ENGL 4310

I have been fascinated by the NPR segment we heard on Tues. and how it works with the body responses--the unarticulated sensations--that we see in both the O'Connor and Porter works.
So---I've been reading a bit of William James on "pure experience"-- and offer you this quotation:

But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity, they will say, but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has put asunder. (Essay I § 8 ¶ 1)

My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The I think which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the I breathe which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of consciousness, so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of spirit, breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are. (Essay I § 8 ¶ 2)

If you're interested in more of James and "pure experience" there is, of course, a website with his publications in the Principles of Psychology:

"Does Consciousness Exist?"