An Attempt to Unify Interpretations of Pure Experience
some methodological considerations
2016 Volume 2016 Issue 67 Pages 169-185
Details
2016 Volume 2016 Issue 67 Pages 169-185
This article’s aim is to chart a course towards a unified interpretation of William James’s concept of “pure experience” by connecting this concept with his philosophical method. I also aim to bring to light the inherent structure of James’s philosophy.
In his Essays in Radical Empiricism James sees the fundamental way of being of this world as pure experience. Pure experience is a stuff of which everything is composed. James aims to explain with this conception the distinctions between mind and matter or subject and object without Cartesian ontological dualism (sec. 2).
How are the generation of a subject and its phenomena explained in this world of pure experience? First, in pure experience as material a certain part becomes aware of another part and appropriates it. Both a selecting subject and a selected object come into being through this awareness (sec. 3). What is given to this subject is the immediate flux of life, or a kind of chaos (sec. 4). James’s aim in these descriptions is to examine the ontological description of pure experience at a more concrete and epistemological level. In this way, I show that James’s aim is to bring to light an evolutionary construction showing how originally chaotic pure experience becomes gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer world.
I then consider the position this method of dealing with pure experience has in James’s cosmology (sec. 5). I show that the philosophy of pure experience is an expression of James’s individual life as well as a form of the world’s self-expression, and that this individual (a philosopher) is a part of this world, not a transcendent subject isolated from experience.
In this way, on the one hand James’s method of using different perspectives lays the foundation for the coherent interpretation of pure experience; on the other hand this methodological perspective is incorporated into the development of pure experience as material. In this manner the unifying interpretation of pure experience and James’s methodology reciprocally substantiate each other (sec. 6).
