Below is my translation of "La Notion de Conscience" by the American philosopher William James, which appeared in his posthumous 1912 collection Essays in Radical Empiricism.
This text can be freely distributed and used for any purpose. If you reproduce it in whole or in part, please make sure to acknowledge me as the translator.
The Notion of Consciousness
By William James
Translated by Carl Manchester, 2006
A communication made (in French) at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology, in Rome, April 30, 1905.
I’d like to tell you about a few doubts that I’ve had on the subject of the notion of consciousness that currently holds sway in our psychology papers.
We normally define psychology as the science of the events of the conscious mind, or of the phenomena or even the states of the conscious mind. Whether we suppose that it is related to personal egos, or whether we believe it to be impersonal in the manner of the “transcendental ego” of Kant - of the Bewusstheit (consciousness) or the Bewusstsein überhaupt (general consciousness) of our German contemporaries - consciousness is always considered to have its own essence, absolutely distinct from the essences of material things. It has the mysterious gift of representing and knowing. Material facts, considered in their materiality, are not felt. They are not objects of experience. They do not refer to anything. In order for them to take the shape of the environment in which we have the experience of living, they must appear, and this fact of appearing, over and above their mere existence, is the consciousness that we have of them. Or, perhaps, according to the pansychist hypothesis, the consciousness they have of themselves.
Here is the deep-seated dualism that it seems impossible to banish from our view of the world. The world may well exist in its own right, but we know nothing of it because, for us, it is purely the object of experience, and it is an indispensable condition of this effect that it is witnessed, that it is it known by a spiritual subject or subjects. Object and subject – these are the two legs without which it seems that philosophy cannot take a single step.
Every school of thought agrees on this. Scholastic, Cartesian, Kantian, Neo-Kantian – all posit a fundamental dualism. Contemporary positivism or agnosticism, which likes to think that it furthers natural science, admittedly adopts, quite contentedly, the name of monism. But this is only monism in name. It posits an unknown reality, but tells us that this reality presents itself always under two “aspects”, consciousness on one side and matter on the other, and these two sides remain as irreducible as the two fundamental attributes of Spinoza’s God: extension and thought. At heart, contemporary monism is pure Spinozism.
So how should we think of this consciousness which we are so inclined to suppose exists? We tell ourselves it is impossible to define, but we each have a direct intuition of it – straight off, consciousness is conscious of itself. Ask the first person you come across, man or woman, psychologist or layperson, and they will tell you that they feel themselves thinking, enjoying, suffering, wanting, just as they feel themselves breathing. They perceive their spiritual existence directly as an internal current. It is active, light, fluid, delicate – diaphanous, if you will – and the absolute opposite of anything material. In short, subjective existence appears to be not only a logical necessity in order for their to be an objective world that appears, but also to be a part of our own direct experience as much as is our own body.
How, then, can we avoid accepting the dualism between ideas and things? How can we doubt the complete heterogeneity between feelings and objects?
Psychology, supposedly scientific, accepts this heterogeneity in the same way that the old spiritualist psychology did. How can it not be accepted? Each science arbitrarily marks out a field in the framework of facts, where it settles and whose contents it describes and studies. Understandably, psychology chooses for its domain the field of facts about consciousness. It postulates them without assessing them. It opposes them to facts about matter and, without assessing those either, it links them to consciousness with the mysterious thread of knowledge, or perception, which is seen as a third type of fundamental and ultimate fact. In following this path, contemporary psychology has celebrated great triumphs. It has been able to sketch the evolution of conscious existence, conceiving of it as adapting more and more to its physical surroundings. It has been able to establish a dualistic parallel between mental and cerebral events. It has explained illusions, hallucinations and, to an extent, mental illness. These are great steps, but there remain many problems. General philosophy above all, whose task is to scrutinise postulates, finds paradoxes and obstacles where science carries on regardless – it is only the devotees of popular science who remain credulous. The deeper we look into things, the more we find enigmas. And I’ll say for my part that, since I’ve taken up psychology seriously, the old dualism of thought and matter, the allegedly absolute heterogeneity of these two essences, has always given me difficulties. I’d like now to tell you about a few of those difficulties.
Firstly, there is one which, I’m sure, will have occurred to all of you. Take our perception of the external, the direct sensation which tells us, for example, of the walls of this room. Can we say in this case that the psychological and the physical are absolutely heterogeneous? On the contrary, they are so little heterogeneous that, if we take a common-sense point-of-view and rid ourselves of explanatory stories, about molecules and waves in the ether, for example, which are essentially metaphysical concepts, if, in a word, we take reality naively as it appears to us from the start, this palpable reality on which our vital interests depend and on which our actions are carried, well, this reality and the sensation we have of it are, at the moment the sensation appears, absolutely identical. Reality is perception itself. The words “walls of this room” only signify this fresh, echoing whiteness that surrounds us, interrupted by these windows and bounded by these lines and angles. Physics in this case has no different content than psychology. Subject and object merge.
Berkeley was the first to bring credit to this truth. Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). Our sensations are not little internal copies of things, they are the things themselves, so long as the things are present to us. And whatever we might want to think about the life of things which are absent, hidden or, so to speak, private, and whatever the hypothetical constructs we make of them, it remains the case that the public life of things, the actuality with which they present themselves to us, from which we get our theoretic constructs, and to which they must return and re-attach themselves, or else float in the air and in unreality, this actuality, I say, is homogeneous, and not only homogeneous but numerically one with a certain part of our internal life.
Here’s how it is for our perception of the external. When we consider imagination, memory or the faculties of abstract representation, although the facts here are much more complicated, I believe that the same basic homogeneity emerges. To simplify the problems, let’s start by excluding tangible reality. Let’s take pure thought, as it appears in a dream or daydream, or in a memory of the past. Here again, doesn’t the stuff of experience play two roles? Don’t the physical and the psychological merge? If I dream of a golden mountain, it certainly does not exist outside the dream, but inside the dream it is in essence or in nature perfectly physical – it appears to me as physical. If I now allow myself to remember my house in America, and the details of my recent voyage to Italy, what is it that happens? What is the pure phenomenon? It is, let us say, my thought and its content. But, still, what is this content? It takes the form of a part of the real world. To be sure, this part is six thousand miles and six weeks away, but it is linked to the room where we are now by masses of things – objects and events – homogeneous on the one hand with the room and on the other with the object of my remembering.
This content doesn’t start as a tiny internal fact which I then project. It presents itself immediately as the distant event itself. And what is the consciousness that I have of the act of thinking this distant content? Is there any other way of naming the content, other than retrospectively, once we’ve separated it from the physical intermediaries and re-attached it to a new group of associations which bring it back into my mental life – the emotions which it awakens in me, for example, the attention I pay to it, the ideas that I’ve just gone through, which the memory aroused? It is only in its relation to these later associations that the phenomenon is classed as a thought. If it were related only to its earlier associations, it would remain an objective phenomenon.
It is true that we are accustomed to compare our internal images to objects, and we consider them as little, inferior carbon copies or duplicates. An object presents a vivacity and clarity which are superior to those of an image of it. The object thus contrasts with the image and, to borrow Taine’s excellent term, it acts as its reducer. When the two are present together, the object comes to the fore and the image retreats, becoming something “absent”. But what is the object itself which is present? What is it made of? The same stuff as the image. It is made of sensations – it is a perceived thing. Its esse is percipi, and it and its image are homogeneous – generically so.
If I think of my hat that I left just now in the cloakroom, where is the dualism, the disjoint, between the imagined hat and the real hat? It is a real absent hat with which my mind is occupied. I think of it, for practical purposes, as if it were a reality. If it were present on this table, the hat would provoke a movement of my hand. I would pick it up. In this same way, this conceived or imagined hat will soon determine the direction of my steps. I will go and get it. The idea I have of it will continue up until the point where the hat is tangibly present, when it will harmoniously dissolve.
I conclude, therefore, that, whilst there is dualism for practical purposes, because images are different from objects, take their place, and bring us to them, there is no reason to say that they are essentially different in nature. Thought and actuality are made of the same thing – the stuff of experience in general.
The psychology of external perception leads us to the same conclusion. When I see an object in front of me, such as a table of such-and-such a shape and at such-and-such a distance, it is explained to me that this experience is down to two things – to a material sensation which comes through my eyes and brings the element of exterior reality, and to ideas which awake in me, meet this reality, class it and interpret it. But who can tell, within the table concretely perceived, what is sensation and what is idea? External and internal, extended and unextended, fuse together and become inseparable. This recalls the circular panoramas, where real objects – rocks, grass, broken wagons and so on – which occupy the foreground, are ingeniously linked to the canvas that makes up the background, representing a battle or a landscape, so that it is hard to tell the object from the painting. The seams and joints are imperceptible.
Could it happen like that if the object and the idea were completely different in nature?
I am convinced that similar considerations to these will have also already provoked doubts in you about the alleged dualism of the world.
And there are other reasons to doubt which arise. There’s a whole realm of adjectives and attributes which are not wholly either objective or subjective, but which we use sometimes in one sense and sometimes in another, as if enthralled in their ambiguity. I’m talking about the qualities that we esteem in things, to put it one way - the ethical or moral aspects of things, their value to us. Where, for example, is beauty to be found? Is it contained in a statue, in a sonata or in our souls? My colleague at Harvard, George Santayana, has written a book on aesthetics (The Sense of Beauty) where he calls beauty “objectified pleasure”. It is true that, in this context, we could talk about projection to the external. We think of a pleasant warmth and of a sensation of pleasant warmth in the same way. The rarity and preciousness of a diamond seem to us essential as qualities. We might speak of a terrible storm, or a detestable man, or a shameful act, and we think ourselves to be speaking objectively, even though these expressions are about nothing more than our own emotional sensibilities. We even talk about a wretched journey, a glum sky, a kind breeze or a cruel midday heat. This animist way of looking at things, which seems to have been the style of primitive man, is very easily explained (and Mr Santayana, in another recent book, The Life of Reason, has made this explanation) by the tendency to attribute to an object the things we experience in its presence. The division of subjective and objective comes from a sophisticated act of reflection, which we are wont to defer on many occasions. When practical necessity doesn’t pull us towards it, it seems as if we prefer to delude ourselves with vagueness.
Secondary qualities such as heat, sound and light themselves no longer have vague explanations. For practical purposes, and as far as common sense is concerned, they are absolutely physical and objective. For the physicist, they are subjective. For him they are the form, mass and movement, which give rise to an external reality. For the philosophical idealist, on the other hand, form and movement are just as subjective as light and heat, and only the unknown thing itself, the “noumenon”, enjoys a complete non-mental existence.
Our private sensations retain some of this ambiguity. There are illusions of movement which prove that our primary sensations of movement are generalised. It is the whole world, including us, that moves. We currently distinguish our own movement by reference to the movement of the objects around us, and among those objects we can discern some that stay still. But it is from a virtiginous height that we today fall back to a primary lack of differentiation. You are all no doubt aware of the theory that wants to make emotions the sum of bodily and muscular sensations. It has caused a lot of controversy, and we’re yet to see universal agreement around any one opinion on the matter. You will also be aware of the controversies over the nature of mental activity. Some hold that it is a purely spiritual force, and that we have an immediate perception of it as such. Others claim that what we call mental activity (effort or attention, for example) is only the conscious aspect of certain operations to which our body plays host: muscular tensions in the head and throat, the stop-and-go of breathing, the flow of blood, and so on.
However these controversies are resolved, their existence clearly proves one thing. It is very hard, maybe even impossible, to know, simply by private inspection of certain phenomena, whether they are physical in nature, occupying extended space and so on, or whether they are purely mental and internal. We must always find reasons for putting forward an opinion. We need to find the most probable way of classifying the phenomenon, but at the end of the day it may be that all are usual classifications are motivated more by practical necessity than by some faculty we may have for perceiving two ultimate, distinct essences which together make up the framework of existence. Each of our bodies gives us an almost violent sense of contrast with the outside world. Everything coming from inside the body is more private and important to us that that which comes from elsewhere. It is identified and classified with our ego. Who really knows how to distinguish soul, life and breath? Even our private images and memories, which only have an effect on the physical world by the intermediary of our body, seem to be part of that body. We treat them as internal, we class them with our emotions. It has to be said, basically, that the question of the dualism of mind and matter is a long way from being finally resolved.
And that’s the end of the first part of my lecture. Ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to instil in you my doubts and the reality, as well as the importance, of the problem.
Myself, after long years of hesitation, I have come to understand my position clearly. I believe that consciousness, as it is commonly represented, whether as an entity or as pure activity, but in any case as fluid, unextended, diaphanous, empty of proper content, but knowing itself directly – in a word, spiritual – is, I say, a pure chimera. The totality of concrete realities that the word “consciousness” ought to cover deserves a completely different description – a description of the kind that a philosophy that pays attention to facts and that knows how to make an analysis will from now on be able to provide, or, rather, to begin to provide. And this brings me to the second part of my lecture. It will be much shorter than the first, because if I develop it to the same extent it will be far too long. For this reason, I will restrict myself only to some indispensable remarks.
Let us say that consciousness, or Bewusstheit, conceived as an essence, an entity, an activity, an irreducible part of each experience, should be suppressed, that the fundamental and, so to speak, ontological dualism should be abolished and that we should suppose to exist what we have, up until now, called the content, the Inhalt, of consciousness. How can philosophy extricate itself from the vague sort of monism that results? I’m going to attempt to give some positive suggestions, although I’m afraid that, without the necessary development, my ideas will not shed much light. But perhaps it will be enough to indicate the starting-point of the journey.
Why do we cling so tenaciously to the idea of consciousness existing over and above the content of things? Why do we complain so forcefully that anyone who denies this must be conveying a poor joke, rather than an idea? Is it not to rescue the undeniable fact that the content of experience not only exists, immediately and intrinsically, but that each part of that content has a foothold, so to speak, on its neighbours? It takes account of itself and of the others, comes out of itself in a way in order to make itself known, and in this way all the field of experience becomes transparent from one part to another, or constituted like a space filled with mirrors.
This binary nature of the parts of experience – knowing, on the one hand, that they have their own properties, and, on the other, that they relate to other parts and are known themselves– is noted and explained by the dominant idea of a fundamental dualism in the makeup of each individual piece of experience. In this sheet of paper, it is said, there are not only contents – whiteness, thinness and so on – but also the secondary fact of consciousness of the whiteness and thinness. This function of being “related”, of being part of a whole, more comprehensive, framework of experience, we make into an ontological fact, and we make a home for this fact inside the paper itself, coupling it with its whiteness and thinness. It is not an extrinsic relationship, as we suppose. It is part of the phenomenon itself.
I think, basically, that we represent reality to ourselves as being made up in the same way as the “colours” in a painting. First of all, there are coloured things that correspond to the content, and there is a medium – oil or paste – that holds them in place, and corresponds to consciousness. This is a complete dualism, in which, through certain procedures, we can separate each element away by subtraction. In this way, we can be sure that, by making a great effort of introspection, we can catch our consciousness in action, as a pure spiritual activity, almost completely neglecting the things it is focusing on at any given moment.
Could we not, I ask, just as easily reverse this way of viewing things? Let us suppose that the principal reality is neutral, and let us call it by a name that is still ambiguous, such as phenomenon, datum or Vorfindung (finding). Personally, I like to use the plural, and I call it pure experiences. This is, if you like, a monism, but it is an altogether rudimentary monism, absolutely opposed to the binary so-called monism of Spinozist scientific positivism.
These pure experiences exist and succeed one another, entering into relationships with one another which vary infinitely. These relationships are themselves an essential part of the framework of experiences. There is “consciousness” in these relationships just as there is “consciousness” in their destinations. The result is that groups of experiences notice and distinguish one another, and that the same single experience, given the grand variety of these relationships, can play a role in several groups at once. In this way, it can be classed as a physical phenomenon in a certain context of its neighbours, whereas in another grouping it figures as an event of consciousness, in the same way that the same particle of ink can appear simultaneously in two lines, one vertical and one horizontal, provided it is situated at their intersection.
To help fix our ideas, let’s take the experience we are now having of the place we are in, of these walls, this table, these chairs, this space. In this full, concrete and undivided experience, just as it is, the objective, physical world and the personal interior world of each of us meet each other and merge, just as lines merge at their intersection. As a physical thing, this room relates to the rest of the building – a building of which we know and understand nothing. It owes its existence to a whole story of financiers, architects and workers. It weighs on the earth. It will last an uncertain amount of time – if a fire breaks out, the chairs and tables inside will quickly be reduced to ashes.
As a personal experience, on the other hand, as something “reported”, something known, something we are aware of, this room can be seen in different ways. Its antecedents are not workers, they are the respective thoughts we have had just now. Soon it will be a fleeting fact in our biographies, associated with pleasant memories. As a mental experience, it doesn’t weigh anything and its structure isn’t combustible. It exercises no physical force except on our individual brains, and many of us will deny even this influence, whereas the physical room has a relationship of physical influence to everything else in the world.
And yet it is absolutely the self-same room in both cases. Although we are not engaged in speculative physics, and although we’re looking at things from the point-of-view of common sense, the room we see and feel is very much the physical room. Of what are we speaking, then, if not of that which, made of the same part of material nature as all our souls at this same moment are embracing, enters just as it is into the present and personal experience of each of us, and which our memories will regard forever as an integral part of our histories. It is absolutely the same stuff which is at the same time, depending on the context we consider, is the material and physical fact, or the fact of personal consciousness.
I think, therefore, that we should shy away from treating consciousness and matter as being different in essence. We can’t derive either one by subtraction, neglecting the other part of an experience made of two parts. Experiences are, on the contrary, simpler in nature in the first place. They become conscious in their entirety, and they become physical in their entirety – it is by way of addition that this comes about. As long as experiences last, entering into relationships of physical influence, stopping each other, warming each other, lighting each other and so on, we take from them a distinct group which we refer to as the physical world. As long as, on the other hand, they are fleeting and physically inert and they arrange themselves in no fixed order, but seem rather to be following emotional caprices, we take them to form another group, which we refer to as the psychological world. It is by entering right now into a great number of these psychological groups that this room becomes something of which we are conscious, something reported, something known. Because it will, in future, become part of our biographies, it will not be followed by the silly monotonous repetition of itself over time which characterises its physical existence. It will be followed instead by other experiences which will be discontinuous with it, or which will have the strange sort of continuity that we call remembering. Tomorrow, it will have taken its place in each of our past lives. But the various presents to which all those pasts will be linked will be very different from the present which this room will enjoy tomorrow as a physical entity.
But this line of reasoning will take us too far. I can’t go into all the hidden recesses of the theory of consciousness or of what you Italians call gnoseology. I’ll have to content myself with short remarks or simple suggestions, which are, I fear, all too obscure for lacking the necessary development.
Allow me then to sum up – too briefly and in a dogmatic fashion – with the following six theses:
1) Consciousness, in its ordinary meaning, does not exist, any more than does matter, to which Berkeley dealt the final blow;
2) What does exist, and forms the truth that the word “consciousness” retains, is the tendency of the parts of experience to be reported or known;
3) This tendency is explained by the fact that certain experiences can lead one to another via intermediary experiences which are clearly characterised in a way so that some play the role of things that are known, and others play that of subjects that are understood;
4) You can perfectly well define these two roles without stepping outside the framework of experience itself, and without invoking anything transcendental;
5) The designations subject and object, represented and representative, thing and thought, signify, therefore, a practical distinction which is of little importance, but which is of a FUNCTIONAL order only, and not ontological as classic dualism would have it;
6) All said and done, things and thoughts are not at all fundamentally heterogeneous, but are made of the same stuff, a stuff that cannot be defined as such, but only felt, and which can be called, if we wish to name it, the stuff of experience in general.