Meanwhile, we may penetrate a little further into this line of thinking by also asking what parts of James the neurophenomenologists have been referring to in their own work. We shall only take a representative example here rather than an exhaustive one because the nuances have occasionally been extraordinarily brief; though in other places have gone into signifi cant detail.
Varela ( 1999 ), for instance, has focused on “the specious present” and applied it to the neurophenomenology of time consciousness, according to Gordon ( 2009 ).
Moreover, according to Varela, himself, his title from his reading of William James’s
discussion of “the specious present” in The Principles of Psychology (1890, vol. 1) is not a comparison of James and Husserl, but more a rendition of Varela’s neuro- phenomenological sense of time consciousness.
In this article, Varela ( 1999 ) engages in a detailed analysis of James’s own discussion of the topic:
We are constantly conscious of a certain duration—the specious present—varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the original intuition of time. Longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symbolically. Kant’s notion of an intuition of objective time as an infi nite necessary continuum has nothing to support it. The cause of the intuition which we really have cannot be the duration of our brain-processes or our mental changes. That duration is rather the object of the intuition which being realized at every moment of such duration, must be due to a permanently present cause. This cause—probably the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different phase—fl uctu- ates; and hence a certain range of variation in the amount of the intuition, and in its subdi- visibility accrues. (p. 642)
As did James, Varela ( 1999 ) used this construct to illustrate how “lived time” is not physical-computational, but existential-phenomenological. James expressed
“awareness of change [as] the condition on which our perception of time’s fl ow depends” (1890, p. 620). He posited a relationship between the bare phenomenon or the immediately known thing and the phenomenon of changing brain states that is cognizant of its object. James argued that the entire brain process is the state of consciousness, the soul a medium upon which these processes combine their effects.
However, for James , and Gordon also would argue for Varela as well, the psycho- physical parallelism within the dualism of thought and actuality, mind and matter, were both aspects of, or structures formed from, a more fundamental stuff—pure experience, which was already reifi ed into preestablished categories by the senses before psychology began its work.
Gallagher ( 1998 ) has also taken up a similar discussion in The Inordinance of Time. There, Gallagher attempted to reconcile the temporality of experience in cog- nitive science with the challenges of poststructuralism (p. 4) at the point where they intersect with phenomenology. He declared Husserl the voice who solves the prob- lem that James sets up in his discussion of the specious present, namely, seeds of the past and the future must exist simultaneously in our experience of the present moment, though they are themselves not yet full- fl edged memories nor projections of what is to come. Gallagher refers to a corrective of this view as Husserl’s “cogni- tive paradox” where:
(1) The succession must be perceived as a momentary, individual, and durationless act of consciousness, and (2) the perception of succession requires continuity of both sensations and memory images. Thus, succession can only be understood in terms of a momentary simultaneity in the present. (p. 4)
In my view, James’s references to radical empiricism could be productively con- sidered here. James refers to the stream of consciousness in his Exceptional Mental States Lectures (Taylor, 2010a ) as a fi eld with a focus and a margin, where the
margin keeps changing as the stream fl ows onward. We have the monoideism of the trance state in hypnosis and the idea fi xe in psychopathic compulsions, all the way at the other end of the spectrum to the limitless expansion of consciousness in the apophatic experience of the transcendent mystical state. Both Husserl and Gallagher limit themselves to what James says about time consciousness in The Principles (1890) in the present argument, however. And it is also true that James did not for- mally coin the phrase “radical empiricism” until 1897. In any case, Gallagher does enter into a discussion of the expansion and contraction of consciousness around the immediate moment as a factor in the specious present. Gallagher himself has said:
I’m a big fan of James from my graduate school days when I studied pragmatism with the late Isabel Stearns. I agree there are some interesting connections between radical empiri- cism and phenomenology, and also James’s notion of the specious present and Husserl’s time-consciousness (Personal communication, Feb. 20, 2008).
As recently as 2005, Zahavi ( 2005 ) also invokes James with regard to the Husserlian idea of time consciousness (p. 67).
Gallagher ( 2005 ) also invokes James elsewhere. He takes up the distinction between consciousness and embodiment and poses that body image and body schema arise out of what James had called the “blooming, buzzing confusion”
(p. 65). Gallagher’s contention was that such perception, with regard to fi rst percep- tions of the infant, did not arise until 3–6 months after birth, which has long been the standard assumption, but he contends there is new evidence challenging that interpretation, but still based on the idea that perception arises out of experience.
Normative psychologists still believe the sensory systems remain separate from each other, when Merleau-Ponty took a more phenomenological point of view that Gallagher referred to as multimodal.
In my view, the argument against the developmental psychologists is that many still think that perception means seeing with the physically intact structures of vision, and if there is no vision, there is no perception. James put no specifi c time limit on when “the blooming buzzing confusion” emerges as a perception in the infant, but he did say that in the evolutionary scheme of things, all attention was based on inter- est and that the true wonder of perception is not judged solely on what we see but also on what we do not see. A perception must emerge out of the blooming, buzzing, confusion for us to focus our attention on the object, but once done, all that we are not interested in is kept at bay. Perception therefore is based on what we see and, as well, all that we do not see. James did say that perceptions are made over long peri- ods of time and that “Every perception is an acquired perception” (Gallagher, 2005 , p. 157). However, Gallagher did review new evidence to suggest that perception based on body schema exists from birth, that sensory systems are already multi- modal, and that one sense modality does educate other sensory modalities.
My own conclusion is that while the neurophenomenologists were familiar with James’s radical empiricism, their primary focus has been on James’s Principles of Psychology , not his radical empiricism of 1904. One gets the sense on reading through Varela that radical empiricism was on the tip of his tongue. Had he known the details of James’s thought on that subject, as well as he and his colleagues have mastered The Principles , neurophenomenology might have broken through already in their task to introduce phenomenology to neuroscience.