William James on a phenomenological psychology of immediate experience: The true foundation for a science of consciousness?

Abstract

Throughout his career, William James defended personal consciousness. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), he declared that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness as such and that he intended to presume from the outset that the thinker was the thought. But while writing it, he had been investigating a dynamic psychology of the subconscious, which found a major place in his Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. This was the clearest statement James was able to make before he died with regard to his developing tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism and radical empiricism, which essentially asked ‘Is a science of consciousness actually possible?’ James’s lineage in this regard, was inherited from an intuitive psychology of character formation that had been cast within a context of spiritual self-realization by the Swedenborgians and Transcendentalists of New England. Chief among these was his father, Henry James, Sr, and his godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, James was forced to square these ideas with the more rigorous scientific dictates of his day, which have endured to the present. As such, his ideas remain alive and vibrant, particularly among those arguing for the fusion of phenomenology, embodiment and cognitive neuroscience in the renewed search for a science of consciousness.