Abstract

Although contemptuous of Kant's Transcendentalism , William James, in The Principles of Psychology, nonetheless, shares with Kant the belief that the unity, continuity and self-identity of each person's enduring sense of "Self" is to be accounted for by and through the structure of consciousness. But where Kant's self is Transcendental, and the conventional and quasi-religious self is Substantial, James's "enduring" self is nothing more nor less than a reflective state of the stream of consciousness itself. How to make this ephemeral and transitory self take on the essential characteristics of the abiding self of Transcendentalism and Substantialism, is James's foremost philosophical problem in Principles. To achieve his end, James's must show that the continuity, unity and self-identity of experience, that is the backbone of the belief in a sustained self within each personal, unique, finite self-history, can be accomplished my momentary mental states alone, without any necessity for an abiding "essence" or "agent" behind the scenes to hold each persons' assemblage of experiences together. The ultimate success of his project, it seems to me, rests in identifying and characterizing the essential meta-psychological structure of consciousness which would allow his "momentary self" theory to be viable. This dissertation attempts to constructively interpret Principles to reveal just such a structure, and to demonstrate that James's theory of consciousness makes such a momentary self not merely possible, but plausible. ;The general question that this dissertation attempts to answer is: What is the formal structure of human consciousness like so as to make the continuity, unity and self-identity of phenomenological experience possible? In order to attempt to answer this fundamental question, this dissertation proposes two interrelated projects. It attempts, firstly, to interpretively construct from Principles, a theory of how the thematic and temporal structure of consciousness makes possible the phenomenological organization of mental data that is manifested in ordinary "lived" and reflective experience. Secondly, after analysis of the thematic and temporal structure of consciousness as developed in Principles, it introduces an explanatory principle called "thematic synthesization" in order to suggest, in an admittedly speculative fashion, how our phenomenological mental states are structured by several operative processes in the mental infra-structure so as to make possible the enduring feeling and fact of self-continuity, self-unity and self-identity for each finite center of unique, experiential self-history that we call, individually, our "self". Contending that this organizing principle of consciousness is implicitly advanced by textual evidence in Principles, I discuss various objections that may be brought against it, and show how it can help us to understand various phenomenological experiences and functions, such as memorial acts, interruption of consciousness by sleep and the "association of ideas"