Pred - Reinstating the Vague

7/27/2019 Pred - Reinstating the Vague

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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by Ralph Pred Please do not cite or circulate without the author's permission.


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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).


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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-


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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'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


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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,

Pred - Reinstating the Vague

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