[MD] JTB

[david buchanan]

"James writes that we "glimpse things ‘on the wing’ so to speak—and only in flight" (WWJ 44). James continues in another place, "We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption" (qtd. P&P 26, WWJ 453)." [...]
"The poetics of transition," suits William James's "radical empiricism," which assumes "a pluralistic universe" and is mainly concerned with the connections and transitions between things or states, rather than the things themselves. Jamesian philosophy is all about how things "hang together" (James's emphasis WWJ 407). It is determined to account for "plain conjunctive experience," to insist that experience simply is conjunctive. "Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected," he writes (WWJ 212-3). "In passing from one of my own moments to another the sameness of object and interest is unbroken, and both earlier and the later experience are of things directly lived." He adds in "The World of Pure Experience," "There is no other nature, no other whatness than this absence of break and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of conjunctive relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong to the same self" (WWJ 198). For James, there is no subject/object distinction in experience; the terms should be heuristic only." (Alec Marsh in "The Poet as a Man of Action")


"With this we have the outlines of a philosophy of pure experience before us. At the outset of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy. In actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which bedding the substances, transcendental egos, or absolutes of other philosophies may be taken to stand. In radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement. Of course such a metaphor is misleading, for in actual experience the more substantive and the more transitive parts run into each other continuously; there is in general no separateness needing to be overcome by an external cement; and whatever separateness is actually experienced is not overcome. It stays and counts as separateness to the end. But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact that experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, cannot, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is 'of' the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past's continuation; it is 'of' the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it." (William James, "A World of Pure Experience," Essays in Radical Empiricism)