"James and the Metaphorics of Transition"

Pertaining to William James's phenomenology of felt relations, James uses a rather straightforward metaphor--that of the stream of consciousness. As Jonathon Levin puts it in _The Poetics of Transition_: "James is responding to two dominant conceptions of mind...the sensationalist account...and the intellectualist account" (46). The former emphasizes the individuated quality of discreet experience, often disjointed from preceding moments of experience. The latter emphasizes abstractions that govern all experience. James's pragmatism often presents a binary system of social sects loosely within broadly historicized philosophical discourse, and then performs a kind of hybridization or middle-grounding of those opposing formations. "Though logic holds that concepts are unchanging" writes Levin "in experience the same concept if subtly different every time it is evoked," thus, thoughts "are always thoughts-in-relation, and no abstract form of those thoughts underlies or secures their shifting relations" (46). James does not deny the sensationalist or the intellectualist position, but instead falsifies the division that separates them to be "as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades" (46). This falsification away from actual experience occurs due to our "habit of confusing a mental process with its end product" (Levin 47). "Since we keep talking about a table, or justice, or the color blue, we imagine a permanent mental or ideal form that we think of as Table, or Justice, or Blueness" (Levin 47). Jamesian psychology collapses the distinction between transcendental mental objects and their spatio-temporal contingencies. To separate any object for discreet contemplation is to imagine it out of its context and to betray the nature of thought itself. This is so because "Consciousness is never reducible to any immediate perception or sensation" (Levin 47). But James is not just attempting to sketch out a theory of the phenomenology of thought. Such a venture would be worthy in itself. But we can see James's early interest in making an intervention into the history of competing philosophical discourses. That intervention, which becomes an elaboration on and integration of _The Principles of Psychology_, is the pragmatist notion of the middle ground between historical philosophical dualisms: mind-body conflicts, empiricisms vs. idealisms, skepticism vs. optimism, because for James, all these dualities and binaries are only opposite ends on the continuum of human thought-experience and its many contingent and yet extending temporalities.