Pure Experience

	Book review on Sciousness by Jonathan Bricklin (2007) Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2010 published in Network Review No 102
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The word in the title of his book will be unfamiliar to readers, who will be surprised to learn that it comes from William James and refers to a quotation from his Principles of Psychology where he expresses the view that the stream of consciousness should be called 'Sciousness pure and simple', omitting the con-, meaning with and implying a false sense of separation. This book brings together an introductory essay by the editor, various papers by William James and an essay by Theodore Flournoy on radical empiricism. The editor notes that William James is the first modern-trained scientist to affirm the prime reality of non-dual experience, a fact that is also likely to come as a surprise as so little emphasis has been placed on this aspect of his thought. However, the editor and James himself make a convincing case for this proposition.

The book begins with a long poem - On Believing in Mind - by the third Zen patriarch about the nature of the Buddha mind, with lines such as 'The Ground of all Being contains all the opposites. From the One, all things originate. The wise man knows that all things are part of the One. The ignorant man sees differences everywhere.' This sets the scene for the introductory essay, where we learn almost immediately that James wrote 'The Witness' next to the word 'sciousness' in his own copy of The Principles; this concept will be familiar to students of the Upanishads. Briefly, sciousness is consciousness-without-self while consciousness is consciousness-with-self, implying a relationship between the knower and the known - but then, as the Zen koan would ask, who is the knower? A parallel thought is expressed in the two forms of Buddhist samadhi: nirvikalpa (without-bifurcated-thought-construction) and savikalpa (with-bifurcated-thought-construction). James even suggests that the phrase 'it thinks' (cf it rains) is a simple and accurate description of the state of affairs, adding that it is the stream of consciousness that creates the I, the thought is the thinker, hence Tat Tvam Asi. Bricklin proposes that to describe the feeling of self without reference to sciousness is like describing sound without silence.

There are six essays by James himself, one of which has been translated from French back into English, reminding one of James's wide culture. One wonders how many contemporary psychology professors would be able to deliver a lecture in fluent French. His definition of psychology is the science of the facts of Consciousness (his capitalisation) or more precisely of phenomena and states of Consciousness. His central insight, elaborated in a number of places, is that percepts and concepts are made of the same stuff, namely the stuff of experience in general. Sensations and ideas both exist within experience. Hence he argues that the attributes of subject and object, represented and representative, thing and thought, are functional rather than ontological distinctions, a theme later taken up by Eddington, Jeans and Schroedinger. Experience is dualistic in structure, but this does not imply for James an ontological dualism between mind and matter (I'm not sure if this essay is entirely consistent with his views expressed in these 1898 Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality).

He gives an interesting example taken from a posthumous manuscript where he analyses his perception of the rustling of leaves in a nearby maple tree. He asks if it was 'rustling' or 'a sense of rustling', observing that we call rustling physical when we relate it to other features of the tree and the wind, but it is mental when we connect it with listening and our stream of thinking. It might be more appropriate to say ' it rustles': the distinction between a physical reality and a conscious state depends upon the context. In this sense, Berkeley is right to equate esse with percipi. Whitehead recognised the importance of this work when he remarked that James's 1904 essay Does Consciousness Exist? was for the modern era the equivalent of Descartes's Discourse on Method - a pretty staggering statement. If Descartes used as a starting point the I of consciousness, James begins with consciousness itself. He rejects Cartesian mental subtraction, asserting that the separation of consciousness and content comes by way of addition. He also questions Descartes's assumption that thought is unextended, asking if when we think of a ruler, extension is not attributable to our thought? An adequate mental picture must reflect the extension of the object.

Reading this gives one a new understanding of radical empiricism. This philosophy includes what is directly experienced, and does not exclude any element that is directly experienced. Hence, 'the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as 'real' as anything else in the system.' As Flournoy puts it, 'all that is experienced is real, and all that is real is experienced', reflecting the Hegelian aphorism about the relationship between the rational and the real. Here the emphasis is as much on conjunctive as disjunctive transitions and relations - conjunction is as important as distinction. For James, 'life is in the transitions as much as the terms connected', reminding one of the work of both Iain McGilchrist on betweenness and David Bohm on language and the implicate order. And Flournoy reminds us that ideas of relation are the very skeleton of our thought.

I hope that I have said enough for the reader to realise that these essays cast a new and significant light on William James, which deserves to be widely known within consciousness studies. One can admire the subtlety of James's thought and relate it to his contemporary Bergson, whose preoccupations proceeded along similar lines. I leave the last word to a letter from Rilke, quoted at the end: 'a bird-call was there, both in the outside and in his inner being, concordantly, so to say, since it did not break the boundary of his body, but formed of the two together an uninterrupted space in which...only one single spot of purest, deepest consciousness remained.'

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