The Stream of Consciousness: Literary Psychology as the First Uniquely American Phenomenology in the Works of William James and His Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist Milieu

Abstract

Husserlians will possibly be shocked at the idea that there might have been a uniquely American phenomenology before Husserl and before the first flourishing of that movement in the US in the late 1950s (Tymieniecka 1989). Theirs is principally a Continental understanding of the subject and we are grateful that they are its foremost champions. A case can be made, however, for a uniquely American phenomenological tradition beginning in the early nineteenth century with the dramatic and charismatic discourse of an aspiring Swedenborgian minister, Sampson Reed, whose “Oration on Genius” at Harvard Class Day in 1821 captivated the young Ralph Waldo Emerson who was sitting in the audience. “Native gold,” he called it, and it became later known, according to Perry Miller, the American intellectual historian, as “the first salvo of the Transcendentalist movement in New England.”

The manner in which the Swedenborgian and transcendentalist impulse can be understood as literary psychology can be seen in the writings of both Emerson and Hawthorne, and certainly in Melville, but also in the work of James John Garth Wilkinson, English homeopath and translator of Swedenborg’s scientific and medical writings, and close friend of Thomas Carlyle and also Henry James Sr.. Wilkinson had published a book of poems that contained in an appendix “an infallible method for automatic speaking, writing, and drawing,” which Emerson drew from, and which the psychologist Saul Rosenzweig later demonstrated was most likely the origin of the James brothers’ steam of consciousness technique (Rosenzweig, Contemporary Psychology III:250–257, 1958).

William James, direct inheritor of the Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist literary legacy, had incorporated a chapter on the “Stream of Consciousness” in his monumental Principles of Psychology in 1890; James’s brand of phenomenology was the source of his data base in The Varieties of Religious Experience (902), and it figured in his definition of phenomenology which he argued with Charles Sanders Peirce about around James’s conception of radical empiricism in 1904. It also gives us a clue to the vitality of the James renaissance that was initiated almost single handedly by the phenomenologist John Wild of Harvard in the 1960s (Wild 1969).