Stream of consciousness

From Geography

Latest revision as of 20:39, 30 December 2012

The stream of consciousness means that an individual has a flow of their own thoughts, feelings and ideas. Thus for example the impressions you have of a day, your memories (Vionivich & Jamieson, 2003), your way of thinking, your feelings. This is given to the human being by their social relationships and has a great influence on how people experience their ‘life world' (Campbell, 1981). These conscious flows of experiences in the brain are continuous which means that they’re no discrete ‘separate’ actions (Voinovich & Jamieson, 2003).

Edward Husserl and 'stream of consciousness'

Edmund Husserl studied a phenomenological philosophy which contains the stream of consciousness (internal consciousness) when he wrote his book ‘Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische untersuchungen’. He wanted to examine and analyse the individuals stream of consciousness. Therefore it is important for him to know how to world seems to appear for the individual, without influences of science and the environment of the individual. These experiences of the world are not just given, but it’s made by the consciousness of the people (Campbell, 1981). According to Husserl the stream of consciousness is based on three main principles, namely:

- Intentionality: how the external world is experienced by the individual. Also see: Intention

- Superposition: how(non)sensory properties are presented in perception

- Temporality: a time perspective, all objects have a perception of past, present and projected future (Ishai, 2002).

All the streams of consciousness of an individual are thus the normative and personal examined consciousness of an object in this world. Alfred Schütz, a well known philosopher, uses this philosophy of Edmund Husserl for his own approach to society for the analysis of the social experience of the individual (Campbell, 1981).

Literature

The stream of consciousness is not just a philosophic concept, but used in literature as well. Also in the literature this concept is the continuous flow of thoughts, memories, feelings, associations which are characteristics of the mental processes of the individual. In literature this is expressed through disordered pieces of text and the lack of grammaticality (Verkruijsse et al, 2002). Stream of consciousness in novels is sometimes called a 'technique'. It is identified most quickly by its subject matter. (Humphrey, 1968)

References

Campbell, T. (1981). Seven Theories of Human Society. Oxford: Clavedon Press.

Ishai, A. (2002). Streams of Consciousness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Vol. 14, No. 6. P. 823-833.

Verkruijsse, P.J., Struik, H. and van Bork, G.J. (2002). Letterkundig lexicon voor de neerlandistiek. Leiden: DBNL. Retrieved from[1]

Voinovich, V. and Jamieson, J. (2003). Stream of Consciousness. New Zealand Slavonic Journal. P. 165-169.

Humphrey, R. (1968). 'Stream of consciousness in the modern novel'. Los Angeles: University of California.

Contributor

Published by Renate van Haaren, --RenateVanHaaren 21:19, 8 October 2012 (CEST) Enhanced and links added by Kasper van de Langenberg 30/12/12