Classics in the History of Psychology

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Christopher D. Green
York University, Toronto, Ontario
ISSN 1492-3173

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Pure Experience, the Response to William James: An Introduction

At his death, William James (1842-1910) was variously described as "the greatest of American psychologists," "the most famous American philosopher since Emerson," "the most powerful and convincing" apologist for psychical research, and a man whose "death leaves vacant a place in the world of English letters which no living writer and thinker can fill."[2] History has generally served to confirm this evaluation.

James's Principles of Psychology, Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism[3] are still widely read and discussed. Modern analyses of James's writings abound[4] and his place in intellectual history seems assured. Yet for all the attention that James's work has received, there are core elements in his thinking that were largely ignored or misunderstood both during his lifetime and in the years following his death. These are the basic psychological, metaphysical, and epistemological principles of "pure experience" that collectively bear the label "radical empiricism."

The goal of this volume is to introduce James's doctrine of "pure experience" and illustrate the extent to which the basic import of his ideas was sidestepped by his contemporaries. To do this, we reprint James's two fundamental papers of 1904, "Does consciousness exist?" and "A world of pure experience" and responses to these papers appearing between 1904 and 1915.[5]

As will be readily apparent, the two James papers do not make easy reading. While James was a brilliant stylist whose popular writing was a model of clarity and persuasive power, he was also a complex, sometimes contradictory thinker whose technical writing could be subtle in the extreme. This is particularly true of the two papers of 1904, both of which not only present ideas that are likely to run counter to the reader's habits of thought but do so in a fashion that is largely non-linear.[6]

In September of 1904, in two closely related articles published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods,[7] James articulated a metaphysical perspective designed to provide a radical reformulation of certain fundamental problems of philosophy and psychology. Termed "radical empiricism," James's metaphysical arguments brought to mature formulation a series of ideas that had long been developing within his thinking.[8] Roughly speaking, these ideas can be grouped under three headings: a) the continuity of experience; b) the metaphysics of "pure" experience; and c) the epistemology of experienced relations.

The continuity of experience. James's argument for the continuity of experience first appeared in 1884 in a seminal paper, "On some omissions of introspective psychology."[9] In an analysis that became the basis for his famous account of the stream of thought,[10] James criticized "orthodox" empiricism for reducing experience to a succession of stable, distinct, substantive elements-ideas, images, percepts, sensations-elements that can be held before the attention and introspectively examined. For James, this punctate, discontinuous view of experience, which overlooks and falsifies "immense tracts of our inner life,"[11] is completely at odds with the dynamic, flowing, stream-like quality of consciousness. Experience, in James's view, is every bit as much an affair of transitions and relations as it is of the substantive ideas and images on which empiricist analysis has traditionally focused:

James's argument for the continuity of consciousness in experienced relations lies at the very heart of his radical empiricism. In 1909, for example, in the preface to The Meaning of Truth, James characterizes the essence of radical empiricism in terms of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized conclusion that make the centrality of experienced relations abundantly evident. His postulate is "that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience." His 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;" and his generalized conclusion is that "the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience."[13]

James's postulate places him squarely within the tradition of empiricism; but his statement of fact and his generalized conclusion take empiricism to its logical extreme. "To be radical," as James puts it, "an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system."[14]

The metaphysics of pure experience. James's metaphysics of pure experience is aimed directly at the dualisms of mind and body and knower and known (subject and object, thought and thing, representation and represented, consciousness and content). In its classical form, mind/body dualism dates from the appearance of Descartes' Meditationes de prima philosophia.[16] For Descartes, everything that exists is made of one or the other of two radically different substances-body and soul. The essence of body is extension; that of soul is thought. Body is spatial and tangible; soul unextended and intangible. Ever since Descartes posed the problem in this fashion, the issue of how spatial body can affect or be affected by unextended soul has bedeviled Western thought.[17]

By the 19th century, however, the dualism of body and soul had been transformed into one of knower and known or consciousness and content. The essence of this dualism lay in a reification of consciousness and a separation of consciousness from its content. The phenomena of consciousness were viewed as entering consciousness as content and consciousness itself was construed simply as that within which the phenomena of consciousness occur, within which, as James puts it, "awareness of content" takes place (see, especially, James's analogy to the separation of pigment from the menstruum of paint).[18] It is this reified consciousness, separated from its content, whose existence James denies; and it was to transcend this dualism of consciousness and content that James articulated his doctrine of "pure experience."

To deny the existence of "consciousness" is not, for James, to deny the existence of thoughts, but "to deny that the word ['consciousness'] stands for an entity," to deny that there is any "aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which our material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made."[19] In place of this substantial dualism, James proposes what might best be called a radically pluralistic monism of pure experience. There is, he says, "only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and...we call that stuff ' pure experience.'" For James, in other words, all that which exists is pure experience and pure experience is all that exists. In contrast to the dualism of consciousness and content, in other words, James argues for a monism of pure experience.[20]

James's view, in short, is only monistic in the sense that "pure experience" is the only existent; it is radically pluralistic in that "pure experience" is infinitely variegated in its nature. It is, as James says, simply "made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not."[22] It is "the instant field of the present...plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that."[23] Pure experience is just exactly what it is, whatever it is that is experienced, in the here and now, in all its multiplicity, exactly as it is experienced.

It is only in retrospect, when pure experience is "'taken,' i.e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience"[24] after the fact that the same indivisible portion of experience assumes the character of subject and object, knower and known. And for James, this reflective taking of experience in different contexts reflects the pluralistic nature of relations within experience rather than a dualism of substance. Section II of "Does consciousness exist?" is devoted to this analysis and there is no better way to make the point than to quote James directly:

The epistemology of experienced relations. Relations in experience also lie at the heart of James's epistemology. Since experience is all that exists and all that exists is experience, James faces none of the problems posed by representational epistemologies that must somehow bridge the dualistic chasm between knower and known. For James, "knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter...the relation itself...(being) a part of pure experience."[26]

When knowing is perceptual, a kind of knowing that James calls "knowledge by acquaintance," the relation is one of identity. "The mind enjoys direct 'acquaintance' with a present object." To know is to experience-directly, immediately, and purely. There is no separation of knower and known. Indeed, in a real sense, there is no knower and known, there is only experience. Knower and known only separate out of the experience retrospectively, as we saw above, when "the self-same piece of experience (is) taken twice over in different contexts."[27]

When knowing is "conceptual,"[28] a kind of knowing that James calls "knowledge about," the relation is one of corroborating continuity in experience. One experience (e.g., an idea, an image, a thought) knows another (e.g., its perceptual referent) when these "two pieces of actual experience...(exhibit) definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them."[29] One experience knows another, in other words, when there is continuity between them, when experience leads seamlessly from one to the other through a series of transitions in which later experience corroborates that which has gone before. As James summarizes it:

James also had a profound distrust of purely rational analysis-the "language about language" that constitutes much of philosophical discourse.[31] With our inveterate penchant for such analysis, he thought, we tend to fall easily into the error of treating reality as it must be, rather than experiencing it as it is.[32] Our sciences, as a result, have restricted themselves only to what can be measured, ignoring vast domains of human functioning-creativity, intuition, psychic experiences, religious visions. The arts and humanities as well are made to take second place to advances in mathematical logic and industrial technology. Even in James's time, the thrust and temper of modern culture was technocratic, bent on reifying the methods of reductionistic scientism in a world view that James most decidedly did not share.

As if these obstacles to the acceptance of James's theory were not already severe enough, there were others that, if anything, were even more difficult to overcome. First, at the time the papers on radical empiricism appeared in 1904, James was involved in numerous controversies surrounding the interpretation of pragmatism. After first enunciating the pragmatic idea before the Philosophical Union at Berkeley in 1898,[33] for example, James had a difference of opinion with his compatriot Charles Sanders Peirce, the originator of the pragmatic maxim, over James's misinterpretation of what Peirce had originally intended. Peirce had conceived of pragmatism as a rule of logic; James took it as a blueprint for action.

As pragmatism gained momentum, controversies of this sort multiplied; and much to his surprise, James found himself at the center of an internationally recognized, if contentious, movement that was to define the core of American populist philosophy during the Progressive Era.[34] All of this made heavy demands on his time and energy at a period when he was in declining health. Distracted on several fronts, he died before he could pull the various strands of radical empiricism together into any sort of systematic statement. Only a handful of published papers and notes and the outline of a book remained of this, his great unfinished arch.[35]

A second factor weighing against the acceptance of James's doctrine of pure experience was that even in his own time (and still today) philosophers misplaced James in the tradition of Western thought. The center of gravity of the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Western European and Anglo-American definition of reality has been the doctrine of rationality and the supremacy of the intellect. Within this tradition, the philosophical pantheon is filled with Greek logicians and ethicists, Scholastic disputants, French encyclopedists, and German idealists. James is frequently critiqued against this rationalistic standard and found wanting. Furthermore, within this genealogy, James is often placed with the British empiricists, running from Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and James Mill, through John Stewart Mill to Bain.[36]

James was weaned on an intuitive psychology of personality transformation promulgated by his godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a Swedenborgian emphasis on the spiritual evolution of consciousness put forward by his father, Henry James, Sr.[37] The Swedenborgian doctrine of The Rational can be seen in James's insistence that logic rests on deeper substrates of experience; the doctrine of Use can be seen in James's interpretation of pragmatism, and the transcendentalist reinterpretation of Swedenborg's doctrine of Correspondences can be found transmuted in James's emphasis on the contextualization of the object in a world of pure experience. While James had undoubted affinities with the British empiricists,[38] he was, from the beginning, a quintessentially American thinker.

In the 1860s, as James's professional career began to unfold, he took the spiritual psychology he had inherited from Emerson and Henry James, Sr. and tempered it with the scientific logic of Charles Sanders Peirce and the positivism of Chauncey Wright. Together Wright and Peirce introduced James to the modern philosophy of science. Through Wright, James took up the study of consciousness in the context of Darwin's theory of natural selection and, from Peirce, James first learned of German psychophysics. During this period, well before they all began to meet as the Metaphysical Club after James began teaching at Harvard in 1872, Wright and Peirce also interpreted the British empiricists to James. Indeed, it was out of these conversations that pragmatism was to develop.[39]

Finally, there was still a third obstacle to the acceptance of James's radical empiricism. By 1904, psychologists had come to believe (and still believe) that James had abandoned psychology following the publication of his Principles of Psychology in 1890. In the Principles, James had emphasized a view of psychology as an empirical science that approached its subject matter, states of consciousness, from a positivistic point of view.[40] The major thrust of the Principles was James's positivistic emphasis on a cognitively oriented experimental psychology whose subject matter was consciousness conceived as a field within which we become aware of objects that are in focus at the center.

In the decade following publication of the Principles, James went on to develop this second thesis. He continued researches into psychic phenomena that he had begun in the 1880s, visiting mediums, conducting experiments in hypnosis and automatic writing, and experimenting with thought transference, all of which he summarized in his Presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research.[41] Delving into the scientific literature on the experimental psychology of the subconscious, he studied trance states and the pathology of the emotions.

In his unpublished 1896 Lowell lectures on Exceptional Mental States,[42] James suggested that beyond the margin lay not only the forgotten and repressed but alternative states of awareness both pathological and transcendent. He developed a dynamic theory of the subconscious that shed light on individual psychopathology as well as personal growth and he analyzed the pathological workings of the subconscious in the social sphere. The text of James's Lowell Lectures reflects the rich perspective on exceptional mental states that emanated from the Boston School of Abnormal Psychology.[43] Until the spread of psychoanalysis, the Boston School was the dominant force in developing scientific psychotherapy in the English speaking world.

Finally, during this period, James also launched a six year study in the psychology of religion that culminated in The Varieties of Religious Experience.[44] There he developed the theme that the subconscious was the doorway to the awakening of ultimately transforming experiences, the highest of which was the mystical. Mystical consciousness, he suggested, was a state of deep and profound awareness. Once experienced, it led to dramatically changed lives and might, in all probability, be the very source of discursive intellect.

Rather than abandoning psychology in the decade after the Principles, in other words, James was actually pioneering the psychology of the abnormal, psychotherapeutics, parapsychology, and the psychology of religion.[45] In doing so, however, James left reductionism and positivism far behind, delving deeply into a domain where most laboratory psychologists have never been able to follow. When James pointed to the reality of a dynamic sphere of experience beyond the bounds of everyday waking material reality, American academic psychology faltered, leaving exploration of this sphere to the generations of depth psychologists and psychoanalysts to follow.

In 1905 and again in 1908, for example, Boyd Henry Bode attacked James's concept of "pure experience" from a dualistic, representationalist perspective.[46] Pure experience, he argued, cannot possibly be all that exists since knowledge of pure experience implies a state different from that of pure experience itself. Furthermore, since consciousness can come and go independently of objects, James could not be right in claiming that the object is dependent upon consciousness. Finally, as truth exists apart from the human mind, consciousness cannot be defined in terms of context. Radical empiricism fails for Bode because it cannot adequately account for an external world common to a multiplicity of individuals.

Another who critiqued James from the position of dualism was the psychologist George Malcolm Stratton.[47] From a representationalist standpoint, Stratton argued for the existence of a material world separate from consciousness, a world of objects that consciousness must model. Differentiating public from private events, Stratton indicated the extent of his misinterpretation of James by claiming that James was in agreement with him in distinguishing between the mental and the physical in terms of their respective modes of behavior.

Charles Hubbard Judd,[48] also a psychologist, compared the thought of James to that of Wilhelm Wundt, the titular founder of the "new" laboratory psychology. Although Judd believed that he saw numerous points of agreement between Wundt and James, he recognized their radical disagreement on the problem of representation. In Wundt's thinking, as in that of psychology more generally, the mind is construed as modeling the world of objects; for James, consciousness participates in the creation of objects. Wundt also differed from James in arguing that space, rather than experience, is the primary and most commonly accepted fact.

Perhaps the most egregious philosophical misinterpreter of James was Bertrand Russell.[49] Although Russell thought James "profoundly original" and "profoundly interesting," he nevertheless believed that James had failed, because his theory was incapable of providing grounds for the analysis of experience (an oxymoron for a radical empiricist) and because he found it impossible to "believe that empiricism, however radical, requires that we should deny the difference between mind and matter...."[50]

James was also attacked by critics as irrational. George Holland Sabine, for instance, accused James of being incomprehensible according to the rules of logic.[51] Although he came close to seeing that James was getting at something beyond discriminative thought, some "archetypal consciousness," which Sabine called the whole of present experience "as it comes," he rejected it as having "nothing to do with logic, or even the psychology of the adult human mind."[52]

James Earl Russell made a parallel point. To him, radical empiricism was appealing but illogical. Truth he thought, was independent of experience, and to identify them as James did forced one to ignore "most of those relations which logical thought recognizes and asserts."[53] Finding James "solipsistic," Herbert Nichols rejected James's primary postulates as "incredible" and his secondary postulates as "superfluous and contradictory."[54] And Evander Bradley McGilvary went back to the Principles to find contradictions in James's thinking.[55]

Peirce was, of course, being metaphorical, because his analysis continues on for several pages. In this letter, Peirce acknowledges the immediacy of our feelings, the immensity of the world of thought that we know exists within us but that always lies outside the immediate field of our awareness, and our sense of the future-all of which must be accounted for in any definition of consciousness. He ends by proclaiming that "the conception of the real is derived by a mellonization of the constraint-side of double-sided consciousness. Therefore to say that it is the world of thought that is real is, when properly understood, to assert emphatically that reality of the public world of the indefinite future as against our past opinions of what it was to be."[56]

In reply, James confesses that he does not "understand a word of your letter;"[57] and this prompts Peirce to respond with an even longer missive.[58] In it, he reviews the definition of consciousness to be found in writers such as George Frederick Stout, Lester Ward, Mary Whiton Calkins, Alexander Bain, and Josiah Royce and continues with his objections to James's use of the word "entity." More importantly, however, Peirce also indicates that he sees quite clearly where James's thought is leading:

That this is not the direction which Peirce himself would take, however, is equally apparent from his emphatic assertion in the same letter that phenomenology "has nothing to do with psychology." James, in effect, wanted to fudge the boundary between the sciences; Peirce wanted to keep the barriers rigid. James wanted to say that phenomenology and psychology observe the same facts; Peirce maintained that they merely observe the same world. James wanted to base his psychology on phenomenology; Peirce insisted that psychology should stand on logic.[60]

Two of the most important supporters of James were Ralph Barton Perry and Henri Bergson. Perry was a protégé of James's at Harvard, a younger family friend, a budding philosopher, and already at that time James's designated biographer. Perhaps the most telling fact about Perry's interpretation of James was that he danced around James's position without explicitly stating it.[61] He could cast James into the context of philosophy in the Western humanistic tradition; he could situate him in the line of British empiricism; he could even place him in the context of the history of philosophy at Harvard, but there was a distinct limit to how far Perry could get into the interior of James's thought.

Bergson was, of course, a major philosophical force in his own right. A friendship between James and Bergson had sprung up after James began reading Bergson in the late 1890s and they began a correspondence, finally meeting in 1905. In their letters they agreed that they were in sympathy with one another; but Bergson also went on to describe some of the ways in which his ideas were not identical to James's.[62] Despite some intellectual differences, however, the bond between them was quite strong and Bergson supervised the translation of several of James's philosophical works into French, as James had supervised the translation into English of Bergson's Creative Evolution.

Of all James 's supporters, the two who seemed to resonate with him best were John Dewey and Theodore Flournoy. Dewey came closest to James by taking a position he called "immediate empiricism." From this standpoint, he maintained that "the adequacy of any particular account is not a matter to be settled by general reasoning, but by finding out what sort of an experience the truth-experience actually is."[63] Flournoy was the first to recognize that radical empiricism lay at the heart of James's metaphysics. In his rendition of radical empiricism, he remained true to James's conceptions, identifying experience with "a field of consciousness, including its objects thought and felt, plus an attitude in regard to these objects, plus a sense of self to which these attitudes belong"[64] and accurately representing James's position that immediate experience at any actual instant is but a subset of pure experience.

The documents of radical empiricism are undoubtedly instructive from an historical standpoint. They help to clarify the nature of James's philosophy and psychology; and they provide a case study in misinterpretation and distortion. But radical empiricism is not merely an historical curiosity. It may yet serve to guide us to a deeper understanding of the rich and complex human spirit. Perhaps in this regard James was actually a psychologist of the more distant future.[65]

[1] James, W. (1904). A world of pure experience. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1, 533-543, 561-570., p. 533. [WPE]