88The Consciousness of Self

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, ch. X, Henry Holt, 1890

Linked to 22 chapters: supports 10 · contradicts 5 · mechanism 6 · same claim 5 · pairing 3

James opens the tenth chapter of The Principles of Psychology by naming his route: begin with the self in its widest acceptation and follow it to its most subtle form, from the empirical Me to the pure Ego. The widest sense is deliberately coarse. A man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his — his body and his psychic powers, but also his clothes, his house, his wife and children, his reputation, his lands and horses and bank account. All of them give him the same emotions: if they prosper he feels triumphant, if they dwindle he feels cast down, and the line between what a man calls me and what he calls mine will not stay put. From that fluctuating material James works inward, through the constituents of the self and the feelings and acts they prompt, to the question waiting behind them: what, if anything, owns the collection. He calls it the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal. His own answer is that nothing owns the collection except the collecting. Each moment's thought inherits what the last one owned, greets it as warm and its own, and hands the title on as it dies.

The empirical self, or me

The empirical Me has three constituents, with the pure Ego standing behind them as the thing still to be settled. The material self begins with the body. The clothes come next, and James declines to treat as a joke the old saying that a person is composed of soul, body and clothes. Then the family, the home, and property, where the parts most intimately ours are those saturated with our labour; a man whose life's work in manuscript is swept away feels personally annihilated. Subtract the goods the property would have bought, and what is left is "a sense of the shrinkage of our personality".

The social self is the recognition a man gets from his mates, and James establishes it by describing its absence: no more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than to be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed, nobody turning round when you entered and nobody answering when you spoke. Properly speaking, "a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him" and carry an image of him in their minds; and since those individuals fall into groups, he has one social self for every group whose opinion he cares about. The youth demure before his parents and teachers swears and swaggers like a pirate among his tough young friends.

Honour is one of these selves under another name: a man's image in the eyes of his own set, held to requirements not made of anyone in another walk of life. Club-opinion is one of the very strongest forces in life — the thief must not steal from other thieves, and the gambler must pay his gambling debts though he pays no others. The strangest of these selves is the one held by the person one is in love with; while it goes unrecognised, a man is not, to his own consciousness, at all.

The spiritual self is a man's inner being taken concretely: his faculties and dispositions, his ability to argue and discriminate, his moral sensibility, his will. This is the part we most verily seem to be, and considering it at all means becoming able to think of ourselves as thinkers. Within it there is a further centre, felt by all men as a sanctuary within the citadel: the active element in consciousness, the place from which the fiats of the will appear to come. Everyone would describe it in much that way. The moment anyone says what it is, the descriptions diverge.

James therefore asks a smaller question with a definite answer: not what the central self is, but what it feels like. Whenever the introspective glance turns round quickly enough to catch a movement of spontaneity in the act, all it can distinctly feel is a bodily process, for the most part inside the head. Attending to a visual idea brings a play of pressures and convergences in the eyeballs; consent and refusal run through the glottis, a valve intercepting the breath at every hesitation and opening the moment the repugnance passes; effort recruits the jaw. The conclusion is offered as a report about one person: the Self of selves, carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of these peculiar motions in the head, or between the head and the throat. He does not claim that is all of it, only that if the dimmer parts resemble these, the whole feeling of spiritual activity is a feeling of bodily activities most people overlook.

He follows the hypothesis for two pages and then stops himself. If the adjustments are the innermost sanctuary, everything experienced is objective, falling apart into a Self portion and a not-Self portion, with nothing over and above them but the fact that they are known — and that fact is not itself among the things known at the time. The stream would then better be called a stream of sciousness than of consciousness. He labels the passage a digression and returns to common sense for the rest of the volume. He did not drop the doubt. Fourteen years later he published it as the essay asking whether consciousness exists.

Self-feeling, self-seeking and the rivalry of the selves

The emotions the self arouses are two: self-complacency and self-dissatisfaction, pride and conceit on one side, shame and personal despair on the other. James treats both as elementary endowments rather than, as the associationists held, rapid computations of the pleasures and pains a person's standing is likely to bring. His reason is that each of us carries an average tone of self-feeling independent of any objective ground for it: a meanly conditioned man may abound in unfaltering conceit, and a man whose success is secure and who is esteemed by everyone may stay diffident to the end.

The acts the self prompts divide the same three ways, and James sets the empirical life of the self out in a table.

The desire to be recognised he takes for a pure instinct, because its strength has so little to do with the worth of the recognition. The pathological case comes from the decade's headlines: Guiteau, who shot Garfield, whose mental horizon the newspapers bounded, and whose most heartfelt utterance on the scaffold was a complaint against the press.

Then the rivalry. No man can be all the selves possible to him at the outset. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's, and the philosopher and the lady-killer could not keep house in the same tenement of clay. To make one actual the rest must be suppressed, so the seeker of his deepest self must pick the one on which to stake his salvation. Having staked everything on being a psychologist, James is mortified if others know more psychology than he does, and perfectly content to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. The man shamed to death for being the second pugilist in the world can beat the whole population of the globe minus one, and it counts for nothing.

From this the formula follows. Self-feeling depends on what we back ourselves to be and do; it is the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities, a fraction with pretensions for its denominator and success for its numerator. It can be increased as well by shrinking the denominator as by enlarging the numerator, and where disappointment is incessant that is what men will always do. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified. His example is the man who lost every penny in the Civil War, rolled in the dust, and said he had not felt so free since he was born.

Men also rank the selves: bodily at the bottom, spiritual at the top, the material and social selves between, with the remote and potential preferred to the immediate and actual in each kind. Of the wider selves the potential social self interests James most. A man who braves the condemnation of his own family and set is steadied by the thought of better possible judges than those now voting against him. That tribunal is what religion calls God. From this, and not from theology, he draws his account of prayer: in all the discussion of whether prayer is efficacious, little is said about why people do pray, which is that they cannot help it, since the innermost of a man's empirical selves is a social self that can find no adequate companion in this world.

Having built all this, he asks what is loved in self-love, and answers that it is never the bare principle. The words me and self, so far as they carry feeling, name all the things with the power to excite a stream of consciousness in a certain peculiar way. A man identifies with his body because he loves it, not the reverse; the baby, whose consciousness of himself as a thinker is not supposed to be developed, is the completest egoist there is, and his self-love is a name for his insensibility to everything but one set of things. Horwicz answers the obvious objection: our own children pass for the brightest not because they are ours but because we know them better and feel them more thoroughly.

The sense of personal identity

With the empirical Me described, James turns to the judgment that binds it across time, and insists first that the judgment is nothing peculiar. Thinking I am the same is no more remarkable an operation than thinking the pen is the same as yesterday. The question is what the thought means when it calls the present self the same as a past one, and whether it is right.

The answer turns on warmth. The present self is felt with warmth and intimacy: the whole cubic mass of the body gives an unceasing sense of personal existence. Any distant self felt that way when it was alive is thought with warmth now, and such selves are separated as a collection from everything lacking the mark. James reaches for a figure from the American West: at the spring round-up the owner sorts together all the beasts on a wide prairie that carry his own particular brand. Add continuity to resemblance and the bond is stronger still. Continuity makes us unite what dissimilarity would separate; similarity makes us unite what discontinuity would hold apart.

He then holds the conclusion to its exact size. Past and present selves are the same just so far as they are the same and no further; from other points of view they are as truly many selves as one. We hear anecdotes from our parents about our infant years and do not appropriate them: the breaches of decorum awaken no blush, the bright sayings no self-complacency. That child is as foreign as a stranger's child today, because the time-gaps break the continuity and no sense of how the child felt comes up with the story. Where resemblance and continuity go, the sense of identity goes with them.

But the simile of the herd has a second half, and James turns it against himself. If the brand is what lets us know the beasts belong together, the belonging is what caused the brand: they are not his because they are branded, they are branded because they are his. Cattle wearing the same brand do not in fact stay together; the herd's unity is only potential until the herdsman comes and gives it a real centre. They stick together by sticking severally to him, and common sense insists the selves are the same case.

In his account, James answers, the herdsman is there and is no metaphysical addition: it is the present, remembering, judging section of the stream, which is not one of the things collected but stands over them, owning some and disowning the rest. One objection survives. The unity it makes does not exist until it is there, as though wild cattle were lassoed by a newly arrived settler and only then owned, whereas common sense holds that the past thoughts were never wild. His reply is a legal metaphor. Suppose the present thought, instead of being substantially identical with the former owner, merely inherits his title. If its birth coincides exactly with the death of the last owner, it finds the past self already its own the moment it finds it at all, and the title never lapses. Each pulse of thought dies and is replaced by another, which knows its predecessor, finds it warm, and greets it as its own; each thought is born an owner and dies owned.

One obscurity he refuses to paper over: the act of appropriation itself. A thing cannot appropriate itself, so the agent must be the thought to which the constituents are known — and that thought is never an object in its own hands. It appropriates to itself, as the hook from which the chain of past selves hangs, and presently drops into the past with everything it carries. The present moment of consciousness, James says after Shadworth Hodgson, is the darkest in the whole series: nothing can be known about it until it is dead and gone. What it appropriates to is therefore less itself than the body and the adjustments in the head, which are the real nucleus of personal identity. The section ends with the sentence the chapter is remembered for: "The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker", and though there may be another thinker behind it, nothing in the facts requires one.

The pure self, or inner principle of personal unity

Three theories have been offered for the thinker behind the thought, and James takes them in turn.

The spiritualist theory is the Soul: a substantial, immaterial, simple agent in which the faculties inhere, held by Plato and Aristotle, formalised in the middle ages, retained by Descartes, Locke and Berkeley, on the grounds that thought is simple while the brain is compound and that no material agent could turn round and grasp itself. James's objection is not that the Soul is false but that it is idle. Compare the two formulations — a brain whose processes have pulses of thought corresponding to them, and a brain whose processes have pulses of thought in a Soul corresponding to them — and the second is a more roundabout way of stating the same bald fact, that when the brain acts, a thought occurs. He quotes Hodgson's maxim about the philosophy that asserts whatever it is totally ignorant of to be the explanation of everything else.

The practical demands fare no better. The immortality the Soul guarantees, the atom-like persistence of a simple substance, is not the kind anyone wants, since what would arouse hope is a continuing stream of consciousness; and its other use, insulating each personal consciousness from every other, is undone by the last part of the chapter. His verdict is that the Soul explains nothing and guarantees nothing, and he drops the word from the rest of the book, noting that his reasoning has not shown no Soul exists, only that science has no use for one.

The associationist theory begins with Hume, who on entering most intimately into what he calls himself always stumbles on some particular perception and never catches himself without one: the rest of mankind are nothing but a bundle of perceptions succeeding one another with inconceivable rapidity. James calls this a good piece of introspective work and then says Hume poured out the child with the bath. Where the substantialists made the self nothing but unity, Hume made it nothing but diversity, refusing even a phenomenal thread of resemblance running through the ingredients. The successors rebuilt identity from the chopped-up stream by a fallacy James had named earlier in the book: putting facts about the ideas into the content of the ideas themselves. The sequence ends with John Stuart Mill, who conceded that the parts of the series are linked by something in common which is not the feelings themselves and of which nothing can be affirmed except its permanence. James identifies that inexplicable tie as metaphysical substance come back to life, and calls Mill's concessions the definitive bankruptcy of the associationist description.

The transcendentalist theory is Kant's. Manifoldness belongs to sensibility, which is chaotic on its own; unity is supplied by the understanding, so that whatever else is true of an object it is known as thought by me. The awareness that I think is therefore implied in all experience — and in the same breath Kant denies the self any positive attribute, leaving the simple and utterly empty idea I, a subject known only through the thoughts that are its predicates. James's reply has two parts. Kant's picture is mythological: thought is not an internal machine shop, and if a dualism is wanted the multiplicity belongs in what is known rather than in the knower. Nor is anything explained by moving the synthesis inside the mind, since knowing must have a vehicle, and the best vehicle has the least pretentious name. If the transcendental Ego is meant as an agent, transcendentalism is only substantialism grown shame-faced, and the Ego a cheap edition of the Soul — "as ineffectual and windy an abortion as Philosophy can show".

The summary is generous to both sides. There need never have been a quarrel between associationism and its rivals, he writes, if the first had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought and the second had allowed that perishing pulses of thought might recollect and know. From here on, let me stand for the empirical person and I for the judging thought.

The distinction is old. Separating a seen object from a seeing subject is the opening move of the Drig-Drishya Viveka, which pushes it until the seer left over cannot be seen at all. What is unusual in James is that he puts no witness on the far side of the cut: the seer is a perishing event that will be an object itself a moment later. That is also the conclusion of the Anattalakkhana Sutta, which tests each constituent of a person for a self and leaves process without proprietor.

The mutations of the self

The last section is the empirical test of everything preceding. If the identity the I finds in its me rests on nothing but resemblance and continuity, then wherever those fail the self should be found in pieces. James goes looking for the failures.

The first class is alterations of memory, either losses or false recollections. Losses raise the forensic question, and law holds that a man is not the same person as the one who acted in somnambulism. False memories James treats as ordinary rather than rare. Their most frequent source is the accounts we give other people of our experiences, which we make simpler and better than the truth until the fiction expels the reality and reigns alone. His example is a friend of Frances Power Cobbe's who described a table rapping with nobody within a yard of it, then found her own note of ten years before recording that the hands of six persons had rested on it. She had erred in entire good faith.

The second class is alteration of the present self, in three types. The first type is insane delusion, where masses of unfamiliar bodily sensation invade a person and stand against the old familiar me as a strange and abhorrent thou. He quotes the patient of Krishaber's, reported by Taine, who found objects receding to infinite distances and looking flat like paper cutouts, whose limbs seemed not to belong to him, and who said that "the world was escaping from me". James's comment is what his theory predicts: in such cases it is as certain that the I is unaltered as that the me is changed. The present thought still knows both the old self and the new; what has happened is that the two will not unite, and the questions that follow are the beginning of the patient's insane life.

The second type is the alternating self. Mary Reynolds of the Pennsylvania wilderness slept through a morning in 1811 and woke with memory gone, a stranger to her parents and her house. Janet's patient Léonie has three, each knowing the ones below it and not the ones above. The case James had gathered himself was the strongest. The Reverend Ansel Bourne, an itinerant preacher of Greene, Rhode Island, drew money from a bank in Providence on 17 January 1887, boarded a horse-car, and was not heard of for two months. On 14 March, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown, who had rented a small shop six weeks earlier and traded in stationery and confectionery, woke in a fright and asked the people of the house where he was. He said his name was Ansel Bourne and refused to believe two months had passed. In June 1890 James induced Bourne to be hypnotised, and the Brown memory returned so readily that it proved impossible to make him remember anything of his normal life. James reports the failure as plainly as the result: no artifice would run the two personalities into one, and Bourne's skull still covered two distinct personal selves.

The third type is mediumship or possession, where invasion and departure are both abrupt, the state lasts minutes or hours, and nothing is remembered afterwards. James, writing as one of the founders of the American Society for Psychical Research, is struck most by the generic similarity of trance utterances across different people, as if one author composed more than half the messages regardless of who spoke them. He records a conviction that one medium's control knew things her waking self could not have known, marks it as bare opinion offered without evidence, and publishes it only because trance phenomena need serious study.

The chapter closes by asking what the brain must be like for all this to happen. It must be able to abandon whole sets of organised association paths, since nothing else would explain the loss of memory in passing from one state to another, and such systems must be able to be thrown out of gear with one another, one giving rise to one consciousness while a second gives rise to another. He rejects the tidy suggestion that two selves mean two hemispheres, since the selves may be more than two. The formal summary is compact. The me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known, with the bodily existence felt at the time for its nucleus; the I that knows them is not an aggregate and need not be an unchanging entity, but a thought, different at each moment from the last and appropriative of it. Since the passing thought is the directly verifiable existent no school has doubted, "that thought is itself the thinker", and psychology need not look beyond. The same brain, he adds, may subserve many conscious selves, alternate or coexisting.

Since 1890

The social self travelled fastest. Charles Horton Cooley's looking-glass self in 1902 and George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self, and Society in 1934 made the image others carry of us the material the self is built from rather than one constituent among several, and Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959 turned the man who shows a different side to each group into a working method.

The fraction had the longest afterlife of anything in the chapter. Morris Rosenberg's 1965 scale made global self-esteem measurable. Mark Leary's sociometer theory in 1995 gave that level a job — tracking one's acceptance by others — which unites James's average tone of self-feeling with his social self. Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe's account of contingencies of self-worth in 2001 is the fraction with the denominator itemised: what matters is not how well a person does but which domains she has staked herself on, which is James on the psychologist and the Greek. The self-esteem movement of the 1980s ran the arrow the other way, and the review by Roy Baumeister and colleagues in 2003 found the benefits of raising esteem thin. James's own advice, to work on the denominator, was never the policy anyone tried.

The method that produced the chapter did not survive. John Watson's manifesto of 1913 made the topic unrespectable for a generation, and self-report remains the least defensible part of his procedure. That particular report has nonetheless aged well. He looked for a spiritual element in the feeling of activity and found postural and visceral adjustments; the interoceptive accounts of the last thirty years put the body back at the centre of selfhood, and Being You builds the whole self out of the brain's predictions about its own physiological condition. His ranking, which put the bodily self at the bottom of the scale of worth, is inverted by that literature: the bodily self turns out to be what the rest is built on.

His negative conclusion has been reached since by other means. The Ego Tunnel argues that the self is the content of a model the brain cannot recognise as a model, a mechanism James had no way of proposing; the destination, that there is no entity where the word I seems to point, is his. The difference is temperament. Metzinger treats the appearance as a construction to be exposed; James treats it as a fact to be described accurately and left standing. The strongest objection comes from the other direction: Dan Zahavi and others working on pre-reflective self-awareness argue that appropriating a past thought presupposes experience already given as mine. James felt the pressure, and acted on it in 1904, when he denied that consciousness names an entity at all.

The clinical material held up remarkably. Ansel Bourne is still the standard case of dissociative fugue, taught from James's own report. What has been contested is the interpretation of living cases: multiple personality was renamed dissociative identity disorder in 1994, and the rise in diagnoses through the 1980s produced a still unsettled argument about how far the alternate selves are made by the procedures used to find them — something James half saw when he compared the medium trance to hypnotic suggestion. His observations on false memory ran four decades ahead of the field, and Frederic Bartlett in 1932 and Elizabeth Loftus from 1974 rediscovered what the note about the rapping table already showed: the story tilts, and the memory follows the story.

The psychical research is the part now least read, and the trance material has not yielded what he hoped. What it left behind is the sentence in his summary that he never withdrew: the same brain may subserve many conscious selves, alternate or coexisting. Much of the century of work since on dissociation, split-brain patients and the unity of consciousness has been an argument about how literally to take it.