Pure Experience Research Articles

Christology of Tuak-Tempayan: Christological Endeavors in the Land of Western Borneo

This paper presents Christological research conducted in Nanga Mahap (Sekadau, West Kalimantan). The main focus of this study is on the phenomenon of Tuak Tempayan, a significant cultural reality considered to hold a wealth of values with open possibilities for Christological interpretation for the teaching of faith. Tuak Tempayan can be a means ofCatechesis in explaining the reality of Jesus Christ who has divine and human nature, God and Man. The research was carried out using a new methodology called Phenomenological Research. This method is a phenomenological approach applied to the pure experience of an encounter within a culture and then validated through research to arrive at its original meaning. The results are then interpreted dialogically with Christology to arrive at a new meaning for catechesis and the transformation of faith life. Such an effort is nothing but doing Christology from the context, an attempt to understand Jesus Christ through localities and local contexts.

Continuities of Consciousness, Life-Worlds, and Numinous Experience: Cognitive-Phenomenological Foundations for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism

Numinous experience—as the felt sense of the sacred—evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world—as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and concept the numinous would be the semantic amplification of the more concrete organism-surround nonduality of non symbolic organisms—as reflected in a primary consciousness shared across Uexkuell’s sentient animal umwelten and Gibson’s “envelopes of flow.” H usserl’s phenomenology of passive synthesis and James on pure experience can be understood as intuiting the implicit forms underlying such a primary transspecies consciousness, as both differentiated into these concrete lifeworlds, to the level of the inferably sentient protozoa, and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. The latter, with its original social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, becomes similarly responsible in the contemporary context of a human caused global climate crisis for the care and conservation of that Spirit it both develops as such and accurately intuits as a universal is-like shared with all sentient beings.

The Concept of Aesthetic Experience Based on the Theory of Sacrum by R. Otto

The article is focused at the demarcation of the concept of aesthetic experience. This operation is carried out through a critical analysis of the theory of the Sacred by R. Otto, set out by him in the book published under the same title. It demonstrates the internal inconsistency of R. Otto’s desire to bring the Sacred as an autonomous experience, not association with aesthetics, on the basis of neo-Kantian philosophy, which gravitates towards the same aesthetics. This contradiction of task and method, placed in a wider context of consideration, allows us to define aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience is the mode of considering any possible experience according to the specific rules of the discipline of aesthetics. In this sense, pure experience is only an illusory perspective from the sensory overload of discourse with pre-conceptual expressions, from the aspect of intensity. The experience itself is completely reduced to a mode of expression, and has no characteristics of its own. Experience is the junction of the pre-conceptual and the conceptual, infinitely segmentable but never grasped, only always reducible to expression, hermeneutic (meaning) and non-hermeneutic (presence). Aesthetic experience, on the other hand, is experience interpreted in the light of the fact that existence is indistinguishable from representation, experience understood in a deontologized sense.

From Epistemology to the Standpoint of “Love”: Nishida Kitarō’s Experience Theory and the Zen Logic of Prajñāpāramitā

Abstract In this paper, I will explain the characteristics of “pure experience” in Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy. This pure experience was a very fundamental concept in Nishida’s philosophy, and was an important thought that was consistently at the core of his philosophy from the beginning through his later years. In his important work, An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida uses “the moment of seeing the color or hearing a sound …” as the initial perception to explain the only reality that developed into many categories by the self-developing characteristics of pure experience. Thus, he discusses “knowing” and “love.” At the very same time, Suzuki Daisetz (D.T. Suzuki) explains the same topic by using the “logic of Prajñāpāramitā.” The “logic of Prajñāpāramitā” states that everything that is affirmative is negative at the same time. It is generally believed that this “logic of Prajñāpāramitā” is very similar to the characteristics of the pure experience mentioned above. The reason for comparing these thoughts was that Kitarō Nishida and D. T. Suzuki were close friends and exchanged ideas with each other. Therefore, to understand Nishida’s “pure experience” and early philosophy thoroughly, the author has also examined the “logic of Prajñāpāramitā.”

The Experience of Affordances in an Intersubjective World

Our paper is concerned with theories of direct perception in ecological psychology that first emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Ecological psychology continues to be influential among philosophers and cognitive scientists today who defend a 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) approach to the scientific study of cognition. Ecological psychologists have experimentally investigated how animals are able to directly perceive their surrounding environment and what it affords to them. We pursue questions about direct perception through a discussion of the ecological psychologist’s concept of affordances. In recent years, psychologists and philosophers have begun to mark out two explanatory roles for the affordance concept. In one role, affordances are cast as belonging to a shared, publicly available environment, and existing independent of the experience of any perceiving and acting animal. In a second role, affordances are described in phenomenological terms, in relation to an experiencing animal that has its own peculiar needs, interests and personal history. Our aim in this paper is to argue for a single phenomenological or experiential understanding of the affordance concept. We make our argument, first of all, based on William James’ concept of pure experience developed in his later, radical empiricist writings. James thought of pure experience as having a field structure that is organized by the selective interest and needs of the perceiver. We will argue however that James did not emphasize sufficiently the social and intersubjective character of the field of experience. Drawing on the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, we will argue that psychological factors like individual needs and attention must be thought of as already confronted with a social reality. On the phenomenological reading of affordances we develop, direct perception of affordances is understood as taking place within an intersubjective world structured by human social and cultural life.

Nishida Kitaro’s Expressive Activity in Katana Sword Making as a Way to Achieve Pure Experience

Western craft and craftmanship have long been taken as complementary or even supplementary – in contrast with high art and artistic explorations. This pejorative approach is quite common from western industrial perspective. An artisan’s work is then taken less seriously than an artist’s oeuvre d’art. Contrary to this, Asian countries have long recognised the mastery of these master craftsmen and gave no different treatment to artists and artisans. This paper examines the concept of expressive activity from Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro in his essay “Expressive Activity” written in 1925. In this Nishida proposes that the fulfilment of a state of mind that he called pure experience can only be achieved through an action that is independent from external urges. The author then pursued this line of thought by taking Nishida’s idea to see how this kind of acting – as Nishida addresses it – is present in the ancient craft of katana (Japanese Sword) making performed by veteran swordsmiths. By analysing Nishida’s texts including An Inquiry into the Good and Ontology of Production, the author explains that the old wisdom of “giving life to the steel” can be justified by taking Nishida’s pure experience as the telos of an artisan’s expressive activity.

The Politics of Pure Experience

In this contribution, I shall attempt to clearly work out the political implications of Nishida Kitaro’s theory of pure experience in An Inquiry into the Good. This effort comes in response to the multitude of vastly different claims about the political meaning and dangers of Nishida’s early philosophy. Is it an implicit foundation for Japanese nationalism and the seeds of the controversial political philosophy he would work out later? Or is it a subtle attempt to critique the nationalist philosophy and educational policies surrounding Nishida while he was writing in the Meiji era? Or, perhaps most obviously, is this work unconnected with any and all political matters (including those that Nishida would face later on in his life)? In this paper, I shall argue that, although there is good reason to endorse any of these claims, ultimately a balanced assessment will find that Nishida’s early philosophy was indeed apolitical in nature, and that attempts to claim the contrary inevitably either go beyond textual evidence or miss key elements of his thought. Yet, as I shall further argue, being apolitical hardly means that Nishida’s work has no political consequences. Instead, for better or worse, the defining characteristic of Nishida’s early political philosophy is its capacity to allow readers to transcend such political issues.

Catch Me If You Can – Wittgenstein on the Ineffability of Logical Form

Logical form and logical analysis as the search for it have been introduced during the development of logic and analytical philosophy and are still widely considered as key tools or methods for the solution of philosophical puzzles. It is instructive to have a look at a criticism of these presupositions and I present Wittgenstein as the author who provides such a criticism. I present a development of his view of logical form which went from the thesis of the ineffability of logical form to the denial of the meaningfulness of the notion of logical form as such. This refusal is linked to Wittgenstein’s abandonment of the idea of the language of pure experience. The method of philosophical therapies is presented as an alternative to logical analysis and this methodology is linked with Wittgenstein’s consideration of game and family resemblance.

Apophasis Approach: Drawing Similarities in Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats and To a Skylark by P.B. Shelley and Challenging the Keats’ Escapism

Apophasis is a rhetoric device aimed at serving different purposes from the relationship between the speaker and the addressee to the mysticism. The understanding of this relationship may be direct and indirect. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley’s To a Skylark have never been explored from apophasis approach. The established notion of negative capability known as escapism from this world to the world of the song of nightingale as a distinctive feature of Keats poetry is challenged and replaced with the pure experience in this paper. This challenge is going to initiate a debate in future research. This paper also discusses the fact that despite similarity of experience in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley’s To a Skylark, the researchers and critics do not associate Shelley’s To a Skylark to escapism. The apophasis approach is useful in drawing this similarity and develop an understanding of romanticism from the two song specific poems of these romantic poets.

Pure experience revisited: A critical reassessment of Nishida Kitaro's radicalization of William James' empiricism

AbstractIn this paper, we will revisit the relation between the respective conceptions of pure experience of Nishida Kitaro and William James. As various authors have previously shown, comparing Nishida and James can not only help us better understand both of their specific understandings of pure experience, and consequently its position within their respective enterprises, but also give a platform with which to see how these two authors could contribute to contemporary discussions on philosophical methodology. However, despite the long history of comparative research on these two thinkers, there is still no consensus about the extent to which Nishida's philosophy actually resembles James' work at all. Was Nishida's interest in James' work found only in superficial similarities between two authors interested in overcoming the subject–object distinction? Or did Nishida attempt to somehow develop or radicalize James' work, taking his notion of pure experience into the realm of religion and metaphysics? In this contribution, we will agree with previous authors who have argued that Nishida is best understood as trying to go beyond or develop James' work. However, we will make this claim with the caveat that James had good reason not to take the avenues Nishida pursued, and that Nishida's attempt to radicalize some ideas in James may have led to some difficult points within his early philosophy.

Perbandingan Konstruktivis dan Parennialis dalam Menjelaskan Pengalaman Mistik

In the discourse of philosophy of mysticism, there are at least two opposing views in explaining the expression of mystical experience, namely constructivist and perennialist. The constructivist views that mystical expression is closely related to the mystical tradition that originates so that the symbols used cannot be separated from tradition. This relates to the cognitive qualities possessed by mystics which shape the reality they find. Meanwhile, the perennialist argues that mystical expressions can be separated from tradition, so mystics often use symbols that are universal and cross-tradition. Discovered reality transcends cognitive influence. This article will analyse the comparison of the two views. The method used in this research is comparative analysis to find a middle ground that the two views are possible to juxtapose. I found a meeting point between the two views is the issue of ineffability or the unspeakable nature which is one of the characteristics of mystical experience. This problem shows that the relationship between experience and understanding in the case of spiritual experience is so complex. There are facts that are experienced but cannot be expressed so that mystics choose to remain silent or make paradoxical expressions. Therefore, the solution given is the ineffability character of mystical experience which cannot be ignored by constructivists and at the same time does not show that mystical experience is a pure experience as perennialist claim. Keywords : Constructivist, ineffability, mystical experience, mystical expression, parennialist

Transplanter le bergsonisme dans le « lieu du néant » : Bergson et « l’École de Kyoto »

The reception of Bergsonism in Japan dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, a pivotal period when the reception of philosophy itself — in the Western sense of the term — was in the process of moving from the stage of total apprenticeship to that of original creation. The event that particularly marked this trend was the birth of the “Kyoto School,” founded by Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945). Nishida was the first to introduce Bergsonism to Japan, and he shared with Bergson one of the imminent philosophical preoccupations of the time, namely a return to the “immediate data” that we are asked to “know as they are.” He began his philosophical journey by developing the idea of “pure experience.” After his arduous efforts to open up the methodical path, known as “self-awakening,” that allows access to this experience prior to the subject/object distinction, Nishida nevertheless arrived at the singular conception of the “place of absolute nothingness,” while maintaining a deep sympathy for Bergsonism. This is very intriguing, given that Bergson himself is an uncompromising critic of the idea of nothingness, which in his eyes is nothing more than a pseudo-concept. So, how is it possible that Nishida is trying to 'transplant' Bergsonism to his place of absolute nothingness? To answer this question, this paper will propose an interpretation according to which the Nishidian locus of absolute nothingness can be seen as a creative transformation of the “plane of pure memory,” the basis of the Bergsonian cone mobilised by Matter and Memory. This reading might indicate that the Nishidian reception of Bergsonism is part of what determines the philosophical approach of this founder of the Kyoto School, and indeed that of the school as a whole: transplanting Western philosophy to non-Western lands.

«Исследование блага» Нисиды Китаро: модусы преодоления эмпирических оппозиций

The paper identifies and characterizes the main modes of overcoming the dual oppositions in the text of An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū, 1911) by Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). The author's attention is focused on the analysis of the first section of the work, devoted to the exposition of the doctrine of pure experience. One of the most notable features of the inner structure of the text is the presence of a wide range of opposing conceptual units between which a re­lation of equivalence is established: “subject/object”, “mind/will”, “thinking/​ experience”, “truth/falsehood”, etc. The author identifies two main modes of overcoming these oppositions in the text: 1) by means of a third concept, the neutralizing term, which mediates the establishment of equivalence relations; 2) without the mediation of the neutralizing term. The neutralizing terms form a nominative series: “pure experience”, “fact”, “intellectual intuition”, etc. Ac­cording to the character of the equivalence established between the concepts, the following modes of removing the oppositions are distinguished: 1) revealing the essential identity of the phenomena; 2) finding the attributive similarities; 3) reducing the opposition to a quantitative (relative) difference. Neutralization of oppositions in the text is characterized by: a) the tendency towards totality, universality (on the level of the inner structure of the whole text all the elements of oppositions become potentially equivalent to each other); b) the inclusion of neutralizing terms in opposition of a different order (the same conceptual unit can play the role of both a neutralizing term and an element of an opposition). Such structural features of the text are due to the content of Nishida's doctrine of pure experience, which implies a progression towards a unity of reality that excludes the possibility of conceptual description.

Henry Thoreau's Perpetual Grief and Unquenchable Life

Abstract This review essay offers an enthusiastically positive review of Branka Arsić's Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (2016). Arsić gives us a Thoreau who is a pondside Pythagoras, learned and disciplined, with roots deep in Greek and Ionian and Persian and Hindu thought. Her Thoreau is a prophet with a freshly thought-out message about how perpetual mourning drives the perpetual renewal of life, about the importance of disindividualizing, and about the persistence of life at its most basic and elemental level. Arsić shows how, once we learn to see and hear and walk and sit without filters, without metaphors, and without other preconceived containers for pure experience, we can come to see, with Thoreau, that at the most important level, there is no death.

“Bodyheartminding” (xin 心): Reconceiving the Inner Self and the Outer World in the Language of Holographic Focus and Field

“Bodyheartminding” (<i>xin</i> 心): Reconceiving the Inner Self and the Outer World in the Language of Holographic Focus and Field

Дослідження блага. Частина І, глава 1 / Переклад з японської, вступна стаття та коментарі С. В. Капранова

This publication presents the Ukrainian translation of the first chapter of Zen-no kenkyū (in English translation An Inquiry into the Good) by Nishida Kitarō, a worldwide-known Japanese philosopher, recognized as the founder of the modern Japanese philosophy. He was the leader of Kyoto School, the most prominent philosophical trend in 20th century Japan. Zen-no kenkyū, a philosophical treatise, is his first book. The year of its first publication, 1911, is often considered as a starting point of the history of modern Japanese philosophy, being a synthesis of East-Asian traditional thought and Western philosophical ideas. Nishida, on the one hand, got Confucian education in his childhood; on the other, he acquired Modern education and mastered Western culture in its various aspects. When writing this book, Nishida pursued Zen practice, thus in his case “East-Asian thought” means primarily Zen-Buddhism.&nbsp; The book in question is the first attempt of expounding Zen experience in Western philosophical terms. Therefore, it is an important example of the reception of Western ideas in East Asia. The treatise has been translated into many languages, both European and Asian; still, until today there was no Ukrainian translation. The book consists of four parts: “Pure Experience”, “Reality”, “The Good”, and “Religion”. The first chapter, presented here in Ukrainian translation, deals with pure experience, which is the basic concept of Nishida’s early thought. Though the notion of pure experience has been earlier developed by Wilhelm Wundt and William James, it was subsequently radically reinterpreted by Nishida. The present chapter contains his analysis and critique of Wundt’s and James’ approaches.

Alternative Configurations of Alterity in Dialogue with Ueda Shizuteru

ABSTRACT Alterity, the difference that being-other makes, is not an overt theme in the writing of Ueda Shizuteru, and yet by bringing alterity to the fore we are able to connect and examine several themes that Ueda does engage explicitly. It will turn out that several models of alterity are discernable in Ueda’s philosophy, and their common ground opens a mode of being-other that offers an alternative to dominant models of irreducible difference. Ueda’s philosophy of language suggests four alternative configurations that increasingly allow for the dual emergence of authentic otherness and selfhood. Those configurations are intimated in his interpretations of Nishida’s pure experience, of the interplay of language and silence, of a dialogue envisioned in a Zen oxherding picture, and of the poetic form known as linked verse, which best models how discrete beings help create a world in common.

Ueda Shizuteru’s Philosophy of the Twofold

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explicate Ueda Shizuteru’s philosophy of the twofold being-in-the-world and the ethics he draws from it. Ueda provides an original reading of Nishida’s concept of pure experience and develops it together with an understanding of Nishida’s concept of place by combining it with the phenomenological notion of the horizon. This leads him to understand the world, or place wherein we are, as twofold, implying the semantic space or network of meanings within it, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the boundless or undetermined open which envelops the former as its other. Our being as being-in-the-world is thus also twofold in implying both sides of the horizon, inside and outside, whereby we are ontologically grounded but at the same time without ground in being suspended by the semantic emptiness and ontological nothingness lying beyond.

Mikrokosmoksen matkaajat. Matkamuistot ja omakohtainen kokemus 1600-luvun englantilaisissa kuriositeettikokoelmissa

Royal gardeners and collectors of curiosities, father and son John Tradescant, were praised as world-travellers, who created a miniature world for their contemporaries to enjoy. But whose world was it based on – and whose world did it convey? In this article, I examine the objects and plants in seventeenth-century English cabinets of curiosities as both personal and culturally collective souvenirs, through which I reveal contemporary ideas about mobility, travel, and the concept of first-hand experience in Early modern England. As an example, I use the collection known as the Tradescant Ark with the help of diary entries, letters, and the 1656 catalogue. I especially analyse the catalogue as a form of reconstructing historical travel. The Tradescants, as was common at the time, were associated with God as creators of their private microcosm. Their subjective experiences of the world were also represented in the geographical as well as the social networks through which the objects had apparently travelled. However, the world of the collection was not only subjective; Collective, for example English and European, aspirations and geographical imaginations were also detectable in its contents. Moreover, a visitor to the collection carried their own personal worldviews that became influenced by the microcosm of the collection. Eventually, there is no such thing as a pure experience of the world, but always an endless combination of one’s own and others’ experiences, past and present, personal and collective – a collection such as The Ark being a perfect representation of such a mixture.

Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene

Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene