The Stream of Consciousness: XXIII. James Contra the Intellectualists (First Part)

Abstract

James distinguished the states of consciousness that successively constitute a stream of consciousness from how they appear to inner awareness. For one thing, the stream has a discrete temporal structure whereas its basic durational components inwardly seem continuous, each with the next one: partly because the stream never abruptly changes in all of the features of its content. States of consciousness that James called “transitive” apprehend objective relations existing between items apprehended successively. The Intellectualists claimed that states of the mundane Jamesian qualitative kind cannot provide awareness of relations and they introduced purely conceptualizing mental states to do the job from on high. James formulated a number of cogent opposing arguments: some of these are discussed in the present article. These arguments may well prove useful, too, against an understanding of consciousness that has been advanced recently in a neuro-psychological context. More extremely than the Intellectualists, the advocate of this conception maintains that any mental stream, whether animal or human, consists entirely of acts of commentary.