The Concept of Consciousness 5 : The Unitive Meaning

This is the fifth of a series of six articles examining respectively the six concepts of consciousness identified in the main entries of the Oxford English Dictionary under the word. I call the concept of consciousness 5 the unitive meaning because it is said to refer to the totality of mental‐occurrence instances that constitute a person's conscious being. The present article consists mainly of an effort to answer the question of which totality of mental‐occurrence instances it is to which the fifth concept refers. Four possible answers are considered, and the fourth, derived form Locke, is found to capture best the dictionary's meaning. Accordingly, consciousness5 is a certain subjectively determined unity of mental‐occurrence instances mat is further specified, of course, in the article. However, I also consider, finally, that the compilers of the dictionary may have had something more objective in mind as well, another meaning toward which the word is tending if it has not already arrived mere. This further sense may amount to an identification of consciousness with those components of James's stream that he described as “the very core and nucleus of our self as we know it, the very sanctuary of our life.”