Reading James’ theories on the self last night in Odin.* It is interesting that he formulated the idea of the process self before Whitehead but it just goes to show that new ideas rarely spring fully developed from the minds of their proponents but have a long gestation period, more often than not in other minds. I felt hesitant and doubtful about James’ insistence on the self as a momentary experience replaced by the next succeeding self. However, this morning at meditation I was able to concentrate for relatively long periods at a time on just breathing. It was very apparent that the lapses into reflective thought, which were sparked off sometimes by external, sometimes by internal events, were haphazard and accidental. They were exactly the discontinuous moments of experience described by James. In each episode the subjective I was wholly and unreflectively involved. I was the ‘I’ of those thoughts and feelings at that moment. A moment later I would become aware of the drift into discursive thought and focus again on breathing and simple awareness. Now what brought about that transition?. One moment I was wholly caught up in subjective inwardness, in the next I was the detached observer of physical and mental events.
According to James the self is also defined in terms of the focal field of attention and although we ‘identify our focal self with the centre, our full self is the whole field’. Now what exactly does he mean by our full self? He goes on to say that ‘There are an irreducible plurality of selves, all private yet overlapping and co-penetrating with the others through their relational fringes’, and ‘Individuals are continuous with other selves and God in the subconscious.’ How can there be a plurality of private selves that are at the same time continuous with others? Does his idea that every self is fringed with relations, both to previous selves and to other selves, answer the question? Certainly I can see where the idea of a series of selves emerging from the stream of conscious experience comes from. I can see too that the concept of the self – private and subjective – yet with a fringe extending into the fringes of other selves can answer some of these questions.
*(Odin S.; The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, SUNY Press, Albany 1996)