A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in PhilosophyJames, William
Philosophy
A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy
James, William
Philosophy, Modern
My book raised only the question of _which_ activity deserved
the name of 'ours.' So far as we are 'persons,' and contrasted and
opposed to an 'environment,' movements in our body figure as our
activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours
in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which
the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,' and their
activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are here
only another name for the total process of experience, another name
for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and
individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor
Stout finds fault.
The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly
called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The
world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness')
comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision,
centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here';
when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all
other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of
emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference
to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the
systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no
developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that
ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their
activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through
first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of
the rest of the world. The body is the storm centre, the origin
of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that
experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its
point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position,
just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position
have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be
felt in a peculiar way. The word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis.
I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my'
activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the
other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in
movements in the head. The 'my' of them is the emphasis, the feeling
of perspective-interest in which they are dyed.]
mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-experiences is
not the whole story, that there is something still to tell _about_
them that has led such able writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_
activity, of an activity _an sich_, that does, and doesn't merely
appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this
phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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