Pure Experience Research Articles

The Problem of God in a Hypervisual Society: An Essay in American Aesthetics

Journal of American CultureVolume 20, Issue 3 p. 67-71 The Problem of God in a Hypervisual Society: An Essay in American Aesthetics William E. H. Meyer Jr, William E. H. Meyer Jr Beaumont, Texas.Search for more papers by this author William E. H. Meyer Jr, William E. H. Meyer Jr Beaumont, Texas.Search for more papers by this author First published: 10 June 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1997.00067.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume20, Issue3Fall 1997Pages 67-71 RelatedInformation

The Days of Darkness

The Days of Darkness Richard Sears Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it isfor the eyes to behold the sun: But ifa man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity. —Ecclesiastes When my grandfather died I was eight years old. Trying to remember my first experience with death I find that what I felt as a child is virtually buried under the weight of later experience, later knowledge, adult interpretation . Memory has no pure experience to offer us—its works are reconstructions; old patterns, perhaps, but reared with new materials. I know when I saw him last and I remember the last time we visited my grandparents because my mother talked about him after the funeral. Otherwise, I would probably have forgotten those occasions, since a child's mind is wonderfully unretentive except for experiences involving his own immediate pain or pleasure. The last time we visited was in the middle of an afternoon, in summer . I remember my mother telling her parents that I had asthma. (It must have been shortly before this that my first asthmatic attack occurred —I seem to recall losing consciousness and waking up with a doctor looming beside my bed. 1 was told that I had asthma, the most exotic word I had ever heard up to that time. But I wasn't curious about it; disease was no harbinger of mortality to me then.) She told them that my breath rattled in my chest. So my grandfather put me on his lap and laid his ear against my back and listened to my breathing. He was very thin and tall, with a long face, sunken under his high cheekbones; his hair was all perfectly white and curly. He wore faded blue overalls, his eyes were a very pale clear blue, and he had a white mustache and white stubble on his face. His hands were long-fingered, bony, with brown spots on the backs. He smelled a little stale. Sitting on his lap that afternoon was the only contact I can remember having with him. I don't recall his ever speaking directly to me. AU he ever did was check the life in me. The last time we saw him was about a week later. It may have been Richard Sears, Berea College English professor, has had several books published concerning the history and racial associations of the college. longer; I certainly didn't know at the time. We had been to town and it was late so we didn't have time to stop. We drove by my grandparents ' house and Grandpa was in the barn lot, getting ready to milk, I guess, since he was driving some cows. He saw us and waved in the remarkably energetic way that was characteristic of him, throwing up both hands at once, arching his back, grinning and calling a greeting that sounded like "Haw!" The image of him waving stays with me because he was so lively and strange-looking too, so completely enthusiastic. He sang hymns as he worked—he must have sung always because I've heard many people mention it. His favorite hymn was "How Firm a Foundation." Once he is said to have been singing while driving a team of horses with a rickety old wagon when one wheel dropped off and rolled on down the hill in front of the horses, but he did not stop singing. A man to take life in his stride! On the morning after Grandpa died, my brother woke me up and told me I would have to go get the cows because something bad had happened. Grandpa was dead and Mom and Daddy were gone. It was a very bright morning and I didn't mind going after the cows. I can remember starting after them, see the green field and the blue sky, colored as definitely and flatly as in a child's coloring book, but after that everything is blurred and impossible to put into proper sequence. I don't know when I saw my mother or first...

The Role of Improvised Music in Psychodynamic Music Therapy with Adults

This is an exciting time to be a music therapist. The field is rapidly advancing. There are many music therapists now working as primary therapists and in private practice. In light of this development, there is a growing need for a theory that unites the concepts of depth psychology with the practice of music therapy. This article defines and describes a theory of psychodynamic music therapy that emphasizes the role of improvised music. Three ways in which improvised music functions within a psychodynamic framework are illustrated: as pure experience in the here and now; as a mediator between conscious an unconscious contents; and as a symbolic language. Special attention is given to Jung's theory of complexes as it relates to psychodynamic music therapy. Case examples from private practice with adults are included.

The Relevance of William James' Radical Empiricism to the Anthropology of Consciousness

William James is usually associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and with his interest in religious experiences. But James also developed a methodology which has received far less attention. James called this methodology "radical empiricism," an approach that requires that (1) all of the ideas and theories in science be grounded in direct experience, and (2) no experience be excluded from scientific purview. This paper describes James' thoughts about radical empiricism, and discusses some of the strengths of, and problems with his view in light of more contemporary science. A biogenetic structural elaboration of James' notion of relations and pure experience is offered, and is used to counter the so called post‐structuralist critique of Jacques Derrida. The relevance of James' views to the anthropology of consciousness is explored, with emphasis upon the necessity ‐‐ anticipated by James ‐‐ of merging a phenomenology with structuralism

Pure Experience, Self-Awareness, “Basho”

Pure Experience, Self-Awareness, “Basho”

Philosophical Premises of Functional Anthropology

The philosophical roots of Malinowski's functionalism are in the academic circles of Krakow, where three figures seem to have exerted a particularly strong influence: Pawlicki, Straszewski, and Heinrich. The predominant trend in philosophy at that time was empiriocriticism, as developed by Mach and Avenarius. Also important were F. A. Lange's interpretation of Marburg neo-Kantianism. It should be noted that the historical philosophy field was extremely broad and diverse. Functionalism, a philosophically open concept, cannot be subordinated to any one philosophical system, although the "openness" of functionalism is not absolute but complemented by its "closedness" to certain other philosophies. Praxism pervades functionalist theory and even creates its foundation. Malinowski approach is entirely scientific, but functionalism is never just empirical. Malinowski realized that pure experience is as impossible as pure reasoning.

William James's Theory of Mind

William James's Theory of Mind W. E. COOPER 1. INTRODUCTION I SHALLPRESENTan interpretation of William James's theory of mind which reconciles four plausible but apparently conflicting accounts of that theory. This extraordinary diversity of scholarly opinion represents just about every interpretive live option, construing James variously as a neutral monist, a naturalistic physicalist, a panpsychist, and a phenomenologist. The key to the reconciliation is to take seriously James's own distinction between scientific and metaphysical levels of enquiry, and to assign the four readings different roles within the two-level structure. The price of the reconciliation, that substantial tenets of these readings must be rejected, is offset by the prospect of interpretive consensus. I hope to show that The Reconciling View, as I shall call it, is securely anchored in the mature works where James directly addresses the nature of mind, namely, The Principlesof Psychologyand Essaysin Radical Empiricism. This view has the hermeneutic virtue of finding more coherence and good sense in James's theorizing than the interpretive alternafives ,' and at the end of this essay I suggest that The Reconciling View's claim to truth cannot be dismissed. A. J. Ayer presents the definitive reading of James as a neutral monist, who dissolved the mind-body problem by giving primacy to a single stuff which is metaphysically more fundamental than mind or body, and neutral with respect to the difference between them; this stuff, which James called pure experience, is the material out of which each of us somehow constructs the private, subjective world of one's mind and the public, objective world of body. Owen J. Flanagan's naturalistic reading of James, by contrast, gives primacy to the body: James ended the hegemony of Cartesian assumptions and initiated the reign, in twentieth-century psychology and philosophy, of ' The virtue I refer to is the one which Ronald Dworkin expresses in his "aesthetic hypothesis " that "an interpretation of a piece of literature attempts to show which way of reading (or speaking or directing or acting) the text reveals it as the best work of art" (a Matter of Principle [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], 149). [571 ] 572 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:4 OCTOBER 1990 the naturalistic assumption that a person is a physical thing with no metaphysically odd, nonphysical properties. Marcus Ford, by contrast with Ayer and Flanagan, gives primacy to the mind, seeing in James a panpsychist who believed that every existent thing has mental attributes. Not only do persons have metaphysically odd properties, by Flanagan's lights, everythinghas them. And so there could be no primally neutral stuff which lacked them, as Ayer's James insists. Finally, there is Bruce Wilshire's James, for whom questions of metaphysical primacy are replaced by subtle descriptions of mental states, anticipating Husserl's case for a phenomenological science of the mind that would be autonomous and not dependent, in particular, on data drawn from the natural sciences. Wilshire's James is a protophenomenologist who emphasized the importance to psychology of introspection, especially for describing mental life in a vocabulary that does not distort it; whereas Flanagan finds James's reliance on introspection to be the least attractive aspect of his theory of psychology. Wilshire takes for granted that James was a naturalist in the sense that he sought psychophysical correlation laws, but he deplores this commitment as being at odds with James's protophenomenological insights. In short, there is a profound lack of consensus amongst James scholars about how to interpret his theorizing about the mind. I have chosen to discuss these four scholars because they represent, in clear and persuasive fashion, four current and often conflicting interpretive schools. Their statements are extreme , and more moderate ones would be less open to the criticisms I shall raise. The extreme statements are the best foils for The Reconciling View and, besides, they expose characteristic interpretive errors of each of the four schools. I shall argue that the Neutral Monist reading is fundamentally correct at the metaphysical level of James's theory, but it must concede to the Panpsychist account that pure experience is protomental; that is, although more basic than mind or body, pure experience is...

The Cats of Pure Experience

The Cats of Pure Experience

The Histonomic Approach to Economics: Beyond Pure Theory and Pure Experience

This article starts off with the distinction between logico-deductive and empirico-deductive approaches to economic theory. The logicodeductive approach, for instance neoclassical economics, uses an axiomatic framework that has only little empirical substance. The empirico-deductive approach, for instance, Ricardian economics, attempts to state economic theory as a “typical” structure of reality. It appears that the latter approach touches reality more closely and is more sensitive to intellectual enrichment and to substantial empirical evidence. However, both approaches operate within the basic assumption applied in classical physics, that theory must represent an invariant structure of reality—highlighting in this case economic phenomena that do not change over time. In the following, the induction issue is given new life, suggesting its validity under the non-conventional assumptions ofvariancy and time-asymmetry. A “histonomic” approach stressing the importance of making theoretical (-nomic) statements about economic phenomena that are basically historical (histo-) in their non-classical properties of variancy and time-asymmetry is favored.

Search and the market for lemons

This paper provides an explanation, not found in the literature, for the origin of quality dispersion in product markets. The consumer's pure experience case of sequential search is modeled and the model is closed by explaining the firm's optimal decision making problem. Then the necessary and sufficient conditions for a non-degenerate distribution of quality are established. It is also shown that if a non-degenerate equilibrium distribution of quality does exist then it is an unstable equilibrium. The only stable equilibrium distribution is the degenerate lemon distribution. Therefore the model provides added support for Akerlof's argument that lemons tend to drive out good quality.

The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America

The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America

The Ramifications of Whitehead’s Theory of Experience

Whitehead's philosophy is thought by many to be a modern-day ra tionalism, yet rationalistic criteria of logical consistency and coherence are balanced by empirical criteria of applicability and adequacy. He understands metaphysics to be the endeavour to frame a . . . necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. . . . Here 'applicable' means that some items of ex perience are thus interpretable, and 'adequate' means that there are no items incapable of such (PR 4).1 Experience is fundamental. Without appeal to experience we could not determine whether our metaphysical proposals pertained to actual world or merely to its possi ble alternatives.2 Although there is a wealth of phenomenological insight describing salient features of human experience in Whitehead's writings, such as in Symbolism (1927), part II of Process and Reality (1929), and Modes of Thought (1938), which bear considerable affinity with William James's radical empiricism, shall not examine them here, preferring to focus on more fundamental question as to nature of experience. The phenomenological method makes two assumptions at odds with Whitehead's approach. It assumes that experience presupposes con sciousness, and not vice versa, and that there is much to be gained by recovery of pure experience unencumbered by philosophical interpreta tion. Whitehead conceives of experience as including a depth of un conscious feeling. Consciousness pertains to mere surface phenomena made possible by fortunate mating of causal influences ultimately derived from external world with relevant contrasting conceptions. Thus in every conscious feeling some conceptual element is ineluctably present. There can be no hope of achieving a completely neutral account of ex perience, for interpretation must be present in some sense for us to be aware of its contents. On level of metaphysical generality we cannot eliminate this conceptual dimension, which makes it all more imperative that we replace faulty presuppositions with sounder ones. Whitehead fully endorses Cartesian turn in philosophy, which he understands as systematic replacing of objective statements by experien tial reports as that which is most fundamental. Thus for statement, This desk is brown, a more basic account is given by report, I ex perience this desk as brown. Here experience is given primary role it

Tiesos kriterijaus problema V. Džeimso pragmatizme

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama pragmatizmo tiesos koncepcija, kuri nuosekliausiai buvo atskleista W. Jameso veikaluose. Nagrinėjami Ch. S. Peirce‘o ir W. Jameso filosofinių principų skirtumai bei šio filosofo ir K. Marxo praktikos sampratos. W. Jameso pragmatizmo pagrindinė tezė yra ši: idėjos reikšmę galima nustatyti todėl, kad ji visada pereina į veiksmą; pati idėja neprieinama stebėjimui, o veiksmai yra suvokiami. Praktinis patyrimas veda sąvoką prie suvokimo kaip tikslo. Aptariama pasitenkinimo (satisfaction) ir tiesos, kaip atitikimo tikrovę, sąvoka. Pagrįsdamas tiesą, jis nediferencijuoja pasitenkinimo (teorinio ir praktinio) hierarchiniu ir rūšiniu atžvilgiu ir nurodo, jog didžiausias pasitenkinimo kiekis, kaip teisingumo kriterijus, apima visas galimas jo pasireiškimų formas. Tiesa ir realybė nėra fiksuoto ir nekintančio atitikimo ryšio nariai, nes realybė yra amžinai besiformuojantis procesas. Naudos sąvoka W. Jameso filosofijoje sinonimiška praktinei teisingų idėjų vertei, kuri atsiranda iš praktinio jų reikšmingumo subjektui. Aptariama W. Jameso darbų kritika ir filosofo reakcija į ją.

V. Džeimso „radikalusis empirizmas“

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama amerikiečių pragmatizmo filosofijos svarbiausio atstovo W. Jameso pažinimo sampratos svarbiausi bruožai. Filosofas plėtojo vadinamąjį radikalųjį empirizmą, teigiantį, kad visa realybė (fizinė ir psichinė) yra sudaryta iš vienos pirminės – patyrimo – substancijos. Grynasis patyrimas yra sudėtingas nuoseklus darinys, atsiveriantis žmogaus sąmonei iš karto savo tikrąja esme. Pirminiai patyrimo duomenys pasireiškia kaip jutimiškai nepertraukiami, kaip patyrimo srautas. Perėjimas į kitą patyrimą yra vienintelė prieš tai buvusio patyrimo funkcija. Teigiama, kad W. Jameso pažinimo teorijoje nelieka objektyvios subjekto bei objekto tarpusavio sąveikos. Pažintinį santykį šioje teorijoje pakeičia skirtingos reagavimo į įvairius dirgiklius formos ir nerami būsena pačios sąmonės viduje. Daroma išvada, kad, sutelkęs visą dėmesį į individualų patyrimą kaip gnoseologinių problemų sprendimo pagrindą, W. Jamesas iš esmės sukūrė naują subjektyviojo idealizmo variantą.

The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America

Book Review| January 01 1983 The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America, Richard C. Poulsen. Steven L. Olsen Steven L. Olsen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utah Historical Quarterly (1983) 51 (1): 96–97. https://doi.org/10.2307/45060979 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Steven L. Olsen; The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 January 1983; 51 (1): 96–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/45060979 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressUtah Historical Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Copyright 1983 Utah State Historical Society1983 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America by Richard C. Poulsen

The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America by Richard C. Poulsen

What Makes An Experience Aesthetic?

ing, the property yellow from a yellow thing: being yellow and being a pumpkin are, as we saw, logically independent of each other; the existence of the one does necessarily require the existence of the other. I know what "yellow" means by fixing my cognitive attention on something yellow in contradistinction to something which is not yellow. Now can I know what "aesthetic" means the way I know what "yellow" means? If I follow the same procedure of knowing I commit a serious mistake. I should in the first place examine what makes my experience of Guernica, for example, aesthetic, then I should compare what makes my experience in this and similar experiences aesthetic in contrast to what makes other experiences of mine moral, religious, or practical. But if I undertake this task I discover it impossible, mainly because "the nature of any experience and its difference from experiences of other kinds is not intrinsic to the realm of experience, itself, but crammed full with all its objects; that, consequently, an experience cannot be understood in isolation from its objects."7 Accordingly, if I attempt to know what makes an experience aesthetic by seeking to isolate aesthetic-ness from given experiences the way we isolate "yellow" from a yellow pumpkin I am bound to meet a dead end. This whole argument is both misleading and misapplied-why? First, let us grant, with Price, that experience as such, or experience apart from its objects, does not exist; let us also grant that what we call experience is always "crammed full with all its objects." When we make an assertion like this we in effect state that an experience is always an experience of something. I do not know of any aesthetician, philosopher, or psychologist at the present who would deny the validity of this assertion. Pure experience is a logical impossibility, for the very concept of experience is relational in character; it entails an object of which it is an experience. But from this premise I do not see why we cannot study a certain kind of experience, analyze its content, and then make an assertion on the items which constitute this content. When a philosopher, or a psychologist, studies experience he does not claim, or pretend, to have an experience-in-general or "the realm of experience, itself," before his cognitive faculty but specific experiences and types of experiences; he has in mind the structure, procedure, and the conditions under which an experience is at 161 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:56:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

In search of pure experience

In his 1963 reminiscence "My Way to Phenomenology" Martin Heidegger recalls his first encounter with Husserl's Logical Investigations in 1909. He speaks of "the spell emanating from the work" and says, "I remained so fascinated by Husserl's work that I read in it again and again in the years to follow without gaining sufficient insight into what fascinated me."1 These are strange words to use about a book on logic, and they suggest something ofthe paradox of Husserl's works and the remarkable influence they have had on the intellectual life ofthe twentieth century. In many ways Husserl was typical of the German academic specialist in philosophy. His focus seemed narrow and recondite, his vocabulary obscure and technical, his interests limited to his own field. If his researches had implications beyond the academy or even beyond academic philosophy, Husserl seemed to have little interest in showing those implications or in appealing to a wider public. "Popular" philosophy was not his style. He seemed sublimely oblivious to the intellectual currents that were swirling about him. Against the rising tide of historicism and relativism, he proclaimed the establishment of philosophy as "rigorous science." When his Ideas appeared in 1913 and he made it clear that the focus of his philosophy was to be "consciousness" and the "ego," he betrayed no awareness of what was being said on these subjects by another Austrian Jew, also trained in Vienna and a near contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Even within academic philosophy Husserl seemed to be something of a throwback: where philosophers after three centuries were still preoccupied with overcoming Descartes' philosophy of mind and the idealism that seemed to flow from it, Husserl appeared both to embrace idealism and to base his philosophical approach on a return to Cartesian principles.

James' metaphysics: Language as the house Of ?Pure experience?

James' metaphysics: Language as the house Of ?Pure experience?

Wallace Stevens and William James: The Poetics of Pure Experience

Stanley J. Scott WALLACE STEVENS AND WILLIAM JAMES: THE POETICS OF PURE EXPERIENCE Though Wallace Stevens's remarkable early poetry germinates from the clash of opposites he terms "imagination" and "reality," many readers have been slow to recognize that the great meditative poems of his later years spring from a mind that has moved, in a noted critic's phrase, "beyond metaphysical dualism."1 A significantly parallel pattern of growth, which also takes the form of a struggle to shed the straitjacket of dualism, emerges in the philosophy of William James. This fact alone suggests a vital kinship between poet and philosopher, a kinship of which Stevens was perhaps never fully aware. Yet in a series of letters to various individuals regarding his major late poem, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942),2 Stevens leaves clues that briefly but unmistakably link the central ideas of the work to elements in James's philosophy. My contention here is that the specific affinity noted by Stevens between his own poetics and the Jamesian "will to believe" is only the hint of a deeper affinity between the two men's ideas; and that certain basic Jamesian principles provide a valuable but neglected critical approach to Stevens's later thought and art—especially the Notes. Such an approach, I hope, will also shed new light on Stevens's move beyond dualistic structures of thought in his poetics. As a psychologist and later as a philosopher, James showed a progressively deliberate effort to describe, apart from theoretical models of any kind, the phenomena of consciousness as found in immediately lived experience. James's "phenomenological method," as this effort has been called, was governed by a constant watchfulness to avoid the natural tendency—the "psychologist's fallacy"—to impose pre-conceived or theoretical constructions on the phenomena of consciousness.3 Thus in the years between the publication of his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) and his Essays in Radical Empiricism (collected in book form in 1912, two years after his death), James turned away from the convention of dividing experience into subjective and objective 183 184Philosophy and Literature categories, and eventually came to regard this dualistic formula as a heuristic device, useful perhaps for some analytical purposes, but not ultimately valid as a way of describing the living actuality of experience. In working out his poetics, Stevens went through a similar process of development. The intensity of his batde with the problem of dualism is suggested by a passage from a late essay "A Collect of Philosophy" (1951): According to the traditional views of sensory perception, we do not see the world immediately but only as the result of a process of seeing and after the completion of that process, that is to say, we never see the world except the moment after. Thus we are constantly observing the past. . . . The material world, for all the assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the mind. The solid earth disappears and the whole atmosphere is subtilized not by the arrival of some venerable beam of light from an almost hypothetical star but by a breach of reality. What we see is not an external world but an image of it and hence an internal world.4 Implicit in the passage is a longing for greater immediacy of awareness and a dissatisfaction not only with "traditional views" but also with the process of ordinary sense perception itself. The split between mind and external reality leads paradoxically to the dissolution of perceived objects into immaterial mental "images." The psychic tension issuing from this "breach of reality" impels the poet to seek a more penetrating and efficacious mode of perception, one capable of grasping and holding on to the "solid earth" as fact, without a mediatory "process of seeing." And the effort to define his "supreme fiction," the ultimate act of imagination, is motivated by this need to pass beyond the limitations of a dualistic psychology. The peculiar meaning that Stevens gives to the terms "fact" and "factual" in his essays throws much light on the higher level of perception articulated in the Notes. In The Necessary Angel (1951), he distinguishes between absolute fact...