The Structure of Experience: James and Husserl
André Leclerc
Analytic philosophers do not have a great predilection for dynamic models. It took decades after the works of Vienna Circle to introduce the notions of tradition, paradigm or research program in the philosophy of science . And when they speak about experience, it is the representational character of experience or the subjective qualities of conscious experience which are the main concern. The resulting description is usually static. My aim is to provide an analysis of experience from the point of view of philosophy of mind, but my suggestion is to take as the main feature of experience its phenomenal continuity, its constant moving forward.
But different things are called ‘experience’ and some are more complex than others. I will first examine different uses of the word ‘experience’ to clear the way and to avoid cases of circularity. There is nothing wrong with our linguistic practices and I suggest that the best way to respect them is to choose one common characteristic to all these uses and construct an “umbrella term”. I suggest that this characteristic is precisely phenomenal continuity. Thence, dreams and the simple humming of a tune in your head (quasi hearing), will count as experiences as well as cognitive experience or the real hearing of a melody.
In modern philosophy, Hobbes was the first to recognize its importance in his theory of “mental discourse". William James (who calls it ‘stream of consciousness’) and Husserl (Bewusstseinsstrom) described it as the most fundamental feature of experience. That constant moving forward of experience allows us to include beneath our umbrella term, dreams, the humming of a tune, and mental activities like imagining and remembering that do not involve directly sensorial impression, alongside experiences that involves sensorial impressions, like the hearing of a tune, perception, non-epistemic seeing, etc. Phenomenal continuity is the common denom inator of all sorts of experience. I shall try to understand phenomenal continuity in terms of horizontal intentionality, a kind of intentionality that operates at a sub-personal level. Then, the structures of retention and protension described by Husserl are presented and explained. I also present Husserl’s reticulum of time showing how it works for temporal objects like melodies.
According to James, continuity here means two things: 1) “That even when there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if belonged with the same consciousness
before it, as another part of the same self” (Psychology: Briefer Course, 1961, p.158); that is, when we wake up, there is nothing strange about what we feel, it is like a new chapter
of the same biography and we just carry on as usual; 2) “That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt”. (Idem,
1961, p.158).
But there could be problems when the time-gap is excessively long that I will illustrate by using Rip van Winkle’s story. The moral of that story is that cognitive experience presupposes abilities (dispositions) to track our thoughts and former experiences and to form judgments of similarities. It also presupposes stability in the world of experience and also on the part of the epistemic agent.