Russell (1960: 767):
[James] holds that there is 'only one primal stuff or material', out of which everything in the world is composed. This stuff he calls 'pure experience'. Knowing, he says, is a particular sort of relation between two portions of pure experience. The subject–object relation is derivative: 'experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity'. A given undivided portion of experience can be in one context a knower, and in another something known. He defines 'pure experience' as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material for our later reflection'.
Blogger Comment:
James' notion of pure experience as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material for our later reflection' is incorporated in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory in the notion that experience is construed as meaning. This also informs Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection which assumes that the brain has to categorise an unlabelled world.
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the notion of knowing as a relation between two portions of pure experience is the construal of experience as a senser mediating a cognitive mental process that either ranges over a phenomenon, or is caused by it. In this sense, such 'a subject–object relation' can be considered derivative, since it is a construal of experience, rather than (unconstrued) experience.
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