6
Experience after the Linguistic Turn
In 1953, in an article entitled “Logical Positivism, Language, and the Reconstruction of Metaphysics,” Gustav Bergmann set out to describe the new style of philosophizing, which he characterized as the “linguistic turn.” Speaking of philosophers primarily influenced by logical positivism, he tells us: “They all accept the linguistic turn Wittgenstein initiated in the Tractatus. To be sure, they interpret and develop it in their several ways, hence the disagreements; yet they are under its spell” (Bergmann 1953, p. 63). In 1964, explaining why philosophers should make the linguistic turn, he amplifies his remarks:
All linguistic philosophers talk about the world by means of talking about a suitable language. This is the linguistic turn, the fundamental gambit as to method, on which ordinary and ideal language philosophers (OLP, ILP) agree. Equally fundamentally, they disagree on what is in this sense a “language” and what makes it “suitable.” Clearly one may execute the turn. The question is why one should. I shall mention three reasons.
First. Words are used either ordinarily (commonsensically) or philosophically. On this distinction, above all, the method rests. The prelinguistic philosophers did not make it. Yet they use words philosophically. Prima facie such uses are unintelligible. They require commonsensical explication. The method insists that we provide it. … Second. Much of the paradox, absurdity, and opacity of prelinguistic philosophy stems from failure to distinguish between speaking and speaking about speaking. Such failure, or confusion, is harder to avoid than one may think. The method is the safest way of avoiding it. Third. Some things any conceivable language merely shows. Not that these things are literally “ineffable”; rather, the proper (and safe) way of speaking about them is to speak about (the syntax and interpretation of a) language. (Bergmann 1964, p. 177)1
In 1967 Richard Rorty canonized the phrase “The Linguistic Turn,” as the title of his classic anthology.
The purpose of this present volume is to provide materials for reflection on the most recent philosophical revolution, that of linguistic philosophy. I shall mean by “linguistic philosophy” the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use. This view is considered by many as the most important philosophical discovery of our time, and indeed, of the ages. (Rorty 1967, p. 3)
In his magisterial introduction to The Linguistic Turn, Rorty surveys the varieties of linguistic philosophy that were prevalent at the time, in order to elucidate their metaphilosophical presuppositions. A careful reading of his introduction discloses Rorty’s own ambivalence. On the one hand, he speaks of progress in philosophy “as movement toward a contemporary consensus.” On the other hand, he also tells us that in the past every revolution in philosophy has failed and that there are reasons to believe that this will also be the fate of the linguistic turn. Even if we think of the linguistic turn with reference to those philosophers who are roughly classified as “analytic,” not only is there disagreement, but their varying conceptions of language are all over the place. The more carefully one examines what Bergmann, Carnap, Ryle, Black, Austin, Strawson, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and others mean by language and the linguistic turn, the more difficult it becomes to speak even about family resemblances. But this is not the end of the confusion about the linguistic turn. The phrase “the linguistic turn” has been used to characterize Habermas’s theory of communicative action and discourse theory of ethics, Heidegger’s late philosophy, Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics, Derrida’s deconstruction, and Foucault’s discourse theory. Furthermore, the term has been taken up by thinkers across the humanistic and social science disciplines – and it has been hotly debated. One of the most controversial discussions among historians and feminists has been about whether the so-called linguistic turn displaces the direct appeal to experience. As the intellectual historian Martin Jay comments, “In fact, the unlamented ‘demise of experience’ became in some quarters almost conventional wisdom” (Jay 2005, p. 3). One commentator tells us that the expression “the linguistic turn” became “a catch-all phrase for divergent critiques of established historical paradigms, narratives, and chronologies, encompassing not only poststructuralist linguistic criticism, linguistic theory, and philosophy but also cultural and symbolic anthropology, new historicism and gender theory” (Canning 1994, p. 369).2
Rorty has played a major role in furthering the linguistic turn in the revival of pragmatism. But this has also been a mixed blessing. There are still many thinkers who take Rorty’s idiosyncratic version of pragmatism as canonical – and what is worse, they accept his tendentious readings of the classical pragmatists as authoritative. Although he frequently expresses his ambivalence about the linguistic turn, Rorty has also been its champion. In The Linguistic Turn he doesn’t hesitate to speak about the progress achieved by the linguistic turn, which he calls “the most recent philosophical revolution.” Despite his sustained and relentless critique of the varieties of epistemological and semantic representationalism, Rorty favors the replacement of representationalism by the idea of alternative incommensurable vocabularies.3 Unfortunately, Rorty bears a primary (but not exclusive) responsibility for denigrating the significance of the concept of experience in pragmatism – and he has been vigorously attacked for this.4
In “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (1977) Rorty takes Dewey to task for wanting to create a metaphysical system. He agrees with Santayana’s critique of Dewey that the very idea of a “naturalistic metaphysics” is a contradiction in terms. Rorty cites Dewey’s remark, written near the end of his life, about a proposed new edition of Experience and Nature in which he spoke about “changing the title as well as the subject matter from Nature and Experience [sic] to Nature and Culture.” In a letter to his friend Arthur Bentley, Dewey wrote: “I was dumb not to have seen the need for such a shift when the old text was written. I was still hopeful that the philosophic word ‘Experience’ could be redeemed by being returned to its idiomatic usages – which was a piece of historic folly, the hope I mean.”5 Rorty not only mocks and dismisses a metaphysics of experience; he asserts that we are better off if we simply drop any reference to ‘experience’ – a term that he thinks is excessively vague and confusing. Dewey, he tells us, never succeeded in developing a coherent notion of experience that would allow him to combine Hegel’s historicism with a Darwinian naturalism. The tenor of Rorty’s critique of Dewey is evident in the following passage:
What Kant had called “the constitution of the empirical world by synthesis of intuitions under concepts,” Dewey wanted to call “interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake.” But he wanted this harmless sounding naturalistic phrase to have the same generality, and to accomplish the same epistemological feats, which Kant’s talk of the “constitution of objects” had performed. He wanted phrases like “transaction with the environment” and “adaptations to conditions” to be simultaneously naturalistic and transcendental – to be common-sensical remarks about human perception and knowledge viewed as a psychologist views it and also to be expressions of “generic traits of existence.” So he blew up notions like “transaction” and “situation” until they sounded as mysterious as “prime matter” or “thing-in-itself.” (Rorty 1977, p. 84).
Rorty is just as dismissive of James’s many references to ‘experience’ – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty’s pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.6
Frequently the appeal to experience by the classical American pragmatists does function like a deus ex machina that is supposed to solve (or dissolve) all sorts of knotty philosophical problems. It would be a fruitless task to try to develop an overarching theory that encompasses all the meanings and uses of experience by the classical American pragmatists. (It would be equally hopeless to try to encompass the multifarious meanings and uses of ‘language’ and the ‘linguistic turn’ into a single coherent theory or narrative.) But this should not dissuade us from recovering what is insightful and still relevant in the reflections on experience by the classical American pragmatists. They certainly took experience to be central to their philosophical visions – and if we want to do justice to their way of thinking, we must understand why experience played such a central role for them. But the primary issue is a philosophical one. I argue that the fashionable and apparently well-entrenched dichotomy between experience and the linguistic turn is just the sort of dichotomy that pragmatists ought to reject. This dichotomy – this either/or – is at once obfuscating and sterile. I shall elucidate the contributions to our concept(s) of experience in the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey. And I shall also indicate briefly George H. Mead’s contribution to understanding language. Finally – and most important – I shall argue that after the linguistic turn, a pragmatic orientation demands a thoughtful and nuanced understanding of the meaning and significance of experience. An enriched pragmatism can integrate the linguistic turn with a subtle appreciation of the role and varieties of experience.
Peirce: Three Categorial Aspects of Experience
One of the features of Peirce’s philosophy that has not had an enduring philosophical influence – with the exception of Peirce scholars – is his categorial scheme of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. There are several reasons for this neglect. Many of Peirce’s claims about meaning, truth, inference, inquiry, and community can be restated without any reference to his categorial scheme. Despite the fact that the appeal to categories has played an essential role in philosophy from Aristotle through Kant to Hegel, most twentieth-century philosophers have been wary of appealing to categorial schemes. Furthermore, to identify categories with ordinal numbers seems excessively formal and almost empty. One may wonder whether such a categorial scheme can provide any philosophical illumination. Finally, Peirce employs his categorial scheme in different domains (logic, semiotics, phenomenology, and metaphysics), and in ways that are not always consistent. Yet I believe that Peirce’s categorical scheme of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness – especially as developed in his mature philosophy – is a powerful heuristic device for grasping what he means by experience.
Consider one of Peirce’s typical statements about phenomenology and the categories:
Phenomenology is that branch of science which is treated in Hegel’s Phenomenologie des Geistes (a work far too inaccurate to be recommended to mature scholars, though perhaps the most profound ever written) in which the author makes out what are the elements, or, if you please, the kinds of elements, that are invariably present in whatever is, in any sense in mind. According to the present writer these universal categories are three. Since all three are invariably present, a pure idea of any one, absolutely distinct from the others, is impossible; indeed, anything like a satisfactorily clear examination of them is a work of long and active meditation. They may be termed Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
Firstness is that which is such as it is positively and regardless of anything else.
Secondness is that which is as it is in a second something’s being as it is, regardless of any third.
Thirdness is that whose being consists in bringing about a Secondness. (Peirce 1998, p. 267)
This passage calls for several comments. When Peirce claims that these elements are invariably present in whatever is in any sense “in mind,” he doesn’t mean that the categories are “merely” mental. They are elements of all phenomena. It would have been better if he had said that these are elements “we are aware of,” to avoid any suggestion that they are “merely” in the mind. The categories are intended to designate features or aspects of all phenomena. These features are distinguishable, but not separable from each other. All of these elements are always present together, so it is impossible to have a “pure idea” of any one of them. Sometimes Peirce uses the technical term ‘precision’ to describe the mode of discrimination that “arises from attention to one element and neglect of the other” (Peirce 1992, p. 2). Moreover, the above statements about these categories are so abstract that, taken alone, they are not very helpful for understanding the meaning or importance of these categories. So let us turn to some of Peirce’s examples of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. (I focus primarily on Secondness because it is the category most relevant for grasping what Peirce takes to be distinctive about experience.)
To illustrate Firstness, Peirce tells us to “look at anything red.”
That redness is positively what it is. Contrast may heighten our consciousness of it; but the redness is not relative to anything; it is absolute, or positive. If one imagines or remembers red, his imagination will be either vivid or dim; but that will not, in the least, affect the quality of the redness, which may be brilliant or dull, in either case. … The quality in itself has no vividness or dimness. In itself, then, it cannot be consciousness. It is, indeed, in itself a mere possibility. … Possibility, the mode of being of Firstness, is the embryo of being. It is not nothing. It is not existence. (Peirce 1998, p. 268)
Initially, one might think that Peirce is merely reiterating the traditional doctrine of our awareness of secondary qualities. But to jump to this inference would be a serious mistake. This becomes immediately evident when Peirce goes on to say:
We not only have an immediate acquaintance with Firstness in the qualities of feelings and sensations, but we attribute it to outward things. We think that a piece of iron has a quality in it that a piece of brass has not, which consists in the steadily continuing possibility of its being attracted by a magnet. In fact, it seems undeniable that there really are such possibilities, and that, though they are not existences, they are not nothing. They are possibilities, and nothing more. (Peirce 1998, p. 269)
For Peirce there is Firstness, or a qualitative aspect, of every phenomenon. Look at the range of examples that Peirce uses to illustrate what he means by Firstness or quality: “the scarlet of your royal liveries, the quality itself, independently of its being perceived or remembered” (8.329); “the quality of the emotion upon contemplating a fine mathematical demonstration, and the quality of feeling of love” (1.304); “a vague, unobjectified, still less subjectified, sense of redness, or of salt taste, or of an ache, or of grief or joy, or of a prolonged musical note” (1.303). Qualities, then, are not subjective feelings that are somehow locked up in the privacy of our minds (even though a feeling may have its own distinctive quality). “The tragedy of King Lear has its Firstness, its flavor sui generis” (1.531).7
When Peirce says that we have “immediate acquaintance with Firstness,” he is not saying that we have immediate or direct knowledge of these qualities. We can speak of knowledge or our epistemic awareness only when we introduce the category of Thirdness. Of course, we know that we have an awareness of Firstness, but this “knowledge that” is not to be identified or confused with our awareness of qualities. For Peirce there is no direct immediate intuitive knowledge of anything. (He emphatically rejects the Myth of the Given.)
We should note that in the above passages, Peirce several times states that Firstness is not existence. This provides a clue to how Peirce understands Secondness, the category that he thinks is the easiest to comprehend of the three categories.
Of the three, Secondness is the easiest to comprehend, being the element that the rough-and-tumble of the world renders most prominent. We talk of hard facts. That hardness, that compulsiveness of experience, is Secondness. A door is slightly ajar. You try to open it. Something prevents. You put your shoulder against it, and experience a sense of effort and a sense of resistance. These are not two forms of consciousness; they are two aspects of one two-sided consciousness. It is inconceivable that there should be any effort without resistance, or any resistance without a contrary effort. This double-sided consciousness is Secondness. All consciousness, all being awake, consists in a sense of reaction between ego and non-ego. (Peirce 1998, p. 268)
Once again, we must not think that Secondness is merely subjective. “We not only thus experience Secondness, but we attribute it to outward things: which we regard as so many individual objects, or quasi-selves, reacting on one another” (ibid.). Existence itself is Secondness. “The existent is that which reacts against other things” (8.191). We can see why Peirce uses ordinal numbers to name his categories. Firstness is monadic, and Secondness is dyadic – it always involves doubleness.
Secondness is the category that brings out the feature of experience that Peirce most wants to emphasize. Experience involves bruteness, constraint, “over-and-againstness.” Experience is our great teacher. And experience takes place by a series of surprises. “It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us” (Peirce 1998, p. 154). This element of surprise is essential in any experimentation, for we learn the most from surprises – and disappointments.
In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read … I don’t remember that anyone has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience. She says,
Open your mouth and shut your eyes
And I’ll give you something to make you wise;
And thereupon she keeps her promise, and seems to take her pay in the fun of tormenting us. (Ibid.)
We grasp why experience is categorized as Secondness when Peirce writes: “I ask you whether at that instant of surprise there is not a double consciousness, on the one hand of an Ego, which is simply the expected idea suddenly broken off, on the other hand of the Non-ego, which is the Strange Intruder, in his abrupt entrance” (ibid.).
Let us turn to Thirdness. Although all three categories are intended to discriminate or prescind elements or aspects of every phenomenon, some of Peirce’s most original thinking concerns Thirdness. This category is labeled “Thirdness” because everything that it designates involves triadic relations. Habits, laws, rules, inferences, intentions, practices, conduct, concepts, “would-be’s” (subjunctive conditionals), and especially signs are all classified as Thirdness. One of Peirce’s favorite examples of Thirdness is “giving.”
A gives B to C. This does not consist of A’s throwing B away and its accidentally hitting C. … If that were all, it would not be a genuine triadic relation, but merely one dyadic relation followed by another. There need be no motion of the thing given. Giving is a transfer of property. Now right is a matter of law, and law is a matter of thought and meaning. (1.345)
We cannot give an adequate account of the relation of giving by describing it in terms of physical (or even mental) juxtaposition – a series of dyadic relations. What is distinctive about giving are the conventions, rules, or customs by virtue of which an act is giving and not just displacement. These conventions, rules, or customs are essential constituents of the type of action or conduct that is properly designated ‘giving.’ Consider the closely related example of A’s making a contract with C. “To say that A signs the document D and C signs the document D, no matter what the contents of that document, does not make a contract. The contract lies in the intent. And what is the intent? It is that certain conditional rules shall govern the conduct of A and of C” (1.475). As Rorty has shown, Peirce’s Thirdness anticipates Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and the application of rules that has played such a prominent role in analytic philosophy (Rorty 1961a). The most notable example of Thirdness is a sign. In one of his several definitions of “sign” he tells us that a sign is “anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former” (Peirce 1998, p. 493). Or again: “I will say that a sign is anything, of whatsoever mode of being, which mediates between an object and an interpretant; since it is both determined by the object relatively to the interpretant, and determines the interpretant in reference to the object, in such wise as to cause the interpretant to be determined by the object through the mediation of this ‘sign’ ” (Peirce 1998, p. 410).8 These are not the clearest statements, but what is crucial is that Peirce objected to any account of signs that restricts the analysis to the sign and the signified (a dyadic account). An adequate theory of signs must take account of the interpretant.9 (Peirce’s insistence on the triadic character of signs became the basis for Charles Morris’s introduction of the technical term ‘pragmatics,’ which he distinguished from semantics and syntax. Syntax is restricted to the formal relations of signs; semantics deals with the relations of signs and the objects that signify, but pragmatics makes essential reference to the use and interpretation of signs.)
Let us stand back and see what Peirce is showing us with the phenomenological application of his categorial scheme. Early modern empiricists assigned prominence to experience because the appeal to experience was taken to be vital for testing what we claim to know. Experience constrains and checks our fancies, prejudices, and speculations. When empiricist and phenomenalist philosophers became more concerned with the character of “sensations,” “impressions,” “sense data,” etc., the brute constraining force of experience tended to get obscured and neglected. But the insight that originally led philosophers to valorize experience – its brute compulsiveness – is what Peirce underscores with Secondness. Acknowledgment of this bruteness – the way in which experience “says NO!” – is required to make sense of the self-corrective character of inquiry and experimentation. Experiments must always finally be checked by experience. Peirce would have been repelled and horrified by Rorty’s claim that the only constraints upon us are “conversational constraints.” To speak in this manner is to ignore the facticity, the surprise, shock, and brute constraint of our experiential encounters.
One of the great dangers of the so-called “linguistic turn” is the way it keeps sliding into linguistic idealism, where there is nothing that constrains our language. When McDowell begins his Mind and World by describing the “interminable oscillation” between the appeal to the Given and a “frictionless coherentism,” he expresses the anxiety that there is nothing that really constrains or ties down our network of beliefs. When Habermas engages in a self-critique of his epistemic theory of truth, and is worried that even an “ideal justification” may fail to do justice to “realistic intuitions,” he is giving expression to the same philosophical anxiety (see chapter 8). When Popper criticizes the logical positivist appeal to verification and argues that falsification is essential for critical inquiry, he is reiterating Peirce’s point (see “Falsifiability,” in Popper 1959, pp. 57–73). Or again, when Gadamer shows how tragedy enriches our understanding of experience, he calls attention to the painful brute Secondness of experience. “[E]xperience is initially always experience of negation: something is not what we supposed it to be” (Gadamer 1989, p. 354).
Consider again McDowell’s description of the oscillation between the temptation to appeal to some version of the Given and the temptation to adopt some version of coherentism that loses contact with reality. I have already argued that most of the arguments that Sellars and others have presented to expose the Myth of the Given are anticipated in Peirce’s 1868–9 Cognition papers. So how does Peirce escape the “interminable oscillation” that McDowell takes to be endemic to modern philosophy? Peirce – like Wittgenstein, Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, Putnam, Habermas, Rorty, and Davidson – maintains that there is something irreducible about anything that we take to be epistemic.10 In Peirce’s scheme anything that is properly classified as epistemic exemplifies Thirdness. The epistemic authority of any cognitive claim is always – in principle – open to challenge, modification, revision, and even abandonment. One of the deepest and most pervasive confusions that gives rise to the Myth of the Given is the confusion of brute constraint and epistemic authority. This is the confusion of Secondness and Thirdness. There is an enormous temptation to confuse the fact that we are constrained (Secondness) with the claim that what constrains us has epistemic authority (Thirdness). This temptation gives rise to one of the most tenacious forms of the Myth of the Given – a Given that is supposed to serve as the epistemically authoritative foundation for empirical knowledge. Peirce even helps us to understand why it is so tempting to make this misleading identification. Secondness and Thirdness are distinguishable, but inseparable, elements or aspects of every phenomenon. Experience itself is not pure Secondness; it manifests elements of Firstness and Thirdness. We prescind the aspects of Firstness (quality), Secondness (brute compulsion), and Thirdness (the inferential or epistemic character) from experience.
Consequently, as soon as we raise the question, “What constrains us?” we are dealing with Thirdness. But there is nothing mysterious here. If we reflect again on Peirce’s examples of Secondness, we say that we experience shock, surprise, resistance, constraint. But as soon as we ask what precisely the character of this experience is and seek to describe what constrains us, we are dealing with an epistemic issue (Thirdness). There may be multiple descriptions that are, of course, fallible. The distinction that Peirce makes between the compulsion of Secondness and the epistemic authority of Thirdness is closely related to the distinction that Wittgenstein makes between causal and logical determination – a distinction taken up by many philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein. But Secondness and Thirdness do not line up with the familiar distinction between causes and reasons. Thirdness includes far more than reasons. Habits, conduct, and signs are all examples of Thirdness. Although many linguistic analytic philosophers appeal to the distinction between reasons and causes, they rarely provide a clear explication of what they mean by causes. Some conceptions of causality involve the type of constraint that Peirce singles out as Secondness, but there are many accounts of causality (for example, Humean regularity theories) that don’t involve constraint. Peirce himself argues that causality involves an appeal to laws. Consequently, causality involves Thirdness.
Peirce not only avoids the Myth of the Given and the aporias of linguistic idealism, he gives a nonfoundational account of experience that does justice to its brute compulsiveness and its epistemic openness and fallibility. His phenomenological account helps to undercut much of the sterile debate about realism and antirealism in contemporary philosophy. I don’t think we need anything more than Secondness to do justice to what philosophers call their “realistic intuitions.”11 We do not need to reify a realm of facts that exist independently of any language, thought, or inquiry. Peirce does justice to the fallibility and openness of all justificatory practices and inquiry without losing touch with a reality “that is independent of vagaries of me and you” (Peirce 1992, p. 52). Contrary to the prevailing prejudice that the linguistic turn displaces old-fashioned talk about experience, Peirce’s conception of experience helps us to escape from some of the dead-ends of the linguistic turn.12
James: The Varieties of Experience
Scholars of pragmatism debate the extent to which William James really understood Peirce. James publicly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Peirce. But when James tells us what he learned from Peirce, it is sometimes difficult to recognize the relation between “James’s Peirce” and what Peirce actually says. Reading their correspondence during their lifelong friendship is painfully moving. Despite Peirce’s sharp barbs and quixotic behavior, James always remained his loyal friend and supporter. (He created a fund to support Peirce at a time when he was barely earning any income.) And it is touching – almost pathetic – to witness how the isolated and lonely Peirce sought over and over again to “educate” his immensely popular and successful friend. Peirce thought that James made grave mistakes, and he patiently tried to correct them.13 James never quite grasps the point of Peirce’s categorical scheme; he simply doesn’t “get it.” But James is masterful in describing what Peirce calls Firstness – the qualitative immediacy of experience. If ever there was a philosopher who didn’t just talk about getting back to the “things themselves,” but showed us how to do it, it was William James. (James’s phenomenological descriptions earned the respect of Husserl and endeared him to many later phenomenologists.) There is also plenty of evidence that James was sensitive to the brute compulsiveness that Peirce took to be characteristic of Secondness. But James was tone deaf to what Peirce meant by Thirdness; and there is little evidence that he ever grasped the point of Peirce’s semiotics.
James sought to describe the variety of human experiences in all their thickness and fluid living quality. James complements Peirce, although there are also some sharp conflicts.14 I will limit myself to four aspects of James’s reflections on experience: (1) his critique of traditional empiricist accounts of experience; (2) his radical empiricist understanding of ‘pure experience’; (3) his pluralistic sense of the varieties of experience (including religious experience); and (4) his subtle interplay of language and experience.
(1) In his Principles of Psychology, James already criticized what he took to be the artificial and deeply misleading traditional empiricist accounts of experience. Experience does not consist of discrete atomic units that simply follow or are associated with each other. This is an intellectualist abstraction of philosophers, not an account of concrete experience as it is lived. James emphasizes the dynamic, flowing quality of the “stream of experience” – what he sometimes called the “muchness” and pluralistic variety of experience. Contrary to Hume and those influenced by him, James argued that we experience “relations,” “continuity,” and “connections” directly. We experience activity – its tensions, resistances, and tendencies. We feel “the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as [we feel] the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve” (James 1997, p. 282). He does not denigrate or underestimate the importance of our conceptual activity, but concepts are never quite adequate to capture the concreteness of experience. To say this is not to claim that there is something about experience that is in principle knowable, but that we cannot know. Rather, it is to affirm that there is more to experience than knowing. James criticizes the epistemological prejudice, which assumes that the only or primary role that experience plays in our lives is to provide us with knowledge. Paraphrasing Hamlet, James might well have said to his fellow philosophers: “There are more things in experience than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
(2) James characterizes his version of empiricism as “radical empiricism” and speaks of “pure experience.”15 As so frequently happens with James, he gives many different (not always consistent) descriptions of what he means by “radical empiricism.”16 Let us pursue a line of thought developed in his famous “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” There James declares:
To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. (James 1997, pp. 169–70)
James introduces his notion of “pure experience” and succinctly states his thesis:
My thesis is that we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material of the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ the knowing can easily be explained as a particular relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. (James 1997, p. 170)
What precisely does James mean by this striking claim? And what is his philosophical motivation for making this seemingly paradoxical assertion? Basically, James is rejecting the standard epistemological and ontological dichotomies: thoughts and things, consciousness and content, the mental and the physical. He is not denying that we make such distinctions, but they are functional and internal to “pure experience.” Against the idea of some sort of basic dualism, James writes:
Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition – the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds. (James 1997, p. 172)
Suppose we consider the example of the experience of a room with a desk and a book that I am reading. I may treat this in a commonsense manner where I think of it as a “collection of physical things cut out from the environing world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual and potential relations” (James 1997, p. 173). But I can also treat “those self-same things” as part of my subjective mental life – as part of my own biography. In effect, one and the same experience can function in two different narratives. So the same bit of experience may be part of the “reader’s personal biography” or part of the “history of which the room is part.”
The physical and mental operations form curiously incompatible groups. As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. … As your mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under attention’s eye. As a room, it will take an earthquake, or a gang of men, and in any case a certain amount of time to destroy it. As your subjective state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous play of your fancy will suffice. (James 1997, p. 174)
James expands his proposal in order to show that it is applicable to our concepts. Despite the initial attractiveness of James’s thesis about the double function of pure experience, there are many serious problems that he doesn’t squarely confront. When James asserts that “there is only one primal stuff or material of the world, a stuff of which everything is composed,” he invites all sorts of misunderstandings because this phrasing suggests that there is a monistic primal stuff – a claim that contradicts his pluralism. Bertrand Russell thought that the term ‘pure experience’ pointed “to a lingering influence of idealism.” “ ‘Experience,’ ” Russell claimed, “like ‘consciousness,’ must be a product, not part of the primary stuff of the world” (Russell 1949, p. 24). Although James asserts that one and the same bit of experience can be taken as physical and mental, objective and subjective, he doesn’t really explain why or how this comes about. He vividly indicates the characteristics that we normally associate with the physical features of a room and with our subjective awareness of a room – but this is not an explanation of the genesis of the two different narratives to which one and the same piece of experience belongs.
There are many questions that can be raised about James’s conception of ‘pure experience’; nevertheless, the problem he is struggling with is a difficult one – one that continues to preoccupy philosophers (even after the linguistic turn). James argues for an alternative to representational theories of mind – theories that presuppose that the mind has impressions or ideas that represent objects that are “outside of the mind.” These representative theories can take a variety of forms – Cartesian, Lockean, Humean, Kantian, neo-Kantian – but they all presuppose a dualism (ontological or epistemological) between the mental representation and what is represented. “Representative theories … violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and book immediately just as they are” (James 1997, p. 173). Normally, we take the room that we perceive to be one and the same as the room that actually (physically) exists.17
There is still another perspective for understanding “pure experience.” Whitehead was more perceptive than he realized when he claimed that “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” marks the end of an era that began with Descartes. It also marks the beginning of a new era – the decentering of the subject – a theme that has been in the foreground of linguistic poststructuralist thought in writers like Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard.18 James’s dismantling of the subject – the autonomous ego – anticipates the post-linguistic critiques of the philosophy of consciousness and subjectivity.
(3) Philosophers frequently focus on the advantages of making the linguistic turn, but they rarely take account of the losses. Rorty, for example, takes James and Dewey to be among his heroes, but as he tells the story of contemporary philosophy, he sees Quine, Sellars, and Davidson as advancing pragmatic themes precisely because of the philosophical finesse they have achieved by making the linguistic turn. The drawback is the shrinkage of what we consider to be a legitimate topic for philosophical investigation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way in which analytically trained philosophers have neglected any serious discussion of religious experience.19 Today, when the topic of religion has become so alive and pressing throughout the world, it is striking how little philosophers have to say about it. This was certainly not true for James. Throughout his career, James’s most central concern was religious experience – and it colors almost everything he wrote about pragmatism, radical experience, and free will. When James introduced the “principle of pragmatism” in 1898, he first applied it to confronting the question: “Is matter the producer of all things? Or is there a God too?” (James 1997, p. 350). Even before he introduced pragmatism, his early collection of philosophical articles contained his controversial essay, “The Will to Believe” (which he subsequently declared should have been more appropriately entitled “The Right to Believe”). But it was only with his Gifford Lectures (1901–2), subsequently published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, that James turned his full attention to exploring religious experience with enormous sensitivity and breadth.
To appreciate how James approaches religious experience, it is helpful to sketch his existential situation. James had many loyalties. We should never forget that he was a scientist. He attended medical school and studied medicine in Germany. He spent three years as an assistant to Louis Agassiz on a biological expedition along the Amazon River. His first position at Harvard was as instructor in anatomy and physiology. Even in his Principles of Psychology, he typically traces psychological functions back to their biological and neurobiological origins. He was a consistent defender of the Darwinian theory of evolution. He was a committed fallibilist; he hated all forms of dogmatism and fanaticism. James – perhaps, in part, due to his father’s influence – always felt that religious experience enhanced human life. For all his commitment to the rigorous demands of scientific inquiry, he had an almost visceral reaction to doctrines of reductive materialism, determinism, and scientism. For James there is no incompatibility between taking the canons of scientific inquiry seriously and responding in depth to religious and spiritual concerns.20 To be sure, he never had much interest in the communal or institutional aspects of religion. He was indifferent to theology; it left him cold. But he was also suspicious of philosophical “intellectualism” that failed to capture the vividness and variety of religious experiences. He did not approach the topic of religious experience dispassionately; it had deep personal significance for him – and he never denied this. Throughout his life he suffered from bouts of melancholic depression and was tempted to commit suicide. He felt that it was his personal religious experience that got him through these dark periods. James wanted to achieve two goals in his Varieties:
first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my class) “experience” against “philosophy” as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life – I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general laws of our destiny and the world’s meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that although all the manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean the creeds and theories) yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function. (James 1920, vol. 2, p. 127)21
Consequently, James identified with “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James 1920, pp. 31–2). The Varieties is rich in its detailed descriptions of the accounts of mystics, saints, born-again converts, and other “religious geniuses,” as James called them. James was drawn to the more extreme forms of religious feeling and expression because he felt that such limit cases helped to clarify more normal expressions of religious feeling. He was fascinated with what the subliminal, subconscious self contributes to religious experience. “James,” as Martin Jay comments “felt most warmly toward the religions that he saw as experimental, non-dogmatic, open-minded, and spiritually alive” (Jay 2005, p. 107, n. 100). Yet at the same time, James explored some of the darker and more intense religious experiences of the “sick soul” (which many have suggested is actually a description of his own intense suffering). The Varieties slights the epistemological and metaphysical questions that frequently preoccupy philosophers of religion. But there is a great lesson to be learned from James, which extends far beyond his description of religious experiences. Few philosophers before or after William James have been his equal in their ability to find language to describe the precise shading of the varieties of the full range of human experiences.
(4) Readers of James – especially philosophers – frequently have two extreme reactions to him. They detest him or love him. His style is charming, but charm is not normally a virtue that philosophers prize highly. Trying to pin down any of his key terms such as ‘experience’ or even ‘pragmatism’ is frustrating. At his best he reads like a virtuoso of belles-lettres and at his worst he is just fuzzy, vague, and superficial – or so his unsympathetic critics complain. He can’t be taken seriously as a philosopher. Many analytically trained philosophers who cherish clarity, precision, and rigorous argumentation take a dim view of James (although one of the most tough-minded, analytically trained philosophers, Hilary Putnam, has consistently argued that many of James’s arguments are sophisticated and subtle). For those who love him (philosophers and nonphilosophers), James’s style, wit, insouciance, and deflationary prose are extremely attractive. James brilliantly deflates grandiose philosophical pretensions, for he has the knack of vividly bringing us back to everyday experiences. James would have been unimpressed by the reasons that Gustav Bergmann gives for why philosophers should make the linguistic turn. He would have thought that it was downright perverse to advocate that philosophers limit themselves “to talk about the world by means of talking about a suitable language.” If James were alive today, he might have reminded Bergmann that Wittgenstein taught us that there are many varieties of description, oriented by different human purposes and interests. James did not develop a systematic “philosophy of language,” but he showed us (to use another Wittgensteinian expression) what language could do in the hands of a skillful stylist to elicit and describe the nuances of human experience.
Dewey: The Darwinian Naturalization of Hegel
Earlier I cited Rorty’s complaint that Dewey never developed a coherent account of experience that combines Hegel’s historicism with Darwinian naturalism. To the contrary, I believe that Rorty is mistaken. That is precisely what Dewey succeeded in doing – or so I want to argue. Dewey’s occasional vague talk about the meaning of experience should not keep us from appreciating his distinctive contribution. In my Prologue, I indicated that a source for the rich diversity of the classical pragmatists was their ability to draw upon different philosophical traditions. Dewey agreed with Hegel’s critique of the fragmented quality of modernity and the disintegrative ethical and political consequences of rampant individualism. This early appeal of Hegelianism is reflected in Dewey’s frequent use of organic metaphors and his reliance on the theory of the “social organism.” Dewey recognized that Hegel had left a permanent deposit on his thinking. In his 1930 autobiographical essay, he wrote:
I drifted away from Hegelianism in the next fifteen years; the word “drifting” expresses the slow and, for a long time, imperceptible character of the movement, though it does not convey the impression that there was an adequate cause for the change. Nevertheless I should never think of ignoring, much less denying, what an astute critic occasionally refers to as a novel discovery – that acquaintance with Hegel has left a permanent deposit in my thinking. The form, the schematism, of his system now seems to me artificial to the last degree. But in the content of his ideas there is often an extraordinary depth; in many of his analyses, taken out of their mechanical dialectical setting, an extraordinary acuteness. Were it possible for me to be a devotee to any system, I still should believe that there is greater richness and greater variety of insight in Hegel than in any other single systematic philosopher – though when I say this I exclude Plato, who still provides my favorite philosophic reading. (Dewey 1981, p. 8)
Nowhere is this “permanent deposit” more evident than in Dewey’s appropriation and transformation of the Hegelian concept of experience (Erfahrung). Dewey shows how Hegel’s insights into the rhythms of experience – its internal tensions and conflicts that give rise to a dynamic movement toward integration (Aufhebung) – take on more concrete experimental meaning when reformulated in the biological language of Darwin.22 The early fruits of this naturalized Hegelianism are evident in Dewey’s classic article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896). Dewey criticizes the notion (popular at the time) of a reflex arc that presupposes “rigid distinctions between sensations, thoughts and acts.” “The sensory stimulus is one thing, the central activity, standing for the idea, is another thing, and the motor discharge, standing for the act proper, is a third. As a result, the reflex arc is not a comprehensive, or organic, unity, but a patchwork of disjointed parts, mechanical conjunctions of unallied processes” (Dewey 1981, p. 137). We should replace this mechanical conception of the reflex arc with the idea of a dynamic coordination in which distinctions of sensory stimulus and motor response are changing functional phases within a unified circuit.
The circle is a co-ordination, some of whose members have come into conflict with each other. It is the temporary disintegration and need of reconstitution which occasions, which affords the genesis of, the conscious distinction into sensory stimulus on one side and motor response on the other. The stimulus is that phase of the forming co-ordination which represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response is that phase of one and the same forming co-ordination which gives the key to meeting these conditions, which serves as instrument in effecting the successful co-ordination. They are therefore strictly correlative and contemporaneous. (Dewey 1981, p. 147)
This early article contains the germ of Dewey’s conception of experience, which he elaborated and refined throughout his life.23 Experience has both spatial and temporal reach; it is neither purely “subjective” nor “objective,” neither “mental” nor “physical.” The language that Dewey uses to characterize this coordination is incorporated in the instrumental logic of inquiry that he was soon to develop: “conflict,” “problem,” “reconstitution.”
Like Peirce and James, Dewey is critical of traditional empiricist conceptions of experience (and for many of the same reasons).24 He also felt – as James had emphasized – that the obsession with epistemology in modern philosophy distorted our approach to experience. Dewey wanted to recover the viability of our ordinary ways of speaking about experience: for example, when we speak about an “experienced craftsman” or the “memorable experiences” of hearing a great performance of Beethoven’s last sonatas or having a fantastic meal at a Michelin three-star restaurant.
Inquiry typically arises from the conflicts and tensions within those experiences that are not primarily cognitive or reflective.25 These experiences “may contain knowledge resulting from prior inquiries … but not so that they dominate the situation and give it its peculiar flavor.”
Positively, anyone recognizes the difference between an experience of quenching thirst where the perception of water is a mere incident, and an experience of water where knowledge of what water is, is the controlling interest; or between the enjoyment of social converse among friends and a study deliberately made of the character of one of the participants; between aesthetic appreciation of a picture and an examination of it by a connoisseur to establish the artist, or by a dealer who has a commercial interest in determining its probable selling value. The distinction between the two types of experience is evident to anyone who will take the trouble to recall what he does most of the time when not engaged in meditation or inquiry. (Dewey 2007, p. 4)
To use a Heideggerian expression, our “being-in-the-world” consists of encounters and experiences that are not primarily “knowledge affairs.”
In the above passage, Dewey speaks of “an experience,” so the question arises, what is it that individuates an experience, what sets it apart from other experiences? “Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of [a] live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. … Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. There is distraction and dispersion” (Dewey 1981, p. 555). There may be a great variety of factors involved in an experience spanning stretches of space and time, but an experience is “saturated with a pervasive quality. Being ill with the grippe is an experience which includes an immense diversity of factors, but none the less is the one qualitatively unique experience which it is” (Dewey 2007, p. 6). Pervasive quality is close to Peirce’s Firstness. Like Peirce, Dewey emphasizes that these qualities are not “merely subjective”; pervasive quality is not to be “regarded as a subjective state injected into an object which does not possess it” (ibid.). When Dewey first introduces the idea of a pervasive quality that unifies an experience, he doesn’t refer to Peirce. But when Peirce’s Collected Papers were published in the 1930s, Dewey acknowledged the strong convergence of Peirce’s phenomenological description of Firstness with his notion of pervasive quality.26 Dewey illustrates what he means by indicating how inquiry emerges out of and against the background of an “indeterminate situation.” It is the situation itself that is “disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, confused, full of conflicting tendencies, obscure, etc.”
It is the situation that has these traits. We are doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful. Personal states of doubt that are not evoked by and are not relative to some existential situation are pathological. … Consequently, situations that are disturbed or troubled, confused or obscure, cannot be straightened out, cleared up and put in order, by manipulation of our personal states of mind. … The habit of disposing of the doubtful as if it belonged only to us rather than to the existential situation in which we are caught and implicated is an inheritance from subjectivistic psychology. The biological antecedent conditions of an unsettled situation are involved in that state of imbalance in organic-environmental interactions. … Restoration or integration can be effected … only by operations which actually modify existing conditions, not merely “mental” processes. (Dewey 1981, pp. 227–8)
Dewey approaches inquiry and knowing from the perspective of those experiences or indeterminate situations that become problematic for us. And what individuates a situation or an experience is its pervasive quality.27
When Dewey speaks of “an experience,” he highlights another important feature of experience. We can see the traces of a naturalized Hegel when Dewey writes:
For life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular rhythmic movement; each with its own unrepeated quality pervading it throughout. (Dewey 1981, p. 555)
In this rhythmic temporal development, experiences achieve fulfillment. Dewey calls this the consummatory or the aesthetic phase of experience. Interpreters of Dewey frequently neglect the importance of this consummatory phase of experience.28 But this consummatory aesthetic dimension can qualify any experience. “The enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum: slackness of loose ends: submission, tightness on the one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions” (ibid.). Solving a complex intellectual problem, or struggling with a complex moral or political dilemma, or creating a work of art, can all have their distinctive consummatory or aesthetic quality. Dewey’s approach to the emotional and aesthetic sense of fulfillment also has the utmost significance for his vision of creative democracy. Like the early Marx (and Hegel), Dewey was distressed by the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of so much of modern life. Dewey’s vision of the good society is aesthetic insofar as he calls for the type of education and social reform that can enrich experience – fund it with consummatory meaning. Speaking of Art as Experience, Robert Westbrook says that the book
was not incidental to the radical politics that absorbed Dewey in the 1930’s. Indeed, it was one of the most powerful statements of that politics, for it clearly indicated that his was not a radicalism directed solely to the material well-being of the American people but directed as well to the provision of consummatory experience that could be found only outside the circulation of commodities. (Westbrook 1991, pp. 401–2)29
I can now justify my claim that Rorty is mistaken when he suggests that Dewey never developed a coherent conception of experience – one that combines Darwinian naturalism and Hegelian historicism. There is a coherent theory of experience that is already evident in “The Reflex Arc Concept,” one that Dewey refined throughout his career. Inspired originally by Hegel, Dewey thoroughly naturalized his understanding of experience in light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Dewey also has an acute sense of the changing historical role of experience. Dewey illustrates how philosophy is conditioned by its cultural context in “An Empirical Survey of Empiricisms.” Dewey distinguishes “three historic conceptions of experience”: the first, formulated in classic antiquity; the second, characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century empiricisms; and the third, which is still in the process of developing (and with which Dewey identifies).
The Greek conception of experience (empeiria) “denotes the accumulation of the past, not merely the individual’s own past but the social past, transmitted through language and even more through apprenticeship in the various crafts, so far as this information was condensed in matter-of-fact generalizations about how to do certain things like building a house, making a statue, leading an army, or knowing what to expect under given circumstances” (Dewey 1960, pp. 71–2). Plato and Aristotle point out three great limitations of experience: empirical knowledge is contrasted with genuine scientific knowledge (epist
m); experience is dependent on practice, in contrast with the truly free character of rational thought; and experience is limited because it is closely connected with the body. This Greek conception of experience is “an honest empirical report.” “In short, the account given of experience was a correct statement of the conditions of [their] contemporary culture” (Dewey 1960, p. 78). The Greek philosophers were mistaken only insofar as they took this historical notion of experience to be the permanent account of experience. “The mistake involved in the philosophy of the period was in its assumption that the implications of a particular state of culture were eternal – a mistake that philosophers as well as others readily fall into” (ibid.).
If the experience of the time had been the measure of all possible, all future, experience I do not see how this conception of experience could be attacked. But the significant point to be borne in mind (one philosophers at the present period have little excuse for ignoring) is that subsequent developments show that experience is capable of incorporating rational control within itself. (Ibid.)
Dewey’s account of the Greek conception of experience is sensitive to the cultural context in which it was developed.30 So, too, Dewey emphasizes the historical significance of Locke’s conception of experience and its subsequent development in British empiricism through the nineteenth century. Like Peirce, Dewey notes that “what characterizes sensation and observation and hence experience, is, in Locke’s thought, their coerciveness. … Compulsion is the safeguard against the vagaries of fancy and accidents of conventional belief” (Dewey 1960, p. 80).
On the positive side, empiricism was thus an ideal, whether realized or not, associated with the eighteenth-century concept of progress and the opening up of vistas of the infinite perfectibility of humanity, when once the corruption that comes from bad institutions, political and ecclesiastical, had been done away with and education and rationality given a chance. (Dewey 1960, p. 83)
This appeal to experience originally served a critical function against prejudices. But it became evident that it failed to account for the active, experimental character of inquiry.
For all experiment involves regulated activity, directed by ideas, by thought. … Therefore it would seem that those ideas which function as theories and hypotheses in scientific experimentation and organization are not copies of sensations nor suggested by past experience, by past observation, but that they have a free, imaginative quality that no direct sensation or observation can have. (Dewey 1960, pp. 85–6)
Dewey concedes that the third concept of experience is still very much in the process of being articulated. But he underscores two of its key features. The first is the shift from antecedents to the consequences of ideas, hypotheses, and theories.
[T]he whole point of James’s philosophy, which comes out better in some chapters of his Psychology, I think, especially in the last chapter of the second volume, than in his lectures on Pragmatism, is that the value of ideas is independent of their origin, that it is a matter of their outcome as they are used in directing new observation and experiment. (Dewey 1960, p. 86)
The second is “the breakdown of the old introvert psychology and the development of a psychology having an objective basis, essentially a biological basis” (ibid.).31 Dewey self-consciously integrates a historical account of changing philosophical conceptions of experience with the lessons he has learned from Darwinian naturalism.
Experience and the Linguistic Turn Again
Before concluding, I want to return to the question of the linguistic turn. When did this turn originate? This is a badly formulated question, because everything depends on what we intend by the expression “linguistic turn.” Bergmann suggested that it began with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I suspect that many analytic philosophers would sharply disagree and give much more credit to the philosopher who inspired the early Wittgenstein, Frege. But if one thinks that the most important aspect of the linguistic turn is its hermeneutical dimension, then we would tell a different story that would give a prominent place to the contributions of Hamann, Humbolt and Herder, Dilthey and Gadamer.32 Still others, influenced by French “theory,” would date the linguistic turn from the poststructuralist critique of structuralism.
Habermas offers still another perspective on the “linguistic turn” when he distinguishes between representation and communication. He asserts that “even after the linguistic turn, the analytic mainstream held fast to the primacy of assertoric propositions and their representative function” (Habermas 2003, p. 3). Although Habermas thinks that the representational and communicative functions of language are equiprimordial and mutually presuppose each other, his major focus has been the communicative function of language.33 Habermas develops a subtle and complex communicative theory of action and rationality and offers an illuminating historical account of the paradigm shift that took place at the end of the nineteenth century from the philosophy of consciousness or subjectivity (that dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes) to a post-Hegelian intersubjective (social), dialogical paradigm of language and communication. As Habermas tells this story, a key figure in bringing about this paradigm shift was George Herbert Mead. This paradigm shift was anticipated in Peirce’s critique of a philosophy of subjectivity and in his intersubjective theory of signs. But it was Mead who sought to work out in detail an account of the genesis of language as a social phenomenon – a theory that brings out the continuity between nonhuman and human communication and also seeks to explain human symbolic communication. Mead is in basic agreement with Dewey’s account of experience. “The Reflex Arc Concept” was one of the sources of his own social psychology. Although Mead’s theory of the social communicative function of language leaves many difficult questions unresolved, Habermas and others have explored and further developed Mead’s basic insights. The following themes have been taken up and developed in original ways by philosophers working after the linguistic turn: the “conversations of gestures”; “the dialogical character of language”; “the generalized other”; “role taking”; the interplay of the “I and me”; “the social character of the self”; how human “subjectivity” emerges from symbolically mediated interaction; and how reciprocal linguistic perspective-taking is the basis for both ethics and the theory of radical democracy.34
By exploring the reflections on experience by the classical pragmatists, I hope to have undercut the sterile contrast that is sometimes drawn between experience and language. It is a slander to suggest that the pragmatic thinkers, who did so much to undermine all forms of foundationalism, were guilty of appealing to experience as some sort of foundation. I have urged that the dichotomy that is sometimes drawn between experience and language is just the sort of dichotomy that ought to be challenged from a pragmatic perspective. A “linguistic pragmatism” that doesn’t incorporate serious reflection about the role of experience in human life is impoverished in at least two serious ways. For it slides into linguistic idealism, which tends to lose contact with the everyday life world of human beings and fails to do justice to the ways in which experience (Secondness) constrains us. But even more seriously, linguistic pragmatism severely limits the range of human experience (historical, religious, moral, political, and aesthetic experience) that should be central to philosophical reflection. Philosophers working after “the linguistic turn” (no matter how it is defined) still have a great deal to learn about experience and language from Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead.
Notes
1 Rorty writes: “The phrase ‘the linguistic turn’ which Bergmann uses here and which I have used as the title of this anthology is, to the best of my knowledge, Bergmann’s own coinage” (Rorty 1967, p. 9).
2 See Martin Jay’s discussion of the debates concerning the role of experience and the linguistic turn by historians and feminists in Songs of Experience, especially his analysis of Joan W. Scott’s controversial critique of the appeal to experience (Jay 2005, pp. 249–55).
3 For an elucidation of what Rorty means by “vocabularies,” see Brandom 2000c.
4 The word ‘experience’ is not even listed in the index to Robert Brandom’s 741-page book, Making It Explicit (Brandom 1994). Even though Brandom closely identifies his pragmatic project with Hegel, he fails to see the philosophical importance of the concept of experience (Erfahrung), which plays such a prominent philosophical role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Martin Jay writes:
One of the most hotly contested issues in the revival of pragmatism, as it turned out, was the centrality of ‘experience’ to the tradition. For Rorty was bluntly outspoken in denying it importance. … [H]e argued against the way in which experience had functioned as a pseudo-solution, a kind of crypto-foundationalism for thinkers who lacked the courage to live without one. Changing the tune, Rorty implied, would not be enough to salvage the song of experience, which, he insisted, should be dropped from the repertory altogether. (Jay 2005, p. 302)
Jay provides an illuminating discussion of Rorty’s blunt dismissal of experience and the strong reaction that he provoked by defenders of classical pragmatism. See Jay 2005, pp. 299–311.
5 Cited by Richard Rorty in “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (Rorty 1982, p. 72).
6 John E. Smith, John McDermott, and Richard Shusterman, three of the best interpreters of the pragmatic tradition, have consistently stressed the centrality and the meaning of experience in the pragmatic tradition. See Smith 1963, 1970; McDermott 1976; and Shusterman 1992. Intellectual historians of the pragmatic tradition have sharply criticized Rorty’s distortions of the classical American pragmatists – especially Rorty’s “dismissal” of experience. See Westbrook 1991 and Kloppenberg 1986, 1998.
7 Peirce, as I have indicated, notes the close relation between his categorial scheme and that of Hegel, but he also expresses his strong differences with Hegel about qualitative presentness.
When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness. So far Hegel is quite right. Immediacy is his word. To say, however, that presentness, presentness as it is present, present presentness, is abstract, is Pure Being, is a falsity so glaring, that one can only say that Hegel’s theory that the abstract is more primitive than the concrete blinded his eyes to what stood before them. Go out under the blue dome of heaven and look at what is present as it appears to the artist’s eye. The poetic mood approaches the state in which the present appears as it is present. (5.44)
8 For Peirce’s explication of these definitions of a sign, see “Pragmatism,” in Peirce 1998, pp. 398–433.
9 Peirce discriminates several different types of interpretant. In one of his classifications, he distinguishes the immediate, dynamic, and final interpretants. It is the final logical interpretant that Peirce identifies with habits of conduct and is most relevant for his pragmatic maxim. See Peirce 1998, pp. 430–3.
10 I am using ‘epistemic’ in a broad sense to include not only knowledge but anything that can be thought.
11 Peirce’s understanding of realism is complex and changes over the course of his career. In “The Fixation of Belief” he writes: “There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them” (Peirce 1992, p. 120). He also rejected all forms of nominalism and argued for the reality of universals. When I claim that Secondness can account for what recent philosophers call their “realist intuitions,” I am limiting myself to Peirce’s claim that there are external (not just “conversational”) constraints upon what we can know empirically.
12 There is a common prejudice (shared by Bergmann) that the “linguistic turn” emerged with analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Linguists, anthropologists, and film theorists have been much more perceptive about the path-breaking significance of Peirce’s semiotics (his theory of signs), which is much broader and more inclusive than language. Long before Wittgenstein, Peirce wrote (1868):
[T]here is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, and taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the word homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself. (Peirce 1992, p. 54; emphasis added)
13 See, e.g., the excerpts of Peirce’s letters to James in Peirce 1998, pp. 492–502.
14 A major conflict that cuts through many issues is the conflict over realism and nominalism. Peirce strongly defended the thesis that universals and laws are real. He argued that his pragmaticism is about practices and conduct (which are general) and not actions (which are singular). James temperamentally and philosophically was thoroughly nominalistic.
15 Peirce was not happy with James’s notion of pure experience. In a letter dated 3 October 1904 he chided James and expressed his exasperation: “what you call ‘pure experience’ is not experience at all and certainly ought to have a name. It is downright bad morals so to misuse words, for it prevents philosophy from becoming a science” (8.302). This occasional remark epitomizes the sharp difference in temperament between Peirce and James. Peirce hoped that philosophy would finally become a true science, and consequently required a technical terminology; this is precisely what James most feared.
16 For a selection of some of James’s statements about radical empiricism, see James 1997, section III.
17 In different ways, Hilary Putnam and John McDowell, two contemporary philosophers who have made the linguistic turn, have sought to defend an understanding of perception and experience that has strong affinities with James’s understanding of “pure experience” insofar as they both deny that there is any ontological or epistemological gap between what we can perceive and what “there really is.” In this respect they both reject the alleged contrast (and conflict) that Wilfrid Sellars draws between the manifest and the scientific images of man. See “James’s Theory of Perception,” in Putnam 1990, pp. 232–51; and McDowell 1996, especially his second lecture, “The Unboundedness of the Conceptual.”
18 Martin Jay discusses this aspect of James’s project and notes its continuity with poststructuralist conceptions of experience. See “James and the Quest for Pure Experience” (pp. 272–86) and “The Poststructuralist Reconstitution of Experience: Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault” (pp. 361–400) in Jay 2005.
19 There are notable exceptions, especially philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, but even these thinkers have been concerned primarily with the linguistic and epistemological issues concerning religious faith and belief, rather than with the full range of religious experience.
20 David A. Hollinger speaks of James’s
anxiety about the fate of religion in an age of science that James frankly shared with most of the people who heard him lecture and bought his books during his lifetime. By taking this anxiety seriously, we can more easily discern … James’s center of gravity: A radically secular, naturalistic vision of the process by which knowledge is produced, and a hope that religiously satisfying knowledge might still be forthcoming if only enough people would bring to inquiry – and place at risk in it – their religious commitments. James wished to reform the culture of inquiry by enriching it with exactly those energies that were intimidated by the agnostics and positivists who announced themselves to be the true representatives of “science.” He sought to promote this reform exactly while developing the philosophical arguments we know as “radical empiricism,” “pluralism,” and “pragmatism.” (Hollinger 1985, pp. 3–4)
21 There is an extensive secondary literature dealing with The Varieties of Religious Experience, and more generally, with James’s reflections on religious experience. For a succinct account see Jay 2005, pp. 102–10. See also Taylor 2002 and Proudfoot (ed.) 2004.
22 See “The Influence of Darwinism and Philosophy,” in Dewey 1981.
23 See my discussion of “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” in Bernstein 1966a, pp. 14–21.
24 For Dewey’s fully developed critique of the empiricist conception of experience, see “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Dewey 1981, pp. 58–97. See also my discussion of this critique in Bernstein 1971, pp. 200–13.
25 Dewey makes it clear that there may be some reflection or inference in anything that we single out as a human experience. “All this is not to deny that some element of reflection or inference may be required in any situation to which the term ‘experience’ is applicable in any way which contrasts with, say, the ‘experience’ of an oyster or a growing bean vine. Men experience illness. What they experience is certainly something very different from an object of apprehension, yet it is quite possible that what makes an illness into a conscious experience is precisely the intellectual elements which intervene” (Dewey 2007, p. 5).
26 See Dewey’s essays “Peirce’s Theory of Quality” and “Qualitative Thought,” in Dewey 1960, pp. 199–210, 176–98.
27 See “The Pattern of Inquiry,” in Dewey 1981, pp. 223–39.
28 In my book, John Dewey, I discuss the centrality of the aesthetic dimension of experience for Dewey. See ch. 11, “The Artistic, The Esthetic and the Religious,” of Bernstein 1966a. See also Shusterman 1992; and Alexander 1987.
29 In A Common Faith Dewey examines the religious quality of experience. “Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value is religious in quality” (Dewey 1998, p. 410). For a discussion of Dewey’s (and other pragmatic) reflections on religion, see Bernstein 2005.
30 Martin Jay points out that although Dewey’s account of the classical Greek conception of experience is simplified, “it is still hard to deny a certain truth to Dewey’s characterization of the relatively modest role played by experience, however defined, in mainstream classical thought. … The legacy of Plato and Aristotle, with varying coherence and often eclectically combined with elements of non-Greek thought, dominated medieval philosophy” (Jay 2005, p. 17).
31 Dewey develops both of these points about the new experimental concept of experience in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Dewey 1981.
32 See Lafont 1999; and Jürgen Habermas, “Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy: Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn,” in Habermas 2003, pp. 51–82.
33 “[T]he pragmatic approach to language [Sprachpragmatik] helped me to develop a theory of communicative action and of rationality. It was the foundation for a critical theory of society and paved the way for a discourse-theoretic conception of morality, law, and democracy” (Habermas 2003, p. 1).
34 See Habermas, 1987b; and “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity,” in Habermas 1992, pp. 149–204; Tugendhat 1989; Joas 1985; Honneth 1996 and Aboulafia (ed.) 1991.