Stern R. Hegelian Metaphysics
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320 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness
flow of time; fourthly, each would have a quality, which would be a determination in
several respects, the color in hue, luminosity, chroma, and vividness; the sound in pitch,
timbre (itself highly complex), loudness and vividness; the delight more or less sensual,
more or less emotional, more or less elevated, etc., and fifthly, each would require a
physical substratum altogether disparate to the feeling itself.⁶⁶
However, Peirce responds to this objection by arguing that while in fact colours,
sounds and so on can be shown to be complex and interrelated in these ways, this
is not how they present themselves to us in experience, which is what matters for
the phenomenological c laim he is making:
But I point out to you that these things are only known to us by extraneous experience;
none of them are either seen in the color, heard in the sound, or felt in the visceral
sensation. Consequently, there can be no logical difficulty in supposing them to be absent,
and for my part, I encounter not the slightest psychological difficulty in doing so, either.
To suppose, for example, that there is a flow of time, or any degree of vividness, be it
high or low, seems to me quite as uncalled for as to suppose that there is freedom of the
press or a magnetic field.⁶⁷
We have seen, then, that Peirce feels entitled to claim that ‘a consciousness in
which there is no comparison, no relation, no recognized multiplicity ...,so
no change, no imagination of what is potentially there, no reflexion’ would not
be empty (as Hegel suggests) but could still contain an awareness of something
with ‘a simple positive character’, such as a red colour, an ache, or a whistle. As a
result, Peirce feels he can treat Hegel’s ontological holism with some scepticism:
for if qualities can be experienced by us in a monistic way (of if we can conceive
of so experiencing them), then this implies that they can also have a monadic
existence:
Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without
reference to anything else ....The typical ideas of firstness are qualities of feeling, or
mere appearances. The scarlet of your royal liveries, the quality itself, independently of
its being perceived or remembered, is an example ....The quality of red is not thought
of as belonging to you, or as attached to liveries. It is simply a peculiar positive possibility
regardless of anything else.⁶⁸
What Peirce seems to suggest here is that ‘qualities of feeling’ should not be
thought of in the relational way implied by Hegel’s use of the Spinozistic principle
⁶⁶ CP 1.305.
⁶⁷ Ibid. Cf. also MS 478: 145–6: ‘The first category is simply the phenomenon as it is present
in itself regardless of anything else. It therefore is absolutely simple and without parts; for parts
are different from one another, and no one is more identical with the whole than is another; so
tha[t] none is the whole; therefore to say that the present phenomenon has parts is to take into
consideration something other than itself. No doubt that the presentation as a fact has parts; but
this is considering it as a fact, which is just what it is not; for a fact is a dualistic abstraction’.
⁶⁸ CP 8.328–9, and Charles S. Hardwick (ed.), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence
between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby (Bloomington and London: Indiana University
Press, 1977), 24–5.
Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 321
‘all determination is negation’: for Peirce, what gives a quality its determination
is intrinsic to it, not its difference from anything else. We might put this point as
follows: for Peirce, it is not because red differs from blue that it is red; rather, it is
red ‘in its own right’, so to speak, just as ‘[t]he present is just what it is ...utterly
ignoring anything else’.⁶⁹ Peirce would thus seem to offer a position that is
strongly opposed to Hegel and his claim that ‘reality is quality, determinate
being; consequently, it contains the moment of the negative and is through this
alone the determinate being that it is’.⁷⁰ This, for Peirce, is to ignore the fact
that qualities have a ‘positive presentness’ of their own, which does not depend
on their relation of difference to anything else, just as they can be experienced by
consciousness ‘regardless of aught else’ in a similarly monadic way.
Underlying Peirce’s ontological position here, and perhaps motivating it in a
way that he does not make fully explicit, is certainly an important worry for the
Hegelian. The worry concerns the ultimate coherence of a holism founded on
Spinozistic determination principle, and is as follows: if, as Hegel seems to be
claiming, ‘only in virtue of what it is not, is any quality precisely what it is—or,
for that matter, anything at all’,⁷¹ then everything is dependent on its relation to
other things to be what it is; but, if everything is what it is by virtue of its relation
to something else, what sense does it make to think of them as relata standing
in relations, and thus what sense does it make to think of A as determined by its
difference from B, when neither have any intrinsic being or ‘Firstness’?⁷² And, if
everything is dependent for its being on something else, won’t the explanation of
the existence of any individual lead us round in a circle, and so leave the system
as a whole unexplained?⁷³
However, I want to suggest that while stated in this way, it may look as if
the disagreement between Peirce and Hegel over Firstness is clear, when looked
at more closely, there is perhaps less distance between them than may initially
appear. For, on the one hand, at the phenomenological level, Hegel seems to
allow that consciousness can have the kind of experience of immediacy that
⁶⁹ EP II, 150 (CP 5.44).
⁷⁰ Hegel, SL, 112 [Werke, V: 119]. Cf. also Hegel, PS,69[Werke, III: 95]: ‘...if the many
determinate properties were strictly indifferent to one another, if they were simply and solely self-
related, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate in so far as they differentiate
themselves from one another, and relate themselves to others as to their opposites’.
⁷¹ Errol E. Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (Lanham: University Press of America,
1983), 102.
⁷² This worry has recently been raised (and addressed) by Robert Brandom: see Tales of the
Mighty Dead (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 205: ‘...positing the property
as—understanding it just in terms of—mediation, exclusion, relation to others puts the relations in
place without yet providing the conceptual resources to make sense of the relata. This is essentially
the position I gestured at above, as threatening to leave us with no ultimately intelligible conception
of properties (facts, ‘‘forces,’’ etc.) as elements in a holistic relational structure articulated by relations
of determinate exclusion’. Cf. also ibid., 187–8.
⁷³ Cf. ibid., p. 205: ‘The conception of reciprocal sense dependence threatens to send us around
in (infinite!) circles, without making progress on determining the content of any of the senses we
run through. How are we to understand the whole thing as getting off the ground?’
322 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness
Peirce argues for in his examples; and at the ontological level, Peirce seems to
accept much of the force of Hegel’s holism.
Beginning with the phenomenological issue, although it is seldom recognized,
I think it is clear that Hegel would have accepted that an experience of the kind
Peirce identifies in his examples is possible, and forms an aspect of consciousness.
In the discussion of ‘sensuous consciousness’ (das sinnliche Bewußtsein)inthe
third book of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, The Philosophy of
Mind (which parallels his discussion of sense-certainty [die sinnliche Gewißheit]
in the Phenomenology), Hegel makes plain that this is in fact what the most basic
form of consciousness amounts to, offering an account of it similar in many ways
to Peirce’s description of Firstness:
[Sensuous consciousness] is distinguished from the other modes of consciousness [i.e.
perception and the understanding], not by the fact that in it alone the object is given to
us by the senses, but rather by the fact that at this stage the object, whether inner or outer,
has no other thought-determination than first, that of simply being, and secondly, of
being an independent Other over against me, something reflected into itself, an individual
confronting me as an individual, an immediate ....[F]or sensuous consciousness as such
only the said thought-determination remains, in virtue of which the manifold particular
content of sensations concentrates itself into a unity that is outside of me, a unity which
at this stage is known by me in an immediate, isolated manner. It enters my consciousness
randomly, and then disappears out of it again. To me it is therefore something which,
with regard to both its existence and its constitution, is simply given, so that I know
nothing of whence it comes, why it has this specific nature, or whether it is something
true.⁷⁴
In characterizing sensuous consciousness as a ‘mode’ of consciousness, as a form
consciousness can take, Hegel is acknowledging that this is a way that we can
experience the world, rather than arguing (as Peirce suggests) that experience must
always be complex and mediated, so that sensuous consciousness must always
be empty. I therefore do not think that Hegel would deny that the examples
that Peirce offers to illustrate our experience of ‘presentness’ or Firstness are
possibilities for us: on the contrary, it is something very like such experiences
which Hegel thinks we can have at the level of sensuous consciousness.⁷⁵
⁷⁴ Hegel, EM, §418Z, 160 (trans. modified) [Werke, X: 209].
⁷⁵ It might be pointed out, however, that Hegel’s account of sensuous consciousness just
cited does not exactly correspond to Peirce’s characterization of Firstness, in so far as sensuous
consciousness involves a self/object distinction, in a way that Firstness does not. However, in earlier
discussions in the ‘Anthropology’ section of the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel seems quite happy to
allow that there can be modes of ‘purely sensitive life’ that lack even this distinction: see e.g.
Hegel, EM, §406, 105 [Werke, X: 138]: ‘The purely sensitive life [das Gef
¨
uhlsleben] ...is just this
form of immediacy without any distinctions between subjective and objective, between intelligent
personality and objective world’; ibid., §400Z, 75, trans. modified [Werke, X: 100]: ‘...the soul to
the extent that it only feels [empfindet], does not yet grasp itself as a subject confronting an object’;
and ibid., §402Z, 90 [Werke, X: 119]: ‘The simple unity of the soul, its serene ideality, does not yet
grasp itself in its distinction from an external world’.
Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 323
It is understandable, however, that Peirce thought otherwise. For Peirce
focused, like many readers of Hegel, not on the discussion of sensuous con-
sciousness in the Philosophy of Mind, but on the discussion of sense-certainty
in the Phenomenology of Spirit; and there (as we have seen) Hegel may indeed
appear to be saying that consciousness involves no awareness of ‘the present in its
direct positive presentness’, because the outlook of sense-certainty is incoherent.
However, it is important to recognize that the incoherence Hegel is concerned
with here is of a particular sort, namely the claim by sensuous consciousness to be
‘the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth ...[and]
the truest knowledge’.⁷⁶ Thus, in criticizing sensuous consciousness under the
heading of sense-certainty, Hegel is claiming not that no such consciousness is
possible, but rather just that it is epistemologically impoverished, and fails to live
up to its cognitive billing. For it claims to give us a rich knowledge of things in
their individuality, but it in fact does no such thing—and Hegel’s point about
the ineffability of sense-certainty is designed to make this point clear. Hegel can
therefore accept the Peircean claim, that sensuous consciousness is capable of
giving us an awareness of ‘presentness as it is present’, while insisting on what
appears to be his main contention, that such an awareness is not sufficient to give
us much by way of knowledge, so that sensuous consciousness can hardly claim
to be a cognitive standpoint of ‘infinite wealth’.⁷⁷
Now, of course, it could be suggested that Hegel’s argument against sensuous
consciousness here is flawed, and that this form of consciousness would not
merely give an awareness of ‘being in general’, but of individuals qua individuals,
just as it claims. However, I do not think Peirce himself can press any such
argument: for he seems to agree with Hegel that Firstness is an experience of sheer
‘presentness’, not of any individuality with criteria of identity over time, and for
this Secondness and Thirdness are required. Thus, Peirce writes: ‘Individuality
is another conception in which Secondness is the more prominent element,
although Firstness, of course, is a constituent of it. It is the Firstness of a most
genuine Second’;⁷⁸ and goes on to comment:
The conception of a First, improperly called an ‘object,’ and of a Second should be carefully
distinguished from those of Firstness and Secondness, both of which are involved in the
conception of First and Second. A First is something to which (or, more accurately, to
some substitute for which, thus introducing Thirdness) attention may be directed. It thus
⁷⁶ Hegel, PS,58[Werke, III: 82]. Cf. Shapiro, ‘Peirce’s Critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology and
Dialectic’, 271: ‘Hegel’s intent [in the analysis of sense-certainty in the Phenomenology]isnotto
describe immediacy as a general form of consciousness ...but to consider whether the consciousness
of immediacy is at the same time a valid cognitive stance ....In so far as Hegel has a general
phenomenology in Peirce’s sense, it is part of his philosophy of subjective mind, and there he does
recognize a ‘‘monadic’’ state of ‘‘sensitive awareness’’ analogous to Peircean Firstness ...’.
⁷⁷ Cf. Hegel, EM, §418Z, 160 [Werke,X:207–8]andEL, §§72–4, 120–1 [Werke, VIII:
162–4], where Hegel emphasizes not that a sensuous consciousness or ‘immediate knowing’ of God
would be impossible, but that it would be cognitively very impoverished.
⁷⁸ EP II, 271.
324 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness
involves Secondness as well as Firstness; while a Second is a First considered as (here comes
Thirdness) a subject of a Secondness. An object in the proper sense is a Second.⁷⁹
As Peirce makes clear, in his own terminology, Firstness or ‘presentness’ is not a
category that includes individuals: thus, while ‘[w]e can suppose a being whose
whole life consists in one unvarying feeling of redness’,⁸⁰ that being would not
have any awareness of individual entities, which is precisely the kind of limitation
Hegel attributes to sensuous consciousness, and which he wants us to recognize
in the transition to perception. Once again, therefore, there seems little reason
to separate Peirce and Hegel on this question.
Moreover, in a manner that also resembles Hegel’s position, Peirce’s phe-
nomenological account also in the end moves away from giving undue privilege
to Firstness, in his suggestion that what he calls the ‘phaneron’ (namely, what
presents itself in consciousness)⁸¹ is to be viewed in terms of all three categories,
not just Firstness:
What room, then, is there for secundans and tertians? Was there some mistake in our
demonstration that they must also have their place in the phaneron? No, there was no
mistake. I said that the phaneron is made up entirely of qualities of feeling as truly as
space is entirely made up of points. There is a certain protoidal aspect—I coin the word
for the need—under which space is truly made up of nothing but points. Yet it is certain
that no collection of points—using the word collection to mean merely a plural, without
the idea of objects being brought together—no collection of points, no matter how
abnumerable its multitude, can in itself constitute space ....⁸²
Thus, while Peirce’s commitment to Firstness may suggest a commitment to
the possibility of phenomenological atomism in contrast to Hegel’s holism, in
the end this commitment is softened by Peirce’s willingness to give a role to
Secondness and Thirdness at this level too, in a way that parallels Hegel’s move
from sensuous consciousness, to perception, to the understanding. Thus, as has
been noted by other commentators, Peirce himself arguably in the end gives
Firstness no great ‘independence’,⁸³ and for reasons that are akin to Hegel’s.
Turning now to the ontological issue, here it is Peirce who can be drawn closer
to Hegel, once it is recognized that the ontological status he gives to Firstness
as a ‘mode of being’ is rather thinner than it may initially have appeared. Thus,
Peirce states that Firstness ‘can only be a possibility’, on the grounds that ‘as
long as things do not act upon one another there is no sense or meaning in
⁷⁹ EP II, 271, n. Cf. also CP 6.375; CP 7.528; CP 6.340. ⁸⁰ EP II, 270.
⁸¹ Cf. CP 1.284: ‘[B]y the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any
sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not’.
⁸² CP 1.319.
⁸³ Cf.JohnF.Boler,Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1963), 122–3: ‘[Firstness] is certainly the least clear of the categories, and the one that
receives the least attention. To some extent this is due to the predominance of thirdness in Peirce’s
treatment: almost any act of the mind leads so immediately to thirdness ...that the priority of
firstness is not only left behind, but begins to seem unimportant’.
Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 325
saying that they have a being, unless it be that they are such in themselves that
they may perhaps come into relations with others’;⁸⁴ and that ‘The being of
a monadic quality is mere potentiality, without existence. Existence is purely
dyadic’;⁸⁵ and that:
We see that the idea of a quality is the idea of a phenomenon or partial phenomenon
considered as a monad, without reference to its parts or components and without reference
to anything else. We must not consider whether it exists, or is only imaginary, because
existence depends on its subject having a place in the general system of the universe. An
element separated from everything else and in no world but itself, may be said, when we
come to reflect on it in isolation, to be merely potential.⁸⁶
Now, this talk by Peirce of Firstness in terms of ‘possibility’ or ‘potentiality’
has puzzled commentators. So, for example, Thomas Goudge conjectures that
Peirce may mean that a universal property (e.g. redness) is a potentiality because
it may be instantiated in many things, or that it is a material potentiality or
power;⁸⁷ but he confesses that ‘[n]either of [these] interpretations seems to me
compatible with what Peirce had previously said about Firstness’.⁸⁸ However,
taken in the context of the debate with Hegel, Peirce’s remarks become clearer.
For, it seems that he is claiming that while Hegel is wrong to think that Firstness
has no ontological status (where to Hegel, the ‘empty abstraction of pure being’
he attributes to the ‘This’ of sense-certainty is equivalent to ‘nothing’), Hegel
is right to think that Firstness does not have the rich ontological status of
existence:⁸⁹ it therefore has being for Peirce, but only in the way that possibility
or potentiality has being, not in the way that a realized actuality does. This does
not make the difference between Hegel and Peirce negligible (and relates to what
Peirce sees as his disagreement with Hegel over the latter’s neglect for possibility
over actuality);⁹⁰ but it arguably reduces the difference between them, in so far
as both agree that as far as what exists is concerned, something like Hegel’s
relational picture holds.
It is also notable that while Peirce recognizes the apparent difficulty for such
a relational picture mentioned above, he holds that this difficulty is no reason
to put this picture aside, where the problem is that if everything is dependent
on its relation to something else, won’t the explanation of the existence of any
individual lead us round in a circle, thus leaving the totality unexplained?:
A thing without opposition ipso facto does not exist. Of course the question arises, if
everything that exists exists by its reactions, how does the total collection of things exist?
⁸⁴ CP 1.25. ⁸⁵ CP 1.328.
⁸⁶ CP 1.424. Cf. also CP 1.351; CP 1.432; CP 1.457; CP 1.461; CP 5.429; CP 6.342.
⁸⁷ Thomas A. Goudge, The Thought of C. S. Peirce ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1950), 86–7.
⁸⁸ Ibid. ⁸⁹ See CP 6.349 for Peirce’s distinction between existence, reality, and being.
⁹⁰ Cf. CP 8.126: ‘This makes an apparent difficulty for [Hegel’s] idealism. For if all reality is of
the nature of an actual idea, there seems to be no room for possibility or for any lower mode than
actuality, among the categories of being’.
326 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness
This is a legitimate and valuable question, the answer to which brings out a new idea. But
this is not the time to consider it ....That question about the totality of things throws
no doubt upon the manifest truth that existence lies in opposition.⁹¹
IV
In the final analysis, then, Peirce and Hegel can be brought closer together than
may at first have appeared; and on reflection this is not so surprising. For, as
Peirce himself saw, by treating Firstness as part of a t riad of categories alongside
Secondness and Thirdness, his outlook is close to Hegel’s and provides grounds
for a ‘hearty friendship’ between them. Once it is recognized that on the one
hand, Hegel’s commitment to Thirdness is not meant to ‘do away with’ Firstness
(or Secondness), and on the other that to bring in Secondness and Thirdness,
Peirce cannot make Firstness too ‘independent’ of the other categories, then
a convergence is to be expected. We have seen, then, that Peirce’s critique
of Hegel on Firstness is somewhat elusive. For, while it raises certain critical
issues for Hegel, it is not clear how far Peirce can really make those issues into
genuine points of disagreement, given the broader similarities between Hegel and
himself on questions concerning the categories, the nature of knowledge, and
the metaphysical background to these positions. Nonetheless, we have seen how
working through these questions sheds light on the views of both these thinkers,
and the nature of the relation between them.⁹²
⁹¹ CP 1.457.
⁹² Versions of this paper were given in departmental seminars at the Universities of Southampton
and Stirling, and I am grateful to those who made comments on these occasions. I am also particularly
grateful to Christopher Hookway for his encouragement and suggestions, as well as to Paul Redding
and Karl Ameriks. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, for funding the research leave during which this paper was written.
11
James and Bradley on the Limits of Human
Understanding
In trying to reach some view regarding the philosophical exchanges that went on
between F. H. Bradley and William James at the turn of the century,¹ it is in some
respects tempting to endorse Bradley’s view that ‘our differences may perhaps on
the whole be small when compared with the extent of our agreement’.² Indeed,
in most of the articles, letters and books in which the debate between these two
men was carried on, one finds the protagonists claiming to be mystified as to
the grounds of the dispute, and to see no great distinction in their respective
outlooks.
And yet at the same time there is something disingenuous about these
protestations. The true position is in fact captured in a metaphor used by both
Bradley and James to describe their relationship, namely that of fellow travellers
along a road, who then part company when the road sharply divides.³ In this paper
I will argue that while James and Bradley share a distrust of the conceptual aspect
of thought,⁴ and with this a belief in the limitedness of the human understanding,
this idea plays a very different role in their respective philosophical outlooks,
James developing it in the context of pragmatic humanism, Bradley against
the background of intellectualist rationalism. I will claim that their similarities
notwithstanding, the dispute between James and Bradley represents a clash
between what Edward Craig has termed the ‘Practice Ideal’ and t he ‘Insight
Ideal’,⁵ and constitutes an important phase in the eclipse of the latter by the
former, and thus in the emergence of the philosophical Weltbild of the twentieth
century. I will begin by outlining the central area of agreement between James
and Bradley, and will then go on to argue that despite this, a fundamental
¹ For a list of relevant works by James and Bradley, see below, n. 45.
² Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 241, n.
³ See, for example, Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 234–5 and James, ‘Bradley or Bergson?’.
⁴ For an insightful discussion of this issue, see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 273–372.
⁵ Edward Craig, TheMindofGodandTheWorksofMan(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 13–68 and 223–81.
328 James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding
difference in Weltanschauung meant that their paths could never do anything
other than diverge.
I
In order to grasp the extent and nature of the common ground between James and
Bradley, it is necessary to begin with the former’s doctrine of radical empiricism.
In the Preface to The Meaning of Truth, James outlines the three central claims
of radical empiricism as follows:
Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of
a generalized conclusion.
The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall
be definable in terms drawn from experience. [Things of an unexperienceable nature may
exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.]
The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as
disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor
less so, than the things themselves.
The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from
next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended
universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses
in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.⁶
While the postulate as it stands is not unorthodox, it is on the statement of fact
and the generalized conclusion that James bases his claim to being an empiricist
of a radical nature. In outline, his position is that only a form of empiricism which
abandons the traditional assumption that the content of experience is atomistic
can avoid slipping into a K antian idealism, which treats the unity of experience
as grounded in a ‘trans-empiricial connective support’, i.e. a synthesizing subject.
Unless the relatedness of experience is taken as given, therefore, the battle against
idealist rationalism will be lost:
The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the rooted rationalist
belief that experience as immediately given is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that
to make one world out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there. In
the prevalent idealism this agency is represented as the absolute all-witness which ‘relates’
things together by throwing ‘categories’ over them like a net.⁷
James saw that traditional empiricism, beginning from the assumption that
experience is made up of discrete sensory elements, played into the hands of
⁶ James, ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘The Meaning of Truth’, 172–3[6–7]. ⁷ Ibid., 173 [7].
James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding 329
this Kantian idealism, and that the latter could only be undermined if that
assumption was given up.⁸
James’s strategy here is well conceived: he seems to be correct in seeing a direct
conceptual link between the atomism of Locke or Hume and the emergence
of Kantian idealism. As I have argued elsewhere,⁹ in order to understand the
evolution of Kant’s doctrine of synthesis, it is first necessary to see how he
inherited an atomistic conception of experience from Locke and Hume, and an
idealistic account of relations from Leibniz. James sets out to block this move
towards Kantianism and away from empiricism by radicalizing the latter, to the
extent that he takes the relatedness of experience to be inherent and so free of
any synthesizing subject.
James does not deny that traditional empiricists recognized some relations in
experience: but, he argues, they were mainly disjunctive rather than conjunctive,
and relations of the latter sort were treated as external. Against this limited
conception of relations, James argues that much stronger conjunctive relations
can be found, for example within the stream of consciousness. His claim here is
that in this case we have direct experience of relatedness given in the continuity
of thought: there is no need, therefore, to postulate any substantial ego or
transcendental subject to ‘ground’ or account for this unity.¹⁰ Jamesarguesthat
it was only the atomism of the Humean ‘bundle’ theory of the self that made
anything like a ‘substratum’ or Kantian view seem plausible: once the relatedness
of consciousness is taken as given, the temptation to make such a philosophical
move evaporates.
Moreover, seen in the context of James’s neutral monism, according to which
the world of material objects is constructed out of pure experiences, which are
themselves neither mental nor physical, James can then insist that these pure
experiences are equally interrelated and continuous:
‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes,
or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have
an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what,tho
ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that
don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and
no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught.¹¹
In treating the basic constructional material as fundamentally continuous in
this way, James argues that the process of construction will involve jointing up
⁸ Cf. also James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 22–3.
⁹ For further details, see my Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object (London: Routledge,
1990), 7–29.
¹⁰ Cf. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 23–7. ¹¹ Ibid., 46.