Alfred Schütz: William James's Concept of the Stream of Thought Phenomenologically Interpreted

Originally published in June 1941 and supplied here in its 1970 republication, Schütz’s essay interprets James’s stream of thought and theory of fringes through Husserl’s phenomenological psychology. It identifies convergent discoveries without equating their philosophical foundations or asserting historical dependence.

And we would by no means dare to reduce an original and powerful thinker such as James to a precursor of phenomenology or to simulate an influence of James on Husserl, who approached the same topics from quite another side.

This qualification governs the comparison. James begins from psychological description, whereas Husserl develops a method that ultimately raises transcendental questions. Schütz establishes their shared resistance to atomistic accounts of consciousness before comparing horizons, the object and topic of thought, and articulated syntheses.

For both thinkers, conscious life possesses an original connectedness that cannot be reconstructed by associating independent sensations. Analysis distinguishes elements within an already continuous stream.

It is, says James, but our abstract conceptual thought that isolates and arbitrarily fixes certain portions of this stream of consciousness.

James’s distinction between the empirical Me and the passing subjective I permits personal continuity to be described without positing a substantial soul. Schütz nevertheless resists treating this psychological position as a decisive rejection of transcendental philosophy.

But James refutes the concept of a transcendental ego only within the realm of psychology, leaving open the question of its possible applicability to other provinces of speculation.

Schütz concentrates on the subjective strand of the Principles of Psychology, while acknowledging Dewey’s emphasis on the organism’s interaction with its environment. This delimitation enables comparison with Husserl without claiming to exhaust James’s thought.

The exposition of phenomenology turns on a change in attention:

In order to reveal these acts of experience as such we must modify the naive attitude in which we are oriented towards objects and we must turn ourselves, in a specific act of “reflection,” towards our own experiences.

Reflection makes experiencing itself available for description. Intentionality specifies that consciousness is consciousness of something; reduction suspends judgments about the world’s existence without denying it. Schütz distinguishes this method’s psychological use from transcendental inquiry into the ego’s constitutive activity. The distinction between noesis and noema differentiates experiencing acts from objects precisely as experienced: perception, recollection, and expectation can present an identifiable object through different modes. James’s distinction between a thought’s kernel and its fringes offers a point of comparison without eliminating these methodological differences.

The first sustained comparison concerns consciousness and its horizons. James’s substantive phases are inseparable from transitive feelings of relation, tendency, and expectancy. Husserl’s inner horizon includes an object’s implied appearances and unseen aspects; its outer horizon encompasses surrounding objects and temporal relations, ultimately referring to the world. Cognitive and practical interests determine how extensively these implications are explicated. James’s acquaintance and knowledge-about can thus be understood through differing articulations of horizons, and constancy of meaning through a synthesis of identification.

Temporal continuity deepens the comparison. Retention and anticipation give the present an experienced past and expected future rather than reducing it to an isolated instant. Schütz connects this account with James’s “specious present”: continuity belongs to experience itself, not to an external association of self-contained moments.

The second comparison distinguishes a thought’s topic from its entire object or content. Fringes connect changing elements with an organizing meaning, suggesting a parallel with the noematic nucleus. Yet James’s compressed descriptions encompass heterogeneous problems whose systematic development requires further analysis of prepredicative experience and constitution.

Finally, the conclusion of a train of thought may remain available after its intermediate steps have receded. Husserl’s articulated or polythetic synthesis explains how successive acts establish a higher-order unity subsequently graspable in a single monothetic act. This comparison opens onto abstraction, syntactic forms, and ideal objects. Schütz presents James’s analyses as an entry into substantial problems of phenomenological psychology while preserving the distinct commitments of the two thinkers.