Introduction.

This essay is dedicated to exploring the rudiments of an embodied phenomenology latent within William James’ philosophy of radical empiricism.

The True Landscape: Consciousness as a Process.

In his essay Does Consciousness Exist? as part of his Essays in Radical Empiricism, William James states that “consciousness…is the name of a nonentity, and has no name of right among first principles…but insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function” (ERE, p4–5). What he means by this is that consciousness is not some primordial or transcendent property standing outside and above experience and governing it but is operative within lived experience. Consciousness is not durable substance, but a dynamic process through which perceptual subjects engage the world and is active within a holistic network of brain, body and environment. This holistic network is what James identifies as pure experience as a formative experiential medium. Thus, consciousness must be comprehended as it emerges from the holistic network and formative medium of pure experience.

In A World of Pure Experience, James states that “Relations are of different degrees of intimacy” (ERE, p18). As a philosophical instrument, pure experience is used by James cartographically to chart the true landscape of the primordially and irreducibly concrete relationship between mind, body, lived environment that is “less clipped, straight-edged and artificial” than the neat and abstract conceptualizations offered by academia (ERE, p17). As James explains, “Life is confused and superabundant,” and even “at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity” he wants to do “full justice to conjunctive relations” by exploring the phenomenological interaction of an embodied subject with the universe which is “to a large extent chaotic” (ERE, p17–18).

Unfortunately, James does not articulate this embodied phenomenology well when he postulates somewhat metaphysically that:

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. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. This will need much explanation before it can be understood. (ERE, p5)

In The Analysis of the Mind, Bertrand Russell attempted to recruit James as a precursor to his theory of neutral monism by referring to the above paragraph:

James’s view is that the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but that it is arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations, and that some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical. (AM, p11)

However, as James later notes, by way of a fictional interlocutor, this statement was made for “fluency’s sake,” and makes the following correction:

(E)arly in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same: “It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not”…Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for ‘being’) there appears no universal element of which all things are made. (ERE, p11).

From his above assertion, James clearly rejects Russellian Monism and later clarifies what is meant by pure experience when he states that “my central thesis that subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification” (ERE, p49).

James’ focus here is on the dichotomies applied by reflexive thinking. That is, conceptual and linguistic classifications which abstract from the relation intimacy of lived experience. Within the realm of pure experience, a plurality of natures can be said to exist before they are divided and fixed retrospectively by conceptual analysis. James takes this claim of openness to possibility so far as to claim in The Varieties of Religious Experience that supernatural and paranormal phenomena may be included as potential natures in the things experienced when he writes of a “present reality more diffused and general than that which our special senses yield” (VRE, p63).

Contra Russell, James’s system is less metaphysical and more phenomenological. Embodied subjects are inexorably embedded within the lived environments of which they are equal part producer and product. This precludes the impossibility of a stance above or outside the world. There can be no view nowhere. Lived experience will always overwhelm and undermine reification and categorization. Pure experience, in the hands of James, is a phenomenological utensil and hermeneutical instrument used to chart the confused and superabundant true landscape buzzing beneath the straight-edged and artificial conceptual frameworks and linguistic systems used to explain and organize a chaotic universe.

A Palmary Instance of the Ambiguous: The Perceptual Body as Both Subject and Object.

In the footnotes to the sixth of his Essays in Radical Empiricism, entitled The Experience of Activity, William James writes that:

The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. 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. So far as ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world….The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles round it. and is felt from its point of view. (ERE, p64).

Interpreting James phenomenologically, the body composes a sensorimotor locus of perspective for an embodied subject to engage and interact with its lived environment. The body is a storm centre around which the chaos of the world is organized into a meaningful arrangement for the self. As a focus of action and interest, the body’s interaction with the environment permits a systematization of things and structures the immanent field of consciousness in a meaningful manner pregnant with potentiality. For James, the body exceeds its physiological restrictions by integrating external aspects of its environment as part of its being. As he writes in The Place of Affectional Facts:

Our body itself is the palmary instance of the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes, again, I think of it as ‘mine,’ I sort it with the ‘me,’ and then certain local changes and determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings. Its breathing is my ‘thinking,’ its sensorial adjustments are my ‘attention,’ its kinesthetic alterations are my Worts,’ its visceral perturbations are my ‘emotions.’ (ERE,p52).

It is through the formative medium of pure experience that James endeavours to explore the body’s somatic fluidity and versatility. As James acknowledges, the body itself is the palmary instance of the ambiguous. Enabled by its sensorimotor pathways, selfhood is forged through the dynamic interplay of body, mind, and environment. Primarily, an embodied subject experiences itself subjectively in the first-person through the storm centre of the body in full recognition of its possibilities and limitations. However, it is only a stranger’s gaze, a stubbed toe or mirror’s glimpse away from experiencing its body as a part of its outer nature. In such instances, an embodied subject becomes aware of itself from the third-person perspective as a being or entity among other beings and entities with which it interacts causally. The genius of selfhood is to integrate these contradictory modes of being in a complimentary manner. Although selfhood is a cumulative production of brain, body, and environment, they are abstractions that emerge from the formative medium of pure experience. Somatic fluidity and versatility are reflective of the infinite liquidity of pure experience. In emphasizing the undifferentiated nature of the body’s primordial sensorimotor interaction with the world, James can be seen to anticipate the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, as the latter writes in The Structure of Behaviour (1942):

The subject does not live in a world of states of consciousness or representations from which he would believe himself able to act on and know external things by a sort of miracle. He lives in a universe of experience, in a milieu which is neutral with regard to the substantial distinctions between the organism, thought and extension; he lives in a direct commerce with beings, things and his own body. The ego as a center from which his intentions radiate, the body which carries them and the beings and things to which they are addressed are not confused: but they are only three sectors of a unique field. Things are things, that is, transcendent with respect to all that I know of them and accessible to other perceiving subjects, but intended precisely as things; as such they are the indispensable moment of the lived dialectic which embraces them…Thus certain phenomena of which it is the seat must be the necessary and sufficient condition for perception; the body must be the necessary intermediary between the real world and perception which are henceforth disassociated from each other. Perception can no longer be a taking-possession of things which finds them in their proper place; it must be an event internal to the body and one which results from their action on it. The world is doubled: there will be the real world as it is outside my body and the world as it is for me, numerically distinct from the first; the external cause of perception and the internal object which it contemplates will have to be separated. The body proper has become a material mass and, correlatively, the subject withdraws from it to contemplate its representations within himself. (SB, p189–190).

It is through sensorimotor pathways that the body is presented to itself as both subject and object, permitting the transcendence of the epidermis and the extension of the self into the world. In turn, this allows the incorporation of aspects of the lived environment into selfhood of an embodied subject.

In quotidian practical interaction with the lived environment: driving a forklift, playing rugby or cricket, typing on a computer, an embodied subject, can extend its body into the world as an object. Technology, language, and culture provide a variety of platforms for extending the human body, and subsequently its norms, meaning, and values, into the lived environment. As James writes:

We must not forget, namely, in talking of the ultimate character of our activity-experiences, that each of them is but a portion of a wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes of experience out of which history is made. Each partial process, to him who lives through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an observer with a wider mindspan who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond. We thus acquire a habit, in discussing activity-experiences, of defining them by their relation to something more. (ERE, p57).

The Tissue of Experience: Functional Integration with the Lived Environment.

It is through the formative medium of pure experience that the pre-reflexive primordial relations that permeate everyday life can be explored and charted. Indeed, as James states, “Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (ERE, p21).

Here James anticipates Heidegger’s later development in Being and Time of zunhandenheit or Handiness. In everyday life, the embodied subject encounters beings and entities with certain purposes: cars for travel, phones for communication, combs for styling, hammers for fixing and repairs, and so on. Primordial relationships with these objects are not forged in detached theoretical observation, but voluntary and considerate application. As Heidegger states, using the example of a carpenter’s hammer:

(T)he less we just stare at the thing called a hammer, the more we take hold of it and use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered as what it is, as a useful thing. The act of hammering itself discovers the specific “handiness” (“Handlichkeit”) of the hammer. We shall call the useful thing’s kind of being in which it reveals itself by itself handiness (Zunhandenheit). (BT, S15, p69)

In its practical engagement in the world, the embodied subject regularly becomes functionally integrated with the entities and beings in its environment to the extent that they become phenomenologically transparent to it, and vice-versa, dissolving the subject-object dichotomy. For Heidegger, however, such behaviour is not automatic with an absence of awareness, but an awareness that the subject-object dichotomy is not operational. Thus, from a phenomenological perspective, the subject-object dichotomy is superseded by the task at hand.

Like James, Heidegger, denies that the subject-object dichotomy is representative of an embodied subject’s primordial encounter with its lived environment. Instead, he insists that it is merely a derivative form of approaching the world. When beings and entities are placed under the microscope of empirical observation, or contemplated in armchair contemplation, they are extricated from their lived environment, or over-determining particular aspects of their existence. Or, as Heidegger states, “(n)o matter how keenly we just look at the “outward appearance” of things constituted in one way or another, we cannot discover handiness. When we look at things “theoretically” we lack understanding of handiness” (BT, S15, p69). This echoes James’ assessment that “When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put together” (ERE, p33).

Similarly for James and Heidegger, when practical activity is disturbed: a car gets a flat tire, a phone battery runs low, a comb snags in one’s hair, a thumb is struck with a hammer, etc., the phenomenological transparency of an embodied subject’s functional relationship with the lived environment terminates. In James words:

We have a most extremely delicate foreshadowing of sensory effects…Surprise can only come from getting a sensation which differs from the one we expect. But the truth is when we know the objects well, the very slightest difference from the expected weight will surprise us, or at least attract our notice. (PP2, p502, his italics).

Or, in Heidegger’s prose:

When we notice unhandiness, what is at hand enters the mode of obtrusivness. The more urgently we need what is missing and the more truly it is encountered in its unhandiness, all the more obtrusive does what is at hand become, such that it seems to loose the character of handiness. (BT, S16, p73)

When practical activity is disrupted, the embodied subject is disconnected from its perceptual and sensorimotor expectations. It is at this juncture that formative medium of pure experience is fractured into the dichotomies of subject and object by the discriminative agency of consciousness. Or, as James writes, consciousness “is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks” (PP1, p284, his italics).

Pure experience can be interpreted phenomenologically as a primordially absolute and undifferentiated sensorimotor form of embodied perceptual interaction with the environment. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visible and Invisible:

(B)etween my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things. (VI, p123).

In quotidian encounters with the world, the embodied subject is functionally integrated into the lived environment in an adaptive, dynamic, and responsive manner.

Having initially posited an ambiguously metaphysical presentation of pure experience in his Essays in Radical Empiricism, James subsequently elaborates a phenomenological interpretation with emphasis upon its primordially undifferentiated nature. In Does Consciousness Exist he states that:

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this naif immediacy it is of course valid; it is there, we act upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby, is just one of the acts. (ERE, p12)

Later, in The Thing and its Relations, he adds that:

‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation.’ (ERE, p37).

Within the instant field of the present that is pure experience, the dichotomies and polarities of consciousness are extant merely as potentialities within the undifferentiated immediate flux of unqualified actuality. This is because:

(N)o dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. In its pure state, or when isolated., there is no selfsplitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is ‘of.’ Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is ‘taken,’ i. e., talked-of, twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh content. (ERE, p12)

For James, the sensorimotor motor interactions of an embodied subject within its environment precede the conceptual activity of consciousness. In short, somatic activity determines cognitive activity. Consciousness arises and is effective within the immanent sensorimotor interaction of the body with its environment, advancing and determining experience of the world.

Sources.

~(ERE) Essays in Radical Empiricism (CreateSpace 2017) by William James.

~(AM) The Analysis of the Mind (Digireads 2008) by Bertrand Russell.

~(VRE) The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin Classics 1985) by William James.

~(ST) The Structure of Behaviour (Beacon Press1963) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

~(BT) Being and Time (SUNY 2010) by Martin Heidegger.

~(VI) The Visible and Invisible (NUP 1968) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.