J. JEREMY WISNEWSKI
Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditation
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume III, Number 01 (2020): 63-80

Logos, Non-Conceptual Experience, and Philosophy

LOGOS AND NON-CONCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE:
OR, WHY PHILOSOPHERS SHOULD CARE ABOUT MEDITATION
J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Abstract
Philosophy in the West, by and large, has been an attempt to show that the languageof reason (logos) is adequate to reality – that it can accomplish
what experience alone cannot. Indeed, this is the central presupposition ofphilosophical analysis as it is usually carried out. The question I would like toaddress is this one: By what rights do we maintain this presupposition? What would
it mean to take experience itself seriously, without allowing logos to colonize it?
The philosophical traditions of the West have not in general taken this question asseriously as it deserves. For when we set aside the demands of logos, we likewise
set aside the assumption that reality itself must be unified, static, and immediately
answerable to conceptual description. The question thus becomes: What ways
might we investigate reality without assuming the immediate legitimacy of reason,
language, and conceptual distinctions? In what follows, I will defend the relevanceof meditation (and meditative states) to exploring these philosophical questions.
Key Words: Samadhi, Phenomenology of Meditation, Non-dual Consciousness,
non-conceptual experience§1. Introduction
It is an astonishing fact that most people claim not to believe their experience. When one asks
the standard questions about what is real, the stock answers are returned: matter is real, or subatomic particles, or energy. When one presses for more, the list of laws may well be roundedout: natural selection, diminishing marginal utility, confirmation bias, supply and demand.
When one turns away from the scientifically-minded metaphysicians, toward the more devout,answers are surprisingly similar: God is real, or God’s love, or sin. In both cases, we see a rather
strange tendency: definitions of the real turn away from immediate experience and toward some
explanation of immediate experience that shows why it cannot be basic. ‘God made the world,which enabled my experience’ is not all that structurally different from the claim that ‘atoms

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create the world, which enabled my experience’. 1 Both claims involve, fundamentally, the ideathat ordinary experience is not itself adequate to the phenomena of reality – there must be some‘deeper’ or ‘more profound’ thing in virtue of which we can make sense of what is, after all,immediately before our eyes.
Of course, an irony pervades the turn away from experience. For any account of what
is fundamentally real, one will inevitably appeal to a certain kind of experience in order tojustify the thing being discussed: the physicist and chemist will focus on the set of experiences
surrounding repeatable experimentation and scientific method. The theist will appeal to theimmediacy of religious experience, or the experience of faith, or encountering the world in themode of wonder; the philosopher might appeal to the normativity felt in the reach ofargumentation. The irony is not subtle: one must appeal to something to show that regularexperience is not to be regarded as fundamental – and appeals to anything will, of necessity,
involve some mode of experience.
And so the philosophical dog must chase its tail. One requires a reason for claiming that
one mode of experience is better – more veridical – than another. Already, however, the appeal
to reason runs against the appeal to experience: reasoning is never concerned with theimmediacy of an experience. Its very modus operandi is to move beyond itself – to hypothesize
things that are not present to explain things that are, or to deduce things that are not present
from those things that are. Reason is, like language, essentially ek-static2: to infer somethingfrom another thing is by definition to move from what is immediate to what is not. In thisrespect, neither reason nor language more generally can be true to the immediacy of experience– to utilize reason is to declare that a particular experience is not adequately intelligible on its
own merits.
Philosophy in the West, by and large, has been an attempt to show that the language ofreason (logos) is adequate to reality – that it can accomplish what experience alone cannot.
Indeed, this is the central presupposition of philosophical analysis as it is usually carried out.
The question I would like to address is this one: by what rights do we maintain thispresupposition? What would it mean to take experience itself seriously, without allowing logos
to colonize it? The philosophical traditions of the West have not in general taken this question
as seriously as it deserves. For when we set aside the demands of logos, we likewise set aside
the assumption that reality itself must be unified, static, and immediately answerable toconceptual description. The question thus becomes: In what ways might we investigate reality
without assuming the immediate legitimacy of reason, language, and conceptual distinctions?
The argument I will make in reply to these questions is this:
1. We should take experience seriously. Experience is the only possible foundation for our
understanding of the world, as it is only through experience that the world is disclosed
to us.

1

Of course, there are non-structural differences between the claims.
That is, it is essentially outside of itself. I borrow the term from Division II of Martin Heidegger’s, Being andTime, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962).
2

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2. There are distinct modes of experience, some conceptual and others not. There is,however, no a priori ground for privileging conceptual modes of experience over nonconceptual ones.3 To put this otherwise: logos is not more primordial than unmediatedexperience.
3. One form of non-conceptual (unmediated) experience is found in the state of Samādhi(concentration), a well-documented mode of experience discussed and analyzed invarious Indic philosophical traditions, often in association with forms of meditationsuch as samatha and vipassana bhavana and their various descendants.
------------------------------------4. Therefore, we should take Samādhi seriously as a mode of investigation into experience
as it is given.
There are undoubtedly a set of initial objections that present themselves. First, one mightclaim that we should not take experience seriously, at least until we have sorted out its
relationship to the world. This roughly Cartesian objection, of course, is a confused one: itsuggests we can both pose and answer such questions in a way that does not take experience
seriously to begin with. Second, one might claim that there are a priori reasons for privileging
certain modes of experience – particularly those that have been structured by logos. As we willsee (§2, below), a defense of this view faces significant – perhaps insurmountable – challenges.
Third, one might deny that there is such a thing as unmediated experience. Moreover, even if
there is such a thing, one might deny that it has any relevance to our metaphysical questions. I
regard the existence of non-conceptual experience as an essentially empirical question. Whether
or not such states are relevant to metaphysical questions is itself a metaphysical question. I see
no benefit in deciding the issue by fiat. I would offer essentially the same response to one whodenied the relevance of Samādhi (or the meditative practices that cultivate it) more generally. 4
In what follows, I will defend the relevance of Samādhi (and meditation 5 ) tophilosophical questions against these (and other) objections. I will utilize thinkers whereappropriate – William James and Nishida Kitaro loom large in what follows, as will thephenomenologists, albeit mostly implicitly – but I do not intend what follows to be a scholarly
inquiry into any one thinker’s particular view (or views) of an issue. I refer to such
Though there is an explanation for the privileging of logos – an explanation that has to do with the very natureof conceptual argumentation: it favors what can be articulated precisely.
4
This objection might take several forms: one might set meditation aside as a merely religious practice, andthereby claim it to be inappropriate to proper philosophical reflection. One might claim that there is simply nomeans by which to approach meditative states in a properly scientific way, and hence what is disclosed withinsuch states is in a fundamental way closed off from those who do not experience them. As will become clear, I
think such objections ultimately presuppose the superiority of logos, and hence beg the question against othermodes of experience.
5
There is no single Sanskrit word that gets translated as ‘meditation.’ The terms yoga, bhavana, and dhyana can
all be so translated. There are likewise a diversity of practices captured by each of these terms. When I refer to‘meditation’ generally, I have in mind samatha bhavana and vipassana bhavana. Samatha bhavana is sometimes
described as the practice that develops samādhi, eventually allowing the practice of vipassana (insight). In othercases, however, samādhi is said to develop with vipassana. For an accessible discussion of the controversies
surrounding the Pali sources, see Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samādhi (Boston: Shambhala
Publications, 2008).
3

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philosophers’ views only as a means to actively address the question at stake. My aim is not toestablish that all philosophers ought to be cultivating Samādhi. My aim, rather, is to provide anargument that such modes of experience cannot simply be ignored by those interested in thecore questions of metaphysics.
§2 Logos
The core question of philosophy, in some ways, is whether or not one can articulate the structureof things in a way that makes them intelligible – that reveals or uncovers a latent structure
already present. In certain respects, the debates between rationalists and empiricists from the17th-century onwards have been debates about what tools would best be suited to uncovering
this structure.6 On the one hand, appeals to things like clear and distinct ideas, combined withthe laws of thought they allegedly justify, were offered up as a means to reconcile the world ofexperience with the world of thought. In brief, the world of thought was to be made master ofthe world of experience – deciding in advance what elements of experience could be groundedin the categories of rational activity. The world of experience was made handmaiden to theworld of thought.7
On the other hand, appeals to immediate experience, supplemented by a reasoning thatwould be used to make the most general sense of this experience, emerged to counter the claimthat thought ought to have any proprietary say over experience. Thus Berkeley was willing to
defend the idea that ‘matter’ was in effect a simple abstraction forced on experience by thought.
If thought is to play second-fiddle to experience, however, such abstractions can be simply
jettisoned.8
Both approaches, strangely enough, presuppose the same thing: namely, that there is a
structure to be captured by the relative rankings of reason and experience. The issue is notwhether the world has a structure, but rather how to get at that structure – what might be thesurest guide. In this respect, the importance of experience was still in some ways subordinatedto reason, even in empiricism. As everyone knows, the sense-data theory of perception says
almost nothing about what experience is like. Instead, it explains experience in terms oflogically-derived sensory ‘atoms.’ In this respect, even the empiricist theory gives pride of place
to rationality: rationality is what will determine how to understand experience, and thus thelaws of thought, now a tool to organize and explain experience, still wind up trumping it. The
rationalists and the empiricists, for whatever their differences, still share a basic orientation

6

One might also read the debates over the primacy of either the universal or particular in just these terms: as adebate about how best to fulfill the demands of logos – a debate that of necessity presupposes the legitimacy oflogos’ demands. The textbook disagreement between Plato and Aristotle (i.e. is the particular or the universal more
‘real’?) is fundamentally a disagreement about how best to express the logos of things. The relation of the particular
to logos in Aristotle is obviously very complicated (as is the relation of the universal to logos in Plato) – and the
textbook reading certainly misses much.
7
Again, this is in no way unique to the philosophical efforts of the 17th-century. In some ways, Aristotle’s problem
with Plato is precisely this one: Plato makes the thought more basic than the thing. In some ways, Aristotle wants
to reverse this, but the notion of ‘thing’ that Aristotle ultimately defends in his treatment of the particular (what
Aristotle calls ‘primary substance’) still seems to be ultimately a function of our capacity to discriminate things inaccordance with logos.
8
Moreover, this mirrors the Aristotelian reply to Plato: a form apart from a thing is simply an abstraction.

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towards logos. Methodologically, reason still gives all marching orders. In the empiricist camp,
however, reason is constrained to organize what is given in experience – but it may do so by
whatever means necessary – including, crucially, explaining experience in terms foreign toexperience itself. 9
In certain respects, then, run-of-the-mill empiricism is just not empirical enough toactually take experience seriously. In its modern form, such empiricism is essentially an
apology for the scientific method – and it is only the scientific method that really counts.
Standard empiricism presupposes, above all else, that the world has an intelligible structure,and that this structure can be limned with language. But this is, after all, really a presupposition.
Must the world have a structure? Our urge is to say ‘yes’, and then to appeal to the standard
panoply of philosophical positions: Plato’s forms, Hume’s impressions, Kant’s pure intuitions
and the categories. Might it not be the case that the structure we find in the world is but thestructure of the language we think and speak? What if, rather than simply assuming that theworld must have some pre-defined structure that we access through experience, we were toallow experience to speak for itself? What if we did not immediately assume that experience
was in fact translatable into expository and assertoric language?
The Greek term logos captures one form of world-disclosure. It is the kind of disclosurethat occurs when we read a compelling description of a thing – something that makes a thing
stand out as intelligible in a system of concepts that enable us to navigate the world. ‘Logos’
has the sense both of reason and of language in general – and this is precisely the way I shouldlike to understand it. It is a kind of conceptual order that we are capable of bringing to bear on
our experience – and which, it must be admitted, can come to constitute our natural attitude
about the events around us. To explain an experience is precisely to articulate that experiencein conceptual terms – terms that both collect the event and display it to those with whom weshare a language.10
Implicit in logos is a sense of order – that things stand a particular way, that they areorganized and conceptually available to us. 11 Logos, as I am using the term here, discloses theAristotle is an interesting case here – and he may in fact be an exception. In Categories, the ultimacy of theparticular is best expressed demonstratively: “that.” Is a demonstrative pronoun ‘foreign to experience’? It seems
like a stretch to say so. Aristotle’s view comes closer to one that would allow experience to speak for itself, at any
rate, than Plato’s written view does. Of course, any claims about Plato’s thought must be tempered with arecognition of Plato’s views on the inability of written language to adequately express truth. See, in particular,
Phaedrus and the 7th letter.
10
On Gadamer’s view, this is also what’s required to understand an experience. In this respect, logos andunderstanding are intimately linked. To give up on logos altogether would be to give up on understanding. For myown part, I am inclined to distinguish kinds of understanding – the conceptual and the non-conceptual. I am open
to the idea that the conceptual can elucidate the non-conceptual, but this is a rather weaker claim than saying thatconceptualization is required for understanding. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the space to consider
Gadamer’s view with the thoroughness it deserves. In brief, I contend that Gadamer thinks logos is a prerequisite
for any understanding rather than an element within an instance of understanding. I think this is compatible withthe existence of non-conceptual experiences that can be understood. To put this another way: it is impossible torealize the cessation of subject/object duality without first experiencing subject/object duality. See Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd Revised Edition (NewYork: Continuum Press, 2004).
11
In many ways, the history of philosophy is a history of excavating the structure of logos (and, occasionally, its
limitations).
9

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationworld as a set of discrete entities, having or failing to have particular properties. 12 The a priori
structure of logos is crucial to understanding what it is that is actually disclosed within logos.
Every language – every logos – consists in a set of distinctions along with rules for arranging,hierarchically even, these sets of distinctions.13
The logic of logos was, in many respects, first systematically treated by Aristotle in theCategories. The categories, at bottom, present a taxonomy of kinds of being – of the ways inwhich things can be said to be. Something can be an animal, but it can also be red, or sad, or
here, or tomorrow, and so on. The arrangement of possible predications into types organizes
the implicit structure of logos – into the ways in which it can gather and display the world.
Implicit within this set of distinctions, however, are rules for how such distinctions can beorganized. Four rules are worth mentioning explicitly: identity, non-contradiction, excluded
middle, and the principle of sufficient reason.14 These are not empirical rules derived from longterm work with concepts in a language. They are, rather, the very condition for the possibilityof an expository and explanatory language at all. If non-contradiction does not hold, forexample, then no predication actually manages to assert anything. To say that ‘s is p’ in theabsence of non-contradiction is not to say that ‘s is not ~p.’ In other words, saying that ‘s is p’doesn’t exclude any other possibilities. But the function of predication just is to preclude otherpossibilities – if s is p, then it’s impossible for it also to be ~p. Excluded middle follows directlyfrom non-contradiction by DeMorgan’s Law, and something like the Principle of Sufficient
Reason can be derived from this in a few short steps.15
Logos, then, has a structure. It consists in making exclusive distinctions between things,
and then mapping the relations between such things in possible predicates, according to basic
logical principles. Some of these principles (Identity, Sufficient Reason, Excluded Middle, and
Non-Contradiction) are more basic than others.
§3 Why Logos Can Not Be Automatically Privileged
The ground of knowledge has, in one way or another, always been claimed to be experience.
The rationalists, as Husserl so skillfully shows in the Crisis, ultimately took for granted thelegitimacy of the experiences made possible by the mathematization of nature – namely, the12

As I am using the term, logos is thus intimately connected to excavating the structure of what Heidegger calls
presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) in Being and Time.
13
On this view, a concept is just such a set of distinctions – ‘this, not that or that.’
14
Aristotle identifies non-contradiction as the fundamental principle of human thought in his Metaphysics, where
he formulates the principle several times: “It is impossible for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not be.”(Aristotle, Metaphysics, 2nd Revised Edition, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924),
IV.3.1005b23-24). “The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in thesame respect.” (Ibid., IV.3.1005b19-20.) “The most indisputable of all beliefs is that contradictory statements are
not at the same time true.” (Ibid., IV.6.1011b13-14.)
15
Excluded middle follows because ~(p & ~p) is logically equivalent to (p v ~p) [DeMorgan]. One can derive aform of the principle of sufficient reason as follows: if p is given, p v ~q follows (rule of addition). If (p v ~q), wethen have, via commutativity, double negation, and material implication, q → p. This entails that, for any p, there
is some q that, if it obtains, will guarantee p. (Of course, the derivation of the principle of sufficient reason fromexcluded middle is a logic trick. On the ground, we accept these principles well before we have ever shown thatthey can be derived.)

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experience of structural-mathematical precision when modeling nature. 16 The empiricists, as
the name obviously suggests, took the very same experience of logical precision as a model fortrying to provide the logic of empirical perception. As is well known, this resulted in an accountof experience that had relatively little to do with experience – ideas, sense-data, secondary
qualities were presented as a means of modeling experience only to come, via the power ofconceptual thinking, to replace the very thing they aimed to describe. In an astonishingturnabout in modern philosophy, the primacy of experience, in both empiricist and rationalist
camps, gives way to its unavailability: each model for experience blinds us to experience itself.
If we take seriously the claim, implicit in the history of philosophy, that knowledge
must be grounded in experience, we find ourselves yet again needing to return to that basic
ground: to what is encountered in living experience. To do this, of course, it is not sufficient tosimply grab hold of our favorite models and then apply them, for in a very real sense theexperience we aim to conceptualize is at least sometimes not in itself conceptual (a point I hope
to demonstrate below).
In fact, the dialectic of rationalism and empiricism, as well as its alleged overcoming in
Kant’s logical reconstruction of experience, displays the way in which logos undermines ourcapacity to see experience for what it is. The move to analysis is always a move away from theobject of experience: any account of x must involve terms other than x. Indeed, reason,
explanation, logos, analysis – this entire family of concepts is essentially ek-statical andmediated: To reason about x, or to explain x, or to analyze x, requires abandoning x as selfsufficient. This is evidenced by the obvious fact that all explanations need to appeal tosomething other than the thing being explained, all arguments move away from what is
immediate to what is inferred if they bother with the immediate at all, and all analysis appeals
to more than is present in an immediate experience. 17
The idea that logos is inadequate to experience has been championed in divergent
philosophical schools, 18 but it is an idea that remains at the periphery of mainstream
philosophical work as it is routinely carried out today. Indeed, on the face of it both philosophy
and the sciences more generally are necessarily hostile to the notion that logos is insufficient towhat it describes. All of the discursive sciences (logoi) seem rather to require that the adequacyof logos – and logos itself, as I am using the term – involve a move from the unmediated to themediated.19

16

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
17This move is what James calls the ‘Psychologist’s Fallacy.’ See William James, Principles of Psychology, Two
Volumes (New York: Dover Publications 1950). It is also what Wittgenstein refers to as a ‘grammatical illusion.’
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). For an
illuminating discussion of the connection between these two ideas, see Russell Goodman’s impressive
Wittgenstein and Willian James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
18
This view can be found in Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), in William
James, Writings, 1902-1910, (New Work: The Library of America, 1988), in Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry Into theGood, translated by Masao Abe and C. Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and in the later work ofMartin Heidegger, see for example, Martin Heidegger, The Event [Ereignis], translated by Richard Rojcewicz(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
19
This is true even when logos is concerned with itself.

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In disputing the exclusive authority of logos, I do not intend thereby to say that every
experience is as good as every other. I only intend to dispute that logos is the only way toinvestigate philosophical questions. As nearly everyone concedes, not all experiences are
identical. There are hallucinations, religious visions, contemplations, scenic vistas,
disappointments, frustrations, movie-goings, proof-completions, and so much more. The major
objection to taking experience as such seriously follows directly from these considerations. One
might well insist that only veridical experience should count, and then note that it is reason thatenables us to distinguish the veridical from the non-veridical. In this respect, then, logos musttake precedence over experience (or, more precisely, those experiences structured by logos
should trump those not structured by logos).
Implicit in this objection, of course, is the presumed legitimacy of logos: the objection
does not establish that logos can distinguish between the veridical and the non-veridical; it
simply asserts it. If we knew that reason was sufficient to make such distinctions, no one could
possibly disagree with the claim that logos ought to trump other forms of experience, given thatthese were known to be non-veridical. But the entire issue at stake is precisely whether or not
the distinction between logos-experience and non-logos experience tracks the difference
between the veridical and the non-veridical. To establish that these distinctions are in fact thesame would require demonstrating that logos itself was justifiably regarded as truth-tracking –and not just truth-tracking, but exclusively truth-tracking. If other forms of experience could
also be shown to be truth-tracking, in other words, we would have no basis for our exclusive
reliance on logos. If logos itself cannot be shown to be truth-tracking – if it inevitably involves
the presupposition of its own legitimacy – we likewise have no convincing reason to limit ourtrust in experience to a trust in the discriminations of conceptual thinking.
Is an exclusive focus on logos justified? The question is perhaps more vexing than it
initially appears. The question itself, in one respect, presupposes the legitimacy of the very
thing it asks after. For whatever the faults of positivism, this much seems right: questions are
only legitimate if they are (in principle at least) answerable. To ask about the legitimacy of ourpresupposition that reason and language are adequate to the description of reality – be it
physical, metaphysical, or moral reality – is already to speak in the language of reasons. To
demonstrate the legitimacy of reason would be, presumably, to offer reasons for thepresuppositions that could perform a legitimating function. But this is precisely what is at issue:
we want to know if reason can be legitimate, and addressing this question seems to require that
we use the very thing we are trying to assess.
The point can be made with a simple illustration of the circular thinking required:imagine an argument designed to show that arguments are legitimate. Any such argument – itreally doesn’t matter the form – will necessarily rely on the presupposition that arguments havenormative force. If it did not rely on this presupposition, one could never take a conclusion tohave been warranted by the premises leading to it. If we do make the presupposition, then theargument cannot be said to have established the legitimacy of reasons so much as illustrated it.
But this entails that an argument aimed to justify reason will be no better at achieving its task
than any argument: for us to take the argument seriously, we must already be committed to thelegitimacy of argument. And this entails something rather serious for philosophers: reason is

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationand must be ungrounded. There is nothing outside of reason itself that ever could justify
reason.20
This is not a problem that has been lost on philosophers, of course. From Kant’s projectof using reason to discover reason’s limitations to the Habermasian attempt to ground reason
in the structure of language-use, philosophers have attempted to show that, although reason
cannot justify itself, we can nevertheless rest easy – reason must be taken for granted, for its
foundation is built into our linguistic endeavors. Alternatively, some argue that we are justified
in accepting reason’s legitimacy given what we have accomplished through its use.
As I hope is obvious, none of these three attempts are ultimately successful:
1. Kant’s claim that we can discover the limitations of reason with reason itself has been
criticized from a number of different perspectives. Kant himself saw, in the antinomies,
that reason necessarily tried to exceed itself. 21 Later, Tanabe Hajime, with some help
from Hegel, more powerfully argued that if reason was inadequate, it could not possibly
be trusted to determine its own limits. 22 The very admission that reason has limits
suggests that we should not trust it to discover and demarcate those limitations. (Indeed,
Tanabe saw Kant’s critical philosophy as yet more subject-centered hubris requiring
metanoesis (Japanese: zange)).23
2. Habermas’s claim that reason was grounded in those discursive rules implicit in all of
language-use faces similar self-referential difficulties: by offering the attempt to‘discursively redeem’ reason by an analysis of the legitimacy conditions of assertoric
speech-acts, Habermas essentially tries to evade the question of the legitimacy ofreason.24 An assertoric speech act, by definition, is one that is capable of being judged
true or false in terms of the evidence available. One might well concede that Habermas
has got the structure of assertoric language right without thereby conceding that reason
is sufficient for determining the structure of the world, or of experience. Habermas’
theory of communicative action essentially restates the claim that reason is selflegitimating. For those who worry that reason is not adequate to experience, claimingthat language legitimates reason is rather similar to claiming that the existence ofbachelors legitimates the existence of unmarried men. Language itself (at least
Compare the character Elizabeth Costello in J.M. Coetzee’s work: “For, seen from the outside, from a being
alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology. Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of theuniverse – what else should it do? Dethrone itself? Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have thatpower. If there were a position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself, reason would already haveoccupied that position; otherwise it would not be total.” (J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), p. 25).
21
See, of course, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22
See Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, translated by Tekeuchi Yoshinori (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1990).
23This is a dominant theme in Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, where Tanabe laments his earlier
infatuation with Kant’s critical philosophy in light of his own actions on behalf of imperial Japan during WorldWar II.
24
See, for example, Jürgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, translated by Thomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
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assertoric language) presupposes the structure of reason, and hence cannot be used tojustify that structure.
3. The instrumentalist defense of reason fares no better. If the legitimacy of reason can beinferred from what we are able to accomplish with reason, two points of response canbe made: first, even the astonishing success of reason would only justify the claim thatreason is instrumentally true, not that it actually captured the structure of experience orof the world.25 Second, reason in fact seems ill-equipped in multiple domains. For any
experience that is non-conceptual, reason will be unable to capture the phenomena inquestion.
In my view, these quick arguments provide at the very least some antecedent plausibility forthe claim that, if there are non-conceptual modes of experience, then these experiences havejust as much prima facie legitimacy as do those experiences structured by logos. While I think
the claim that we should take all experience seriously – even what logos demands we call‘unreal’ – can be plausibly defended, 26 I will limit myself to those experiences that we cancharacterize as non-conceptual. In particular, I am interested in the experience of samādhi.
Before discussing this ‘one-pointedness of mind,’ however, it will be useful to get clearer on
the notion of the non-conceptual I am employing.
§4 The non-conceptual
What is the notion of ‘experience’ that escapes the net of logos? The sort of thing in question
here can be found in several places. The beginnings of this idea are clearly articulated, forexample, in William James’ Principles, as well as some later papers on radical empiricism. 27 It
is also present in Nishida Kitaro, of the Kyoto School, who first came across the idea of ‘pure
experience’, treated conceptually, in James’ work. 28 (Nishida undoubtedly came across thisexperientially in his study of Zen). 29
As early as The Principles of Psychology, William James was already calling into
question the idea that consciousness was best captured in terms of a knowing ego intentionallydirected toward the world. The evidence for this ‘egological’ view, according to James, wassimply not present within experience. Or, to put the point more precisely, the idea of a knowing
ego grasping experiential content could only capture certain kinds of consciousness:

This form of argument parallels Arthur Fine’s arguments against scientific realism: Fine notes that the successof science is only evidence for the claim that it is instrumentally true, not that it is true tout court. See Arthur Fine,“The Natural Ontological Attitude” Noûs 18 (1984), pp. 51-65.
For a comparison of Fine’s views on the realism/antirealism debate with Heidegger’s similar views, see my“Heidegger, Arthur Fine, and the Natural Ontological Attitude,” Prolegomena 12 (2013).
26
This claim has been defended, in different ways, by numerous philosophers, as we will see.
27
See “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience,” both in William James, Writings, 19021910.
28
See his An Inquiry into the Good. Carter makes the plausible claim that the notion of ‘pure experience’ is present
throughout Nishida’s writing, even when he later turns his attention to the core idea of ‘topos.’ See Robert Carter,
The Kyoto School (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
29
See Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2002).
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But this condition of the experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing
is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead, then, of the stream ofthought being one of con-sciousness…it might be better called a stream of Sciouness pure andsimple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a ‘Me,’ and only aware of its ‘pure’
Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way.30

On James’ view in Principles, the root of our core idea of the self comes, ultimately,
from motor intentionality – from the fact that we move in the world. The idea of a centrally
located ‘agent’ is one that we feel, and that forces itself upon us when we reflect on things likethe nature of conscious experience. What is fascinating about this account, then, is that the very
idea of a self is an idea found in reflection upon experience rather than in experience itself. Thismeans that any account of experience that invokes a model of a knowing ego set over against acontent of awareness will necessarily depart from experience as it is immediately given, andwill do so precisely because of the demands placed upon us by the structure of thought itself(logos).
As James was well aware, when we come to the idea of a ‘self’ in our reflections, theidea that we consider is necessarily different from the activity of consideration itself. While itis true that a thought-content has no reality apart from the act of thinking that produces it, andthat thinking has no reality apart from the particular thought-content it thinks, it is still the casethat one cannot simply identify the thought-content with the activity of thinking. This is so for
relatively familiar reasons: the activity of consciousness – despite always being tied to an
intentional object – acts as a condition for being aware of the thought-content in question.
What kind of condition is this? If James is right, it is a logical condition – a condition of logos.
If we are to account for consciousness in terms of the categories of logic, we will need topostulate, as a transcendental condition of experience, a subject of experience. What I findinnovative about James’ treatment here, however, is his flat-out refusal to assume that logicalconditions are also metaphysical conditions. Accepting that, in the realm of logos, we must
postulate a subject as a condition for the possibility of experience does not entail that there aresuch subjects. Moreover, granting that logos demands a subject does not entail that we must
accept this demand in our account of experience.
In this respect, perhaps strangely, James is far more radical than Kant. As is well known,
Kant too thought of the subject as a necessary theoretical postulate, but recognized that only
the empirical ego was accessible to any acting agent. Thus, in Kant, the subject becomes atranscendental requirement for experience, but one that we can never really know. For James,a recognition that something is a necessary postulate of thought is sufficient to show that weneed not necessarily postulate it. To put this less cryptically: as soon as we recognize acompulsion to postulate something in addition to what is immediately given in experience, thatcompulsion can be seen for what it is: an urge rather than a necessity. For someone like Kant,
responding to the urge is required to bring a systematic philosophy to fruition; for James, seeing
the urge is enough to give up on the prospect of a systematic philosophy all together.
In later writings, the initial notion of ‘sciousness’ comes to play a much more central
role in James’ thinking:30

Willian James, The Princiles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), Vol. I, p. 304.

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the stream of thinking...is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist
chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all
my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them...breath, which was ever theoriginal of 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 asconsciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts inthe concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.31

The idea of consciousness emerges out of reflection on experience, not out of experience. In
the act of experience, there is no thing called ‘consciousness’ that is experienced: consciousness
is exhausted by its object. In this respect, Sartre is right: consciousness is what it is not, and it
is not what it is.32 The thought being thought is real enough – present – but there is not a ‘thing’to which it is present. Consciousness, in other words, is nothing other than the simply-beingpresent-of-the-intentional. 33 Indeed, this is the fundamental truth of intentionality itself:
consciousness without an object simply does not exist.34 Consciousness without directedness is
unintelligible. It follows that consciousness is, well, nothing – at least when we construe it assomething other than an event, or a relation, or an occurrence.
To take experience seriously, then, we must take this mode of experience seriously. We
have chased out one conception of the world by developing scientific thinking and powerfulconceptual maps. We have been hounded by what Husserl calls, at one point, the ‘ghosts oflogic.’35 What happens when we turn our attention to this ‘nothing’, rather than simply allowing
the rules of logos to determine what we must say about the logical ‘structure’ of experience?
And how can we turn our attention to such experience – how can we deliberately access the
non-conceptual experiential bedrock?
§5 Why meditation should be taken seriously: Samādhi
In Indic and other Asian philosophical traditions, it is widely recognized that one can develop
certain perceptual and experiential capacities in such a way that they are more disclosive thanthey would otherwise be. 36 This is the essential role played by vipassana meditation and its
descendants. Within these meditative traditions, various modes of conscious awareness are
distinguished. A central experiential state involves intense levels of ‘concentration’ (samādhi).
This mode provides us with one access point to the notion of non-conceptual experience. 37 In
states of samādhi, many of the standard assumptions we utilize to organize our experience are

31

William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 37.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes (New York: Harper Collins Press, 1993).
33
For an interesting take on how this relates to some forms of meditation, see Wolfgang Fasching, “Consciousness,
Self-consciousness, and Meditation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008), pp. 462-483.
34
We are misled to the extent that we take talk of an ‘object’ here – one set over against a ‘subject’ – to bereferential. It is simply convenient. As T.S. Eliot once remarked: I have to use language to talk.
35
See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, translated by David
Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
36This notion is likewise at the core of Aristotle’s account of phronesis as a form of perception. See in particular
Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, collected in J.L. Ackrill, ed., A New Aristotle Reader (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987).
37
Or what is called, in some literatures, ‘non-conceptual content’.
32

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationin fact called into question. The most significant of these are subject/object duality, on the one
hand, and the very idea of structure, on the other.
Saying these things are ‘called into question,’ however, is a bit misleading. It is not thecase that while one is in a state of samādhi, one therein raises a question about what one isexperiencing. In a certain respect, the instant one raises a question, one is no longer in theabsorptive states of samādhi. Questions themselves take one out of the immediate experiential
present – they indicate an absence in the field of the present – something that is sought. 38 In
samādhi, there is nothing that is ‘sought after.’ There is not even an experiential self that could
raise a question about itself, let alone about what was being experienced. In this respect, raisingsuch questions is always retrospective: one thinks back on the state of experience one was
immersed in, and then attempts to characterize it utilizing the very concepts that were, within
said experience, set aside. The issue of how to characterize samādhi is thus a complicated one.
In one respect, any characterization must be inadequate, as it will be couched within a set ofconcepts that are foreign to the experience itself; samādhi is essentially non-conceptual. 39
Nevertheless, given that we are navigating discursive waters, some sort of characterizations
must be used. The trick, as the old Zen proverb has it, is not to mistake the finger pointing at
the moon for the moon itself.
Samādhi, it should be noted, does not really pick out a single state of awareness. It is
commonly distinguished into several different levels. 40 For our purposes, it will be sufficient topick out the basic features of samādhi without reference to its various modes or levels. The aimof doing this is to articulate a mode of experience that is non-conceptual, and that can becultivated.
The most general rendering of the term samādhi is ‘concentration’ or ‘unification.’ Acommon metaphor used to describe samādhi is ‘one-pointedness of mind’ [Sanskrit: cittass’ekaggata], or ‘unification of mind.’ 41 As Shankman characterizes it: “samādhi entails theunifying of the mind in a steady, undistracted awareness” (4).42 This is accomplished throughpractice, and can be developed well beyond what someone is initially capable of:
Fixed concentration is cultivated, concentration on a fixed object so intense that awareness of noother experience can arise, resulting in one-pointed focus and states of tranquility and peace where
all experience of changing physical and mental activity ceases. Subtle states of steady, undistracted

38

See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Section 2.
This is the case because concepts inherently imply subject/object duality. To utilize a concept, at least in regularassertoric language, is to specify a thing other than oneself – even when the concept is ‘self.’ This is a point thathas been made by numerous philosophers, not the least of whom are Nishida Kitaro and Nishitani Keiji. Gadamer
also makes the point when he claims, in Truth and Method, that intelligible assertion depends on a distance between
what is said and who is saying it (See, e.g., 442).
40
For an account of the treatment of samādhi in the Pali texts, see Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samadhi(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2008).
41
The etymology of the term “is derived from the Pali prefix sam, meaning ‘together,’ and the root dha, meaning
to ‘to put’ or ‘place’” (Shankman, 3). The sense of the term thus involves something like unification, or a ‘placing
together.’42
Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samadhi (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2008).
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awareness can ultimately be achieved, but awareness of changing phenomena is lost as the mind isfixed or absorbed into its meditation object and mental activity becomes still.43

In samādhi, then, we see something like the disappearance of subject/object duality: the objectof awareness and the act of awareness are no longer experientially distinguished. No judgments
are made. The self that we pre-reflectively regard as a necessary partner in the perceptual act
recedes into oblivion. There is no ‘naming’ of the object of our awareness – there is simply
awareness. The state picked out by the term samādhi is thus an instance of what Nishida Kitaro,
following William James, calls ‘pure experience’: “When one directly experiences one’s own
state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and object arecompletely unified.”44 This is not the same as the cool contemplation of some object in thought.
“The present of pure experience is not the present in thought, for once one thinks about thepresent, it is no longer present.”45 In other words, the addition of any conceptual labels to one’s
immediate experience essentially moves one’s attention away from that experience and toward
the labels one is utilizing: “when one makes judgments about it, it ceases to be pureexperience.”46 This is so because “pure experience coincides with the sphere of attention.” 47
Both the general notion of samādhi and Nishida’s notion of pure experience (which I read asencompassing samādhi) provide us with examples of one type of non-conceptual experience. 48
There are those who would claim that all experience is conceptual. I deny this claim,
but regard the matter as essentially an empirical one. It is true that experience is informed byconcepts in many ways – concepts organize both the perception of the workaday world as wellas our descriptions of it. Nevertheless, there are states of consciousness – ways of relating tointentional objects – that essentially break down the distinction between the intentional object
and the consciousness that is aware of it. To put this another way: there are states ofconsciousness in which any awareness of ‘I’ is completely recessed – in which the content andthe act of consciousness are identical.
The Zen tradition sometimes characterizes this in terms of ‘just sitting.’ The practice of
vipassana bhavana anchors itself in breathing – just breathing. In the state of samādhi, there is
not an object of consciousness (the act of breathing) set over against a subject engaged in that
activity (the ego, or self, or atman). Instead, there is pure activity: just breathing.
It should be admitted immediately that our descriptions of such experience seem to insist
on attributing the activity to an agent – if there is pain, it must belong to someone; if there isbreathing, there must be an organism doing it; if there are thoughts, there must be a thinker.
Such descriptions may, in the end, be true. What is important for our purposes here, however,is to see that these claims are the results of inference. They are not immediately present in theexperience itself. We infer that there is a ‘self’ that experiences the pain, or does the breathing,
43

Ibid, p. 55.
Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, pp. 3-4.
45
Ibid., p. 5.
46
Ibid., p. 4.
47
Ibid., p. 6.
48
There are of course other forms of non-conceptual experience. Indeed, much absorptive experience strikes me
as non-conceptual in ways similar to the sense articulated above. The difference between Samādhi and other nonconceptual experiences is an important issue, but not one I have time to explore here.
44

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Logos and Non-Conceptual Experience: Or, Why Philosophers Should Care about Meditationor thinks the thought. If we stick to what is present in experience, we find no such thing – or,perhaps better, we find no such thing that is permanent.
Can there be pain without someone experiencing it? If pain is intrinsically
phenomenological, one will be tempted to say ‘no’ here. But, again, it really depends on how
we parse the question. Let us grant that pain is intrinsically phenomenological: whenever thereis pain, there is awareness of pain. This is not the equivalent, however, of saying that there must
be someone who is being aware of pain whenever there is pain.
There is no reason to deny that we think about pain in terms of subjects and intentional
objects. That much is certainly true. But to say that we think of x in a certain way is not yet todemonstrate that x is in fact really captured in this way of thinking about it, nor is it todemonstrate any kind of metaphysical necessity.
In samādhi, pain is just pain. It is not my pain.49 Awareness fuses with its object in sucha way that there is really no experiential distinction to be made. Interestingly, this changes thevery way pain is encountered within experience: it is no longer something to be avoided. It isjust pain.
The example of pain is a telling one for the larger point I want to make here. It is very
easy – completely natural, in fact, to think that any pain I feel must be my pain. And yet theexperience of samādhi calls this into question in a fundamental way: pain is simply pain, there
is no ‘me’ apart from the awareness of pain: what I call ‘me’ is exhausted when we simply
describe the experience: ‘there is being aware of pain now.’ 50 Nothing else is required by theexperience, though thinking longs to build up a conceptual structure around this experience –to note subjects and objects, to engage in the language of substance.
If samādhi involves the fusion of subject and object – the unity of consciousness and its
object – then there is at least one experience that suggests that the entire edifice upon which wehave built science, philosophy, and the discursive sciences (logoi) more generally is inherently
problematic. It suggests that the discursive sciences (logoi) will only ever be able to gesture
toward certain modes of experience. This also suggests an explanation for the routine rejectionof some modes of experience by the sciences: the assertoric, propositional nature of scientificdiscovery (as currently conceived) fundamentally limits what science itself can legitimately
investigate (namely, only those things with propositional or conceptual structure). The instantsomething can be put into words only inexactly (or metaphorically), it ceases to be regarded as
falling within the domain of ‘science.’ 51
When I say that the discursive sciences (logoi) are ‘problematic,’ I mean that we should
not assume that the experiences corresponding to (and issuing in) science, philosophy, andsubject/object thinking are self-justifying. I do not mean that these things are false. Taking
experience seriously requires us to take seriously even common sense experience – and it isobviously true that sometimes we do experience things like the idea of a self, or of cause andeffect, or of straightforward distinctions among objects. This must be taken seriously, but it
49

For a wonderfully written account of how one comes to realize, in meditative states, that pain is not personal,
see Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still (New York: Rodale Press, 2010).
50
Or even: “It’s like this right now.”51
I think a plausible case can be made that all language is metaphorical. I do not mean to suggest otherwise withmy remarks. My above point should be read in terms of what we self-consciously regard as metaphor.

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cannot be the final word. It cannot be the final word precisely because there are other modes ofexperience that reveal things in a fundamentally different way. 52
If we compare these modes of experience in the realm of logos, the results are given
before we even get them: logos demands structure – and this structure is usually given in termsof subjects and objects, substances and their predicates. It is in the nature of logos to accountfor things in these terms. It is precisely for this reason, however, that logos is not a sure guideto the organization of every possible experience – logos gathers the world in one way: by sorting
it into categories, by making distinctions. It is true that many different distinctions can be made– and that there are many ways of organizing things conceptually – but this is itself further
evidence of the point: logos thrives on distinctions. Indeed, reasoning and language-use moregenerally exist precisely as sets of distinctions and the relations between them. To demand thatexperience conform to logos is thus to rule out the possibility that the world is itself
unstructured. More specifically, it is to rule out the possibility that subject/object duality isinadequate to certain kinds of experience.
§6 Some implications for philosophical problems
Nothing I have argued so far in any way indicates that non-conceptual experience should be
privileged over conceptual experience. Indeed, the view I have been articulating is at least
compatible with the claim that, after investigation, we will decide that the structure of logos is
the one worth pursuing. My primary contention here has only been that we ought not dismiss
non-conceptual experience prior to its investigation – that we ought not presume the superiorityof logos simply by fiat.
I have tried to make the case that a commitment to experience is in general a hallmark
of inquiry, that this commitment has too regularly been read as simply a commitment toconceptual experience, and that there is no compelling a priori reason to privilege such
experience. Indeed, a focus on non-conceptual experience seems to support a particular type ofanswer to the traditional questions of metaphysics in much the same way that a focus onconceptual experience does. The obvious relevance of things like samādhi for those interested
in the questions of metaphysics, broadly construed, is that such experiences seem to challenge
standard assumptions in an immediate and direct way. If experiential states like samādhi aretaken seriously, then, as a source of experiential evidence – something that seems to be
demanded even by logos – we might well expect a different set of responses to some standard
philosophical questions. By way of conclusion, I’d like to suggest some of the possible
implications of regarding samādhi and similar experiential states as fundamental ones – that is,
as states that disclose things in a primordial way. While there is much that might be said toelaborate the claims I will make, my current intention is only to highlight the general shape ofsuch responses.
1. Privileging samādhi suggests that language is essentially metaphorical, despite the factthat in the workaday world it may be perfectly adequate to its task. If the unification ofmind present in samādhi is regarded as reality-disclosing, then any description of that
52

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

reality will rely on distinctions that either function well or do not function well for thetasks at hand. Language, then, will enable us to articulate particular conventional truths,
but it will only ever be able to indicate the metaphysical structure of things through setsof metaphors – metaphors that will mark distinctions that must ultimately be real only
conventionally.53
Samādhi likewise suggests the priority of the particular over the universal. After all, inthe state of samādhi one is completely absorbed in the particular. The instant theuniversal intervenes, we are functioning at the level of logos – at the level of conceptual
thinking, attaching predicates to subjects. Given that this is mediated experience, it is incertain respects metaphysically derivative (at least from a point of view that privileges
non-dual experience). This means that universals are likely best construed as
abstractions, and particulars are best regarded as metaphysically fundamental.
Samādhi likewise seems to suggest the superiority of an event ontology as opposed to a
substance ontology. The very notion of a substance is, for reasons just given, connectedto the idea of enduring things to which particular predicates attach. This language isinescapably fraught with subject/object duality, and tied, perhaps inextricably, to thenotion that universals will best capture the reality of a thing. In samādhi, however,experience cannot adequately be described in these terms: it is always immediate, fluid,
and particular.
Our standard philosophical positions in metaphysics are structured in a way that ignores
the reality of non-dual experience. To recognize such experience will involve therecognition that positions like realism and antirealism are in some ways both false andin some ways both true (if language is metaphorical, and we can distinguish between‘conventional truth’ and ‘ultimate truth,’ then both realism and antirealism fail tocapture the nature of things at one level of analysis, while managing to capture it atanother).
Our attitude toward the law of non-contradiction may be forced to change. Such laws
do not actually describe some aspects of reality – i.e. non-dual experience. This meansthat the limits of language may not be the limits of the world. It also means that we mayneed to take deviant logics more seriously, both traditional dialectical logic, as found infolks like Hegel, Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, and more formal logics that denycertain axioms of traditional logic (specifically: the law of non-contradiction).
An ability to stop doing philosophy when we want to, to show the fly the way out of the
fly bottle, etc. also seems to follow from the recognition of samādhi (or other nonconceptual experiences) as potentially reality-disclosing. After all, if our philosophicaldebates all occur at the level of the conceptual – at the level of logos and theconventional reality we share simply in virtue of sharing a common language – we will
always have recourse to the non-conceptual when we want to step away from suchdisputes.

The phrase ‘conventionally real’ should not be read to mean ‘less real.’ Things routinely regarded as merely
conventionally real (marriage, the rules of games, etc) are not therefore less real, despite having an ontologicalstatus we regard as different from what we conventionally call ‘non-conventional reality.’
53

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7. Samādhi, given what has so far been said, will also allow us to see many disputes inphilosophy (and perhaps all of them) precisely as disputes about metaphors – about what
set of metaphors will most fruitfully allow us to describe the world given the interests
we have. This seems to indicate that a pragmatic conception of belief-acceptance will
likely by the best epistemological stance at the level of logos.
§8 Concluding Remarks
Perhaps the days of systematic philosophy are over. They are certainly on the wane. If we everhope to return to fundamental questions, however, it seems to me that the logos-driven
traditions of Greco-European philosophy must address the presumptive privileging of Logos
that has characterized its multi-faceted history. I have tried to provide an argument that this isa question worth examining, and that the answers we get will depend in part on the openness
with which we approach the question of experience.

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