American Advaita
William James and John Dewey on the Prime Reality of Sciousness
Sciousness--consciousness without consciousness of self--was first suggested by James in the Principles of Psychology to be prime reality, a suggestion he returned to in the conclusion of his revised, briefer edition, 2 years later. John Dewey, drawn, in his early days, to Hegelian Absolutism, with its "synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human," was an enthusiastic endorser of James's suggestion, writing to him, a year after the Principles was published:
"I am not going to burden you with my reflections or criticisms, but I cannot suppress my own secret longing that you had at least worked out the suggestion you throw out on Page 304 of vol. I [the pages where James introduces sciousness]. If I understand at all what Hegel is driving at, that is a much better statement of the real core of Hegel than what you criticize later on as Hegelianism. Take out your "postulated" 'matter' & 'thinker,' let 'matter' (i.e. the physical world) be the organization of the content of consciousness up to a certain point, & the thinker be a still further unified organization [not a unifying organ as per Green] and that is good enough Hegel for me. And if this point of view had been worked out, would you have needed any 'special' activity of attention, or any 'special' act of will? The fundamental fact would then be the tendency towards a maximum content of sciousness, and within this growing organization of sciousness effort &c could find their place."
I wrote a book published by Suny Press in which I try to show that Dewey's "secret longing" to have James develop sciousness in this way was secretly--or at least reluctantly--fullfilled by James. The book is entitled The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James's Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment, but without a single change in the text it could have been titled The Illusion of Will, Self, Time, and Matter.
Despite James's reluctance to embrace sciousness as prime reality, his conceptualization of consciousness as ultimately beyond the reach of objectifying science, could (as I wrote in a brief essay for the Journal of Consciousness Studies) have spared the Biennial Tucson Consciousness Conference--who anointed James "the Father of Consciousness Studies"--decades in futile pursuit of the Hard (to believe this has lingered as a legitimate) Problem.