William James and Kitarō Nishida on “pure experience,” consciousness, and moral psychology

Joel W Krueger, Purdue University

Abstract

The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion of “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. In the first chapter, I discuss James’s “pure experience” as developed in Essays in Radical Empiricism. I argue for a phenomenological interpretation of pure experience. I contend that a phenomenological rendering of pure experience respects James’s claim that consciousness and perception are modes of bodily activity: not things that happen to us but rather things that we do. I draw out pure experience’s implicit claims about the prereflective continuity of conscious self and world, and I make explicit the way that the body’s world-engaged, sensorimotor systems secure this prereflective continuity within pure experience. In the second chapter, I argue that James’s “pure experience” can be used to develop an extended view of mind. I argue that mind—including the content of phenomenal consciousness—is a dynamic, temporally-extended process that is distributed beyond the skin and skull of the subject. The extended model of consciousness I develop avoids the intractable skepticism of internalist, representationbased models of mind while, at the same time, remaining faithful to the phenomenology of our embodied and embedded experience. I discuss how recent experimental research— including work on change blindness, inattentional blindness, blindsight, neonate empathy and cross-modal perception—supports this extended conception of mentality. In the third chapter, I argue for a phenomenological interpretation of Nishida’s pure largely consonant with James’s formulation. According to Nishida, pure experience points to the fact that, via the changing forms of its prereflective adaptive action, body is functionally integrated with world in a nondual or “pure” manner. Embodied mind and world are thus intimately coupled. I examine Nishida’s phenomenological descriptions of aesthetic creativity and moral action as they express this feature of pure experience. Along the way, I contextualize Nishida’s pure experience first within Buddhist thought, generally construed, and then more pointedly within the Zen Buddhist tradition which greatly influenced Nishida’s work as a whole. In the fourth chapter, I argue for an enactive, sensorimotor-based conception of moral psychology as skillful action. Drawing upon classical Buddhism and Nishida on pure experience and “acting-intuition”, I develop a phenomenological analysis of the structure of morally skillful action. I argue that traditional western cognitivist views of moral cognition, emphasizing critical-rational analysis concerned with a priori justifications of subsequent actions, overlook the fundamentally situated and spontaneous nature of the bulk of our moral experience. I argue that moral consciousness expresses itself primarily in and through immediate, skillful responses to concrete situations. In short, I argue for a moral psychology of involvement. I discuss experimental research on neural and perceptual plasticity, synaesthesia, meditation, and empathy, all of which I contend supports a bodily skills-based model of moral psychology.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Seigfried, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy|Psychology

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