In the first essay in Essays in Radical Empiricism, “Does Consciousness Exist?” William James argues that there is no such thing as consciousness. His argument is clear, cogent, and logical. I’m sure if anyone wanted to take the time to convert his points into syllogisms they would find it fairly straightforward to convert is 19th Century prose into outline form, something I admit, I have little interest in tackling.
At the end of the chapter, he addresses what he expects will be the strongest opposition, that, that others will say, “our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you” (37-38). At that point he deserts his logic to reply, “I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them (37-38).
In other words, he admits at the end that his logic isn’t his means of establishing the certainty of his claim, but simply supporting it. In 21st Century terms, he has become the blonde (of either gender; I’m fine with being a melaninist, but not a sexist) sitting in the back of the class who raises their hand and says, “Everyone has their own opinion. Why get so bent out of shape about it?” His argument is no stronger than this: I have my opinion and you have yours. And thus, the question as he presents it has nothing to do with empiricism at all, but with “How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?”
It strikes me that, while intuitions can be productive, even creative, obeying intuitions may be the most dangerous move a philosopher can make.
James, William, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Essays in radical empiricism. Vol. 3. Harvard University Press, 1976.“But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. “All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity,” they will say, “but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has put asunder.”
My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.
