§75. Neutral Monism

With this theory of pure experience James makes his own an idea from Ernst Mach, whom he admired. For Mach, nature comprises individual events, termed “elements,” tied together by a network of causal-functional relations, with no spirit above or substance below.

Adapting Mach's theory to his radical empiricism, James equates the ele­mental events with pure experience. In “Does ‘Consciousness' Exist?” (1904), the paper he placed first in the planned Radical Empiricism, he argues that being material and being conscious, perceived, or known are not different qualities possessed by different things. They are different patterns of relation in phases or series of pure experience. These patterns and relations become subjective or objective depending on what other pure experience they enter into series with in the future.

Bertrand Russell popularized the description of this theory as neutral monism, alluding to a neutral stuff of which the mental and the physical are compounded. The idea of stuff is a poor fit with both Mach and James, stuff being timeless and spatial, like water or gold, whereas they were referring to events, local becoming, pure experience antedating stuff as it antedates the distinction between mental and physical. Becoming present, the event of a new present (pure experience), is not aboriginally qualified as “physical” or “mental,” but becomes one or the other in the sequel, as it falls into series. With one kind of future, I now perceive a dog, with another I am dreaming.

What is pure experience, what mode of being, what manner of entity? Nothing at all: it is nothing at all; it comes to pass, though an is is always in the offing. The experience will have been subjective or objective, will have been a body or a dream, though in the present, at the moment, it is nothing more than happening, local becoming, an event. One may wonder why such an event is called “experience” if it is nothing for me and nothing for itself. Pure experience is not aboriginally owned by a personal conscious­ness, nor is it aboriginally intentional or referential, being impersonal and non-intentional, which distinguishes pure experience from personal mental states. But it remains a felt continuity, an interpenetrating succession, and in this temporal quality James, like Bergson, sees consciousness and especially memory, which is to say, experience.²⁸

James wants to get away from the idea that knowledge consists in con­quering the discontinuity between mental and physical. Idea and object, abstractly considered, are unrelated entities, two of Ockham's absolute individuals. How can one be about the other? The difficulty diminishes if instead of nominalistic mental atoms we think in terms of process and con­tinuity. The function of perception is to lead, and not merely intend or refer. Perception enables ambulation; we “ambulate toward the object under the impulse which the idea communicates.” The perception is made cognitive “by the ambulation through the intervening experiences.” If the idea led no­where, “could we talk of its having any cognitive quality? Surely not.”²⁹

Knowledge is pragmatically reoriented in the time of practice, in oppo­sition to the spectator theory in earlier empiricism, for instance Locke and Hume.

Pure experience is not pure content for a purely formal grid of concepts. As a duration this experience exceeds concepts and confuses content. There is no congruence between its continuity and the blocks of meaning that de­fine concepts and delimit content. A conceptual, linguistic interpretation of experience is a brutal abridgement whose only value is efficient communi­cation. Pure experience is not content awaiting organization. It is duration without interruption or punctual discontinuity. Call it “reality, life, experi­ence, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, [pure experience] exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.”³¹

Bertrand Russell very publicly attacked James's idea in lectures delivered at Harvard University shortly after James died. He explains neutral monism as “the theory that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly regarded as physical do not differ in respect of any intrinsic pro­perty possessed by the one set and not by the other, but differ only in respect of arrangement and context,” a theory he says is subject to “an insuperable difficulty.” According to James, the difference between Russell seeing a red patch and a red patch unseen consists in relations between his present per­ception and others of one or another kind.

That is Russell's tormented idea of an insuperable difficulty. It is, he says, “the main objection to neutral monism.” If neutral monism were true, a mind that had but one momentary perception would be impossible, since some­thing is mental only in virtue of its place in a temporal series of external re­lations. Russell implies that a mind might have a single perception—no past, no memory, just this, then annihilation. The percept and its perception come from nowhere, briefly abide, enjoy each other, then disappear into the void whence they came. We can have one point in space. Why not one percept? A subatomic particle can last for a vanishing fraction of a second, why not a mind? Perhaps one feels James's exasperation. “Abstractionism of the worst sort dogs Mr. Russell.”³³

Perception is a process, not instantaneous recognition, and does not occur in a present without a past of some depth or a mind without memory. As Dewey explains, “Nothing is perceived except when different senses work in relation with one another, except when the energy of one ‘center' is commu­nicated to others, and then new modes of motor responses are incited which in turn stir up new sensory activities. Unless these various sensory-motor energies are coordinated with one another there is no perceived scene or object.” All of that organization requires an organism, an evolved form of life, and is not something that might simply appear fully formed for a fraction of a second, then vanish.³⁴

If Russell seems overeager to discredit James's idea, it may be for the threat it poses to his principle of acquaintance. “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.” He thinks James is proposing that “there is no distinctive re­lation such as ‘acquaintance' involved in all mental facts, but merely a dif­ferent grouping of the same objects as those dealt with by non-psychological sciences.” In his refutation-by-contradiction way, Russell grandly dismisses the theory.

The idea of acquaintance was introduced in English philosophy by John Grote in 1865. He described it as “the kind of knowledge which we have of a thing by the presentation of the senses or the representation of it in pic­ture or type, a Vorstellung” That was different from knowledge expressed in judgments or propositions, embodied in concepts without any necessary im­aginative representation. James had read Grote and was enthusiastic about sensory acquaintance, which he thought recognized a power of sensory con­sciousness that rationalists like Green and Bradley overlook in favor of judg­ment. Judgments mobilize concepts, but a concept pragmatically considered is an instrument. What we perceive and feel, the qualities of consciousness, does not require concepts to mediate our acquaintance.³⁶

James introduced the theory of acquaintance in Principles of Psychology, where he explained that “there are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.” The first volume of Principles is de­voted to introducing this distinction and describing certain basic patterns of experience as revealed by acquaintance (association, memory, attention, self), all of which is preliminary to introducing James's reflex arc concep­tion of mental life in the second volume. “Any mind, constructed on the triadic-reflex pattern, must first get its impression from the object which it confronts; then define what that object is, and decide what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.” It is a crucial point in this theory that all knowledge traces back to “mere dumb knowledge-of-acquaintance.” “'1 hese percepts, these termini, these sensible things, these mere matters-of- acquaintance, are the only realities we ever directly know.” His language is extraordinary.

Acquaintance for Russell is a semantic principle, endowing signs with ref­erence. For James, acquaintance overwhelms concepts and judgment, and we are acquainted with relations no less than terms; and though he found the idea of acquaintance early it serves the later thought of pure experience well. Pure experience has two components, purity and experience. The pu­rity I explain in terms of becoming and a processual, primitive transition; pure means not yet form, innocent of the fall into form. Acquaintance relates to what is experiential about this pure event, the felt becoming of perception, a felt continuity or interpenetration. Only in perceptual experience, he says, “do we acquaint ourselves with continuity, or the immersion of one thing in another, here alone with self, with substance, with qualities, with activity in its various modes, with time, with cause, with change, with novelty, with ten­dency, and with freedom.”³⁸

'1 he value of acquaintance for James is its contribution to a more consistent empiricism, being part of his theory about how sensible realities get drawn into the tissue of experience. The relations that establish knowledge, truth, and objectivity fall entirely within experience and its interpenetrating tem­poral continuity. '1 he truth that differentiates knowledge from fantasy is a quality of future experience, not guaranteed either by causal history or by phenomenological presence. Truth is one of those relations we cognize by feeling. Knowledge of truth is an affect. A rationalist like Russell must loathe that conclusion. He craves unsullied theorematic certainty, a mathemat­ical sublime. For James, sublime certainty is not available, or alluring either. Knowledge depends on external relations, which are exposed to time and change, so working knowledge enjoys no certainty that it will not be refuted in the future. That does not mean it was never knowledge. It worked, it func­tioned as we expect knowledge to, and if it eventually fails to function, that should not induce retrospective denial of its quality as knowledge, as if a worn-out tool never was a tool at all.

Other empiricists have been unhappy with the empiricism of their time. Condillac sought a more consistent Locke, Biran a more consistent Condillac, Quine a more consistent Carnap, but James is different. His criti­cism turns hard against the nominalist current of modern empiricism, as no earlier critic did, making his idea of a more consistently empirical empiricism radical in a way others were not. His criticism of mental atomism refutes the nominalist ontology of absolute individuals, and the empirical reality of ex­ternal relations redoubles the argument against anything so absolutely actual as such individuals. Radical empiricism is not an epistemology, not even a radical epistemology; instead it returns empiricism to ontology. The modes of being are experimental, not semantic. We do not know with finality how many different beings exist or even what the modes of existence are.