Experience in the West
For the layers of impossibility to share anybody’s experience see Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in The Philosophical Review 83/4 (1974) 435 – 450.
For the history and importance of the exhortation to save the phenomena see the classic account by Pierre Duhem, To save the phenomena, an essay on the idea of physical theory from Plato to Galileo, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1969.
For an overview over Western philosophical approaches to experience see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience. Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme., Berkeley: University of California Press 2005. Jay’s valuable and extremely well researched and structured account is exclusively focused on Western philosophical concepts. Andrea Tagliapietra, Esperienza. Filosofia e storia di un’ idea, Milano: Raffaello Cortina 2017 is especially interesting when he discusses the ancient Greek antecedents of the modern problem of experience, as well as the relation of experience to narrative and he, too ends with William James, though he does not discuss non-Western ideas of experience. Both Jay and Tagliapietra have chapters on Walter Benjamin. For an analysis of Benjamin’s position – and of the role of experience in “revolutionary” philosophies in the shadow of the Great War – see Peter Fenves, “Pure Knowledge and the Continuity of Experience” in P. F., The Messianic Reduction. Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011, 152 – 186.
For the transition from physics to metaphysics in Aristotle’s Physics see Walter Bröcker, Aristoteles, Frankfurt / M.: Klostermann 1987, 272 – 280. For the Leibniz – Clarke (Newton) correspondence see Ezio Vailati, Leibniz and Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997, esp. 165 – 192.
For a most ‘optimistic’ interpretation of David Hume, see Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, New York City: Columbia University Press 2001. Deleuze emphasizes the role fiction plays in the constitution of subjectivity, much like Nāgārjuna, as we will see later. The lovely phrase “ghosts of departed quantities” is from George Berkeley’s assault on what he believed to be the trickery of infinitesimal calculus in The Analyst (1734)< https://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Berkeley/Analyst/Analyst.pdf>, 18. For the emergence of mathematical certainty in physical science – the possibility of which Kant thought he had to demonstrate – see Alan Shapiro, “Experiment and Mathematics in Newton’s Theory of Color,” in Newton. Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries (ed. I.B. Cohen, Richard Westfall), New York / London: Norton 1995, 191 – 202. The progressive mathematization of physics coincides with the rise and ultimate supremacy of Newtonian science; see Peter Dear, “Mathematics challenges Philosophy: Galileo, Kepler, and the Mathematical Practitioners” in P.D., Revolutionizing the Sciences, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009, 64 – 78.
Certainty has been the subject of some of the most celebrated works in the history of science, notably Alexandre Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1968, and Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, Cambridge: MIT Press 1989. Philosophically, it formed the core of concerns for the development of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1970 and of John Dewey’s pragmatism in The Quest for Certainty, New York: Minton 1929. For Newton’s theory and practice of experiments see Newton, 147 – 164. The great opponent of Newton’s experiments was Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who went so far as to liken Newton’s ‘crucial’ experiments (experimentum crucis) to the crucifixion of nature; see Joel Lande, “Acquaintance with Color: Prolegomena to a Study of Goethe’s Theory of Color” in Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016), 143 – 169.
For the similarities between Kant’s Transcendental Dialectics and the Buddha’s refusal to address unanswerable questions see “Translators’ Introduction” in Introduction to the Middle Way. Chandrakirti’s Madhyamakāvatāra with Commentary by Jamgön Mipham. Boulder: Shambala Publications 2004, 5 – 12. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and its ‘highest point’ can be found in Immanuel Kant, Critique of pure reason (ed. & transl. Paul Guyer and Alan Wood), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, 246 (B 132) and 247 fn. A classic account of Kant’s arguments for the transcendental anchoring of knowledge is given by Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense, New Haven: Yale University Press 1983, especially 81 – 114, and, on the other end of the spectrum, by Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985.
Kant’s aversion to psychological introspection is directed not against the tradition of Montaigne but against so-called ‘rational’ psychologists who tried to demonstrate the immortality of the soul from concepts; see Gary Hatfield, “Empirical, rational, and transcendental psychology: Psychology as science and as philosophy” in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992, 200 – 227. Kant’s popular and late writings are full of psychological wisdom and curious observations. His The Conflict of the Faculties (New York City: Abaris 1979, 199) contains self-observations, for example “On Pathological Feelings that Come from Thinking at Unsuitable Times,” that would fit right into Tibetan meditation manuals.
For the transition from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel see Eckart Förster’s The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2017; for the rapid succession of antagonistic systems from the early 1790s to the 1820s see Rolf Peter Horstmann, “The early philosophy of Fichte and Schelling,” in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000, 117 – 140. The editor’s introduction to this volume (1 – 17) is extremely valuable. Schelling’s surprising use of “Deconstruktion” is in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, „Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie,” in Manfred Schröter (ed.), Schellings Werke, Munich: Beck 1927, vol. 3, 66.
For Hegel’s concept of experience see Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, London: HarperCollins 1989. For an overview over Hegel’s project see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989 (and everything else Pippin has written about Hegel); for a lucid guide through the Phenomenology see Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford Guides to Philosophy), Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023. For the importance of German Universities for the US see Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, Chad Wellmon (eds.) The Rise of the Research University. A Sourcebook, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2017. A famous case study of the collective change of experience in the industrial age is Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press 2014. For Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Emerson, see Benedetta Zavatta, Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche reads Emerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019, xiii – xx. The Sanskrit word for middle (and waist) is mādhya, the syllable ma indicates the elative (ka is the adjective ending); mādhyamaka thus means ‘middlemost,’ itself a typically self-effacing concept.
Buddhism and Experience
For the history of Buddhism see Donald S. Lopez Jr, The Story of Buddhism. A Concise Guide to its History and Teachings, New York City: HaperCollins 2009. For the centrality of experience to Buddhism – so central that there isn’t a special term that would differentiate it from other faculties – see John Holder (ed.), Early Buddhist Discourses, Indianapolis: Hackett 2006, xii – xiii; the book also gives a good impression of how these early discourses ‘sounded’, and how different, in comparison, the MMK are. For the Western misunderstanding of Buddhism as a philosophy of Nothing and Nihilism see Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness. The Philosophers and the Buddha, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2003. For a decluttering of the Buddha’s biography see Bernard Faure, Les Mille Et Une Vies Du Bouddha, Paris: Seuil 2018.
For my understanding of the MMK, I have consulted three editions/commentaries: 1) Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura, Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way, Boston: Wisdom Publications 2013, which gives a transliteration of the Sanskrit original, an English translation, as well as a commentary. The translation is not undisputed; see Claus Oetke, “Review Article on: M. Siderits and S. Katsura (eds.), Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā”, Acta Orientalia LXXVI (2015), 190 – 243. 2) Jay Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995; Garfield translates from the Tibetan text and provides important continuous commentary. Garfield may be the most influential interpreter of Nāgārjuna in the US and has a significant YouTube presence. Two of his essays are particularly important: ”Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Nāgārjuna Start with Causation?” in Philosophy East and West 44/2 (1994), 219 – 250, and Jay Garfield and Graham Priest, “Mountains are Just Mountains”, in Mario D'Amato, Jay L. Garfield & Tom J. F. Tillemans (eds.), Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 71—82. 3) Emanuela Magno, Nāgārjuna. Logica, dialettica e soteriologia, Mimesis: Milano 2012. Magno, who includes a transliteration and Italian translation, is interested in Nāgārjuna’s relation to the history of Western logic, and in the soteriological consequences of the emptiness of emptiness. One of her main interlocutors is Guy Bugault, whose immensely interesting L’Inde pense-t-elle? (Paris: PUF 1994) gives an overview over the main currents of Indian philosophy and their reception in the West before concentrating on the MMK. Magno and Bugault set Nāgārjuna’s logic against the background of Western, more precisely Aristotelian, logic and its rules and exclusions.
Neither of them goes as far, however, as Lutz Geldsetzer, who in Nāgārjuna, Die Lehre von der Mitte, Hamburg: Meiner 2010 translates Nāgārjuna into German from a 5th century AD Chinese translation and claims that Nāgārjuna (most obviously in MMK 1.1) is responding directly to Aristotle’s theory of the four aitiai. Appealing though this line of interpretation might be – Geldsetzer basically argues that Nāgārjuna abolishes three of the Aristotelian causes but keeps the causa formalis, which would align it with the aesthetic reading I am proposing – it has come under withering criticism by Claus Oetke, “Review of: Geldsetzer, Lutz. Nāgārjuna” in Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 107 (2012) 304 – 309. An interesting comparative study of Aristotle and Nāgārjuna could begin with the relation of the four causes to the four noble truths and follow their different paths from that intersection.
Two books by Jan Westerhoff were very helpful for my understanding of Nāgārjuna: a monograph on the MMK(Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka. A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and a broader overview, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023.
For Nāgārjuna’s use of the fourfold rejection (catuskoti) see David Seyfort Ruegg, “The Uses of the Four Positions of the Catuskoti and the Problem of the Description of Reality in Mahāyāna Buddhism” in his The Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle: Essays on Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka, Sommerville: Wisdom Publications 2010, 37 – 112. For readers wanting to both get a chapter-by-chapter commentary on the MMK and a taste of 15th century Tibetan thinking about the middle way there is RJE Tsong Khapa, Ocean of Reasoning. A Great Commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārā. Translated by Geshe Ngawang Samten and Jay Garfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006.
On the question of “giving reason” – a transformation of the problem of theodicy, itself a transformation of the problem of “saving the phenomena” – and the principle of sufficient reasons in Western metaphysics, Martin Heidegger’s lecture and seminar (The Principle of Reason, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1996) is remarkably clear. For the continuing importance of this principle even for Hegel’s Idealism see Pirmin Stekeler, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ein dialogischer Kommentar. Hamburg: Meiner 2014, 69 – 71. There is naturally a great deal of divergence about how to understand emptiness. Surely it is not a negation that annihilates its position, nor is it a Hegelian Aufhebung where the negated is somehow conserved and carried over to a higher level – the arguments in the MMK are always the same, even if they are differently formulated. Apart from Ruegg’s and Magno’s discussions mentioned above, an interesting vein to follow is to look at the genealogy of the ‘number’ zero, which arises in Indian mathematics at about the same time as Nāgārjuna’s śūnya and has the same name. This provenance excited the interest of Western semioticians (Julia Kristeva, Semeiōtikē. Recherche pour une sémanalyse, Paris: Seuil 1969, 273 – 275) and soon that of historians of culture, both analog (Brian Rotman (Signifying Nothing. The Semiotics of Zero. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1987) and digital (Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology? Wiley: Hoboken 2012). More likely is the provenance of śūnya from the speculation of ancient grammarians; see David Seyfort Ruegg, “Mathematical and Linguistic Models in Indian Thought: The Case of Zero and Śūnyatā”, in The Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle, 1 – 12, and Claudio Bertocci, “Lo Zero” in Claudio Bertocci, Piero Martin, Andrea Tagliapietra, Zerologia. Sullo zero, il vuoto e il nulla, Bologna: il Mulino 2016, 10 – 34.
There is considerable debate in the critical literature whether chapters 26 (on the twelve links that constitute dependent origination) and 27 (on wrong views) are later interpolations, given that chapter 25 ends with the cumulative statement that the Buddha – true to the self-unsettling dynamism of dependent origination as emptiness – has never taught any doctrine (Bernhard Weber-Brosamer, Dieter M. Back, Die Philosophie der Leere, Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden 2005, 100 – 102). It is interesting to consider whether these last chapters were not inserted to rein in the revolutionary and dogmatically disturbing consequences of Nāgārjuna’s thought. In Buddhism, doctrine often manifests as numbered lists – four truths, eight-fold path, three jewels, twelve links, etc. -, and domesticating dependent origination in such a list may just have been a way of defusing the anti-dogmatic thrust of Nāgārjuna’s verses. Significantly, when the guardian of Buddhist doctrine, the Dalai Lama, teaches the MMK, he begins not with the dedication or with chapter one, but with chapter 26; see Barry Kerzin, Nāgārjuna’s Wisdom. A Practitioner’s Guide to The Middle Way, Sommerville: Wisdom Publications 2019, 1 – 4.
For the topic of fiction and fictionalism in relation to Buddhism see Charles Crittenden, “Everyday Reality as Fiction – A Madhyamika Interpretation” in Journal of Indian Philosophy 9/4, 1981, 323 – 333, Mario d’Amato, “Buddhist Fictionalism,” in Sophia 52/3, 2013, and Tom Tillemans, “How Far Can a Mādhyamika Buddhist Reform Conventional Truth? Dismal Relativism, Fictionalism, Easy-Easy-Truth, and the Alternatives” in The Cowherds, Moonshadows. Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, 151 – 166.
Nietzsche and Experience
For a convincing reading of the experiential dimensions of the BT see David Wellbery, “Form und Funktion der Tragödie nach Nietzsche,” in Bettine Menke and Christoph Menke (eds.) Tragödie – Trauerspiel – Spektakel, Berlin 2007, S. 199–212; a shorter version of this essay was published as “Nietzsche on Tragedy” in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2024, s.v. For the contradictory experience of tragedy and its importance for the entirety of Nietzsche’s oeuvre see Jim Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: an essay on The Birth of Tragedy, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000. For a first orientation in the vast literature on Nietzsche and Buddhism see Robert G. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999, Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism: Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study, Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 1987, and Antoine Panaïoti, Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013, 17 – 87.
I have not found a sustained and mutually informed cross-reading of Nietzsche and Nāgārjuna. Nietzsche’s dictum “I could be the Buddha of Europe – but that would be the opposite of the Indian one” appears in Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1882 – 1884 (KSA 10), München / Berlin: dtv / de Gruyter 1988, 109 (November 1883). The Wisdom of Silenus quotation is from Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, 1 - 116, 23. The reference to birth as the cause of dukkha can be found, for example, in Bikkhu Bodhi (ed.), Noble Truths, Noble Path. The Heart Essence of the Buddha’s Original Teachings, New York: Wisdom 2023, 104.
The question of aesthetic cosmodicy is discussed in Raymond Geuss’ introduction to his edition of the Birth of Tragedy, xxii – xxvi. For Nietzsche’s turn to the French moralists see Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011. Their common ancestor, in turn, was Michel de Montaigne, one of Nietzsche’s favorite writers. For a philosophy of the aphorism see Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019, on Nietzsche 151 – 176. The cultural history of Nietzsche’s ‘rescue’ first from the falsifications of the Nietzsche-Archive in Weimar and then from the suspicion of GDR administrators has just been told by Philip Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold, Wiley: Hoboken 2024.
In his famous Nietzsche-lectures, Martin Heidegger argued at length that Will to Power is a metaphysical concept, an essence with which Nietzsche demonstrates his belonging to the very tradition he seeks to abolish. That the Will to Power as essence is, for Heidegger, the order (der Befehl) illuminates in a flash the background – the (ridiculously self-contradictory) Nazi slogan “Führer befiehl, wir folgen!” (Leader, order, we follow!) – against which his increasingly uncharitable readings of Nietzsche are set: Nietzsche must be aligned with fascism so that Heidegger’s criticism of him can serve as a (post factum) distancing from his own early enthusiasm for the Third Reich. Heidegger himself was on the board of the Nietzsche Archive and had proposed a plan for the re-edition of the notes contained in Der Wille zur Macht(see Marion Heinz, “Edition und Interpretation. Zu Heideggers Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsches Wille zur Macht“ in Nietzsche-Forschung 30/1 (2023), 3 – 19 and Sebastian Kaufmann, “Der Wille zur Macht, die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen und das Sein des Seienden. Heideggers “Aus-einander-setzung” mit Nietzsche“ in Nietzsche-Studien 47/1 (2018), 272 – 313. Heinrich Meier (“Nietzsches Wille zur Macht und die Selbsterkenntnis des Philosophen” in Nietzscheforschung 30/1 (2023), 127 - 139 has argued that Will-to-Power is a critical concept that Nietzsche uses to uncover the errancy of the will, rather than celebrate it.
William James’ remark about the importance of grammatical particles in philosophy can be found in his “A World of Pure Experience” in Writings 1902 – 1910, New York: Library of America 1987, 1161. The inability of God to die without losing his divinity – in contrast to Nietzsche’s Dionysus who affirms his own destruction – is the interpretive matrix with which Hans Blumenberg has analyzed the emergence of modernity; for the most concentrated version of this argument see his St. Matthew Passion, translated by Helmut Muller-Sievers and Paul Fleming, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2022. Nietzsche’s dating of the thought of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same appears most prominently in his Ecce Homo (The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, 123), but the fact that thoughts can come to one because they are not the same as their thinker is fundamental to his late philosophy, for example in his Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (eds. Rolf Peter Horstmann, Judith Norman), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, 17: … “thought comes when “it” wants, not when “I” want.”
Heidegger, in his first and more charitable reading of the Eternal Return, remarks expansively on the experiential nature of this thought, see Nietzsche I, 229 – 236. The phrase “unharnessing” the will occurs in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006, 112 (“On Redemption”) and 92 (“On the Sublime Ones”). That Nietzsche cannot mean that numerically identical lives recur eternally has been shown repeatedly, e.g. by Paul Loeb, “What Does Nietzsche Mean by “the Same” in His Theory of Eternal Recurrence”, in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 53/1 (2022), 1 – 33, and Gerard Visser, “Der unendlich kleine Augenblick,” in Nietzsche-Studien 27/1 (1998) 82 – 106. “How The ‘True World’ Finally Became A Fable” is in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, 171. The infinite horizon aphorism is in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, 119 (§ 124). The aphorism following is the famous madman-story in which the death of God is announced. § 109 – the one with repeated exhortation “Hüten wir uns!” (Let us be vigilant!”) is Nietzsche’s attempt to describe a world in which nothing has to be saved, in which everything recurs to the state of finally being the same.
For Nietzsche’s reading of Darwin, see Morrison, 73 – 87. For Nietzsche’s intensive reading of Emerson see Dieter Thomä, „Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste. Zum Zusammenhang zwischen Personaler Identität und Moral bei Nietzsche und Emerson,“ in Nietzsche Studien 36/1(2008), 316 – 343; Mason Golden, „Emerson Exemplar: Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Emerson Marginalia: Introduction,“ in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44/3 (2013), 398 – 408 and Mason Golden, „Emerson-Exemplar (Autumn 1881) ( KSA 9:13[1 – 22] and KSA 9:17[1 – 39]): Translation and Excerpts“ in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44/3 (2013), 409 – 431; and Bendetta Zavatta, Individuality and Beyond. Nietzsche reads Emerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021.
William James and Experience
The literature on James is, deservedly, near-infinite. Coming to James from the “outside” (from idealist and deconstructive philosophies, from a European context, from a primary interest in literature) I found the following sources extremely helpful: Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America, New York: FSG, 73 – 148; David Lapoujade, William James: Empiricism and Pragmatism, Raleigh: Duke University Press 2019); Felicitas Krämer, Erfahrungsvielfalt und Wirklichkeit. Zu William James’ Realitätsverständnis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006; the essays in Sarin Marchetti (ed.), The Jamesian Mind (Routledge Philosophical Minds), London and New York: Routledge 2022, especially David Scott, “James and the ‘East’: Buddhism and Japan” (333 - 343), Rachel Christy, “’The moral earth, too, is round’: James and Nietzsche on the aim of philosophy” (385 – 397), and Calvin O. Schrag, „Struktur der Erfahrung in der Philosophie von James und Whitehead.“ In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 23/4 (1969), 479 – 494, esp. 481 – 484.
A very circumspect assessment of James’ role in American philosophy of the 19th century is by Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1989, 54 – 68. James’ reflections on the potential and dangers of introspection are articulated in “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” in Writings1778 - 1899, 986 - 1013. The reflections on “The Stream of Consciousness” are in William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, in Writings 1878 – 1899, New York: Library of America 1992, 152 - 173. He speaks about fringing on pages 162 – 166. “A permanently existing ‘Idea’ which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spade.” in Briefer Course, 157 (italics in the original).
I have embedded Kant’s argument for the ‘epigenetic’ origins of our categories in contemporary debates about biological reproduction in my Self-Generation. Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997, 48 – 64. The essay “A World of Pure Experience” is in William James, Writings 1902 - 1910, New Yok: The Library of America 1987, 1159 – 1182. It forms, together with “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (1141 – 1158) and “The Experience of Activity” (an appendix to his lecture series “A Pluralistic Universe” (797 – 812)), the clearest statement of the stakes of radical empiricism. James defines ‘pure experience’ as the “instant field of the present” (Consciousness, 1151), i.e. experience before it is sorted and shaped by concepts, norms, or habits – pure potentiality. Consciousness (1145 – 1147) also contains the clearest statement that everything (room, book, man) is an experience. At the end of Consciousness (1157) James comes, unknowingly, around to an authentic Buddhist insight: “[…] breath, which was ever the original ‘spirit,’, breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness.”
For the interesting debate around Buffon and the age of the earth see Noah Heringman, Deep Time. A Literary History, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2023, 75 – 119. Peirce’s view of the current state of the solar system as its current experience is in “Design and Chance,” in: Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition. Bd. 4: 1879–1884, ed. Christian J. W. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1989, S. 544–554. For James’ theory of emotions see his Briefer Course, 350 – 365, and “What is an Emotion?” in: Mind, Apr. 1884, 188 – 205. For a recent interpretation of this approach see Shannon Sullivan, “William James on Emotion. Physiology and/as Spirituality.” In: Sarin Marchetti (ed.), The Jamesian Mind. Routledge: London 2022, 61 – 69. This is also, broadly speaking, the Buddhist view of emotions. Whereas Christian ethics acknowledges the primacy of emotions but sorts them into noxious or propitious for salvation (e.g. envy vs. compassion), Buddhist treatises, like James, understand emotions as (mis)interpretations of occurrences (frustration over their impermanence). Very different ethics result from these different approaches. See, e.g. Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva. Boston / London, Shambala, 2011, chapter 6, “Patience”. James confesses his ignorance of, and sympathy for, Buddhism in the Postscript of “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” in: Writings 1902 - 1910, New Yok: The Library of America 1987, 466.
For a systematic account of the similarity between Nagarjuna’s and William James’ thought see David Kalupahana, “The epistemology of William James and early Buddhism,” in John Runzo, Craig Ihara (eds.) Religious Experience, Religious Belief, Lanham: University Press of America 1986, 53 – 73.
James’ quip about Freudian theories of sexuality is in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” 19, footnote 1. James would meet Freud and Jung at Clark University in 1909. One of the purposes of William James’s early visit to Germany in 1868 was to get a closer look at the theory and practice of German experimental psychology; much of his later work is, often explicitly, directed against its binarisms and data fetishism. For the emergence and importance of the graphical method in German science see Cornelius Borck, Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography, London: Routledge 2018 and C. Borck, Coen, D., Lerner, P., Nyhart, L., and Brain, R., “The ’German Question’ in the History of Science and the ’Science Question’ in German History”, in German History, vol. 29 (2011), 628-639. The intermediary figure between James and the German physical psychologists is Hugo Münsterberg, a student of Wilhelm Wundt who ended up directing the psychology lab at Harvard; see Henning Schmidgen, “Münsterberg’s Photoplays: Instruments and Models in his Laboratories at Freiburg and Harvard (1891 – 1893)” https://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/art71 and R. M. Brain, “Self-Projection: Hugo Munsterberg on Empathy and Oscillation in Cinema Spectatorship”, in Science in Context, vol. 25 (2012), 329-353.
The importance of Goethe for the transcendentalists, and for Emerson, is hard to overstate; for a recent analysis see Kai Sina, “Goethe“ in Kollektivpoetik: Zu einer Literatur der offenen Gesellschaft in der Moderne mit Studien zu Goethe, Emerson, Whitman und Thomas Mann, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 109 -144. For the concept of metamorphosis see Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager. Berlin: August, 2016. See also Goethe’s didactic poem „Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,“ in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedichte 1756 – 1799, Frankfurt / M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1998, 639 – 641. For the rejection of Goethean science by the German academic establishment see Eva Axer, Eva Geulen, Alexandra Heimes, Aus dem Leben der Form. Studien zum Nachleben von Goethes Morphologie in der Theoriebildung des 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen: Wallstein 2021, 32 – 34. James met with the two scientists most responsible for this rejection, Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, in Berlin.
For a detailed list of William James’ repeated reading and studying of Goethe see Alexandra Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus: Goethe und William James, Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter 2019, 74 – 79; for the similarity of James’ and Goethe’s understanding of external relations see 182 – 185. “Wirkung in die Ferne” (Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedichte 1800 – 1832, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1998, 132, or “Nähe des Geliebten” (Johann Wolfgang Goethe,Gedichte 1756 - 1799, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1998, 647) are among the innumerable poems that speak of the interstices of experience; the sense that Goethe invokes to captures these transitions is “ahnen” (guessing, suspecting, sensing). The famous scene in which Faust wagers his soul is in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag 1999, verse 1700, 76. For the temporality of whiling see Joseph Vogl, On Tarrying, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2019. The French “causer” means both causing and idly chatting. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in Thomas Carlyle’s translation was of signal importance for the transcendentalists and the generation following. David Lapoujade, Fictions du Pragmatisme, Paris: Minuit 2008, reads Henry’s entire oeuvre as a demonstration of radical empiricism. Broader in its scope, but equally incisive is Paul Grimstadt, Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 90 – 119. Here is a snippet of a conversation from one of Henry’s stories: ””what great fact?” “The fact of a relation. The adventure’s the relation; the relation’s an adventure. The romance, the novel, the drama are the picture of one.” (“The Story In It” in Complete Stories 1898-1910, New York: The Library of America 1996, 41)
The Novel and Experience
For Horace and the afterlife of the Ars Poetica – arguably more influential than Aristotle’s Poetics - see Leon Golden “The Reception of Horace’s Ars Poetica” in Gregson Davis (ed.), A Companion to Horace, Oxford: Blackwell 2010, 391 – 413. For the emergence and characteristic of the ancient novel see Pierre Grimal, “Introduction” in Romans grecs et latins, Paris: Gallimard 1958 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), IX – XXVI, Niklas Holzberg, “The Genre” in The Ancient Novel, London: Routledge 1994, 1 - 20 (with amusingly antiquated references to 1980s soap operas), Tomas Hägg, “The Ancient Greek Novel. A Single Model or a Plurality of Forms?” in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Volume 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, 125 – 155, and Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, “The Poetry of Mediocrity,” in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel, Volume 2, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, 64 – 94. Thomas Pavel (La pensée du roman, Paris: Gallimard 2003) is very eloquent about the ancient novel and its subterranean influence.
For the formation of the New Testament in opposition to secular narratives see Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible, Cambridge: Belknap 2021, 222 – 279, for Jerome’s and Augustine’s hostility to the depiction of Jesus as an epic hero see my "Patchwork und Poesie. Bemerkungen zum spätantiken cento." G. Treusch-Dieter et al. (eds.), Denkzettel Antike. Texte zum kulturellen Vergessen. Berlin: Reimer 1989, 229-238. For the importance of random ‘bible lots’ (sortes biblicae) as a way individualize the universal message of the bible see Christopher Wild, Descartes’ Meditative Turn. Cartesian Thought as Spiritual Practice, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2024, 56 – 69.
The classic (Catholic) account of scriptural exegesis is Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis. The Four Senses of Scripture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998; see also Franklin T. Harkins, “Hugh of St. Victor. Didascalion on the Study of Reading,” in Oda Wischmeyer (ed.), Handbuch der Bibelhermeneutiken: von Origenes bis zur Gegenwart, Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 2016, 135 – 148. Fredric Jameson has actualized – with reservations, but still emphatically - the four senses for contemporary literary study in his Allegory and Ideology. London: Verso 2019. For the «return to philology» and its many problems see Merve Emre, “The Return to Philology” in PMLA 138/1 (2023), 171 – 177. For the emergence of philology as a self-standing discipline see James Turner, Philology. The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014. For an attempt at a ‘deep’ history of the novel see – aside from volume 1 of Moretti’s The Novel – Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History 1600 – 1800, London/New York: Bloomsbury 2013.
For the supreme importance of the fictional editor device see Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, Cambridge 1988; Uwe Wirth, Die Geburt des Autors aus dem Geist der Herausgeberfiktion: Editoriale Rahmung im Roman um 1800: Wieland, Goethe, Brentano, Jean Paul und E.T.A. Hoffmann, Paderborn 2008; Derek Alsop, Practices of Reading. Interpreting the Novel, New York: Saint Martin’s Press 1999, 28 – 50, and especially Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancient Regime of the Novel, Philadelphia 2011.
For the philosophical and literary history of fiction see Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Calrendon 1994; Tobias Klauk/Tilmann Köppe (eds.), Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter 2014, and Johannes Franzen, Patrick Galke-Janzen, Frauke Janzen, Marc Wurich (eds.), Geschichte der Fiktionalität. Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept, Baden-Baden: Nomos 2018. The opposition between novels and science was proverbial in post-Newtonian Europe. Newton’s famous “hypotheses non fingo” was a quip against the novel. A common put-down of a rival scientific theory in 18thcentury France was “ mais ce n’est qu’un roman!”.
For the practices of reading see Reinhard Wittmann, “Was There a Reading Revolution?” in Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1999, 284 – 312. A good example for the massive impact of epistolary novels is Denis Diderot, Éloge de Richardson, Paris: BnF 2016; For the emergence of suspense as a narrative quality in the 19th century – culminating in the detective novel of the late 19thcentury – see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1984; for the English market Linda Hughes, Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial, Charlottesville 1991 and Louis James, The Victorian Novel, Malden: Blackwell 2006.
I apologize for the coinage seriablity; it can only be justified by referring to the massive research and synthesizing argument that Clare Pettitt is making in Serial Forms. The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815 – 1848, New York: Oxford University Press 2020. With its even more comprehensive companion volume Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form, New York: Oxford University Press 2022 she reconstructs and makes visible the network, the many conditions that sustain the novel in the 19th century. These conditions have their antecedents in the formal affordances of the novel.
For the relation of narrative and suspense see Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasure of Suspense, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2003. For the reciprocal experiences of novel and readers the most clamorous case before industrial serialization was Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which appeared over a span of 7 years and incorporated in its later volumes responses to criticism and allusions to recent events; see Derek Alsop, Practices of Reading, 28 – 50. The prominence of Sam Weller in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers in response to sales figures is a later example. For the industrial conditions of 19th century novels see also my The Cylinder. Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press 2012, 103 – 112.
For a richly illustrated account of the metaphysics of fictional worlds see Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press 1984, esp. 114 – 135 (the chapter is entitled – oblivious of Buddhist terminology – “Conventions”). There have been various attempts to link the doctrine of two truths to philosophical fictionalism; see, e.g. Mario d’ Amato, “Buddhist Fictionalism” in Sophia 52 (2013), 409 – 424 and Tom Tillemans, “How Far Can a Mādhyamika Buddhist Reform Conventional Truth? Dismal Relativism, Fictionalism, and Easy-Easy Truth, and the Alternatives” in The Cowherds (eds.), Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, 151 – 165. Jay Garfield (The Fundamental Wisdom) uses ‘reification’ and ‘reificationist’ as a collective noun for external and internal opponents of Nāgārjuna. For a more recent reconsideration of the concept (without reference to Buddhism) see Axel Honneth, Reification. A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008.
The Experience of Reading
One of the insights in Dominick La Capra’s meticulous reconstruction in “Madame Bovary” on Trial (Cornell University Press 1986) is that it really was the novel that was on trial; such was the effectiveness of free indirect discourse that neither publisher nor author could be linked to the novel beyond reasonable doubt. The most eloquent proponent for the moral benefits of reading novels is still Martha Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990. This suppression of writing was, of course, the starting point for Jacques Derrida’s investigations in Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998. The more technical arguments about the relation between the barrenness of the printed page and the excitement of the imagination were made by Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, London/New York: Routledge 2012) and, more flamboyantly still, by Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1992. For the career of “influence” as an astrological, religious, and philosophical concept see Rainer Specht, “Einfluß” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel / Stuttgart: Schwabe 2017 < https://www.schwabeonline.ch/schwabe-xaveropp/elibrary/start.xav?start=%2F%2F%2A%5B%40attr_id%3D%27hwph_productpage%27%5D >. A most startling document of the impact of Richardson’s novels is the Eloge de Richardson (1761, https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Éloge_de_Richardson) by the usually clearheaded Denis Diderot. Goethe put a warning to the readers of his Die Leiden des jungen Werthers – “be a man, do not follow him” – into the second edition (1775, Leipzig: Weygand) after he heard reports that there were copycat suicides. For the transformation of moral-focused sacred reading to lay reading see Roger Chartier „Du Livre au Lire,” in: Paul Beaud (ed.), Sociologie de la Communication, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1977, 271 – 290. A glorious counterexample to this neglect of corporeal reading is Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel. Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. Dames seeks to recover the outlines of a Victorian science of reading that in turn shaped the form of 19th century novels (the length of installments, the shape of chapters, the number of characters). For the science and history of reading I have consulted Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid. The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, New York: Harper 2008; Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, Katie Hasley (eds.), The History of Reading, London: Routledge 2010; Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, New York: Penguin 2010 (who beautifully compares the emergence of meaning to a tidal bore, 113 - 115); Alexander Honold, Rolf Pfarr (eds.), Grundthemen der Literaturwissenschaft: Lesen, Boston: de Gruyter 2018; Julika Griem, Szenen des Lesens. Schauplätze einer gesellschaftlichen Selbstverständigung. Bielefeld: transcript 2021; and Ingo Berensmeyer, A Short Media History of English Literature, Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter 2022. For the theology and iconography of the annunciation see Sarah Drummond, Divine Conception: The Art of the Annunciation, London: Unicorn 2018 and Laura Saetveit Miles, „The Origins and Development of Virgin Mary’s Book of the Annunciation,” Speculum Vier Sinne 89/3 (July 2014), 632 – 669. For the relation of conventional truth, language, and institutions of meaning see Jan Westerhoff, “The Merely Conventional Existence of the World,” in Moonshadows, 189 - 212. James’ harshest criticism of subjectivity as the originator of experience is in “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist? In Writings 1902 - 1910, 1141 - 1158. The degradation of the object is probably the area where James and Heidegger (who, like Husserl, had read James) would agree most. The thought experiment of the hike is inspired by Bruno Latour, who in his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press 2013, 74 – 77) recounts the conditioned arising of an Alpine hiking path. Latour was an unequivocal if clandestine admirer of William James: “Let us recall that radical empiricism, the version that inspired William James and that this entire inquiry aspires to extend in a more systematic way, reconnects the thread of experience by attaching prepositions to what follows them, to what they merely announce, utter, dispatch. To follow experience, for second-wave empiricism, is thus to follow – by a leap, a hiatus, a mini-transcendence – the movement for a preposition to what it indicates, prepares for, or designates.” (Inquiry, 236). For recent research in the activity of the text in making us read see Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print. Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2017, and Carlos Spoerhase, Das Format der Literatur. Praktiken materieller Textualität zwischen 1740 und 1830. Göttingen: Wallstein 2018. James describes the two directions of inquiry thusly: “[A] sensible “experience” of mine, say this book written on by this pen, leads in one dimension into the world of matter, paper-mills, etc., in the other into that psychologic life of mine of which it is an affection. Both sets of associates are contiguous with it, yet one set must be dropped out of sight if the other is to be followed. They decline to make one universe in the absolute sense of something that can be embraced by one individual stroke of apprehension.” William James, Notebook J, William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1092.9 (4509) (quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 377). For saccades in eye movement see Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 13 - 18. For the notion of droplets of experience (“Erfahrungströpfchen”) see the excellent reconstruction by Felicitas Krämer, Erfahrungsvielfalt und Wirklichkeit. Zu William James’ Realitätsverständnis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006, 143 – 212. For the prepositions that antecede ‘because’ see James, Pure Experience, 1161.
Teaching Experience
The formative power of narrative has been a staple of popular anthropologies; for one of the latest exemplars see Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, New York: Vintage 2024. The most comprehensive and sophisticated version of the argument for the foundational power of narrative is by Albrecht Koschorke, Fact and Fiction, Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 2018. For the realism of Don Quixote see José Ortega y Gasset, “Meditations on Quixote” in Michael McKeon (ed.), Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2000, 271 – 316. For the narratological structure of Western novels see Franz Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1995 (still well worth translating) and Mieke Bal, Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1997. For an influential account of the Bildungsroman-tradition see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso 2000. See also the important late essay by Wiliam James, “The Experience of Activity,” in Writings 1902 – 1910, 805; for the context of this thought see Jeremy Dunham, “The Experience of Activity. William James’ Late Metaphysics and the Influence of Nineteenth-Century French Spiritualism”, in Journal of the History of Philosophy 58 (2) 2020, 267 – 291. For Free Indirect Discourse see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984 and Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences.Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, Routledge: Oxford 1982. Neither Cohn not Banfield relate the emergence of FID to the industrialization of the novel in the 19th century. For the relation between FID and censorship that became the center of Flaubert’s trial for obscenity see William Olmsted, The Censorship Effect. Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the formation of French modernism. New York: Oxford University Press 2016, 14 – 40. For the continuing importance of Free Indirect Discourse see Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect. The Novel in a Postfictional Age. New York: Columbia University Press 2022. The concept of “pseudofactual” representation for the editor fiction is used to brilliant effect by Nicholas Paige in his Before Fiction. The Ancien Regime of the Novel, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011. For the cultural value of “having read” see Paul Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Canon Formation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995. The value of having “an” experience as provided by works of art is John Dewey’s Art as Experience, New York: Penguin 2005, 36 – 58. The quote from Ronald D. Laing is from his astonishing The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967, 16.