4

The Polysemiality of the Concept of

Pure Experience
In Whiteheads PancreativismThe 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 prismor a vector
rather than a screen? That latter question is not, as we shall soon see, purely
rhetorical: language can be used in a mbian, self-referential, way that
1
short-circuits its constitutive intentionality.
The assertion of a primordial experience, both in the sense of a temporal
primacy and of a semantic or existential primacy (original or pristine
characterPerry 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 Jamess 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
2
and it is not difficult to understand why. On the one hand, Jamess vision
is counter-intuitivebetter: non-rational. Its purpose is to draw all the
onto-epistemological consequences of anti-foundationalism and of nondualism. On the other hand, Jamess style is quite surprising and it takes
time to organise the intrication of the semantic layers involved.

This chapter expands the heuristics of An Argumentation for Contiguism,

Streams of William James, Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 1999, pp. 14-16.
Eugene I. Taylor and Robert H. Wozniak (Edited and Introduced by), Pure
Experience. The Response to William James, Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1996.

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Michel Weber

Before diving into the debated questionthe polysemiality of the concept

of pure experience, it is worth to quickly refresh the philosophers
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 consciousnessand 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
1
be total. 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

2
panexperientialism.

4.1. Pure ExperienceDefinition

Lexprience nest rien ou il faut quelle soit totale. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception, Paris, NRF ditions
Gallimard,1945, p. 299.
Griffin was the first to use the conceptwhich has been coined in conversation
with Cobbin his Whiteheads 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 cant say, I made the river, any more than the river can
say, I made the bank. The right leg cant say, I do the walking any
1
more than the left leg can.

Here lies the fatum of process thought: to depict a radical ontoepistemological renewaland thereby arouse a modification of
consciousnesscan 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 reformedif 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 prepredication. 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
2
adults) who intuit a that which is not yet any definite what. One could
1
2

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

Cf. ERE 92-94; cf. PP I 488 and II 32. Of course, Jamess 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

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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
1
Nishidas words.
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 ethophenomenologists say) can overlap, as it factually does, with other worlds.
And here is the obvious conflictexploited ad nauseam by
2
deconstructive postmodernism 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; Lon Chertok, L'Hypnose. Thorie, pratique et
technique. Prface de Henry Ey. dition remanie et augmente, Paris, ditions
Payot, 1989; Franois Roustang, Qu'est-ce que l'hypnose?, Paris, ditions 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.
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.

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

95

From the objective, or outer point of view, pure experience is the primal
1
stuff or materia prima of the world. Experience as a whole is selfcontaining 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 keycategories 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. Jamess 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
2
aim at the full thickness of the concrete, at its overall chaosmic structure;
derogative occurrences denounce the understanding of realitys 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
3
intuition, lying beyond the power of words to tell of. The Will to Believe
has even more adventurous utterings (besides the fact that it still speaks of
a mind):
1
2
3

Cf. the note 35 on Aristotelian hylemorphism.

See, e.g., ERE 4, 37, 78, 138.
William James, Review of The Ansthetic Revelation and the Gist of
Philosophy, The Atlantic Monthly, November 1874, Volume 33, No. 205, pp.
627-628.

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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 Jamess 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 individuals 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

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

97

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, Platos 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 NeoPlatonic 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 spectatorsubject, i.e., of a totally passive onlooker factually unaffected by the
1
scenery. Anyway, the XXth century has seen three major thinkersJames,
Bergson and Whiteheadclarifying 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
immersedbetter, that constitutes the subject.
We have used, explicitly or not, contrapunctic parallels with Nishidas
interpretation of Jamess 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
2
nothing to reconcile in the first place, just a seamless eventful tapestry. To
go to the core of the matter, we have to acknowledge that experience is not
1
2

Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, op. cit.

Cf., e.g., Ames Van Meter, Zen and Pragmatism, Philosophy East and West 3,
n 1, 1954, pp. 19-33.

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Michel Weber

understood in the same way by the two philosophers: James understands it

1
as a plenum, whereas Nishida sees it as a vacuum. The fullness, fullbodiedness, 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 experiencein the strong sense of the termof 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
2
kinds.
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 Jamess 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 realitythe 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
3
feelings and desires. 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.
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 Hawa Press,
1967, pp. 122-142, p. 139.
Repousser une conclusion par ce seul motif qu'elle contrarie nos sentiments
intimes et nos dsirs, c'est faire emploi de la mthode subjective. (James,
Quelques considrations sur la mthode subjective, in EP 23)

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

99

The concept of pure experience constitutes the focal point of Jamess

radical empiricism while radical empiricism is itself arguably the very core
1
of his works, both historically and conceptually.
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 Jamess 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.

For an historical review of the concept, see John J. McDermotts first-rate

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

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Michel Weber

So far, we have questioned the continuous-discontinuous dialectic in

Jamess 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 Jamess psycho-phenomenological inquiries an
emphasis on the continuity of experience: from a subjectiveor 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 andespeciallyinto 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 objectivethe 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 epistemometaphysical 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.

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

101

Since the Greeks, it was commonly accepted that only one principle
(arch) should be evoked to understand reality. The metaphor of the
1
source was very explicit in that regard. Through the insistent influence
2
of Scholastics in our culture, it the hydra of all possible heresiesand
especially of Manicheismhas been furthermore fought. Neither the
regression ad infinitum nor the ambivalent counter-tension of two coeternal 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 worlda 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 oneand 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
3
are various Weltanschauungen. 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
2
3

Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Delta.

The term is not used derogatorily.
Cf., e.g., Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Paul
K. Feyerabend, etc.

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Michel Weber

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
1
substance or flux. 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 thinkersand
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
2
of that nocturnal and tactual experience (a touching in the night).
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 itand
yet lets it go. Suffice it to say that that paradoxanexteriority, which is
as old as philosophical speculation, has never discouraged the quest for the
holistic transfiguration. Better, it has been thematized as such in Platos
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.
[] in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power (VRE 464
quoting Auguste Sabatier); contact with the only absolute realities (VRE 503).

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

103

polysemantic technicalities to deal with Jamess 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
1
all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. (VRE 388)

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 nonrationality is completed and operationalized by the ontology of pure
experience. Even though one could claim that pragmatisms 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
2
a muddle.

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
2

The passage is quoted entirely in 5.3.

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

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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
1
theory. 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) existingor notbetween 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. Gesprche in Umkreis ser Atomphysik,
Mnchen, 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.

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

105

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
1
perspective.

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 birds life [] seems to be made of an alternation of
flights and perchings, of places of flightsor transitive partsand
resting-placesor 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 Jamess use of the expression
comparatively restful, which alleviatesif not destroysBergsons
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

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.

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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
1
is metaphysics itself.

Similarly, James claims that our lived, immediate presentthat he calls

specious presentis 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 Zenos
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,
2
in his Elemente der Psychophysik (1860), the concepts of absolute
1

Bergson, The Creative Mind. 4th Ed. Trans, Mabelle L. Andison, New York,
Philosophical Library, 1946, p. 221 (uvres, p. 1419).
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), Mnsterberg (1889) and
eventually Myers, in the years 18891895. Furthermore, Fechner himself has
relativized his psychophysics with a panpsychic cosmopsychology (Zend-Avesta,

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107

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 doesnt 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, ber 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.

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But the meaningfulness of life appears to the philosophers 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 hasurgentlyto 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
hereperhaps even more clearly than in the case of the streamis the
powerful concept of internal relations. This is the road Whiteheads
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 Jamess ideas, and
conclude with some remarks on Whiteheads development.
On the one hand, we have shown that the stream is susceptible to a
dissection; but that partition does not disclose separateexternal
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 casesthrough the concept of
internal relationsis 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)

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

109

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 Jamess
reading of Bergsons Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience
(1889translated as Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data
of Consciousness) and Matire et mmoire (1896translated as Matter and
Memory), sometime in 1902. Although there is no doubt that the
importance of the discontinuist argument is linked with Jamess 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
1
perception.
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
Jamess apophthegm: when we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and
exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-andno-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, Whiteheads 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

[] dmolition dfinitive du dualisme et de la vieille distinction du sujet et de

lobjet dans la perception. (Letter to Bergson, 14 dcembre 1902, in Henri
Bergson, Mlanges, pp. 566-568)

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Michel Weber

wager). Sketching PRs 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 Jamess 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 becomingor concrescenceof actual entities is the crux of the
matter in so far as vivid privatei.e., subjectiveexperience 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
1
God and the World, 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
2
conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. (PU 263)

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 Whiteheads

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

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111

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 subjectsand among objectsthere 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 (18701945)the Japanese scholar whose
thought has been mainly influenced by James, Bergson and Husserl,

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Michel Weber

together with a constant practice of Zen Buddhismunderstands the true

self as a series of moments of pure experience, i.e., as a continuity of
1
discontinuities. 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 Jamess immense emotional sense of atonement and
reconciliation.
In conclusion, the atomism of Whiteheads 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 nave realism nor a nave 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

Kitar 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 Kenky, 1911.) Cf. Keiji Nishitani, Nishida Kitar.
Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig. Introduction by D. S.
Clarke, Jr., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991.

Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience

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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 experiences
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 Kants
noumenalization of the ultimate concreteness.
Ontologyone could even dare to say lived ontologynecessitates a
thought bypassing the principle of excluded middle. The continuousdiscontinuous dialectic does not ask for an either or choice. Similarly, the
polysemiality of Jamess 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 Jamess 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.)
Jamess 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.