§74. Pure Experience
German neo-Kantian philosopher Richard Avenarius published his Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experience) in 1888. By 1895 James owned the book and two others by Avenarius.
The expression “pure experience” was apparently the author’s coinage though obviously playing on Kant’s “pure reason.” He explains pure experience as “experience taken in an absolutely empirical way, and conceived without metaphysical presupposition.” Pure experience means “mere experience, experience just as it comes.” James began to introduce the phrase in approximately this sense in his notebooks; for instance, “First the phenomenon the datum ‘pure’ experience which we find that common sense has already dirempted.” By 1897 he uses the phrase freely in notebooks and seminar material as a name for his own position.18The ultra-empiricist connotation of “pure experience” was consistent with an idea James had already expressed in Principles, in those famous lines about the infant for whom the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” The expression “pure experience” begins to figure in James's publications in work he planned to gather in a book on radical empiricism (Essays in Radical Empiricism was published posthumously). It has been suggested that what in Radical Empiricism he calls “pure experience” is a rebranding of what Principles called “sensation.” I cannot concur with the equation of these concepts outright but I do think they are genetically related, the concept of pure experience being James's effort to salvage something from his earlier, conflicted commitment to a distinction between sensation and perception that he inherited from the modern psychological tradition but did not really want or need.19
Writing in the eighteenth century, Thomas Reid introduced that distinction to modern psychology, a sensation being the feeling of pressure on the organ, and perception the awareness of something by means of such sensations.
Sensation is a passive preconceptual impress; perception is this sensation referred to an object, and is a kind of thinking. Helmholtz, Mill, Lotze, Spencer, and others take this line in the nineteenth century. Awareness of color is a sensation; seeing a red apple is a perception. The defining feature of perception is that different senses can give the same perception. I see the apple, taste it, smell it, touch it, thump it, and hear it resound. Different senses are like different languages that can say the same thing. Perceptions, in contrast to sensation, are these sensible propositions.20The more we learn about the physiology of perception the more futile it seems to divide it in these terms. Cells of the cortex's earliest visual processing area (V1) have properties already conditioned by experience, the nerves responding to identically energized arrays differently with different experience. Some of the processing that culminates in perception occurs at the very earliest interface of the organ, and cannot be likened to the passive reception of a touch. Functional differentiation in the rods and cones begins at the first retinal layer, the retina being fitted out with more than fifty different types of neurons. By the time retinal stimulation gets to the primary visual cortex it is already a texture of many independent stimulus dimensions synthesized by algorithms that neurology has barely begun to unravel. However, it is not too early to draw the conclusion that perception is not a later stage of a sensation that begins with a passively received touch. There is no passing of the baton, no moment when something that is sheer stimuli accedes to the perception of an object.21
Another problem with the distinction is that it was introduced for a bad reason, and entrenches the error with which it began, namely, that sensations are first, primary, directly given, and through them we obtain perceptions. That is not so: sensations are not signs.
For a sign to function we have to perceive it, as imperceptible signs are insignificant, but we almost never perceive our sensations, which is why the inversion of the retinal image is irrelevant and requires no correction. We do not perceive the retinal image. Perception has no initial phase of pure receptivity or sensibility. Sensory stimuli always occur in a context of expectations and motor activities, which change how they feel and what, if anything, they mean.In Principles of Psychology, James explains sensations as “the first things in the way of consciousness. Before conceptions can come, sensations must have come; but before sensations come, no psychic fact need have existed, a nerve-current is enough.” However, he betrays his awareness that the concept and its usual distinction from perception does not serve him well because the more he explains and qualifies sensation, the more he subverts it. For example, he says that sensation and perception are names for different functions, not different sorts of mental things. Sensation is the nearer to simple quality, perception more full of relations, differing from sensation “by the consciousness of farther facts associated with the object of the sensation.”22
Before it is perception, sensation already has an “object,” and grows into full perception through attention, reflection, and memory. “No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention.” Nervous energy is intermittent and can be measured, but not sensation, which is always continuous and enduring, disappearing if we stop the changes and try to measure it. The chief quality of his later concept of pure experience is this continuity, pure experience being unmarked, smooth, an interpenetrating duration (James has by now studied Bergson). This experience is not sensation, because “sensation” is a reflective, retrospective, analytical concept.
Nothing in pure experience foretells whether it is a sensation or a perception. Pure experience is not pure sensation—it is not yet sensation and may never be sensation. One sequel in experience determines that an earlier phase was but a sensation and not the perception of a body, while a different sequel can reverse this determination. But pure experience is more primitive even than sensation, which is already a kind of thing, or what pure experience is innocent of.23James wants to isolate a phase of experience not yet striated by intentional objects, divided by concepts, or articulated with words. “ ‘Pure experience' is the name which I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes or men in semicoma from sleep, drugs, illness, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what” Pure experience is older than perception, arising in advance of perception; it could be called what perception is made of, but I describe it as the becoming of perception. Pure experience is not sensation because it “is” nothing whatever; it is becoming (something), but is nothing at all. Its only “being” is this becoming, an original action in advance of ontological categories, which apply only to the relation among phases of a becoming that in itself never stops.24
James describes pure experience as chaotic. It is not an actual chaos (which is an incoherent notion), but rather a becoming that can develop in many directions. The process, the becoming, the experience, is “pure” in being primordial, primitive, arising in advance of relations to a wider field of experience that either segregate the “pure” experience to mental, conscious life (e.g., a dream), or expand it into a veridical perception of the physical world (recognizing Emerson Hall). Pure experience can follow a future vector toward the private and idiosyncratic or toward the public and verifiable.
No quality of the experience as endured authorizes its membership on one or the other line. Nothing in the becoming of the experience determines that; it depends on the sequel, on the indefinitely prolonged development of experience.The idea of pure experience belongs to pragmatism, not phenomenology. Pure experience is not the given. With pure experience we do not know what is given until the retrospective clarification of the future. “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.” Pure experience is “the instant field of the present... in its pure state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought.” James's non-knife-edge, saddleback present is hard to reconcile with an instantaneous perceptual field, but I don't think he is making a point about instantaneity. His point is that any momentary phase of pure experience is neither intrinsically nor phenomenologically subjective or objective, a sensation or a perception, mental or physical, dream or waking. All such determinations await connection with a wider expanse of future experience.25