Accueil
"James was especially concerned to expose to critical scrutiny assumptions about the self and its relations to the world that lead us astray and bar us from directing our inquiries toward the concreteness, depth, and fullness of experience in all of its dimensions. He was a relentless foe of the reduction of mental processes to the theoretical descriptions of physics and of the kind of materialistic metaphysics that is committed to the causal closure of the physical and that can thus find no place for genuinely free, reason-guided choices by the human self among relevant alternatives. He was profoundly open to and respectful of theories and findings in the natural sciences such as those of Newtonian physics, Darwinian biology, and the neurophysiological researches of his day, but he was insistent throughout his life that these developments and findings be supplemented with what he regarded as perceptive insights and critical perspectives of other important fields of thought and awareness such as the arts, morality, religion, and philosophy. Above all, he insisted that those who are committed to thinking deeply about the self and its relations to the world should stay in constant close touch with the disclosures, practices, and demands of ordinary, day-to-day life. He wanted to develop a philosophy that was not just carefully thought about and critically defended but that could also be successfully put into practice and lived.
My principal focus in this book is on the philosophy of William James as it relates to his conceptions of “pure” and ordinary experience, the respective natures of self and world, and the interrelations of experience, self, and world. I provide explications and critical interpretations of these themes in James’s philosophy and, when I think appropriate, make substantive suggestions for their clarification and improvement. I defend the thesis that these themes offer a promising basis for building a credible philosophy of mind and its relations to the world. They are an excellent starting point or springboard for such a philosophy, although they should not and cannot be considered a place to stop or remain. Along the way I consider some recent objections to empiricism as an epistemological program and defend empiricism in general and James’s brand of empiricism in particular (what he called radical empiricism) against these objections.
Finally, I argue the need for a greatly expanded, enriched, and multidimensional version of a materialistic metaphysics and contend that such metaphysics can be fully integrated with James’s philosophy of radical empiricism. It can be so despite his fervent objections to the much narrower Newtonian conception of materialism he tended to take for granted and that was widely assumed in his time. This constricted, mechanical, one-eyed, and outmoded view of matter and its functions continues to contribute substantially toward making the inescapable fact of consciousness and its routinely experienced capabilities the intractable hard problem for a nondualistic philosophy of mind that it is generally considered to be in our own day." (pp.9-10)
"Who and what am I as a conscious self ?
• How do I relate to my body ?
• How can I distinguish between what is in me and what is in the world ?
• How do I and my body relate to the world, including the world of other selves ?
• What is the relation of experience in its various guises to my conceptualizations, beliefs, purposes, and values ?
• How is it possible for me to know anything, either about myself or the world, and how can I tell when I or others are thinking, or are on the path of thinking, reliably and veridically ?
• What is matter, and what is the relation of matter and mind ?
• Am I free, and if so, what is the extent of my freedom ?
• What ought I to aspire to become as an individual self ?
• What sort of world of the future should I envision, contribute to, and work toward, and why ?" (p.11)
"I defend the thesis that James’s philosophy is perfectly compatible with a materialistic metaphysics, so long as we are willing to recognize matter to be everything it has shown itself over evolutionary time and in its manifold configurations to be capable of accomplishing or producing. In other words, matter is what matter does. And part of what it does, at least in some of its evolved and highly organized forms, is to be alive and aware, to feel and think, to intend and plan, to exert effort and experience resistance—in short, to function as life and mind. The discussions in this final chapter are placed in the context of some continuing quandaries in contemporary physics and of recent emergentist views of life and mind." (p.XII)
"While I am sympathetic with the general outlook of James’s philosophy, as can readily be seen in the focus, tone, and content of this book, I seek to cast important new light on themes discussed and interrelated in the book.
For example, I
• contend for a purely epistemological (and not metaphysical) interpretation of James’s concept of pure experience ;
• claim that pure experience is not some kind of single amorphous reservoir independent of individual persons ;
• demonstrate that experience does not require a prior experiencer ;
• exhibit that radical empiricism and pragmatism are in no way opposed but are aspects of a single, entirely consistent outlook ;
• discuss, amplify, and exemplify James’s contention that emotions can be ways of knowing and not just of subjective, self-contained feeling ;
• expose the fallaciousness of simple-minded and wildly misleading interpretations of James’s so-called will to believe ;
• show why it would be impossible, on James’s ground, for two firsthand experiences to coalesce into one ;
• respond to the charge that James is a closet Cartesian ;
• defend the continuing viability of empiricism, and James’s brand of empiricism in particular, against contemporary critics of empiricism as an epistemological approach or program ;
• provide support of my own for indeterminism and noncompatibilist freedom, complementing that of James’s ;
• contend that consciousness and mind are not confined to the brain but are functions of the whole bodily organism in its relations to the external environment, including the social and cultural environment (in keeping with the insistence of writers such as W. Teed Rockwell, Alva Noë, Michael S. Gazzaniga, and Evan Thompson, whose works are discussed or cited) ;
• insist that matter is what matter does and illustrate the wide variety of things it does ;
• endeavor to show the compatibility of radical empiricism with what I call radical materialism and with new perspectives brought to bear on the concept of matter in such areas as contemporary physics, emergentist biology, and neurophysiology ;
• make a case for a multidisciplinary approach to an adequate understanding of the potentialities, functions, and manifestations of matter, one that is especially cognizant of the contribution philosophy can make in this regard." (pp.XII-XIII)
[Chapter one : The role of pure experience]
" “Pure experience” is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes only the material to our later reflection, with its conceptual categories. —William James (1976: 46)
We begin our investigations with the theme of this initial chapter, which is James’s conception of pure experience and the pivotal role it plays in his philosophy. His terse definition of pure experience is contained in the epigraph to the present chapter, but he hastens to add that its “purity,” in the contexts of normal, everyday, non-pure experience “is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies” (James 1976: 46). This statement about unverbalized or unconceptualized experience will be seen to have particular importance for our discussion of the viability of empiricism as an epistemological outlook and program in chapters 5 and 6, because were there no distinction between experience and its conceptualizations, experience as such would be left with no standing as a test of the adequacy of current conceptualizations or as a source of bold new insights and understandings. Experience and conceptualization would then be blended indissolubly together. Their complete, unqualified entanglement would allow no independent role for experience as over against conceptual theorizations or interpretations. The idea of at least relatively pure experience, on the other hand, allows us to envision the distinct possibility of a newly noted, freshly emphasized, or previously unconceptualized aspect of experience coming to stand in contrast with and in that way to challenge the appropriateness of one or more of the taken-for-granted, familiar, and hitherto unquestioned ways of understanding, organizing, and interpreting experience." (pp.1-2)
"Philosopher of mind Evan Thompson helps us to comprehend James’s concept of pure experience when he talks of what he calls “prereflective bodily self-consciousness.” The “bodily” part of his terminology will have to await my later discussions of the relations of mind and body in James’s (and Thompson’s) thought. But the notion of “prereflective consciousness,” as Thompson also refers to it, is highly germane to James’s idea of pure experience and gives us a good sense of the latter’s importance for understanding our experiences of ourselves and the world. “The term prereflective is useful,” Thompson urges, “because it has both a logical and a temporal sense. Prereflective experience is logically prior to reflection, for reflection presupposes something to reflect upon; and it is temporally prior to reflection, for what one reflects upon is a hitherto unreflected experience” (2007: 249–50). Similarly for James, pure experience is the diffuse field of awareness from which focused items of attention and conceptualization are drawn and thus operates as the logically transcendent precondition, context, or background for the latter’s intelligibility and meaning. And pure experience is temporally prior to all selections and conceptualizations because their occurrence requires an already existent impetus and basis for what is sorted out and reflected upon.
James adamantly insists that no set of conceptual categories, however ingenious or refined, is or can be adequate to capture the fullness of experience in all of its dimensions and depths. We always experience more than we can clearly state, analyze, or explain. The necessary excess of felt but unverbalized resonances of meaning in every particular experience points toward the all-encompassing, inexhaustible reality of pure experience. Within the field of pure experience there are, he tells us, teeming multitudes of thats which are not yet whats (James 1976:
. These are particular details, units, or aspects of experience that have not been sorted into conceptual categories and relations even though they may qualify for such sorting. Pure experience is a vast swarm of unnamed particulars in continual flux, a confusing mélange of connections and disconnections, similarities and differences, interfusions and separations. In his book A Pluralistic Universe, James contrasts the “thickness” of experienced reality with an implied thinness of any or all of the concepts we use at any time to explore and explicate its character and meanings (James 1996a: 250–51, 261). In his essay “The World of Pure Experience” he declares that “our fields of experience,” properly understood, “have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed for ever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds” (James 1976: 35). Bruce Wilshire nicely captures the plausibility of this notion when he states, “At every waking moment of our lives there is a margin of things known vaguely. James wants to grasp the environment in which we actually live—that which shades off on all sides into the dense, opaque, and vague; that which lies in the corner of the eye” (Wilshire 1968: 200).
Pure experience is James’s term for what the world would be like for us humans or any other kinds of creature if we or they had no organs of perception or discrimination, no memories or expectations, no capacity for sorting or selecting, no conscious powers of acting or interacting, no sense of what is important or unimportant at given times or circumstances amid the teeming flow of things. In such an imagined world of inexhaustible, incomprehensible density and complexity, no creature could survive, find its way, or leave progeny in the world. We humans cannot live the whole or experience the whole ; we can only cope with parts of the whole. Our senses themselves are at bottom, James observes in The Principles of Psychology, “organs of selection,” and they enable us to ignore “as completely as if they did not exist” most of the welter of goings-on present to us at any moment (James 1950: I, 284). Those parts of potential experience we either instinctively or consciously select for focus and attention are surrounded by a penumbra of all that is not focused upon or attended to, a penumbra that shades off into the murkiness of a stupendously vast and ever-changing experiential world." (pp.2-3)
"In his widely influential 1890 work The Principles of Psychology James anticipates the penumbral character and all-pervading influence he was later to attribute to pure experience. He notes there, in a style of considering various theses about the concept of the unconscious mind and replies to those theses, that
"[m]ost of our knowledge is at all times potential. We act in accordance with the whole drift of what we have learned, but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Many of them, however, we may recall at will. All this cooperation of unrealized principles and facts, of potential knowledge, with our actual thought is quite inexplicable unless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immense mass of ideas in an unconscious state, all of them exerting a steady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking, and many of them in such continuity with it as ever and anon to become conscious themselves." [...]
The stress in this passage is upon ideas conceived in the past but not now present in the conscious mind, while James’s later theory of pure experience gives primary emphasis to items of flowing and fleeting experience that are unsorted and devoid of conceptualization. Still, the passage in The Principles contains some of the flavor and suggests to an important extent the role he attributes to pure experience in his later thought. James also tries to suggest to us something of the nature of the chaotic and undiscriminated world of pure experience when he compares it to the hazy, blurred consciousness of “new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows” (James 1976: 46). In his considered view, such a world must be presupposed as the diffuse but necessary background and setting of all conscious cerebration. [...]
Our optical experience is another reminder of this inescapable fact of the need for selection of relatively small aspects of a more vast and encompassing whole in order to make sense of things, as the following passage from an article by Marcus E. Raichle indicates: “Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, the equivalent of 10 billion parts per second arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic nerve attached to the retina has only a million output connections, just six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only 10,000 bits per second make it to the visual cortex” (Raichle 2010: 47). In similar fashion for James, the specificity and selectivity of our day-to-day perceptive and other kinds of experience can only hope to bring into focus a tiny part of the inexhaustible richness and complexity of pure experience." (pp.3-4)
"Pure experience is a chaos of potential sensations and meanings and can be rendered into something actually meaningful to us only when we are able to select out aspects of it in particular contexts of inquiry, purpose, or use. James’s point in setting up the conception of pure experience is not that it is devoid of implicit structures or characters in its own right but rather that not all of its implicit aspects or shades of meaning could possibly be recognized or registered in exactly the same manner or in exactly the same details by any particular creature —including us humans— at any given time or even throughout all the course of time. “Our perceptual experience,” James observes, “overlaps our conceptual reason ; the that transcends the why”." (pp.4-5)
"There are comings and goings of vague, teeming, gently intruding and surrounding thoughts, intimations, inclinations, feelings, and the like for which I have no distinct concepts and no specific names." (p.6)
"When I attend to one aspect of the possible experiences of the leaf, I find that I cannot simultaneously attend to the other. I select one part of it for attention and by so doing throw other possible ways of attending to it into the background. And yet, all the encompassing and interfusing experiences of the moment are the context and field for my focused attention at any time, whatever that may be. [...] I become aware through my reflections that the possible ways of experiencing the leaf are infinite. The earlier list is only a tiny segment of what could be noticed about the leaf, its surroundings, its associations, and my own self as its perceiver, manipulator, and contemplator. “Scandalous though it may seem to those for whom logic tells the only truth,” writes John J. McDermott, “if we were to focus on a single object and detail its relations, we would have access to a perceptual entailment which would involve us in everything that exists”." (p.6)
"The pure experience of specific episodes of experiencing consists of everything that is left out of any particular conceptualized experiences or of any distinct focuses of attention, however broad or inclusive we might try to make the latter, and that nonetheless persistently pervades those focuses of attention. It is the necessary background of possibility for diverse and multitudinous experiences of inexhaustible kinds. To be sure, some of this massive background has been previously attended to, conceptualized, and named, but much of it has yet to be explicitly noticed or verbalized, and the vast majority of it persistently outstrips the capacities of our languages and conceptual schemes. To state the matter somewhat differently, pure experience is like the indistinctly heard, vaguely describable, and yet profoundly felt and subtly informing resonant overtones of a passage of music. These essential but indefinable overtones are part of the whole musical experience, even though they are not written into the score, deliberately performed, or focally attended to. Similarly, we cannot explicitly concentrate on the whole of experience at any given moment of experience; we can only concentrate on aspects of the whole. Still, the whole is not left entirely out of account ; it continues tacitly to pervade and influence our present more focused, more selective consciousness.
Our linguistic and conceptual schemes, and our individual modes of interpretation, are like the rocks in a turbulent river that we may use to cross it. There are many other possible rocks for crossing than the ones we actually use, and the river itself has nothing like the inertness and distinctness of the rocks. The other possible crossing rocks represent alternate languages and alternate ways of coming to understand and cope with the surging wildness of our ever-streaming experience. Individuals select their crossing rocks in particular situations based on their own acculturations, interests, and habits of attention. What they emphasize and attend to, as Ellen Kappy Suckiel points out, “is determined to a significant extent by categories of interpretation, shared in common with others. Within that common conceptual scheme, however, there is much play for the individual’s own particular interests to determine how he will select from the stream of experience and arrive at an acceptable interpretation of the world”." (pp.6-7)
"McDermott writes, “Genetic epistemology has much to teach us, for children naturally make their own relations until we teach them that the world has already been named and properly codified. Against their aboriginal bent, they are told to march in step, name by name, definition by definition, until they too see the world as an extension of local grammar and hidebound conceptual designations” [...] James is right to remind us that there is always much more lying potentially in experience than can be grasped by any prevalent grammar or set of assumed concepts, and it is important to be constantly aware of this fact. Not to be so aware is to consign ourselves unwittingly to an unnecessarily narrow world.
I think it might also be useful to contrast James’s concept of pure experience with its direct opposite, that is, a state of radical sensory deprivation in which no sensible inputs are felt and one is left in a posture of seeming disconnection from the world. Here, instead of a plethora of experiences from which one is able to sort out only a small part, there is a void of experience altogether. Such a void is the furthest remove from James’s concept of pure experience, in my view. The distinction I have in mind is between a radical excess or daunting “too-muchness,” on the one hand, and a radical emptiness or distressing “not-enoughness,” on the other.
Wayne Viney, in a personal communication, notes that sensory deprivation experiments in a water tank can have the effect of causing the minds of subjects of such experiments to manufacture substitute, bogus stimuli in the form of hallucinations in order to compensate for the loss of normal sensations. The former can turn out to be extremely frightening and may induce panic in the subjects. James’s pure experience should be seen as an overflowing superabundance of experience that at all times defies complete conceptual assimilation or capture, rather than as a distressing deficiency of experience such as that in the sensory deprivation experiments." (p.
"The only world that has meaning for him is a world accessible to experience —a world that is experienced, is amenable to experience, or can be rightly inferred on the basis of experience. We admittedly do not directly experience such things as one another’s minds, ether waves, or ions, James observes, but our experience can put us into the “neighborhood” of them and enable us to infer their existence and character [...] Experience for him is not a veil cast over the world, behind which it inscrutably lurks, but the only meaningful way of conceiving of and gaining access to the world. For James, as for Alfred North Whitehead and John Dewey, experience enables us to “sound the utmost depths of reality” (Whitehead 1967: 18) and to reach “down into nature” (Dewey 1958: 4a), including human selves as parts of reality or nature. Reality or nature for James is always what is experienced, what is experiencable, or what can rightly be deduced from experience. [...]
In sum, then, pure experience, in contrast with particular experiences, is the welter of all that might at some time or place be experienced by us or other creatures but can at no particular time or place be experienced in its totality. Each experience is selective and partial, capturing some parts of the experiencable world at the expense of ignoring or casting into dim background other parts." (p.9)
"What causes experiences in their pure form to be what they are is a nonsensical question for a strict empiricist like James. “[H]ow the experiences ever get themselves made,” he reflects, “or why their characters and relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand” [...] To try to respond to such a question would be to reason in a circle, finding a particular experience or range of experiences that would purport to account for experience as a whole, including that particular experience or range of experiences. In other words, we would be appealing to some part of experience to explain the totality of what is experienced or experiencable instead of recognizing the totality of what is experienced or experiencable as the ultimate source and basis of all possible explanation. We would be seeking for what Charlene Haddock Seigfried calls “a ground of constitution of facts” which would amount to “a needless metaphysical duplication” of reality." (pp.9-10)
"Hypothetical entities may be posited and speculative hypotheses set forth, but they must always be rooted in experience or brought to the test of experience, that is, have empirical meaning, character, or consequence, if they are to have factual (or valuative) significance or be genuinely descriptive of something real." (p.10)
"Is experience William James’s metaphysical ultimate, then ? Does it have the role in his philosophy that substance (ousia) does for the metaphysics of Aristotle, namely, that which is finally and most fully real, that with reference to which everything else is a derivation or an abstraction ? James’s outlook does have this role in one sense but not in another. For him, all concepts or conceptualizations with existential import are ultimately rooted in and derived from pure experience, and they are abstract in varying degrees, in contrast with its density and concreteness. But I do not interpret James to mean by these ideas that pure experience is a kind of metaphysical ultimate in the way that Aristotle’s ousia is, even though his statements seem sometimes to suggest this view. He does not always clearly distinguish between the notion that reality is made up of pure experience as its primal “stuff” (or “natures”) and the notion that our knowledge of reality and contact with it require pure experience as the context or condition within which or on the basis of which we arrive at judgments about the nature of reality and the characters and relationships of different sorts of reality.
I suggest that it is this latter view that James really has in mind (or, at least, ought to have had in mind) and that this view gives more plausibility and coherence to his overall philosophical position than the other interpretation does. Experience is not a substance or thing, and not a metaphysical ultimate in its own right, but a source of awareness and mode of awareness." (p.10)
"In my interpretation, pure experience for James is the transcendental condition that lies behind and is unavoidably involved within or presupposed by all empirically based metaphysical theories, whatever specific form or character they may have. This strictly epistemological conception is in keeping with James’s notion that all that can qualify as reality —including the reality of individual selves and extra-mental reality— is contained within the orbit of pure experience, which means within all of what is or could possibly be experienced directly or indirectly." (p.10)
"Critically important in the earlier The Principles of Psychology is the concept and role of chaos to James’s views of the world, on the one hand, and of the human self as a stream of consciousness, on the other [...] James writes, “without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos” [...] The indeterminate, inchoate, chaotic (or at least quasi chaotic [...]) character of pure experience, as James describes it in Essays in Radical Empiricism, reflects this earlier view, but now world and self are encompassed within the unifying conception of pure experience rather than being viewed as entirely separate realities. And James makes more explicit here the idea that he is making no attempt to describe either as it is in itself but only as it is experienced or accessible to experience. In the more dualistic mind-set or methodology of The Principles he was [...] vague and unsettled on this point [...] There is thus a subtle but discernible shift in the Essays from claims in The Principles about what self and world are like in themselves to unwillingness on James’s part in this later work to describe reality in any other way than phenomenologically, that is, from the standpoint of experience." (p.11)
"Experience exhibits everywhere connections as well as disconnections, relations as well as things related (in contrast with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s exclusive, nominalistic emphasis on the disconnectedness or isolatedness of simple impressions of sensation and reflection), and his conviction that experiences critical to our understanding of ourselves and the world encompass more than sensations and include such things as cause-effect relations ; recollections, anticipations, and efforts ; emotional responses, needs, and yearnings ; dreams, intimations, and infusions of the unconscious ; and confrontations with aesthetic, moral, and religious types of significance, value, and demand." (p.13)
-Donald A. Crosby, The Philosophy of William James. Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013, 166 pages.
My principal focus in this book is on the philosophy of William James as it relates to his conceptions of “pure” and ordinary experience, the respective natures of self and world, and the interrelations of experience, self, and world. I provide explications and critical interpretations of these themes in James’s philosophy and, when I think appropriate, make substantive suggestions for their clarification and improvement. I defend the thesis that these themes offer a promising basis for building a credible philosophy of mind and its relations to the world. They are an excellent starting point or springboard for such a philosophy, although they should not and cannot be considered a place to stop or remain. Along the way I consider some recent objections to empiricism as an epistemological program and defend empiricism in general and James’s brand of empiricism in particular (what he called radical empiricism) against these objections.
Finally, I argue the need for a greatly expanded, enriched, and multidimensional version of a materialistic metaphysics and contend that such metaphysics can be fully integrated with James’s philosophy of radical empiricism. It can be so despite his fervent objections to the much narrower Newtonian conception of materialism he tended to take for granted and that was widely assumed in his time. This constricted, mechanical, one-eyed, and outmoded view of matter and its functions continues to contribute substantially toward making the inescapable fact of consciousness and its routinely experienced capabilities the intractable hard problem for a nondualistic philosophy of mind that it is generally considered to be in our own day." (pp.9-10)
"Who and what am I as a conscious self ?
• How do I relate to my body ?
• How can I distinguish between what is in me and what is in the world ?
• How do I and my body relate to the world, including the world of other selves ?
• What is the relation of experience in its various guises to my conceptualizations, beliefs, purposes, and values ?
• How is it possible for me to know anything, either about myself or the world, and how can I tell when I or others are thinking, or are on the path of thinking, reliably and veridically ?
• What is matter, and what is the relation of matter and mind ?
• Am I free, and if so, what is the extent of my freedom ?
• What ought I to aspire to become as an individual self ?
• What sort of world of the future should I envision, contribute to, and work toward, and why ?" (p.11)
"I defend the thesis that James’s philosophy is perfectly compatible with a materialistic metaphysics, so long as we are willing to recognize matter to be everything it has shown itself over evolutionary time and in its manifold configurations to be capable of accomplishing or producing. In other words, matter is what matter does. And part of what it does, at least in some of its evolved and highly organized forms, is to be alive and aware, to feel and think, to intend and plan, to exert effort and experience resistance—in short, to function as life and mind. The discussions in this final chapter are placed in the context of some continuing quandaries in contemporary physics and of recent emergentist views of life and mind." (p.XII)
"While I am sympathetic with the general outlook of James’s philosophy, as can readily be seen in the focus, tone, and content of this book, I seek to cast important new light on themes discussed and interrelated in the book.
For example, I
• contend for a purely epistemological (and not metaphysical) interpretation of James’s concept of pure experience ;
• claim that pure experience is not some kind of single amorphous reservoir independent of individual persons ;
• demonstrate that experience does not require a prior experiencer ;
• exhibit that radical empiricism and pragmatism are in no way opposed but are aspects of a single, entirely consistent outlook ;
• discuss, amplify, and exemplify James’s contention that emotions can be ways of knowing and not just of subjective, self-contained feeling ;
• expose the fallaciousness of simple-minded and wildly misleading interpretations of James’s so-called will to believe ;
• show why it would be impossible, on James’s ground, for two firsthand experiences to coalesce into one ;
• respond to the charge that James is a closet Cartesian ;
• defend the continuing viability of empiricism, and James’s brand of empiricism in particular, against contemporary critics of empiricism as an epistemological approach or program ;
• provide support of my own for indeterminism and noncompatibilist freedom, complementing that of James’s ;
• contend that consciousness and mind are not confined to the brain but are functions of the whole bodily organism in its relations to the external environment, including the social and cultural environment (in keeping with the insistence of writers such as W. Teed Rockwell, Alva Noë, Michael S. Gazzaniga, and Evan Thompson, whose works are discussed or cited) ;
• insist that matter is what matter does and illustrate the wide variety of things it does ;
• endeavor to show the compatibility of radical empiricism with what I call radical materialism and with new perspectives brought to bear on the concept of matter in such areas as contemporary physics, emergentist biology, and neurophysiology ;
• make a case for a multidisciplinary approach to an adequate understanding of the potentialities, functions, and manifestations of matter, one that is especially cognizant of the contribution philosophy can make in this regard." (pp.XII-XIII)
[Chapter one : The role of pure experience]
" “Pure experience” is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes only the material to our later reflection, with its conceptual categories. —William James (1976: 46)
We begin our investigations with the theme of this initial chapter, which is James’s conception of pure experience and the pivotal role it plays in his philosophy. His terse definition of pure experience is contained in the epigraph to the present chapter, but he hastens to add that its “purity,” in the contexts of normal, everyday, non-pure experience “is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies” (James 1976: 46). This statement about unverbalized or unconceptualized experience will be seen to have particular importance for our discussion of the viability of empiricism as an epistemological outlook and program in chapters 5 and 6, because were there no distinction between experience and its conceptualizations, experience as such would be left with no standing as a test of the adequacy of current conceptualizations or as a source of bold new insights and understandings. Experience and conceptualization would then be blended indissolubly together. Their complete, unqualified entanglement would allow no independent role for experience as over against conceptual theorizations or interpretations. The idea of at least relatively pure experience, on the other hand, allows us to envision the distinct possibility of a newly noted, freshly emphasized, or previously unconceptualized aspect of experience coming to stand in contrast with and in that way to challenge the appropriateness of one or more of the taken-for-granted, familiar, and hitherto unquestioned ways of understanding, organizing, and interpreting experience." (pp.1-2)
"Philosopher of mind Evan Thompson helps us to comprehend James’s concept of pure experience when he talks of what he calls “prereflective bodily self-consciousness.” The “bodily” part of his terminology will have to await my later discussions of the relations of mind and body in James’s (and Thompson’s) thought. But the notion of “prereflective consciousness,” as Thompson also refers to it, is highly germane to James’s idea of pure experience and gives us a good sense of the latter’s importance for understanding our experiences of ourselves and the world. “The term prereflective is useful,” Thompson urges, “because it has both a logical and a temporal sense. Prereflective experience is logically prior to reflection, for reflection presupposes something to reflect upon; and it is temporally prior to reflection, for what one reflects upon is a hitherto unreflected experience” (2007: 249–50). Similarly for James, pure experience is the diffuse field of awareness from which focused items of attention and conceptualization are drawn and thus operates as the logically transcendent precondition, context, or background for the latter’s intelligibility and meaning. And pure experience is temporally prior to all selections and conceptualizations because their occurrence requires an already existent impetus and basis for what is sorted out and reflected upon.
James adamantly insists that no set of conceptual categories, however ingenious or refined, is or can be adequate to capture the fullness of experience in all of its dimensions and depths. We always experience more than we can clearly state, analyze, or explain. The necessary excess of felt but unverbalized resonances of meaning in every particular experience points toward the all-encompassing, inexhaustible reality of pure experience. Within the field of pure experience there are, he tells us, teeming multitudes of thats which are not yet whats (James 1976:
. These are particular details, units, or aspects of experience that have not been sorted into conceptual categories and relations even though they may qualify for such sorting. Pure experience is a vast swarm of unnamed particulars in continual flux, a confusing mélange of connections and disconnections, similarities and differences, interfusions and separations. In his book A Pluralistic Universe, James contrasts the “thickness” of experienced reality with an implied thinness of any or all of the concepts we use at any time to explore and explicate its character and meanings (James 1996a: 250–51, 261). In his essay “The World of Pure Experience” he declares that “our fields of experience,” properly understood, “have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed for ever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds” (James 1976: 35). Bruce Wilshire nicely captures the plausibility of this notion when he states, “At every waking moment of our lives there is a margin of things known vaguely. James wants to grasp the environment in which we actually live—that which shades off on all sides into the dense, opaque, and vague; that which lies in the corner of the eye” (Wilshire 1968: 200).Pure experience is James’s term for what the world would be like for us humans or any other kinds of creature if we or they had no organs of perception or discrimination, no memories or expectations, no capacity for sorting or selecting, no conscious powers of acting or interacting, no sense of what is important or unimportant at given times or circumstances amid the teeming flow of things. In such an imagined world of inexhaustible, incomprehensible density and complexity, no creature could survive, find its way, or leave progeny in the world. We humans cannot live the whole or experience the whole ; we can only cope with parts of the whole. Our senses themselves are at bottom, James observes in The Principles of Psychology, “organs of selection,” and they enable us to ignore “as completely as if they did not exist” most of the welter of goings-on present to us at any moment (James 1950: I, 284). Those parts of potential experience we either instinctively or consciously select for focus and attention are surrounded by a penumbra of all that is not focused upon or attended to, a penumbra that shades off into the murkiness of a stupendously vast and ever-changing experiential world." (pp.2-3)
"In his widely influential 1890 work The Principles of Psychology James anticipates the penumbral character and all-pervading influence he was later to attribute to pure experience. He notes there, in a style of considering various theses about the concept of the unconscious mind and replies to those theses, that
"[m]ost of our knowledge is at all times potential. We act in accordance with the whole drift of what we have learned, but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Many of them, however, we may recall at will. All this cooperation of unrealized principles and facts, of potential knowledge, with our actual thought is quite inexplicable unless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immense mass of ideas in an unconscious state, all of them exerting a steady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking, and many of them in such continuity with it as ever and anon to become conscious themselves." [...]
The stress in this passage is upon ideas conceived in the past but not now present in the conscious mind, while James’s later theory of pure experience gives primary emphasis to items of flowing and fleeting experience that are unsorted and devoid of conceptualization. Still, the passage in The Principles contains some of the flavor and suggests to an important extent the role he attributes to pure experience in his later thought. James also tries to suggest to us something of the nature of the chaotic and undiscriminated world of pure experience when he compares it to the hazy, blurred consciousness of “new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows” (James 1976: 46). In his considered view, such a world must be presupposed as the diffuse but necessary background and setting of all conscious cerebration. [...]
Our optical experience is another reminder of this inescapable fact of the need for selection of relatively small aspects of a more vast and encompassing whole in order to make sense of things, as the following passage from an article by Marcus E. Raichle indicates: “Of the virtually unlimited information available in the world around us, the equivalent of 10 billion parts per second arrives on the retina at the back of the eye. Because the optic nerve attached to the retina has only a million output connections, just six million bits per second can leave the retina, and only 10,000 bits per second make it to the visual cortex” (Raichle 2010: 47). In similar fashion for James, the specificity and selectivity of our day-to-day perceptive and other kinds of experience can only hope to bring into focus a tiny part of the inexhaustible richness and complexity of pure experience." (pp.3-4)
"Pure experience is a chaos of potential sensations and meanings and can be rendered into something actually meaningful to us only when we are able to select out aspects of it in particular contexts of inquiry, purpose, or use. James’s point in setting up the conception of pure experience is not that it is devoid of implicit structures or characters in its own right but rather that not all of its implicit aspects or shades of meaning could possibly be recognized or registered in exactly the same manner or in exactly the same details by any particular creature —including us humans— at any given time or even throughout all the course of time. “Our perceptual experience,” James observes, “overlaps our conceptual reason ; the that transcends the why”." (pp.4-5)
"There are comings and goings of vague, teeming, gently intruding and surrounding thoughts, intimations, inclinations, feelings, and the like for which I have no distinct concepts and no specific names." (p.6)
"When I attend to one aspect of the possible experiences of the leaf, I find that I cannot simultaneously attend to the other. I select one part of it for attention and by so doing throw other possible ways of attending to it into the background. And yet, all the encompassing and interfusing experiences of the moment are the context and field for my focused attention at any time, whatever that may be. [...] I become aware through my reflections that the possible ways of experiencing the leaf are infinite. The earlier list is only a tiny segment of what could be noticed about the leaf, its surroundings, its associations, and my own self as its perceiver, manipulator, and contemplator. “Scandalous though it may seem to those for whom logic tells the only truth,” writes John J. McDermott, “if we were to focus on a single object and detail its relations, we would have access to a perceptual entailment which would involve us in everything that exists”." (p.6)
"The pure experience of specific episodes of experiencing consists of everything that is left out of any particular conceptualized experiences or of any distinct focuses of attention, however broad or inclusive we might try to make the latter, and that nonetheless persistently pervades those focuses of attention. It is the necessary background of possibility for diverse and multitudinous experiences of inexhaustible kinds. To be sure, some of this massive background has been previously attended to, conceptualized, and named, but much of it has yet to be explicitly noticed or verbalized, and the vast majority of it persistently outstrips the capacities of our languages and conceptual schemes. To state the matter somewhat differently, pure experience is like the indistinctly heard, vaguely describable, and yet profoundly felt and subtly informing resonant overtones of a passage of music. These essential but indefinable overtones are part of the whole musical experience, even though they are not written into the score, deliberately performed, or focally attended to. Similarly, we cannot explicitly concentrate on the whole of experience at any given moment of experience; we can only concentrate on aspects of the whole. Still, the whole is not left entirely out of account ; it continues tacitly to pervade and influence our present more focused, more selective consciousness.
Our linguistic and conceptual schemes, and our individual modes of interpretation, are like the rocks in a turbulent river that we may use to cross it. There are many other possible rocks for crossing than the ones we actually use, and the river itself has nothing like the inertness and distinctness of the rocks. The other possible crossing rocks represent alternate languages and alternate ways of coming to understand and cope with the surging wildness of our ever-streaming experience. Individuals select their crossing rocks in particular situations based on their own acculturations, interests, and habits of attention. What they emphasize and attend to, as Ellen Kappy Suckiel points out, “is determined to a significant extent by categories of interpretation, shared in common with others. Within that common conceptual scheme, however, there is much play for the individual’s own particular interests to determine how he will select from the stream of experience and arrive at an acceptable interpretation of the world”." (pp.6-7)
"McDermott writes, “Genetic epistemology has much to teach us, for children naturally make their own relations until we teach them that the world has already been named and properly codified. Against their aboriginal bent, they are told to march in step, name by name, definition by definition, until they too see the world as an extension of local grammar and hidebound conceptual designations” [...] James is right to remind us that there is always much more lying potentially in experience than can be grasped by any prevalent grammar or set of assumed concepts, and it is important to be constantly aware of this fact. Not to be so aware is to consign ourselves unwittingly to an unnecessarily narrow world.
I think it might also be useful to contrast James’s concept of pure experience with its direct opposite, that is, a state of radical sensory deprivation in which no sensible inputs are felt and one is left in a posture of seeming disconnection from the world. Here, instead of a plethora of experiences from which one is able to sort out only a small part, there is a void of experience altogether. Such a void is the furthest remove from James’s concept of pure experience, in my view. The distinction I have in mind is between a radical excess or daunting “too-muchness,” on the one hand, and a radical emptiness or distressing “not-enoughness,” on the other.
Wayne Viney, in a personal communication, notes that sensory deprivation experiments in a water tank can have the effect of causing the minds of subjects of such experiments to manufacture substitute, bogus stimuli in the form of hallucinations in order to compensate for the loss of normal sensations. The former can turn out to be extremely frightening and may induce panic in the subjects. James’s pure experience should be seen as an overflowing superabundance of experience that at all times defies complete conceptual assimilation or capture, rather than as a distressing deficiency of experience such as that in the sensory deprivation experiments." (p.
"The only world that has meaning for him is a world accessible to experience —a world that is experienced, is amenable to experience, or can be rightly inferred on the basis of experience. We admittedly do not directly experience such things as one another’s minds, ether waves, or ions, James observes, but our experience can put us into the “neighborhood” of them and enable us to infer their existence and character [...] Experience for him is not a veil cast over the world, behind which it inscrutably lurks, but the only meaningful way of conceiving of and gaining access to the world. For James, as for Alfred North Whitehead and John Dewey, experience enables us to “sound the utmost depths of reality” (Whitehead 1967: 18) and to reach “down into nature” (Dewey 1958: 4a), including human selves as parts of reality or nature. Reality or nature for James is always what is experienced, what is experiencable, or what can rightly be deduced from experience. [...]
In sum, then, pure experience, in contrast with particular experiences, is the welter of all that might at some time or place be experienced by us or other creatures but can at no particular time or place be experienced in its totality. Each experience is selective and partial, capturing some parts of the experiencable world at the expense of ignoring or casting into dim background other parts." (p.9)
"What causes experiences in their pure form to be what they are is a nonsensical question for a strict empiricist like James. “[H]ow the experiences ever get themselves made,” he reflects, “or why their characters and relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand” [...] To try to respond to such a question would be to reason in a circle, finding a particular experience or range of experiences that would purport to account for experience as a whole, including that particular experience or range of experiences. In other words, we would be appealing to some part of experience to explain the totality of what is experienced or experiencable instead of recognizing the totality of what is experienced or experiencable as the ultimate source and basis of all possible explanation. We would be seeking for what Charlene Haddock Seigfried calls “a ground of constitution of facts” which would amount to “a needless metaphysical duplication” of reality." (pp.9-10)
"Hypothetical entities may be posited and speculative hypotheses set forth, but they must always be rooted in experience or brought to the test of experience, that is, have empirical meaning, character, or consequence, if they are to have factual (or valuative) significance or be genuinely descriptive of something real." (p.10)
"Is experience William James’s metaphysical ultimate, then ? Does it have the role in his philosophy that substance (ousia) does for the metaphysics of Aristotle, namely, that which is finally and most fully real, that with reference to which everything else is a derivation or an abstraction ? James’s outlook does have this role in one sense but not in another. For him, all concepts or conceptualizations with existential import are ultimately rooted in and derived from pure experience, and they are abstract in varying degrees, in contrast with its density and concreteness. But I do not interpret James to mean by these ideas that pure experience is a kind of metaphysical ultimate in the way that Aristotle’s ousia is, even though his statements seem sometimes to suggest this view. He does not always clearly distinguish between the notion that reality is made up of pure experience as its primal “stuff” (or “natures”) and the notion that our knowledge of reality and contact with it require pure experience as the context or condition within which or on the basis of which we arrive at judgments about the nature of reality and the characters and relationships of different sorts of reality.
I suggest that it is this latter view that James really has in mind (or, at least, ought to have had in mind) and that this view gives more plausibility and coherence to his overall philosophical position than the other interpretation does. Experience is not a substance or thing, and not a metaphysical ultimate in its own right, but a source of awareness and mode of awareness." (p.10)
"In my interpretation, pure experience for James is the transcendental condition that lies behind and is unavoidably involved within or presupposed by all empirically based metaphysical theories, whatever specific form or character they may have. This strictly epistemological conception is in keeping with James’s notion that all that can qualify as reality —including the reality of individual selves and extra-mental reality— is contained within the orbit of pure experience, which means within all of what is or could possibly be experienced directly or indirectly." (p.10)
"Critically important in the earlier The Principles of Psychology is the concept and role of chaos to James’s views of the world, on the one hand, and of the human self as a stream of consciousness, on the other [...] James writes, “without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos” [...] The indeterminate, inchoate, chaotic (or at least quasi chaotic [...]) character of pure experience, as James describes it in Essays in Radical Empiricism, reflects this earlier view, but now world and self are encompassed within the unifying conception of pure experience rather than being viewed as entirely separate realities. And James makes more explicit here the idea that he is making no attempt to describe either as it is in itself but only as it is experienced or accessible to experience. In the more dualistic mind-set or methodology of The Principles he was [...] vague and unsettled on this point [...] There is thus a subtle but discernible shift in the Essays from claims in The Principles about what self and world are like in themselves to unwillingness on James’s part in this later work to describe reality in any other way than phenomenologically, that is, from the standpoint of experience." (p.11)
"Experience exhibits everywhere connections as well as disconnections, relations as well as things related (in contrast with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s exclusive, nominalistic emphasis on the disconnectedness or isolatedness of simple impressions of sensation and reflection), and his conviction that experiences critical to our understanding of ourselves and the world encompass more than sensations and include such things as cause-effect relations ; recollections, anticipations, and efforts ; emotional responses, needs, and yearnings ; dreams, intimations, and infusions of the unconscious ; and confrontations with aesthetic, moral, and religious types of significance, value, and demand." (p.13)
-Donald A. Crosby, The Philosophy of William James. Radical Empiricism and Radical Materialism, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013, 166 pages.
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Sam 7 Déc - 17:28, édité 10 fois
