Pure Experience and the Critique of Subject-Object Dualism

The opening chapters of An Inquiry into the Good (1911) define Nishida's most influential early concept: junsui keiken, "pure experience," a term he adapted explicitly from William James's account of experience in essays later collected as Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) and from James's Principles of Psychology (1890). For Nishida, pure experience names a moment of direct, unmediated experiencing that precedes the division of that experience into a knowing subject and a known object; a person absorbed in playing music, or an infant's undifferentiated sensory field before it has learned to distinguish itself from its surroundings, exemplifies experience in which, in Nishida's own formulation from the book's opening chapter, "there is not yet a subject or an object, but subject and object are one."