James and Husserl

time-consciousness and the intentionality of presence and absence

Richard Cobb-Stevens

pp. 41-57

in: Dan Zahavi (ed), Self-awareness, temporality, and alterity, Deventer, Kluwer, 1998

Abstract

During one of his visits to Heidelberg, William James was impressed by Wilhelm Wundt's efforts to determine experimentally the duration of our immediate consciousness of unified clusters of successive musical notes and of differently spaced monotonous clicks. Subjects were asked to indicate the point at which they no longer enjoyed an intuitive grasp of the series of sounds as a present whole. They were also asked not to attempt to count the successive notes or clicks, because counting introduces linguistic expressions which carry us away from the immediate context by permitting reference to identities across presence and absence. Counting might thus incline the subjects to conflate their perceptions of a series as a present whole with a series "whose beginnings have faded from our mind, and of whose totality we retain no sensible impression at all."¹ Wundt and his students concluded that the duration of our immediate consciousness of successive impressions varies from five to twelve seconds, depending on our manner of grouping the strokes and on the length of the intervals between the successive components of the whole.² James took these conclusions as a confirmation of his theory of the "specious present" an expression that he borrowed from the work of a little remembered writer, E. R. Clay, who had claimed that the experienced present "..is really a part of the past — a recent past given as being a time that intervenes between the [obvious] past and the future".³

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Wundt Wilhelm

James William