Beyond the Fringe: William James on the Transitional Parts of the Stream of Consciousness

One of the aspects of consciousness deserving of study is what might be called its subjective unity—the way in which, though conscious experience moves from object to object, and can be said to have distinct ‘states,’ it nevertheless in some sense apparently forms a singular flux divided only by periods of unconsciousness. The work of William James provides a valuable, and rather unique, source of analysis of this feature of consciousness; however, in my opinion, this component of James’ theory of the mind has so far gone under-emphasised in the scholarly literature. This paper undertakes some philosophical geography, trying to draw out and elucidate some of the relevant ideas from James’ corpus, and also subjects those ideas to some analysis to try and assist in judgements of their current importance. Like a bird’s life, [the stream of consciousness] seems to be made [up] of an alternation of flights and perchings. (William James, Principles of Psychology, p. 243) This rather well known metaphor lucidly captures a rather neglected, but very significant, aspect of William James’ account of phenomenal consciousness: his distinction between substantive states of consciousness and the transitive ones which intervene temporally between them. James insists that though consciousness is a flux, it is also differentiated: the bird’s life is a seamless unity, but it also contains two different kinds of activity, flying and perching. However, as James himself presciently noted (1890, pp. 243 ff.), we tend to concentrate our attention— both phenomenological and theoretical—upon our substantive mental states. And so it has come to pass that, in the scholarly literature on James, interest in the transitional parts of the stream of consciousness, or in their distinction from substantive synchronic mental states, has been sparse. Such as it is, it has tended to come from those working within the framework of traditional Continental phenomenology, such as Alfred Schuetz (1941), Aron Gurwitsch (1943), and Bruce Wilshire (1968). Perhaps partly for this reason, interest in the transitive parts has not yet found its way into contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of consciousness, and in particular not into the emerging new interdisciplinary field of ‘consciousness studies,’ even for those most influenced by the work of William James. Thus, for example, thinkers like W. E. Cooper (1990) and Owen Flanagan (1991) generally place almost no emphasis on the transitive parts. Tim Shallice (1988, heavily influenced by James here) enumerates what he calls the two ‘structural’ properties of consciousness—being sensibly continuous, and being divided into foreground and background—but takes 1 Ralph Barton Perry, James’ student and first and perhaps best commentator, phrased it thus: “The practically habituated mind flies from perch to perch, and is aware of the perch rather than of the passage.” (1938, p. 81) 2 Perhaps this circumstance would not have pleased James, who apparently took some pleasure in deflating the “unspeakable Meinong”; that “humbug” Wundt; Kant, whom he called a “mere curio”; and the “sour grapes” of his nemesis Hegel; and who completely ignored the publication of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen in 1901, despite Husserl’s idolisation of his own Principles of Psychology and probably despite the urgings of James’ close friend Carl Stumpf—indeed James was even influential in preventing its publication in translation in America until the second half of this century.