Abstract

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James explores in some depth, among much else, a kind of dividedness that can exist within the stream of consciousness — “the divided self.” This condition of the stream consists in crucial part of a phenomenological heterogeneity, inconsistency, discordance, or division of which disapproving notice is taken subjectively. The pertinent discordance exists among states of consciousness that comprise the same stream, is evident directly to inner awareness, and is not necessarily a matter of positing or inferring the existence of a second stream of consciousness or an unconscious mental life. Typically, intrinsic theorists of inner awareness — or the immediate awareness we all have of at least some of our own mental-occurrence instances — disagree with appendage theorists concerning, inter alia, what the firsthand evidence reveals about inner awareness. I proffer in the present article an hypothesis that should help to explain why the first-person reports of appendage theorists contradict intrinsic theory with regard to inner awareness. My hypothesis derives from James’s discussion in Varieties of the not uncommon divided-self phenomenon