O’Shaughnessy on the Stream of Consciousness

Abstract

Abstract Philosophy, unlike most other subjects, does not try to extend our knowledge by discovering new information about the world. It tries to deepen our understanding by reflection on what is already closest to us—the experiences, thoughts, concepts, and activities that make up our lives, and that ordinarily escape notice because they are so familiar. Philosophy begins by finding utterly mysterious the things that pervade our everyday lives, such as language, perception, value, and truth. For everyday purposes we don’t have to know how these things are possible: We talk, we see what is in front of us, and we judge that this action is wrong or that assertion true. But it is possible, in the tradition deriving from Plato, to stop and think about what we are really doing, not for a practical purpose but just in order to understand what lies beneath the familiar surface of life. Human consciousness, which is at the core of everything we do and think, is one of the principal targets of such philosophical understanding. In our time the advance of physical and biological science makes possible the search for some of its physiological conditions, but there is a more basic understanding of consciousness that remains a philosophical task, and that is surprisingly undeveloped—an understanding that we can pursue only from within. It has occupied phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre, and empiricists like Hume and Russell. Even if empirical science starts from the evidence provided by conscious experience, understanding the nature of that starting point is still mainly the concern of philosophers.