The Walk · 9 of 14
THE STREAM
Is consciousness continuous?
William James, 1890. A river Heraclitus already knew. Later names are later waters.
Heraclitus · Ephesus
You cannot step twice into the same river.
A claim about becoming. James cites him. Recurrence is not descent.
James · 1890
The stream of thought, of consciousness, of subjective life.
Let it speak in its own tempo. If you chop it into bits, you miss the transitions.
Flow · 1990
Absorption. The watcher recedes.
Another water. In flow, self-consciousness thins. That is not James restated.
Hear
In 1890 William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, in The Principles of Psychology, refuses to describe thought as a chain or a train. Consciousness, he says, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits.
It is nothing jointed. It flows.
A river or a stream is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described. Let us call it, he says, “the stream of thought”, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
He names Heraclitus, the Greek thinker of Ephesus, about the sixth century before the common era: we never descend twice into the same stream.
That is James using an old river to name how thought presents itself from inside. It is not a claim that James is Heraclitus restated.
He also says thought is personal, constantly changing, and interested: some parts of the field matter more. To describe it, you have to let it speak in its own tempo.
If you force thought into bits, you miss the transitions, the fringe, the feelings of relation. This is not the invention of inner life.
The stream is an account of how thought presents itself. It is not a proof.
The book is still the book.
Primary text
Five characters of thought
James's stream chapter treats thought as personal, constantly changing, sensibly continuous, appearing to deal with objects independent of itself, and selective. The stream metaphor belongs to the third of these.
Continuity is how consciousness presents itself, including across time gaps that are not felt as ruptures of the self.
Primary text
Heraclitus. Another water.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, late sixth to early fifth century before the common era, said you cannot step twice into the same river. The waters are not the same, and in some reports neither is the one who steps.
That is a claim about becoming, not a laboratory of the mind. James cites him by name.
Recurrence is not descent.
Scholarly interpretation
Let thought speak
James's method is introspection with a warning. If you chop thought into bits, you miss what he called the transitive parts: the feelings of relation, the fringe, the way one state shades into the next.
The stream has to be allowed to run if it is to be described. That is not a proof that a soul speaks.
It is a discipline of not interrupting.
Documented
A literary method borrows the metaphor
In April 1918 May Sinclair, reviewing Dorothy Richardson, applied stream of consciousness to a work of literature. The phrase caught.
Joyce, Woolf, and others let inner speech run without a narrator chopping it into bits. The method is fiction.
It is not evidence that James's description was true. It is evidence that the metaphor was useful.
Documented
Flow is another water
In 1990 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist born in Fiume in 1934, published Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow names absorption in which self-consciousness recedes.
Challenge and skill meet. The watcher of the stream often goes quiet.
That is not James's stream restated. In James, thought presents itself as a flow you can describe.
In flow, the describing self thins. Same family of water-words.
Different problems.
Open question
Does it flow?
Buddhist momentariness, later flicker arguments, and debates about the specious present all press on the metaphor. A mindstream in Indian Buddhist philosophy is not James's English stream.
Parallel water. Different partition.
James is a landmark, not a settlement.
Sources
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890.
Consciousness as personal, constantly changing, and sensibly continuous. Names Heraclitus: we never descend twice into the same stream.
The stream metaphor is an account of how thought presents itself, not a claim to have invented subjective experience.
Heraclitus of Ephesus. Fragments on the river. c. late sixth to early fifth century BCE.
You cannot step twice into the same river. A claim about becoming.
James cites him. That is not a psychology of consciousness, and not a line of descent.
Sinclair, May. “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson.” The Egoist. April 1918.
First applies stream of consciousness to a work of literature, taking the metaphor from psychology. A method of fiction, not a proof of James's description.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.
Flow as absorption in which self-consciousness recedes. A later water.
Not James's stream restated. In flow, the watcher of the stream often goes quiet.