Homo-Formalism: Analogy in "The Sacred Fount"

Abstract

In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James sets out to investigate the commonsense belief the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear parts of personal selves (227). The primary question about experience, according to James, is why it seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned (226). In putting the question this way, James takes issue with Hume's empiricist critique of identity, his conclusion that persons nothing but a bundle or collection of perceptions, and thus whatever we may have to imagine that simplicity and of the self, [t]here is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different (35152). James's argument in the Principles is that this critique of the unified self ignores the most crucial evidence in its favor: what Hume identifies our natural propension to imagine that we are so unified. For James, the fact that individuals continue to experience themselves selves, despite all evidence to the contrary, suggests that this of self must be more than a mere mistake. What holds the self together in his analysis is, in the end, a feeling of warmth and intimacy (331) with one's past thoughts, a recognition that they all belong to the same self. And thus it is, finally, he claims, Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to (334). What is striking, I think, about this moment in the Principles is that the model for the routine way in which the self gets constituted a self in everyday life is an image of two men waking up in bed together. In calling attention to the strangeness of this image, however, I do not mean to suggest that the Principles is somehow really about homosexuality. In fact, it is precisely the asexual and unerotic nature of this image of Peter and Paul waking up together that interests me. One might argue that James relies on such an image here because the issue he's addressing is the issue of sameness, the way in which individuals inevitably recognize the sameness of their past and present selves. Given that (with their alliterative names) Peter and Paul are meant to work mirror images of one another, James is asking how it is that Peter, on awakening next to Paul, has no problem recognizing that he is himself and not Paul. His answer is that while we make judgements of similarity all the time, some things are more the same than others. No matter how warm and intimate are Peter's feelings for Paul, no