Bevissthet / Mind Flashcards
(2 cards)
“Thoughts don’t flow like the luxuriant sentences of Henry James. Consciousness is not a stream. It is a brief assembly of fragments on the margins of the deep, a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it.”
Kevin Birmingham makes this point well in The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (2014). Of the novel’s style he writes,
“We can know of the existence of other things only by sensation. No idea you have in your mind has any necessary connection with any real existence … Merely having the idea of a thing in your mind no more proves its existence than the picture of a man is evidence of his existence in the world, or than the visions of a dream make a true history.”
In book 4, chapter 11 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, titled “Knowledge of the existence of other things,” Locke argues,
