Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [98]
James considered consciousness not a thing but a process or function. Just as breathing is what the lungs do, conducting conscious mental life is what the brain does. Why does it? “For the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”28 Consciousness allows the organism to consider past, present, and future states of affairs, and, with the predictive power thus achieved, to plan ahead and adapt its behavior to the circumstances.29 Consciousness is “a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all.”30 The chief one is survival; that is its function.
On further introspection, we notice that consciousness has certain characteristics. Of the five James named, the most interesting—because it contradicted traditional Aristotelian conceptions of thinking—is that each person’s consciousness is a continuum, not a series of linked experiences or thoughts:
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. 31
While the objects of our thoughts or perceptions may seem distinct and separate, our consciousness of them is itself a continuous flow; they are like things floating in a stream.
The concept of the stream of thought (or, as it is better known, the stream of consciousness) struck a responsive chord among psychologists and became useful and important in both research and clinical work. It also was immediately taken up by a number of authors who sought to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, among them Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. (Stein actually studied under James at Harvard.)
The self: Even breaks in consciousness, such as those occurring in sleep, do not interrupt the continuity of the stream; when we awaken, we have no difficulty making the connection with our own stream of consciousness, with who we were and are. But that is because of another major characteristic of consciousness: its personal nature. Thoughts are not merely thoughts; they are my thoughts or your thoughts. There is a personal self that separates one’s consciousness from that of others and that knows, from moment to moment and day to day, that I am the same I who I was a moment ago, a day, decade, or lifetime ago.32
From the beginnings of psychology, thinkers had struggled with the problem of who or what knows that I am I and that my experiences have all happened to the same Me. What substance or entity, what watcher or monitor, accounts for the sense of selfhood and of continuous identity? James called this “the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal.”33
The classic answer was the soul or transcendental self. But a century earlier both Hume and Kant had shown that we can have no empirical knowledge of such a self.34 Philosophers might still speculate about it, but psychologists could not observe or study it. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists of the nineteenth century did not even discuss the self, and the British associationists sloughed it off as no more than the connected chain of passing thoughts.
James, however, felt that “the belief in a distinct principle of self-hood” was an integral part of the “common sense of mankind,”35 and found a way to restore to psychology a meaningful—and researchable— concept of self. We are all conscious of our individual identity,