embodies an archeological hypothesis that obviously has a theoretical (contemplative) dimension: “The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails.” (EP 62)

The epilogue shows how this extremization of the concept of non-rationality is completed and operationalized by the ontology of pure experience. Even though one could claim that pragmatism’s reversal of the Greek onto-logism is basically instrumented by its refusal to cross the gates of metaphysics, James, for one, has been quickly aware of the fact that “empirical facts without «metaphysics» will always make a confusion and a muddle.”

2

4.2.3. The Included Middle

In all these pages, we have been looking for a third alternative, for an included middle lying beyond subjectivity and objectivity, beyond continuity and discontinuity. Beyond, ultimately, the verdict of rationality or irrationality delivered from the finite perspective of a given system of thought. It has been suggested that the keystone to dichotomies is the shared level of consciousness between human beings qua that level is locked by everyday language. We have to go back to the thickness of the concrete itself, to its nonrationality. With regard to the status of language, two simple complementary remarks need thus to be made.

1 The passage is quoted entirely in § 5.3.

2 James to Ribot, 1888, cited by Perry, In the Spirit of William James, p. 58.

104 Michel Weber

One, by sharing a common language, human beings share a common world. We have just seen that the process of learning a language corresponds to the learning of a certain way of cutting out reality. Philosophers and theologians have repeatedly said that everyday language is more or less useless for the purpose of speaking of the Ultimate. Interestingly enough, it is only at the edge of the twentieth century that scientists have begun to hammer the very same point: Bohr, Heisenberg, and Einstein, to pin point some of the most known figures of the quantic revolution, came very quickly to realize that common sense language is totally overcome by their theoretical breakthroughs. Bohr has even confided to Heisenberg that a modification of the internal structure of thought needs to be spurred if one wishes to grasp the full depths of quantic theory.

1 It is a change of a rational system that is indeed required (cf.

Birkhoff and Neumann).

Two, it is often forgotten that the semantic structure of language is intrinsically intentional. The words, as well as their organization in discourses, aim at pointing to a state of affairs. Fallacies quickly make irruption in arguments that claim a total abstractedness from stubborn facts. In such a case, language is no longer a vector, a shallow gauze through which the shimmering concreteness is still given, but a screen, whose opacity is mistook for a reassuring baroque curtain. Adequately manipulated, however, language can direct our attention towards the nonrational.

4.3. The Contiguism of “Pure Feeling”

Let us now address the question of the real discontinuity (no pun intended, but appropriate) existing—or not—between two Jamesian concepts: the “stream of thought,” on the one hand; and the “drops of experience,” on the other. It is indisputable that the former belongs to a period when William James was primarily concerned with psychology; whereas the latter is explicitly dealing with ontological matters. But the two fields have always been closely intertwined in his works, and, as Perry says: “if he was ever a philosopher, he was always a philosopher.” Furthermore, in both cases the

1 Niels Bohr, in a conversation quoted by Werner Heisenberg in Physics and

Beyond. Encounters and Conversations. Translated from the German by Arnold J. Pomerans [Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche in Umkreis ser Atomphysik, München, Piper Verlag, 1959], New York, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971. Cf. also Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, New York / London, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. / Chapman & Hall, Limited, 1958.


underlying question is the status of “what is immediately given”… and the rational answer does not spell itself simply in terms of the opposition of “continuous” and “discontinuous” approaches.

We will briefly examine the “stream of thought” and the “drops of experience” respectively, before showing the common features of these two specular concepts, and eventually concluding with a “contiguist” perspective.

1

4.3.1. Stream of Events

The “stream of thought” metaphor obviously intends to put forward the continuous flow of consciousness as it is introspected. In chapter IX of his Principles of Psychology, in the making since 1884 or so, James defines “continuous” as “that which is without breach, crack, or division” (PP 231). In spite of interruptions, time-gaps or quality breaks, consciousness remains an essentially continuous phenomenon: it “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits” (PP 233). In most cases, it manifests itself as an endless semi-conscious soliloquy.

Nevertheless, two subjective states can be distinguished within that flux: consciousness, “like a bird’s life […] seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings,” of “places of flights”—or “transitive parts”—and “resting-places”—or “substantive parts” (PP 236). The former is a dynamic relational thinking, whereas the latter is a comparatively restful and stable contemplative state. Let us notice James’s use of the expression “comparatively restful,” which alleviates—if not destroys—Bergson’s repeated critique of the Jamesian binomial.

James pictures here a real differentiated rhythmic structure of consciousness whose major tone is continuity in the flux. There are no breaches as such, only variations in intensity. By definition, all moments of the stream interpenetrate and melt together. This description invites a parallel understanding of the eventful world as a seamless tapestry out of which, for pragmatic reasons, one identifies recurrent knots. In both cases, the evidence of relations plays an essential role. Bergson will soon adopt the same stance:

the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the

void as pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a whole

1 Interestingly, a similar argument could be made with Bergson: cf. Pete A. Y.

Gunter, “Bergson, Mathematics, and Creativity,” Process Studies, 28/3-4, 1999, 268-287.

106 Michel Weber

continuity of durations which we should try to follow either

downwardly or upwardly: in both cases we can dilate ourselves

indefinitely by a more and more vigorous effort, in both cases we

transcend ourselves. In the first case, we advance toward a duration

more and more scattered, whose palpitations, more rapid than ours,

dividing our simple sensation, dilute its quality into quantity: at the

limit would be the pure homogeneous, the pure repetition by which we

shall define materiality. In advancing in the other direction, we go

toward a duration which stretches, tightens, and becomes more and

more intensified: at the limit would be eternity. This time not

conceptual eternity, which would be an eternity of death, but an

eternity of life. It would be a living and still moving eternity where our

own duration would find itself like the vibrations in light, and which

would be the concretion of duration as materiality is its dispersion.

Between these two extreme limits moves intuition and this movement

is metaphysics itself.1

Similarly, James claims that our lived, immediate present—that he calls specious present—is no knife-edge but saddle-like (PP I 609).

4.3.2. Drops of Experience

On the other hand, the “drops of experience” concept, constituting the focal point of the tenth chapter of the posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy, primarily puts forward discontinuity in our conscious and pre-conscious experience. Granting that the bulk of the argument relies upon Zeno’s antinomies, James claims for the obvious discontinuity of direct perceptual experience as well: “we either receive nothing, or something already there in sensible amount.” (SPP 155) There are two complementary issues: macroscopic and microscopic.

The former is on the agenda of psychology since Gustav Fechner framed, in his Elemente der Psychophysik (1860),

2 the concepts of absolute

1 Bergson, The Creative Mind. 4th Ed. Trans, Mabelle L. Andison, New York,

Philosophical Library, 1946, p. 221 (Œuvres, p. 1419). 2 The co-emergence of the concepts of threshold and unconscious has of course a

more complex history: Herbart (1824), Weber (1829), Helmoltz (1859), Fechner (1860), Wundt (1878); then Lotze (1884), Ward (1886), Münsterberg (1889) and eventually Myers, in the years 1889–1895. Furthermore, Fechner himself has relativized his psychophysics with a panpsychic cosmopsychology (Zend-Avesta,


threshold, discrimination threshold and scaling in order to understand why some stimuli are not perceived. It is underlying the stream of consciousness’ discussion that is thus less straightforward on the issue of continuity than one could expect. Throughout the Principles, James often speaks of integral and sectional pulse of subjectivity, pulse of consciousness or pulse of thought:

Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought, dies away

and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it knows,

knows its own predecessor, and finding it ‘warm,’ in the way we have

described, greets it, saying: “Thou art mine, and part of the same self

with me.” (PP I 339; cf. 278, 337, 500, 651)

The later addresses the question of the possibility the irruption of novelty in the world and of free decisions of human beings. Introspection is here somewhat less important than the requirements of reason: “the problem is as to which is the more rational supposition, that of continuous or that of discontinuous additions to whatever amount or kind of reality already exists.” (SPP 154) In other words, our acquaintance with reality “grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all.” (SPP 155) Reality grows thus by “abrupt increments of novelty” (SPP 187): these increments, drops, buds, or steps, are characterized by some (microscopic) duration and extension; they are the “building blocks” of our (macroscopic) world.

To repeat, two levels of the argument have to be distinguished: on the one hand, the epistemological question of sensory perception; on the other, the properly meta-physical question of the ontological structure of the Whole. Let us question further the latter, which grounds the former. To put it even more straightforwardly, the point is here that

nature doesn’t make eggs by making first half an egg, then a

quarter, then an eighth, etc., and adding them together. She either

makes a whole egg at once or none at all, and so of all other units.

(PU 230)

That all-at-once-ness or abruptness is furthermore of primary importance to grant the possibility of genuine novelty, which itself conditions the meaningfulness of life. So far so good.

oder, Über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung, Hamburg/Leipzig, L. Voss, 1851) that James discovered in the years 1900. Wundt, Lotze and Clifford were also panpsychists of sorts.

108 Michel Weber

But the meaningfulness of life appears to the philosopher’s eye as being directly correlated not only with genuine novelty, but with mundane stability and continuity as well. It is the actual togetherness of continuous and discontinuous ontological features that has—urgently—to be thought of. This is all the more so since challenging that “novelty seems to violate continuity [and] continuity seems to involve ‘infinitely’ shaded gradation.” (SPP 153) So how to solve the conundrum, if not by building the world of the subject (expression which is susceptible of a strict ontological understanding as well) with an uninterrupted series of buds of experience? In conclusion: there are breaches, but they are not gaps. Reality is a plenum, each and every one of its quanta impregnate and fertilize the others, thereby constructing the arrow of time. What adumbrates itself here—perhaps even more clearly than in the case of the “stream”—is the powerful concept of internal relations. This is the road Whitehead’s argument will take.

4.3.3. Contiguum

Our dialectic moment is itself three-fold: once the concept of contiguum is introduced, we raise the question of the development of James’s ideas, and conclude with some remarks on Whitehead’s development.

On the one hand, we have shown that the “stream” is susceptible to a dissection; but that partition does not disclose separate—external—elements:

I say of these time-parts that we cannot take any one of them so

short that it will not after some fashion or other be a thought of the

whole object ‘the pack of cards is on the table’. They melt into each

other like dissolving view […]. (PP 269)

In other words, there is an internal relationship between them that preserves the whole without killing the parts. On the other, we have seen that the “buds” have to be understood as building a continuum. As SPP 187 claims, there is absolutely nothing between the buds. Each occurrence is at the same time something unprecedented and something acquainted with the universe in which it bursted. Sameness bring forth otherness. The image that is consequently projected in both cases—through the concept of internal relations—is that of a contiguum which preserves both continuity and discontinuity, internal and external relations. What James claims of percepts and concepts can be said of continuity and discontinuity: “neither, taken alone, knows reality in its completeness. We need them both, as we need both our legs to walk with.” (SPP 53)


The remaining problem is that of the nature of the shift that James endures between the Principles of Psychology (1890) and the Problems of Philosophy (1911). Actually, the concept of buds or drops, already present in the Pluralistic Universe lectures (1908), was in gestation since James’s reading of Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889—translated as Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness) and Matière et mémoire (1896—translated as Matter and Memory), sometime in 1902. Although there is no doubt that the importance of the discontinuist argument is linked with James’s awareness of the Zenonian Bergson, we can find in the Principles somewhat quantic expressions: “a kind of jointing and separateness,” “sudden contrasts in the quality” (PP 233). Hence the necessity of re-examining the whole idea of a real shift in his thought: why could it not be simply a difference of emphasis? The subsidiary question is the timing of his progressive abandonment of dualism: for PP 233 “things” are still “discrete and discontinuous;” but as early as 1902, James praises Bergson for his complete demolition of dualism and of the old subject-object distinction in perception.

1

Eventually, all this needs to be put in perspective with the help of the constant knowledge James shows of the weaknesses of our insights and of the deficiencies of our languages. Both stand inexorably on our way towards truth. Language, like sight, prefers clear-cut distinctions, independent entities, external relationships. It is worth quoting once again James’s apophthegm: “when we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other.” (PU 265) Reality, on the contrary, is in the making.

Three points have been made so far: our mental experience, as James sees it, is above all, continuous; if we peruse the conditions of possibility of this experience, we have to acknowledge its actual discontinuity; the concept of contiguity enables us to think these two dimensions together. Now, the same pattern can be applied to Whitehead.

On the one hand, Whitehead’s philosophy of nature emphasizes the notion of a pure eventful continuity while protecting the evidence of punctual existences; on the other, his late metaphysics crystallises around the idea of a pure feeling constituting not only the immediacy of the subject, but the “primal stuff” of the World as well as the condition of the dynamic togetherness of the subjects and the objects (panexperientialist

1 “[…] démolition définitive du dualisme et de la vieille distinction du sujet et de

l’objet dans la perception.” (Letter to Bergson, 14 décembre 1902, in Henri Bergson, Mélanges, pp. 566-568)

110 Michel Weber

wager). Sketching PR’s ontological atomism should now allow a better insight of the synergy of these two traits.

When Whitehead decides to throw a match into the powder magazine, he introduces a concept inspired by James’s drops of experience: the “actual entity.” Actual entities “are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. […] The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. (PR 18) The conscious experience of a subject is thus actually made of a consecution (string or sequence) of atomic events, each being a particular mode of togetherness of the universe. As a result, his ontology systematically studies three main areas: the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of actual entities (PR xiii).

The becoming—or “concrescence”—of actual entities is the crux of the matter in so far as vivid private—i.e., subjective—experience is concerned. When “the many become one” it is ipso facto accompanied by subjective immediacy and enjoyment. To put it another way, the process of concrescence names the ontological mystery itself: at the confluence of God and the World,

1 a totally new mode of togetherness of all past events is

actualised, thereby creating new value, new enjoyment. When a “genetic analysis” of the actual entity subject is lead, it concentrates on “prehensions”: one speculates then on the selective appropriation, contrast, and contrast of contrast of the various prehended data. The mighty image Whitehead uses is “feeling of feelings”: in his technicalities, a feeling is a positive prehension of the feeling(s) of other actualities. Of course, the concept has been purified in order to be applicable to any actual entity, whatever its grade. The higher grade of mental activity human beings testify are in continuity with lower grades; there is no difference in kind, only (huge) difference in degree.

What really exists is not things made but things in the making.

Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative

conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. (PU 263)2

That Jamesian claim definitely resonates in the ontology of Harvard. When the process of concrescence has reached its end, when out of a mere multiplicity a new unity has crystallised, the actual entity topples into

1 The introduction of the concept of god, an essential feature of Whitehead’s

ontology, cannot be approached here. 2 Cf. PU 256 on the “conceptual decomposition of life” and PU 232 on the “ideal

decomposition of the drops.”


objectivity; from actual entity-subject, it turns into actual entity-object. So, through concrescence, “the many become one” and, through transition, “the many are increased by one” (PR 21). The actuality-subject exists; is in determination; the actuality-object is, is determined. Genetic analysis is not possible here, but instead a “coordinate analysis” is required: processes of integration and of reintegration are so to speak replaced by a pure position in being (more precisely, the analysis is carried on the extensive standpoint occupied by the actuality-subject). What really matters for our argument is summarized in the “principle of process”: “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; […] its “being” is constituted by its “becoming.” (PR 23) In other words, subjectivity constitutes, again and again, objectivity. The concept of “substance” is replaced by various “societies,” the simplest one being the “enduring object,” which is made of a continuous line of inheritance among successive actual entities. There is a trajectory of actualities-object crowned by an actuality-subject, soon to topple into objectivity and to be followed by a new concrescence. That never-ending innovatory unrest is what Whitehead names the “creative advance.”

A quick glance at the relatedness of actual entities will disclose the contiguism at work here. Rather than injecting in the discussion the binomial physical pole/mental pole, we use the old opposition between external and internal relations. To make a long story short, let us say that Whitehead claims for his societies of actualities subject and object both types of relations. The actuality-subject, i.e., the actuality in determination is externally related, it constitutes a separate quantum of existence, and internally related to the universe, the power of the past is active at the nucleus of the concrescence. The key is once again the subject-object difference: among subjects—and among objects—there can be only external relations; but the relation subject-object is more subtle. Given a subject prehending an object, the vector-like relation instituted is external from the perspective of the (prehended) object and internal from the perspective of the (prehending) subject. The concrescence of any one actual entity necessarily involves the other actual entities among its components, but these actualities-object constitute a complete whole.

All this is strikingly very close to the Buddhist image of moments of consciousness as a string of pearls, provided that the “string” is not understood as a support or medium (in the sense of the Greek “hupokeimenon” or the Latin “subjectum”), but as a way of suggesting the continuous discontinuity of the primordial experience. Now, it is quite amazing to remark that Nishida (1870–1945)—the Japanese scholar whose thought has been mainly influenced by James, Bergson and Husserl,

112 Michel Weber

together with a constant practice of Zen Buddhism—understands the “true self” as a series of moments of pure experience, i.e., as a continuity of discontinuities.

1 The true self is the authentic or enlightened self; it is the

awakening to the Buddha nature (“satori”). The unity of subjectivity and objectivity occurs furthermore at the “standpoint of emotion,” which reminds us of James’s immense emotional sense of atonement and reconciliation.

In conclusion, the atomism of Whitehead’s Harvard epoch is far from being monadological; concrescing actualities have “windows” and are thus Janus-like: on the one hand, they constitute a quantum (or drop) of existence; on the other, they are the product and the actor of a continuous innovatory process. The continuous features of the universe are generated quantically and “every act of becoming must have an immediate successor” (PR 69). That tight intermingling of continuity and discontinuity fully deserve the “contiguist” label. It is a contiguism of pure feeling because of the prehensions involved in the processes of concrescence and of transition, and especially because of their emotional tone. These are remote from the edges of normal consciousness, and convey the primordial form of ontological enjoyment.

Radical empiricism is neither a naïve realism nor a naïve constructivism. For the former, the absolute steadiness of being allows the quest for one single Truth; for the latter, it is doubtful that any escape from solipsistic/pluralistic “perception” is possible. The pragmatic conception of truth, for its part, realizes something like a processualization of the old correspondence theory of truth. By interpreting truth in terms of action and power of adaptation, it makes the “adequatio rei et intellectu” more subtle and adequate.

Pure experience occurs in buds; and since these buds occupy only a limited spatio-temporal slab (this needs to be qualified from a strict Whiteheadian perspective), it is their uninterrupted succession that builds the continuous features of our world. Pure experience, in other words, structures itself in a contiguum. Pure experience, in the strong sense of the term, names the event that is the unison between the experiencing and the experienced. It is a bare ethereal experiential tuning in which subjectivity and objectivity have become irrelevant tags. Useful in everyday life, these

1 Kitarô Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by Masao Abe and

Christopher Ives, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990, chap. I. (The original title is Zen no Kenkyû, 1911.) Cf. Keiji Nishitani, Nishida Kitarô. Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig. Introduction by D. S. Clarke, Jr., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991.


complementary concepts have reached, together with the substantialism they properly speaking materialise, their breaking point. It is here that the unavoidable idea of a ladder of consciousness intervenes: the level of consciousness at which human beings are attending to their affairs is definitely not the level at which the awareness of pure experience’s contiguity is possible; it is the analogon of the visible part of the spectrum. To insulate everyday consciousness would be a mistake as heavy as Kant’s noumenalization of the ultimate concreteness.

Ontology—one could even dare to say lived ontology—necessitates a thought bypassing the principle of excluded middle. The continuous-discontinuous dialectic does not ask for an “either or” choice. Similarly, the polysemiality of James’s concepts is not a handicap. It is not only possible to organise (i.e., analyse) the various semantic layers involved, but it is through the activation of their synergy (i.e., syntheses) that we can make the concrete “speak.” The internal dynamic of the semantic nebulae that characterizes his major categories has the virtue of pointing to the ineffable. The rational womb has given birth to the nonrational.

When the commentators look for a strict univocality in James’s prose, they only carve a Procustean definition destructive of the total cosmic experience imbedded in the texts. Pure experience is the emotional vividness of the nonrational. Since there is neither distance nor distantiation involved in pure experience, language is nothing but irrelevant. (This is especially obvious from the perspective of its intentional structure.) James’s conceptual efforts to recover the integrity of experience, however radical, ask again and again for their experiential actualization. How and why the experiential contiguum does not belong to everyday consciousness still need further explorations.

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