7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
1/51
Reinstating the vague to its proper place in our mental life: onJamesian phenomenology and some issues in contemporaryneuroscience
by Ralph Pred
1. Jamess psychology: precursor to radical empiricism
The stream of consciousness and the characters of thought
Psychophysical parallelism
2. Jamess radical empiricism
3. Jamess monism of pure experience
4. Jamess methodical inversions
5. Into the pulse: Jamesian phenomenology
Of Jamesian and traditional phenomenology, briefly
'Pulse'-based phenomenology
Invariants of experience
6. An emotional meeting of Damasio with James and Whitehead
7. Jamesian and organic challenges to Edelmans emergent materialism
by Ralph Pred Please do not cite or circulate without the author's permission.
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
2/51
1
The daring, sensitive, and first psychologist of experience, William James, and the
holistic, under-appreciated, and foremost philosopher of process and organism, AlfredNorth Whitehead, have together provided tools, concepts, styles of sensibility and
approaches to philosophy, that enable us to make effective conceptual contact with the
actual onflow of experience.
In Jamess chapter on the stream of consciousness in his The Principles of Psychology
(1890), titled "The Stream of Thought," he draws extensively on an essay published in
1884. Writing as a psychologist, he holds to a psychophysical parallelism involving a
dualism of mental states and total brain processes, and admits many dualismssubject-
object, knower-known, mind-world and so on. He takes the "only thing which
psychology has a right to postulate at the outset . . . the fact of thinking itself" as his
starting point and the present Thought as the ultimate fact for psychology (J1 224,
360). Throughout, James uses thought to "designate all states of consciousness merely
as such, and apart from their particular quality or cognitive function" (185186).
Once embarked, he promptly introduces the characters of thought, which enable him to
treat each moment of thought as personal, unique, conjoined with other moments in the
personal stream, concept-dependent (intentional), and interested. Concern with the
conjoining of moments in the stream will come to anchor his radical empiricism. By
applying his radically empirical approach with rigor to what is revealed in the stream of
waking life, he arrives at a monism of pure experience, which amounts to a transform of
his earlier provisional psychophysical parallelism and that offers resolution of the mind-
body problem. At the same time it provides the equivalent of a phenomenological stance,
attitude or methoda way to draw close to the lived immediacy of actual experience.
Neuroscientists could benefit from radically empirical ventures, which can: foster
philosophical coherence; encourage a useful phenomenological sensitivity that may put
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
3/51
2
them in close conceptual contact with the richness of experience; and enlarge their
imaginations, even as they enrich the imaginations of radical empiricists. Jamess radical
empiricism and psychology, and Whiteheads philosophy of organism, which in
significant measure extends Jamess approach, and the organic or 'pulse'-based,
phenomenology that derives from their philosophies, together facilitate the achievement
of such close contact.
1. Jamess Psychology: Precursor to Radical Empiricism
The stream of consciousness and the characters of thought
In the Principles, Jamess immediately addresses the fact of thinking itself by asking
how thinking does go. He identifies five important and readily noticed characters in the
thought process (J1: 225):
1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes
or rejectschooses from among them, in a wordall the while.
1) When James says that every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness, he
means it in two principal senses. First, each thought is personal in that it is private: it can
be directly experienced only by oneself. I cannot experience your thoughts as you do,
from your perspective or within your stream, any more than you can experience my
thoughts. In this sense our streams of thought, of experience, are disjoined from one
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
4/51
3
anothers. Second, each thought is felt to belong with ones other thoughts, to be part of
an onflowing stream of accumulating personal history: "Experience is remolding us every
moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our
experience of the whole world up tqo that date" (J1 234).
James, who accepts David Humes denial of the existence of a substantial self,1
does
account for the sense of self in experience"that appearance of never-lapsing ownership
[of thoughts in waking experience] for which common-sense contends" (J1 339). He
finds that the personality and consciousness of self involve "the incessant presence of two
elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as
continuing in time" (371, 400). James uses the word "me" to refer to the objective person"continuing in time," and "I" to refer to the passing subjective thought, that which in its
momentary activity is a vehicle of choice and cognition that appropriates from all that is
given to it but cannot appropriate the act of appropriating without terminating it and
initiating a new present moment of thinking (341).
The objective person or self is thus being modified continually, and in each moment the
modifications and associations available are constrained by immediately and recently
preceding, and deeply sedimented, moments. Not only is there no separate self or
knowing mental substance here, but "all the experiential facts find their place in this
description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing
thoughts or states of mind . . . and psychology need not look beyond" (J1 401).
Nonetheless, "the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as
parts of personal selves," and a mans self has a "sum total of . . . psychic powers,"
including a memory, habits, dispositions, and a sense of personal identity (227, 291).
Memory, dispositions, and habits may all be treated as habits, which, "from the
physiological point of view," consist of "pathway[s] of discharge formed in the brain, by
which certain incoming currents . . . tend to escape." Habits include not just the bodily
bases facilitating motor behaviors, for, in addition to observable behavior patterns, "such
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
5/51
4
functions as the association of ideas, perception, memory, reasoning, the education of the
will, etc. etc., can best be understood as results of the formation de novo of just such
pathways of discharge" (JB 1). We may then see the Jamesian self or me as a congeries
of habits, each of them subject to development and change (J1 105), and each moment in
the history of a self then involves an I arising out of a me and subsequently transforming
the me, however slightly. I refer to this ongoing process as Jamess I-me dialectic and
regard it as a Jamesian structure of experience essential to the continuity of personality
and of an individuals actual capabilities. According to James, the I-me process of self-
constructionthe ongoing enabling and constraining structuring of the I by the me and
the ongoing modification of the me by the I, of all that one has been by what one now
isis one in which the bodily, and the social as well, are principal constituents of the self(292). "The nucleus of the me is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the
time (400). We always have some awareness of bodily position, attitude, and condition,
and "as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking" (J1 241242) and
indeed "the nucleus of all reality" (J2 iv).2
2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
For James, "it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same.
Every thought . . . is, strictly speaking, unique" (J1 233). Consequently, each personal
consciousness, thought, is always changing, from moment to moment and, as well
shortly see, the thinking constituting the momentary thought is always in transition,
changing.
3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
Yet each moment of experience, while unique, remolds the me as it is appropriated by
and flows into its successor. What is at issue here is the transition from thought to
thought. At this juncture in his analysis James introduces the stream of consciousness and
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
6/51
5
his well-known notions of substantive and transitive parts. Regarding the rate at which
the mental contents in our psychological processes change, James observes,
When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful
and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or
between it and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful
stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a
birds life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of
language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every
sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial
imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for
an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with
thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters
contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.
Let us call the resting-places the "substantive parts," and the places of flight the
"transitive parts," of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our
thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from
which we have just dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is
to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another. (J1 243)
I construe transitive parts broadly to begin with the transition beyond the attainment of
a substantive part, with the readying for takeoff from a perch. James later named this
transition the "co-conscious transition . . . by which one experience passes into another
when both belong to the same self" (ERE 47).
For James, each substantive part or thought is a single pulse of indecomposable
subjective unity, arising from and appropriating all that its predecessors in the stream
contain and own (J1 278, 339):
The unity into which the Thoughtas I shall for a time proceed to call, with a capital T, the
present mental statebinds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
7/51
6
not exist until the Thought is there. (J1 338)
The pulse is thus the formation of the Thoughtthe recognizing of the object, the
recalling of the name, the arriving at the decision, for exampleand the mental state qua
substantive part or "stable psychic fact" (J1 253) appears in "a single pulse of
subjectivity" (278), "one undivided state of consciousness" (276) not properly to be
isolated from the transitive parts, fringe, and feelings contributing to its formation, or
from subsequent thoughts. So understood, "the present Thought, or section of the Stream
of Consciousness [is] the ultimate fact for psychology" (360) and that Stream is a stream
of pulses (PU 283284). Late in his life, in a passage characterizing the process of
thought-formation within the stream of experience, James asserted:
Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of
content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of
perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as
immediately given, they come totally or not at all. (SPP 155)
Plainly, the notion of a bud or drop can be broadened to include any type of thought, and
I will use the term 'bud' frequently in that fashion.
Now, once having distinguished the substantive and transitive parts, James fleshes out his
account with two other features of the continuous flow of experiencethe fringe, which
helps illustrate how the embodied self and habitual association come into play in each
passing thought, and feelings of tendency and direction, which figure in moments and
link moments together in action.
Now, think of the transitive parts as standing in for psychological functions that carry us
from bud to bud, e.g., from thought to thought, perception to intention, or intention to
perceived satisfaction. The feelings of tendency and direction figure in how we
experience the transitive parts (J1 253). They are not merely "descriptions from without,
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
8/51
7
but . . . are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within"
(254). James (250) gives several examples to indicate the reality of these feelings:
consider feelings when trying to recall details of an event, when taking a few steps to
retrieve an object, or as your words form when speaking.
These feelings of tendency are "often so vague that we are unable to name them at all."
But they and their correlate transitive parts play so pivotal a role in Jamess enterprise
that he views a substantial portion of his task as "the reinstatement of the vague to its
proper place in our mental life" (J1 254) and lessening the weight given to the clear and
distinct: ". . . the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part
of our minds as they actually live" (J1 255). A psychology or empiricism that recognizesfeelings of tendency will be considerably broader in scope than one that does not. But if
the feelings of tendency correspond to transitive parts, they are also linked to activities in
the brain and can constitute an important part of the fringe, a term introduced "to
designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of
relations and objects but dimly perceived" (258, 264), the influence being experienced in
a variety of expectations, intimations, associations, and other subtle feelings.
Of the remaining two of Jamess characters of thought the first holds, in effect that 4)
thought is intentional or appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is
cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing." (J1 271)
The reason why we all believe that the objects of our thoughts have a duplicate existence outside,
is that there are many human thoughts, each with thesame objects, as we cannot help supposing.
The judgment that my own past thought and my own present thought are of the same object is
what makes me take the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangulation into an
independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective
appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought. (J1 271-272)
This ability to think of the same matters in different portions of the mental stream turns
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
9/51
8
on the development and application of concepts (J1 459461). Concepts can be the same
many times over; no momentary state of mind can be. In each act of conception, attention
isolates in thought some matter out of the continuum of felt experience, and "hold[s] fast
to it, without confusion" (461, 465). As a result, the same matters can figure, as topics of
thought or discourse, in different pulses of thought or states of mind, even though each
such repeated conception occurs in a unique mental state (480).
For James, this ability to form concepts and act with "constancy in our meanings,"
constitutes "the most important of all the features of our mental structure" (J1 460).
Conception is the mark of the mental, and it is practical: the ability to apprehend in
accord with concepts enables one to affix "views taken on reality" (SPP 200), to perceive(recognize or interpret sensory stimuli), think (consider possibilities), and take effective
action (bring about conceived states of affairs). Concepts thus are tools that function to
connect sensation, perception, and action; thinking essentially involves nothing other than
the ability to form and use concepts, which inevitably come to be associated and may be
aggregated or integrated into a more or less stable cognitive framework that makes it
possible to lay hold of the novel, to test in living the adequacy of conception, and to build
up, and act in accord with, and modify a "conceptual scheme, . . . a sort of sieve." This
scheme can perform a preeminently cognitive function, "But whenever a physical reality
is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, all the
predicates and relations of the conception becomes its predicates and relations; it is
subjected to the sieves network" (J1 482).
If we can recognize something, we have a concept of it, and we can perceptually
categorize factors in experience as exemplifying the concept. To perceive something is to
recognize it under the aspect of some concept(s) or another. So understood, the formation
of a thought involves translating from the perceptual to the conceptual. As James later
noted (SPP 101), "concepts are as real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment
without taking account of them," although taking account need hardly involve conceptual
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
10/51
9
analysis or verbalization. However, when verbalized or used analytically, "since the
relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for
the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled" (SPP 81). This, touches on
Jamess radically empirical notion of raw, unverbalized experience, treated below.
While the fourth character holds that thought is intentional (directed at or about objects or
states of affairs), has intentional content, the fifth holds that intentional content is colored
by interest, valuing. It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of
others, and welcomes or rejectschooses from among them, in a wordall the while.
Valuation is at play in every moment of experience.
In an act of consciousness, "what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous
terms" (J2 559). Whether it arise in the course of action, with incoming data largely pre-
selected by expectant attention, or not, each moment of consciousness, "consists in . . .
the selection of some [among simultaneous possibilities], and the suppression of the rest
by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention" (J1 288). Emphasis, selection and
neglect function in sensation, perception, theoretical reasoning, deliberation, and in fact
in all conscious activity, so that objects of thought are always dealt with under selected
aspects (284287). As attention focuses on an object it always does so "for the sake of
some subjective interest, and . . . the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible
experience is really nothing but a teleological instrument" (482). Each moment of thought
involves conceptual activity and each exercise of conceptual capability, each application
of a conceptual scheme, reflective or not, is for the sake of some interest, lifting the
object of cognition into sufficient clarity to serve some useful function, the conceiver
invariably being a self-modifying creature with purposes and ends (461, 482). The
mentation occurring at the heart of the bud, between sensation (stimuli) and action and
the aftermath of associative effects, relies on concepts and distinctions that are retained
precisely because they can make practical differences. In the moment, one perceives what
is relevant to ones intentions, desires, and interests, and in the course of interested
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
11/51
10
activity neural pathways correlate with habits of attention, perception and action are built
up or strengthened, modifying the conceptual sieves network marked in the brain and
comprising the Jamesian neural net, so that order and the self is always in the making as
the I-me dialectic carries forward.
Psychophysical parallelism
In Principles, James attempts to provide a psycho-physical parallelism, an "unmediated
correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the
succession of total brain-processes" (J1 182) and to give the five characters of thought
clear physical correlates. Thus, thought is personal in that it is enabled and constrained byeach persons Jamesian neural net; novel thoughts are formed with the summing of
stimuli along interacting nerve tracts; thought is sensibly continuous in part because no
brain state abruptly dies away; and the neural net carries the associations and values that
underlie and propagate the value-laden conceptual scheme. In this account, "the whole
neural organism . . . is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli
into reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or
central portion of the machines operations" (J2 372).
Although James worked hard to relate psychological and neural processes, he regarded
the physiology of his day as too superficial to be very helpful in dealing with "the
intimate workings of the brain," a subject he relegated to the "physiology of the future,"
(J1 8182). A century later, Gerald Edelman offered a now-contemporary way to treat the
Jamesian characters of thought in neurobiological dress. That said, I offer a few
highlights from Jamess psychophysical parallelism, often with an eye to later discussion.
Regarding the first character of thought, Weve already seen that the Jamesian self may
be regarded psychologically as a sum total of habits and physiologically as a network of
pathways in the brain. With each moment in the history of a self ones habits are
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
12/51
11
transformed, however slightly, in an instance of the I-me dialectic. And the neural
network is transformed too, in a process facilitated by plasticity.
Plasticity, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak
enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively
stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set
of habits. . . . [T]he phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the
organic materials [especially nervous tissue] of which their bodies are composed.
. . . the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up . . . when we call it an organ in which
currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not
easily disappear. . . . a simple habit [is] nothing but a reflex discharge; and its anatomical
substratum must be a path in the system. The most complex habits . . . are from the same
point of view, nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centers, due to the
presence there of systems of reflex paths, so organized as to wake each other up
successively. . . . The entire nervous system is nothing but a system of paths between a
sensory terminus a quo and a muscular, glandular, or other terminus ad quem. (J1 105,
107108)
These systems of paths are built up and modified firing-of-nerves by firing-of-nerves,
experience by experience: "A path once traversed by a nerve-current [is] . . . made more
permeable than before," so that our plastic nervous system grows pathways according to
"the modes in which it has been exercised" (108, 112). This "expresses the philosophy of
habit in a nutshell" (112) and also is plainly a precursor of "the Hebb rule," to the effect,
in popular form, that when nerve cells repeatedly fire together they wire together.
James gives a detailed physiological account of habits, ranging from the laying down of
the relevant neural pathways to the exercise of habits as the unfolding of activatedcapabilities in series of sensory-action loops, modulated to momentary circumstances.
These loops involve readinesses to recognize and respond, including anticipated ('pre-
prepared') movements, all of which show up in Jamess feelings of tendency and when
acted on call up their successors and, so, arise within a coordinated pattern of action.
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
13/51
12
James understands that what looks like the unfolding of habit on the basis of such loops
is, from the inside, made up of buds, momentary formations of thoughts that are fringed
and that carry feelings of direction. We may regard transitive parts largely as the
operation of enacted habits which serve to structure behavior or, to put it more
practically, which serve to structure action. As we so act, we experience an actual world
in the midst of purposive action rather than a merely physical world given to our senses.
Habits develop because they "simplif[y] the movements required to achieve a given
result, . . . . economiz[ing] the expense of nervous and muscular energy" and also reduce
"the conscious attention with which our acts are performed, . . . bring[ing] it about that
each event calls up its own appropriate successor . . . without any reference to theconscious will. . . . Our lower centers know the order of these movements, and show their
knowledge by their surprise if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be
made in a different way" (J1, 112, 113, 114115).
Mental habits and competences are brain-embodied as well as those that are enacted in
observable physical activity: ". . . the machinery of association, as we know, is nothing
but the elementary law of habit in the nerve-centers. And this same law of habit is the
machinery of retention also . . . [or] liability to recall." (J1 654) Likewise, in perception,
"part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us," and
another possibly larger part "out of our own head" or alternatively from "the brain
[which] reacts by paths which previous experiences have worn" (J2 103), for objects
previously attended to remain in memory (J1 427). Experienced objects may thus later
figure in "pre-perception" or expectant attention affecting future perception (439).
James, as a dualistic psychologist, gives the second character of thought a physiological
face too. The I-me dialectic is written in the brain: "whilst we think, our brain changes"
(J1 234) and every change "undergone by the brain leaves in it a modification which is
one factor in determining what manner of experiences the following ones shall be" (499).
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
14/51
13
For James, "the whole internal equilibrium [of the brain] shifts with every pulse of
change." Outside objects certainly influence each particular shifting, but so does "the
very special susceptibility in which the organ has been left at that moment by all it has
gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly determined by the nature of this
entire past succession. . . . It is out of the question, then, that any total brain-state should
identically recur" (234).
The richness of the experiential field and the uniqueness of each moment is reflected in
physiology. The unceasing change in the world affecting our senses, the correspondence
of every sensation to some cerebral action, the changing of brain state and of the "whole
internal equilibrium" of the brain while we think and with every pulse of change, and thephysiological effects of all changes in the brain, even the "summation of apparently
ineffective stimuli" suggesting that "none are bare of psychological result" (J1 232235),
all serve to ensure that thinking involves change and each formed thought or state of
mind and each corresponding brain state is different from what went before (499).
The continuity of the stream of consciousness corresponds to the waxing and waning of
nerve tracts. These too are continuous: no brain process or state perishes instantly; each
momentary internal equilibrium, which shifts with every pulse of change, has its own
inertia and carries on to influence its successors (242).
The formation of a bud or pulse of experience is also reflected in physiology. As the
brain changes continuously and states of consciousness melt into their successors in an
unbroken stream, the law of "the summation of stimuli in the same nerve-tract" hold
sway (J1 248, 82). This law, which underpins Jamess mind-body or "psycho-neural" (J2
164) parallelism, saves place for the vague as outwardly ineffective excitations.
. . . a stimulus which would be inadequate by itself to excite a nerve-center to effective
discharge may, by acting with one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by
themselves alone), bring the discharge about. The natural way to consider this is as a
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
15/51
14
summation of tensions which at last overcome a resistance. The first of them produce a
"latent excitement" or a "heightened irritability" . . . ; the last is the straw which breaks
the camels back. Where the neural process is one that has consciousness for its
accompaniment, the final explosion would in all cases seem to involve a vivid state offeeling of a more or less substantive kind. But there is no ground for supposing that the
tensions while yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, may not also have a share in
determining the total consciousness present in the individual at the time. In later chapters
we shall see abundant reason to suppose that they do have such a share, and that without
their contribution the fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital ingredient of
the minds object, would not come to consciousness at all. (J1 82)
The "final explosion" is the formation of a pulse, a unique relatively vivid substantive
feeling or thought, say a recognition of an object or a decision to act. The explosive
resultants of summations are experienced, in conscious mental states, as fringed
substantive parts. The processes of "summing" may be viewed as, in effect, the brain
processes corresponding to the transitive parts, which are experienced in feelings of
tendency, and which are "flights" to the fringed substantive parts. A Jamesian may even
say that the flow of attention in the course of activity can be understood in terms of
substantive and transitive parts and parallels the canalization of flows in an associative
web of paths of arousal and recall (J1 460). Attention then is the concentration of concern
on some few things out of the wealth of incoming data, typically so as to deal with them
effectively, said concentration involving characteristic "accommodation or adjustment of
the sensory organs," readinesses to respond, "anticipatory preparation from within of the
ideational centers concerned with the object to which the attention is paid" (434, 439).
Attention thus isolates an object of paramount interest at the time (139), an isolation that
produces and is marked by a grade of clarity adequate to the occasion, and leads to the
formation of a memorable substantive part (marking the formation of the passing thought
or I) and corresponding changes in associative neural pathways and the conceptual sieve.
2. Jamess Radical Empiricism
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
16/51
15
James articulated his philosophy of radical empiricism twenty years after he first wrote of
the stream of consciousness, defining the enterprise as follows:
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is
not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be [and are]
experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as real as
anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of
things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced,
whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (ERE 42)
In 1884, he announced (1884 2) his intention to show what immense tracts of our
inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by psychologists. In 1890, beginning
his study of the mind from within, he cautioned against abandoning the empirical
method of investigation (J1: 224) even as he hammered on traditional empiricists for
holding such ridiculous notions, as that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed
to our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not (255). James already intended
to honor the relations conjoining moments of experience and making for the streamingcontinuities of experience, and to give overlooked tracts of our inner life their due. His
account of the stream of consciousness was au fond radically empirical and his radical
empiricism is an outgrowth of his concern with the stream.
As radical empiricist, James calls the experienced relations that connect experiences
conjunctive relations.
The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious
transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to
the same self.... Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is
one of the things immediately experienced. 'Change' in this case mean continuous transition
as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
17/51
16
conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive
relation of all others.... The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value...
just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talkaboutit . (ERE 47-48)
So far as James is concerned, the co-conscious transition is so troublesome because the
traditional empiricists self-observational stance results in the focusing on substantive
parts and the neglect of the transitive parts including co-conscious transitions. The
substantive parts are described using concepts, which enable us to isolate and hold fast in
thought factors occurring in the continuum of felt experience, the perceptual flux. But the
transitive parts, which are so hard to hold fast and observe (J1 244), escape notice and
description and slip through the conceptual sieve, and as they are neglected so are causal
relations between what Hume, like other traditional empiricists, took to be disconnected
"perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity" (252253). That
is,
Conceptual treatment of perceptual reality makes it seem paradoxical and
incomprehensible; and when radically and consistently carried out, it leads to the opinion
that perceptual experience is not reality at all, but an appearance or illusion.
Briefly, this is a consequence of two facts: First, that when we substitute concepts forpercepts, we substitute their relations also. But since the relations of concepts are of static
comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which
the perceptual flux is filled. Secondly, the conceptual scheme, consisting as it does of
discontinuous terms, can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely. The
one is no full measure of the other, essential features of the flux escaping whenever we
put concepts in its place. (SPP 8081)
One hallmark then of radical empiricism is not to exclude from our philosophicalanalyses any element that is directly experienced, to consult raw, unverbalized (which is
not to say uninfluenced by language) experience before accepting any such analysis. This
despite our being so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats discursive
thought generally as the sole avenue to truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
18/51
17
more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson
calls them, comes very hard (PU 272-3). To make plain the inadequacies of those
conceptual accounts which do not recognize real connections between discrete
experiences, the smooth passing of one moment into the next in an ongoing present, and
what he earlier termed feelings of direction, James turns to general examples of activity,
each necessarily being lived through for him in the generic "dramatic shape of something
sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome" (SPP
212). It is with those "personal activity-situations," which are "continuously developing
experiential series" (SPP 210, 211), that James rendered the habitual experiential, and
made the co-conscious transition almost palpable, while perhaps over-dramatizing the
causal nature of these situations, even though they certainly involve intentional causation,the feeling of something making something happen.
3
Co-conscious transition affords the continuity in these experiential series, and to
appreciate this form of transition is to achieve further contact with the stream. For James,
activity-situations thus provide a radically empirical benchmark for co-conscious
transition, and he wraps up his analysis thusly:
Our outcome so far seems therefore to be only this, that the attempt to treat "cause," for
conceptual purposes, as a separable link, has failed historically, and has led to the denial
of efficient causation, and to the substitution for it of the bare descriptive notion of
uniform sequence among events. Thus intellectualist philosophy once more has had to
butcher our perceptual life in order to make it "comprehensible." Meanwhile the concrete
perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly
comprehensible instances of causal agency. The transitive causation in them does not, it
is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on. Rather does a whole
subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to
yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality-at-work flavors the
entire concrete sequence. (SPP 217-8).
3. Jamess Monism of Pure Experience
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
19/51
18
Jamess radical empiricism affords a way of going from psychology to experience, from
conceptual description to perceptual flux and life as lived through. When he gets there he
has already become a monist of pure experience, as if his psychophysical parallelism
helped him bootstrap down there, revealing that states of consciousness and brain-
processes are moments of non-dual experience taken twice over.
As a philosopher, James did not accept the dualisms he abided as a psychologist. Pure
experiencethe unmediated flux of life, whose salient or interesting parts are often held
fast, identified, named, and associated in conceptual categoriesis more primitive than
the dualisms of mind and matter, knower and known, subject and object, thing andthought (ERE 14, 2325, 9394). Those dualisms arise when particular experiences
(thoughts) are considered, in retrospect, with focus on the substantive part, in the form of
verbalized propositional content and typically separately from the transitive parts,
feelings of direction and the fringe. By contrast James, as philosopher of pure experience,
as radical empiricist, attempted to get back to raw unverbalized life, virtually conceivable
and classifiable as objective and subjective (7475), but not directly so conceived and
classified. Raw experience is too rich with sensory content, association, and feeling for
any amount of verbalization or conceptualization to fully describe or express, in which
one experience passes into another belonging to the same personal consciousness,
forming a stream of pure experience, in which each experience, each field of the present,
is a place of intersection of processesincluding processes arising in ones personal
history and processes arising elsewhere (12 ff.), "knit by different transitions" (80).
In The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience (ERE 137-155) James
aimed to show what he means by his principal tenet of monism of pure experience:
"There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff . . . ; but the same identical piece of
pure experience (which was the name I gave to the materia prima of everything) can
stand alternately for a fact of consciousness or for a physical reality, according as it is
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
20/51
19
taken in one context or another" (ERE 137138; cf. 12). James then specifies that the
commonest objection which his monism runs up against is drawn from the existence of
our affections. The objectors regard affections as purely mental and unextended but
James argues they afford his monism powerful support (138). Let's see how.
In one of his influential essays on the emotions, published in 1884 right after his essay
concerning the stream of consciousness, James offered this characterization of emotions,
reiterated in hisPrinciples (J2 449):
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions [including surprise, fear,
anger, lust, greed, and the like] is that the mental perception of some fact excites the
mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the
bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the
PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur
IS the emotion. (JCE 247)
For those unfamiliar with the tenability of Jamess thesis here, I cite this tempered but
affirming assertion from Antonio Damasio:
The mechanisms I have outlined to enact emotion and produce a substrate for feelings are
compatible with William James's original formulation on this theme but include many
features absent in James's text, namely that James relied on representations arising in the
viscera to the exclusion of concern with the sourcing of feelings in the skeletal muscles
and internal milieu. None of the features I have added undermines or violates the basic
idea that feelings are largely a reflection of body-state changes, which is William James's
seminal contribution to the subject. (FWH 288)
Returning to James, first notice that for him to claim here that bodily changes and
emotion are identical, and shortly after (JCE 255) that emotion dissociated from all
bodily feeling is inconceivable, is later to offer support for Jamess monism of pure
experience, in which affections of the mind to a great extent at any rate, are
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
21/51
20
affections of the body (ERE 142). To a great extent possibly because on some
occasions, a peripheral feeling of affection of the body may afford, by co-conscious
transition, conjunctive relation to the ensuing bud in which emotional feeling flowers
centrally. In either event, pulses of affectional experience are unitary yet they may be
taken twice over, conceptually, in one context as a state of mind and in another by
treating the bodily feelings as objective, the body as an object (ERE 18). For James (cf.
ML 226), the duality is not immediate, rather the immediate is non-dual.
By our natural way of thinking about emotions James refers to the view that the
emotional sequence proceeds from stimulating event to mental affection or emotion, and
thence to bodily expression; this leaves room for and presumes an agent acting on the
basis of a felt emotion. James holds that the sequence runs from event to bodily changes
which are felt as they occur and that that feeling is the emotion. James thus inverts the
natural sequence: perception of the stimulating fact issues in bodily changes rather than
issuing directly into an emotion which issues in bodily changes. It is as if he subjected his
monistic thesis to a radically empirical testmade contact with, consulted, the
unverbalized embodied experience, rather than standing off from it, and in description
succumbing to prevailing habits of thought. I will discuss these and other aspects of
Jamess theory of the emotions below, in relation to Damasios own treatment of the
emotions, but with this inversion fresh in mind, I press on to discuss other inversions of
Jamess and to indicate how symptomatic they are of his philosophy and his way of doing
philosophy.
4. Jamess Methodical Inversions
Notice too that by inverting the sequence James is also inverting our natural way ofthinking, where that natural way may be likened to the natural attitude with which we
typically live life through and unreflectingly engage in everyday activity and coping. To
invert that attitude is kin to another of Jamess inversionary moves published in early
1884, that of redressing emphasis on substantive partshere, affected states of mindby
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
22/51
21
acknowledging the reality and functioning of transitive partshere the feelings of bodily
changes (e.g., in breathing, heartbeat) which give rise to, or are, emotions.
In mentioning the natural attitude, which may bring Edmund Husserl and capital P
Phenomenology to mind, I am taking these Jamesian inversions to point to a Jamesian
phenomenological method that can help increase awareness of co-conscious transitions,
conjunctive relations, transitive parts, feelings of direction, and so on, in part by
overturning habits of thought that militate against any such recognition, and so can help
bring us closer conceptually to the stream of consciousness and life as it is lived. Let us
quickly review some other principal Jamesian inversions.
Subject-formation: from subject as thinking thoughts to thinker as thought For James,
each instance of thinking culminates in the formation of thought and thinker: "The unity
into which the Thought . . . binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself,
does not exist until the Thought is there," and "that thought is itself the thinker" (J1 338,
401). James attends to the actual composition of the thought under review rather than
sticking to the clear images and verbal formulations representing "the halting-places, the
substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought" (269). He avoids being
misguided by the misleading clarities of language (194 ff.) and regards the object of each
thought or bud of perception as "neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks,
exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic
the manner of the thinking may be" (276). But that thought is constituted in "a single
pulse of subjectivity" (278), the novel formation of the substantive part and the thinker of
the thought, the I, the subject. Each momentary thinker arises through the activity of its
meexisting capabilities and associations, which themselves import value and operate in
the processing of stimuli and the preparation of response. Here we make contact with the
two core dynamic structures of experience: the process of subject-formation and the
ongoing I-me dialectic of experience as personal history accumulates.
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
23/51
22
If we come to see what subject-formation involves, and what "subject raising"
(understood as pivotal to the formation of a subject-predicate or subject-verb-object
sentence) leaves out, we may resist crucial impacts of submission to language-supported
habits. We all go through subject-formation as our subjective moments are taking form,
but this is beneath the mention of our language. In fact, subject-formation is obscured by
subject-verb-object expression (e.g. "I see a boat entering the harbor"), which often
expresses the propositional content of the substantive part, grammatically abstracted from
its formation, and in which expression the subject (say, the I) is raised out of the flux, as
if the subject created the perception. So any radically empirical attempt to indicate
subject-formation remains not just incomprehensible but ever inaccessible to one
maintaining a detached, self-observational, transition-masking, and ultimately language-constrained, stance. It seems to me that a phenomenology should be able to enter or
engage with the process of subject-formation.
The notion of momentary process as subject-formation is the most revolutionary aspect of
Jamess and Whiteheads thought. It requires thinking without unquestioning reliance on
habits of thought fostered by our active-voice-dominated grammar and its ally, the
subject-predicate form of expression.4 It requires thinking outside the long-reigning
syntax. Whitehead, extending James, has given us the tools for getting outside of or
beneath the subject-predicate form of expression to arrive at an understanding of subject-
formation that enables us to become sensitive to the process and be attentive within it.
The I of the subject-superject (a functional counterpart in Whitehead of Jamess co-
conscious transition) is not an agentive I that builds mental scenes out of discrete
sensations and associations and sees each concrescence through to its end:
We do not initiate thought by an effort of self-consciousness. We find ourselves thinking,
just as we find ourselves breathing and enjoying the sunset. (AI 47; cf. ERE 37)
In this sense, insofar as it encourages belief in a homuncular, agentive I, subject-
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
24/51
23
predicate-based discourse is thoroughly misleading. In addition, it abstracts from relation
(of, say, knower and known); in Jamess words,
We are so befogged by the suggestions of speech that we think a constant thing, known
under a constant name, ought to be known by means of a constant mental affection. The
ancient languages, with their elaborate declensions, are better guides. In them no
substantive appears "pure," but varies its inflection to suit the way it is known. (1884: 11;
cf. SMW 24)
And Whitehead believed, as he said in the course of a general criticism of Humean
atomism, that
If you once conceive fundamental fact as a multiplicity of subjects qualified by predicates,
you must fail to give a coherent account of experience. The disjunction of subjects is the
presupposition from which you start, and you can only account for conjunctive relations by
some fallacious sleight of hand, such as Leibnizs metaphor of his monads engaging in
mirroring. The alternative philosophic position must commence with denouncing the whole
idea of "subject qualified by predicate" as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of
language. (R 1314)
From derivative clarity toward the actualities of experience The heart of the move from
intentionality-based analyses of experience to more process-sensitive ones, is the shift
from treating the relatively clear, distinct, and isolated intentional contents of substantive
parts as the object of analyses to treating (typically nonverbal) contents had interior to
experience as they take shape and function in pulses and in streams of thought. It is
integral to Jamess move or inversion from the static relations of concepts toward the
dynamic perceptual flux and raw, unverbalized experience.
Traditional empiricism doesnt admit that "the conscious recognition of impressions of
sensation is the work of sophisticated elaboration" (PR 315) or as James saw, that "what
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
25/51
24
we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very
high degree" (J1 224). Intentionality-based analyses of conscious experiences often
encourage the same error, by neglecting the process of thought-formation, and
concentrating on late, clarified, elements. As Whitehead put it, "those elements of our
experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic
facts: they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process" (PR 162). What
James and Whitehead are both out to accomplish is to correct the inversion of the true
constitution of experience (PR 173), whether it be in the analysis of causation,
perception, or thinking.5
The task for Whitehead and for experiential analysis then is to
grasp the nature of the basic facts of experience and to see the importance of the early
stages of pulse-formation, and thereby to reinstate the vagueincluding the unclear andindistinctto its proper place in philosophy. The contrast with the Western philosophical
tradition is stark:
When Descartes, Locke, and Hume undertake the analysis of experience, they utilize those
elements in their own experience which lie clear and distinct, fit for the exactitude of
intellectual discourse. It is tacitly assumed, except by Plato, that the more fundamental
factors will ever lend themselves for discrimination with peculiar clarity. (AI 175)
The process of thought-formation may indeed introduce clarity and distinctness, but
the consequences of the neglect of this law, that the late derivative elements are more
clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements, have been fatal to the
proper analysis of an experient occasion. In fact, most of the difficulties of philosophy are
produced by it. Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy [read inverted]
fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been
made to follow upon impressions of sensation. (PR 162)
James early recognized that ". . . the definite images of traditional psychology form but
the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live" (J1 255), and like Whitehead,
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
26/51
25
devoted much analytic effort to restoring the vague to its proper place in our mental life"
(254).
5. Into the pulse: Jamesian Phenomenology
I use the term phenomenological to refer to the lived immediacy of actual experience,
as well as to talk about that immediacy. Conjointly, Ill here use phenomenology to
refer to that lived immediacy (the phenomenology of living) and to descriptions and
analyses of it. Let me quickly propose some conditions of adequacy and additional
desiderata for attempts at phenomenology. Among the former, I here include these four:
1. An acceptable phenomenology must meet the radically empirical tests of not admitting
into its accounts or constructions any element that is not directly experienced and not
excluding from them any element that is directly experienced.
2. The relations that connect experiences must themselves be treated as experienced
relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as real as anything
else in the system. Specifically, an adequate phenomenology must recognize co-
conscious transition and conjunctive relation and elucidate the nature of these
phenomena.
3. A phenomenology must provide a method for appreciating or gaining access to the
types of experience it alleges to be real, lived through, phenomenological. A Jamesian
phenomenological method affords ways to make gentle contact with the easily disrupted
and elusive stream of experience by showing how to attend to co-conscious transition in
the living through of concrete personal activity-situations, how to invert misleading,'natural' ways of looking at experience, and by offering routes into the bud of experience.
4. A phenomenology must be able to give a rich account of the formation of any
experience, so much so that it can plausibly come at consciousness from inside the
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
27/51
26
momentits process of formationand 'inside' the stream and surround. The
explanatory philosophy associated with a phenomenology should be attractive and rely
on or stem from or arise interdependently with a coherent metaphysics.
Among my explicit desiderata, I here also include four, omitting others concerning, e.g.,
the facilitation of self-analysis, and the fostering of authenticity and empathy.
1. A phenomenological philosophy ought to be able to situate and appreciate the worth of
other phenomenological approaches, while remaining open to criticism as to linguistic,
cultural or other biases imported with its own presuppositions.
2. It should address the possibility of differences in phenomenology from culture to
culture, and in treating the living through of raw, unverbalized experience (where
unverbalized does not mean uninfluenced by language, and where raw suggests
uncooked, not processed conceptually or reflected on), it ought to be able to indicate how
language may contribute to the structuring of experience.
3. It should be neurobiologically plausible in the sense that a very tight fit may be
achieved between its accounts and neurobiological accounts of how experience arises.
4. Its philosophical analysis of lived experience should be so sensitive to matters
biological that it is able to put neuroscientists in vivid conceptual contact with the stream
of experience and enlarge the imagination they can bring to bear on topics of interest to
them.
Of Jamesian and traditional phenomenology, briefly
By my lights Jamess psychological and radically empirical accounts of the stream of
experience, especially as extended by Whitehead, satisfy these conditions of adequacy
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
28/51
27
and desiderata.
While the phenomenological (what we live through) is what it is, how we frame,
conceive and attend to it may differ with chosen descriptive vantage. Traditional
Phenomenology, associated with early work of Husserl, practices a phenomenological
reduction that steps back from or suspends the natural attitude concerning the reality of
things in the world en route to studying how things in the world are experienced. This
practice often seems to me to be diametrically opposed to Jamess, which consults and
articulates what he (J1 305) terms "direct awareness of the process of our thinking as
such in the course of living.
I am not sure that Husserl, from his phenomenological standpoint, can make contact with
co-conscious transition or conjunctive relationprecisely where a Jamesian
phenomenology must getor with causal efficacy. Here I remember with Whitehead that
clearness in consciousness is no evidence for primitiveness in the genetic process (PR
173) and note that for Whitehead perception of causal efficacy is the direct feeling or
prehension of the surround, including "the animal body [which] is only the more highly
organized and immediate part of the general environment for its dominant actual
occasion, which is the ultimate percipient" (PR 119). By contrast, Husserl seems more
concerned with the content of perception, not with its formation and functioning in
embodied, onflowing experience. Recall too that for James, the concrete perceptual flux,
taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible
instances of causal agency [read causal efficacy]. The transitive causation in them does
not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on (SPP 218), and
because it does not stick out the phenomenological reduction seems to reduce it away.
If we take Husserl to be working on the intentionality of consciousness, and in effect to
be focusing on intentional content, than John Searles inclusion of intentional causation
the feeling of something making something happenin the intentional content of
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
29/51
28
perceptions, intentions, memories of events, among other intentional states, supplies a
telling remedy or criticism. On the other hand, although Searle says (195) that
"intentionality occurs in a coordinated flow of action and perception, he offers no
detailed analysis of the flow: his analysis includes no transitive parts, no anticipation, no
co-conscious transition, nor does his perceptual experience explicitly involve focusing,
bodily feeling, or recognition. A process-sensitive analysis can include these factors in
the intentional contents functioning in the flow of action and perception, enlarging the
range of much intentionalistic analysis. As for Husserls account of the flow, his analysis
of the retentional-impressional-protentional structure of temporal experience appears
sound but too detached, disembodied, and removed from the concrete working of
valuational factors to get at the onflowing transitivity of lived experience.
In defining Jamesian phenomenology we have recourse to that transitivity central to the
third character of thought, but the other characters plainly have a role in leading us into
the moment. Starting from intentional content, and attentive to the play of interest in its
selection, we can deal with the background habits in play, shaping momentary
experience, as well with relevant social constituents of the self (J1 293 ff.) and with our
bodily selves which "as we think we feel as the seat of the thinking" (242) and indeed
as "the nucleus of all reality" (J2 iv). Radical empiricists can do this recognizing all the
while that their descriptions are of a different nature than the actual experiences and that
one can seek to draw yet closer. Thus, understanding that in activity-situations the
activated or appropriated background is active, guiding action and perception, as it
structures, and serves as the organizing center of, experience, we can try to recapture
embodied experience in the world had from that world-contouring, 'habit'-enacting, aim-
serving 'perspective.' Such experience is had not againsta background of presuppositions
and habits grounded in prior experience, butfrom an activated background.
'Pulse'-based phenomenology
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
30/51
29
James opened the study of the stream of consciousness and of the pulses constituting
individual streams of experience, using notions of transitive parts, feelings of direction,
the fringe, co-conscious transition, the characters of thought, and the bud or pulse as
involving formation of thought and thinker. Jamess work thus enables one to approach
the stream with sensitivity to what habits and dispositions are in play in particular
moments of experience, to social setting and role, the transitions toward substantive parts,
to those parts with their fringes, to the shifts of attention and the interests carrying
attention along, to the intentional content of the substantive parts, to the pulse as a unit of
experience, to co-conscious transitions, and so on. Whiteheads philosophy of organism
deals fully and systematically with the internal constitution of buds or concrescences
(derived from a Latin verb meaning "growing together"). His analysis gives us a furtherbasis for appreciating and feeling our way into what happens in moments of experience,
refining our understanding of perception, of thought-formation, and of transition from
moment to moment. Concrescence- or pulse-based analysis and its adjunct methodology,
concrescual (pulse-based) phenomenology, bring us into the bud whose real internal
constitution comprises an act of experience. Following Whitehead, we can enter the
moment conceptually, treating it as an act of experience issuing from and into other
experiences, an act occurring within the constraints of inheritance from all that is
encompassed in ones past and within the onflow of concrescences. In fact, having
extended philosophical analysis into the experiential bud, Whitehead gives us the
wherewithal to characterize momentary consciousness as it arises from pre-conscious
phases of synthesis and thereby to situate the stream of consciousness within the stream
of embodied, socially conditioned experience, and within broader onflows. That is,
thinking concrescually, we can see that intentional content is abstracted from its
formation in the process of concrescence, and can also see the experiential counterpart of
intentional content as it arises in that very process.
Finally, notice that the phenomenological reduction seems to remain within a natural
cultural attitude that is affected by deep cultural presuppositions, in which James and
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
31/51
30
Whitehead, the latter more fully, think syntax plays a vital role. The concrescence-based
approach is flexible enough to apply, or more modestly, to attempt to apply to the lived
experience of inhabitants of other cultures than ours. For very bare example, acts of
perception are acts of selection and abstraction, involving movements of attention,
focusings: in some cultures visual directedness may naturally move, rove, more freely
and in more tactile fashion, regularly stopping short of Western fixity, but encompassing
in the moment more than concern with a single object permits.6
Likewise, we may
conjure variations in action: the feeling of self-determination may fall short of volition
yet may include elements of responsibility, related to shame perhaps, or may include
feelings of self-origination without any of individuality, and the scope of intention may
be less focused than that based on means-ends thinking; or apparent action may flowfrom imitation or from the power of a tradition given over to, or from inspiration, or it
may resemble a Taoist form of 'acting without acting' or a form of acting out of readiness
to respond, say while hunting, when the circumstances dictate (and the disposition to
act is primed per traditional practice). As Ortega y Gasset said of the hunter, he needs
to prepare an attention [an alertness,] which consists precisely in not presuming anything
and in avoiding inattentiveness (150).
With this perforce hasty review of parameters perceptual, agentive, relational, I merely
point to cultural differences that are differences in phenomenology, in a culture's shared
orcollectivephenomenology,that is, in how the immediacy of experience is constituted
in the lives of a culture's members. A shared or collective phenomenology is a component
of a collective intentionality, the taken-for-granted background which enables people to
engage in cooperative, mutually coordinated activity on the basis of shared
understandings and practices. A collective phenomenology is crucial to such
coordination, and the related experiential differences are efficacious in, and reflect and
sustain, differences in ways of life. For me, of principal concern here among human
practices is language. Not only does our language sustain and reflect cultural
characteristics but its deepest presuppositions are anchored in and carry forth a syntactic
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
32/51
31
stance or a cultures natural syntactic attitude, a complex of syntax-related dispositions
affecting not only what feels right to speakers syntactically, but more deeply influencing
perception, action, and concrescence.
I suspect that when Husserl 'bracketed' the natural attitude he brought along his
grammatical dispositions. By contrast, Whitehead regarded the idea of subject qualified
by predicate as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language. In his central
work, Process and Reality, Whitehead repudiates the influence of the subject-predicate
form of expression on philosophy. But the trap such language sets is laid for all speakers
of a given language. The syntax of a language anchors a web of abstractions, and urges
on its speakers characteristic ways of segmenting experience and speech, and ways offunctioning within their given surrounds. Here I cite the linguistic relativist, Benjamin
Whorf (240; see also Gentner): the segmentation of nature is an aspect of grammar....
We cut up and organize the spread and flow of events as we do, largely because through
our mother tongue, we are parties to an agreement to do so, not because nature is
segmented in exactly that way for all to see. Languages differ not only in how they build
their sentences but also in how they break down nature to secure the elements to put in
those sentences.
In this brief treatment, I have pointed to the overwhelming, yet unconscious, background
power of syntax, to indicate that language not only facilitates the build-up of social and
cultural backgrounds, but contributes significantly to the collective phenomenology of a
cultures members, affecting perception, sense of agency, and feelings of relation. Of
course, experience can affect language too: the experience of changes in technologies,
communication technologies, and lifeways, can change language as well as
phenomenology, as happened with the development of alphabetic writing which
supported a new intentional capability, a power of mental representation, namely the
ability to hold something steadily in mind, stably enough to think about itthe ability to
experience and apprehend substantive partsassociated with what Bruno Snell called the
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
33/51
32
discovery of the mind (see, e.g., O section 7.4; SCM 289).
Invariants of experience
James and Whitehead have shown how each moment of experience arises in accord with
a very few requirements, roughly the constraints or conditions governing all possible
moments of experience. I refer to these conditions as invariants of experience. No matter
who the experiencing person, what the way of life, the mother tongue, the technological
milieu, the social context, the cultural overlay and inheritancenever mind the endless
unique particularities of the moment in a stream of experience and in the living ecology
and onflowing surroundthese requirements are fulfilled and exemplified, moment aftermoment, throughout anyones life. They are categoreal obligations of living.
Yes, people of whatever age, gender, body type, of whatever genetic heritage in whatever
culture, engaged in whatever undertaking, in whatever mood, perpetrating whatever
apparently heinous or glorious, mundane or ecstatic deed or practice, are each undergoing
or living life in accord with the invariants of experience, principles governing all
moments of experience and constituting a framework for any collective phenomenology.
These laws of experience, include such principles as these, formulated by combining
elements from James and Whitehead:
1. The discreteness of momentary experience: experience comes moment by moment, as
perceptions and thoughts take shape, growing literally by buds, drops, or pulses.
2. The continuity in the stream of ones momentary experiences: moments arise from
their pasts and issue into their futures all in ones stream of experience.
3. The moment of experience as an integrative act: moments are processes in which many
feelingsperceptual, emotional, conceptualbecome integrated or synthesized.
4. The functioning of valuation in the moment: valuing or bias or caring or concern
some form of interestis to some degree a factor in every moment. This valuative aspect
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
34/51
33
guides and takes definite shape in the moment and constitutes the momentary aim. (This
is treated further in the next section.)
5. The conditioning by ones past of ones possibilities in the moment: the possibilities
open in specific moments are conditioned by the experients evolutionary and genetic
inheritance, by her or his past experience, accumulated habits and dispositions, and by
what has gone immediately before in the experients stream of experience and in the
relevant surround, the experients actual world, including momentarily retained or short-
term memory.
6. The conformity in the moment to received purposes, emotions, feelings: as a moment
passes into its future, the relevance of that moment to its successors typically varies with
the final intensity (properly understood) of the momentary aim and so with theintegration or synthesis arrived at in that now-passing momentary experience.
7. Freedom or indeterminacy in the moment: the outcome of a momentary integration is
not wholly determined by what was functioning at the moments inception.
Language affects experience, yet each moment of experience exemplifies these
experiential invariants, and as language affects experience it does not and cannot force
experience to violate any of those invariants. In effect, they afford a syntax or grammar
of the moment that can give us access to the most concrete elements and actualities of
experience. As we start to grasp how the laws of experience function, and come to feel
into their functioning in any and every moment, we can appreciate the extent to which,
and how, our language-dominated biases affect how we are governed by those invariants
in our waking moments. We can grasp, live into, and analyze the working of our
language in our experience, and to a lesser extent imagine, grasp, and live into the
workings of alternative languages, syntaxes. With this, the notion of common humanity,
not to say of common creatural experience, may begin to gain deep traction.
Finally, if all experience is to be understood as comprised of moments in a stream, then a
correlate philosophy of society will understand all social phenomena, including emergent
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
35/51
34
new phenomena, in terms of concrescences experienced by society members. Via its
affiliation with philosophy of organism, an organic philosophy of society is obliged to
treat coming into a society, the formation and propagation of social institutions, and
processes of social change, including breakdown, concrescually. In short, a concrescence-
based philosophy of society should be able to show how different collective
phenomenologies may arise. That is another matter; for now, what about neuroscience
and pulse-based or concrescual phenomenology?
6. An emotional meeting of Damasio with James and Whitehead
In recent work, while remaining deeply respectful of James, both Edelman and Damasio
have offered new critical responses to James. I consider Damasio first, because I find
many of Damasios discussions in SCM more related to phenomenological concerns on
the table today.
In Jamess article on affectional facts, James argues (ERE 150) that such appreciative
attributes as dangerousness, beauty, utility, etc., primarily appeal to our attention. In our
commerce with nature these attributes are what give emphasis to objects; and for an
object to be emphatic means also that it produces immediate bodily effects upon us,
alterations of tone and tension, of heart-beat and breathing, of vascular and visceral
action. As Damasio has it (LS 55), most objects that surround our brains become
capable of triggering some form of emotion or another, weak or strong, good or bad, and
can do so consciously or unconsciously. He calls such objects emotionally competent
stimuli, and for such stimuli we have dispositions to respond emotionally; these
dispositions would be among the psychic powers comprising the Jamesian self.
For James the psychologist all objects arouse primary, affective, reactions: "It is as if all
that visited the mind had to stand an entrance-examination and just show its face so as to
be either approved or sent back. These primary reactions are . . . turnings-towards and
turnings-from" (J1 302). Likewise, Whitehead talks of "the primitive functioning of
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
36/51
35
retreat from and expansion towards [as] . . . reactions to the way externality is
impressing on us its own character" (S 75). For Whitehead, The basis of experience is
emotional and every physical feeling or prehension is valuated up (strengthening its
claim on attention) or downward, and in this sense the basic fact of experience is the rise
of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given, (AI 176) primarily
by the concrescence-guiding indeterminate aim arising with transition from the previous
bud.7
An affective tone or, equally, subjective form, of a feeling is how the feeling is
feltat its simplest whether it is valuated up or down. As the contents of feelings are
progressively integrated into a final datum, the subjective forms of the feelings become
synthesized into a complex unity of feeling. In each concrescence, the subjective forms
become adapted with mutual sensitivity to each other under the coordinating guidance ofthe subjective aim, which is likewise becoming determinate as it conditions feelings
being integrated in the concrescence. Thus, throughout the process, the subjective aim,
like a desire, urge, or prompting with indefinite goal (e.g., to quench thirst), shapes and
takes shape as it calls elements of past experience and contextual details into relevance
and leads to a coherent aim (e.g., get water at nearby sink) that affects consequent action.
In the immediate present, by a form of co-conscious transition, we prehend the outcome
of our antecedent experiential functioning(s), including the surround as it is ordered in
projective appearance, and our state of mind typically reflects a dominant subjective aim
as it operates in a habitual sequence in play in an intention-induced activity-situation. In
short, and to keep things simpler than a pulse-based phenomenology has to keep them,
we can say that at their outset, pulses have aims, whether intentional or dispositional,
roused by a homeostatic imbalance or an emotionally competent stimulus felt on the
fringe of the prior pulse: valuation functions in every pulse (law 4, above; SCM 268).
For Damasio, emotions are evolved automated programs of activity that can be triggered
by emotionally competent stimuli. The body emotes when an emotional program is
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
37/51
36
enacted, and Damasio views emotional feelings as perceptions of what the enacting body
is emoting. Note first that, in Jamess words, what Damasio calls emotions are the
dispositional programs that produce the immediate bodily effects triggered by appropriate
emotional stimuli, and second that what James calls emotions, namely our feeling of the
immediate bodily effects, Damasio calls feelings of emotion and emotional feelings.
So the differences look to be terminological. True, Damasio's 'emotional feelings' include
cognitive aspectsideas, plans, come quickly to mindthat James doesnt seem to
include, but given his account of association and plasticity I dont see this as much of a
hurdle for a Jamesian to clear. Finally, he thinksa terminological problem again
James has conflated feeling and emotion, but he concludes (SCM 116), None of these
reservations diminishes in any way Jamess extraordinary contribution. Nor should mycomments be thought to intend to diminish Damasios contribution, which I find exciting,
illuminating and of great aid to concrescual phenomenology, perhaps especially by
opening ways to think about bodily and primordial feelings and also by bringing
valuation and emotion down to the level of turnings toward and away. For these latter,
like feelings of pleasure and pain, are related to life regulation, homeostasis, which
begins in unicellular organisms, and which, in creatures like us, who are capable of
having images marked as valuated by emotional factors, the degree of emotion serving as
a somatic marker for the relative importance of the image (SCM 175). As a
consequence, emotionally competent stimuli, which, for us, abound in the surround (e.g.,
LS 55), give the emotional a foundational power in the moment of experience.
Damasio seems coy concerning Spinozan monismhe describes himself as indulging in
aspectdualism (SCM 65)and might have sympathy for Jamesian 'twice-over' monism
(see esp. 316) or a Whiteheadian version in which physical and conceptual (e.g., bodily
and emotional feelings) are 'poles' within pulses of subjective unity. Also, Damasio
certainly might endorse the I-me dialectic, in the form of a '(pulsing) mind-self' dialectic:
Damasio's 'core self,' which is about action, ... about a relationship between the
organism and the object and unfolds in a sequence of pulses, is not only grounded on a
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
38/51
37
'protoself'with 'primordial feelings' reflecting the current state of the body, but provides
biographical knowledge defining an autobiographical self(21-23). Further, Damasio can
be enlisted in support of the notion of actual, experiencing, neurons, counterparts in
experiential monism, as I present it, of neurons in neurobiology (O 308). In fact, Damasio
proposes that the microorigins of cognition and feeling may be found at the neuronal
level (252 ff.) and be scaled up in complex organisms from small circuits into larger
circuitry and additional processing in each forming pulse. By contrast, Edelman is an
unabashed materialist monist, although an emergentist one. Finally, of upcoming note:
Damasio (14), unlike Edelman, does not rule out the possibility that quantum physics
deals with phenomena that may help explain consciousness.
7. Jamesian and organic challenges to Edelmans emergent materialism
Let me cut to the chase with Edelman, without rehearsing details of his formidable,
comprehensive account of how consciousness arises from the workings of the brain.8
One
has to have great regard for the syntheses he has accomplished in his analysis of
consciousness based on neuronal processes and structures in the brain. Drawing on
Edelmans "neural Darwinism" or "theory of neuronal group selection" I have elsewhere
(O, ch. 7) gone some length to show that a concrescence-based account of consciousness
and experience, and concrescual phenomenology, can claim thoroughgoing
neurobiological plausibility.
Edelman does not deny the existence of qualia (discriminable properties of conscious
experience), but he also flatly asserts that "consciousness arises within the material order
of certain organisms" (UC xii), and that "[in] any adequate global theory of brain
function . . . consciousness must rest on orderings and processes in the physical world . . .
and should be based on a materialist metaphysics" (RP 10). In 2004, in Wider than the
Sky, Edelman introduced the notion of a phenomenal transform to subsume qualia in the
material order. As background for understanding this, the dynamic core refers to a
system of strong mutualreentrantinteractions among a set of neuronal groups, mainly
7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague
39/51
38
within the thalamocortical system. Now, The fundamental neural activity of the
reentrant dynamic core converts the signals from the world and the brain into a
'phenomenal transform'into what it is like to be that conscious animal, to have its
qualia. He calls the existence of such a transform our experience of qualia, and
specifies that the transform is entailedby that neural activity. It is not caused by that
activity but it is,
Top Related