Nonduality Salon (/ \)
By Anonymous
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Introduction
These reflections on William James (1842-1909) explore how his
radical empiricism was an approach to the duality of
concsiousness and objects of consciousness. In a nutshell, James'
radical empiricism was an attempt to account for the world using
as building blocks only what arises in expereince. Motivated
partly as an answer to F.H. Bradley's (1846-1924) absolute
Idealism (only mental entities are real), James' work on these
issues is closely related to the issue of solipsism and the
existence of other minds. My two reflections in are based on
readings of two of James' essays: "Does Consciousness
Exist?" and "A World of Pure Experience," which
are the principal works in James' book Essays in Radical
Empiricism (1912).
Here's a line from James: "The instant field of the present
is always experience in its 'pure' state, plain unqualified
actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into
thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective
fact or as someone's opinion about fact." By the way, James
knew Swami Vivekenanda.
One interesting note that arises in theese reflections is that in
trying to account for the world, and reconstruct the world from
the phenomenal, empirical data, James runs into the problem of
solipsism. On one hand, he wants to allow as constructional
material only what occurs in experience. On the other hand, he
wants to reconstruct the notion of other minds in common-sense
terms. These two projects generate some tension, and issues I
discuss in the Second Reflection below.
First Reflection - non-technical
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James's anti-dualistic aims include that of identifying a kind of
fundamental "stuff" on which the subject-object
distinction is superimposed. Given this goal, his choice of the
expression "pure experience" as a label for that stuff
is infelicitous. One can argue that, at least given ordinary
linguistic conventions, experiences presuppose an experiencer.
James, however, takes his pure experiences to exist prior to any
sort of subject of experience. One might defend him by pointing
out that there is nothing inherently wrong with flying in the
face of linguistic convention, as long as one replaces with new
meanings the conventional meanings of the words one is using in
novel ways. There is, however, a deeper, related problem that is
not so easily addressed. This problem emerges in his strategy for
avoiding what he takes to be solipsism.
Before we can examine this problem, some stage setting will be
necessary. According to James's conception of radical empiricism,
the philosopher should not accept anything that cannot be
experienced. This prohibition underlies his claim that
consciousness does not exist. From a purely phenomenologial point
of view, there is no basis for claiming its existence; the
transcendental ego, the conscious witness of experience,
is simply not to be found in experience. Nor, from James's
point of view, is matter.
In rejecting matter as well as consciousness, James parts company
with both realism and idealism as they are traditionally
conceived. He is particularly interested in dispensing with the
British idealists' conception of an absolute subject. On the
other hand, he does try to reinterpret or reconstruct the notions
of subjectivity and objectivity, and even the notion of a mind.
The heart of his reconstruction lies in his conception of a
context.
James' strategy is to make subjectivity and objectivity
relational. The same experience, from his point of view, can be
both subjective and objective. What makes it subjective is that
it is located in a context made up of certain other
experiences--such as thoughts, memories, and emotions--which we
commonsensically think of as mental. What makes it objective is
that it is embedded in a context made up of certain other
experiences, percepts, that we commonsensically interpret
as being perceptions of material objects. The same experience can
be embedded in more than one context, just as, in a striking
image, James notes that the same point can lie on more than one
line.
James also employs the notion of a field in this connection. For
James, there is only the field of pure experiences, which include
thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions, and so on. This field
can be divided up into subfields in various ways. The same
experience can be located in different subfields. Along with
feelings of exhiliration, an Empire State Building-percept is
located in what for James is the subjective subfield that
constitutes my mind. The same percept, I take it, is also located
in an objective subfield that consists of other perceptions, but
no feelings or memories. But these subfields are just the results
of imposing boundaries on sets of experiences. This is the sense
in which, for James, the subject-object distinction is
superimposed on the nondual stuff of pure experience.
Now one might ask what or who imposes these boundaries. I presume
James's reply would be that certain thoughts do this. Thoughts,
for James, are experiences, unlike the transcendental subject he
rejects. And he speaks of thoughts as knowers. His
conception of knowledge is itself a relational one, but we don't
need to go into it here. The main point, on this interpretation,
is that the objective and subjective worlds are for James simply
the product of thoughts.
Now we are in a position to return to the problem I mentioned
earlier, the problem that arises in relation to James's treatment
of solipsism. In what I have so far said about James's view there
is nothing to prohibit the same experience from entering into
more than one mind. Nevertheless, James is still sufficiently
attached to common sense to think that, at least as far as percepts
are concerned, this never quite happens. His percepts retain
something of what commonsensically we would think of as the
perspectival character of perception. Thus, in "A World of
Pure Experience," James asks, "Is natural realism,
permissible in logic, refuted then by empirical fact? Do our
minds have no object in common after all?"
James is concerned here with what he takes to be Berkeley's
predicament, that of a "congeries of solipsisms," as he
puts it, in which "our minds" never "meet in the same."
Now James's reply is extraordinary. Although he had asked whether
our minds have any object in common, his immediate
answer is, "Yes, they certainly have Space in
common." I say this answer is extraordinary because space is
generally not taken to be an object. Nor is it at all clear that
we have an experience of space. In fact, one can
argue that space is no more to be found in experience than
consciousness--a point that takes on a certain resonance against
the background of the spatial metaphors that are sometimes used
in relation to consciousness.
If we do not have an experience of space, then James's radical
empiricism precludes him from being able to appeal to it as he
does. On the other hand, James might well claim that we do have
an experience of it. His insistence that we don't just experience
objects, but the relations between them, could be seen extending
to spatial relations. But to think in these terms
about the current problem won't help, because spatial relations
between "my" percepts and spatial relations between
"yours" may not be the same. And what James wants is
for our minds to overlap in some way. (Besides it isn't clear
that we do have an experience of the relation of, say,
betweenness.)
James writes, "The percepts themselves may be shown to
differ; but if each of us be asked to point out where his percept
[of Memorial Hall at Harvard] is, we point to the same
place." This remark resembles the common sense realist claim
that if we're asked to point to Memorial Hall, we will point to
the same place. But James cannot avail himself of the space of
the common sense realist. A space containing physical objects is
not available to him. In what space is there a "place"
to which we can both point in James's system? I doubt that James
can answer this question satisfactorily.
Second Reflection - a bit
technical
In my first comment, I challenged James's radical empiricism on
the grounds that his way of dealing with solipsism by talking
about a shared space is incompatible with his stricture against
admitting anything that isn't experienced. Within a mind (qua
his reconstruction of minds as in effect fields of certain sorts
of experiences) there may well be experiences of spatial
relations. But since James doesn't seem to think that these
relations exist apart from their relata, we are not in a position
to conclude that the space associated with one mind is identical
with that associated with another.
Now, interestingly enough, Russell, who was familiar with James's
work, and who, like James, was a phenomenalist, grappled with
this very problem. In "The Relation of Sense-Data to
Physics" (published in 1914, about 10 years after James
published "Does Consciousness Exist?"), Russell
outlines a procedure for constructing what he calls a
"perspective space" from the "private spaces"
that are in his view associated with individual minds. This
perspective space, in his view, is the space of physics. One can
think of it as a three dimensional space augmented with other
dimensions as follows. Associated with each point in the initial
three dimensionsal space is a perspective, and each of these
perspectives is itself three dimensional.
Russell's phenomenalist constructional project received two
significant elaborations: one is Carnap's Aufbau, his
"Logical Stucture of the World;" the second, developing
Carnap's strategies in a technical way, is Goodman's The
Structure of Appearance. Quine's critique of Carnap's effort
in "Two Dogma's of Empiricism" was the American nail in
the constructional project's coffin--the British nail is Austin's
Sense and Sensibilia, and the Austrian nail is
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. But what
seems to be overlooked even in America is the fact that the roots
of the project lie in James.
Whether or not these critiques of the constructional project are
fully adequate is not an easy question to answer. But even if the
constructional project could be sucessfully carried out, it is
not obvious that it would help James. For James's radical
empiricism prohibits him from admitting anything that cannot be
experienced. And it is far from clear that the Russellian space
of perspectives described earlier, or its heirs, can be
experienced. Russell and his followers were not radical
empiricists, so they did have to face this problem; they were
much more willing than James to accept hypothetical constructs.
Contemporary American attempts to revive James--such as Richard
Rorty's and Hillary Putnam's -- have focused more on his
pragmatism than on his radical empiricism. To the extent that
these two facets of his philosophy can be separated,
neo-pragmatism need not trouble itself with the problem we have
been considering.
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