Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?

Nov 12

“Does ‘consciousness’ exist?” Asks William James in a 1904 essay of that same title. No! is the resounding answer. This conclusion may appear peculiar to that reader (me) who has “consciously” decided to take the time to read an obscure one hundred and twenty year-old essay in order to consciously deliberate upon consciousness—granted that there are no doubt plenty of unconscious readers of William James; like, imagine, if you will, the William-James-reading-somnambulist humming above the candle lit pages of The Principles of Psychology (1890), in the dead of night (also me). In reality the mental state of this person is probably not so different than that other insomnambulist doomscrolling at 3AM, overdosing their insomniac pineal gland with excoriating blue-light—but I digress.

James’s argument is not simple, but rather fairly tortuous and humpty-philosophical; which is probably due to the many invocations of “neo-kantism,” together with the gnarlyness of the terrain. Because consciousness is so given and obvious, it’s very obviousness belies a tangled thicket of wild assumptions and fallacious semantic values that we take for granted, baked as they are into the symbolic, and all underwriting the very means by which we interface with mundane reality. That is to say, a close and thoroughgoing examination of the concept consciousness, as performed in James’s essay, overwhelms the very consciousness of the reader into a “diaphaneity” (James’s word) and that is finally displaced back onto the William James essay, so that the reader’s consciousness becomes James’s. “See!” James says in a triumph.

The essay is much more readable and funny than I am giving it credit here, for example he uses the word “plumply;” as in the sentence: “To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of it.” The fat cat James, a Boston Brahmin and intellectual aristocrat, plumply denies that thing that everyone takes to be most real: their own subjective awareness.

To summarize William James’s essay in the most hackneyed and internet-friendly manner: Consciousness, as such, does not exist because it is impossible to be conscious of consciousness itself (This is similar to a position held by the Auguste Comte who held that a science of mind was impossible, because the mind cannot be grasped in itself). One is always conscious of something, whether that is a memory of early childhood, a pain in your knee, or the collapse of the neo-liberal world order; your consciousness is never made of itself, but rather consists entirely of a series of phenomena. This series is the famous stream of consciousness, that you may have heard about. One is only ever conscious of the stream, in fact, the stream is consciousness, and the stream is never ending. It is as if consciousness were constantly being delivered to us, sent from both the external world and from our interior, in a continual stream of thoughts, perceptions, rain, hail, amazon packages, dyspepsia and so on. So much so that if you find yourself doomscrolling at 3AM watching the world fall apart, in a very real sense, you are the world falling apart.

This is what James calls the world of pure experience. It is a world of relations in which experience is the means and medium of interaction. The perspicacious reader may blanche at the attempt to replace consciousness with experience—as if one were less abstract than the other—but his argument is, nevertheless, fairly canny (even if it is only semantic) and it can be applied equally well to that other common abstraction cherished by humanity: subjectivity.

Subjectivity, as such, does not exist, only those things to which I am subjected can be said to exist; my body, my family, language, gender, peyote buttons, the Christmas spirit, etcetera. This, I think is what Louis Althusser means by interpellation: I only really encounter my ideological subjectivity when I am being chased by the police for motorcycling too fast down the coast of Oregon (reader, I escaped subjection).

While James would like to collapse the age old distinction between thing and thought, between subject and object, by resolving these dualities into the world of experience, his argument has the further implication and benefit of invalidating that old privileged and isolated viewpoint that Thomas Nagel has called the view from nowhere, but that many people refer to as the immutable truth. That is to say that I do not have a privileged view of consciousness, because I am just as entangled in and subjected to the streaming forces of consciousness, here in project 2025, as everyone else. That which I call my I, is no sovereign individual, but is rather a point in a matrix, a barely organized collated nexus caught between occult systems of force that, sometimes, think me.