Elsevier

New Ideas in Psychology

Volume 24, Issue 2, August 2006, Pages 117-132
New Ideas in Psychology

Whitehead's onto-epistemology of perception and its significance for consciousness studies

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2006.06.006Get rights and content

Abstract

The question of how “inner” states can be elucidated with reference to external phenomena receives, within Whitehead's coordinates, a twofold answer. First, a macro-analysis spelling out the characteristics of everyday perception and conceptualizing its conditions of possibility. Second, a micro-analysis questioning the ontological background of what is phenomenologically given. The conclusion underlines the main consequences of panexperientialism for Consciousness Studies.

Introduction

One of the main questions in current debates in philosophy and in psychology—how “inner” states can be elucidated with reference to external phenomena—receives, within Whitehead's coordinates, a rather innovative answer which can be unfolded in two complementary phases. First, a macro-analysis spelling out the characteristics of everyday perception and conceptualizing its conditions of possibility. Second, a micro-analysis questioning the ontological background of what is phenomenologically given. We will see that Whitehead is always struggling to avoid any bifurcations within philosophy or between the “cognitive” territories of philosophy, science, and religion… A first consequence is the replacement of the classical distinction between epistemology and ontology by the articulation of macroscopic and microscopic analysis. The conclusion underlines the main consequences of panexperientialism for Consciousness Studies.

In the European philosophical landscape,1 Whitehead is like a ghost who has a great impact each time he appears—let us think for instance of Bergson, Jonas, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Prigogine and Stengers. But he very seldom does appear, and still remains so to speak in scholarship limbo. Hence his vision is usually caricatured: even amongst the “specialists” in his philosophy, one can spot here and there the silent development of a scholasticism. In other words, his philosophical motivations are given less consideration than the coherence and consistency of his apparatus of technical categories; ready-to-wear strings of concepts take the place of reconstructing their interanimation.

A speculative vision is always difficult to tame. There is no way to break into a philosophical system; putting oneself in unison with an author requires the inner activation of his or her algorithm in order to let its categories freely mobilize their meaning. This is especially true in the case of Whitehead, who attempts a strange ontological revolution that has been presented as a “process philosophy” or a “panexperientialism.” The latter term, coined by Griffin (1977), has the merit of straightforward (if not clear) suggestiveness: everything that is experiences; everything that is is in virtue of its experience itself; nothing actual can be unexperiencing. (James’ radical empiricism is definitely not far off: “Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must be somewhere real”—James, 1912, p. 160). The term “process philosophy,” probably coined by Bernard MacDougall Loomer (Weber, 2004b, p. 44), is broader and has been applied retrospectively to thinkers such as Heraclitus, Leibniz, Hume, Schelling, Peirce, and Nietzsche (see, for instance, Deleuze, 1988; Hartshorne, 1984; Hartshorne & Reese, 1953; and Rescher (1996), Rescher (2000)).

For his part, Whitehead speaks of a “reformed subjectivism” that he bases in a reformed subjectivist principle (PR166) that de facto sets his panexperientialism in motion. Fully aware of the difficulty of the concepts that have nourished the philosophical tradition, he avoids using them as far as possible. The philosopher nevertheless speaks of “organic realism” (and more often of “organic philosophy”) to suggest the organic structure and ontological thickness of the World. There are “stubborn facts” that arise “from without us.” He is of course not the first to use the organic image; the Romantic stream is there to testify that the meditation on the human's Being-in-the-World willingly builds upon the organic. But in his case, there is a radicalization of the process perspective: what matters is to understand how genuine novelty can burst forth in the World without making it fly into pieces. Spontaneity is pristine; even temporality is subsidiary to it.

Our author feels both closely related and completely foreign to Spinoza. His system has a monistic trend because only one kind of “occasions of experience” (Whitehead also says “actual entities”) is appealed to; and because of the all-embracingness of the category of “creativity,” the nucleus of the “Category of the Ultimate” (itself the focal point of PR's categorial scheme). Although only differences of degree are used to name the various guises of “creativity,”2 this monism has nevertheless to be qualified—so much so that Whitehead uses the concept of monism only derogatorily: for him, it connotes first and foremost a static and deterministic (i.e., closed) universe (PR137). His system is pluralist because of the idiosyncrasy of each and every event, i.e., of every experiential hapax contributing to the open universe (PR79, PR73–74). Finally, let us notice that his pluralistic realism (PR78) implies a strong relativism (PR148).

How can “inner” states be elucidated with reference to external phenomena? The Whiteheadian answer can be unfolded in two complementary phases. We will benefit from sketching first his epistemology and second his ontology. But we already need to pinpoint that Whitehead is always struggling to avoid “watertight compartments” (PR10) among any of the fields defining the gnoseological patrimony of humanity. Consequently the classical distinction between epistemology and ontology is replaced with the articulation of macroscopic and microscopic analysis (PR128–129). The former is rather phenomenological; the latter enters metaphysical territory by formulating the rational requirements of the creative advance. The most straightforward way to sketch the creative advance is to evoke its three complementary functors: creativity, efficacy and vision. Creativity basically means the irruption of the unheard, the beginning of a new causal chain. In common philosophical parlance, it refers to becoming, difference, discontinuity. Efficacy basically means the reproduction of patterns. In common philosophical parlance, it refers to being, continuity and determinism. Vision basically means an eschatological horizon, a melioristic trend. In common philosophical parlance, it refers to God. The overall picture is thus an eschatological growth.

To facilitate comparison with other conceptions of mind and consciousness, the following should be said: (i) Whitehead's concept of consciousness is speculative, i.e., it is a broad framework that requires specific input to actualize its applicability (cf., e.g., our clinical exemplification at the end of the macro-analytic section); it seeks to show how all dimensions of our conscious experience can be systematized. (ii) Whitehead would have welcomed all contributions, provided of course that they were compatible (or could be made so) and that they kept room for—better yet, extended a welcome to—the experience of value and of meaning. (iii) Panexperientialism provides new ways of looking at ontological puzzles that result only from a precommitment to simple-minded dualism. (iv) The interactivist treatment of knowledge and consciousness seems fully compatible with Whitehead's organicism; of course their respective categories are not directly transferable and (local) applicability is gained at the expense of (global) adequacy.

An excellent introduction to Whitehead's Weltanschauung in general, and his epistemology in particular, can be found in his Barbour-Page Lectures of 1927, published under the title of Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect.3 One discovers there how his views marry elegant simplicity and acute applicability. Our experience, he claims, has three main modes, “each contributing its share of components to our individual rise into one concrete moment of human experience” (S17). Two of these modes are perceptive, and the third one names the interplay between the former. The goal is to save “appearance” and “being,” opinion and science.

In respect to “pure (sense-)perception” (cf., e.g., S5, 40 and also 17, 20, 53–56; PR168) or “direct recognition” (S7 and passim; PR65, etc.), the philosopher distinguishes “causal efficacy” and “presentational immediacy,” both constituting an objectification of the existing world (Whitehead is a realist). On the one hand, in “perception in the mode of causal efficacy” we “conform to our bodily organs and to the vague world which lies beyond them” (S43). In other words, we undergo the pressure of an external world which is both determined and past (S44, 50, 55 and PR178). That heavy and primitive experience (S44) brings to the fore the meaning of our embodiment (the “withness of the body,” as he will later call it), which is to deeply root us in the World. On the other hand, “perception in the mode of presentational immediacy” delivers a clear and distinct image of the contemporary world. An instantaneous cut-out presentifies reality (renders it present) as an extensive pattern: determined items localized in a spatio-temporal continuum. This projection, in our present, is achieved with the (past) data delivered by causal efficacy. Its paradigm is vision and the coldness of its objectification: to locate is the act of sight itself. The intrinsic natural processuality is here obliterated; the World becomes stiff and lifeless, a mosaic of qualities spread out in front of an acosmic subject.4

Two interesting contrapuntal speculations would be worth exploring. On the one hand, there is the noteworthy similarity between Whitehead's bipolarity of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy and James’ distinction between fringes and nucleus of experience. In both cases, there is a strong emphasis put on the virtues of “vague, haunting, unmanageable” (S43, cf. S57) presences and “vague but insistent” (S73) meanings. “Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. […] I prefer bluntly to call reality if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution, —and by reality here I mean reality where things happen, all temporal reality without exception.”5 This fundamental issue is dramatically highlighted by the ontological atomicity that constitutes the main support of Whitehead's late speculations.

On the other hand, it would be useful to clarify the claims that Jonas makes in his study of the impact of the metaphor of vision on the history of Western philosophy (a study that, interestingly enough, might have been directly spurred by Whitehead's own insistence on the issue6). The visual metaphor imposes the idea of a spectator-subject factually unaffected by the scenery or by visceral awareness (Jonas, 1966). Jonas takes the three essential characters of vision to be: simultaneity of the data presented (an instant-like coordinated picture), neutralization of the causality of sense-affection (a frozen, non-relational, perspective), and distantiation in the spatial and mental senses (a totally passive onlooker independent of all mundane contingencies).

To summarize Whitehead's claim in his own words:

It is the thesis of this work that human symbolism has its origin in the symbolic interplay between two distinct modes of direct perception of the external world. There are, in this way, two sources of information about the external world, closely connected but distinct. These modes do not repeat each other; and there is a real diversity of information. Where one is vague, the other is precise: where one is important, the other is trivial. But the two schemes of presentation have structural elements in common, which identify them as schemes of presentation of the same world. There are however gaps in the determination of the correspondence between the two morphologies. The schemes only partially intersect, and their true fusion is left indeterminate. The symbolic reference leads to a transference of emotion, purpose, and belief, which cannot be justified by an intellectual comparison of the direct information derived from the two schemes and their elements of intersection. (S30–31).

Neither of the two pure modes can be judged true or false, only their confrontation can. Aristotle saw it already: truth and falsehood are not “in” things, but in the synthesis operated by the mind.7 In order to explain perceptual errors and other, more positive, degrees of freedom humans can enjoy with facts, Whitehead introduces “symbolic reference,” which is the synthetic activity whereby the two pure modes are “fused into one perception” (S18). To mistake a square tower for a round one is to misinterpret what is actually given to us: although what is seen is undoubtedly a roundish object, the tower is indeed square and this fact cannot but be conveyed by causal efficacy. “Direct experience is infallible. What you have experienced, you have experienced” (S6). The mistake lies in the conscious judgment claiming that this tower is round.

Whitehead's answer to Hume (and Descartes) is thus the following. Although it is with good reason that the Scot criticizes perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, his reduction of all possible perception to sensory perception (restricted to the five senses) is sophistic.

We have already done violence to our immediate conviction by thus thrusting the human body out of the story; for, as Hume himself declares, we know that we see by our eyes, and taste by our palates. But when we have gone so far, it is inevitable to take a further step, and to discard our other conviction that we are perceiving a world of actual things within which we find ourselves. For a barren, extensive world is not really what we mean. We thus reduce perceptions to consciousness of impressions on the mind, consisting of sense with “manners” of relatedness. We then come to Hume, and to Kant. Kant's philosophy is an endeavour to retrieve some meaning for the two convictions which we have successively discarded. We have noted that Locke wavers in his account of perception, so that in the earlier portion of his Essay he agrees with Hume, and in the later portion with the philosophy of organism. We have also noted that Hume is inconsistent to the extent of arguing from a conviction which is discarded in his philosophy. (PR122–123).

Hume's obliteration of causal efficacy has undoubtedly cleared the way for dereliction. Everyday modern consciousness has lost the sense of derivation from the body: “The contrast between the comparative emptiness of Presentational Immediacy and the deep significance disclosed by Causal Efficacy is at the root of the pathos which haunts the world” (S47). Of course, the worm was in the fruit: the body has specialized itself in order to become “transparent” to external stimuli—“normally, we have almost negligible sense-presentations of the interior organs of our own bodies” (S45).

In sum, Whitehead correlates consciousness with symbolic reference; i.e., with a comparative rationalization operating on past data. If we put between brackets one single occurrence that seems to be a slip of the pen (S19), consciousness is never predicated of the direct modes of cognition and always of the symbolic synthetic activity. Symbolic reference is a “conscious analytical recognition” (S10, 46–47, 55), a synthetic activity of analysis (S17–18) that phenomenalizes the world with the help of “complex coherent judgments” (S38). “The result of symbolic reference is what the actual world is for us” (S18). Consciousness steps back from direct experience, allowing for more flexible—creative—responses but possibly leading to “irresolution in action” (S42) as well as “affectation”; i.e., the death of “natural grace” (Kleist, 1982). Before concluding this section, let us look, on the one hand, at the evidence Whitehead manipulates and, on the other, at the contemporary debate with respect to these issues.

The concept of “withness of the body” does not occur either in Whitehead's corpus before his Gifford Lectures or after them, but it is essential to evoke it in this macro-analysis (which focuses otherwise on Symbolism). The territory of PR being mainly ontological, the concept crystallizes meanings articulative of the macro and micro perspectives (remember our introductory statement on the requirement of not bifurcating the natural realm). The body is not only the starting point of our knowledge of the world (it mediates our perception of all events), it is the most primitive perception we have. Macroscopically speaking, the withness of the body could be approximated with the concept of cœnæsthesia because it names the synergy of the different perceptive modes Sherrington has identified. Three complementary sets of sensory receptors have to be distinguished (Sherrington (1906), Sherrington (1940)).

Exteroception (commonly called “sense perception”) is constituted by the five senses open to the external world.

Interoception names the internal sensitivity complementing the exteroceptive one. Most of the time, its messages, coming from receptors housed by all organs and tissues, do not “reach” consciousness: they are, through reflex action, the source of a harmonious bodily life. One can distinguish internal pains (headache, colic…), internal taste (chemical sensitivity ruling various reflex activities), and internal touch (sensitivity to variations of pressure, like distension of the bladder or the rectum, stomach contractions, antiperistaltic contractions of the esophagus, accompanying the feeling of nausea). So, for instance, the entire intestinal motricity is neurally coordinated by the unconscious messages of receptors sensitive to distension.8

Proprioception names the messages of position and movement allowing, with the help of the internal ear's semi-circular canals a spatialization —i.e., a full (ap)propriation— of the body. Proprioceptive perception grows from sensory receptors9 delivering data about the position and the relative movements of the different parts of our body. Through reflex action, it regulates muscle tone and helps us to localize ourselves in space and to create a sense of depth (stereognosy). Proprioception also includes the muscular sensitivity that complements exteroceptive touch in offering estimates on the weight and volume of the prehended or moved object. The structuration of our proprioceptive field provides for the fundamental organic anchorage of our identity. The withness of the body can be said to emerge out of the togetherness of all these perceptive modes.

So, through the massiveness of the experience of the “lived body,”10 we undergo the pressure of external events. Whitehead, who was fully aware of the epistemological consequences of Einstein's relativities,11 understood very well that perceived (sense-presented) events are always, by definition, past events. Hence his visionary dialogue between the efficacy of the past and the immediacy of the present. Symbolic reference constitutes the backbone of “normal” consciousness and its peculiarities are worth considering from a clinical perspective. Three recent works are relevant to contextualize this process: those of Franz G. Riffert, Daniel C. Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne, and Jason W. Brown.12 We will linger only on the last one, which provides interesting points of contact with the philosophy of organism.

How could one find empirical evidence for Whitehead's theory of perception? That very question has been recently addressed by Riffert,13 who argues that causal efficacy is made especially obvious by experiments in the following fields: early childhood perception (Jean Piaget and Heinz Werner provide the marrow of his discussion), subliminal perception (Heinz Werner and Anthony Marcel are here in the hot seat), and physiognomic perception (Heinz Werner's and Ulric Neisser's decisive arguments are sketched). According to Riffert, in all cases, the existence of a primitive form of data reception (rather than perception) is demonstrated.

With Dennett and Kinsbourne's (1992) intricate argument on temporal anomalies in consciousness (designed to support a “Multiple Drafts” rather than a “Cartesian Theater” theory of consciousness), the discussion takes a temporal turn that offers suggestive hints on what can be expected of a non-substantialist paradigm (Dennett and Kinsbourne underline the pioneering work of Pöppel (1985), Pöppel (1988)).

But it is Brown who provides the broadest framework with the most sophisticated symptom-based approach. Let us give a quick synopsis of the microgenetic account of perception. Microgenetic theory is the outcome of clinical research based on the assumption that “the symptoms of brain damage represent normal stages in the microtemporal processing of cognitions and behaviors”14; i.e., they are a direct path to mental structure. In other words, symptoms are revealing patterns of normality: “pathology is not retroontogeny” (Brown, 2002, p. 5). This is Freud's thesis reactualized through the works of Heinz Werner. Microgenesis is the basic pattern of the brain activity; it is a wave-like arborization of processes that unfolds from depth to surface, from an unconscious core to consciousness itself, i.e., from the upper brain stem to the neocortex. The usual substantialist paradigm is replaced by a process one: “things” are not “out there” waiting to be “discovered,” they arise. In the words of William James: “what really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them” (1909, p. 263). Microgenesis basically argues for two main theses: the reversal of the current cognitivo-connectionist interpretation and its rhythmization.

It is a reversal of the cognitivist model because the “cognitive” flow runs from whole to features. Four levels, pacing the continuous transition from flux (where vagueness and complexity dwell) to processed representational stasis (displaying clear and distinct external objects), can be heuristically distinguished (cf. Brown, 2002, p. 63ff.).

Here we identify each level, its major characteristics and main correlated pathologies:

  • (i)

    upper brainstem: pure (unfocused) wakefulness, without self-awareness or even mental content; the corresponding pathologies range from partial disruption of eye movements and misreaching to coma (Brown, 1988, p. 177ff.);

  • (ii)

    limbic-temporal lobe: image awareness disclosing a plastic and shallow world; damage in these areas leads to impairment in object recognition, dream-like states, and hallucinations (cf. Brown, 1988, p. 183ff.);

  • (iii)

    parietal cortex: object awareness (of an exteriorized, i.e., spatialized world featured with stable entities) and self-awareness; parietal lesions disrupt space perception and object relations (1988, p. 189ff.);

  • (iv)

    occipital cortex: analytic perception per se bifurcating perceiver and perceived—a fully independent external world organized rationally and consciously; destruction of striate cortex leads to cortical blindness (1988, p.198ff.).

Each phase in this transition from one mental grade to another shows progressive individuation. Sensations act as input at successive stages and motor responses are generated. On the one hand, sensations shape, carve, limit, select, constrict the process: they are not its building blocks, they do not fill pre-existing categories, but bend the process of reaction of perceptions by suppressing alternative routes. They are not incorporated in what remains a purely endogenous derivation but “sculpt” it to model reality (Brown, 1988, p. 15; cf. p. 195). On the other hand, motor outputs corresponding to each level of activity participate in the life of the individual through their actions.

The fourfold basic pattern is the pristine pulsation of mental life: sensory input and motor output receive a somewhat contingent and symmetrical status. Movement and sensation are analogous to action and perception, in both cases one contributes to the crystallization of the other. Better: “action and perception are ab origo [sic] a single form, a unitary act-object” (Brown, 2002, p. 9, cf. p. 123). The pattern repeats itself endlessly (within the boundaries given by the life of an individual, of course). Furthermore, it not only recapitulates previous (partially faded) phases, it retraces phylo-ontogenetic growth planes. Cognition is evolution compressed: evolution delivers the structure of behavior (core differentiation), ontogenesis refines it (regional specification and neural selectivity), and microgenesis ongoingly actualizes it (specification of target representations). “There is in living systems only one law, an evolutionary law, which is everywhere the same but in a different mode of concealment” (Brown, 1988, p. 9). Here we reach the second thesis: microgenesis advocates a rhythmic recapitulation. The mind/brain state grows and decays; it is essentially pulsatile, flickering. Since the decay is slower than the growth, there is a brief overlapping of phases that accounts for the experienced continuity. From base to surface, the mind/brain state smoothly unfolds before folding back up while being replaced by a new unfolding.

Consciousness is a relational process depending upon preliminary subconscious stages (Brown, 2002, p. 51): there is a continuous unfolding of a mental wave-like pattern, a dynamic stratification that eventually makes consciousness possible. “Consciousness is the intuition of a relation between levels in object formation, an intuition of the organic thread binding mind to world” (Brown, 2002, p. 72; cf. p. 75). As James saw, consciousness does not exist: “when one is conscious of being conscious, the object of consciousness is not the self but an idea or description of the self in a [momentary] state of consciousness” (Brown, 2002, p. 62). On top of that, consciousness is deceptive (a deception that is lost in psychosis): “the feeling of agency and the belief in the autonomy of a self set against objects […] are necessary for survival in a perilous environment” (p. 74, cf. p. 123). Now, consciousness lags behind the neural processes that gave rise to it (p. 133). “The present in which the past is (re)experienced is all that exists” (Brown, 2002, p. 37, cf. pp. 33, 60, 116, 123, 137, 189–190): in the normal state of consciousness, life is lived in the present—and that present is actually always already past (cf. pp. 186–189).

Section snippets

Microscopic analysis

If we dig further and raise the question of the conditions of possibility of the direct experience of the World and of its conscious “judgement” that have just been put into perspective, we will have to cross the gates of metaphysics in order to delineate (very) briefly how the required common platform between “subjects” and “objects” is secured by Whitehead's naturalistic ontology. One of the main achievements of Whiteheadian process thought is the destruction of the old concept of substance

Conclusion: panexperientialism and consciousness

Macroscopic analysis overtly focuses on human-conscious-experiences by articulating two preconscious modes of direct recognition with the help of an analytical activity, “symbolic reference.” Microscopic analysis opens the debate to all possible experiences by providing a finer resolution with the help of a sharp ontological discussion.

With regard to the question under debate—how to understand the factual interweaving of subjective and objective patterns and the possibility of distinguishing

Acknowledgment

This paper is a revised version of the one presented at the Mind-4 Conference, Dublin City University, August 16–20, 1999. The author is deeply indebted to Anderson Weekes for his speculative and linguistic expertise.

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