Abstract
While modern philosophy has paid enormous attention to, and centered on, rational and physical-psychic experiences, these identifiable and presentable experiences are but a small portion of the vast ocean of our experience of existing in the world. Underneath the visible part of the iceberg of consciously or physio-psychically aware activities is always a sea of ex-appropriating movements. For spatial and temporal human beings, pure experience is the anonymous and unannounced that escapes conscious fixation. Pure experience encompasses the free memories of infinite singular events, sensitive encounters that no longer register, the nebulosity of experiences of direct encounters…. Pure experience constitutes the infinite depth of our existence, uncontainable and ex-appropriate in a living present, and thus is beyond Being.
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- 1.
In addition to Sigmund Freud and his followers, other modern philosophers have also made similar claims. For example, Hegel said in Science of Logic: While “the activity of thought, which is at work in all our ideas, purposes, interests and actions, is … unconsciously busy…, what we consciously attend to is the contents, the objects of our ideas, that in which we are interested; on this basis, the determinations of thought have the significance of forms which are only attached to the content, but are not the content itself” (p. 8). Available at http://www.hegel.net/en/pdf/Hegel-Scilogic.pdf.
- 2.
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194.
- 3.
Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy”, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 25–71, 71.
- 4.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991).
- 5.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 83.
- 6.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 85.
- 7.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 74.
- 8.
Jean Hypopolite made a strong argument on this point in Jean Hypopolite, “Various Aspects of Memory in Bergson” (1949), trans. Athena V. Colman, in Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2003): 112–128.
- 9.
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
- 10.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 95.
- 11.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 88.
- 12.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 88.
- 13.
Jean Hypopolite, “Various Aspects of Memory in Bergson” (1949/2003).
- 14.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 32.
- 15.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 240.
- 16.
The word “spirit” is used by Bergson to mean an existence of an independent reality other than the one we know.
- 17.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 239.
- 18.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 95.
- 19.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 128.
- 20.
This point is made clear also by Lawlor in Leonard Lawlor, (2004) “What Immanence? What Transcendence?”.
- 21.
Lawlor, “What Immanence? What Transcendence?” 34.
- 22.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 83.
- 23.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 131.
- 24.
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1991), 104.
- 25.
Even though his concept of perception is tied to the living body, and cognition is effectively vital, rather than speculative, Bergson’s concept of consciousness, or the mental-psychological system, is always in the context of the sensori-motor; and its interest and function are primarily in motor actions and praxis in the world. This tendency of Bergson has been carried further by Deleuze and has contributed much to the recent post-human turn. Bergson’s affirmation of the co-existence of discrete and multiple kinds of existence takes him no further than our sensori-motor encounter with the world.
- 26.
This point is further elaborated below.
- 27.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1912), 74.
- 28.
James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 93.
- 29.
William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977): 96–97.
- 30.
Krueger, “The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment,” in William James Studies. Online at http://williamjamesstudies.org/the-varieties-of-pure-experience-william-james-and-kitaro-nishida-on-consciousness-and-embodiment/.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
James, A Pluralistic Universe, 94.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 94.
- 35.
For example, James writes in a footnote, “The world experienced (otherwise called the ‘field of consciousness’) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is ‘here’; when the body acts is ‘now’; what the body touches is ‘this’; all other things are ‘there’ and ‘then’ and ‘that’. These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form…. The body is the storm centre, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view.” [William James, “The Experience of Activity,” Psychological Review 12, no. 1 (1905): 1–17, 9.]
- 36.
Krueger, “The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment”.
- 37.
Husserl writes, “It is certainly an absurdity to speak of a content of which we are ‘unconscious,’ one of which we are conscious only later. Consciousness (Bewusstsein) is necessarily a being-conscious (Bewusstsein) in each of its phases. Just as the retentional phase was conscious of the preceding one without making it an object, so also are we conscious of the primal datum—namely, in the specific form of the ‘now’—without its being objective;… retention of a content of which we are not conscious is impossible; … if every ‘content’ necessarily and in itself is ‘unconscious’ then the question of an additional dator consciousness becomes senseless.” [Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James S. Churchill, Appendix IX (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 162–163. The latter part is modified by Derrida in Speech and Phenomena.]
- 38.
James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 93.
- 39.
Joel W. Krueger, “The Varieties of Pure Experience: William James and Kitaro Nishida on Consciousness and Embodiment,” in William James Studies. James also states, “My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter.” (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 4.)
- 40.
A key term in Chinese Confucianism. It needs to be noted that in the consistent appreciation of the “personal-cosmic communion,” there is always a lingering sense that the cosmic is always larger, the other-than-me that draws upon the self from beyond. Another sign of such an Eastern tendency is also shown in the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, the modern Japanese philosopher who attempted to synthesize the West and East. Kitaro has taken on this aspect of James’ “pure experience” and underscores the unity of the self and the world, the absolute boundary-less self that is in unity with the universe. “By pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination.” [Nishida Kitaro, “Pure Experience,” in An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990): 3–29, 3.]. Nishida Kitaro spent much of his lifework on synthesizing the Zen approach to the world and some of the German and American philosophies. He is heavily influenced by James, particularly his concept of pure experience. Indeed, Kitaro’s philosophy may be seen as centered on the James’ concept of pure experience, which is applied to his philosophy of religion, art, and morality. Unfortunately, he incorporated much of James’ thought related to the psychological and bodily source of pure experience and his appropriation of the Zen approach does not go further than its original state.
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Zhao, G. (2020). Pure Experience. In: Subjectivity and Infinity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45590-3_6
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