In “A Pluralistic Universe” and in some of his essays, William James develops the notion of a pure experience, which he defines as being ‘plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that.’ This is not a subjective that, nor an objective that, but is rather for James the ‘one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed.’
Part of James’s motivation for this move to ‘pure experience’ was a lingering problem that he felt persisted with Hume’s philosophy. Among other problems, the one most relevant to the idea of pure experience is that Hume’s form of empiricism failed to do justice to novelty. To see something as a novelty would entail, on James’s reading of Hume, seeing it as an effect that is related to the cause of which the novelty is the effect, but then by Hume’s system this novelty is already contained in the cause as that which enabled us to see the relationship between a cause and a novel effect. James is quite forthright that this would be damning to his understanding of pluralism, if true: ‘The effect in some way already exists in the cause. If this be so, the effect cannot be absolutely novel, and in no radical sense can pluralism be true.’
Given the emphasis James places upon the notion of pure experience, it is fair to say that the problematic for much of James’s philosophy, then, is one of doing justice to true novelty. This will become the problematic for a number of continental philosophers as well. Bruno Latour, for example, draws from Whitehead’s notion of the event in order to do justice to the historicity and novelty of scientific practice. As Latour argues,
If history has no other meaning than to activate potentiality – that is, to turn into effect what was already there, in the cause – then no matter how much juggling of associations takes place, nothing, no new thing at least, will ever happen, since the effect was already hidden in its cause, as a potential…Causality follows the events and does not precede them.
As Latour will put this point in other places, causal relationships between scientific objects are stabilized events; or, adopting Latour’s own metaphor, scientific objects and truths are ‘the cooled down continents of plate tectonics’ (Never Been Modern, 86); or they are the domestication of novelty. As James might put this, they are the result of the domestication of pure experience. And in fact James does sound much like Latour (or I suppose it’s the other way around if we’re to avoid anachronism), when he argues that pure experience ‘is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. And then there is this long passage of James, which I cite at length because of a similar passage one finds in the work of Giorgio Agamben:
‘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 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 that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready to be all sorts of what; 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’ (from A Pluralistic Universe).
In his short book, Infancy and History, Agamben echoes (whether knowingly or not I do not know) James’s concept of pure experience, what Agamben calls primary experience, and it is brought to bear upon Agamben’s effort to establish the difference between his concept of bare life and the polis. Agamben claims that
A primary experience, far from being subjective, could then only be what in human beings comes before the subject – that is, before language: a ‘wordless’ experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy, whose boundary would be marked by language…[and a few pages later:] In terms of human infancy, experience is the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The individual is not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant – this is experience.’
Without branching off into a long discussion of Agamben, I just want to note that a problematic similar to the one that motivated James, Latour, and others, leads Agamben as well to draw upon primary (or pure) experience in the form of infancy—the problem, in short, is one of doing justice to the novel without reducing it to the historical, the legal, the political, the discursive, etc.
And this brings me as well to what is perhaps the most important difference between analytic and continental thought: for most analytic philosophers doing justice to novelty is not a problem (or at least not a significant problem) whereas giving an adequate account of the way things are is a problem. I do not believe doing justice to novelty or justifying the way things are (or common sense) are mutually exclusive goals—William James certainly didn’t think so—but it is important to realize that these are different problems that lead to the creation and use of different concepts. This brings to mind Deleuze and Guattari’s rather infamous remark from What is Philosophy? that
Every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, “Let’s discuss this.” Discussions are fine for roundtable talks, but philosophy throws its numbered dice on another table. The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it to philosophy that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed.
I can offer a recent example. At a conference in Claremont last December, Graham Harman and Steven Shaviro detailed their respective differences. Shaviro I think got it right when he stated their differences were consequences of their respective problems, and their responses to these problems.
For Harman, in what he calls Object-Oriented Ontology (or Philosophy), objects are completely withdrawn from one another and the resulting problem is one of how objects communicate with one another, for even causation, as Harman understands it, only occurs vicariously since the objects are completely withdrawn and thus do not come into direct causal contact (they are thus much like Kant’s in-itself on steroids). For Shaviro, by contrast, things are in constant, incessant communication and contact with one another and the problem is one of clearing space, of separating from the crowd so to speak so that an object can best effectuate its powers (or answer the Spinozist/Deleuzian question: ‘what can a body do?’).
This summary does not do justice to their extended discussions, but the point is that the difference between them was not one of truth, of who was or was not right, but rather it was a matter of which problematic motivated their thinking, their conceptual innovations, etc.. It is this type of difference that I think characterizes much of the divergence between the approaches of analytic and continental philosophers.
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