Chapter 4 | The Microphysics of Experience

William James

It is tempting to pair William James’s works with Friedrich Nietzsche’s—The Varieties of Religious Experience with The Antichrist and The Genealogy of Morals, The Principles of Psychology with Human, All-Too-Human and Daybreak, and the Essays in Radical Empiricism with The Gay Science and the more discursive portions of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both men were convinced that experience had to be freed from its subservience to knowledge and convention, both saw in Ralph Waldo Emerson an example of what such freedom could look like, and both gleefully disregarded philosophy’s injunction against introspection, experiment, and experience. Yet James, though he certainly knew the tragic dimensions of life, was of a more serene philosophical temperament than Nietzsche. Unlike the solitary wanderer at 6,000 feet, he was intimately familiar with the actual variety of others’ experience: his large family, his extended travels, the patients he observed in his lab at Harvard, the reading, talking, and lecturing he did to understand religious experiences in their vast diversity, his abiding interest in what we now call paranormal phenomena—they furnished James with data and insights that allowed him to grasp the singularity, the subtlety, and finally the absoluteness of experience.

A continuous line connects James’s early empirical work in clinical psychology to his late essays in radical empiricism, and this line runs parallel to Nāgārjuna’s and Nietzsche’s thought. Despite his seemingly conciliatory and at times garrulous tone, his late essays propose the most far-reaching rethinking of experience prior to such philosophical iconoclasts as Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze.

James’s Psychology: Briefer Course (1892), the condensed revision of his seminal Principles of Psychology of 1890, though structured as a textbook, dismantles the static view of separate faculties, of distinct states of mind that correspond to distinct external events. The taxonomic impulse of Immanuel Kant, already weakened by the organicism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his followers, dissolves here into a dynamic, interactive, and concrete analysis grounded in observation, empirical data, and scholarly synthesis. At this stage in his career, James did not position his Psychology as an alternative to idealist philosophical investigations, of which he was well aware. The opening sentence of the famous chapter on “The Stream of Consciousness”—“The order of our study must be analytic”—is not so much a challenge to philosophy as an exhortation to eliminate speculative and deductive reasoning that has slipped into the discipline undeclared. In his later writings, however, he extracted from his textbook those insights that would destabilize core tenets of Western philosophy, in particular the “unity of consciousness” and the view that experience is something this consciousness “has.”

An early indication for James’s break with the philosophical tradition is his concept of “fringing.” Since René Descartes and John Locke, philosophers have posited as irreducible units the distinct “idea” and the distinct consciousness that thinks them. Under these presuppositions, the most pressing concern has been to account for the relation between consciousness and ideas, specifically the relation called knowing with its attributes of certainty and clarity. Drawing on introspection and clinical observations, James refutes the assumption of atomic ideas and isolated consciousnesses, and the need for their transcendental deduction. Every idea, he counters, has around it a halo, or fringe, of relations that connects it to other ideas; every thinker is traversed by streams of thoughts that intermingle, transform, and bleed into one another. Traditional philosophical and psychological investigations arbitrarily segment this stream and then associate that segment with a single consciousness that has them and with a single event that it represents. They also impose transtemporal identity to both thought and thinker even though no thought ever recurs in the same way twice to a thinker immersed in her temporal and social “stream.” In James’s view, classical philosophy of consciousness, in its pursuit of scientific certainty, first created artificial isolates that then require elaborate (“transcendental”) arguments to connect them.

James opposes to this self-imposed conundrum an account in which every aspect of our relation to the world remains resolutely empirical, including—and this may be his boldest step—the relations between our ideas or, to use Kant’s terminology, between our “representations” (Vorstellungen). Kant argued that if we want to be justified in making judgments beyond our actual human experience—if we want to be justified in enunciating natural laws à la Isaac Newton—then these relations must transcend experience, not derive from it. In the analytical part of his Critique of Pure Reason, he mobilized an intricate sequence of arguments to show that the relations stated in natural laws are in fact relations that hold between the concepts of our understanding and the manifold that is given to us in time and space. They are not acquired from experience because their generality and necessity can, by definition, not be experienced; instead, self-generated concepts—the categories of the understanding—shape the manifold and thus make experience possible in the first place.

James does not dispute that concepts articulate our experience, but that the work of relation they perform is purely logical, transcendental, prior to experience. On the contrary, he argues, these relations can be felt: “So surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known … We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (Briefer Course, 161–162, italics in the original).

Kantians would be—and were—horrified by the idea that one could “feel” the categorical relations between our ideas. And yet, after he had generalized “feeling” into “experiencing” in his later texts, this is what makes James’s empiricism radical in the mūla (root) sense of Nāgārjuna: he does not, like empiricists before and after him, throw up his hands when asked to explain the continuity of our experience but expands the field of experience to include relations. Experience to him is no longer a subordinate layer of cognition, awaiting articulation by concepts; instead, it extends to the categories, to the self, to all aspects of human life—it is all there is.

Drawing on his psychological research as well as on his investigation of religious experiences and his reading of French philosophy (culminating in his friendship with Henri Bergson), in his late Essays James draws the bewildering outlines of “A World of Pure Experience.” In this world, knowing—the relation that has shaped and threatened the status of experience in so many ways—turns out to be only a specific, refined experience in which one part of an experience, the subjective side, relates to, and thus codepends on, another part of an experience as its object of knowing: “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” (“A World of Pure Experience,” 1142).

There is no need to install a permanent entity like “consciousness” that initiates, controls, and reflects on the processes of knowing, except for ease of address in institutional and social settings that require it; James’s arguments here sound more Buddhistic even than those of Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche. “Below” knowing is an infinitely graduated field of experiences—doubting, guessing, reading, playing—that can be articulated by conjunctive and disjunctive relations of more or less “intimacy” with the bodily core of experience. All are real experiences in the sense that they have conditioning power in the real world. The elimination of gaps between experiences, the fringing and bleeding of experiences into one another, the vision of an infinite ocean of experience from which repeated experiences emerge like temporary islands—these make up James’s version of Nāgārjuna’s axiom of dependent origination.

In its fully realized “radical” state, James’s empiricism dissolves all that is solid into the flux of experience. The room he sits in is the experience the house made through its design and furnishing; the experience of the paper he is writing on reaches back millions of years to the earth’s fauna and later to the invention of paper machines (and their engineers and workers). The book he is reading is composed of the paper and its experience, of the experience of the author, of the experience of the bookseller, and so forth. There are no discrete objects and subjects, only experiences in a specific state of reification. What looks to us like a stone is just a very slow-moving experience of the earth. This dissolving gaze will allow us to understand reading as the intersection of two singular experiences, that of the reader and that of the book. It justifies the nonmetaphorical proposition that the book has agency.

With his claim that “relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations” (“A World of Pure Experience,” 1160), James vaulted over the difficulties that had stumped traditional empiricists and pushed Kant and his followers into their idealist stance. Already the Briefer Course had given examples for the experience of cognitive halos that surround such sensations as trying to remember a name: “The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct” (163). In the late essays, James more boldly invokes the experiences of “with, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, through, for, my” (“A World of Pure Experience,” 1161) that help us connect our own experiences.

Such knowing, it is true, can never aspire to the a priori certainty Newton’s science had required, and Kant believed he had furnished: “It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am anxious to press on the attention” (Briefer Course, 164). However, despite its emphasis on feeling and experience, radical empiricism is rigorously experimental and scientific. James could combine striving for exactitude with acknowledging vagueness because like Nietzsche he had access to a resource unknown to Kant and Hegel: evolutionary time. The discoveries of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin had opened a narrow window of time (the Comte de Buffon in 1780 was sharply criticized for extending the age of the earth to 75,000 years) onto a vast temporal expanse in which regularities once deemed explicable only by assuming divine laws—such as the fixity of species—now have the time to evolve and self-select over eons. The vague is not the antithesis but the precursor of the exact. Western philosophy’s imperative to “save the phenomena,” it turns out, had been forced upon us by the tight time frame into which the dogma of creation had squeezed the world. Once these spatial and temporal limitations were lifted, it became conceivable not only that species, that the solar system, that the universe had evolved, but also that human habits, ways of sensing and perceiving, and ultimately the concepts of knowledge and truth themselves have emerged over time. “Knowledge thus lives inside the tissue of experience. It is made, and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (“A World of Pure Experience,” 1167).

Rather than looking backward to secure truth by re-cognition, for James truth is always in the future. In an image marvelously anticipating the culture of surfing he writes: “We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path” (“A World of Pure Experience,” 1172). This—the futurity of truth—is the essence of what James and others call pragmatism. His sometime collaborator Charles Sanders Peirce went so far as to argue that the universe itself makes open-ended experiences, that its present state—for example our solar system, the number of planets and the planes of their orbits—is simply its current experience; the idea of immutable “laws” governing it results from us mistaking a brief-aperture snapshot of a constantly evolving system for its essence.

If conjunctions and disjunction, if relations can be felt, the danger arises that philosophy and psychology drown in emotions. Feelings, however, are not emotions. In the Briefer Course and in an important separate essay, James proposed a strikingly original view of emotions. Feelings—for example the feeling of “with-ness” or “and-ness” or “because”—are authentic, if preconceptual, modes of experience that reach for, but often fail to achieve, expression. Emotions, by contrast, are snap judgments masquerading as experiences; they presuppose a subject that sorts through experiences and pairs them with previously established templates. The traditional view that takes emotions for primary psychic events rather than for post hoc judgments aligns with the stance of re-cognizing sameness in phenomena—recognizing the planet in the moving blob—that we have identified as elemental to Western metaphysics; here, it imposes recognitive sameness on the undetermined and always novel flux of experiences. Because we do not want to make each experience anew—or because we fear that we lack the time—we reach for prior judgments and declare them immediate reactions.

James realized that radical empiricism was vulnerable to the proliferation of emotional judgments. The James-Lange theory of emotions, therefore, reverses the commonly accepted sequence in which emotions are the direct response to an external stimulus. For instance, it is not the case that we see a bear, become afraid, and then tremble, or that we lose all our money, feel sorrow, and then cry. Rather, we see the bear, our heart races, and we interpret that as fear; or we lose all our money, go into shock and cry, and then feel sorrow. Even more poignantly, we are afraid because we tremble, we grieve because we cry—emotions are interpretations of bodily events, the “mental” side of perceptions in strong experiences. James’s central argument for his hypothesis was the observation that if we were to abstract them from their bodily manifestations—from the trembling and the crying—nothing of the associated emotions would remain. Fear is not fear if our heart rate stays the same.

Though James formulated this theory well before he announced his turn to radical empiricism, and although it focuses primarily on intense perceptions resulting in noticeable bodily manifestations, we can see how it advances his broader project of depersonalizing experiences and the habits and reactions we form around them. Inserting the physiological reaction between the event and the emotional response deprives the latter of its naturalness, its inevitability. Though in the majority of cases we will experience fear at the sight of a bear, it is not inconceivable that we may be simply surprised, or excited (if we are hunters), or relieved (if we are researchers). This variability increases if the event is less drastic—without being shocked, we have more space and time to reflect on the appropriateness of our emotional response.

In James’s view, then, it is entirely meaningful to say, “I don’t know how I feel about this book,” because the task of a feeling’s articulation lies yet ahead. Emotions, on the other hand, are judgments based on past judged experiences—“I love spy novels (because I read them before and enjoyed them)”; they thrive on identification. Feelings embody openness and singularity whereas emotions presuppose identity and selfhood. James’s rejection of the traditional supremacy of emotions as authentic expressions of inner experiences stems from his conviction—expressed throughout the Psychology and implicit in the later Essays—that the human body is in a continuous sentient relation to its surroundings even when these relations remain below the threshold of language. This is not unlike Sigmund Freud’s contemporaneous argument that conscious decisions are driven by unconscious bodily processes—though James rejects the genital focus: religious life, for example, “depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus.”

The thesis that relations between experiences can themselves be experienced is crucial for James’s claim about the absoluteness of experience. It is a difficult thesis to prove, especially if corroboration cannot primarily come—as would be the practice of later radical empiricists such as Bataille and Deleuze—from paranormal or pathological sources. How can one show that between two states there are always intervening phases, that no experience is irreducible, solid, impenetrable? How can one articulate the experience of “with, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, through, for, my”?

Beginning in April 1867, James spent a transformative year and a half in Germany. Originally intended as a study trip to meet post-Kantian psychologists in Berlin and Heidelberg, like so many study trips it was derailed and turned into a year of encounters and deep reading in German science and literature. The author to whom he returned again and again was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He knew of him, of course, from Emerson’s Goethe essay in the collection Representative Men, and from the transcendentalists’ fascination with Goethe, for which Emerson, again, was a central figure. Importantly, the transcendentalists appreciated Goethe both as a poet and as a scientist, whereas in Germany’s post-Kantian universities his scientific writings were belittled or simply not read.

Goethe considered his most important contribution to the natural sciences to be the concept of metamorphosis. It sought to capture the transitional stages of change in a plant or an animal while holding on to the notions of identity in change, and to an ideal form toward which all changes tended. Metamorphosis “saved” the phenomena of change while preventing the natural world from drifting apart into formless contingency. If only we develop a poetic mindset that extends our attention span, Goethe argued in treatises, poems, notebooks, and conversations, we can account for all the apparent gaps between forms, and we can discern that their change follows rules and tends toward an ideal order. Proper attention and imaginative experimentation will show the relations between seemingly distinct phases and states in a changing phenomenon, between leaf and bud in a plant, for example, or between seemingly separate natural realms, for example between stones, stalks, and bones.

Even during his lifetime Goethe lamented that his theories were misunderstood and disrespected by the scientific establishment. What the professors lacked, he contended, was the poetic sensibility required to see the intervening stages that emerged in the cracks between their coarse concepts. In Goethe’s polemics there is a subtle play with the German word for poet, Dichter. While commonly derived from the Latin word for “to dictate” (dictare), in German it resonates with the adjective dicht (tight, dense, compact) that can also function as a preposition: “close by, near.” A Dichter by this etymology is someone who brings things closer (dichter) together, who discerns their closeness and finds words for their relation.

Goethe’s oeuvre pulses with poetic expressions of relations. His poems derive their force—aside from technical mastery—from his uncanny ability to articulate the experience of relations: distance, closeness, togetherness, nearness, absence, or presence, but also the relations of attending, of parting, of expecting, of fearing, of gazing, of beholding.

However, the relation that most captivated Goethe and that he attempted to express in poetry, drama, and prose is the one Kant deemed so abstract that it could only be understood on a logical, transcendental level: “because.” The German equivalent weil has a verbal form, weilen, that conveys being present, tarrying, lingering, or, indeed, whiling. Its nominal form, die Weile, denotes the time that passes between, separates, and at the same time connects events. When combined with the infamous prefix ver-, verweilen is used to indicate the lingering in time, at a place, or on a topic in conversation. As its antonym, rhyming poets often use eilen (hurrying); “haste makes waste” in German turns into “Eile mit Weile.” The affect melancholia becomes, in the nineteenth century, “long whiling,” Langeweile, ennui, boredom.

Goethe’s fascination with the relational qualities of weil lasted throughout his life. It is legible, for example, in the fifteenth of his Roman Elegies, in which he adds to the well-known palindrome of roma-amor the anagram mora, delay or deferment (as in moratorium), the Latin word for Weile. The lovers in the poem experience all the joys and all the agonies encapsulated in the weil, showing the depth and intensity with which conjunctive and disjunctive relations can be experienced. Goethe goes so far as to suggest that it is the moratorium, the act of lingering and deferring, that causes love to grow rather than be thwarted. To deny the experience of this causing, for Goethe and for James, amounts to denying the complexity of the experience “love.”

This fascination with the relation weil, in which time and causation are not yet differentiated, became the driving force of Goethe’s lifelong project, the drama of Faust. As a good Kantian, Faust wagers with the devil that he would never desire to linger in the in-between moments of chasing his desires. “If I ever say to a moment in time [“Augenblick”] / ‘stay a while [“verweile”], you are so beautiful’ / then you may put me into chains / then I am ready to perish.” Faust unfolds over thousands of verses as a search for the elusive experience of this time-before-causation. Whether Goethe’s proposed solution—finding the ultimate cause in the “eternal feminine”—is a satisfying conclusion remains a subject of debate.

Goethe did not rely solely on the poetic resonance of the single word weil to capture the experience of relation; he also explored it in narrative prose. The concept of Bildung—the idea of education or formation, which propels his second novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796)—is, like metamorphosis, an attempt to join change and identity, to make the stages of a character’s development readable against a background of change. Bildung stands for the continuity of purpose and individual maturation of a character and encompasses both psychological growth and aesthetic harmony. Although it remains questionable whether Goethe succeeded with his program—the novel ends abruptly with a deus ex machina contraption—the concept proved so powerful as a descriptor of narrative development that it is hard to find a novel of the nineteenth century to which the designation bildungsroman has not been affixed.

Of course, had James really wanted to bolster his claim that all relations can be experienced with examples from literature, he might have looked to his brother’s work. Henry James’s writing is (in)famously preoccupied with such states of mind as expectation, suspicion, premonition, jealousy, and disappointment (or, inversely, naivete, trust, innocence, and kindness) that lead characters to endlessly puzzle about the relation between events, between people, between objects. If ever there was a Dichter in the sense discussed—an expert in drawing things closer and to articulate the relation between them—it was Henry James. Much to the chagrin of his brother’s sturdier literary tastes, Henry James seemed to understand that if one just looks closely enough, one could see that a character’s experiences co-originate in the intersection of myriad conditions, and that the Dichter’s task is to bring as many of them to language as possible.

The oft-repeated complaints about Henry James’s fastidious late style react to the temporary loss of narrative ground, to the disorientation that befalls the reader who struggles to distinguish reflection from locution, imagination from representation, narrated from narrative space, to say nothing of the meandering syntax that warps sentences in the same way as the plot warps the story. Yet while it is disorienting, it is also liberating to read Henry James’s late work. He may well be the first novelist to make the reading of experiences coincide with the experience of reading. Both are slow processes that take time and attention and balance, just like surfing in the metaphor William deployed so poignantly.

Since the end of the nineteenth century—since the end of the period known as literary realism when other media of representation had encroached (photography) or were beginning to encroach (film) on its monopoly of representing experience—reading novels no longer merely acquaints the reader with experiences but becomes itself an experience, perhaps the experience of experiences par excellence.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED from these three apostles of experience? Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and William James—each in their own way but overlapping to a surprising and mutually illuminating degree—analyze, expand, and show ways to overcome our subject-centered, dualistic understanding of experience.

Nāgārjuna delimits the field of experience in the most radical way possible: by simply not heeding the Western (and Brahmin) imperative to impose meaning on the world. Instead, he takes embodied human experience as the sole framework for evaluating knowledge and truth, focusing intently on the intricacies and conceptual fallacies into which unguarded experience leads. With no firm ground to stand on, Nāgārjuna argues that the mind, individually and collectively, generates fictions and conventions that it then forgets having generated. The MMK run through a catalogue of such fictions, taking their intention seriously but showing that they all are logically and intrinsically flawed or, to use the Mahāyāna term, that they are empty. Importantly, the path out of this web of fictions and reified beliefs is through logic and analysis, not faith or conversion. Unlike for modern critics of reification and ideology, however, Nāgārjuna offers no stable parameter—conceptual or economic reality, for example, or human nature—against which to measure the truth of these fictions and conventions. Instead, the goal of enlightened experiences is to recognize their emptiness and to engage with them honestly and compassionately.

Nietzsche arrives at the same position, but from within the Western logic of cosmodicy and theodicy. He charts historical trajectories, names the cast of characters, and assails the logic of fictions the West believes as foundational truths. His focus is on the fusion between Christianity and social control (and not, importantly, on the message of Jesus), and on the lasting harm these fictions have inflicted on our capacity for genuine experience. Like the Buddha, Nietzsche awakens to the truth of a world without entrenched views and the adjustments it requires from us; like the Buddha he realizes that escape from the strictures of justification is possible only into an infinitely—eternally—conditioned world; like the Buddha, he—in the figure of Zarathustra—struggles in the drama of communicating a radically experiential insight.

William James, in turn, synthesizes Nāgārjuna’s panfictionalism and Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modernity and tests them in empirical research and in his explorations of extreme forms of experience. Under the microscope of his analyses, raw, “pure” states of experience become visible—states in which the fictions of subject and object, sensations and concept, other and self are, at best, embryonic. His exposure to modern forms of fiction—to the novel in particular—allows him to see what Nāgārjuna could not: a way to experience the experience of others through reading, and thus to dispel the aura of solitude that hovers both over the Buddhistic meditator and the “solitary Wanderer” 6,000 feet above sea level.

It is to the reading of experience, to the experience of the novel that we now turn. My argument will be that the modern novel, for generic and historical reasons, meets the requirements of genuine experience to which our three witnesses have testified: that it be unbounded by ontological and epistemological limitations, that it recognize yet take seriously the fictitious nature of conventions (including the conventions of narrative), that it be open to the radical novelty of its explorations, and that the field of experience must be extended to nonhuman experiencers. With Nāgārjuna in mind, I want to investigate how the modern novel acquaints its readers with the facility for handling the conventional truth-fiction divide; with Nietzsche, I want to show how the modern novel became an instrument of conformist education; and with William James I want to explore how the experience of reading becomes the experience that we can, despite all obstacles, share in common.