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Orpheus’ Glance.
Selected papers on
process psychology
The Fontarèches meetings, 2002–2017
So liebt die Lerche
Gesang und Luft
Und Morgenblumen
Den Himmelsduft.
Gœthe, Das Mailied, 1771

Und so lang’ du das nicht hast,


Dieses : Stirb und werde !
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
Gœthe, Selige Sehnsucht, 1814, in West-östlichen Diwan, 1819

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the
ground of particular observation ; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative
generalization ; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by
rational interpretation.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929
Orpheus’ Glance.
Selected papers on
process psychology
The Fontarèches meetings, 2002–2017
Paul Stenner and Michel Weber (eds.)
Contents

The Whitehead Psychology Nexus: Retrospect and Prospect


Michel Weber & Paul Stenner ........................................................... 9

Introduction: Some thoughts on the nature of existence


Jason W. Brown .............................................................................. 15

William James and Jakob von Uexküll:


pragmatism, pluralism and the outline of a philosophy of organism
Arthur Araujo .................................................................................. 33

Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond


Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk .......................................... 45

Process in Vedantic Mysticism: The Example of Ramakrishna


David T. Bradford ........................................................................... 61

Simultaneity and Serial Order


Jason W. Brown .............................................................................. 79

Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres:


Science, politics, and religion at the margins of the Modern
Adrian J. Ivakhiv ........................................................................... 115

Whitehead and Roger Sperry. The negation of the instant and the free
will problem
Rémy Lestienne ............................................................................ 143

Re-thinking the Self: Process philosophy in Murray and Morgan’s


Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Eleonora Mingarelli ....................................................................... 161

On Signs: Hayek's Surmise, Process Philosophy & Biosemiotics


John Pickering............................................................................... 175

What is Called “Feeling”?


Lure and Certainty in Whitehead and Descartes
Pierre Rodrigo............................................................................... 203

Whitehead and liminality


Paul Stenner ................................................................................. 211
8 Contents

The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology and Philosophy of


Mind
Maria Teresa Teixeira .................................................................... 227

Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection


Xavier Verley................................................................................. 239

Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action


Michel Weber ................................................................................ 259

How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Processual Self


Karen Yan ..................................................................................... 287

Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance


Denys Zhadiaiev............................................................................ 295

Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality” in an existential


philosophical context
Anastasiia Zinevych....................................................................... 305

Analytic Table of Contents ............................................................... 315


The Whitehead Psychology Nexus:
Retrospect and Prospect
Michel Weber & Paul Stenner1

Whitehead should have remarked that the true method of discovery is like the
flight of a lark. It starts from the ground of particular observation, makes a
flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization, and lands (or perches)
again. He would have made sharper what unites his philosophy of the
organism with the romantic poets. Anyway, Gœthe’s epigram adumbrates the
links that unite, in nature, earth and sky, matter and spirit, as love unites the
lovers and passion separates them. The lark leaves the ground to rise
vertically in the heavens, the immaterial, where it becomes almost invisible,
before coming back to haunt the earth. Die, and become, and die again.
The Whitehead Psychology Nexus is an international open forum
dedicated to the cross-examination of A. N. Whitehead's “process” philosophy
and the various facets of the contemporary field of psychological research and
debate.1 It seeks to encourage psychology in a Whiteheadian atmosphere and
Whiteheadian scholarship informed by psychology. The raison d’être of this
learned society will be clear from the following brief introduction, which
sketches its history, its current organization, and its past and forthcoming
activities in three areas: publications, annual research workshops, and
international conferences.
The Silver Anniversary conference (Claremont, Ca., 1998) featured exciting
overtures to the field of psychology. In October 2000, the need of a renewed
effort to federate scholarship in this interdisciplinary domain became clear.
With Fr. Riffert, M. Weber conceived the idea for an international volume of
invited papers that would “search for new contrasts” between psychology-at-
large and Whiteheadian philosophy. The WPN was born and baptized with the
symbol of the scarab as an emblem, which we asked Chromatika’s graphist,
M. Laurent, to design for us. By the following year most of the invited papers
were in preparation, and Riffert negotiated the publishing agreement with
Lang in Vienna. Before the end of 2001 the possibility of annual research
meetings was secured with Jason Brown's (New York) generous offer to
welcome us in Fontarèches (France). In December of that year Weber
launched the second volume of WPN studies on consciousness studies. In
March 2002, Anderson Weekes (New York) was invited to join us as secretary

1
MW: Centre for Philosophical Practice (Brussels) and Department of
Educational Foundations of the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon). PS:
School of Psychology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
10 Michel Weber & Paul Stenner

and his influence on the development of the nexus since then has been
significant.
Since its inception, the Nexus' structure is purposely minimalist in order to
allow as much freedom of becoming as possible. If the WPN courts the
possibility of various intellectual abuses by insisting on vagueness of structure,
we must remember that a certain nobility was conferred upon that term in its
rehabilitation by James and Whitehead and that the risk of such abuses is the
cost of being “worthy of the event,” as Deleuze would put it.
The Nexus' scientific activities have taken place in three complementary
areas: the annual meetings in Fontarèches, international conferences, and the
WPN Studies.
First, yearly meetings, co-organized by Jason Brown and M. Weber, with
the occasional help of Pauline Nivens (Vanderbilt) and Maria Pachalska
(Krakow), and lately by John Pickering (Warwick) and Paul Stenner (Open U.),
are taking place in Fontarèches since 2002. The first meeting developed a
variety of paths towards “new contrasts.” Since then, the workshops have
either focused on a specific topic, such as the cross-examination of
Whitehead's theory of perception and contemporary psychology, the unity of
knowledge and action, (bio)semiotics, social praxis and psychotherapeutical
practice, or have offered room for scientific exchange on the interface
between philosophy and psychology.
Secondly, the Nexus has been involved in the organization of international
conferences at various sites: the 5th International Whitehead Conference
(Seoul, 2004), a symposium exploring forms of dialogue between the
perspectives of Whitehead and James (William James et l’empirisme radical.
1904–2004, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2004), and one on the
stakes of microgenetic theory (Katowice, 2005).
Thirdly, the Nexus publishes the WPN Studies and promotes research on
the interdisciplinary themes envisioned for its publications. The inaugural
volume, edited by Riffert and Weber, appeared under the title of Searching for
New Contrasts. Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in
Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind
(Vienna: P. Lang, 2003). In conceiving this volume, the editors sought to
gather two types of provocative communications by prominent international
scholars: on the one hand, discussions of the present state of affairs in
psychology; and, on the other, critical studies of the relevance of the
imaginative generalizations of Whitehead for psychology and/or of the impact
of contemporary psychology on Whitehead's system of thought. The common
denominator of all these inquiries is the process worldview understood in its
widest sense, not a strict use of Process and Reality's technicalities (although
this was encouraged). The volume is extensively indexed for subjects and
Retrospect and Prospect 11

includes a complete index of names and bibliography of works cited. Its


critical apparatus should prove to be a handy companion for further research.
The second volume, entitled Process Approaches to Consciousness in
Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind and edited by Weber and
Weekes, was published by SUNY in 2009. A variety of innovative trends in
consciousness studies seem to be moving in a Whiteheadian direction and
are, right now, poised at the verge of a novel confluence. For example,
research in evolutionary epistemology, embodied cognition, autopoiesis,
dynamic systems, biosemiotics, and ecopsychology all bear an organic ring
that opens, at last, the possibility of moving beyond the bifurcation of nature.
The volume directly addresses the epistemological question of the status of
these recent trends.
The third volume, entitled The Roar of Awakening. A Whiteheadian Dialogue
between Western Psychotherapies and Eastern Worldviews, edited by Derfer,
Wang and Weber (Ontos, 2009), describes the contemporary state of affairs
in Western psychotherapy in a Whiteheadian spirit: with genuine openness to
the relative ways in which creativity, beauty, truth and peace manifest
themselves in various cultural traditions. To do so it chooses to explore afresh
a path of cross-elucidation that was born with the field of history of religion:
what have we and can we learn from a dialogue with Eastern religious
worldviews? This volume features two main types of critical studies operating
in an Whiteheadian environment: discussions of eastern worldviews and
transcultural contextualizations. In order to generate a meaningful contrast
between the different systems of thought, all the authors of the volume were
kindly asked to address as straightforwardly as possible the following core
issues. On the one hand, how does the given system understand the
interaction of individuality, society, and nature (or cosmos)? Especially: what
is its standpoint with regard to the nature of consciousness and with regard to
the mind/body “problem”?; how far is it dualistic?; how are destiny and
historicity assessed? On the other hand, what is the paradigm of all mal-
adjustment (or pathology) and what is its typical tuning-in (or curative)
pattern? What are furthermore the ins and outs of the diagnostic and
therapeutic assessments involved? A clear-cut statement on the question of
normality would of course help while, wherever possible, some
(meta)theoretical and clinical issues should be addressed from the vantage
point of selected material from abnormal psychology or psychiatry.
Weekes anticipates a volume devoted to Whitehead and Gestalt theory.
Among specific themes appropriate to the Gestalt volume, a few can be noted.
(i) Aron Gurwitsch argued that the ideas of Husserl, James, the Gestaltists, and
Piaget were animated by similar concerns and could be brought to converge
in a holistic understanding of experience. How would Whitehead fit into this
picture? (ii) Whitehead's critique of Hume is original. Apparently
12 Michel Weber & Paul Stenner

independently, the same critique was developed by Maurice Mandelbaum,


who claims Köhler among his principal inspirations. This convergence invites
exploration. (iii) Whitehead diagnosed our modern alienation in much the
same way Husserl did in his Krisis. How does Whitehead's project of
reconciliation compare to that of Köhler or Mandelbaum? (iv) Merleau-Ponty's
last pages on Koffka and Goldstein are side by side with his account of
Whitehead's philosophy of nature. It would be valuable to define how the
French thinker understood this proximity.
Last Easter, we have celebrated the 15th anniversary of our inter- and
trans-disciplinary meetings, and it seems appropriate to publish a collection
on that occasion. It is dedicated to all attendents, past and future, and to our
hosts, Jason and Carine Brown. We have named this collection after Orpheus
and his famous backwards glance. Orpheus was the first poet. Or at least, that
is how he is described by Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil and Ovid. He received
the gift of music from his mother Calliope, a Muse no less. With his singing
lyre, Orpheus charmed also the trees and the beasts of the wilderness, even
the rocks and rivers. But these irresistible powers of song notwithstanding,
Orpheus was unable to prevent his beloved Euridice from being killed after
their wedding by the venom of a viper. Distraught, Orpheus determined to
charm the Lord of the Dead into returning his newlywed from the underworld
to new life. His audacious plan was accepted on one condition: he must not
glance back at her until both had emerged from Hades. On resurfacing to the
upper world, Orpheus could not resist a glance at Euridice, who —alas— was
still inside the cavern. Thanks to this glance, having reached the threshold she
was gone forever, leaving Orpheus to a lonely existence singing only to the
rocks and rivers. He was finally torn limb from limb by a band of Maenads,
and entombed at the foot of Mount Olympus.
What has this glance of Orpheus’ to do with a volume on process
psychology? Whilst we do not wish to spoil a good title by subjecting its
resonances to a grimly clinical analysis, we do seek to encourage a certain
reconnection of psychology with ‘music.’ The inverted commas here indicate
that we are not thinking of music as it is usually understood, but ‘music’ in
the broad sense of the poetry and artistry associated with Pythagoras and the
Muses: with the aesthetic as distinct from the merely epistemic. Forms of
process psychology inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy allow us to take a
step back from the usual epistemic assumptions that inform the mainstream
of today’s scientific psychology, assumptions usually passed over without
mention. This step back is announced loud and clear in the title of Jason
Brown’s introductory chapter: ‘Some thoughts on the nature of existence.’
These ‘musings’ on the nature of existence are not some indulgent drift into
pre-scientific speculation: they are observations that are critical to the future
of psychology and that are based on a lifetime of sustained and practical
Retrospect and Prospect 13

engagement with neuroscience. These musings first of all acknowledge that


what Whitehead called ‘the utmost abstractions’ —far from being
inconsequential— are ‘the true weapons with which to control our thought of
concrete fact.’2
From the off, Brown announces his departure from the usual unspoken
utmost abstraction: that ‘only causal objects, substances or properties exist.’
Instead, he draws us immediately into an inclusive complexity that refuses to
separate the physically real from modes of experience. This affords him a
sharp appreciation of the importance of the liminal zone between
psychological functions which are typically treated as separate categories.
Memory, for example, ‘can become perceptual,’ whilst in its turn perception
‘fades to memory’. Through such mobile contrasts, Brown brings new life to
the reality of memory and imagination but without cutting off their vital
relation to a ‘sensibility’ which, as he puts it, ‘parses possibility to
definiteness.’ This process of parsing to definiteness makes sensibility double-
edged. On the positive side, it is that which allows us to recover a world
beyond our existential dream bubble, and hence to survive and thrive within
practical reality. On the negative side, this entails a trimming of thought and
imagination to practical necessity and hence a pruning of possibility which in
turn cuts back contingency and tames temporality. The virtual genies of
imagination and memory that are usually kept in check by this processes of
parsing can, however, be released from their respective lamps by a certain
‘relaxation’ —perhaps caused by the ritual of a gentle rubbing— of this
sensibility. In this way we move from the immediate tension of practical
reality, with its primarily epistemic focus, and into the charmed realm of
‘music,’ symbolised by Orpheus.
The first poet was shocked out of his charmed life (of communitas with
nature) by the event of the death of his lover. The poetry associated with the
Muses, in this way, holds out the possibility of bringing what has perished
back to life, and of shepherding whatever has lost its living immediacy into
some form of objective immortality. Shamanism was never far in these
archetypal times.
But, just as a dream evaporates on crossing the threshold to woken
sensibility, so the poetic preservation of Euridice must respect the sensible
law of the upper world. In this way, the adventures of Orpheus illustrate the
stakes for any process psychology that is not predicated upon a materialistic
‘explanation’ of the psychological, but that strives for insight into our
collective existence.
14 Michel Weber & Paul Stenner

Bibliography
Derfer, George, Zhihe Wang, and Michel Weber (eds), The Roar of Awakening.
A Whiteheadian Dialogue Between Western Psychotherapies and
Eastern Worldviews (Whitehead Psychology Nexus Studies III),
Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2009.
Riffert, Franz and Michel Weber (eds), Searching for New Contrasts.
Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in
Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of
Mind (Whitehead Psychology Nexus Studies I), Frankfurt am Main,
Peter Lang, 2003.
Stenner, Paul, Liminality and Experience. A Transdisciplinary Approach to the
Psychosocial, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Weber, Michel and Anderson Weekes (eds), Process Approaches to
Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind
(Whitehead Psychology Nexus Studies II), Albany, New York, State
University of New York Press, 2009.
Weber, Michel and Will Desmond (eds), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process
Thought, Frankfurt / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, Process Thought X1 &
X2, 2008.

Notes

1
Two first versions of this overview have been published in Searching for New
Contrasts. Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in
Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind
(Lang, 2003), and in Process Perspectives, Volume 26, Number 3, Summer
2003, pp. 3-4.
2
A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. The Lowell Lectures, 1925,
New York, The Free Press, 1967, p. 32.
Introduction
Some thoughts on the nature of existence
Jason W. Brown1

Abstract
This paper explores some perplexities in thinking on the nature of existence,
primarily the distinction of, and transition between, the subjective
antecedents and objective realizations of perceptual objects and the relation
to brain process through which they are derived. The subjective properties —
formativeness, subjective aim and becoming— that precede and appear to
persist in the object are an intrinsic part of —and exist as surely as— the final
object itself. The temporal quality of existence is discussed in relation to
recurrence as the basis of object stability and persistence, which presumably
applies to the physical entities mirrored in perception.

1. Introduction
Among the ways of conceptualizing existence, it seems to me one has to
decide whether to begin with a definition or preconception, for example, that
only causal objects, substances or properties exist, and bring the various
phenomena that exhibit some mode of existence into relation with this
definition or, as in this discussion, to explore without preconceptions and in
an inclusive manner the enormous complexity that is hidden in this
seemingly innocuous term in the hope of arriving at some novel criteria that
can accommodate a wide range of phenomena that lay claim to this
designation.

2. Can a thing exist as a concept or mode of thought?


One way to begin is by asking, can a thing exist as a concept or mode of
thought and not as an ingredient of the physically real? Is this a binary choice?
Is existence absolute or are there forms or degrees? If we say everything
exists, every thought, feeling, object, is there not some difference between a
perceptual object, a physical entity, and its indefinite and/or imaginary
antecedents? If we say nothing exists, that objects are phenomenal veils that
obscure reality like a film of the real that is on-line with external events, one

1
New York University Medical Center (New York).
16 Jason W. Brown

descends into the deepest skepticism. What precisely does it mean to exist? If
causal relations are necessary, how would they apply to psychic experience or
mental phenomena?
A footprint in the sand as a momentary depression that mirrors a foot is a
negative image of the real that is washed away in the tide. Does the fleeting
imprint differ in existence from the object that shaped it? The fact that a foot
is a solid object and the footprint is a cast, a depression or an outline implies
that solidity and stability impact existence. Is a footprint a copy of the real like
a shadow? The footprint is stationary but disappears. The shadow comes and
goes, changes. What does it mean to come into existence and then no longer
exist? A shadow has no substance; a footprint is an empty space. Does
emptiness exist? The footprint is a construct, however brief, no less than a
sandcastle. In contrast, a shadow is an absence of light. Are we saying that
absence can exist? The space behind my head exists inferentially while the
space of the eyes closed —the “visual gray”— is a perceptual existent. A
shadow can affect the warmth of earth or stone it covers and attract
organisms avoiding the sun.
If causal effect is necessary for existence, a footprint is causal like a
shadow; in this respect, it exists no less than a reflection of a person in a
mirror. We could say the person exists but not the reflection, yet the
reflection depends on the object reflected, as all things depend, for their
perception, on the surface reflection of light on the retina. Like Escher’s
animals that parade behind a mirror, or Cocteau’s world within mirror space,
the interposition of the mirror between self and world gives a sense of a
parallel world that is an artifact of perception. In one, there is self-reflection or
the reflection of other objects that are identified with their reflection as
opposed to the ordinary reflection of light, while a mirror image is perceived
as distinct from the person or object reflected. There is the person and the
mirror reflection of the person. In effect, the person sees himself, while
ordinarily he sees the reflection of other objects, just as he is a reflection for
other observers. Does a reflection exist in some fashion like a perceived
object? If we say that for a thing to exist it must have causal relations, a
mirror image can cause a person to alter his appearance, as the image of
Narcissus led him to abandon life. The mirror reflection reminds us that a
world of reflected light is not an actual world, though the world that is
reflected is presumably the ultimately real.
We tend to think that objects in the world have a more certain existence
than mental phenomena such as feelings and ideas, or that true facts exist
unlike false ones. Unicorns exist in drawings or as ideas, while horses exist as
real things. If one thing exists as an idea, or as an idea of a non-existent
object, in what sense does it exist like an actual object? A horse exists in
actuality and a unicorn as an idea; what of the concept of a horse, which not
Thoughts on the nature of existence 17

only promulgates horses but informs us of what a horse is? With respect to
existence, can a false or mythical concept be distinguished from a veridical
one, or one that points to an actual object? A true concept differs from a false
or imaginary one but they are all concepts so if concepts exist, all concepts
exist regardless of their content or what they refer to.
Every object appears for a moment and is replaced by the same or another
object. The evanescence of a thing gives the impression of a fleeting or even
questionable existence. Impermanence has a weaker claim on existence than
an object that endures. However, from a mental standpoint, persistence is a
recurrence of like instances that gives the impression of stability. The object
—the category of the object— recurs continuously so we think the object is a
solid thing independent of perceiving it. Repeating a word does not increase
its hold on existence like repeating a perception, say reviving an object like a
tree. One object has the appearance of a persistence that is lacking in the
other. A particle with a half-life of a fraction of a second exists for that fraction
no less than the mulberry in my garden. In this respect it is like a footprint or
a shadow.
An error or falsehood can have a more intense effect than a truth, a value
more than a fact. If causal effect is essential, how do we understand a
difference in causal power between truth and fiction? If errors and falsehoods
do not point to true facts, what mode of existence do they share? Things of
the imagination may seem more vivid and real than “solid” objects. Is inner
speech (verbal thought) less real than vocalization? Where is the difference
between formulating a sentence in the mind and producing it in speech?
From a neural standpoint, the difference is passage to the articulatory
apparatus, but this is only the final stage in word-production. A word spoken
and then forgot has a fleeting existence no less than its psychic precursors
and physiological substrate. Words have causal effects, not just shared ideas
or cries of “help” but even the little structural words that have no other
function than grammaticality. A word uttered in the desert is no different than
one in conversation. Suppose mental telepathy was proven to occur. Would
this mean that thoughts now have a causal existence like words? Is the effect
of a word what the word is, what it means, what it provokes or signals or
what it points to?
Every act or object is a contrast with other possible objects carved out of
an antecedent yet unrealized potential, with the adaptive or relevant
“selected” to map to and represent what is otherwise imperceptible. All
objects are impressions. Like footprints, they are negative images of the real.
Adaptation conditions an object to fitness in a social or physical niche. The
object becomes what it is by a process of elimination. It is what remains after
all other possibilities —like those that appear in dream— are trimmed away.
In this respect, the object is like the relief of an entity, the concave that
18 Jason W. Brown

appears convex. Assuming a physical reality mapped by appearance, the


mental image of the world is not merely a copy of reality but a reciprocal. An
object does not replace what it represents but is like a mask, an alternate if
accurate representation of the outside world, a Rorschach of the real, like anti-
matter —positron to electron, the levo to the dextro— a reflection of reality or
its complement.
It is evident that the perceptual object is not what is physically there. Apart
from the temporal lag, constancy effects, and the reconciliation of the
separate images of binocular disparity, mind inverts the retinal image as
inverting lenses temporarily invert objects. The conscious object is a mental
image that models and is slightly off-line with the physical entities it
represents. In spite of this, immediacy of response is guaranteed by the
activity of preliminary phases in image and act prior to conscious realization.
At successive levels, sensibility bounces off the receptors to create a psychic
replica of the physically real. The perceptual object is derived from mind as an
endogenous category generated within the subjectivity of the observer and
parsed at its endpoint to a virtual model of the world, but the true (yet
inferred) source of the image is the relation to physical reality as a mirror
reflection of an unknowable or noumenal world.
As in the case of the preverbitum becoming speech, not only is there the
contrast of an object with the physical entity it represents, there is the
sculpting process that elaborates and is submerged in the object-
representation. Objects are reflections of something, and we call this
something the reality behind or reflected in the object. Ordinarily the object-
representation is identified with the reality that it actualizes. The image of the
world, though presumed to be a copy and a result of impressions coming
from physical entities, is felt as solid, real and tangible, not as a mental
category that fractionates into featural detail, or an approximation to a reality
that impacts the brain by way of the constraints of sensibility. This mental
image of the world, including the self, navigates through physical reality;
survival depends on correspondence of the real and perception, and
coherence of act and object across serial occurrences. The reality to which
objects correspond is imposed on the developing image; conscious life
transpires in a mental bubble that maps to the physically real.
The perceptual model must be close to physical reality or survival would
be endangered. The match is such that objects are apprehended as direct
perceptions of physical reality independent of the subjectivity within and
behind them or the process through which, like an utterance, they develop. In
the normal waking state, sensibility governs perception by exclusion, but the
body of the object is a series of mental configurations that, as potential or
possibility, prefigure the final modeling. The object matches reality by virtue
of the elimination of irrelevancy at successive phases, especially the final
Thoughts on the nature of existence 19

transition to independence, but the object world, though a field outside the
observer, is fully subjective. Given that the major portion of the object is an
intra-psychic process, with objectification by sensory pruning at its endpoint,
the question of what constitutes existence for a perceptual object cannot focus
on the outcome and ignore the inner derivation.
We can ask, does a forming object that is not-yet, that is, the potential for
it to be what it will become —which as potential or possibility is not identical
to the outcome— exist in a manner comparable to the objectified endpoint of
the becoming? Ostensibly, there is little relation of early phases in object-
development to the final outcome, whether such phases are viewed,
conventionally, as features to be assembled or categories to be partitioned.
For standard theory, stages in the progression to an object are partial
constructions. The microgenetic view of a succession of whole/part shifts has
wholes as categories out of which parts, as sub-categories, devolve. Since pre-
object categories are not containers and members are unresolved unless they
actualize, categories are better conceived as proclivities that are not fully
predictable or even probable (at the point of passage) that trend to the
definiteness of a subjective aim in the final qualitative partition.
For example, if one dreams of being stabbed by a unicorn as an
unconscious image that foreshadows or is a psychoanalytic interpretation of a
waking preoccupation, say a conscious fear of horses, perhaps with a sexual
element, the unconscious image is a displacement in the broader category
from which the conscious idea or feeling is derived. This is not to say the
unconscious image is a transitional phase on the way to an object, but that
the same “operation” that leads to the object is corrupted in the dream. A
unicorn image does not persist in the final thought or object; the phase that
actualized as a unicorn passes to an ensuing phase and is unrealized in the
conscious outcome. The fusion of images in dream —unicorn, piercing, sexual
connotation— which can be related to conscious ideation, illustrates the
overlap or metaphoric extension of sub-surface categories that precipitate in
dream. More generally, at every phase in thinking or object-development,
virtual categories of object- and word-concepts and experiential memories
achieve definiteness only when they actualize.

3. Memory and perception


Memory and the creation of novel categories are records of object-
experience that figure in every perception. Memory can become perceptual;
perception fades to memory. A relaxation of the sensibility that parses
possibility to definiteness allows objects to withdraw to a field that is the
ground of possibility, and the potential for creative advance and novel
20 Jason W. Brown

arisings. Sensibility is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, mind adapts to


sensibility to individuate endogenous categories to an independent world.
Without the final adaptation, life would be a dream and survival impossible.
This is essentially what happens in prolonged sensory deprivation; to a lesser
extent in snow blindness, though a world can still be recovered by unaffected
modalities (audition, etc.). On the other hand, sensation limits possibility by
trimming the unexpected, narrowing contingency and restricting innovation.
Thought and imagination are trimmed to necessity. The immediacy of
sensory adaptation filters the image to the perceptible, elaborating thought
and an interpretation of the environment in a sequence of world-states to give
an anticipatory response, as well as forming the mentation within the
multiplicity to gird perception with recognition, emotion and conceptual
possibility. Early phases exhibit potential in fusion and displacement in
proximity to experiential memory and feeling. The images and distortions of
dream, fantasy and creative thought that crystallize in the mind in the relative
abeyance of sensation give a picture of antecedent process through which
veridical objects develop.
Possibility is the converse of the certainty that sensibility imposes on
novelty, though the certainty of the world is not apparent until it actualizes.
We cannot say the subjective process aims at a veridical world, since
veridicality is impressed on subjective process. Even the genesis of a veridical
world shared by others differs in each observer as to conceptual content and
value, which depend on the balance of mind-internal with sensibility, a
balance not between the inner and outer but of concepts with the sense-data
that rain down in each modality on developing configurations. In creative
thought, the withdrawal is intermittent; in psychosis, it is pervasive. In most,
there is some balance in commitment to the external and relaxation to the
preliminary, reflecting the mitigation of a forward surge to completion by the
prominence of pre-terminal phases.
The question may be asked, is the memory, meaning and feeling in the
object a continuation of mind into appearance, that is, do subjective
antecedents accompany the forming object outward in its development as
psychic constituents, or does the object stand alone as an external product of
antecedent phases as its precursors fade away? Put differently, is the
subjective diachronic or micro-temporal history of an object-development part
of the object or, once it develops and is “projected” outward, is the object a
quasi-physical entity that exists outside its formative or constructive history?
On the standard view, in which objects are conceived as logical solids
independent of their construction, value and meaning are projected as
attachments. While the featural contents —lines, angles, color, etc.—
participate as elements in construction, like tires on a car they are seen as
additions or supplements, not as pre-objects, categories or images. That is, in
Thoughts on the nature of existence 21

principle, an incomplete object is, on standard theory, a piecemeal construct


lacking certain elements, while for microgenetic theory an incomplete object
is a configuration with an attenuated analysis to a subjective aim.
From an objectivist point of view, the process is like a conveyer belt with a
series of separate stages leading to the completed product. These stages are
important as to their specific contribution, not to their order of assembly and
not as continuants. The lines and angles of early process are building blocks
in the final mosaic. Memory, concept and feeling are secondary additions
after object-assembly, while the process through which the object exteriorizes
remains opaque. Moreover, the mental activity that is presumed to assemble
an object consists of the properties of the object to be modeled. This assumes
that object properties are installed in the brain or instantiated in nerve cells as
constructive elements. On this view, properties of the object are merely
transferred to visual cortex as detectors of the very properties they duplicate.
For process theory, the object grows out of belief, value and memory as a
configural precursor. The sequence follows the processing direction of the
mind/brain state as well as evolutionary growth trends. Specifically, the
cognitive process iterates patterns of forebrain growth in phylogeny, while
micro-temporal features continue the “force lines” of morphogenesis. We
could ask the same question of a person as an object, namely, in what sense
does an individual incorporate the prior states of a life, i.e. is the person a
composite of successive moments of existence, a reconstitution or revival of a
history of instantiations, or is the individual at a given moment independent
of past states such that the current state excludes the endogenous past
through which it develops.
The fundamental question is, is existence in mind part of the sum of what
exists in nature, or is there an ontological distinction between subjectivity and
the physical outside? While it is commonly held that the form of our
knowledge originates in the mind while the material is given from outside,
with the properties of physical entities thought to exist differently than the
mind-dependent ones, as Whitehead pointed out, all properties of matter are
conceptual. Still, we tend to think that objects exist in a different way than
concepts, ideas or feelings, even if psychic events are phases in the formation
of objects no less than the physical components of an object/entity are
conceived as external constituents. The mental structure of an object is its
diachronic history. The fabric of external or physical structures —tissue,
machine parts— consists of synchronic ingredients. One entails the becoming
of an object in mind; the other the being of an object in the world. Does one
set of constituents have priority over the other, that is, are the physical
constituents of an object more real than the internal (cognitive) ones? What of
the physical brain process through which the object is formed? Surely this
exists even if it cannot be described. If we grant existence to the brain
22 Jason W. Brown

process that mediates the act and object-development, then surely the mental
events that accompany the brain process have an equal claim on existence.
That is, if mental phases from drive to concept to object correspond with
neural activity —a series of physical events— the correlated mental events
would exist if only as indices of underlying brain events.
If a concept that actualizes as an object exists no less than the object that
actualizes, what of transitional images such as dreams and hallucinations that
appear real but are not object-like in their realness? If intermediate segments
in the transition actualize, or the endpoint deviates from the shackles of
sensibility and adaptation, or segments do not fully objectify, what share of
existence attributed to an object rightfully belongs to its antecedents? Outside
of perception, mental images do not persist nor have a definite locus in space
and time, nor do they necessarily correspond to anything in the world. The
problem of an inner life is largely a problem of human mentality since the
presumed absence of an unconscious or subjective phenomena in animals
implies that only action and its physiological correlates exist, though what a
bat or horse perceives, what a dog smells, and what a plant senses in the
earth or sun may be said to exist as well. If we did not experience the
foreshortened and palpable space and fluid image-transformation of dream
we would not have knowledge of an alternate, imaginary realm that
foreshadows the visible world. We become aware that object space is an
outcome of mental activity and that what applies to dream, as a mode of
perception not sanctioned by sensibility, also applies to waking perceptions
that are constrained by adaptation.
Here the question is whether a subjective —or any— existence requires
consciousness, that is, whether one must be conscious of a thing —mental or
external— to say it exists, though a physical reality inaccessible to
consciousness is presumed to exist —possibly all that exists— including brain
events that mediate conscious and unconscious phenomena. It would seem
the contribution of consciousness is not to confer existence but to conceive
the problem that existence poses, and to consider the distinction of existence
for physical entities and for subjective phenomena. Without consciousness
one might have a mechanical universe that exists only in god’s mind.
The converse is that everything that happens is part of reality including
mental events —conscious or unconscious, subjective or objective— even if
reality is assumed to be mind-independent. Reality would then include mental
and brain events in each individual mind. One could argue that brain events
are primary with the mental events collapsed or reduced to brain as
secondary or epiphenomenal, but why should the mental, of which we have
some direct knowledge, be deprived of reality for the corresponding
physiological events of which we know so little? We might say that thought
and feeling are real and exist but what about every momentary individual
Thoughts on the nature of existence 23

perspective? Does what is in a momentary consciousness exist, or does it


vanish when attention is diverted, like a thought that comes and goes? If an
idea must be conscious to exist, what of the idea of the world? A continuous
shift in attention gives a world in constant change. As mental events shift
from one occasion to another, the reality to which mind is coupled is also in
constant change.
When we perceive the world, we are not conscious of most of the detail
within our perspective. The tree before me exists even if I am not aware of
every leaf and branch. When my attention is focused on a leaf, its structure
surely exists even if I am not aware of it. I do not have to take an object apart
to know it has a structure from the visible to the microscopic. A general
knowledge of things replaces the dissection of each individual object. The
point is that a perception of the world as a whole cannot be accompanied by
attention to individualities or to the totality and multiplicity of embedded
objects, not to mention the layered fabric of each item, so existence
predicated on consciousness implies that what exists is the focus of
momentary attention. Clearly, this places an extraordinary burden on
consciousness which, for the transient objects of attention, would be
responsible for the existence of now one, now another, brief perception. The
consciousness of a thing creates the problem of what the thing is and its
dependence on conscious experience, but it is dubious that consciousness,
though creating objects in the mind, confers existence on them.
Still, this raises the question whether every instant of mind and world at
every moment in every consciousness is a new reality, and whether reality
includes all prior instantiations. If reality is taken to consist of only the present
occasion, then every event comes into existence in every present —a
conscious present since there is no present in nature— and ceases to exist —
at least in the same form— in every ensuing present. This problem is resolved
in mentation, not in physical nature, in the category-belongingness of objects
that enfolds successive appearances. On this way of thinking, there is passage
from one category to the next in the actualization of the mental state, which
gives a present that is also categorical, namely, a virtual duration that
encloses virtual instants. Since the present is illusory and presumably unique
to human mind, and since existence means present existence, existence
would be mind-dependent, or at least refer to events within a conscious
present, specifically, a state of consciousness. The problem is to resolve the
virtual now of human mind with the absence of a present or category-
formation in physical nature. If the present is unreal (illusory) and not part of
physical nature, and if events in an illusory now are equally illusory, all events
in the present are unreal, so the existence of objects in the phenomenal
present is as illusory as the duration in which they are perceived.
24 Jason W. Brown

4. The concept of self


A self is a preliminary concept that overlaps prior instances of itself
antecedent to full realization, but without existence unless in relation to
actualized contents or objects. If the self is a categorical prime through which
the mental state actualizes, an illusory quality would invalidate the reality of
its products. In that the derivations of the self and its ensuing categories result
from progressive limitation of possibility, which is liberation from
mechanism, so that no actual contents pass from one phase to the next. If
reality consists in the passing state, with the past forever gone and the future
not-yet, a before and after in which the after continuously melts into the
before, and all that exists, or all that has some constancy, occurs as a
phenomenal appearance in a micro-temporal present in forward transition,
reality would refer to a process of change or transition (see below), not a
series of states from and into which the transition occurs, since the duration
or persistence necessary to have a state is conditioned on a bridge over
passage in the now. The only knowable state that meets this criterion is the
process of state-creation and replacement in a human mind/brain; that is, the
mental state that gives a conscious present spanning the before/after
transition. From this standpoint, genuine change occurs in the realization of a
perceptual moment, a mental state, not in the succession of replacements, i.e.
the passage from one objectification to another, so the essential transition is
the elaboration of appearances as present objects or events, not the presumed
causal change from one conscious world to another.
Given continuous transition within or across putative states of the world —
and the impossibility of describing any transition without aborting it— there is
no solid, stable reality, no actual states, substances or static masses, only a
process of change and recurrence, a flux well-captured in Whitehead’s remark
that a rock is a mass of raging particles. We perceive objects in space as
spatial objects but in subjective time objects exist in the transposition to a
now of the before and after. Objects are artificial demarcations in passage,
since to delimit a state from the becoming through which it is realized severs
transition in order to fabricate arbitrary boundaries. Causal theory requires
instantaneity, or stoppage, to circumvent the problem of transition across
causal pairs, isolating states —causes, effects— at the cost of change between
them. Private experience and public objects may be described in terms of
logical solids, but these solid objects are illusory isolates in a dynamic of
recurrent becoming.
The specious present results from a becoming-into-being that creates brief
stabilities (categories). The absence of a present in nature entails, in process
philosophy, the hypothesis of a minimal duration of entities necessary for the
entity to exist. The entity, it is argued, must complete one cycle of itself to be
Thoughts on the nature of existence 25

what it is. In this respect, the hypothetical duration of a physical entity


replicates the category of a mental duration. In mind, objects are events, the
nature of which depends on the scope of the category and the attention of the
observer. An event can be the spark of a match or an evening by a campfire.
In nature, events are carved out of change by postulating atomic entities, that
is, substances or discrete particulars that endure for a variable period of time.
If time is the measure of motion, it is also the measure (container) of
persistence.
In contrast, for process theory, an entity is the minimal period over which
the entity can be said to exist, while persistence is the recurrence of the entity
over some period of time. On this view, it is an open question as to whether
the inferred duration of entities, e.g. arising, perishing, recurrence, is an
application to the physical world of perceptual experience —a necessary
postulate in process theory to achieve some semblance of stability— or if
subjective duration is an evolved outcome in mind/brain process of the
minimal duration of physical entities. That is, is the duration that is necessary
for the actualization of the mental state, and the experiential duration of its
outcome in the now, the basis of the hypothesis of minimal duration in a
physical entity for its existence in an objective world, or is the concept of a
minimal duration a proto-psychic feature that evolves to that of the mental
state? Clearly, animals exhibit category-formation, for example the category
of things to eat or avoid, of same and different species, of mating and so on.
The question is whether these drive-based categories arise from duration in
physical entities, and/or whether they develop to the object and lexical
concepts in man that provide a basis for the duration of the present.
For a long time I presumed that entities enclose a process of becoming like
that in mind, with a minimal duration to become what they are. I now see
that the principle basis for this belief —which may well be true— is the (very
real) possibility that inanimate nature exhibits proto-psychic features in the
shift from isotropic energy to anisotropic feeling, such that entities require
duration to completion. Feeling strives to a subjective aim, undergoing
progressive expansion over the evolutionary sequence. The becoming of the
mind/brain state and the category of a virtual present are the outcomes of the
creation of entities out of flux.
It is difficult to conceive an ostensibly solid object as a process of
becoming, or to accept that mental categories delimit and stabilize objects
and, to a lesser extent, mental contents. Change is conceived as something
that happens to an object or what the object undergoes, not as a process
through which the object comes into being. The generation of categorical
parts out of categorical wholes is the basis for the relative stability of
perceptual objects —object-categories or events— as well as thoughts and
other mental phenomena. If there are no categories in physical nature save
26 Jason W. Brown

for those imposed by mind, and if categories are the foundation of durations
that like wholes enclose virtual parts or instants, the absence of categories in
the physical world entails the absence of duration and, by implication, entities
stabilized by categories. This is consistent with transition, becoming and
relationality as fundamental.
If we think of a dream as a forecast of waking perception, in which the
present is very brief with no past or future, and a self that is carried on the
crest of change, we get some idea of continuous becoming in a presentless
world. The dream still has an ephemeral present but it does not enclose an
immediate or distant past (or a sense of an oncoming future). Since dream
does not realize a veridical object, memory in the dream content cannot itself
be an object of conscious reflection, which requires a waking self and a
completed object-development. That is, in waking, the conscious self has
memory as an object, while in dream, the content of which is largely
memorial, this distinction is not possible. The foreshortened present of dream
results from a truncated mental state. If nature does not have a present, just a
passage from earlier to later, there is no fixed locus for physical happenings in
space or time. Similarly, there is no spatio-temporal locus for dream and
waking imagery, only for objects, and even the locus of a perceptual object is
illusory. If this is an argument against the existence of intra-psychic events, it
applies as well to physical nature, but if we decline to say physical events do
not exist, what of ideas and feelings?
The insolubility of the problem leads to the temptation to attribute reality
to extra-psychic objects and events and deny it to mental phenomena or
individual perspectives. What is perceived is mind-independent regardless of
its perceptual basis, with the act of perception independent of the object
perceived and the diachronic of object formation. On this basis, a thought or a
word achieves reality in speech or action, whereas objects, irrespective of
perspective, are real existents and not distinguished from, indeed, for all
practical purposes identical to, external physical entities. This gambit, which
effectively identifies perception with reality, may ease the difficulty that
representation and object-development create, but it eliminates mind from
nature, with the result that even brain activity, which can be interpreted as
wholly physical and external and apart from its appearance in conscious
perception, cannot be partitioned into (non-existent) psychic functions.
To make the objective primary or to remove mind from nature supposes
that mental phenomena are secondary to sensibility, in that to assign
existence only to the objective presumes that subjective phenomena are
phantoms. This is largely a theory of provenance. For an externalist theory to
be plausible, the sensibility that guides perception has to be imported into the
mind/brain to explain the least preference or choice. This assumes an
invasion of sensibility into what is essentially a blank slate, with sensory
Thoughts on the nature of existence 27

association building up mental activity, or a compilation of physical reflexes


accounting for the complexity of mind. Since brain facts cannot in the
particulars be substituted for mental phenomena, this strategy holds only for
those willing to overlook explanatory gaps.

5. Reality and the real


Is a thing that exists necessarily real and part of reality? How is the real
established? What we see or experience as real does not ordinarily entail a
judgment of its reality but is a feeling of its realness. What is felt as real may
not physically exist (rainbow, hologram); what exists may not be felt as real,
or felt as unreal (events described in Mongolia or on the moon, in dream or
hallucination, a film). This raises the question, what is the nature of the real,
and its relation to reality? Since we cannot know physical reality, any
determinant of the real will be a subjective judgment of how real the object or
event appears, i.e. physically real or conforming to our perceptual model of
the world. We are misled by dream and hallucination, by feeling, and
judgments of the character and motives of others, by perceptual constancies,
mirror images and so on, but the main criterion of the real is its match, or
closeness, to our ordinary perceptual model.
Reality and the real are not identical. There is a distinction of the real and
the unreal in individual mind, and common sense holds that reality may
include the mind but is not its product. Can we say a thought is part of reality
but not a judgment as to its function, truth or plausibility, or whether the
criterion of reality is the meaning or correspondence of a concept? If I think
about something, having the thought is a real event irrespective of what I
think about. A thought may refer to a real horse or a unicorn but the reality of
the thought, which is all there is at that moment, is distinct from what the
thought is about. To dissect a statement or concept as to what it is actually
about may be necessary to tell us what exists within the concept, but not
whether the concept exists. This is similar to the existence of a tree and the
analysis of the tree into its visible and microscopic elements, each of which
has existence as a feature or property of the tree. The content of an object can
be deconstructed down to the constituent molecules and atoms that compose
it, just as a concept can be analyzed into its formative, contextual and
experiential history. The old concept of essences is replaced by an infinite
descent of categories. Similarly, postulating that a thing exists, even if true,
does not make the thing exist, it only accounts for the existence of the
postulate. A thing is independent of what is said or thought about it, though
what is said about it exists as a statement. The statement that unicorns do not
exist exists as a statement regardless of the non-existence of unicorns. In the
28 Jason W. Brown

same way, the aboutness of the thought, its intentionality, is a mark of its
conscious occurrence, a kind of arc from the self to an idea or object. This
points to the relational quality of conscious experience, but the aboutness
does not distinguish whether the thought exists or not.
For existence to be a property makes a thing independent of the property
of existence. A horse that can jump has the property of jumping but it is the
horse or the jumping horse that exists, not the property, no matter how
essential or paradigmatic it may be. What would it mean for a property to
exist apart from the thing to which the property pertains? Does each property
designate a unique existent, or does the thing that possesses these properties
exist independent of them? If having 4 legs and a tail is, inter alia, defining for
a horse, it is the horse, not the defining properties that exists. If a property of
a lion is being a carnivore, or a dancer the ability to dance, what happens to
the property when the lion or dancer is sleeping? Does the property cease to
exist when it is inactive, or persist when not exercised? A horse that has lost a
leg is still a horse. What do descriptions or definitions add to the things they
describe? One could say a lion eating meat or a dancer dancing exhibit those
properties, and then the property becomes part of the thing, but a lion and a
dancer exist when these properties are not realized, or remain as potentials
for future activity. There is confusion in a statement about a thing and the
thing that is the topic of the statement, as in the relation of facts to truth
judgments or propositions. A predicate is not the same as its subject; an
utterance is not the same as its mental predecessors. The momentary form of
the thing —a thought or an object— is what exists, a bird in flight or on a
perch, a frivolous idea or a profound truth, and the momentary form is in
change over time so its existence, or what it is, is constantly changing as well.
Things come into and out of existence, whether they die, transform or
disappear.
Reality exists though we cannot know it directly but does existence refer
to reality? The real exists even if it is unknowable, while the unreal may exist
even if we cannot disconfirm it. There may be unicorns in some other galaxy
or living things composed of silicon. Appearance approximates reality but
cannot be ingredient since what appears real may be (indeed is) illusory, and
the illusory would not exist in physical nature. If the world of perception is an
appearance, and a close approximation to some aspect of reality, and if an
appearance as an approximation to physical reality is part of reality, then
reality consists not only of what it is, which we can only approximate within
the limits of our sensory organs, but of all occasions of the real that are
approximations to a reality that can only be experienced through a
simulacrum. No doubt, the degree to which perception maps to reality differs
to some extent across individual human minds —certainly in relation to
animal mind— but the mapping will never be exact in relation to the aspect
Thoughts on the nature of existence 29

of reality that is modeled, while the degree of precision will have infinite
planes of definiteness. Perception is more exact than description, or opinion,
which seeks to replace, record or express the facts of observation. Description
is heavily influenced by belief, presupposition and the knowledge base and
subject to test, dialogue and critique, in contrast to the effect on perception of
sensibility in eliminating false or erroneous objects. Certainly, we want to
believe there is one reality or truth that is modeled in perception and
communicated in language, but the varying degrees of clarity and accuracy,
and the inexact proximity of a social and physical model of the world to
physical reality implies that reality is best described by physics or other
material sciences independent of individual perspectives. Science can, of
course, tell us the probable constituents of the material world, which in
physics is generally taken as an account of the ultimate ground of reality.
However, science cannot answer the question of whether the mind, which is
after all the instrument of understanding the processes of nature, is also part
of reality, though in microphysics, mind-dependent phenomena have been
described.
Things seem more or less real but not in relation to reality. The feeling of
realness is not an indication of reality. Dreams and hallucinations seem real
but are questionable elements of reality, while a movie is not perceived as
real but can be conceived as part of reality which, being known only through
its perceptual model cannot provide a standard for approximation. The irony
is that the real is judged, or felt, in relation to the object world —a
correspondence of one idea with another, or thought with appearance— while
the actual world can only be judged as real by its coherence and testability in
behavior. What is the relation of the involuntary or unconscious production of
the world and the evident purposeless of nature? The appearance of the world
in consciousness, and with agency, explains the impression of teleology in the
world, god’s aim or a final cause. As the subjective objectifies, it carries with it
features of subjectivity. The tension of a subjective and objective point of
view, and the possibility that an intuition of mind/brain process, which
derives from nature, is conveyed back into nature, was addressed by
Schelling1 who wrote that idealism brings forth realism in that it materializes
the laws of mind into the laws of nature.
A mirage appears real until it is sampled or matched to behavior. The real
is not a substitute for reality; it is a feeling of completeness that comes of the
coherence of perceptual modalities. In dream, the image can be seen, heard
and experienced in other ways. As in waking, there is no sensory modality to
disconfirm the others. Hallucination in one modality, e.g. a face, is usually
recognized as unreal, until another modality is engaged, e.g. an imaginary
face speaks. One can say that judgments of the real depend, for the most
part, on the coherence of perceptions, while judgments of reality depend, so it
30 Jason W. Brown

is assumed, on the correspondence of concepts with objects. The real is an


inner and usually implicit judgment based on a conspiracy of the senses.
Reality is a relation of inner to outer that is grounded in common sense belief.
If reality is inferred from the correspondence of a concept and an object,
or an object and the entity it represents, even if the physical entity to which
the object-representation refers is screened from observation or knowledge, a
judgment as to physical reality must depend on the adaptive value of the
representation. In fact, a concept does not correspond uniquely to an object
but is a category out of which the object is derived. Even a simple proposition
such as 1 + 1 = 2, or grass is green, requires a mountain of proof or
argument. There is no direct comparison of object (being) with its conceptual
precursors, or the precursors with the outcome. The notion of correspondence
replaces the passage from mind to object in a becoming-into-being.
What then is the status of mental experience with respect to reality and
existence? Are mental phenomena excluded from existence no matter how
real they seem, even though the physical brain correlates of mental
phenomena constitute part of the material world? If brain activity corresponds
with mental activity, describing the mental is equivalent to describing the
physical but in a different vocabulary. That is, if every mental phenomenon
traces, reduces to or is identical with brain process, and there is no slippage
between mind and brain events, the mental would be no less part of the
world than the underlying brain activity through which it occurs. Except for a
resolute and, in my view, indefensible realism as to the perceived world,
there is no alternative but to attribute the same quality of existence, or reality
afforded to physical entities to object-appearances, or hypotheses about such
objects, or logical and mathematical accounts that substitute a method of
analysis for the things analyzed. Once the door of idealism is opened to
perceptible objects, i.e. appearances, their psychic precursors also pass
through. Only the sharp separation of images and objects, the contrast with a
non-veridical unconscious, and the transitional nature of thought assign reality
to the outcomes of acts of cognition and not to the cognitive act itself.
Conversely, if appearance and the subjective are presumed not to exist,
not only do we lose thought, imagination, feeling and the self, but also the
world as a correlate elaborated in the brain and, for that matter, brain as well
and the whole of our knowledge base. Reality is a definite concept that refers
to an experiential and inferred world, including everything that is, even if it is
beyond individual experience or direct knowledge. Experiences that are more
or less real, that fill and entertain our lives, a manifold of incomplete,
fragmentary or erroneous phenomena, though part of reality, can be
conceived as images of a parallel universe, a real mental world in relation to a
real physical one, a realm of experienced subjectivity that models the
Thoughts on the nature of existence 31

unknown. The question is not so much what there is, or what exists, as the
nature of existents in a subjective or physical manifold.
The argument that all happenings in all minds and entities exist and are
constituents of reality, mental and physical, regardless of their origin, duration
and illusory quality, leaves unanswered what it means for a categorical object
to exist in the absence of essence, substance, spatial location and persistence.
Existence is largely a temporal concept. To exist is to be in time. To be
timeless or out of time is to not exist. There are many ways of thinking about
time or change that impact this concept: one is the brevity and variability in
the minimal duration of a thing; another is change in an object in its
development over that duration; still another, the possible interval between
successive instantiations. An object and presumably an entity are bundled
transitions with evanescent stability, which is attributed in part to a realization
over a series of categories and, in part, to the inapplicability of temporal
analysis prior to completion. The transition is presumed to be a succession of
earlier/later shifts, but the simultaneity of the unconscious does not allow a
description of phases in the becoming. Once actualized, events take on
temporal order in mind and world, and an object, retroactively, can be
analyzed into a definite series the becoming of an object is a dynamic process
of transformation, depositing objects that comprise segments in change.
Every existent has a micro-developmental history that achieves temporal
order on actuality. The paradox is that the becoming of an object can be
delineated only after the object exists or achieves momentary being, but once
it exists it perishes in its replacement. Being is the illusion of persistence
created by iterated replacement, while becoming is the reality of objects that
exists as they vanish. In the rapid replacement of objects, we perceive change
from one occasion or event-series to the next, when in fact we merely
exchange the seamless recurrence of mental states for the appearance of
persistence and stability.
Life is the sum of the births and deaths of all momentary objects. If we
assume that, like objects, entities arise and recur, the reality of things in the
world is the invisible process of their creation, the transformation within an
entity, not an entity itself, which is inert. Only by perishing does an object or
entity make possible the novelty in its successor. The reality that is veiled by
perception, were it perceptible, i.e. could we perceive physical entities, would
still not consist of perceptions but of the generative process through which
they become what they are. Reality is doubly impenetrable: first, because we
perceive appearances that are approximations; second, because entities
consist of a becoming into existence that is imperceptible. Similarly, the
change that is inside an object, which is the becoming what it is, is not only
concealed within the final object-appearance but, as process or transition,
escapes detection.
32 Jason W. Brown

The centrality of change in the transitional process and the ephemeral


stability of particulars —the becoming and being of objects— has some
resemblance to the wave/particle theory of light though it is not clearly a dual-
aspect concept. Still, a wave-like becoming creates momentary objects
(modules, being, particulars) with recurrence not continuity the glue of
passage, and overlap the other face of causation. However, as light has wave-
like properties but requires a particle theory to explain other properties, the
converse is true of objects, which appear as particulars that enclose an
intrinsic dynamic. The processual or relational ground of reality encompasses
all objects and entities. This leads to the conclusion that mind and nature,
subjective phenomena and physical entities, exist as constituents of reality,
while reality presumes a processual basis for all the entities it includes.

Notes
1
Schelling, F. (1800) System of Transcendental Idealism, translated by Peter
Heath, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.
William James and Jakob von Uexküll: pragmatism,
pluralism and the outline of a philosophy of organism
Arthur Araujo1

Abstract
This study aims to bring together the pragmatist and pluralistic notions of
meaning of William James and Jakob von Uexküll, respectively, to develop the
outline of a philosophy of organism. Combining elements of pragmatism and
pluralism, I will sketch the outlines of a philosophy of organism in that
meaning is to be understood as process rather than an objective content of
thought or a perennial entity.

1. Introduction
Our paper addresses several works by two contemporary authors: the
American philosopher William James and the Estonian biologist Jakob von
Uexküll.1 In a previous paper (Araujo 2012), which is supported by Sharov
(2001), I identified a particular form of pragmatism in Uexküll’s theory of
meaning: meaning corresponds to a functional relationship between organism
and world. If something is meaningful for an organism, it is because of the
particular way in which it perceives and acts in the world. The theory of
meaning corresponds to Part II of Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt and it is not a
theory of object representation. For Uexküll, meaning has nothing do with
representation. These ideas presented in Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt seem to
match key features of William James’s pragmatic conception of meaning and
his pluralism.
For James ([1907] 2000, 25), the term ‘pragmatism’ derives from the
Greek word ‘pragma’ and it means ‘action’: to develop the meaning of a
thought implies our understanding of its pratical consequences. For James,
this is the pragmatism of Peirce. According to James, pragmatism is a method
that makes clear the meaning of thought following a test of tracing its
practical consequences. Considering the pragmatic method, the practical
consequences of a thought are all that it means to us.
Additionally, pluralism is a distinctive characteristic of James’s
metaphysics of the experience. Following the general hypothesis of the
‘radical empiricism’ [1904], in The Pluralistic Universe (1909), what James
designates as the ‘each-form’ of reality appears in distinct and countless

1
Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (Brazil).
34 Arthur Araujo

forms of meaning and outside the possibility of an absolute or ultimate form


(all-form). In comparison with Uexküll’s theory, meaning is not separate from
all possible and distinct forms of Umwelt.2
Aiming at a philosophical convergence between James and Uexküll, this
chapter seeks to articulate elements of pragmatism and pluralism. From these
two perspectives, a common thread can be traced: meaning is activity.
Accordingly, as for the analysis of meaning, the articulation between
pragmatism and pluralism indicates that meaning is an activity rather than an
objective content of thought or a perennial entity.
From the articulation between pragmatism and pluralism, consequently, it
is possible to emphasize a characteristic of the “common sense” as
anticipated by James ([1907] 2000, 74). Regarding a pragmatic conception of
common sense, meaning is not independent from the practical consequences
of the action of thought. Such a view of common sense also seems to be
present in Uexküll’s theory insofar as meaning emerges from the organism’s
action in the world. Indeed, for Uexküll, Umwelt is a dynamic unity
constituted by perception and action of an organism. In addition, it is only
inside an organism’s Umwelt that something can be meaningful. As noted by
Sharov (2001, 212), each organism has his/her own theory of the world or
Umwelt. Accordingly, meaning is not a perennial entity and it can only be
grasped in the activities of an organism’s Umwelt. Activity means here
‘process’ and it evokes Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.
Briefly, following James and Uexküll’s conceptions of meaning, I will try to
combine elements of pragmatism and pluralism for sketching the outlines of a
philosophy of organism in that meaning is to be understood as process.

2. Pragmatism and pluralism


The work of Uexküll has received different interpretations. In addition to
being quoted and commented on by many philosophers, such as Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Ortega y Gasset, and Cassirer, throughout the 20th century,
Uexküll has been a frequent reference for different scientific fields (Sukhdeo
and Sukhdeo 2009; Berthoz and Christen 2009; Berthoz Petit et al. 2006;
Sharov 1998; Rüting 2004). For Uexküll, in addition to the physical and
evolutionary traits, each organism has a specific mode of perceiving and of
acting in the world:
[…] everything that a subject signifies becomes his world-of-
perception, and what he performs, his world-of-action. World-of-
perception and world-of-action constitute one single unit —the
subject’s Umwelt. (Uexküll [1934] 1957, 6)
William James and Jakob von Uexküll 35

The Umwelt is the central idea of Uexküll’s work. For him, the primary
question consists of understanding how organisms perceive their external
environments and how this perception determines their behaviour:
This little monograph does not claim to point the way to a
new science. Perhaps it should be called a stroll through into
unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other
creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves […]
the world as it appears to animals themselves, not as it appears
to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the Umwelt of
the animal. (Uexküll [1934] 1957, 5)
In contemporary epistemology, the observer is considered to be a central
problem. Insofar as for Uexküll an organism is a ‘subject’, he redefines the
notion of ‘observer’ as it relates to the process of investigating the animal
behaviour and abandons the realist perspective that a reality exists and it is
independent from observation.
Following Uexküll’s criticism of the realist perspective, an approximation
between James and him can expand a pragmatic conception of meaning: the
practical conception of an object is all that it means. From this pragmatic
conception of meaning stems a pluralistic worldview. Incidentally, a pluralistic
perspective was already anticipated by James:
Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or
distributively, […] the absolute sum-total things may never be
actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, and that a
disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance is
the only form that reality may yet have achieved. (James [1909]
2000, 44)
Instead of the idea of oneness of the world, the facts regarding experience
demonstrate that in actuality what exist are always additional meanings. In
this particular form of empiricism, new and different meanings are added
infinitely by experience. That is, for James, instead of a form of universal
meaning (all-form), the world appears as different forms (each-form) in
experience. James’s empiricism distances itself from realism. In effect,
meaning is always the result of a particular form of experience.
Such a pluralistic view of meaning also seems to emerge in Uexküll’s
theory of Umwelt. Although Uexküll ([1934] 2010, 43) makes use of the
monadic metaphor of the soap bubble for describing the organism’s Umwelt,
that does not mean that an organism is an isolated entity from the world. One
can only see an organism as part of a web of relationships in the world. The
plurality of organisms makes up a monadic community whose meaning is a
web of relationships. As a whole, therefore, the web of relationships is the
activity of a complex community in constant process of becoming.
36 Arthur Araujo

In Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt ([1934] 2010, 42-5), it is important to point


out here that if one breaks off with the stimulus-response mechanist schema
of explanation, one can see organism and world as parts of a process of
becoming. In the organism’s Umwelt, organism and world are continuous: the
world is always of or for an organism. That is what I call the premise of
continuity in Uexküll’s theory. It must also be noted that the process has no
one single point of view, that is, it is countless and dynamic. This second
point is what I call the premise of pluralism in Uexküll’s theory of meaning.
Indeed, continuity and pluralism are central notions in James’s metaphysics
of the experience. Following his Principles of Psychology [1890], James holds
a conception of reality as experienced and that in experience, for instance,
the transition between two moments are continuous (James [1909] 1977,
292; 2000, 315; 318).
According to the premises of continuity and pluralism, the comparison of
different forms of experiences demonstrates that meaning can only be
captured by the reference to different Umwelts. Thus, meaning is not in
reduction to a viewpoint exterior according to the so-called epistemological
principle of the ‘independent observer’. Additionally, compared with Nagel’s
idea of the ‘point of view’ (Nagel 1974), the interpretation of the relationship
between experience and reality is always incomplete and fulfilled by
innumerable different viewpoints and not by one viewpoint, which is what
Nagel (1986) refers to as the ‘view from nowhere’. Nagel’s metaphor
illustrates well the type of pluralism of James and Uexküll regarding meaning
as a possibility from the countless viewpoints of the world.

3. Common Sense and Umwelt


In the Lecture V of his texts on Pragmatism ([1907] 2000), James traces the
pragmatic meaning of the common sense. Unlike the realistic perspective of
the philosophical tradition of the common sense, James understands common
sense as an attitude or as a disposition of action of thought and not as a
mirroring the world. By definition, pragmatism is a philosophy of action
rather than of representation.
James’s notion of common sense and the pragmatic sense of Uexküll’s
theory of Umwelt can be summarised here as follows. Firstly, for Uexküll, the
organism’s Umwelt constitutes an active process of meaning. In comparison,
for James, ‘common sense’ characterises a particular intellectual form:
Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization
would have led to our using quite different modes from these of
apprehending our experiences. (James [1909] 2000, 76)
William James and Jakob von Uexküll 37

This quotation of James fits as a glove with Uexküll’s conception of Umwelt.


The world is certainly unique. However, as a sort of metastructure, the world
is meant from distinct and countless ways (e.g., human beings, lobsters, bees,
bats and ticks) that overlap. So, the world consists more of processes of
meaning than of independently existing reality. Such a metaphysical
worldview surely breaks away from a realistic ontological commitment.
Secondly, as a pragmatic trait of Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt, one can
understand meaning as a form of action (and not of representation of the
world) from a plurality of contexts. Among the different aspects of the world,
not all are meaningful to the organism: some aspects are completely
irrelevant for the organism and other ones are not. Thus, meaning is
determined by a criterion of relevance in the organism’s life. Although James
and Uexküll most likely do not understand meaning in the strict linguistic
sense, both authors seem to understand meaning as a form of use. However,
surely, the idea of meaning as ‘use’ does not indicate a linguistic signification
as understood by Wittgenstein (PI, 43).
In Theoretical Biology (1926), which is a previous reference to Uexküll’s
theory of Umwelt, it might illustrate the idea that meaning corresponds to
subjective use:
All reality is subjective appearance […] It is utterly vain to
go through the world for causes that are independent of the
subject; we always come up against objects; which owe their
construction to the subject […]. When we admit that the objects
owe their construction to the subject, we tread on firm and
ancient ground, especially prepared by Kant. [He] set the
subject, man, over against the objects, and discovered the
fundamental principles according to which objects are built up
by our mind. (Uexküll 1926, xv)
Despite the reference to Kant and his influence on Uexküll, what can be
remarked here is that the subjective apprehension of reality is a pragmatic
process of meaning in that something becomes significant.

4. Meaning and aboutness


For Uexküll, organisms are not simply mechanical things. Instead, they are
subjects that apprehend reality using different forms of organisation:
This is indeed the position of all mechanist theorists […].
We no longer regard animals as mere machines, but as subjects
whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting.
(Uexküll [1934] 1957, 6)
In the article Are we automata? (1879), comparatively, James critically
develops an analysis of what he calls the ‘Conscious-Automaton Theory’:
38 Arthur Araujo

The theory maintains that in everything outward we are


pure material machines. Feeling is a mere collateral product of
our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more
than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it
accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the
voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch
the helm or handle the rigging. (James 1879, 1)3
From a metaphysical perspective, one can claim that both Uexküll and James
do not engage themselves with epiphenomenalism. For them, respectively,
the organism’s Umwelt and consciousness are real phenomena of being
directed upon something. That is, they have aboutness: the property of being
about something in the word according to the philosophy of mind jargon.
In the preface to The Meaning of Truth ([1909] 2000, 135), James states
that ‘truth’ is a ‘relationship’ that can be obtained between an ‘idea’ (‘opinion,
belief, statement or not’) and an ‘object’: ‘the ‘truth’ is a property of certain
ideas of ours’. Thus, regarding true and false ideas, the difference between
such ideas is practical, i.e., whether an idea influences our conduct or not.
However, it is also possible to establish a cognitive relation between idea and
object when a given knowledge is conceptual or representational. Although
there is immediate knowledge of objects, e.g., ‘as the white paper before your
eyes’ in this moment, the tigers in India, for example, are only known to us
conceptually or representatively.
But, ‘exactly what do we mean by saying that we here know the tigers in
India?’, James questions ([1909] 2000, 142). Although the tigers in India are
not physically present, they are present in our thoughts. This statement is an
example of Brentano’s canonical definition of the ‘intentional inexistence of
an object’ ([1874] 2005). The target of James’s criticisms is exactly the so-
called ‘presence in absence’ as a type of explanation for a particular type of
existence or the ‘intentional inexistence’ of the tigers in our mind. For James,
to know the Indian tigers means the mental direction over them or
aboutness.4 However, James ([1909] 2000, 142-3) wonders if ‘the pointing
known-as’ of our ideas means the Brentanian self-transcendence of the tigers
in our minds. The answer is no. The cognitive relations between ideas and
objects or ‘pointing known-as’ (aboutenss) are external and accidental
operations and do not mean internal mental events of a mysterious sort:
A stone in one field may ‘fit’, we say, a hole in another field.
But, the relation of ‘fitting’, so long as no one carries the stone to
the hole and drops it in, is only one name for the fact that such
an act may happen. Similarly with the knowing of the tigers here
and now. (James [1909] 2000, 136).
Following James, the relation of fitting between idea and object promotes a
certain economy of the Brentanian conception of intentional inexistence.
William James and Jakob von Uexküll 39

Accordingly, in The Tigers in India ([1909] 2000), James presents the essential
elements of a pragmatic conception of the aboutness. Thus, the expression
‘tigers in India’ is solely a ‘name’ of a relation of fitting between idea and
object. Such an expression does not mean ‘self-transcendence’ or ‘presence in
absence’ of the mental content as an explanation of a particular type of
existence.
James’s pragmatic conception of the aboutness displays the characteristics
of a deflationary understanding of the mental content. He anticipates the
criticism of the traditional view of the aboutness (or intentionality) as an
intrinsic property of ours ideas (or mental states). For him, the mind is not a
sort of container and our ideas are not unchanging entities. Once more, just
like in his Principle of Psychology, James sees mind as a process and he is
among the first to use the term ‘process’ in relation to conscious life
(McDermott 1977, xxxv).
Unequivocally, immediate or intuitive knowledge is also an illustrative
example that there is no ‘presence in absence’. As demonstrated by the
example of the white paper before our eyes, both the object and the idea are
indistinguishable. So, according to James ([1909] 2000, 144), contrary to
representational knowledge, in the immediate or intuitive knowledge, ‘the
object seen’ and ‘to see the object’ are only two ‘names’ for a single
‘indivisible fact’ that is designated ‘datum, phenomenon or experience’: To
know immediately, then, or intuitively, is for mental content and object to be
identical (James [1909] 2000, 144-5).
Subsequently, considering James’s conception of the immediate or
intuitive knowledge, we can identify mental content and object in that we are
not concerned with a relationship of two locations. Such a conception of
knowledge represents a form of adverbialism.5 In fact, for example, the
‘object seen’ and ‘to see the object’ of an experience could be formed in the
same way that pain is formed. That is, pain is not distinct from the
experience of pain nor it is a distinct property of experience. In principle, the
phenomenon of pain does not have a reference to a transcendental object.
Accordingly, an adverbialist conception of mental content involves a two-fold
aspect of experience and not the relation between two locations. The
paradigmatic case of an adverbialist conception of the mental content of
experience is qualia. Indeed, qualia illustrates well James’s conception of the
immediate or intuitive knowledge in that mental content and object are
identified.
Additionally, in “Does consciousness exist?” [1912], one of the Essays on
Radical Empiricism, James affirms that experience does not have an internal
duplicity and that consciousness is a function: experience flows and, from it,
conscious states emerge. Accordingly, as a function of experience,
consciousness is a relation or conjunction between terms (such as subject and
40 Arthur Araujo

object). The first term corresponds to the role of knowing and the second to
the role of what is known. Consciousness is function-like, not substantial or
entity-like. From James’s perspective, as a function, consciousness means a
relationship between terms and it does not involve internal duplicity between
thought and object. If consciousness means something or is intentional, it
does not follow that it has an internal duplication of the mental content.
In comparison, considering the organism’s Umwelt, it is undoubtedly an
intentional structure: the world is of and for the organism. In the organism’s
Umwelt, the aboutness indicates a particular form of perceiving and acting
and it is not a representation or internal duplicity of contents. Just like in
James’s pragmatic conception of fitting between idea and object, Uexküll’s
notion of Umwelt also displays the characteristics of a deflationary view on
the aboutness. Surely, it is possible to find between James and Uexküll a
pragmatic conception of aboutness if this conception means to deflate the
internal duplicity of contents.
Besides, according to Peirce and James, there is no non-relational idea. So,
regarding a conception of meaning, James has an externalist view. And as a
cognition is always inferred from a previous cognition (Peirce [1868] 1966,
36), meaning is externally determined. Equally, Uexküll has an externalist
view on meaning. Although the organism is a sort of monadic entity, it is not
isolated from the world due to the fact that Umwelt is necessarily a coupling
between organism and world. Therefore, according to Uexküll’s theory of
Umwelt, meaning is not an internal representation of the world. As a form of
acting on the world, meaning can just be determined externally. The idea
here is that there is meaning without representation.6

5. Pragmatism and pluralism:


an outline of a philosophy of organism
Although James’s conception of truth has been a target of criticism, it reveals
a stimulating theory of meaning. Insofar as James attributes a functional
property to truth, a statement is true if it enables an effective interaction with
the world. Thus, something is true means that it ‘works’ or ‘performs’ a
‘marriage function’ of interaction with the world (James [1907] 2000, 33).
James states that if an idea is true it means that it is productive in our lives
and it is good: ‘an idea is “true” so long as to believe it is profitable to our
lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit’ (James,
[1907] 2000, 37).
Considering that the meaning of truth is always a dynamic relation
between idea and world, James states that the truth is not a stagnant
William James and Jakob von Uexküll 41

property. This is the ‘pragmatist thesis’ of the meaning of truth that is


advocated by James:
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by
events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process
namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the
process of its valid-ation. (James ([1907] 2000, 88)
Interestingly, James breaks with the substantialist notion of truth and claims
that truth is an event or process. Similarly, Whitehead ([1927-1928] 1978)
affirms a ‘process philosophy’ or ‘organic philosophy’. He replaces the
traditional notion of ‘substance’ or ‘being’ as an invariable and static reality
with a dynamic worldview. Whitehead views reality as process. In effect, from
the perspective of process or organic philosophy, the world is a composition
of levels that overlap dynamically. Instead of ‘being’, process or organic
philosophy aims to ‘becoming’. James anticipates such a view in his
empiricism in that reality is viewed as changing (James [1909] 1977, 301).
Thus, process or organic philosophy displays the characteristics of a pluralistic
worldview as anticipated by James in his empiricism and his conception of
truth as process.
After establishing James’s pragmatist thesis regarding the meaning of truth
as event or process, it is important to emphasize what it means to argue
about the process of verification of an idea. If an idea is true, it is true because
the idea has practical consequences and agrees so to speak with reality.
Surely, the notion of ‘agreement’ does not involve a realist interpretation of
the relationship between idea and reality as an objective content of thought.
From James’s pragmatist perspective, ‘to agree’ means ‘to conduct’, and if an
idea has practical consequences, it conducts our thought. The verification of
an idea is a function of conduct: ‘This function of agreeable leading is what
we mean by an idea’s verification’ (James [1907] 2000, 89). In comparison, it
is important to note here that considering Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt, if an
object is significant, it is because it has practical consequences for the
organism. That is, the object means something that agrees with the
organism’s Umwelt and, consequently, its meaning can be verified.
According to James, ideas correspond to or copy reality. However, this
statement does not mean that ideas are representations as argued by the
traditional correspondence theories. Accordingly, if an idea copies reality, it
does not follow that it is a representation of reality. As an epistemological
alternative to realism and idealism, for James, if an idea copies reality, it
conducts us to what is ‘useful’ (James [1907] 2000, 94). Equally, for Uexküll, if
an object is meaningful, it is useful and it conducts the organism’s action. For
that reason, Uexküll’s theory of meaning has nothing to do with the idea of
object representation. The object means what has practical consequence for
the organism and it is all that it can mean.
42 Arthur Araujo

Thus, considering James’s concept of the meaning of truth as process, if an


idea is true, it becomes something useful in life:
Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-
process, Just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for
other processes connected with life, and also pursued because it
pays to pursue them. Truth is made, just as health, wealth,
strength are made, in the course of experience. (James [1907]
2000, 96)
From the pragmatic conception of truth redefined as process, it follows a
pluralistic view of meaning. Incidentally, as James emphasises ([2000] 1909,
7), empiricism favours a pluralistic view in the sense that it seeks to explain
the whole by means of the parts. That is, there is only one world of
experiences and the meaning of the world follows from countless parts. Each
part is a form of perception and action as claimed by Uexküll and the world
as whole is a process of meaning.
In sum, James and Uexküll’s conceptions of meaning can be understood as
an outline of a philosophy of organism in the sense that the organism’s
activities means process. Incidentally, ‘process’ means what James designates
the ‘immediate flow of life’ or ‘pure experience’. Thus, the world is a process
in which life and experience overlap.
In the The Thing and its relations, James argues as follows:
I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that the
one and same world is cognized by our different minds […] The
usual given reason for its being absurd is that it assumes one
object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my
mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a
second relation cannot logically be the same which it was at first.
(James [1909] 2000, 353-4)
Similarly, Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt favours a pluralistic worldview in that
the one and same world can be cognized by different organisms. That is, in
accordance with the premises of continuity and pluralism in Uexküll’s theory
of Umwelt, as I called them previously, organism and world are continuous
and parts of a process and all process has no one single point of view.
In conclusion, according to James and Uexküll’s conceptions of meaning, I
presented a combination of elements of pragmatism and pluralism for
sketching the outlines of a philosophy of organism in that meaning is to be
understood as process.
William James and Jakob von Uexküll 43

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Rüting, Torsten. “History and significance of Jakob von Uexküll and of his
institute in Hamburg.” Sign Systems Studies 32.1/2, 2004
Sharov, Alexei. “Towards the semiotic paradigm in biology.” Semiotica 1998,
Issue: 120, 403-419.
Sharov, Alexei. “Umwelt theory and pragmatism.” Semiotica 2001, 134: 211-
228.
Sprigge, Timothy L. “James, aboutness and his British critics.” In: The
Cambridge Companion to William James. Edited by Anna Putnam.
Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sukhdeo Michael V. K. and Sukhdeo, S. C. Trematode behaviours and the
perceptual worlds of parasites. (http://www.nrcresearchpress.com
/doi/abs/10.1139/z03-212#.UlSHZZI3vw8)
44 Arthur Araujo

Uexküll, Jakob von. Theoretical Biology. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Company, Inc., 1926.
Uexküll, Jakob von. “A stroll through the worlds of animal and men.” In:
Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept. Edited
by Claire H. Schiller. New York: International Universities Press,
1957.
Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality. An essay in cosmology. New York:
The Free Press, 1978.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (PI). Translated by G. E. M.
Ascombe. Oxford (UK): Basil Black, 1958.

Notes

1
An earlier version of this chapter was published in Cognitio-Estudos: São
Paulo, vol. 11, n. 2, 2014 (http://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitio/
article/view/17208). I am grateful to the Cognitio’s Editors for the
permission to use that publication here.
2
The notion of Umwelt implicitely defines ‘organism’ as an active being that is
constituted by a world of perception and a world of action.
3
The article of James can be updated here as a critique of physicalism and
functionalism in philosophy of the mind that deny the existence of the
consciousness and its causal power respectively: ‘Nothing is commoner
than to hear them speak of conscious events as something so essentially
vague and shadowy as even doubtfully to exist at all I have heard a most
intelligent […] biologist say: “It is high time for scientific men to protest
against the recognition of any such thing as consciouness in a scientific
investigation.” In a word, feeling constitutes the “unscientific” half of
existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a “scientist” will be too
happy to purchase an untrammeled homogeneity of terms in the studies
of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the
same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being,
banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or
interruption on its part need ever be feared’ (James 1897, 2).
4
On James and aboutness, see Sprigge 1997.
5
It is a type of adverbialism that appears among the new realists of the
beginning of the 20th Century. That is, the conscious is not a relation
between two locations or a duplication between the content of the mind
and the content of the object. As I see, adverbialism becomes part of
James’s monism regarding the so-called mind-brain problem.
6
On meaning without representation in Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt, see
Araujo 2012.
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications
in Physics and Beyond
Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk1

Abstract
Early in the last century, it became obvious that operations involved in
physical “measurements” or “observations” may exhibit a non-commutative
character. Later this insight turned out to be a cornerstone of quantum
physics, one of the two major conceptual revolutions in the physics of the
20th century. In other fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and
consciousness studies, non-commutativity is so self-evident that its relevance
has been overlooked for a long time. In a number of recent interdisciplinary
research programs worldwide it has now been established that, on the one
hand, even in physics non-commutativity is not restricted to the microworld,
and, on the other hand, that the conceptual breakthrougs and the
mathematical formalism developed in quantum theory are highly significant
also beyond the domain of physics.

1. Introduction
During the last 25 years an increasing number of researchers in psychology,
cognitive science and consciousness studies started to apply mathematical
tools that were originally developed in quantum physics to successfully model
results of their experiments. The first attemps in this direction were due to
Diederik Aerts and his group at Brussels (Aerts and Aerts 1993, Aerts et al.
1995), for recent reviews and numerous applications see, e.g., Atmanspacher
(2015), Busemeyer and Bruza (2012), Haven and Khrennikov (2013), Pothos
and Busemeyer (2013), Wang et al. (2013), Wendt (2015).
A key question in this respect asks for the reasons why the mathematical
formalism of quantum theory is so successful in non-physical domains. This
question has no uncontroversially established answer so far. Within a
physicalist framwork of thinking, a straightforward move would be to identify
physical quantum processes in the brain and relate these to mental or
cognitive functions. The most popular approaches along these lines are due to

1
Harald Atmanspacher, Collegium Helveticum, ETH and University Zürich,
Switzerland & Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology, Freiburg, Germany;
Thomas Filk, Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg, Germany &
Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking, Munich, Germany.
46 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk

Beck and Eccles (1992), Hameroff and Penrose (1996), Stapp (1999), and
Vitiello (2001) (see Atmanspacher (2015) for a critical review).
However, there are a number of alternative explanatory attempts in
different directions. The following list may by far not be complete:
—Improper partitions of the state space of the system under consideration
may lead to non-commuting observables in classical dynamical systems (beim
Graben and Atmanspacher 2006).
—There are conceptual similarities between quantum physics and
fundamental phenomena underlying cognitive processes or particular notions
of consciousness (Filk and Müller 2009).
—Aerts and Sozzo (2014) suggest that there is a similarity between
cognitive and quantum processes in the sense that both aim for maximal
coherence within a noisy environment.
—Measurement processes in cognitive systems red may share similarities
with classical models for quantum physics like Bohmian mechanics (Filk
2016).
Common to these approaches is the idea that measurements influence the
state of the measured system. This insight came as a surprise in the
investigation of atoms, molecules, and the nature of light a century ago, in the
early days of quantum physics. By contrast, classical (non-quantum)
measurements are considered as non-invasive operations which —at least in
principle— do not influence the state of the measured system. The implicit
assumption here is that measurement is nothing more than simply recording
the values of attributes or properties of the system. The state of the system
does not change during measurement, so the measured value is identical with
the value before measurement. Classical physical attributes like energy,
position, momentum etc. are assumed to be correlated with the values of
ontic properties of an investigated system (e.g., a planet, a billiard ball, a
particle), irrespective of whether the system does or does not undergo a
measurement. Instead of “measurement” one often speaks of “observation,”
which emphasizes their classically assumed non-invasive nature.
If, within this classical framework, the investigated system is only
“observed” without being influenced by the process of observation, there
should be no principal reason prohibiting that different attributes (like
position and momentum) cannot be measured simultaneously with arbitrarily
sharp accuracy (depending on the measuring instruments). Moreover, the
order in which two measurements are performed should have no impact onto
the outcomes of the successive measurements —in other words: the
measurement sequence should make no difference for the results.
Exactly this assumption had to be given up for quantum systems and their
properties. In the beginning, physicists like Bohr and Heisenberg thought that
an uncontrollable “mechanical influence” of a measurement,1 i.e. the
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond 47

exchange of energy between the observed and the observing system, is the
reason for the state change of the observed system during measurement.
However, the implications that John Bell (1964) later worked out seem to
imply that already the mere act of obtaining information about a system has
(in general) an influence onto the state of this system. What is even more
surprising: This influence can even be non-local, instantaneous, so that it does
not depend on the propagation of a signal. The conclusion is that empirical
statements about purely ontic attributes of a quantum system, independent of
the context of how they are observed, are meaningless.
The mathematical formalism developed in quantum physics explicitly
incorporates the fact that every measurement is an interactive “process”
rather than simply an observation without any influence onto the observed
system. Acknowledging the (more than plausible) fact that in psychological
experiments every “measurement” is a process that changes the mental state
of the “observed system” (i.e. the subject) offers a strong structural similarity
between quantum physics and psychology, and entails the quest for a
common (or, at least, similar) formal level of description.
In the following Sect. 2 we will discuss the observation of quantum
systems in more detail and explain a key formal concept that has been
established together with it: the concept of non-commutative algebras of their
properties. In Sect. 3 we then investigate another key concept of quantum
theory, entanglement, and its relation to the contextuality of observations.
Finally, in Sect. 4, we draw parallels to cognitive systems and argue that the
feature of non-commutativity is a viable candidate to understand why the
quantum formalism has been so successful to model cognitive systems.

2. Non-commutativity, Incompatibility, Complementarity, and


Uncertainty
Commutativity is a basic mathematical expression. An operation, which
combines two mathematical objects to yield a third one as a result, is said to
be commutative if the order in which the objects are combined makes no
difference for the result. Very often this is expressed in multiplicative form:
AB = BA (1)
If, on the other hand, the order matters, then the operation is called non-
commutative. Since two well-known mathematical operations —addition and
multliplication of real numbers— are commutative, non-commutativity is
sometimes considered as a somewhat exotic feature. However, even in
mathematics already very simple combinations of entities can be non-
commutative, e.g. 2 – 1  1 – 2, 1⁄2  2⁄1, 12  21. With more involved
48 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk

objects such as matrices or operators, even multiplication is generally non-


commutative. After all, commutativity makes things simple, but it is actually a
special case rather than the rule.
Even more obvious is the non-commutativity of combinations of objects
that themselves are operations: Imagine three objects A,B,C placed in front of
you from left to right. We now define two operations: (1) exchange the left
object with the one in the middle, (2) put the left object to the right and shift
the other two objects by one place to the left. One can easily check that these
two operations do not commute: First exchanging the first two objects and
then shifting everything to the left (placing the first object to the right) yields
first B,A,C and then A,C,B. Doing these steps in reverse oder yields first B,C,A
and then C,A,B. Obviously, the result is not the same.
The combination of objects can be interpreted as a process changing the
state of both the observing and the observed system. Viewed from this
perspective, non-commutativity becomes a very familiar property of many
everyday situations: First opening a door and then passing through (which we
do many times a day) yields a different result as first passing through the door
and then opening it (which can be quite painful).
As any measurement is a process, an interaction between an observing
system and an observed system, it is actually implausible to assume (like this
is done in classical physics) that measurements are commutative. Of course,
one may easily acknowledge that the state of the observing system changes
(by gaining information about the observed system), but the state of the
observed system is still assumed to be the same before and after the
measurement. This led to the (in many cases erroneous) impression that a
measurement yields information about the state of an observed system right
at or even immediately before measurement. Interestingly enough, even in
situations where it is obvious that the process of measurement changes the
state of a system, it is often assumed that the information gained is about the
state of the system at a time before the measurement is performed.
The important role of non-commutativity as a fundamental mathematical
concept in quantum theory was not recognized immediately —its full-fledged
algebraic form was identified by Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan (1926). Prior to
this, the mysterious double-nature of light as a wave and a collection of
particles, depending on the experimental context, had puzzled physicists for
years. Louis deBroglie had postulated this double-nature —particle-like and
wave-like properties— for all types of matter, in particular for electrons and
protons, and Bohr, Heisenberg, or Pauli speculated about some very
fundamental feature of reality, which differed completely from classical
notions in physics.
In his memories of that period, Heisenberg (1971) remembers a
conversation with Bohr at Göttingen in 1922 about this issue. He asked Bohr:
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond 49

“If the inner structure of the atoms is inaccessible to a pictorial description, as


you say, if we basically have no language to speak about this structure, will
we ever be able to understand the atoms?” Bohr hesitated for a moment, then
he replied: “Yes we will. But at the same time we will have to learn what the
notion of ‘understanding’ means.”
Niels Bohr (1928) employed the term “complementarity” to account for
this double-nature of matter. He did not, however, use it in the way
mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers use it: expressing natural
opposites, like “true” and “false” or “yes” and “no.” For Bohr, complementary
descriptions refer to mutually exclusive aspects of reality, which are together
needed to cover “the full picture.” The idea is that we can never describe a
system exhaustively unless we do so with conflicting, complementary
perspectives.
Where did this idea of Bohr’s come from? The answer is that Bohr was
familiar with the concept of complementarity through the psychologist Edgar
Rubin, the philosopher Harald Høffding, and, indirectly, with William James
(Holton 1970, see also Kaiser 1992). Rubin considered the different options to
perceive ambiguous stimuli as complementary perspectives, and Bohr
transferred this, to begin with, to the duality of waves and particles. Later it
should turn out that this duality rests on the (mathematical) representation of
the system considered. Two representations are complementary if they (i) are
both necessary for a complete description of the system, but (ii) are mutually
incompatible with one another, e.g. contradictory.
At about the same time, Heisenberg developed his “uncertainty relations”
(also called “indeterminacy relations”) as a consequence of complementarity.
The point here is that for two complementary observables of a system one
cannot assign sharp values simultaneously. If the system is in a state where
one observable has a sharp value,2 the results of repeated measurements of
the complementary observable will have maximal possible variation. In such
a case complementarity can be characterized as maximal incompatibility (see
also beim Graben and Atmanspacher 2006).
Particularly well known is the uncertainty relation between position and
momentum of a system: When the position of a particle has been prepared to
be within a small volume, measurements of the momentum will yield almost
arbitrary results, and vice versa: if the particle has been prepared in a state of
sharp momentum, measurements of its position will yield widely distributed
locations. To be sure, this notion of an uncertainty is not restricted to position
and momentum (neither is the notion of complementarity), but it holds for
other observables as well.
Essentially, the non-commutativity of observables, their complementarity,
and the uncertainty relations between them are different aspects of the same
thing.3 Non-commutativity is the mathematical way of expressing the
50 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk

philosophical notion of complementarity, and the uncertainty relations are the


experimental signature (or, in other words, the operational definition) of
complementarity and non-commutativity. The fact that observables can be
non-commutative (or complementary) is a consequence of the fact that
measurements are processes that in general change the state of both
observing and observed system.

3. Entanglement and Contextuality


In the 1920s, when quantum theory took on its formal shape, many physicists
believed that the uncertainty relations and the indeterminacy they express are
caused by an uncontrollable “mechanical” interaction between the observed
system and the observing system during the process of measurement. This
interaction was thought to be due to an uncontrollable exchange of energy
and momentum.
However, in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (1935) published an
article entitled “Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be
considered complete?,” which was intended to criticize the understanding of
quantum theory at the time. This article by “EPR” eventually led to a
revolutionary change of the notion of reality in physics. It describes a thought
experiment performed on a pair of particles with certain global properties
such as total momentum or total angular momentum. Today, such a system is
called entangled,4 and the subsystems (particles) into which it can be
decomposed do not have determined properties in the first place. If a
measurement is performed on one of the particles, the (unpredictable) result
allows one to predict “with certainty one” (an expression from the EPR
article) the outcome of a corresponding measurement performed on the other
particle.
Now the essential argument of EPR is the following: If we can predict the
outcome of complementary measurements on a system with absolute
certainty, the corresponding results must somehow be related to an ontic
property with a value that exists already before the measurement has actually
been performed. As quantum mechanics denies the existence of such ontic
“elements of reality,” EPR came to the conclusion that quantum theory
provides an incomplete description of reality.
One of the implicit assumptions in the argument by EPR is that a
measurement performed on one of the particles has no influence onto the
state of the other particle, because, at least in principle, these particles can be
arbitrarily far apart from each other and any information about the outcome
of this measurement cannot propagate faster than the velocity of light to the
other particle. EPR suggested to interpret the predicted correlations between
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond 51

the properties of the particles in terms of an underlying reality in which the


results of the measurements are predetermined by a common cause (e.g. due
to the preparation of the particles). Quantum theory rejects such an
underlying (classical) reality: the results are “created” in the process of
measurement, and the correlations between the results are due to the non-
classical situation of entanglement.
Almost three decades later, John Bell (1964) presented an ingenious idea
about how one can test whether a hidden classical reality à la EPR exists or
whether the quantum mechanical interpretation is correct. In order to give a
flavor of his argument, let us assume a system has three properties, each of
which can assume only two values (“plus” or “minus”). If, say, property a has
the same values as property b (in which case we write a = b) and if property
b has the same value as property c (i.e., b = c), then we have a = c. This
implies, by modus tollens, that if ac then either ab or bc. For classical
properties we would expect that the number of cases where ac is smaller
than or (at best) equal to the number of cases where ab plus the number of
cases where bc.
It turns out, however, that particular quantum systems may be in states for
which the inequality just mentioned (or related ones) is violated for non-
commutative properties. Numerous experiments (the first conclusive one by
Aspect et al. 1982), performed such that any finite-velocity exchange of
information could be excluded, showed this violation without any reasonable
doubt. There are two conclusions: (1) Unless nature allows for signaling faster
than the speed of light (which would contradict the special theory of
relativity), properties have no predetermined values, but obtain these values
in the process of measurement. (2) As soon as one value has been measured
on a pair of entangled subsystems, the other value is co-determined by so-
called EPR-correlations. Since the value of the first subsystem is
undetermined before measurement, these correlations cannot be due to a
classical common cause.
In addition to these conclusions, there is a further surprising aspect of
entangled systems: The result of a measurement depends on which other
measurement was performed before, even if the two measurements are
compatible in the sense that the corresponding properties commute. Local
measurements on one particle (in a two-particle system) commute with local
measurements on the other particle. Nevertheless, the outcome of one of
them depends on the other. This aspect of quantum theory is called
contextuality. Given three observables A,B,C such that A and B commute and
A and C commute as well, but B and C do not commute, then the result of
measuring A depends on whether it is measured together with B or together
with C. This is even more surprising when we bear in mind that we can
measure A even before we decide whether to measure B or C.
52 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk

This puzzle cannot be solved in terms of classical physics, but has a partial
solution in the fact that only the quantum correlations in the A-B- or A-C-
measurements reveal the effect. This implies the conclusion that the
correlations are non-signaling, i.e., they cannot be used to transmit
information from one subsystem to the other, so that one cannot decide
which measurement is “the cause” and which “the effect.” In the case of EPR-
type experiments, it may even be the case that in one reference frame (i.e.
for one observer) A has been measured first and B second while for another
reference frame B has been measured first and A second. This makes it
obvious that the classical notions of “cause” and “effect” break down in such
situations.

4. Non-Commutativity and Contextuality in Cognitive Systems


Since the pioneering years of quantum physics a century ago, most physicists
thought that the formalism of quantum theory is restricted to a description of
atomic and subatomic systems. This prejudice also shaped the public
reception of the theory as a scientific revolution without much impact on our
daily lives. Today this picture turns out to be wrong for several reasons.
—We owe about half of all gross national products worldwide to quantum
physics. Without its achievements there would be no transistors or other
semiconductors, which form the basis of virtually all microelectronics, and the
foundations of energy, bio, nano, and laser technology would be lacking
entirely (Hasinger 2007, p. 30).
—It has been recognized (beim Graben and Atmanspacher 2006,
Atmanspacher, et al. 2013) that classical dynamical systems whose properties
require a state space partition can exhibit phenomena reflecting non-
commutativity, incompatibility, complementarity and even (at least in a
generalized sense) entanglement.
—There is strong evidence that quantum effects play a significant role for
particular functions of biological systems at room temperature. Pertinent
examples are photosynthesis, the avian navigation system, and particular
features of biomolecules (e.g. in microtubules). For an excellent review see
Huelga and Plenio (2013).
—Basic concepts of quantum theory, such as the complementarity of
descriptions or the entanglement of states of a system, surface even in
psychology and cognitive science. Today there is an increasing number of
examples showing that measurements on cognitive systrems are better
understood on the basis of their non-commutative nature.
The last one of these points is of particular interest for the remainder of
this article. Already Niels Bohr was convinced that the concept of
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond 53

complementarity has applications beyond (quantum) physics. For instance, he


talked about the complementarity of knowing and learning, of the definition
and the usage of a concept, of clarity and truth, or of goodness and justness.
An illuminating example due to James (1890, p. 284) is the complementarity
of belief and doubt. The logical negation of belief would be disbelief, but this
fails to fit the idea of complementarity. Later, Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav
Jung conjectured in the mid 20th century that the uncontrollable backreaction
that an observation leaves on a measured physical state has an analog in the
observation of mental states (Jung 1969, Atmanspacher 2012). This highly
plausible idea directly entails that observations of mental states should in
general be non-commutative.
In recent years, a number of research programs have been developed in
order to develop these ideas in a formal manner and with empriical
applications. The first steps in this direction were made by the group of Aerts
in Brussels in the early 1990s.5 Since 2000, Atmanspacher, et al. (2002, 2006)
developed an axiomatic framework that serves as a formal basis for
applications and demonstrates the precise steps leading from non-
commutative structures at a most general level back to their specific
appearance in quantum physics. Other pioneering work is due to the groups
of Khrennikov (Sweden), Bruza (Australia), and Busemeyer (US), to name just
a few.
The strength of the idea of a “generalized quantum theory” is that it
provides a formal framework which both yields a transparent well-defined
connection to conventional quantum physics and describes a number of
concrete examples with surprising conceptual and empirical results. Two of
them will be presented in a little more detail subsequently: sequence effects
in successive complementary mental operations and complementarity and
entanglement in the perception of ambiguous stimuli.

4.1 Sequence Effects

With numerical studies of learning processes on artificial networks such


sequence effects can be analytically investigated (Atmanspacher and Filk
2006). For instance, these networks can be trained in such a way that they
are able to learn and recognize patterns. In such tasks they do in fact not only
learn the patterns themselves, but also the sequence in which they learn
them. This implies that a series of patterns is best recognized if they are
presented in the sequence in which they were learned. Otherwise, the
recognition process typically does not attain its goal.
Similar sequence effects, also called context effects, are observed in all
kinds of polls and surveys in social science (Schwarz and Sudman 1992). This
is a crucial point for the design of questionnaires. Some aspects of this
54 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk

observation have been studied by Aerts et al. (2004), Atmanspacher and


Römer (2012) provided a compact classification of such sequence effects, and
Wang et al. (2014) provided overwhelming evidence for non-commutativity as
the reason of sequence effects in a metaanalysis of 70 national surveys in the
US.

4.2 Bistable Perception

Another application is the perception of ambiguous stimuli —the topic that


inspired Bohr to introduce complementarity into quantum mechanics. The
contributing processes can be modeled with non-commuting operations
(Atmanspacher et al. 2004, 2008, 2013a), representing two types of
dynamics: the dynamic of the switch between perspectives and the dynamic
of the observation of the presented stimulus. The model that has been worked
out agrees well with a number of old and new experimental results, and thus
has proven its value for a better understanding of particular features of
bistable perception. In the case of ambiguous stimuli it is more than obvious
that the “result” of an observation —the particular perspective— is generated
in the process of observation.
Moreover, it is not implausible to assume that there are mental states that
cannot be uniquely assigned to one of the two perspectival options and are,
as something like transitory states, located in between them. 30 years ago,
the physicist Sudarshan proposed to consider such states as superposition
states in a generalized sense.6 Using temporal versions of so-called Bell
inequalities, it was recently worked out (Atmanspacher and Filk 2010) how
this can be scientifically studied by a suitable combination of theory and
experiment.

4.3 Violations of Bell Inequalities in Cognitive Systems

In recent years, several groups have reported violations of Bell inequalities in


mental systems (Aerts and Sozzo 2011, Busemeyer and Bruza 2012, Bruza et
al. 2015). However, in all these cases the experiments were performed on
single subjects where a signaling influence, also called invasiveness, cannot be
excluded. A violation of Bell inequalities for such cases can be attributed to
priming or other context effects in mental systems, which would entail
classical rather than quantum correlations (Atmanspacher and Filk 2013b).
Genuine quantum correlations may exceed standard classical correlations
but obey the so-called Tsirelson bound. However, this bound does not exhaust
the range by which Bell-type correlations can be violated in principle. Popescu
and Rohrlich (1994) found corresponding super-quantum correlations for an
idealized model of quantum measurements. In recent work, Kujala and
Dzhafarov (2016) studied such quantum and super-quantum correlations in
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond 55

more detail and derived an ingenious way to distinguish invasive from non-
invasive origins for such correlations.

5. Conclusions
The examples mentioned before illustrate clearly that basic concepts of
quantum theory indeed do come to bear in many questions in psychology,
cognitive science and consciousness studies. But this is not to mystify these
instances in a way in which some have tried to mystify quantum physics.
Rather, the point is that some conceptually crucial features of quantum theory
are (1) not unintelligible at all, and (2) not only applicable to quantum physics
alone.
A quantum theoretically inspired, but farther-reaching understanding of
reality forces us to revise plugged-in cliches of thinking and resist tendencies
toward overly concrete pictorial worldviews. The Boolean “either —or” in
logic and the law of commutativity in elementary calculations are special
cases with their own significance. But it would be wrong to believe that their
generalization holds only for exotic particles and fields, with no potential for
everyday phenomena. The opposite is the case.
56 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk

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Notes

1
The idea of a “mechanical influence” was used by Bohr in his reply to a
seminal article by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen of 1935, which we will
comment on in more detail in Section 3.
2
In this case, any number of repetitions of measurements of this observable
will allways yield the same result. Such states are called “eigenstates” with
respect to the observable in question.
Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond 59

3
Yet another aspect appears in the logical calculus of propositions related to
non-commutative properties, as introduced by Birkhoff and von Neumann
(1936). Complementary propositions in the sense of quantum logic are not
simply negations of one another; this led Bohr to his proverbial statement
that “you can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also
a deep truth.” Complementary propositions are reflected in non-Boolean
lattices for which both the law of the excluded middle and the distributive
law are violated.
4
The term entanglement was coined by Schrödinger (1935) in an insightful
response to the article by EPR.
5
See Aerts, et al. (1993) for a general lattice theoretical approach. An example
for an early application to mental systems was proposed by Aerts and
Aerts (1995).
6
See Sudarshan (1983), p. 466: “[…] sensations, feelings, and insights are not
neatly categorized into chains of thoughts, nor is there a step-by-step
development of a logical-legal argument-to-conclusion. Instead, patterns
appear, interweave, coexist; and sequencing is made inoperative.
Conclusion, premises, feelings, and insights coexist in a manner defying
temporal order.”
Process in Vedantic Mysticism:
The Example of Ramakrishna
David T. Bradford1

Abstract
A mystical experience is the overt expression of a process of change that
transforms awareness into one and then another extraordinary state of
awareness. In tracing the experience’s diachronic development, two
perspectives are involved. In the first, the experience’s subjective or
experiential aspect is the focus. Its form and content are examined. Special
attention is given to the transitions that initiate sequential phases of the
experience’s development. Each such phase is a distinct state of mystical
awareness. The temporal proximity of neighboring states reflects their mutual
reciprocity; each conditions the other. In the second perspective, the
experience’s chronometric aspect is examined. The internal development and
the temporal structure of mystical experiences are seen most clearly in highly
extended examples. The new perspective is illustrated through an analysis of
the longest mystical experience ever reported: the six-month nirvikalpa
samadhi of the Indian saint Ramakrishna.

0. Introduction
Most mystical experiences are brief rather than prolonged. The brevity of a
mystical experience compresses its content and makes it difficult or
impossible to discern its internal development. The brevity of the experience
can also diminish the likelihood of remembering the details of the experience,
particularly when its content is ineffable. The short duration contributes to the
impression that the experience is instantaneous and that its content is an
indissoluble unit of meaning. The rapidity of the experience’s onset and
development supports the impression that the experience is encapsulated and
discontinuous with the mental activity that precedes and follows it. These
impressions have been used to support certain second-order inferences. For
example, mystical experience is said to convey a simple or non-compound
awareness of God. Theological reflection has bolstered this inference by
promoting the idea that the divine nature is simple and immutable. In my
view, these impressions are artifacts of the brevity of mystical experience.

1
David T. Bradford, M.Th., Ph.D., is an independent scholar based in Austin,
Texas, and Gunnison, Colorado; dtbrad2@gmail.com.
62 David T. Bradford

A new perspective is developed in this study: A mystical experience is an


internally complex event composed of sequentially occurring states of
mystical awareness. The states are spanned by a series of transitions that
begins and terminates in normal conscious awareness. A mystical experience
is the overt expression of a process of change that transforms awareness into
one and then another extraordinary state of awareness. The temporal
structure and the internal development of mystical experiences are seen most
clearly in highly extended examples. I will illustrate the perspective through
an analysis of the longest mystical experience ever reported: the six-month
nirvikalpa samadhi of the Indian saint Ramakrishna.
Samadhi is a general term for mystical states of absorption. Nirvikalpa
indicates the most profound such state. In the course of nirvikalpa samadhi,
Ramakrishna cycled between the saguna and the nirguna aspects of Brahman.
Brahman is identified in Vedantic philosophy as the blissful, intrinsically
conscious substance of being.1 Saguna means “with qualities”; nirguna,
“without qualities.” These terms refer to the two basic ways of conceiving and
experiencing Brahman. Brahman’s saguna aspect has countless
manifestations; it upholds and animates the entire world and is sought,
personified, and experienced as the personal God, the divine creator.
Brahman’s nirguna aspect is the impersonal, undifferentiated ground of being,
approximating the Christian mystic’s reference to the unknowable, abysmal
depth of God. In non-dual Vedantic philosophy, Brahman’s two aspects are
identical. Our inability to grasp this truth results from spiritual ignorance and
leads to the illusory appearance of the multitude of independent objects that
crowd our minds with conflicting ideas and feelings.
Nirvikalpa means “without second” or “without alternative.”2 Nirvikalpa
samadhi is so named because its nirguna phase subsumes and transcends all
forms. Encompassing all, the nirguna state does not allow for an alternative or
second point of comparison. Ramakrishna’s six-month samadhi is called his
nirvikalpa samadhi because his union with Brahman’s nirguna aspect occurred
during some of the six-month period.
Throughout this essay I refer to states of mystical awareness. In the
traditional view, mystical states entail direct participation in transcendent
reality. They are not reducible to mental representations or cultural
influences. They are metaphysical probes and veridical contacts with the
structures of ultimate meaning.
Process thinkers concerned with religious pluralism have addressed
Vedantic mysticism and Ramakrishna in particular.3 In his pluralistic
metaphysics, Cobb draws on Whitehead’s distinction between “God” and
“creativity” and likens a number mystical claims (including nirguna Brahman)
to “creativity,” while other claims (including saguna Brahman) are likened to
the ultimate reality called “God.”4 I am sympathetic to comparative studies of
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 63

this nature but also skeptical of work that begins with a predetermined
philosophical framework rather than the comparative analysis of personal
mystical accounts written or reported by virtuoso ascetics. Illusory correlation
and question-begging are risks in both cases but more so when moving
deductively from a philosophical framework toward mystical accounts.
Ideally, one begins with comparative phenomenology and works tentatively
and inductively toward higher levels of interpretive abstraction.
Ramakrishna’s historical importance and manner of teaching are
described in the first part of this article. One of his retrospective descriptions
of nirvikalpa samadhi is examined in the second. The relationship of
Brahman’s two aspects is discussed in the third. Ramakrishna’s experiences
of the saguna aspect as God is described in the fourth part. The psychology of
the nirguna state is analyzed in the fifth. The sixth part shows that the overall
process of Ramakrishna’s samadhi was formed of a series of cycles in each of
which he oscillated between two serially occurring states. In one state he
envisioned God and felt ecstatic emotion while participating in saguna
Brahman; in the other state he was insensate, cataleptic, and immersed in
nirguna Brahman. I identify each such cycle as a mystical cycle. The analysis
in the seventh part compares the mystical cycle and a fundamental biological
rhythm called the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle. In the final part, Ramakrishna’s
samadhi is characterized as an exemplary mystical experience because it
displays two fundamental forms of mystical experience. 5

1. Ramakrishna (1836–1886)
Ramakrishna was a leading figure in the nineteenth-century Hindu revival.6
Among the younger generation “his voice became the call of resurgent
India.”7 Apart from India, his historical impact has been considerable. His
followers introduced Hindu spirituality in Europe and America, primarily
through the Vedanta Society. His leading disciple was responsible for reviving
and popularizing Patanjali’s yoga in India and the West.8 His disciples
consider him an avatara, a divine incarnation.
Ramakrishna wrote nothing. His “teachings consist of parables, advice and
recollections given orally.”9 His rural upbringing, limited schooling, and
religious knowledge were reflected in the content and style of his teaching. He
“spoke a colorful village Bengali” and “interspersed his teachings with
technical Sanskrit terms from various strands of Hindu yoga and philosophy.
He made extensive references as well to the complete realm of sacred history,
as recorded by the Vedas, Puranas, and Tantras.”10 His inspired utterances
were less recondite than his technical references. They included songs and
sayings framed in metaphors and images.
64 David T. Bradford

Ramakrishna’s nirvikalpa samadhi was the culmination of five years of


training with three gurus in succession. The third guru, a naga sadhu named
Totapuri, introduced Ramakrishna to non-dual Vedantic philosophy. Under his
tutelage Ramakrishna experienced three days of nirvikalpa samadhi. After the
guru’s departure he decided to train for a nirvikalpa samadhi of months in
duration.

2. Nirvikalpa Samadhi
Ramakrishna was “unconscious of the outer world” during samadhi.11 A
nephew attended to his bodily needs. An itinerant monk, worried that
Ramakrishna might die, would strike him repeatedly and “during the resultant
fleeting moments of consciousness he would push a few morsels of food
down Sri Ramakrishna’s throat.”12 An attack of dysentery terminated the
samadhi: “Day and night the pain tortured me, and my mind gradually came
down to the physical plane.”13
One of Ramakrishna’s retrospective descriptions of nirvikalpa samadhi is
valuable for its concrete details:
For six months in a stretch I remained in that state from
which ordinary men can never return; generally the body falls
off, after three weeks, like a dry leaf. I was not conscious of day
or night. Flies would enter my mouth and nostrils as they do a
dead body, but I did not feel them. My hair became matted with
dust.14
The “falling off” of the body refers to the inhibition of somatic awareness.
In Ramakrishna’s words, “knowledge of Brahman is impossible without the
destruction of body-consciousness.”15 In saying he was “not conscious of day
or night,” Ramakrishna did not mean he was unconscious for the duration of
samadhi but that he was unaware of the passage of diurnal cycles.

3. Two Aspects of Brahman


In scripture, Brahman is called “the Whole,” conveying “completeness,
wholeness, and health” and indicating “a higher-level totality that
encompasses the universe.”16 “Brahman” derives from the root brh, “to
grow,” which suggests that “the ultimate does not have to be conceived as
something static, finished or fixed.”17 During nirvikalpa samadhi,
Ramakrishna transitioned between the states aligned with Brahman’s saguna
and nirguna aspects. For Ramakrishna, the divine manifestation of the saguna
aspect was usually Kali, the goddess of ascetic renunciation. The nirguna
aspect is impersonal and formless; any form-generating latencies it contains
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 65

are indistinct and undifferentiated, suggesting its characterization as no-thing.


The states mediating Ramakrishna’s participation in Brahman were the
inflection points of the mystical process that shaped his entire meditation.
The relationship of Brahman’s two aspects has been discussed by Indian
philosophers for centuries.18 A perceptual analogy of the relationship will help
to clarify its meaning in mystical experience and in Ramakrishna’s nirvikalpa
samadhi in particular. The relationship of the saguna and the nirguna states is
like the relationship of the forms composing a reversible figure drawing. The
forms of a reversible figure are reciprocally related; the lines defining one also
define the other. But the forms do not appear simultaneously. An implicit
form becomes explicit through a spontaneous reversal. Similarly, the
Brahman-related states are reciprocally related. One must have begun to
dissipate before the other can engage and begin to transform awareness. The
realization of God or the divinely infused whole of things alternates with the
realization of the no-thing of nirguna Brahman. The states are neighboring
phases of one and the same mystical process.
The relationship of the states can also be understood in terms of the
principle of contrast. Contrast organizes perception in setting a targeted
object against its field; it displays “this” as opposed to “that.” An analogy is
the optical changes during foveation when the lens of the eye adjusts to a new
target while other objects composing the newly forming field lose visual
definition. In nirvikalpa samadhi, contrast sets the saguna and the nirguna
states in opposition. The mystic must have partly exited one before the other
stands in sufficient contrast to engage and transform awareness. The absolute
plenitude of saguna Brahman is fully apparent only when contrasted with the
no-thing of nirguna Brahman, and vice versa. The mystic situated on the
margin of contrasting states can discern the oncoming state or the one that is
presently in recession. This is illustrated schematically in Figure 1.
66 David T. Bradford

Fig. 1. Mystical States and Margins (m=margin; S=Saguna Brahman;


N=Nirguna Brahman)

4. Saguna Brahman
Ramakrishna experienced Brahman’s saguna aspect as the presence of God
manifest in the surrounding world: “After coming down from samadhi, one
may see that it is God himself who has become the universe and all that
exists.”19 The passage shows that samadhi concludes gradually and may be
followed by an awareness of the all-encompassing divine presence. One
“comes down” from samadhi, entering a God-inhabited world. A preliminary
state, indicated by “samadhi,” is followed by a second state that imposes the
awareness that “God himself […] has become the universe and all that
exists.”20 The transition from the first state into the second alters awareness
such that the mystic and the multitude of surrounding objects become
integrally related elements of a divinely infused world. The panentheistic
nature of this realization is clear. Ramakrishna’s first experience of this kind
occurred during his daily devotions: “The Divine Mother revealed to me in the
Kali temple that it was She who had become everything. She showed me that
everything was full of Consciousness […]. I found everything inside the room
soaked, as it were, in Bliss—the Bliss of God.”21
One of Ramakrishna’s experiences of a God-inhabited world occurred
during his final days, before he died from cancer. “He talked to the devotees,
sometimes in a whisper, sometimes by signs”:
Do you know what I see right now? I see that it is God
Himself who has become all this. It seems to me that men and
other living beings are made of leather, and that it is God
Himself who, dwelling inside these leather cases, moves the
hands, the feet, the heads. I had a similar vision once before,
when I saw houses, gardens, roads, men, cattle—all made of
One Substance; it was as if they were all made of wax.22
God is the “Substance” that upholds and animates material forms. He is
“One” in His coherence and His unity with “all this.” Ramakrishna perceived
individual objects as unique and united in a field of awareness in which all
have comparable value as the body of God. They seemed made of wax or
leather because their existence and activities were dependent on the divine
animating presence.
Ramakrishna’s capacity to experience a God-inhabited world evolved from
early meditation experiences in which he perceived images of Kali, photopsic
hallucinations (“flashes like a swarm of fire-flies”), and a great expanse of
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 67

luminous water (“a sea of deep mist […] with luminous waves of molten
silver”).23 He was paralyzed during visionary meditations: He “would hear
strange clicking sounds in the joints of his legs, as if someone were locking
them up, one after another, to keep him motionless”; “I had no power to
move my body and change my posture even slightly.”24 The sounds recurred
at the conclusion of meditations when he heard his joints “unlocking and
leaving him free to move about.”25 His paralysis is like the atonia that occurs
in REM sleep and in episodes of sleep paralysis.26 Similarly, his visions during
meditation are like dreaming and the breakthrough of REM-related visual
phenomena during wakefulness.27

5. Psychology of the Nirguna State


A remark of Ramakrishna’s is significant for revealing the psychology of the
nirguna state. He was asked, “Don’t you feel at that time even a trace of
ego?:”
Yes, generally a little of it remains. However hard you may
rub a grain of gold against a grindstone, still a bit of it always
remains […]. In samadhi I lose outer consciousness completely;
but God generally keeps a little trace of ego in me for enjoyment
of divine communion. Enjoyment is possible only when “I” and
“you” remain. Again, sometimes God effaces even that trace of
“I.” Then one experiences jada samadhi or nirvikalpa samadhi.
That experience cannot be described. A salt doll went to
measure the depth of the ocean, but before it had gone far into
the water it melted away. It became entirely one with the water
of the ocean. Then who was to come back and tell the ocean’s
depth?28
From the perspective of observers, the person in nirvikalpa samadhi
appears lifeless and insentient. “Jada” refers to the behavioral expression of
the nirguna state, when the mystic “appears lifeless, like an inert object.”29 A
medical doctor examined Ramakrishna with a stethoscope during an
experience of samadhi: “No heartbeat could be detected. He also touched
Ramakrishna’s eyeball with his finger. There was no reaction.”30 His condition
signals the cessation of normal mentation and displays behavioral features of
the mystical state. The “I” is effaced, not a “trace of ego” remains;
“enjoyment” is thus impossible. “I” indicates self-directed conscious
awareness and the sense of personal identity. “Enjoyment” refers to bliss
(ananda), a basic attribute of Brahman. On another occasion Ramakrishna
said, “In nirvikalpa samadhi, ego, name, and form do not exist.”31 Name-and-
form refers to the objects that inform awareness and the conceptual means of
their doing so.
68 David T. Bradford

Granted the “I’s” effacement, the mystic cannot personally realize nirguna
Brahman. It can be discerned under one or the other of two conditions:
before the “I’s” effacement, when a lingering “trace of ego” allows for the
recognition, or when the nirguna state has begun to dissipate and the “I” has
been partially restored.32 The “I” must have partially coalesced before the
mystic can attain either an anticipatory or a retrospective awareness of
nirguna Brahman. The same point can be made as follows: Brahman’s nirguna
aspect can be discerned under one or the other of two conditions: when the
nirguna state is incipient but has yet to nullify the “I,” or when it has begun to
recede and no longer consumes awareness. It is inconsistent with traditional
teachings and psychologically impossible to personally participate in nirguna
Brahman.

6. Troughs and Peaks of Mystical Process


Several sources show that Ramakrishna alternated between insensibility and
liminal awareness during samadhi. Romain Rolland identified Ramakrishna’s
behavior during periods of insensibility as “cataleptic ecstasy.”33 A disciple
named Saradananda referred to the intermittent periods of liminal awareness
in saying that Ramakrishna would “come back now and again very gently.”34
At such times, he was “semiconscious” and “remained in bhavamukha.”35
Bhavamukha is the threshold condition that defines the common margin of
the states aligned with Brahman’s saguna and nirguna aspects. Another
disciple, Mahendranath, said that during bhavamukha Ramakrishna remained
“on the threshold of relative consciousness, the border between the Absolute
[nirguna Brahman] and the Relative [saguna Brahman].”36 A Western scholar
described bhavamukha in saying that Ramakrishna entered “a state in which
he is said to have been aware simultaneously of both the one eternal
substance at the foundation of existence and the ongoing personal presence
of divinity.”37
Bhavamukha is a temporal margin and a subtle point of transition that
Ramakrishna crossed repeatedly in passing between the two states:
He gently oscillated back and forth across the dividing line.
Ecstatic devotion to the Divine Mother [saguna Brahman]
alternated with serene absorption in the Ocean of Absolute Unity
[nirguna Brahman]. He thus bridged the gulf between the
Personal and the Impersonal.38
Ramakrishna’s samadhi was composed of two, serially occurring states. In
one, he was insensate, cataleptic, and absorbed in nirguna Brahman. In the
other, he lingered on the margin of wakefulness and experienced saguna
Brahman through “ecstatic devotion to the Divine Mother.” His oscillating
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 69

between the two states formed the cycles of the mystical process that shaped
his samadhi’s temporal parameters and psychological content. The peaks of
mystical cycles coincided with liminal awareness and devotional contact with
God; the troughs coincided with catalepsy and “serene absorption in the
Ocean of Absolute Unity.” The two states were the inflection points of a
mystical process whose basic unit of change was a cycle. The cyclic nature of
mystical process is illustrated in Figure 2.

Fig. 2. Cycles of Mystical Process (SB=Saguna Brahman; NB=Nirguna


Brahman)

In the trough-to-peak transition, awareness rises from the encompassing


darkness of nirguna Brahman into the cascading, emotionally rich imaginal
forms of the saguna state. The “I” coalesces, allowing a partial resumption of
the sense of personal identity. The trough-to-peak transition involves the
progressive differentiation of the perceptual world and the mystic’s sense of
personal identity. In the peak-to-trough transition, the “I” dissolves in the
indeterminate mass of the nirguna state. In Ramakrishna’s words, it “melts
away,” erasing conscious awareness.39

7. Mystical Process and the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC)


Turning to a closer analysis of the mystical cycle, I will make two
assumptions: A biological rhythm governed the temporal pattern of the
mystical cycle, and this rhythm’s ordinary psychological expression was
70 David T. Bradford

transformed based on the neuropsychological consequences of Ramakrishna’s


practice of yoga.
A number of ultradian rhythms activate and organize psychological and
physiological responses throughout the circadian cycle.40 They range in
duration from 0.1–5 hours. Some rhythms are active continuously; others are
keyed to certain phases of the circadian cycle or restricted to certain times of
day or night. An ultradian rhythm like the mystical cycle is the 90-minute
REM-NREM sleep cycle. Like REM-related dreaming, the saguna peak of a
mystical cycle corresponds with intense emotion and visionary phenomena.
Like NREM sleep, the nirguna trough erases the sense of personal identity and
imposes unconsciousness. The atonia that occurs during REM sleep is like
Ramakrishna’s paralysis during ecstatic visionary experience. Were it not for
two exceptions, these similarities might be used to support the view that the
mystical cycle is based on the REM-NREM cycle: The REM-NREM cycle is a
sleep-related phenomenon, but Ramakrishna’s samadhi was continuous
throughout the circadian cycle and included mystical states (saguna peaks)
when he was not asleep.
A different rhythm must be sought. The most likely possibility is the BRAC,
an ultradian rhythm with a duration of 90–100 minutes.41 The BRAC is
phylogenetically older than the REM-NREM cycle. It activates and organizes
mental and physiological activity in sleep, dreaming, and wakefulness. A
number of 90-minute periodicities are considered BRAC-governed
phenomena, including the REM-NREM sleep cycle.42 The BRAC controls the
appearance of REM sleep phases on successive nights and may do so
independently of sleep onset time.43 It governs oscillations in vigilance
between the mental states of “rest” and “activity” and is aligned with
oscillations of the ergotropic and the trophotropic states of the autonomic
nervous system.44 It corresponds with oscillations in the relative activation
and efficiency of the two cerebral hemispheres during wakefulness and is also
coordinated in both sleep and dreaming with alternating patterns of
functional cerebral hemispheric dominance.45
I conclude that the BRAC determined the temporal shape of the mystical
cycle. Its “rest” phase was represented as a nirguna trough, when mental
activity ceases and the mystic loses consciousness. Its “activity” phase was
represented as a saguna peak, when the “I” coalesces and the mystic is
absorbed in blissful visionary experience. Arousal is diminished in a nirguna
trough, a quiescent condition comparable to calming meditative states that
decrease muscle tone and induce a hypometabolic state of decreased oxygen
consumption, carbon dioxide production, and respiratory rate. A nirguna
trough is trophotropic, weighted toward parasympathetic dominance, in
contrast to relatively heightened arousal during a saguna peak, which is
ergotropic in its autonomic effects.
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 71

Ramakrishna’s samadhi was a BRAC-governed spiritual phenomenon. Its


basic unit of change was a cycle with a duration of 90–100 minutes. Mystical
cycles recurred at regular intervals, imposing a series of transformations that
resulted in consecutive phases of saguna-related arousal and nirguna-related
quiescence. At the basic level of the mystical cycle, Ramakrishna’s samadhi
was governed by a biological rhythm, the BRAC, which acquired mystical
features based on psychological and physiological changes resulting from
yoga practice. This conclusion is illustrated in Figure 3.

Fig. 3. Mystical Process and the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC=Basic Rest-
Activity Cycle; m=margin; SB=Saguna Brahman; NB=Nirguna Brahman)

8. Mystical Process
Ramakrishna was a virtuoso of the ascetic life and a superlative devotional
mystic. The spiritual experiences of persons of this level of excellence are
72 David T. Bradford

exemplary in fulfilling the most profound aspirations of their traditions.


Ramakrishna’s nirvikalpa samadhi displayed in relatively pure form two of the
most fundamental types of mystical experience: participation in the personal
God, and transient probing of the undifferentiated ground of being. Most
mystical experiences are partial displays of what his showed in rounded form.
Using Ramakrishna as a guide, I will assume that the processes driving other
mystical experiences have a cyclic temporal structure and rely on a biological
rhythm. Mystical experiences of shorter duration than Ramakrishna’s may be
composed of fewer BRAC-governed cycles, or of one or more truncated
cycles. Were the saguna phase of a mystical cycle accentuated and the
nirguna phase truncated, the mystic would experience emotional communion
with God but have little or no awareness of the nirguna state. Were the
nirguna phase accentuated and the saguna phase truncated, as in non-theistic
mystical experiences, the mystic would discern and possibly pass into the
nirguna state but have little or no awareness of the possibility of contact with
the personal God. Preexisting ideas about the nature of personal identity may
contribute to these outcomes. In traditions in which personal identity is
viewed as impermanent or illusory, the mystic would not expect and would
involuntarily resist any momentum intrinsic to a mystical process that
accentuated personal identity and promoted the appearance of the personal
God. Were the divine presence to appear, or were the sense of personal
identity to become a prominent feature of the experience, the mystic would
view such events as penultimate relative to the desired mystical goal. In this
manner, expectancy influences the form and content of a mystical
experience.
Process interpretations of mystical experience vary in their points of focus,
which range from overt behavior and physiological change to mental and
emotional content. But they are alike in revealing the temporal structure and
the transitional margins of a mystical experience and in describing in fine
detail the experience’s subjective aspect. One goal of the process approach is
the description of the few fundamental mystical processes that account for
the diverse, seemingly irreconcilable forms of mystical experience. A remote
goal is to see the single encompassing process whose partial expressions
include these few fundamental processes.46

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Process in Vedantic Mysticism 75

Notes

1
E. Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta. A philosophical reconstruction (Honolulu, HI:
East-West Center Press, 1969); P.T. Raju, Structural depths of Indian
thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 1985.
2
H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press),
1989.
3
J.D. Long, “Anekanta Vedanta: Toward a deep Hindu religious pluralism,” in:
Deep religious pluralism, ed. D.R. Griffin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2005),130–157.
4
J.B. Cobb, Beyond dialogue: Toward a mutual transformation of Christianity
and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982). Also see: D.R. Griffin, “John
Cobb’s Whiteheadian complementary pluralism,” Deep religious pluralism,
ed. D.R. Griffin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 39-
66.
5
This essay summarizes a longer version that includes clinical and
neuroscientific analyses of Ramakrishna's samadhi and the effectiveness
of yoga in inducing such a condition. The longer version can be obtained
from the author.
6
P. Heehs, Indian religions. A historical reader of spiritual expression and
experience (London: Hurst & Co., 2002), 430.
7
Ibid.
8
S. Vivekananda, “Raja-Yoga,” in S. Vivekananda, The complete works of
Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1989), vol. I: 119–313.
9
Heehs, Indian religions. A historical reader of spiritual expression and
experience, 431.
10
L. Hixon, Great swan. Meetings with Ramakrishna (Burdett, NY: Larson
Publications, 1996), xi.
11
S. Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda Center, 1992), 151.
12
Ibid., 32.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., 468.
16
P. Olivelle, Upanisads (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 289, 297.
17
P. Bowes, “Mysticism in the Upanisads and in Sankara’s Vedanta,” in The
yogi and the mystic. Studies in Indian and comparative mysticism, ed. K.
Werner, (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1994), 54–68.
76 David T. Bradford

18
P.T. Raju, Structural depths of Indian thought.
19
C. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and his disciples (Hollywood, CA: Vedanta Press,
1965), 298.
20
Ibid., 298.
21
Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 15.
22
Ibid., 941–942; also see 70–71.
23
Ibid., 14.
24
Heehs, Indian religions, 433; Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,
14.
25
Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 14.
26
V. Cologan, M. Schabus, D. LeDoux, P. Moonen, and S. Laureys, “Sleep in
disorders of consciousness,” Sleep Medicine Reviews 14 (2010): 97–105.
27
J.A. Cheyne, S.D. Rueffer, and I.R. Newby-Clark, “Hypnogogic and
hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: Neurological and
cultural constructions of the night-mare,” Consciousness and Cognition 8
(1999): 319–337.
28
Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 196–197.
29
Ibid., 1036.
30
Isherwood, Ramakrishna and his disciples, 298.
31
Ibid., 468.
32
Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 196.
33
R. Rolland, The life of Ramakrishna (Delhi: Advaita Ashram, 2000), 45.
(Original publication 1929).
34
Ibid., 46.
35
Ibid.
36
Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 30; also see 17.
37
J.D. Long, “Anekanta Vedanta: Toward a deep Hindu religious pluralism,” in
Deep religious pluralism, ed. D.R. Griffin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 2005), 145.
38
Nikhilananda, The gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 31.
39
Ibid., 197.
40
R. Broughton, “Biorhythmic variations in consciousness and psychological
functions,” Canadian Psychological Review 16 (1975): 217–239; M.P.
Gerkema,”Ultradian rhythms,” in Biological rhythms, ed. V. Kumar (New
York: Springer-Verlag, 2002), 207–215.
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 77

41
N. Kleitman, Sleep and wakefulness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press),
1963, 1969, 1982.
42
Gerkema,”Ultradian rhythms,” 2002.
43
L.C. Johnson, “The REM cycle is a sleep-dependent rhythm,” Sleep 2 (1980):
299–307; H. Schulz, G. Dirlich, and J. Zulley, “Phase shifts in the REM
sleep rhythm.” Pflugers Archiv: European Journal of Physiology 28 (1975):
203–212.
44
M. Hayashi, K. Sato, and T. Hori, “Ultradian rhythms in task performance,
self-evaluation, and EEG activity,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 79 (1994):
791–800; D. Shannahoff-Khalsa, “Lateralized rhythms of the central and
autonomic nervous systems,” International Journal of Physiology 11 (1991):
225–251; D. S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, J.C. Gillin, F.E. Yates, A. Schlosser, and
E.M. Zawadzki, “Ultradian rhythms of alternating cerebral hemispheric
EEG dominance are coupled to rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye
movement stage 4 sleep in humans,” Sleep Medicine 2 (2001): 333–346; Y.
Tsuji, and T. Kobayashi, “Short and long ultradian EEG components in
daytime arousal,” Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 70
(1988): 110–117.
45
R. Klein and Armitage, R. “Rhythms in human performance: 1½-hour
oscillations in cognitive style.” Science 22 (1979): 1326–1328; A.C.
Neubauer and H.H. Freudenthaler, “Ultradian rhythms in cognitive
performance: no evidence for a 1.5-h rhythm,” Biological Psychology 40
(1995): 281–298.
46
Rhythms of a higher frequency than the BRAC may govern the temporal
pattern of mystical experiences of a shorter duration than Ramakrishna’s
samadhi. For example, event-related neural oscillations may set the
internal temporal structure of exceptionally brief mystical experiences (for
neural oscillations, see G. Buzsaki and A. Draguhn, “Neuronal oscillations
in cortical networks,” Science 304 (2004): 1926–1929; L.M. Ward,
“Synchronous neural oscillations and cognitive processes,” Trends in
Cognitive Science 7 (2003): 553–559). The process perspective illustrated in
the present essay is developed in: D.T. Bradford, “Mystical Process in Isaac
the Syrian: Tears, Penthos, and the Physiology of Dispassion,” in Studies in
Spirituality, 2016; D.T. Bradford, The spiritual tradition in Eastern
Christianity: Ascetic psychology, mystical experience, and physical practices
(Leuven: Peeters Publishers), 2016. A neuropsychologically informed
process perspective on Archetypal Psychology can be found in D.T.
Bradford, “A certain form of psychotherapy (kenosis, prajna, Jung, and
Hillman),” in The roar of awakening: A Whiteheadian dialogue between
Western psychotherapies and Eastern worldviews, ed. G. Defer, Z. Wang,
and M. Weber (Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2009), 201–218.
For emotional process in devotional mysticism, see D.T. Bradford,
“Emotion in mystical experience,” Religion, Brain, and Behavior 3 (2013):
1-16. For a process psychology developed by early Christian ascetics, and
78 David T. Bradford

its likeness to early Buddhist psychology, see D.T. Bradford, “Comparable


process psychologies in Eastern Christianity and Early Buddhism,” in
Chromatikon VII: Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, (2011): 87–102. For a
critique and elaboration of the microgenetic theory of mysticism, see D.T.
Bradford, “Microgenesis of mystical awareness,” in Neuropsychology and
philosophy of mind in process: Essays in honor of Jason W. Brown, ed. M.
Pachalska and M. Weber (Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008),
53–113. For an outline of a single comprehensive mystical process,
segments of which account for diverse types of mystical experience, see:
D.T. Bradford, “A process perspective on mystical states of awareness” in
Chromatikon X. Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, (2014): 115–120.
Simultaneity and Serial Order
Jason W. Brown1

“A man sets himself the task of portraying the world.


Through the years he peoples a space with images…
Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth
Of lines traces the image of his face.”
Borges, Dreamtigers

Abstract
The present paper develops as a suspension of a “length” of the before/after
of succession within a mind/brain state. The earlier does not vanish into the
later, but adds a penultimate layer as its immediate predecessor descends to a
lower phase. Oncoming states, revived close to the perceptual surface, are
progressively attenuated over time. With each new state, the segment at the
posterior boundary is replaced by the next in succession. The epochal nature
of states —the simultaneity of before/after succession and the simultaneity of
the now— give the duration that hovers over passage. The transition from
before/after to perspectival time involves consciousness of embedded revivals
in the mental state. The transition is from the simultaneity of an epochal state
to serial order in the simultaneity of present duration. In this shift, the self is
simultaneous with images and objects, and is conscious of a past that would
not otherwise exist. The inclusion of phases in forgetting as part of the
perceptual now supports the claim that veridical perception results from the
imposition of sensibility on the subjectivity of mind-external.

1. Introduction
To common sense, the perception of serial order is not a problem, since we
have a direct perception of the changing sights and sounds of the world,
which simply impinge on the mind/brain in the order of their occurrence.1 For
many cognitive scientists, serial order is just the causal sequence of events in
the world mirrored by events in the mind. From the standpoint of movement,
serial order is explained by chains of association, just one thing after another,
whether a person playing a game of basketball or chess, or a computer
playing a sonata. What chaining does not explain is the memory of

1
New York University Medical Center (New York).
80 Jason W. Brown

antecedents and the anticipation of consequents, both of which are no more


essential to perception than they are to memory. The theory of causal chains
applied to actions and (perceptible) events in the world extends, by
implication, to memory, which is conceived as recurrent perception.
However, chaining cannot explain an essential (if implicit) aspect of much
perception and conception, the chunking of serial wholes prior to their
sequential enactment, the apprehension of the whole of an event, from
beginning to end in vision or audition, hearing stretches of language or music,
phrases and melodies, even an entire work, a poem or piece of music in the
mind. Such chunking always entails spatialization.
Temporal chaining and spatial assembly in fact derive from the same
theory. The concept of causal chains entails that the brain not only directly
perceives an object sequence but pieces the object together from its
perceptible features, such as color, size, shape and movement. Functional
components for such features are inferred from what is observed in
perception. Parts of objects are internalized in the machinery of their
construction, just as bricks and mortar are the constituents of a wall. We see
the wall put together from its parts, and assume that objects in perception,
such as the perception of the wall, are put together in the same way. We see
color and postulate a functional area or system that adds color to the final
object. We see motion and postulate that it is perceived by way of detectors
that add motion. The finding of brain cells that detect motion leads to the
assumption that change and serial order are outcomes of the operations of
functional units dedicated to their detection.2 This implies that objects are
aggregates of smaller elements in the physical world, in the physical brain
and, finally, in the mind of the perceiver. The isolation of atomic solids in
space —wholes as sums of parts— is comparable to the isolation of solid
objects in time —duration as a compilation of instants.
An object, however, can only move or change in relation to the world
around it, and at every moment there is a changing relatedness of the world.
The inter-locking motion of the totality is missed when interest settles on one
object or its features. If one postulates a functional brain area for objects, is
there such a correlation for the space between them? The inability to study
the entire field, and the inclination of science to ever-greater precision and
analysis, explain why the study of the mind/brain tends to isolate the simplest
psychic or neural elements and proceed from there to a theory of the
complex. But starting with elements conditions theory and reinforces the
notion that a field is an aggregate, or that the world-manifold is a composite
held together by external relations. All these accounts are of a piece with the
concept of succession as a causal chain in mind or world, while the real
questions are how the mind/brain perceives succession in the first place, the
nature of implicit and explicit change and how the past relates to the present.
Simultaneity and Serial Order 81

What individuates particulars that float in the soup of perceptual space? An


object is singled out by attention, the focus of which can go from field to
object, or from an object to a particular, a feature or an attribute. The object is
whatever is attended to, but attention itself depends upon a
conceptualization, a caategory, whether it be a landscape, a horse or a fly on
its back, or even a speck. Elements in perception are contrasts at different
levels of detail, not individual building blocks. The space between objects is
not a vacuum or void, at least not in visual perception, but is itself an object.
We perceive an enormous gestalt in which figural elements specify according
to interest or value. This leads one to ask, is the pattern of whole to part in
mind, in its complexity, a microcosm of universal law?
Conventional theory is at risk when objects are conceived not as static
wholes unto themselves but as parts or aspects of events, for then change is
prior to stability. When I close one eye, then the other, or tap my eyeball and
the world jumps to one side, I do not think the world is moving. When my
eyes flicker in microsaccades or move in voluntary gaze, the world remains
relatively motionless. When I lift my hand to my eyes, it does not increase in
size to the extent anticipated in optical geometry. In such instances, motion
or change and its absence are attributed to the mind, to constancies, to
categories, to the eyes or to feedback systems that control eye movement, all
of which have evolved to keep the world and the self as stable as possible.
This raises the question, is change artificially stabilized or is the changing
image of the world a succession of static pictures (e.g. Andrews and Purves,
2005)?
The capacity to arrest change and apprehend what appear to be logical
solids in the mind or physical solids in the world, or to perceive change as
something that happens to an object, or to perceive objects as instigators of
change, is fundamentally the problem of change itself. The perception of
objects as things, not events, or the perception of an event as the change an
object undergoes, or the sequence of object occurrences, or the collection of
states of the same object (or self), is possible when a series of actualities —or
mental states— contracts to an object or expands to an event. To perceive the
momentary history of an event as a whole, or as a collection of slices, entails
that snapshots of varying thickness are perceived in a certain order. Every
instant an object changes in relation to the field and the observer’s
perspective. These snapshots, if that is what they are, have to be summed or
averaged over some duration just to be perceived.
In order for an object to exist as a “solid,” or for a solid to become an
event, it must recur over successive durations. This is true for all perceptions,
though it is more emphatic in some modalities than others. It may not be
obvious that a tree, like any visual object, must be perceived over a
succession of occasions for it to be perceived at all. To perceive a continuous
82 Jason W. Brown

series, not a succession of flashes, and to be aware of the succession,


temporal order must be sustained by the recurrence of the object. As
mentioned, this is no less essential to visual perception than to audition. For
vision, we usually say the object is just there and perceived as it is, while in
audition, the difficulty is finessed by saying that words or tones are held in
memory over a period of time. To hear language or music supposes that
temporal-order in memory accounts for time-order in perception. The usual
idea is that the order is first perceived and then transferred to short-term or
working memory. But, since an “instant” no longer exists when the next
occurs, working memory is merely a technical term to mask explanation.
What does it mean for something to be held in memory if the immediate past
no longer exists in actuality? If the past must be revived in the present, how is
temporal order maintained, revived, perceived? If the past fully perished and
could not be revived, every object would be a momentary and unfamiliar
novelty, as would the self that perceives it. Without at least an implicit
memory of antecedents there would be a stroboscopic succession of
disconnected selves and worlds.3 Clearly, the past must be within the present
—indeed, the major part of the present— for both the stability of an object
and its change over time.4

2. Conscious and unconscious


Change or motion actualize in the mind as temporally-ordered events.
Whether internal or external, they reflect the temporal order of events as they
actualize in the mind. We know, inter alia, from the lag in perceiving an
object or from the image that results from binocular disparity, that perception
is not on-line with physical nature. We perceive mental images that model
physical events, not the physical events themselves, which are inferred from
the images. Object and space are the outcome of the sculpting and
externalization of phases underlying image-formation. The transition to
objects from the intra-psychic and unconscious to the conscious and external
is so obvious and so often stated it should be accepted as a starting point for
speculation (see Noe, 2002). Let us begin with the transition in the mental
state from depth to surface or onset to termination in relation to time and
change.
Many thinkers since von Hartmann (1868/1931) and Freud have claimed a
transition from timelessness to temporal order. Since timelessness is non-
existence, and the unconscious does not have the instantaneity of a
durationless slice, it is preferable to speak of simultaneity, which has
extension or thickness. Simultaneity is not quite the same as instanteneity, for
it encloses, in a spatial epoch, the duration or temporal extensibility of the
Simultaneity and Serial Order 83

process through which the entity becomes what it is. If unconscious process
in a conscious person is conceived as a subliminal transition, i.e. if the psychic
unconscious is beneath or outside consciousness though essential to it, and if
the unconscious exists when the mental state actualizes, what would be the
form of an unconscious transition that actualized without becoming
conscious? On the microgenetic account, consciousness is always preceded
by, and enfolds, an unconscious transition, so that an attenuated mental state,
such as dream, or a variety of pathological states, even coma, could exist
without realizing consciousness, For most psychologists it is the other way
around, i.e. experience first passes through consciousness in order to be
revived in the unconscious. A memory is the record of a perception, as the
imagery of a dream is a memory (true or distorted) of prior conscious
experience. On this view, which is not uncommon among those hostile to
psychoanalytic excess, in which content in the un-conscious is dependent on,
is a copy of and secondary to consciousness, without which, qua unconscious,
it would not exist, the unconscious is merely a physiological storehouse of
past conscious experience. It is worth noting that Jung’s break with Freud was
partly over this storehouse notion.
For microgenetic theory a memorial unconscious underlies and is
antecedent to conscious experience (Fig. 1). Consciousness is an endpoint of
unconscious process —actually, a relation of early to late phases in this
process (Brown, 2008a, Pachalska et al 2009). An image develops out of
memory to externalize as an object, while a perception sinks or decays
beneath consciousness. Microgenetic theory holds that the perceptual rim is
uncovered to reveal underlying memory or dream, as pre-terminal phases re-
actualize to varying degrees of completeness and in conformity with
immediate experience. Stages of long-term, short-term and iconic memory
are traversed in the original perception and uncovered as it decays (Brown,
1986, et seq.). In brief, instead of perception laying down memory, memory lays
down perception. Further, it is necessary to avoid a preoccupation with the
contents of the unconscious —memories, images, dreams— for it is the
process of unconscious mentation, not the content into which the process
deposits, that is common to human consciousness. Content varies, process is
uniform.5
84 Jason W. Brown

Fig. 1: The transition, or process of becoming, from core (self) to perception


(world) frames a mind/brain state. Consciousness is the relation of early to
late or depth to surface in this process. Visual and verbal imagery, including
conceptual or intentional feeling, arise at intermediate phases so long as an
external world is realized. The arrow represents sensation acting on the phase
of imagery to externalize and adapt the state to the physical world. The
phase-transition is non-temporal until it terminates. The mind/brain state and
immediate present develop in a fraction of a second, replaced by overlapping
states.

What is the status of the unconscious in the absence of consciousness?


Since a mental state is not conscious until its antecedents are transformed,
the unconscious achieves a retroactive existence on becoming conscious.
Access to unconscious cognition in conscious subjects is limited, for it is
transformed by sensation to adapt to conditions in the physical world.
Symptom-formation in cases of brain damage is helpful in this respect. For
example, errors tend to respect the bacckground category of the target item,
e.g. chair for table. Pathology reveals the background lexical category from
which that item is selected that is adaptive to the immediate situation.
Similary, one cannot perceive and hallucinate in the same locus at the same
time because hallucination, as with other forms of imagery, entrains the same
process leading to final perception. Claims of a revolution in perception
theory by Kosslyn, or Llinas, that dream is parsed by sensation to perception
are identical to what I proposed years ago (summarized in Brown, 1986).6
However, the paradox of dream is that the unconscious takes on existence
only when the individual awakens. If dream and REM dissociate with no
definite markers of dream in a sleeping person, certainly not of its content,
Simultaneity and Serial Order 85

the only direct knowledge of the unconscious is when it becomes conscious,


at which point we can no longer say it is unconscious. Does a dream that fails
to achieve consciousness exist in actuality?7 One would have to postulate
“degrees” of actuality, with acts and perceptions having more actuality than
thoughts, thoughts more than dreams that are not remembered on waking
and such dreams more than dispositions.
Perhaps one should speak of differing states of actuality, or the extent to
which particulars are specified in a given mental state. Existence is more
readily applied to the external, the distinct and specific, rather than the
internal, general and non-specific. Existence is being, but whatever becomes,
i.e. actualizes, achieves being for the moment of its existence. If we believe
that thoughts, images and dreams exist, a thing does not have to be real,
substantive and external to have existence. The transition from concept to
object is one of increasing clarity and actuality. Concepts seem vague and
impalpable, objects real and substantive, but we would not want to say
concepts do not exist. Here, the idea of existence clashes with that of the real
(Brown, 2004). We might not want to say that dream images are real, but
would we say a dream, even if unreal, does not exist?
Indeed, most of us have experienced, while dreaming, a subject-object
reality that in some respects is indistinguishable from waking reality, no
matter how fantastical or surreal many of these dreams later, on reflection,
prove to be. This indistinguishable is a remarkable, if seldom reflected-upon,
fact that is critical, for example, to conceive the conceptions of James (1899)
on mysticism and consciousness. The reality of the dream depends on a
conspiracy of the senses. Waking perception as well depends on the sme
conspiracy of senses or, put differently, the coherence across modalities.
Thus, patients with a visual hallucination of a face recognize its hallucinatory
quality until the image speaks, at which point the image is taken as real.
A dream is an endogenous perception that lacks sensation to carry it
outward. Sensation at the visual (auditory, etc.) cortex parses, analyses,
transports and detaches the image and its space outward into (as) the external
world. The fundamental difference between dream and waking perception is
the adaptive or survival value of the latter due to sensory constraints at the
final phase of the image-development, and the degree to which the
endogenous image exteriorizes. Is this sufficient for objects to have greater
existence than images or dreams? It is also the case that the existence of a
thing depends on the duration over which it actualizes. If the actual is epochal
and if existence is existence in time, each actuality has a unique temporal
character.
86 Jason W. Brown

3. The perception of change


The shift from cause to effect has usually been postulated as simultaneous,
though for some it is successive. Causal sequence in the world is perceived as
a particular kind of transition of a continuous event or event series. If the
process account of this shift is correct, i.e. as the appearance of a transition
from one conscious endpoint to another, with change occuring in the
derivation of the endpoint in an epoch of consciousness, the causal shift
would be simultaneous if occuring within an epoch and successive if occuring
across epochs. Specifically, as states are replaced, not concatenated, real
change occurs within the actualization or microgenesis of the state while
apparent change occurs across its conscious outcomes.
Some writers have looked at the shift from the simultaneity of spatial
cognition to the successivity of the temporal in speech or action. This has also
been framed in terms of a shift from the (spatial) right to the (temporal) left
hemisphere (e.g. Teuber, 1956; Luria, 1966), or from posterior to anterior
brain processes in language, as inferred from aphasia (e.g. Jakobson, 1968).
There may also be a transition from the simultaneous to the serial in the
microgeny of a mental state. If the inception of the mental is simultaneous,
and temporal order occurs at the conscious endpoint, (spatial) simultaneity
and (temporal) seriality refer to earlier and later in a single epoch. While the
shift from spatial to temporal, or simultaneous to successive, has been
discussed in neuropsychology, the philosophical difficulties and implications
of such a shift, as well as the nature of simultaneity and succession, have not
received sufficient attention.
Not just the simultaneity of the unconscious can be posited, but that of the
mind/brain state as a whole, which is simultaneous over the epoch of its
existence. Entities have a temporal extensibility over which they become
what they are. In mind, late phases are not the outputs of early ones which,
having been traversed, disappear, but rather early phases are embedded in
late ones and all phases actualize together on completion of the final phase.
There are conditions in which the core might be the endpoint of the state, say
when processes mediating subsequent phases are inactive or destroyed, as
perhaps in coma or dreamless sleep. There are cases in which an
intermediate phase actualizes briefly as a pathological symptom, such as an
aphasic naming a chair as a table, but a phase in transition does not exist in
isolation. A phase is not a temporal object. An object is the minimal cycle of
phases that constitutes one epoch. Thus, a hypothetical atom is not a
collection of slices in the orbit of an electron or the sum of its positions at
every slice, but is one complete revolution. Existence is all or nothing, and the
existence of the all is simultaneous when an entity becomes the being that it
is.
Simultaneity and Serial Order 87

How is temporal order in consciousness achieved? Is it by unpacking the


given whole of the spatial simultaneity? Is it a result of the replacement of
individual states? If serial order derives from simultaneity or potentiality,
simultaneity would forecast succession in the derivation of a state. If a
succession of states is required, experience is still confined to the virtual
present of a single state. The now, the present moment, arises in the disparity
between the endpoint of an actualization and a phase to which the past is
revived, so that successive states are required to stratify the phase-transition
as well as to sustain it.8
If serial order in consciousness is coupled to the phase-transition leading to
consciousness, as deduced from the state on completion, with memories of
recent events revived in the order of their occurrence —the transition
activating earlier, then later phases in memory up to the final perception—
the sequence of activation could provide the basis for a line in time from the
immediate past to the present endpoint. When we listen to speech or music,
the words and tones continue to resonate for some period of time as each
new sound is perceived. This is explained by the strength (degree) of revival
—usually cast as decay— of preceding states in novel ones. The earlier events
are incompletely revived in relation to their pastness or, perhaps, the feeling
of the relative pastness owes to the degree of revival. A transition leading
through memory to perception that is apprehended as a horizontal sequence
from past to present would explain sequencing in action, music, language, in
the world and in the mind (Fig. 2). Since the duration laid down by the phase-
transition enfolds the memorial remnants of prior states that provide the
posterior boundary of the now, both perceived and remembered event-series
fall within the present duration. In that this account explains order in both
memory and perception, it has a parsimony not found in rival theories.

Fig. 2. The perception (P) at Tn is replaced at Tn+1 by another perception


(Q), which may resemble or differ from that at Tn. Perceptual stability
depends on resemblance; change depends on difference. Within the
88 Jason W. Brown

perception (arrow, R), the mind/brain state at Tn+2 revives Tn+1 almost
completely, such that the image of P at Tn+2 is prior to the object (Q), and so
on. Over a brief succession of mental states, P, Q and R represent images of
past perceptions revived to a decreasing extent in the oncoming present, and
graded according to this revival. An eidetic image is a near-complete revival.
A memory image is a vague recurrence at some psychic distance from a
present object. At Tn+3, the series of images, P, Q and R, forms an order
antecedent to the perception (S). The perception and memory of serial order
depend on the perception developing out of memory. Serial order occurs
within the present, but depends on succession for the layering of prior
experience.

As mentioned, a static mental state with a spatial character is the


precondition for serial order since temporalized order can only actualize as an
epochal whole. The simultaneity or spatial totality of the present epoch
distributes into the order it realizes. Regardless of whether temporal order in
a mental state develops from the totality of an epoch or an iteration of
totalities, in the transition from initial simultaneity (core), through the before
and after of the phase-transition, to the now that arises with a conscious
endpoint, the state incorporates three modes of time-discourse:
1. Simultaneity, which entails temporal thickness or extensibility,
2. Physical passage in the becoming of the mind/brain state, which gives
mind but is itself mind-independent, and
3. A subjective present (past, future) that gives being or existence to the
transition.
The simultaneity (1) that is the spatial whole of the core, or the epoch it
generates, leads to and embraces a transition over phases (2) that is the
bridge to temporal order. This transition, and the duration of the present that
is its outcome (3), correspond to the two series of McTaggart (1927), though
without the implication of externalism. Since the transition does not exist
until it is complete, at which point the entire transition actualizes, every
temporal moment or mind/brain state —whether a static picture or an event-
sequence— occurs against a backdrop of simultaneity.
Ordering depends not on perceived succession but the implicit role of
succession in the layering of memory and the replacement of one state by the
next. But is it possible that serial order is just the perception of linkage made
fluid by the rapidity of shifts? This assumes that a mental state, as an epochal
whole, is simultaneous through its phases, with change from one epoch to the
next being experienced as causal links, i.e. the linkage of states, not their
replacement or overlap. We are conscious of the final contents of a state, not
the transition from state to state or depth to surface, nor are we aware of
interstices in the linkage. Even if temporal order is not dissociable from
Simultaneity and Serial Order 89

oncoming and antecedent states, any account based on rapid succession must
return to events within the state itself.
Consider the phase-transition within the state in relation to replacement
across states. If order is laid down in the distribution of spatial objects, or if it
is derived serially from the outpouring of the core, the array of objects in the
world would be a static grouping with a leading edge of change, i.e. micro-
events fused to an event-sequence in the overlap. An object would then be an
incipient event that becomes continuous when the next state appears. The
perishing of the state would support the anticipation of the next and avoid a
succession of pictures. If the clock duration of a mental state of 50-100
milliseconds is insufficient to generate serial order within the state, like the
flash of a tachystoscope (stroboscope), it might permit a perception of
forward momentum. Order and continuity would then depend on the overlap
of recurrences.
Is conscious succession —the sequence of events in observation, or the
motion of the world in perception— an illusion of causal transition? Is it like
the phi phenomenon, in which illusory change results from the rapid
replacement of static images? A series of causal pairs may explain fusion from
one state to the next, but not memory of preceding pairs to give a continuous
event or narrative. Some have noted differences between real and apparent
motion but others (e.g. Frisby, 1973; in Schiffman, 1976; p. 262) have argued
they “are mediated by the same movement detecting mechanism.” There is
an dependence of intensity of stimuli, distance between them and time
(Schiffman, 1976). In a movie, continuity requires a frequency of around 40
milliseconds per frame, which is close to the estimated duration of a mental
state, thus the rate postulated for the replacement. This rate is likely governed
by a pacemaker and is relatively constant, but there are individuals with brain
damage in whom events appear to be speeded up or slowed down (Hoff and
Poetzl, 1988ed). The acceleration and deceleration of events in pathological
cases, as in the speed of a film projector, might reflect the frequency of
replacement.
The conclusion of this line of thought is that states are not concatenations
but superimpositions on the remnants of predecessors that are embedded as
memorial residues (Fig. 2 above). The graded decay of memory is its graded
revival in conformance with the occurrent state. We see a tree as persistent
because of the similarity across recurrences. If the recurrence differs from its
predecessor, the object is perceived as changing. In psychology, decay
(revival) is assumed to account for serial order in memory, as in episodic
tagging or stacking in forgetting, at least for short-term memory. However,
what accounts for serial recall in memory must apply to perception.
90 Jason W. Brown

4. Perception and memory


In order to understand temporal order in perception it is necessary to
understand the relation of perception to memory. An incomplete perception
has the character of a memory. The decay of perception to short-term
memory, which is dogma in psychology, is ordinarily conceived as the
transfer of perception to a store that retains many of the physical features of
the original stimulus. One problem with this theory is that it posits a trace that
is degraded rather than one that is incompletely revived. The persistence of a
dead past is the heart of the problem under study. As soon as an object is
past, it no longer exists except as an echo in memory. The concept of
perception as externalized memory, or forgetting as incomplete revival, puts
the relation of memory and perception in a different light. On this view, the
transition is from long-term to short-term memory to perception. The
trajectory is the opposite of that assumed in psychology. A perception grows
out of phases in memory uncovered as incomplete recurrences within a
momentary actuality.
The greater part of perception is memorial, the endogenous infrastructure
of which is modeled by sensory data to represent objects in the world. To
understand subjective time and serial order, it is necessary to conceive
perception as a form of exteriorized memory. Russell (1921) wrote of the
relation of image to object, but Whitehead (p. 69) pointed directly to the
memorial basis of perception: “there is no essential reason why memory
should not be raised to the vividness of the present fact; and thus from the
side of mind, what is the difference between the present and the past”?
Again, (p. 73): “what we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory
tinged with anticipation.” The difference owes to the effects of sensation on
an endogenous process of image formation.
The claim here is that serial order in memory underlies serial order in
perception. The recall of the order of past events, so-called episodic memory,
develops in a setting (some would say out of a store) that is simultaneous until
it partitions. Whether memories are conceived as associative chains, circuits,
networks or configural potentials, whether they are localized or distributed,
until they are activated they are dormant possibilities, not actualities or
existents. An event in memory is a potential for activation. The search for the
memory store, trace or engram, has a long disappointing history. This is
because the accuracy of recall is determined by the extent to which the phase-
sequence of the initial encounter is revived. In what other sense can we even
write of the existence or temporal location of the memory of a long-forgotten
face that is suddenly revived in a chance encounter? In what sense is a memory
in the brain waiting to be activated? On the other hand, how does something
come into existence from non-existence?
Simultaneity and Serial Order 91

A difference between episodic memory, in which an event is ordered in


time, and semantic memory, which is for knowledge rather than events, that
is, for thought or language rather than perceptual experience, is that episodes
become parts of categories, shifting their allegience from isolated occurrence
to family resemblance, i.e as members of a category. An event absorbed in a
category, say by repeated exposure, loses its exceptionality. The recurrence
strips the event of episodic context for the relational system of thought. If I
travel a certain route only once, I may remember it as an event in time. If I
travel the same route every day, it becomes part of my knowledge, and is
recalled as a specific occasion only if something unexpected happens. The
unexpected creates novelty by decontextualizing an event from a family of
like-occurrences.
The temporal locus of a memory, its position in a temporal series, can be
accurate in immediate recall, as in hearing and recalling a telephone number,
but even here it is imperfect, and it becomes more fallible over time. I can say
that my first trip to Paris preceded one to Barcelona, though the revival of
other events may be required to reconstruct the sequence and locate a
specific event in the correct order, especially if there are frequent visits to
both cities. The specificity of encounters is here in tension with the generality
of categories. Separation in time is naturally important. I would probably not
recall whether, on a first visit to Paris, I went first to the 5th or 7th
arrondisement. In amnesia with a shrinkage of past (and present) duration,
the inability to revive events, even implicitly, fails to articulate and expand
past duration. Empty duration collapses on itself.
Do events in episodic memory have markers or relational indices of the
perceptual history of their occurrence? To assign a temporal tag to events, or
postulate a scanning device (Lashley, 1951) merely offers a mechanism as
much in need of explanation as what it purports to explain.9 In citing the
Würzburg school, Lashley implied, as is developed in this paper, an hierarchic
system of unconscious schema or constructs out of which serial order
develops. His example of the final word of a lengthy sentence disambiguating
the meaning evoked the problem of languages such as German, in which a
sentence may not be understood until the final verb. Many subsequent
accounts have focused on language production and errors. The difficulties
illustrated by such phenomena as co-articulation, pronominal reference or
Spoonerisms, and the various computational models they have led to may
seem plausible, but they make no attempt to relate the model to brain
function and neuropsychology, nor do they address the more fundamental
issues of a lost past that reappears in an actual present. The argument here is
that an episodic sequence in memory, i.e. the temporal order of past events
in a mental state, or the basis on which we say A came before B, and B before
92 Jason W. Brown

C in the past, i.e. succession in thought and memory, is the same problem as
the temporal order —A, B, C— of ongoing experience (Fig. 2).
In perception, event-order is immediate, objective and external, in
memory it is fuzzy, often effortful, internal and imaginal. This distinction,
which is one of memory and perception, of inner and outer, mind and world,
not serial order, helps us to know whether an experience is a memory or a
perception. We get a glimpse of the fragility of this distinction in deja vu. A
unified theory is obligatory if perception, as Whitehead put it, always contains
an element of memory. Merleau-Ponty went further when he wrote that we
remember events into perception. (See also, Bergson, 1896/1959).
Probably, the experience of an animal is closer to the perception of a
succession of scenes, bodily adjustments and anticipations than an
apprehension of order over an extended series. It is doubtful that an animal is
aware of a chase. Rather, there is a succession of acts and objects and a tacit
computation of trajectories that are positions in static pictures without an
apprehension of the ongoing sequence. We do not believe an animal has a
past to compare with a present for the recognition of serial order. Obviously,
animals learn from past experience, and there is implicit revival, even to the
conditioning of response bias, for the recognition of danger and opportunity,
as for the perception of change, but we do not presume the animal is
conscious of its past. There is sensitivity to change even as the world is
changing, e.g. the movement of a mouse to a hawk, a deer to a lion. A sudden
shift in the detail of a static picture resonates more than overall change in the
array. Similarly, humans are more sensitive to difference than sameness on
experimental tests, possibly because sameness as a static picture is the
background out of which difference resolves, as difference or contrast is
necessary for the awareness of sameness.

5. A note on dream report


The argument that memory and perception have a common basis entails that
processes underlying serial recall are the same as those for serial order in
perception. If the awareness of a series of recalled events is comparable to the
awareness of ongoing events, one approach to the resemblance is through the
phenomenon of dream recall, in which the memory of a dream appears to be
coupled to the dream sequence, especially in a lengthy and complex dream.
However, we also have the impression that the dream is first apprehended
when recalled as a whole, with the constituent events taking on order as they
fade. In dream and ordinary recall, as in perception, serial order is embedded
in the present state, even if a succession of states is necessary for the
embedding. For some, causal relations between mental states are assumed to
Simultaneity and Serial Order 93

fill the eventless, timeless gaps in succession and account for the continuity or
continuous identity of perceptual objects. In dream, similarity of shape,
function, signification and family resemblance appear to conserve identity
and serial relatedness. In a strong, Laplacean causation, the world unfolds in
time like a movie. Given a state of the world at any moment, all ensuing
states follow of necessity. If the causal future of the world unfolds like a film
from a reel, could a temporal series in the mind unfold out of simultaneity?
At any moment we live in overlapping bubbles of the immediate moment.
Preceding states are a past that no longer exists; ensuing states are
continuously becoming present (how the replacing state retains patterns of
the state it replaces is discussed below). Serial order depends on succession,
but mere correspondence is not explanatory. The absence of the awareness of
a past during a dream may reflect the congealing of succession in the
thickness of the state on waking but all images in dream or perception,
present or past, exist in the present.
Some might argue that the entire past of the individual is revived in the
present. The Lebensfilm phenomenon in near-death experience, in which
one’s life is said to pass before the eyes, suggests this possibility (Schilder,
1950). McCulloch (1965) was lead to similar conclusions based on hypnosis
and other data.10 To what extent is the seriality applied to dream an effort at
meaning and plausibility as the awakened self grasps at narrative? If passing
images are immediate on waking, i.e. if the entire dream, though
apprehended on waking as a whole, occurs within a limited set of overlapping
states, how are the images aligned in the order of their occurrence?
The content of dream differs from ordinary recall in its novelty, digression,
derailment, substitution and symbolism, all features of early cognition.
Consider a dream of a past vacation in relation to its conscious recollection.
On the usual interpretation, recollection is for events that were initially
conscious, and thus, even if spotty or incomplete, events are revived with a
greater correspondence to the objective sequence. In contrast, dream is a
secondary elaboration of what was first in consciousness, with the quality and
order of events subsidiary to their meaning. The microgenetic interpretation
deepens this understanding in claiming that conscious experience traverses a
memorial infrastructure, which is tapped in memory and recurs to a varying
extent in dream. Content beneath the original perception that is revived in
memory is uncovered in dream, with the lesser degree of realization and lack
of sensation giving the unreality and precarious recall.
This account of order in dream-recall is reminiscent of inspired thought in
creativity (Brown, 2008), when a work is apprehended all at once, then
composed or worked out over time. The description of Mozart hearing a work
all at once in his mind, though disputed, conforms to my experience (Brown,
2005) and that of other writers, composers and artists (Koestler, 1964).
94 Jason W. Brown

Composition occurs in dream or transitional states, such as the Kublai Khan of


Coleridge, or Wagner’s Prelude to Das Rheingold. In fact, the ability to revive a
poem or piece of music composed in dream is perhaps the best indication
that waking recall preserves the order of visual and auditory images.
In creative insight, in dream, trance or transitional states (Brown, 2008),
the potential for order may occur in spatially-given parts. An example can be
found in studies of iconic imagery when, say, a 3 X 3 matrix of 9 numbers is
briefly presented and the subject asked to recall them. Usually, a few are
recalled each time as the remainder fades, but it can be shown that in each
exposure any set at any location has the potential to be recalled. The numbers
are apprehended all at once but they cannot all be recalled in one exposure.
The necessity to report items in a series gives an order to the report, but the
order, not present in the stimulus, is chosen by the subject. The relevance to
dream would be that on waking, the focus on a few images is at the expense
of the many irrespective of where in the dream one begins. Any part of the
dream can be remembered, but recalling what is focal in consciousness tends
to occlude the remainder. In creative work as well, it is not unusual that the
Idea spills into portions irrespective of the final order. Cut-and-paste revision
sorts out order as composition is renewed. The waking self is felt to impose
order on the Idea and, to a lesser extent, the dream content, in contrast to
perception, in which order is felt to be independent of the observer.
The order of events in a dream, or in more distant memory, is relatively
inessential, while in perception it is inescapable. Memories come and go in
relation to current life experience but the exact order or dating of a memory
is less important than its content or effect on current behavior. Order is
prominent in dream because the dream is closer to perception, and
perception cannot occur without implicit order. Serial order shows decreasing
emphasis from perception to (very) short-term memory to working memory
to dream and to long-term memory.
Could one say that the order in dream on waking, or in memory, is
reconstructed from the imagery, while in perception, order is time-creating?
Put differently, serial order in perception mirrors objective time consistent
with its external locus, while in the subjectivity of dream and memory,
temporal order is less precise. Again, this confirms the thesis that external
images in perception are realized out of internal images in memory, with serial
order occuring as an implicit thread — or explicit narrative— of change from one
image to another. There is a deep commonalty in the ability to recall the event-
series of a dream, the ability to recall a series of events in memory, and the
ability to perceive an ongoing sequence of events in the world.
In perception and re-perception (memory), as one moves inward, time
gives way to space, succession to simultaneity, and serial order becomes
more elusive. The order of a subjective series (dream, memory) is not the
Simultaneity and Serial Order 95

residue of a perception, rather, the objective series of perception is founded


on the subjective one facilitated by sensation. The absence of sensation
permits the pre-perception to develop along endogenous lines. The categories
that prefigure the object give rise to unexpected images mediated by shared
atttributes, as in metaphor.
The memory of a face presupposes seeing the face before, but a face is
specified out of categories and is or is not recognized, i.e. is familiar or not,
before it is consciously perceived. In recall, the image of the face, to a varying
degree of clarity, recurs as long as completion to an external object is not
realized. This leads to the inference that the memory of the face, when it is
realized, is actually an uncovering of what stood there to be known, with its
terminal layer in perception. The difficulty for the perception-first account is
that order is retained in short-term and immediate memory when the effects
of sensation are over, an order that is essential to perceiving events in the first
place. The challenge to the memory-first account is that episodic recall and
temporal order in perception must arise out of a process of implicit learning
in which the present is influenced by the past without awareness of the
duration spanning the succession. In either case, a more fundamental
problem concerns the transition from spatial to temporal and the realization
of temporal order within a mental state in relation to state-succession.

6. Unconscious categories and conscious parts


Causation is the engine of conscious succession, as meaning is in dream.11
Serial order develops in the transition from relations of meaning to those of
causation, or from spatial relations to temporal order, or from a position in a
spatial pattern to a locus in a temporal series. This transition passes through
agency as an intermediate phase. The categories and meaning-relations of
unconscious process have a spatial character —this is why the unconscious is
said to be timeless— while objects in the external world are temporal but
largely devoid of meaning. Agent causation, deliberation, reason, decision,
choice, commitment, are psychic phenomena midway in the conveyance of
the psychic relations of meaning to the physical relations of cause and effect.
From a psychological standpoint, the relation of self to action in agency is
the ground of object-causation, not the other way around. We do not perceive
order in the world and internalize it as psychic causation. Instead, the impulse
in voluntary action is transferred to objects as they externalize. For Guyau
(1988ed), the child’s reach for an object is the seed of causation and the idea
of the future. The internal or psychic limb of this process is the self and its
intentional arc. The external limb is causal efficacy and the implementation of
the intentional aim. For some, causation in the world is mechanical passage.
96 Jason W. Brown

For others, it is guided by meaning, as in destiny, fate or the hand of deity.


The common belief that things happen for a reason is, for externalists, the
fiction of personal meaning inserted in nature’s machine. But such
externalism, presuming the mind-independence of objects, prevents a fuller
understanding of serial order as an exemplification of mind’s outward growth.
For the internalist, on the other hand, the meaning and value of external
objects is the thread of the observer’s feeling accompanying the object’s
outward migration, with the process through which an entity recurs having
the rudiments of psychic experience.
With regard to agency, which directs attention to an intentional object and
is thus an implementation of value in action, the contrarian thesis and the
kernel of truth in anthropomorphism is that feeling arises as energy in
elementary entities to reach its apogee in human value (Brown, 2005). The
seeds of meaning are planted in mind-independent entities, in temporal
extensibility, whole-part relations and primordial sentience, which evolve over
millions of years to human modes of thought. In this process, nascent
patterns of primitive existents are gradually transformed to a high level of
incursion in human mentation. We see this in the genesis of meaning out of
lower forms, its installation in objects and, in causal necessity (Hume), in the
outward transmission of feeling and meaning.
The claim that unconscious wholes translate to the succession of conscious
parts, in memory, in perception, in dream-recall and in creativity, can be
reconciled by attributing the whole to a category and the ordered items to its
members or parts (sub-categories). An object is a final particular but also,
itself, an implicit category of virtual parts, as well as of the recurrences or
snapshots buried in its stability or fused into events. An action (or utterance)
—in its derivation over a hierarchy of rhythms from postural and axial
systems to the distal innervation— is equally a category, the parts of which
are phases in its derivation. The transition from spatial to temporal parallels
this fractionation, as virtual wholes elicit concrete members or parts.
In any category, prototypical items exhibit the most salient properties, e.g.
chair, sparrow, while other items are atypical or less familiar, e.g. ottoman,
rhea. If the category furniture partitions to chair, table, sofa and so on, the
members are elicited in a temporal order that seems arbitrary. However, the
list is not arbitrary in that it reflects word frequency, familiarity, emotional
intensity, associative strength and psychic distance. Asked to give items of
furniture, one does not ordinarily begin with ottoman, so there are constraints
on the order of recall. If one takes a spontaneous category such as a vacation,
the sequence of events, or items in the category, seems less arbitrary, such as
planning the trip, packing a suitcase, the mode of travel, the voyage, the
destination, and so on, which have a causal or logical order. Does this
sequence exist in statu nascendi before the vacation begins?
Simultaneity and Serial Order 97

We think of the distance from the central to the peripheral meaning of a


category in abstract spatial terms, but eliciting members from typical to
atypical to marginal or overlapping transforms the virtual space of a category
to relations of serial enactment or recitation. When the images in a category
such as that of a particular dream are aligned on waking, the category or
meaning is discovered in the narrative. Often, it is only after the narrative
occurs that we begin to understand the categories of thought that were driving
the imagery.

7. Seriality and the store


If perception develops out of a non-temporal core, how is a sequence of
events in the world maintained or forecast at an unconscious phase? The
stacking of to-be-realized events in non-temporal planes supposes that a
mental state is layered like a tea garden, with events peeling off in the order
of their registration. Otherwise, tone or words heard in the past and revived
in the present would merge together in one discordant sound. We assume the
sequence of observed events in a single state corresponds to that in reality.
However, within a mental state, or with respect to the actualities the state
delivers, if the first in a brief series persists until the last registers, the first will
fade into memory when the last is perceived. In this scenario, events are like
pigeons on a wire, in which the first flies off, then others, but none actually
leave (exist in the mind) until the last in the series, i.e. the whole sequence, is
traversed (Fig. 2).
Put differently, phases in a mental state exist when the state terminates,
the sequence assuming order when the final phase is realized. If a single
mental state encompasses an event or brief succession, all phases in the state,
early and late, actualize together before any phase is perceived. The state can
be thought of as a spatial whole parsed to succession on completion. Now, if
events are perceived in the order of their occurrence, and the state is non-
temporal until it actualizes, how is order preserved? How is a melody heard if
the preceding tones no longer exist the moment of the present one? A melody
is a good illustration of this difficulty, since tones obviously perish, while
visual objects appear to persist unchanged, but it is the same problem.
Listening to speech or music is an example of holding an ordered stretch
of speech or musical sounds in memory. But to explain serial recall by saying
we remember the tones or words, or that retrieval recurs over the path of the
perception, merely describes the problem, since a memory of the past (tone,
word) is a memory in the present. Moreover, the process that accounts for
change also accounts for stability. Thus, the recurrence of a relatively
unchanging visual object such as a chair gives the impression of permanence
98 Jason W. Brown

in the world even if the object is impermanent in the mind, i.e. the stability of
the chair is sustained by the similarity of its recurrences, while change in an
auditory object, which depends on the revival of past sounds, tones or words,
gives the impression of impermanence in the world and persistence in the
mind.
Knowledge plays a role in the perception of temporal order, which points
once more to the memorial or conceptual underpinnings of perception and
serial time. A series of environmental sounds does not stick in the mind like a
melody, and a melody stays with the listener inter alia in relation to its
familiarity. In complex music, the more the piece is understood, the more the
listener will recall what is heard. The less coherent the music, the less a
sequence can be anticipated, the less revival is facilitated. Even the recall of
digits in a telephone number is accentuated if they are syncopated or given
rhythmically, or with familiarity in the sequence. Widely separated tones are
less easily revived. Intervening silence corresponds to intervening states.
Music lacking melody or continuity is heard as a succession of rapidly fading
sounds. Environmental noises show even less recall. In language, a sentence
persists (recurs) in the mind in relation to fluency and meaning. Contents are
revived out of categories. The conceptual relatedness of elements or their
semantic coherence enhances revival. Conceptual structures, categories,
meaning-relations, help to support serial order which, in each modality,
depends on antecedent states being revived to varying degrees of
incompleteness.
The concept of a storehouse of innumerable memories, some explicit,
others implicit, some with the potential for activation yet destined to be
forgotten, others lost or irretrievable, is widely accepted, though the nature of
the store or trace eludes description. Even if a cell is re-activated by the same
stimulus, most researchers do not think that an event is located in a single
neuron, though in holographic theory the trace is everywhere (Pribram,
1991). We conceptualize the “to-be-realized” as encoded in widespread
systems of neurons and filaments that cohere according to probabilities latent
in the connectivity. Presumably, memories emerge out of the relative synaptic
strengths of myriad configural possibilities occasioned by experience. A
memory in the connectivity implies a circuit or configural potential. In
microgenetic theory the trace is the entire sequence up to the penultimate
phase through which the perception actualizes. If every mind/brain state in its
entirety has the potential to be revived, what is ingredient in the trace? Is it
what was formerly in consciousness, its unconscious precursors, the
immediate and remote context, related events, relevant thoughts, shared
meanings, feelings? Are billions of attenuated memories entrained in every
cognition or is the connectivity quiescent or virtual in the latency of synaptic
contacts?
Simultaneity and Serial Order 99

8. Simultaneity and succession


Object-causation is a narrative of change based on the replacement of internal
episodes and an externalized series of events. The minimal structure of an
event entails an ordering into past and present. From a subjective point of
view, change (1) depends on the elaboration of temporal order in the mind; (2)
appears only when simultaneity becomes actual, so that spatial order is given
in advance of change; (3) depends, perceptually, on a past and future in
relation to a phenomenal or specious present (Brown, 1996 et seq.), while
objective time is that of earlier and later; and (4) derives from the unconscious
succession of phases laying down temporal order, unlike the world that is the
‘gathered-up’ outcome of this transition (passage).
Sprigge (1974), after Whitenead, argued that change from one event to
another is experienced in succession, that mental change is not real change
and that only the extra-psychic is changing. Doubt about real change in the
mind/brain comes from the fact that a mental state, as an epochal whole, in a
Platonic moving image of eternity, cannot be divided into successive parts.
The world is a stationary image with the continuity of motion depending on
the rate of replacement. It is difficult to conceive that change and multiplicity
in the world are apprehended simultaneously in the unconscious. This agrees
with Sprigge’s argument that in real change one experience gives way to
another, and that an ensuing content ‘takes up the story told by the first
content’, or that serial order is in the replacement, not the state. The problem
with this account is that, while it may work for perception, as in the phi
phemonenon, it does not adequately explain serial order in memory, and
there is no reason to think these are unrelated phenomena.
If order in the world successively comes into view, can non-temporality at
the onset be reconciled with successivity at the outcome? In the epochal
theory, temporal order is the unfolding into time of spatial diversity as novel
worlds recur in succession. Either the core is partitioned to a seriality not
anticipated at the onset, or temporal order in consciousness is a copy of that
in the core, with unconscious events serialized in situ prior to actualization. A
temporal order embedded in a simultaneity, with the potential for order at the
surface, would yield a spectator who, in theory, could intuit the order of
events before they actualize. However, individuals who descend inwardly in
meditative practice or mystical states report unity or oneness, not serial order
or multiplicity.12
100 Jason W. Brown

Fig. 3: Phases in short-term or working memory are generally revived in


ensuing states in the order of their registration, i.e. in relation to their
resemblance to the oncoming state and, thus, their capacity for revival.
Images closer to the current perception, i.e. those in short-term memory that
almost achieve re-perception, are most likely to be revived in the currrent
state. The mind/brain state at T-1 is replaced by an overlapping state at T-2.
The core of T-1 is overlapped at T-2 before T-1 terminates, i.e. before the
epoch exists. This explains the recurrence of early phases in T-1 associated
with individuality, self, character, dispositions, long-term and experiential
memory, and the “persistence” of core beliefs, values and personality. Later
phases perish on completion of the entire state to make way for novel
perceptions. The re-activation of earlier phases by the overlapping state
explains the sustained personhood behind succession. Early phases are
ingredient across states, later ones are malleable to a greater extent as
endogenous process is shaped by sensation.

William James (1890) was the first to postulate overlap in the succession of
mental states, which he termed pulses of cognitive consciousness. If the
overlap is for early phases, later ones will perish before the tip of the
oncoming state arrives (Fig. 3). More precisely, the early unconscious phases
associated with long-term memory, character and the self are revived in the
oncoming state before the present state concludes. Since the epoch does not
exist until the transition is complete, phases trailing in the derivation would
recur in the forward edge of the overlap. Indeed, these phases would be
continuously modified by ensuing states before they become actual. This is a
solution to the non-existence of the unconscious, for while unconscious
phases never exist, since they are constantly being replaced before existence
is possible, while conscious phases exist but are continuously perishing. The
paradox is that the non-existent survives and is perpetually transformed,
while existents are novelties that do not mutate, for they are replaced as they
arise.
Simultaneity and Serial Order 101

The revival of proximal, unconscious phases before the state actualizes —


before those phases have existence and temporality and, therefore, before
they can perish— allows early cognition to recur across states. On the other
hand, the distal or world-close phases vanish before they fully re-actualize.
This, so to say, ‘wipes the slate clean’ for oncoming objects, recalling Freud’s
magic writing pad analogy. On this interpretation, the persistence of early
phases and the evanescence of late ones, i.e. the consolidation of long-term
memory and the transience of short-term memory and perception, reflect the
reinforcement of not-yet-existent configural patterns at early phases and the
perishing-on-termination of late ones.
We are aware of change in the world, as well in ideas and feelings, but
unaware of the process through which inner and outer develop. The
experience of change lies in outcomes and replacements. For the observer, the
mental state is all there is. This means that genuine change occurs within the
state, even if the layering of the past, in imagery and perception, requires a
series of states. Indeed, the present also requires a series of states, since an
isolated mind/brain state could not give conscious experience. If the outcome
of a state is given at the onset, change within the state would be prohibited by
its epochal character. An externalized world enjoys novelty in delimiting the
endogenous. There is the novelty of the unexpected or creative, as in the
departure from world attachment. Observed events are outcomes of the
becoming through which they are generated, the changing physical surround,
and the individuality of response.
The changlessness of an epoch is a logical entailment of its holistic
character, but the outcome of the epoch cannot be ordained at the onset
because the facts of the final world depend on sculpting by incoming sensory
data that guide the state to completion. In addition to these effects, the transit
of proximal phases of endogenous process —less constrained by sensory
data— through experiential memory and intentional feeling —mediated by
limbic formation— are a source of spontaneity, originality and the creative
imagination.

9. Addendum: Summary of Microgenetic Theory


The approach in this paper will probably be unfamiliar to most readers, but
the theory is the outcome of over thirty years of clinical study and
philosophical speculation. To aid the reader, I have included some personal
references to earlier work that describes the gradual development of the
model in relation to clinical research and evolutionary anatomy. I would also
refer the reader to updated papers on microgenesis in Pachalska and Weber
(2008), particularly chapters on anatomy by Don Tucker, and physiological
102 Jason W. Brown

studies by Talis Bachmann in that volume. A central theme is the subject-


object relation, which in various guises is the relation of self to world, mind to
nature, experience to reality, memory to perception and feeling to
mechanism. Every philosophy takes a stance on this problem but it is no less
fundamental to psychology, though in the latter epistemology tends to be
implicit in method and bias. My early work in neuropsychology led to a
subjectivist or internalist approach but it may be closer to the truth to say the
approach was little by little uncovered as the work went on.
Science and psychology tend to an objectivist or externalist view of the
same material as the subjectivism of this paper, so that some remarks are
needed to orient the reader to what is a strikingly different interpretation.
Externalism imports objects into the mind and isolates them from their spatial
and temporal context. Internalism works with the same data but retains a
richness that is often untestable and speculative. Both accounts have
ontological implications. For externalism, it is that mental or external objects
are substance-like —physical or logical solids. For internalism (and
microgenesis), a becoming over the temporal extensibility of an object or
entity —a rock or mental state— deposits the being that the thing becomes. I
would agree with William James that the basic problems of psychology —
mind and brain, thought and nature, knowledge and reality— are ultimately
metaphysical.
There is one reality but many doors through which it is apprehended, and
each doorway is a perspective that takes the reality it perceives as the true
one. For most people the world of perception is the real world. For some, the
question is the degree to which mind encroaches on the physical or the
degree to which the physical is installed in the mind. The debate is whether a
perspective is direct, a subjective appearance, a model or representation, an
illusion or false belief. For this writer, knowledge of reality is inferred from its
copy or representation. This takes the subjective to its limits. A long tradition
of such thinking includes a negation of the real by denying its existence,
creating an alternate reality in art or mystical contemplation and retreating to
dream, fantasy, even psychosis. The turn from world to mind can rest on
disillusionment, but it can be a choice as to the kind of life one wishes to live.
A life lived resolutely in the mind is no less vibrant than one in the world. The
inner life or an intuition of the primacy of the subjective is the starting point
of philosophy. In an echo of Descartes, Schelling (1800) wrote that “the
science of knowledge cannot proceed from anything objective, since it actually
begins with a general doubt about the reality of the objective.”
Transitional phenomena show that a division of mind and world is not as
stark as it appears. The bifurcation of nature into two portions, one mental,
one physical, is a way of thinking that derives from and supports the
distinction of self and other, past and present, feeling and mechanism. The
Simultaneity and Serial Order 103

bifurcation dissolves in all-mind or all-nature, eliminating one of its limbs, the


physical in idealism, the mental in materialism, the replacement of nature by
mind or the removal of mind from nature and brain, restricting subjectivity to
pains, after-images and other qualia or assuming that consciousness is the last
remaining problem before mind can be fully reduced to material brain
function.
It is essential to regain the full scope and character of subjectivity to
understand the relation of mind to nature. The first step is to account for the
bifurcation, the belief in an independent world and the felt boundaries of
mind inside the head or at the surface of the sensory organs. Why do we
believe mind stops at the ears and eyes and the world outside is independent?
It seems inconceivable that this marvelous universe, which has existed for
billions of years before we were born, and will continue well after we are
gone, is merely an image of a true reality from which we are forever
screened, a reality we will never know. Yet everything we see and hear and
feel and think and believe —mind in its entirety— is brain activity. This does
not mean there is no external reality, only that it is known through its model
in the mind. The reasons for the belief that the world of sight and sound is
independent of the observer are manifold but they bear enumeration and
discussion.

9.1. Development

The paradigm for mental development is mitosis, division within a


membrane. In mind, the first division is subject and object, which is a
psychological mitosis within the subjective field of the organism. The object,
or objective world, does not so much confront the subject as it draws outward
and objectifies a portion of a subjective ground. This creates an objective and
subjective segment within a subjective field. The subject responds to an
outside world that is an extension of its subjectivity. The individuation of
subject and object is the initial phase. Gradually, within the subject-portion, a
self individuates in opposition to the world and in relation to its own
subjective content. At the same time, the object-portion undergoes further
articulation. The appearance of proto-intentional, then intentional, goals still
remain within the mind’s outer garment. The separation of object from
subject is a transition from mind to world over a continuous sheet of
mentation. This occurs in a recurrent sequence from a subjective core to an
objective surface that is constrained by sensation at successive points. It leads
to an objectified image that represents or models a world that results from the
pruning of maladaptive form driven by the impact of sensory data on an
endogenous process of image-formation.
104 Jason W. Brown

9.2. The impact of sense data

After activation to a phase of vigilance or arousal, a construct of the act- and


object-to-be organized about the body midline sets the process in motion,
keeps it on track and shapes unconscious precursors to their outcomes.
Sensory data orient the incipient act-object at archaic formations in brain to
an outcome in rational thought, veridical perception and adaptive behavior.
After the initial phase, there is relative suspension of sensation as the
construct passes to a space of dream, symbolic imagery and thought. This
phase is propelled to conscious reason and adaptation. The gaining of reality,
or the detachment of perception from the mind, requires sensory data at the
endpoint of this microtemporal development.
When sensory constraints are in abeyance and the world is still present,
say when we close our eyes and the visual data that impinge on the brain are
reduced, earlier phases in thought-development come to the fore. So long as
there are auditory or other sense data to maintain an external world, these
phases are rational and adaptive, as in contemplation, deliberation or
sustained concentration. With a persistent relaxation of constraints, thought
can range from creative imagination to daydream and fantasy. With sensory
data markedly reduced or eliminated, as in sleep or sensory deprivation, there
is dream, hallucination or psychosis. Sensation at the neocortical phase of the
traversal is the final constraint on the emerging pre-object. Sensation is
essential to the analysis and externalization of the pre-object. Otherwise,
there is premature termination or an improbable route of actualization.
Personal need must adapt to impersonal reality.
In normal perception, as inferred from pathology (Brown, 1986), the
application of sensation through the geniculo-striate pathways partitions the
developing holistic pre-object and its space to a fully objectified image distinct
from antecedent process in the mind. The foreshortened, palpable subject-
centered space of imagery, dream or hallucination that underlies a proximate
space of object relations —the perimeter of limb action or the world of the
infant— becomes the open-ended, infinite expanse of waking perception. The
transition is so abrupt, the model so accurate, the passivity and detachment
so complete that we believe the outer world to be the source, not the product,
of the perception. The restriction of the analysis and exteriorization to the
distal segment of the mental state cleaves the object from the self, from
private thought and feeling, to create an external rim of mind filled with
extra-psychic objects. But all it takes is a brief spell of vertigo as the world
spins around the observer to remind one that the world before us is an image
in the mind.
Simultaneity and Serial Order 105

9.3. Stages in memory and perception

The initial phases of the mental state arise out of an instinctual core —the
inherited repertoire of drive categories— to a phase of affective and
experiential memories that shape conceptual feeling in the direction of
perception. Early phases are felt as memorial, later ones as perceptual, but a
memory is an incomplete perception and a perception is a memory specified
to an object. The image transports the experiential past to the occurrent
present. The same transition occurs in all domains of cognition, for example,
when a word individuates a semantic category. At successive phases and with
sensory guidance, whole-part shifts eliminate the potential irrelevance or mal-
adaption of possible objects to outer conditions. The transition from a
perception that is like a memory to a memory that is like a perception
delivers the present of ongoing experience out of the past of its own
infrastructure. The traversal of a pre-perception from phases of distant to
recent memory embeds conceptual, experiential and affective knowledge
within what appears to be a naked object. The conventional belief that
perception precedes memory merely translates common sense to theory of
mind. The natural impulse is to ask, how can we recall something before we
perceive it? But if object-formation is parsed to a model of reality over an
endogenous phase-transition, the object incorporates as its trace the
memorial sequence through which it is realized. In forgetting, earlier phases
in the object are recaptured. Memory is thinking to the extent it departs from
perception and perception is memory to the extent it fails to reach a veridical
endpoint.

9.4. Feeling in opposition to objects

We seem to attach and direct feeling to an object. The feeling is felt inside the
person as an interior phenomenon communicated in speech and action but
largely inaccessible to others, as their feelings are to us. Most people believe
that feeling is associated to objects or derives from them, or that there is an
external connection from self to object or other, but feeling in the object is
part of what the object is, part of its becoming or the process through which it
is realized. The impression of an external relation to objects comes from their
outward movement and loss. This splits the object off as something external,
leaving its affective tonality behind. The effect is to reinforce the separation of
mind and object and support the belief that the world is not ours to create but
is out there to observe, react to and experience, which of course it is, but not
in the manner most people believe it to be.
If we ponder how object-worth or value is generated —the feelings we
have for others, for animals, for things, possessions, memories— we come to
106 Jason W. Brown

understand that feeling is not applied to objects but develops into them. The
intensity of feeling for memory, dream, the savoring of the past, the concept
of memory as incomplete perception, all conform to the idea that as the
memorial becomes the perceptual, the affect that accompanies the image
distributes as value into objects. Feeling is more intense at early phases of
drive and desire, less so at distal ones of object and word-production.
Moreover, feeling is felt as a pressure behind, directed or in opposition to the
object, not in it. The process that leads outward from concepts to objects
accompanies a specification of drive to desire, to affect ideas, feelings of
interest and then outward in the externalization of the object as value or
worth. The qualitative change over successive phases is continuous from
activation to termination. Feeling is the vitality and becoming of the object
and the mark of its realness.

9.5. Mind arises in experience of the world

The mind is not a tabula rasa, but to the extent it is so conceived, it is a tablet
on which letters are carved in relief by chipping away at mal-adaption or
redundancy. Instincts and primitive categories of knowledge form part of the
animal endowment. The enrichment of mind through instruction and
experience seems inserted from outside. The diversity of the world is not felt
to be created by the observer but exists for enjoyment or suffering, in any
event, to be perceived, absorbed, felt, stored and digested. There is a
powerful impression of mind as a container filled by experience rather than
sensation shaping the mind to conform or adapt to what is experienced. The
reflection of the physical world is taken for the real. The creativity trimmed
away in each cycle of world-creation is attributed to the internal portion of
mind before the world appears. The incessant novelty that is the work of
nature —the astonishing creativity of life— in the novelty of perception is a
tributary of creativity in the mind.

9.6. Extension, causality, space and time

One of the earliest objections to a conflation of the mental and physical


concerns the extension of external space. We know there are levels of space
formation in the mental state, such as the space of dream, the space of the
body, that of the newborn and congenitally-blind, so that an extended three-
dimensional space, along with its objects, is achieved out of earlier space-
forms. External space is elaborated over a transition in which an initial non-
spatial field of insubstantial mind is set in opposition to the extensive space of
a substantial world.
Subjective time, duration and the virtual present preclude instantaneity
and differ from objective time-order and the causal sequence of world events
Simultaneity and Serial Order 107

(Bohm, 1980). The causal interaction of external objects is observed but not
felt unless there is impact by an external cause, while action willed by the self
is felt but not observed. We perceive causation in the world and feel it in the
mind. When we act on a decision, it is not the decision that instigates the
action but the self that feels an agent to the act. Decision is not the cause of
action, no more than options that are blocked, abandoned or exhausted are
the cause of inaction. In conscious thought we are informed of acts that are
instigated at unconscious phases. For the most part, the direction of world
events is from cause to effect, that of mental events is from potential to actual
or from possibility to commitment. In the world, fact is primary and mind-
independent, though influenced by probability and contingency. In the mind,
possibility is the ground of freedom and fact is the final stage of belief.
Consciousness involves a trajectory from self to object, and thus mediates a
transition from the simultaneity of the unconscious to the temporal order of
world events. The discovery of transitional phases in the creation of temporal
order undermines a sharp opposition of these two frames of time-experience.

9.7. Transience and permanence

The inner perception of time and the outer perception of space, the feeling of
transience in the mind, the coming and going of mental phenomena, the
evanescence of life generally, the passing of things mental and the endurance
of things physical, the stability of objects, the insubstantiality of thought, all
combine to set one world against the other. All things are in change, indeed, it
is intrinsic to them, but the tree in my garden will outlast my thoughts about
it, the telephone will be there long after my conversation is over, and the
generic cows in the meadow will replicate themselves long after my
individuality is lost. Stability is the iteration of like-objects; impermanence is
the iteration of dissimilar ones. It is a matter of the perceptibility of change
and the repeatability of occasions. But, the tendency of mind to apprehend
the extremes rather than the gradations accentuates these distinctions and
makes overcoming them all the more difficult.

9.8. Evolution and cognition

The pillars of evolutionary thought are abundance of form and elimination of


the unfit as the environment trims away and prevents the reproduction of
less-fit organisms. Adaptation entails a pruning of organism so only those
best-fitted to the environment survive. The population dynamic of evolution is
realized in the micro-transition of the mental state. The environment in the
form of sensation trims away irrelevant or mal-adaptive possibilities so what
survives —an act, a thought, an object— is best suited to its social or physical
habitat. The world of the organism, like that of object-formation, is a limiting
108 Jason W. Brown

point on degrees of freedom. The aim of evolution to produce and reproduce


an organism best adapted to some niche in the physical world is the same as
the aim of thought to produce and reproduce (replicate) an object best
adapted to a momentary niche in the physical world. Both processes lead to
an objectification and a continual re-testing of fitness.

9.9. Agency and recipience

An essential aspect of the indifference of the world to individual mind and the
feeling that the objects that grow out of us to be independent of their
conception is the transition from agency to recipience (passivity) in the
outward-going flow. The feeling of agency is that of a self willing an action.
This feeling is conveyed into an action to give it a volitional character.
Agentive feeling deposits in the body, not the world. I do not raise the glass —
that would be telekinesis— rather, I move my hand which then raises the
glass. An action belongs to the agent because it remains in the body and does
not fully externalize. In object-development, intermediate phases prior to
detachment may have a volitional quality. I can will a mental image to occur
and manipulate it as I like. The image is my image. It has not fully separated.
In instances of incomplete object-development, agency can be carried
outward with the image, as in hallucinatory voices that command actions by
the percipient observer.
Endogenous phases that actualize an image are guided by sensory data to
veridical objects. There is progressive loss of voluntary control, which is ceded
to terminal sensory constraints, finally to the world. As the image detaches
and is felt to be independent of the perceiver, the agent becomes passive to
the outcomes of his own image formation. The feeling of passivity to objects
is essential to detachment, but agency is dependent on the nature and the
phase of the content it accompanies. Agency can be lost or regained in
pathology, as when an individual feels that objectified thoughts are
transmitted to others. The differing modes of agency in various forms of
mental imagery —after-images, eidetic images, memory images, and so on—
illustrate a transition from the voluntary to the involuntary in the passage
outward to objects.

9.10. Knowledge and insight

We are constantly guided by knowledge of the world, especially the


pragmatics of life, much of which is attributed to the cumulative wisdom of
common sense. Common sense draws its considerable authority as a tactic
for coping and survival that, by genetic or cultural transmission, has passed
down over the ages. The perils attached to ignoring common sense have, no
doubt, eradicated most of the outliers who raised questions about it or acted
Simultaneity and Serial Order 109

in a way as to deny what seem to be obvious truths. When applied to


behavior in the world, common sense is a reasonable strategy. The difficulty
arises when such beliefs are transferred to a theory of the mind, or become a
standard against which theory is judged.
Much of microgenetic theory is a challenge to common sense beliefs,
though the theory can explicate their origins. The problem occurs when a
common sense theory of the world is interiorized as a theory of mind, or of
antecedent phases in the mental state, or when early phases or constituents
in perception are described in terms of final ones, or the flux of brain activity
is depicted from the standpoint of external solids, or when memorial or
unconscious contents are held to be copies of what is selected by
consciousness. That a model of the real should grow out of fantasy, that
objects are recognized before they are consciously perceived, that the world is
an extension of the mind, that succession in time is generated out of
simultaneity, or that the pathology of cognition displays preliminary normal
phases, is not common sense dogma.
This brief introduction describes some of the phenomena that account for
our experience of reality and the bases for believing, indeed, rarely
questioning, the naive view that the real world is just as it appears before us.
We have learned that fact in the world is appearance in the mind, and that
the phase-transition in the actualization of the world, as revealed by
pathological conditions and altered states is a continuum over neural and
psychic substrates, not a sudden break from mind to nature. The notion of the
unconscious and the perceptible world as physical spheres surrounding a
psychic arena of consciousness is refuted by the perturbations of
neuropsychology that expose phases that fill the process from unconscious to
conscious and from consciousness to the world. The psychic landscape before
me is not an hallucinatory vision but a representation of reality, though not
the reality it represents. This changes little for me unless, like a schizophrenic,
I feel the phenomenal basis of conscious experience, in which case the model,
in its incompleteness or distortion, is exposed for what it is and life becomes
intolerable. To know the real is inaccessible is an intellectual challenge or
limitation, but to feel it is unreal is to live in the transition from dream to
wakefulness.
Apart from an entrapment in the mind, the temporal extensibility of
physical entities, as inferred from that of the mental state, entails that
knowledge of a thing is knowledge of the change by which the thing exists.
This means that being is not a frozen substance or slice but a becoming, a
before and an after, that brings the thing into existence. It is probable that
uncertainties at the quantum level in physics, or ambiguities that cannot be
resolved by calculation, or do not obey some of the laws that underlie
prediction, can be attributed to the temporal extensibility of nature,
110 Jason W. Brown

compounded in the mind, and the inability to escape the psyche regardless of
the instrumentalities that are employed. A slight but significant error will
occur owing to the approximation of mind to reality, or to the psychic process
through which reality is encountered. We study the reality given in mind, not
a reality mind can perfectly measure, for even in the most accurate
representation there is inevitably some immeasurable disparity.

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112 Jason W. Brown

Notes

1
The term, sense-data, is used for the data of sensation, extrinsic to
perception, i.e. sensory constraints, not as in philosophical texts ingredient
in or equivalent to perception. The term transition is used for process
within the mind/brain state, while passage is for process in a physical or
mind-independent world. Phases in the mind/brain state conform to the
transitions that underlie the mind and to passage in an entity, the brain,
which is mind-independent in that brain activity is extrinsic to
consciousness. Objects are internal or external contents of mind. Entities
are mind-independent.
2
More generally, the activation of neurons by external stimuli does not mean
the neurons are responsible for the perception of those stimuli. Levitan
(2006) gives the example of regions in left hemisphere shown to be active
in the perception of musical structure that are also active in the perception
of sign language. If acoustic noise and silent motion activate the same
regions, clearly the experiment is tapping into something more general
than the stimuli. This is no doubt true for most, if not all, studies that
purport to map brain areas to cognitive function.
3
The relation to brain wave cycles relevant to these remarks is discussed by
Austin, (1999; see my review of Austin in Brown (1999).
4
Whitehead (Cobb, 2008) is close to this idea when he writes of the first stage
of concrescence as the conformal inclusion of past occasions
supplemented by conceptual feelings.
5
The focus on content rather than process led researchers to prematurely
discard the regression hypothesis in early language and cognitive
development (e.g. Caramazza and Zurif, 1978). The pattern of parcellation
in morphogenesis, in which exuberant growth is sculpted to specificity lays
down force lines (Pribram, 1991) that continue in mature cognition as
whole-part or context-item transforms (Brown, 1996).
6
On the meaning of the symptom in relation to normal language and
cognition see Brown, 1996).
7
Behaviors such as sleep-talking, somnambulism, cries, laughter, which imply
mentation in the individual who is sleeping, challenge this argument.
However, in personal studies of sleep-talking, in which individuals are
awakened and asked about their dream, concordance to the dream report
is inconsistent. Anecdotally, this is also the case when someone is
awakened during bouts of crying or laughter. This implies that on waking,
the simultaneity of the imagery is retrofitted to a linear narrative.
8
My debt to the concept of overlapping pulses of cognitive consciousness
described by James (1899) is obvious, and discussed at some length in
prior publications (see also Volkmann (in Ward, 1933).
Simultaneity and Serial Order 113

9
There is discussion of the impact of Lashley’s paper in Bruce (1994). See
Houghton and Hartley (1995) for a cognitivist interpretation of Lashley’s
ideas.
10
This notion is wonderfully evoked by Philip Roth in the depiction of a non-
sensory after-life with total recall of past experience for an eternity that is
timeless.
11
Although it has been shown that dreams occur in right and left hemisphere
in callosal disconnection, there is some relation of dream experience to
the confabulations of right hemisphere in split cases, and the attempt at
rational explanation by the left.
12
See Brown (1999; 2008) for the relation to mystical experience, creativity
and the Buddhist concept of momentariness.
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres:
Science, politics, and religion
at the margins of the Modern
Adrian J. Ivakhiv1

Abstract
Along with other forms of enchantment that put in question the notion of a
‘disenchantment of the world,’ popular fascination with occult, paranormal,
mysterious or ‘Fortean’ phenomena takes many and varied forms in today’s
global world. Drawing on theorists of modernity including Latour and
Luhmann alongside a Whiteheadian understanding of life as process, this
article examines the geographies of such phenomena as ghosts, zombies,
conspiracies, and ‘Earth energies’ in light of their relationship to the
separation of the onto-epistemic systems of science, politics, and religion.
While contemporary theory has brought sufficient attention to power and
desire as factors in the shaping of socio-spatial relations, the study of such
Fortean phenomena suggests that more attention needs to be paid to
imagination or ‘imaginality.’ The growing interest in affect and 'non-
representational theory' are laudable moves in this direction, but the gap
between representational and psychological (including psychoanalytical)
theories will remain inadequately bridged without a more refined
understanding of the imaginal. This paper proposes a reading of these
'modern marginalia' as processual constructions aiming toward the ideals,
respectively, of knowledge, trust, and vision or ultimate truth.

0. Introduction
It has commonly been thought that Enlightenment modernity ‘disenchanted’
the world and that, in its wake, religion, superstition, and all manner of
wonder and enchantment have been forced to retreat to the margins.
Increasingly, however, scholars have questioned this disenchantment
narrative and recognized that religion, wonder, and enchantment exercise a
popular fascination that shows little sign of disappearance (Bennett, 2001;
Bruce, 1992; Dube, 2002; McEwan 2008; Meyer and Pels, 2003; Partridge,
2005; Pile, 2005; Saler, 2006; Taylor, 2007). This paper examines the

1
Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources, University of
Vermont, Burlington VT 05405.
116 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

geography and spatiality of Enlightenment knowledge practices by focusing


on the margins of knowledge associated with phenomena considered to be
occult, paranormal, anomalous, or mysterious. Among such ‘Fortean’
phenomena —so named after early twentieth-century anomaly and mystery
seeker Charles Fort— I will include beliefs about extraterrestrial visitors,
angels and apparitions, ghosts and zombies, sightings of unknown biological
species, mysterious Earth energies, forgotten civilizations, and conspiracy
theories —in other words, the panoply of ‘weird phenomena’ commonly
featured in such venues as the magazine Fortean Times and the 1990s
television series X-Files. While mainstream scientific opinion holds these
areas to be marginal if not valueless, these phenomena carry an aura of
fascination that have made them popular among subcultures of aficionados,
believers, and advocates.
Any examination of these phenomena falls into a paradox of classification
in that the terms used to describe them, and even the presupposition that
they make up a single field —that poltergeists, unidentified biological species,
government conspiracies, and visiting extraterrestrials are all of the same
category of object— delimits their ontological status in a particular way. Are
they enigmas, anomalies, real phenomena the nature of which has simply not
yet been determined? Or are they popular fallacies, cognitive illusions,
trickeries of con artists or ravings of lunatics? Does their study represent
legitimate or alternative science, para-science, pseudo-science, or some mix
of these categories?
Instead of assuming a single response to these questions, I will suggest
three heuristic categories or ‘dimensions’ by which to examine and situate
them in relation to three organizing systems, in Niklas Luhmann’s (1995)
sense, of modern onto-epistemology: specifically, to science, politics, and
religion. Forteana shade over into science insofar as they are framed within an
‘economy of knowledge,’ an economy concerned with what is, what is not,
and the means of distinguishing between the two; they engage the realm of
politics when they are framed within an ‘economy of power-knowledge,’
focused on questions of trust and authority —on who can or cannot be
trusted, and on which knowledge is authorized as legitimate and which
remains illegitimate; and they enter into the mode of religion insofar as they
concern an ‘economy of meaning’ or of ‘sacred power-knowledge’ where the
predominant question is what is ‘really real,’ true with a capital T, and of
ultimate concern. While current social and spatial theory commonly grapples
with the first two of these categories, the third points to a dimension, that of
the visionary or spiritual imagination, that has not been engaged with the
same rigor.
I will look at these three dimensions in turn and will propose some
generalizations about the geographics of each, that is, of the ways they have
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 117

been distributed in space or, more properly, in time-space (May and Thrift,
2001). This will allow for their historical contextualization within the
unfoldment of modernity and postmodernity as theorized by a range of
thinkers from Latour and Luhmann to Foucault, Habermas, Jameson,
Lefebvre, Polanyi, Deleuze and Guattari, Jodi Dean, and others. Since I will not
be able to cover the entire range of Fortean phenomena, I will focus my
comments, in the first category, on the appearance of ghostly, mysterious, or
otherwise anomalous entities; in the second, on conspiracy theories involving
unusual or occult sources of agency; and in the third, on the movement that
has developed around so-called Earth mysteries, including power places, crop
circles, and mysterious telluric energies. My observations will remain
generalized —a meta-anthropology of modernity (Latour 1991) rather than an
ethnographically particular and localized analysis of any specific phenomenon
or belief. In the process, I hope to show the cultural relevance of Fortean
phenomena for understanding knowledge, politics, and religion or ‘vision’ in
the time-spaces of today’s postmodernizing world.

1. Economies of knowledge:
Geographies of illumination and shadow
At the most common level of thinking about Fortean phenomena, they are
matters of fact or fiction, the known versus the unknown or that known to be
untrue. Particular lake monsters or extraterrestrial visitors either exist or they
do not. The category ‘knowledge’ is taken to be self-evident: we know what it
means to know something, and we know something when we have
conclusive evidence of it. Forteana are those phenomena that have not been
conclusively proven to be real. Viewed less generously, they are assumed to
be unreal unless and until proven real. Viewed more generously or open-
mindedly, they are granted their own space, an ambiguous, suspended
middle-realm we might call ‘parascience’ as in the science of the possible but
not yet proven, fields of endeavor that share in the modalities of science but
whose precise relationship to science is uncertain or unstable. Cryptozoology,
parapsychology, and ufology —which Henry Bauer (2001: 14) calls the “‘Big
Three’ subjects” in anomalistics— provide paradigm cases of such
epistemological border zones. Each has developed its methods and protocols,
its scholarly societies (the International Society of Cryptozoology, the
Parapsychological Association, the Center for UFO Studies) and journals (e.g.,
Cryptozoology, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Journal of UFO Studies) which
attempt to bring scientific respectability to their fields, but whose legitimacy
remains underdetermined. At the far end of the spectrum from the skeptical
perspective is that which sees these phenomena in the most generous light
118 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

possible, either as simply real in themselves or as largely real in one sense or


another. So, for instance, ghosts and poltergeists might be thought of as
energetic remainders or ‘soul remnants’ of their physical and human
forebears, but not all claims of ghosts, or Nessie sightings, or crop circles are
necessarily admitted as genuine.
There is, then, an economy of knowledge and of reality that works on two
levels: (1) only certain things are real and others are not; in this sense, it is
reality itself that parses out the difference between the two categories; (2) our
knowledge of what is real can be less or more complete, and the line where
that knowledge ends can be located along a continuum represented by reality.
In this second sense, the economy of knowledge is parsed not by reality itself
but by the present limits of knowledge. Reality is in principle decidable and
determinable; or as Donald Rumsfeld might have (infamously) put it, there are
known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and our task is
to bring more of the latter into the former categories. Erring on the side of the
known, professional or self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ such as members of the
Committee for Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP,
publishers of Skeptical Inquirer) and the Skeptics Society (publisher of Skeptic
Magazine), portray Fortean and parascientific knowledges as forms of failed
reason or unreason, antitheses or primitive precursors to Enlightenment
reason, to be cast off as humanity moves forward on its ascent to knowledge.
In their hands the Enlightenment narrative takes on a normalizing
prerogative, calling for a policing of boundaries to hold the forces of
superstition and unreason at bay.
Ironically, however, one need only look at the immense resources of
reasoned argumentation, scientific fieldwork and analysis, and the whole
paraphernalia of science applied to establishing the veracity of paranormal
claims by parapsychologists, cryptozoologists, and others, to see how
eminently scientific much of their research appears. When cerealogists (who
study crop formations) deride crop circlemakers as ‘hoaxers’ rather than
artists, they uphold the same boundary between the genuine and the false as
do professional skeptics (Roberts, 1999). When magician James Randi
challenges psychics by offering a prize to any who would successfully
demonstrate their powers under his controlled conditions, or when, on the
other side, Georgina Bruni challenges crop circlemakers to duplicate a “Julia
set” design on film (Irving and Bruni, 2002), the two sides speak to the same
truth-claims and position themselves on the side of reason and their
opponents on the side of preconception and faith (cf. Gieryn, 1983; Hess,
1993; Miles, 1999). Similarly, as Knight (2000) argues, when critics of
conspiracy theories, like Pipes (1997), Robins and Post (1997), or Showalter
(1997), portray conspiracy thinking as a “mysterious force with a hidden
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 119

agenda that takes over individual minds and even whole societies,” they “end
up replicating the very mode of paranoid thinking they seek to condemn” (7).
On the science-nonscience continuum, Fortean endeavors are often seen
as forms of incomplete, premature or proto- sciences, or ‘wild’ frontier
sciences which are untamed, prone to error until a more consensually held
paradigm emerges. For an open-minded observer not engaged in these
debates, this position may appear a reasonably agnostic one. Yet decades of
detailed and painstaking work by parapsychologists suggests not that the
phenomena they study are real or unreal, but that the methods they employ
—the same rigorous scientific methods successfully employed in more
respectable fields— leave too much latitude for maneuvering and not enough
exactitude to determine a convincing answer to the questions being posed.
They are undecidable (Matthews, 2004), but their indeterminacy carries
lessons —which is the main point pursued and insisted upon by researchers
in the field of ‘anomalistics,’ that is, the interdisciplinary study of scientific
anomalies, not just as mysteries to be solved, but as part of a social process of
claims-making and counter-claiming, evidence presentation, theory
development and adjudication (Bauer, 2001; Truzzi, 1998).
To understand the geography of anomalous phenomena at this level of
inquiry, we would have to ask where they occur and how these places relate
to the places where knowledge, science, and reason are found or produced.
Fortean phenomena, in this light, are located out of the spotlight of reason.
The spotlight metaphor suggests that enlightenment, when it occurs, does not
occur all at once but unfolds in increments, lighting up proximal spaces
before it reaches distant, less frequented spaces. Darkness remains at the
margins, in liminal places, in poorly mapped backwoods and backwaters,
deep forests and distant mountain ranges (where we might find Bigfoot or
Yeti), at the bottoms of lakes and oceans (where Nessie dwells), in cemeteries
and zones associated with the dead, or in racially coded slums of multicultural
cities (where human-beast hybrids like Chupacabra might lurk). As the Earth
becomes more fully mapped and the lifeworld increasingly colonized, the
spaces of Fortean play are pushed to the margins and, ultimately, to outer
space. In her ‘dark history of fairies, hobgoblins, and other troublesome
things,’ historian Diane Purkiss (2003) writes:
Human nature seems to abhor a blank space on a map.
Where there are no human habitations, no towns, where villages
dwindle into farms and farms into woods, mapping stops. Then
the imagination rushes to fill the woods with something other
than blank darkness: nymphs, satyrs, elves, gnomes, pixies,
fairies. Now that we have mapped every inch of our own planet,
our remaining blank spaces lie among the stars. Unable, like our
forebears to tolerate space uninhabited, we have made with our
minds a new legion of bright and shining beings to fill the gaps
120 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

left by our ignorances. Aliens are our fairies, and they behave
just like the fairies of our ancestors. (3)
Anomalous space, then, is uncharted space in which reason has not yet
been purified of its ‘others’ —magical thought, imaginative fantasy,
superstition. Purkiss’s analysis extends from the ancient Mediterranean world
to the present and examines fairies, nymphs, and other folkloric beings
alongside their less sanitized relatives such as vampires, poltergeists, and
aliens. The liminal status of such beings makes them analogous to spirits and
other entities found in the narrative and ritual of indigenous societies (cf.
Mageo and Howard, 1996). Collectively, Purkiss suggests, they are associated
with transitions —of life (birth, initiation, death), time (midday, midnight,
seasonal changes), and space (liminal areas between civil space and wild
terrain)— and with the remainders of the past, of ancestors and of ‘unfinished
business’, that do not fit comfortably within the everyday world. They are
“Janus-faced, ambiguous,” “gatekeeper” figures (Purkiss, 2003: 4) whose
appearance responds to the boundary anxieties of the times. So they appear
at one time as dark-skinned child-stealers and abductors, at another as
mechanically grey-skinned biological experimenters, impregnators and
genetic thieves, and at a third as radiant “space brothers” heralding a new age
of cosmic brotherhood. They reveal anxieties about otherness onto which are
projected differences of race, gender, species, and so on. Even at their most
mundane, as in cryptozoologists’ fascination for unknown creatures such as
Nessie or newly discovered species of giant squid, they can be seen as a way
of addressing anxieties about species extinction or the disappearance of
wilderness (Dendle, 2006).
But this is getting ahead of ourselves. It is true that cognitive and
existential uncertainty is unlikely to disappear anytime soon —the mysteries
of death and of outer space, to note just two examples, will continue to haunt
and compel the human imagination. But the arbitration of reality, as seen
from within this economy of knowledge, is primarily about the ongoing
discrimination and articulation of the real from the unreal. This first level of
examination fits comfortably within an empiricist and realist ontology. Its
shortcomings can be seen from a range of post-positivist and non-realist
critical perspectives. In a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading, for instance, this
economy of knowledge consists of the articulation of the symbolizable real —
the real as constructed by society— but not the actual Real, which forever
eludes symbolization. In such an understanding, language and the symbolic
can never get us at the Real, and the world of identities (Oedipal and other
kinds) will always remain a social construct that papers over a gap in our
being, a construct haunted by a world that is ontologically primary but forever
inaccessible except in our dreams and nightmares.
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 121

2. Economies of power-knowledge:
Geographies of trust and suspicion
More common than a psychoanalytic reading, however, is one which takes
suspicion of authority as its motivating premise. Viewed through a
hermeneutic of suspicion, truth is always truth-in-quotation-marks, since
some have more say in defining it than others. The economy here is one of
trust: not every source can be trusted, and there is no longer a universal ‘we’
since subjectivity is shaped in part by shadow and suspicion. Knowledge can
be revealed or concealed, censored, stigmatized, marginalized, and forbidden;
it can be rendered legible or opaque. Beyond official knowledge is the realm
of unauthorized, illegitimate ‘knowledges,’ claims, rumors, speculations,
dissensions. Revelation occurs through leaks, rumors, betrayals, and the spy-
versus-spy tactics of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
This is of course the realm of conspiracy theorizing. Conspiracy theories
give lie to the notion that all alternative modalities of thought constitute
disavowals of Enlightenment modernism. Like Enlightenment thinking in
general, conspiracy theories are founded on a hermeneutic of suspicion; but
unlike it, they reject any faith in an easily attainable enlightenment. The world
is too complex and fraught with uncertainty, its shadows conceal mischievous
agents working to prevent enlightenment from coming to fruition. Yet if
conspiracy theory risks pushing the hermeneutic of suspicion into a
methodological paranoia, it relies on an ultimate faith in exposure: once the
dark forces are held up to the light, their true nature will be revealed.
Conspiracy theory, as Jodi Dean puts it, “demonstrates the constitutive
antagonism between transparency and revelation,” that is, the transparency
supposedly promised by modern science and a democratic public sphere and
the revelation that that public sphere may itself be “invested in specific lines
of authorization and subjection” (Dean, 2000).
Conspiracy culture, Peter Knight (2000:3) has argued, is characterized by
“a cynical and generalized sense of the ubiquity —and even the necessity— of
clandestine, conspiring forces in a world in which everything is connected.”
This interconnected world can be read as an artifact of modern
communications technology, with the World Wide Web as its emblem (and
cybernetics its predecessor) and networks, connectivity, and viral risk its key
metaphors. But it also bears uncanny resemblance to a world that long
predated the Internet. The popular success of The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2003),
along with earlier novels like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988),
suggest a historical analogue for conspiracy culture in European occult
cosmologies, which had been premised on the mysterious or invisible
interconnectedness of all things in the universe —plants and planets, bodily
fluids and stars— and which flourished widely before their overcoming, as the
122 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

modernist narrative has it, by science (Berman, 1981; Couliano, 1987;


Vickers, 1984; Yates, 1979).
As anthropologists of globalization have shown, tropes of conspiracy and
suspicion can be found throughout non-Western responses to Westernization
(Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993; Geschiere, 1997; Graumann and Moscovi,
1987; Marcus, 1999; Silverstein, 2002; Stoller, 1995; Taussig, 1987; West and
Sanders, 2003). West and Sanders (2003) argue that a global diversity of
occult cosmologies —systems of belief, both local and translocal, which
perceive themselves to be surrounded by “a world animated by secret,
mysterious, and/or unseen powers” (6)— are flourishing in a world that
increasingly touts both global interconnectedness and transparency as its
guiding lights. These conspiracy cosmologies are responses —reflections,
refractions, inversions, and kaleidoscopic refigurings of actual and imagined
power relationships structuring an increasingly complicated global world. As
Fredric Jameson puts it, “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping
in the postmodern age” (1991: 38). The information-saturated postmodern
media universe, with its ubiquitous eye in the sky of satellite surveillance,
confers a paranoid modality to postmodern life, and Jameson reads the high-
tech paranoia of the cyberpunk and conspiracy genres as “degraded”
attempts “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system,”
the system of world capital (1991: 38; cf. Flieger, 1996, 1997). His readings of
conspiracy films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson, 1992) show a
prescient sense for the decade of The X-Files, a series which first appeared a
year after that book was published. As a political fantasy about the
labyrinthine workings of an unmappable and highly secretive system of global
domination, with its individual cases of Fortean phenomena woven into a
tight web of conspiratorial intrigue, X-Files represents a barometer of popular
occultism, especially if the word “occult” is taken at its literal meaning of
occluded knowledge, knowledge that is hidden or underexposed, and which
may be brought to light only through painstaking and clandestine
investigation.
Conspiracy thinking, or more broadly the attempt to weave together
whole-cloth cosmologies in resistance to dominant and official narratives, has
taken on new contours in the era of globalization. Comaroff and Comaroff
(2003) argue that conspiracy narratives “presume the eclipse of middle-order
social institutions, of conventional sites of production and power, of a
collective sense of morality, sociality, and history” (297). It is in such
boundary-blurring contexts that icons of threatening otherness such as
vampires, zombies, and alien abductors appear. In Steve Pile’s (2005)
analysis, the figure of the vampire has haunted the imperial and colonial
imaginary, for both colonizer and colonized, and now lurks in the global
imaginary of trans-boundary flows and circulations. Vampires embody the
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 123

risks of the body, blood, mortality, intimacy, the circulation of shadowy


agents infiltrating across borders and boundaries. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for
Pile, represented the encounter between center (London) and periphery
(Transylvania) in the nineteenth century expansion of Europe and of the
British empire through the development of railroads, shipping, and industrial
capitalism. For Marx, capitalism itself was vampiric, penetrating into and
cannibalizing land and labor in its process of capital accumulation, while for
racists vampires represent the risk of the pollution of blood, racial purity, and
sexual miscegenation and violation. Both cases mark an anxiety around
identity and the self-other boundary.
Zombies are similarly double-coded, often marking white anxieties about
non-whites, primitive religious practices, slaves, or totalitarian societies, but
also representing the colonized’s fear of possession by mental and economic
colonizers (Warner, 2002). Comaroff and Comaroff (2002) argue that the
zombie re-emerged in South Africa in historical conditions of economic
disruption, when domestic and communal production practices have been
disrupted by distant market forces and labor has been commodified and
subjected to competition and predation by poorly understood new forms of
wealth (795). In the post-liberation South Africa of neoliberal economic
deregulation, with unemployment hovering at close to 50% (790) and migrant
laborers from neighboring countries scapegoated for the high unemployment,
the popularity of zombie tales marks a “process of fervent speculation, poetic
elaboration, forensic quest” in response to a “seismic mutation in the
ontological experience of work, selfhood, gender, community, and place”
(798-9).
In western societies, alien abduction narratives are today’s border
violation stories, “everyday transgressions of the boundaries demarcating the
limits that define reality. As such,” Jodi Dean (1998) writes, “in the
demystified societies of the present they provoke skirmishes with arbiters of
the real, with science, law, and the press” (163). Where the space of common
discourse, the public sphere, has become irreparably pluralized, its borders
blurred by a “kaleidoscopic jumbling together of partial and fragmented
visions of reality” (135), “common sense” is lost and we are left only with
“particular” and often incommensurable “senses” (24). Alien abductions, in
this context, register the ontological insecurity of a world perceived to be
borderless and unprotected.
The figures of these transitional beings populating conspiracy culture echo
anxieties associated with the ‘authorized entry only’ zones of science and
technology. The mysteries of genetic experimentation and of military and
surveillance technologies become, in alien conspiracy cultures, narratives of
alien implants, government-alien conspiracies harnessing human genetic
material to breed alien races, and so on. Fears of scientific experimentation
124 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

and resulting ecological collapse figure in the X-Files as unexplainable goo


coming from the ground, viral outbreaks triggered by scientific experiments,
uncanny biological hybrids, mysterious residues or side effects of creepy
shadow-government experiments —all very alien yet deeply embedded in our
brains and bodies. Paranoia today encompasses perceptions of conspiracy,
collusion, hidden agency, trauma, catastrophe, victimization, surveillance, risk
and its uneven distribution, racial profiling and scapegoatism, racial and
territorial boundary blurring, disease and infestation, all of it contributing to a
lingering sense of epistemological or ontological doubt, a “panicked” sense
“that normality is not normal anymore, that ‘somebody’ has done something
to the way things used to be, […] that we have been —changed” (Harding and
Stewart, 2003: 260).
The geographics of this economy of power-knowledge, then, take on
multiple contours to the extent that the world is not flat and intervisible but is
curved and striated with the warp and weft of power, translucency and
hiddenness, trust and suspicion. The most extreme form of ‘other’ space is
‘grey’ space, space under erasure, which has literally been blacked (or whited)
out —what we might call out of the picture space, zones that no longer appear
on maps because they have been concealed and fenced off from official
knowledge. Here we find the Dreamlands and Area 51s (Nevada’s Area 51,
the officially unacknowledged military facility near Groom Lake, is perhaps
the paradigm case of such a zone, and is one to which conspiracy hunters
flock), the Roswells and Bermuda Triangles, militarized zones and systems of
state terror premised on the ‘disappearance’ of political undesirables (such as
Argentina’s desaparecidos), and so on (Gordon, 1997: ch. 3; Paglen, 2006;
Patton, 1998).
More ubiquitously, fences and borders demarcate the spaces that have
been blacked out to people for whom they are barriers. Even as modernity
touts its vision of transparency and enlightenment, the world remains
structured by barriers and bottlenecks —barriers to knowledge and to
passage, atopias and aporias. The geographics of the economy of power-
knowledge mirror the uneven geographies of the global political economy,
within which some have the power to move and participate in global flows
and circulations while the movements of others are monitored, bounded,
administered, regimented, checkpointed, channeled, opened and closed
according to opaque systemic needs. Gates and thresholds are the markers of
this geography: thresholds, as Pile (2005: 174-5) puts it, are “not simply
open” but are “porous,” permitting certain movements but not others, acting
as much as “points of departure as sites of meetings or passing-by.” To those
who perceive boundaries as prisons, what is on the other side is rendered
selectively visible, displayed and marketed through mass media as well as
phantasmagoric rumour and oral narrative, such that they become spaces of
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 125

positive and negative imagination, utopian projection and dystopian


suspicion.
If there is any location that transcends this bottlenecked economy of trust,
a space of perfectly transparent representation, it would be the space of the
watchers, the eye in the sky of satellite surveillance and monitoring. But the
structures of panoptic observation, once they are set in motion, provide no
ultimate haven even for agents in their own ranks (as the fictional Fox Mulder
and the real ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame would both attest). Even the
ostensible freedom of liberal democratic capitalism must protect itself from
imagined enemies. The covert detention facilities or ‘black sites’ of the global
security space of the ‘war on terror,’ the Guantanamo Bays and new gulags,
are just the outer edges of a network of surveillance that polices itself
internally and externally. Surveillance cameras, like the bureaucratic systems
of rationality and efficiency they are meant to serve, aim for transparency but
breed secrecy and paranoia, treating sources of suspicion of their own power
as conspiratorial (cf. Marcus and Powell 2003).
Ontologically, at this level of the economics of power-knowledge there is
no way to proceed without recognizing the multiplicity and heterogeneity of
‘truths.’ Where, in its relation to science, spectral space was found at the
outer, uncolonized edges of the known world, in relation to politics it is at the
border zones between worlds, at thresholds, crossroads, and transition points.
Where ghosts traditionally inhabit graveyards (thresholds between the living
and the dead) and haunted houses (thresholds between present inhabitation
and that of the past), today’s ghosts, vampires, and abducting aliens work in
the blacked-out spaces behind closed doors, fences, and border points.

3. Economies of the sacred:


Geographies of transcendence and upheaval
Where the transition from the first (scientific) to the second (political) levels
took us through the passage-point of trust, that from the second to the third
(religious) deepens this passage: from trust in the presenters of the facts to
what we might call foundational trust, a matter of faith or skepticism in the
foundations of modernity or of the cosmos writ large. Where political trust
could, in principle, be regained with the shadowy forces being exposed and
brought to light, at this foundational level light and darkness would have to be
reversed altogether and a restitution brought about through a revolutionary
upheaval, a transformation of cosmic proportions. Where conspiracy theories
show the occult imagination at work, weaving together disparate threads to
make scattered sense of them but remaining immanent to the given reality,
flourishing in its nooks and crannies, at this third level these threads become
126 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

fully woven and constitute an imminent alternative to the dominant order,


ready to overthrow it and reconstitute reality anew. Such a transformation
would lead to a liberation from a state of enslavement or illusion, the
restoration of some prior state that had been upended in the creation of the
current common world, or the instauration of a future that has only been
presaged, intimated, but which is to be born like a phoenix out of the ashes.
Profanity here would be replaced by sanctity, division and severance by
renewed wholeness, the passing and illusory by the real and eternal.
Here we enter the arena of prophetic and revolutionary discourse as
represented by hopes for a millennial transformation which can take many an
ideological form (evangelical Christian, Islamist, fascist, nationalist,
revolutionary Marxist or Maoist), by Gnostic visions of liberation from the all-
encompassing ‘matrix’ or a global cleansing (as in the Heaven’s Gate space
cult), by New Age channelers’ prophecies of galactic reconcordance, New
Paradigm visions of a collective transformation through psychological
liberation and renewal grounded in a transpersonal or collective unconscious,
or the eco-rapture of Gaian Earth spirituality, wherein humanity rediscovers
its green heart and its kinship with trees, whales, and all of nature. Here is the
‘politics of ontology’ as the late Harvard psychologist and alien abduction
theorist John Mack described it (Dean, 1998: 57), a politics premised on the
possibility of simultaneous individual and collective emancipation and
‘healing.’ While the forms of agency involved in the struggles over the
previous two levels of knowledge were primarily human —the nonhuman
figuring as shadowy trickster figures at best— here agency comes from
beyond, out of a cosmic commonwealth that transcends the currently
dominant system. It may be the collective unconscious, an organized
collectivity of space brethren, the revolutionary proletariat led by the party or
leader, or some other salvific or remedial force that speaks to individuals in
the form of dreams, visions, or occult transmissions, but it is believed to be
trustworthy to a degree that, at our second level of analysis, seemed
inconceivable.
The geography here is therefore not one of marginal spaces nor of blank
spaces, blacked-out and silenced spaces, but of openings, portals to alternative
worlds that underpin the known universe and are thought to be guiding it to a
r/evolutionary leap of some sort. All that is left for us to do is to tap into them.
In the literature of New Age channelers, for instance, the Earth is portrayed as
redolent with invisible and mysterious, but psychically perceivable activity,
filled with ‘energy portals’ and ‘interdimensional doorways’, dissemination
points, stargates, spiritual presences and alien beings. In the tradition of post-
1960s countercultural representations of sacred places, on which recent New
Age literature builds, we find geographic tropes of ‘networks of light’, an
‘Aquarian conspiracy’ of spiritual communities (Ferguson, 1987; Spangler,
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 127

1977; Sutcliffe, 2003:65ff.; Thompson, 1974), monumental landscapes


associated with natural ‘power’ or with the spiritual authority of ancient
civilizations (as at Stonehenge, Macchu Picchu, the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, or
the imagined civilizations of Atlantis, Lemuria, Hyperborea, Shambhalla). It is
no accident that many such places are located away from major urban
centers, and that the cultural sites are associated with civilizations imagined
as an ancient alternative to the ‘disenchanted’ and dispirited modern West.
Such a neo-Romantic and often neo-Orientalist (Bartholomeusz, 1998;
Mehta,1991) projection of Earthly power is found in the movement dedicated
to so-called ‘Earth mysteries’ (Devereux, 1992; Heselton, 1991; Ivakhiv,
2005). Before examining this movement more closely, however, it would be
useful to summarize the argument so far, as I have made a jump of sorts
between the second and third ‘levels’ that requires further commentary.

4. Modernity and its ghosts


The first two of the three levels or dimensions outlined thus far —the
scientific and the political— reflect the products of what Bruno Latour (1991)
has called the ‘modern constitution,’ a tacit agreement by which Nature and
Society have become identified as separate realms, to be studied,
represented, and managed differently: in the first case dispassionately by the
objective natural sciences, in the second incorporated into the subjective
politics of interest as these are governed by modern systems of political, legal,
and philosophical representation. Meanwhile, religion was separated from
both science and politics, becoming a matter of belief in the unproven and
unprovable (while science took care of the empirical and provable) and a
private and individual affair (while politics took care of collective issues in the
public sphere). In the process, a “bracketed” God “could descend into men’s
hearts without intervening in any way in their external affairs” (Latour, 1991:
41, 33). Other spheres, such as those of art (as the realm of individual
creativity) or the economy (that of exchange relations), have similarly been
carved out in ways that grant each autonomy from the others and that keep
each free of the impurity and corruption that would arise through their
mixing. The picture, in Latour’s terms, is one of simultaneous ‘purification’
and ‘translation.’ As each system has been separated from the others through
a series of translations, displacements, and delegations, each is granted its
own proper space, its requisite institutions, procedures, and operational
spaces (laboratories and journals for science, representative democracy for
politics, the marketplace for economy, churches for religion, galleries for art,
courts for law, schools for education, hospitals and clinics for medicine) and
its standards of disciplinary judgment (objectivity or veracity for judging
128 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

science, ‘beauty’ for art, ‘justice’ for law, health and normality for medicine,
etc.) by which the world is deterritorialized of its previous relations and
reterritorialized into those appropriate to a smoothly functioning modernity.
In this narrative anthropology of modernity, we have proceeded from a
state of pre-modern messiness to a clean separation of spheres. And yet, as
Latour (1991) argues, “we have never been modern”: ‘nature’ and its
scientific spokespersons have always been cultural products, just as culture
remains ecologically embedded, and their interrelation not only consists of
hybrid relations but actively produces new hybrids. Similarly, the political —
the space of the polis, where issues of power and decision-making are worked
out— and the religious, the space of belief and devotional ritual, have and
continue to be intermingled in various ways. Art, or aesthetically impacting
forms of expression, has throughout history been infused with religious
impulses, political intent, or scientific knowledge. Economic interactions have
been integrated into social life such that the exchange of objects may have
encumbered its participants to social obligations or political expectations. And
human identities or subjectivities have in the past been inextricably entwined
with places, landscapes, and material ecologies. The modern separation of
spheres has been a work in progress and remains subject to reversion back
into the messiness still found in those places less ‘enlightened’ and
modernized than the West. Modernity is thus mapped both temporally, as
proceeding from a hybrid, primitive, and/or corrupt past to a purified and
enlightened present (or future), and spatially, as generated in Western
metropolitan centers and permeating outwards to their wild peripheries.
This modernity rests on the premise that its guiding ideals —of knowledge
and enlightenment (economy 1), political and representative transparency
(economy 2), and emancipation (economy 3, minus the religious thematic)—
are natural and obvious. These are not seen as sacred ideals, since sanctity
has been relegated to the realm of religion and therefore to unprovable
individual beliefs. But where alternative knowledges, political systems, and
emancipatory ideals are suggested, these are easily derogated through an
association with religion and/or pre-modern beliefs and practices, such as
those of magic and occultism (Styers, 2005). Moderns do not want their
politics, knowledge, or economic relations to be corrupted by religious beliefs
or spirits.
If we take reason to be not simply the application of mental operations,
but an entire configuration of discursive and material techniques that
redistribute power and desire across space, then we must examine
Enlightenment modernity as a spatial phenomenon premised on the principle
of bringing the world to the light that dispels shadows. In the light of, and in
the name of, Enlightenment reason, land and territory have been subjected to
and enclosed within geographical mapmaking and the system of practices
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 129

that enables the administration, parcelization and distribution of these spaces


for the good of the collective subject of modernity —the productive individual
and/or the sovereign state. Progressively, land and lifeworlds have been
enclosed, assimilated, and incorporated into a modern regime of power-
knowledge, disenchanted of previous enchantments and libidinal
investments, disembedded from previous socialities and relationalities
(Carter, 1987; Cosgrove, 1984; Harvey, 2006; Lefebvre, 1991; Mitchell, 1988;
Polanyi, 1957; Scott, 1998). Problematic, blurred and hybrid relations have
been eliminated as land and space have been encompassed within a grid of
legal institutions and regulations, figural and as well as literal lines and fences
providing clear title deeds to their owners and reducing their meanings
primarily to their exchange value. Yet this new striation of space, as Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) would call it, involves a simultaneous ‘smoothening’ for
the flow of capital and its intermediaries. It is at once deterritorialized and
reterritorialized along different and more global lines. This colonization of
lifeworlds brings lands previously unowned or held in common through
traditional networks of obligation and exchange into the single political-
economic grid of modern capitalism, premised on the principles of property
ownership, commodity exchange, and legal-juridical control.
Modernity has been described as a “consciousness of radical temporal
rupture” (Pels, 2003: 30; Habermas, 1987). The quintessential modernist
gesture, even in the arts, has been the “repetitive erasure of preceding
moments,” the ceaseless re-enactment of tabula rasa (Venn and Featherstone,
2006: 463). Modernist space is premised on a clean slate purified of any
historical claims and counterclaims: it is pure object, natural and given, to be
turned into personal (or collective) property through the Lockean (and
Marxian?) principle of productive labor. And yet, ever since the enclosures
and dispossessions that established colonial, imperial, and modernist space,
land and property have been haunted by ghostly remainders: by the land
claims of indigenous populations, rooted in traditions of communal land
management and sacred relations with nonhuman and spiritual beings; by the
resistance of peasant and subsistence-based groups; by ethnic territorial
claims, kinship and tribal relationalities, histories of blood and belonging
written into the landscape; and by the underground remainders, and
reminders, of spectral pasts —bones and ruins which can turn up at any
moment, invoking intermingled human-natural histories which perpetually
threaten to obscure and obstruct the free play of commodity exchange and
property ownership and development. If the Enlightenment drew a line
“between reason and its more shadowy others —magic and witchcraft,
irrationality, superstition, the occult”— reason has remained “haunted by
what it excludes” (Buse and Stott, 1999: 3, 5). The modernist purification of
magic and modernity, as Pels (2003) puts it, is “constantly being betrayed by
130 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

the translations and mediations needed to relate the two” (32; and see Latour,
1991; Styers, 2004).
Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstructing the binary oppositions of
modernity becomes pertinent here. Where popular scientist Carl Sagan
devoted his last book to the celebration of science as ‘a candle in the dark’ of
the ‘demon haunted world’ (1997), a world haunted by the residue of
imaginative unreason, Derrida’s late political writing circled around the notion
of ‘hauntology,’ by which he suggested that the haunting, like the ‘h’ grafted
onto the French noun ontologie, while silent is not eradicable (Derrida, 1993).
Rather, it represents an illimitable residue of undecidability permeating the
known and the modern, one that is neither present nor absent, neither
reducible to presence (the real) nor to absence (the imagined) (Buse and Stott,
1999: 10). The anomalous is unsettling not because it opposes the real, the
known and the normal, but because it evades and scrambles the binaries
real/unreal, known/unknown, and normal/deviant. In such an uncanny state,
“one can never be in possession of a place,” since claims to possession are
undercut by counter-claims addressing, soliciting, and implicating them, if in
an inscrutable and incommensurable language (Gelder and Jacobs 1998: 138).
Ghosts and all manner of hauntings thus represent unfinished business,
the lingering traces of past traumas and injustices, anxieties around property
relations, around our debts to the dead (ghosts) or to our dependents
(changelings and abducted children), around the threshold between the
personal/familial and social worlds, between ‘freedom’ and the enslavement it
was built on, wealth and the dispossession that made it possible (cf. Gordon,
1997). Rural landscapes as well as urban ones are inhabited by the ghosts of
the past (Bell, 1997; Read, 2003). As Edensor (2004: 834) points out, even
quintessentially modern spaces such as cities, with their ‘wild zones,’ edge
lands, industrial ruins and marginal sites, are full of “spaces of surplus
materialities and meanings” which “swarm” with the ghosts of the past, the
“spectral interstitial residue” (Stewart, 2002: 356) of memory, and of present
longings for transgression and disorder. In an economy of knowledge, such
specters are a matter of empirical evidence. In an economy of power-
knowledge, they become a matter of claims and counter-claims, an ever-
present reminder of debts, dependencies, and infinitely regressing
calculations. In an economy of sacred power-knowledge, they become a
matter of profound contestation, where the antagonists are situated on an
incommensurably bifurcated playing field from which each casts her spells
and enchantments. The alternative movements that have grown around the
notion of ‘Earth mysteries’ in the last three or four decades represent one
such form of contestation, which ties together a concern for Earth’s ecology
with a thoroughgoing critique of modernity and hopes for an overturning of
the latter in favor of a new covenant with the former.
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 131

5. Earth mysteries and life energies in late capitalism


The ‘Earth mysteries’ movement takes much of its impetus from a vision of
the Earth’s hauntedness not so much by ghosts as by science and visionary
reason. In The View Over Atlantis (1969), one of the books that launched the
movement, mystical luminary John Michell deconstructed the modern
worldview, for his readers, by positing that today’s secular, rationalist, and
utilitarian science is no science at all compared to the ‘sacred’ science of the
ancients. Synthesizing such previously disparate Fortean fields as the study of
ancient architecture and sacred geometry, numerology, pyramidology,
Chinese geomancy, and Alfred Watkins’ evocative notion of ancient ‘ley
lines’, Michell presented an alluring narrative of a glorious past whose
fragments haunt and inspire us today:
A great scientific instrument lies sprawled over the entire surface of the
globe. At some period, perhaps it was about 4000 years ago, almost every
corner of the world was visited by a group of men who came with a particular
task to accomplish. With the help of some remarkable power, by which they
could cut and raise enormous blocks of stone, these men erected vast
astronomical instruments, circles of erect pillars, pyramids, underground
tunnels, cyclopean stone platforms, all linked together by a network of tracks
and alignments, whose course from horizon to horizon was marked by
stones, mounts and earthworks. (Michell, 1969: 69-70)
In Michell’s version this universal civilization was led by a male elite of
druid-like geomancer-engineers. In archaeologist Marija Gimbutas’s (1991)
matricentric version of a similar alternative prehistory, the central role is
played by a peaceful agricultural civilization of Neolithic Goddess worshippers
which allegedly dominated much of Europe before the arrival of horse-riding,
patriarchal Indo-European warriors. The two visions have been combined in
literature (as in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series of visionary novels)
and in recent New Age and ecospiritual literature, in which the Earth is
Goddess (Gaia) and the recovery of ancient sciences, more harmonious and
holistic than ours, is believed to be spurring the transformation of partial,
mechanistic, and destructive sciences into new forms by which we are to
regain the rightful spiritual relationship between people and nature. It is such
a restoration of order that is believed to herald the end of thousands of years
of —take your pick— empire, patriarchy (Eisler, 1987; Sjoo and Mor, 1987),
‘dominator culture’ (McKenna, 1992), agricultural civilization (Quinn, 1991),
reptilian conspiracies (Icke, 1999), or collective amnesia (Cope, 1998; Leviton,
2002).
Earth mysteries discourse has taken on an increasingly detailed
geographical texture as its followers’ cultural capital and mobility have
increased. Richard Leviton’s The Galaxy on Earth: A Traveler’s Guide to the
132 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

Planet’s Visionary Geography (2002), an encyclopedic summation of this line


of thought, draws on ideas from several religious and mystical traditions;
scholars including Mircea Eliade, Gerschom Scholem, James Lovelock, and
Doris Lessing; and New Age cosmological theories and speculations about the
‘galactic connections’ between Earth and stellar constellations and galaxies.
Leviton sees the entire galaxy, including the astrological meanings ascribed to
the planets and star clusters, reflected in the Earth’s geography, and
advocates ‘responsible sacred sites tourism’ —travel to sacred sites with
spiritual intent, to ask Gaia ‘where it hurts’ and find out what should be done
in response— as a means of contributing to ‘planetary detoxification.’ For
writers in this genre, the ‘power places’ of New Age and ecospiritual
pilgrimage constitute an alternative, counter-modern geography that reverses
the valences of modernity’s centers and margins (Ivakhiv, 2001, 2003, 2005).
This form of pilgrimage falls into a longstanding tradition that includes the
nineteenth century Romantic canonization of areas such as England’s Lake
District and New York State’s Catskill mountains, the American West and its
national parks, and other repositories of sublime nature. Resistance to
modernity’s encompassments and disenchantments has occurred repeatedly,
among Romantics, gothic novelists, folklorists and Herderian nationalists,
Spiritualists and mystical occultists of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and counterculturalists and New Agers of the 1960s and 1970s
(Hutton, 1999; Löwy and Sayre, 2001; Owen, 2004). In turn, they feed and
interact with local and ‘essentialist’ movements celebrating pre-modern or
‘traditional’ cultures in the developing world.
All of these, however, emerge dialectically within a capitalist modernity
that has itself become more flexible and accommodating of the symbols and
affects of cultural resistance. Spirituality is easily commodified, places
signifying resistance have become places of spiritual tourism, manifold forms
of libidinal investment and enchantment once considered subversive have
become incorporated into and mobilized by consumer culture. In the resulting
hybrids, voices of counter-modern and anti-global or anti-imperial resistance
mix with the flows of new globalisms, new tourisms, and neo-primitivisms.
New Age pilgrimage presumes an infrastructure and ‘power geometry’
(Massey, 1994) that accommodates the movement of westerners to and
between the locales where non-westerners play hosts to the desires of their
guests. For this reason, New Age spirituality has been described as the
‘spiritual logic of late capitalism,’ even while it pursues counter-modern,
romantic and non-capitalist goals (Hanegraaff, 1996; Heelas, 1992; Ivakhiv,
2003; Mikaelsson, 2001; Urban, 2000). To see how this tension is worked out
within the discourse of ‘Earth mysteries,’ it would be useful to examine more
clearly the central role played by the notion of ‘energy’ in this discourse.
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 133

Like complexity, flow, and connectivity, ‘energy’ is part of a grab bag of


metaphors that have proliferated in the wake of the past century’s
technological and communications revolutions. Energy metaphors have
helped shaped contemporary ecological science, though they have been partly
supplanted by chaos and complexity metaphors (Worster, 1994a). Both serve
among the discursive frames of ‘soft’ and ‘fast’ capitalism (Agger, 1989; Luke,
1998; Thrift, 1997, 1999). Much New Age discourse reflects a desire to tap
into the ‘energy’ of the Earth and to channel Gaia’s energy flows. In part, this
idea of Earth energies is a modernization of the notion of ‘ley lines,’ which
Alfred Watkins conceived in the 1920s as ancient merchant paths connecting
features of the archaic British landscape (Ivakhiv, 2005). Energy metaphors
worked their way into New Age discourse from the spiritualist and
metaphysical movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but
also from scientific developments of the cybernetic, televisual, and (now)
digital eras. Like other quasi-scientific jargon, they are intended to grant New
Age discourse a semblance of authority, while their ambiguity makes for a
polysemic applicability to anything and everything. Alternative medical
traditions, from Chinese acupuncture and martial arts to alternative western
systems such as polarity therapy, Reichian bodywork, and Reiki, conceive of
the body in energetic terms: a healthy body is one in which the flow of life-
energy is unimpeded. If the Earth is identified as the living body of Gaia, then
it seems reasonable to suppose that life-energy flows through ‘her’ body and
that there will be places, chakras or energy centers, where the energy is more
concentrated than elsewhere —Gaia’s erogenous zones, so to speak.
At the same time, the energy metaphor provides a flexibility that allows it
to become readily incorporated into the flow of capital. Energy suggests a
convertibility, whereby one form of energy can be transformed into another.
In a not atypical example of such a conversion of energies, New Age
pilgrimage leaders Suzanne McMillan-McTavish and Glen McTavish (1994),
founders of Sacred Sight Journeys International, recount their several-year
mission to complete a “circuit” of “transceiving stations” that would “unite
the Americas on the ley lines (earth's energy grid).” Having completed several
dozen of these ‘stations,’ the couple moved to Arizona, where Glen got a real
estate license to sell vacation interval ownerships. “Glen's mission now,” the
couple recount, “is to move large amounts of financial energy and real estate
(earth energy) around to create the physical spaces for Suzanne to anchor the
Light for Spirit to move into.” Earth energy thus becomes real estate, which
becomes financial energy, all in an invisible circuit of flows and
transformations.
Another case of alternative ‘energy’ discourse, that of Wilhelm Reich’s
orgone energy, can provide an instructive example of the ways the three
dimensions of Forteana overlap and interact with each other. A psychological
134 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

and scientific pioneer, Reich is often considered to have been Freud’s most
radical student, a political and sexual revolutionary well ahead of his time. His
theory of body armoring, according to which cultural influences shape and
mold bodies to repress and channel libidinal impulses into social structures of
obedience and compliance, has become part of the discourse of therapeutic
‘bodywork’ and influenced radical thinkers as diverse as Marcuse, Foucault,
Deleuze and Guattari, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and Paul
Goodman. Reich’s notion of life energy, which he termed ‘orgone,’ parallels
and predates many other energy-based forms of alternative medicine. At the
level of the economy of knowledge, Reich’s scientific efforts to establish
orgone as a physical and measurable energy, his development of ‘orgone
accumulators,’ ‘cloudbusters,’ and other technical means to harness this
energy, all constituted a parascience —the scientific study of something that
may be real or illusory. His obsessive efforts to develop these technologies,
coupled with his difficulties working within the psychoanalytic and Marxist
establishments —resulting in expulsion from both the International
Psychoanalytic Society and the German Communist Party, with his book The
Mass Psychology of Fascism more predictably being banned by the Nazis—
lent an urgency to Reich’s activities. Ultimately, this urgency transmogrified
into a conspiratorial paranoia that, in the end, seemingly proved its own case.
Reich developed a messianic idea that his orgone discoveries would liberate
all of humanity, but that they also threatened all powers-that-be. He became
convinced that he was being persecuted not only by the FBI (which
investigated him due to his Communist and immigrant background) and the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (which prohibited the sale of orgone
accumulators beyond the state of Maine, where he had settled), but also by
Communist spies and extraterrestrials. Accused of contempt of court for
violating a court injunction against moving his orgone accumulators across
the state line, the unrepentant Reich was ultimately sentenced to two years
imprisonment, his books burnt —a drastic measure, by any account— and his
orgone accumulators destroyed by FDA agents (Sharaf, 1983). He died in a
federal penitentiary in 1957. What began as an experiment in science —or
pseudoscience, according to detractors— thus traveled the full route through
occult conspiracy (accurate or otherwise) to liberatory, messianic mission. The
data on Reich remain difficult to reconcile to this day: the fact that hundreds
of his books were burned suggest that he wasn’t merely mad or criminal, but
that his ideas were thought to constitute a danger to someone or other; but if
so, that would lend credence to his suspicions about the system of control
that they threatened. Like similar cases in the field of anomalistics, that of
Reich may in the end remain undecidable, resting as it does in a space of
incommensurable worldviews which maintains a frisson of fascination for any
who endeavor to explore it.
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 135

The common element underlying the many forms of alternative ‘energy’


discourse, from Earth energies to orgone fields, is the notion of a network of
bio-organic relations that are productive, that are at some level accessible to
us, and that underlie the sedimented husk of social, political, or other
structures, providing the power in potentia of dramatic and liberating change.
This network model shares ontological characteristics with models that are
flourishing in academic and intellectual life today, including chaos and
complexity theories, nonlinear dynamical systems, self-organizing and
emergent structures, and related forms of ‘non-representational’ thinking
(Thrift 2008). Hayles (1990, 1994), Terranova (1996, 2004), and others have
shown that these are shared across a range of cultural strata, from elite and
professional cultures to popular and subcultural arenas. Thrift (1997), for
instance, documents a shift in dominant metaphors in corporate managerial
discourse from more “scientific” forms of administrative management to a
view of management as a form of speedy, constant adaptation and
adjustment, “surfing” and “going with the flow” within a larger environment
that is fast-moving, “fuzzy,” and unpredictable. Such shifts should not be
surprising; indeed it has been argued that nature always takes on the hues
and features of the technologies used to mediate our relationship to it
(Williams, 1980). To recognize this tells us little about the political functions
new metaphors are made to serve; they are, at the very least, multivalent and
pliable. As such models are extended into spheres of everyday life and of the
biopolitical governmentalities adjudicating them, the questions that remain to
be asked are: what are the implications for knowledge of new metaphors such
as that of nonlinear complex networks? What are the implications for politics
and the economy of trust? What are the implications for the foundational
grounds of shared meaning? Seen a certain way, these metaphors may appear
to herald a liberation from the strictures of modern epistemology, yet it is far
from clear what they are liberating us into.

6. Conclusion: Imaginality and the promises of spectres


For believers in one or another Fortean phenomenon or parascientific
endeavor, the virtue of pursuing Forteana is taken for granted. Viewed
scientifically, they can provide us with new, heretofore unknown knowledge.
Viewed politically, they offer the possibility of new revelations —the opening
up of knowledge that had been suppressed by the powers that be— and
therefore a powerful, effective, and equalizing knowledge. Viewed religiously,
they proffer a knowledge that can emancipate the soul and provide
restoration and renovation, allowing for the overcoming of a social order that
has lost its meaning. For scholars, the virtues of studying such phenomena
136 Adrian J. Ivakhiv

can also be outlined according to these three dimensions of science (or


epistemology), politics, and religion. Epistemologically, they tell us about the
nature of knowledge and about the changing boundaries between different
kinds of knowledge practices. Politically, their study can tell us about
changing configurations of trust and suspicion, transparency and paranoia,
within a reconfiguring global ecumene. Finally, their study can inform us
about changing notions of the sacred and secular, about the globalization of
religion, and, in the case of Earth energies, about the role of Earth, nature,
power, and energy as tropes within changing religious, national, and global
imaginaries.
With respect to the geography of Fortean phenomena —that is, both the
occurrence/appearance of such phenomena and their social salience and
pursuit— these phenomena tell us several things about the time-spaces of
modernity. Insofar as modernity is the pursuit of enlightenment and
knowledge, this pursuit occurs in a spatially and temporally uneven world and
produces its own unevennesses, creating geographies of temporal and spatial
displacement within which certain sites, peoples, nations, and activities are
empowered while others are deprivileged, rendered less-than-modern and
relegated to the past. The space of modernity, however, remains haunted by
its others, its purified arenas perpetually threatened by infection and
corruption from its wild edges. Secondly, insofar as modernity is the pursuit
of transparency, the systems it sets up to make possible that transparency
generate their own occlusions, concealments, and erasures. In eliminating the
barriers of traditional societies, modernity sets up new lines of authorization
and subjection, facilitating certain flows while bounding, enclosing, and
suppressing others. But it is precisely in, or around, those epistemological and
political border points and conflict zones that alternative knowledges grow.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Fortean phenomena point to the
role of imagination as an important dimension of social and cultural life, one
which should be treated alongside the dimensions of power (or power-
knowledge) and desire, both of which are now fairly ubiquitous in social
theory. Perhaps the better term here is ‘imaginality’ —the human capacity to
produce images by which to shape relations, give forms to bodies, channel
desires, and configure sensory data into narratable and visualizable patterns
and motivating suasions. Insofar as modernity is the pursuit of a rationalized
world, disenchanted and disinvested of occult, hidden, and sacred forces, its
uneven enactment produces countervailing forces which draw desires,
symbolic discourses, visual-sensory orientations, bodily comportments and
practices, into new and oppositional alignments. To the extent that modernity
is premised on a disavowal of imaginality, with imagination rendered at best
a pale copy of reason and at worst its stark opponent, the recognition of the
unevenness and injustice associated with Enlightenment reason serves as a
Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres 137

catalyst for movements we moderns recognize as religious and sacred. This,


in part, is why the disenchantment and secularization of the world has hardly
proceeded as Weber and others had imagined it would.
Imagination, then, is productive, motivating, and formative (that is, form-
generating); it is not the opposite of objectivity, truth, and reality, but is
constituent in the production of these categories and their opposites. The turn
toward ‘affect’ in recent social theory is in part a move in the direction of
recognizing the potency of the imaginal (e.g., Massumi, 2002; Clough, 2007;
Thrift, 2008); arguably, it reflects an advancement of psychoanalytically
oriented analysis into an engagement with embodiment, sensation,
physiological response, and collective subjectivities. There remains a wide
berth, however, between socio-theoretical approaches premised on an
individually and psychoanalytically conceived notion of subjectivity and those
focusing on textual and visual representations and meanings. Within that
terrain there is much room to develop an understanding of imaginality as the
production of animating, bodily and sensorially engaging, affectively charged
images and forms, capable of organizing, shaping or ‘channeling’ desire and
affect into particular relationalities.
Seen in this light, a new set of guiding metaphors, such as the metaphorics
of energy, networks, and connectivity, should be seen as neither good nor
bad, but rather as an imaginal ordering, rooted as it is in technical, discursive,
and material developments, capable of being put to use toward divergent
ends. In Lefebvrian (1991) terms, such an imaginative reordering can appear
simultaneously in our ‘spaces of representation’ (administrative and managed
concepts of the world), our ‘representational spaces’ (everyday lived
imaginings), and our ‘spatial practices’ as these are repatterned by new
technologies and forms of embodiment. In the process they reshape forms of
governmentality and resistances to those forms. A closer examination of
imagination, or imaginality, in the geographies of ‘occulted’ or deprivileged
knowledges can tell us much about the reserves available for critiquing the
world as well as remaking it. I hope to have made the case here for such an
examination by situating these ‘knowledges’ within the larger story of
modernist purification (including the disciplinary separation of onto-epistemic
systems) and hybridization that Latour and others have begun to tell about
modernity and its ambiguous aftermath.

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Whitehead and Roger Sperry.
The negation of the instant and the free will problem
Rémy Lestienne1

Abstract
In 1911, Whitehead had a flash of mind: if we deny the reality of the instant,
many problems of the philosophy of nature seem solved. His metaphysics,
however, will wait to mature until moving to Harvard in 1924. Besides his
denial of instants of time and the replacement of the concept of time by that
of ‘process’, Whitehead articulates new concepts to account for the
crystallization of successive realities, the solidarity between events, the
permanence of objects and their deterministic behavior. But one of his largely
unnoticed merits, in my view, is to reopen the question of free-will in the
mind-body problem. Though Roger Sperry’s arguments for an emergentist
view of consciousness with a downward causal power onto the subjacent
neuronal activity was convincingly disputed in particular by Jaegwon Kim, we
suggest that in Whitehead’s philosophy of time Kim’s demonstration is
broken, opening new avenues to understand free will.

0. Introduction
In the first pages of his 1906 paper On Mathematical Concepts of the Material
World (Whitehead, 1906), Whitehead reminds us that the basic concepts for
the description of nature in classical physics are the points of space, the
particles of matter, and the instants of time. But, since his working together
with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica, Whitehead did not like the
idea of geometrical points. It does not correspond to anything concrete in
immediate perception, and is a very abstract concept with regard to the

1
Rémy Lestienne, honorary research director at France’s Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), was President of the International Society
for the Study of Time from 1998–2004. Elementary particle physicist by
formation, since 1985 he has specialized in theoretical neuroscience (the
processing of information in the brain). He is in particular the author of Les
Fils du Temps / The Children of Time (Presses du CNRS, 1990 /Univ. Illinois
Press, 1995), Le Hasard Créateur / The Creative Power of Chance (La Découverte
1993 / Univ. Illinois Press, 1998) and Dialogues sur l’Emergence / Dialogues
about Emergence (Le Pommier, 2012 / Kronoscope Vol. 16, No 1, 2016).
lestienner@gmail.com
144 Rémy Lestienne

foundations of geometry. As is well known, to clarify the situation he


developed a formalism of ‘extensive abstraction’. But in this paper, he
continues to use instants of time: “time must be composed of instants,” he
writes, and justifies this ‘must’ by a reference to an article by Bertrand Russell,
published in 1901 (Russell, 1901). A few years later, however, Whitehead
came to the proposal that, in time, points (i.e., instants) are a remote
abstraction that should no longer be taken among the basic concepts of the
philosophy of nature.
How is this approach important for psychology? A partial, but important,
answer may be the renewal of the question of free will. In this paper, I
articulate Whitehead’s philosophy of time with the debate on free will, with
emphasis on the work of the psychophysiologist Roger Sperry (Nobel prize
1981) on ‘split-brain patients’ and the criticisms by the philosopher of science
Jeagwon Kim about Sperry’s strong emergent view of consciousness. To that
intent, I shall make a large usage of two prior papers (Lestienne 2010; 2017).

1. Instants do not exist. The Newtonian time is an abstraction and


a mutilation
Late on the night of September 2d, 1911, Whitehead was proofreading the
second volume of the Principia and his mind reflected on the theme of the
then planned volume IV of the series about Geometry (that he was in charge
of writing, but would never be completed). Suddenly, one idea flashed in his
mind: Time also is mistreated in science. Just like I am convinced that points in
space are abstractions that should not be taken as basic elements of reality, so
instants of time are abstractions that do not correspond to any basic reality.
Early the next morning he writes to Russell to share his experience: “Last
night when I should have finished [the proofreading], the idea flashed on me
that time could be treated in exactly the same way as I have now got space
(which is a picture of beauty, by the bye). So till the small hours of the
morning I was employed in making notes of the various ramifications. The
result is a relational theory of time, exactly of four legs with that of space. As
far as I can see, its gets over all the old difficulties, and above all abolishes the
instant of time” (quoted by Victor Lowe, 1985, p. 299; my emphasis). And he
continues by confessing that, in fact, the nature of time has since long been a
subject of worry for him, but he had had to conceal his dislike “from lack of
hope. But I have got my knife into it at last.”1
It is only eight years later, in 1919, that he comes back on the question in
An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. There, he broaches
for the first time the subject of non-existence of instants of time: “A state of
change at a durationless instant is a very difficult conception. It is impossible
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 145

to define velocity without some reference to the past and the future. […] This
conclusion is destructive of the fundamental assumption that the ultimate
facts for science are to be found at durationless instants of time.” Accordingly,
he admits that the ultimate fact for observational knowledge is perception
through a duration; “namely, that the content of a specious present, and not
that of a durationless instant, is an ultimate datum for science […] In fact
absolute time is just as much a metaphysical monstrosity as absolute space”
(Whitehead, 1919, p. 2-8).

2. William James’ specious present


In the latter quotation, a qualification should retain our attention because it
points at a probable source of inspiration for Whitehead’s reflection: the
specious present. These words, indeed, inevitably, make reference to William
James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). The chapter that James devotes to the
perception of time opposes the concrete experience of the present to the
abstract mathematical instant dividing the past and the future. Quoting one
friend, James writes: “Let [the concrete experience of the present] be named
the specious present […]. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener
to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to
the beholder to be contained in the present.” Then he develops his idea of
specious present, calling on the support of observations made by
contemporaneous psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, Georg Dietze,
Sigmund Exner, Gustav Fechner and others.
In 1890, psychophysiology was not well enough developed to understand
the physiological mechanisms involved in time perception, and to more
precisely define the content of the specious present. Nowadays, progress in
neuroscience has allowed us to confirm and clarify James’ reflections. Far
from being a machine adapted to take instantaneous snapshots of
surrounding reality, our brain is perceived today as a machine for analyzing
sensory data in order to verify their coherence and evaluate their most
probable causes (see for instance Lestienne, 2016). Such an analysis
necessarily takes time. Verifying the coherence of the lived scene, the brain is
able to erase details that appear surrealist, eventually to add others that seem
missing for substantiating their probable causes. These correcting
mechanisms explain why, for instance, in a concert hall, when a musician
strikes a cymbal, we have the sensation of simultaneity between the act seen
and the sound emitted; while we all know that light is usually received several
tens, perhaps a few hundred of ms before sound, depending on the distance
between us and the orchestra. Many similar observations today converge and
allow us to affirm that what we call our visual present is not a photographic
146 Rémy Lestienne

snapshot but (as it were) a painted picture that can be revised within a
window of time of the order of 500 ms (Lestienne, 2001).
One year after the publication of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of
Natural Knowledge, Whitehead published The Concept of Nature, which
contains a full chapter devoted to time. This chapter reiterates his conviction
that the mathematical instant cannot be a primitive concept in the description
of nature, with profound echoes to James’ specious present:
“There is no such thing as nature at an instant posited by
sense-awareness. What sense-awareness delivers over for
knowledge is nature through a period. […] The ultimate terminus
of awareness is a duration with temporal thickness.” (Whitehead,
1920, p: 57-69).

3. The support of quantum mechanics


A second, strong support to Whitehead’s theory of the ‘atomicity’ of time
came from the development of quantum mechanics. In 1920, the new theory
is still in its infancy. The main principles of the new theory are posited in
1925 by Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and other physicists around
Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. It is remarkable that Whitehead takes hold of the
subject as soon as this very year 1925, publishing Science and the Modern
World.2 In this new book, he refers to what will be later known as the
‘Principle of collapse of the wave function’: “The discontinuities introduced by
the quantum theory require revision of physical concepts in order to meet
them. In particular, it has been pointed out that some theory of discontinuous
existence is required. What is asked from such a theory is that an orbit of an
electron can be regarded as a series of detached positions, and not a
continuous line” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 137).
This quantal conception of motion is particularly well illustrated in
photographic plates of the tracks of atomic particles in a cloud chamber. This
device developed in England at about that time by Charles Wilson allows us to
visualize the tracks of moving atomic particles. Basically, it is a volume closed
by glass windows that contains the vapor of a chemical substance at a partial
pressure close to its condensation point. Particles that cross the volume, for
instance cosmic rays, ionize that gas and induce the formation of liquid
droplets along their paths. Placing the chamber in the air gap of an
electromagnet, one can see the bending of the particles’ trajectories caused
by the magnetic field, thus allowing us to infer their velocity. Now, how do the
trajectories of these particles appear in a cloud chamber? Precisely, as a
sequence of isolated droplets, exactly as Whitehead describes in his book. The
figure below is an example of a cloud chamber picture taken at about that
time.
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 147

 

Figure 1. A Wilson’s cloud chamber frame. Motion of particles is displayed by
discrete beads of droplets.

Discussing the relations between time and duration in Science and the
Modern World, Whitehead begins by claiming that the old scheme whereby,
according to Descartes and Newton, the elements of ultimate reality are
points, instants of time and particles of matter3 should be completely revised:
all three concepts are only abstractions from sense data, and even mutilations
with regard to the complexity of our relations with the external world.
Let us sum up, quoting again Whitehead. “Time is sheer succession of
epochal durations. But the entities which succeed each other in this account
are durations. The duration is that which is required for the realisation of a
pattern in the given event” (Whitehead, 1925, p. 128). The resultant
complexity of time and of the network of relations between events in the
world convinces Whitehead that common language and its extensions in the
scientific language of the day are traps to contemporaneous minds.
Accordingly, he decides to cut with our habits, and announces in The Concept
of Nature that, from then on, he will avoid use of the word time, since the
measurable time of science and the civilized life shows only some aspects of
the more fundamental fact of the passage of nature. In Science and the Modern
World, he finally introduces the word that will retain his preference: process.
148 Rémy Lestienne

“Thus, nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process”


(Whitehead, 1925, p: 74, my emphasis). What in this process, this succession
of crystallizations, or ‘concrescences’ impacts the problem of perception? It is
time to introduce Roger Sperry’s works in the debate.

4. The Nobel award-winner’s career as a neuro-psychologist


Roger Wolcott Sperry, born at Hartford, CT, in 1913, became in 1934 a
student of Professor Raymond H. Staton (1872-1950) in psychology, with
whom he worked for three years at Oberlin College. Raymond Staton was a
specialist in motor phonetics, and studied speech from the point of view of
the muscular movements which produce it. At that time, research in
psychobiology was largely influenced by the behaviorist school led by John
Watson (among others). Raymond Staton was no exception. In short,
behaviorism claimed that the brain was too complex an organ for an
understanding of its inner mechanisms. Instead, the brain was considered a
black box; a psychologist could only observe and note the correlations
between input stimulations and output motor responses. In particular,
“behaviorism claims that `consciousness' is neither a definable nor a usable
concept; that it is merely another word for the `soul' of more ancient times”
(Watson 1930).
At Oberlin, Staton had equipped his laboratory with instruments for the
study of the control and coordination of learned gestures, in particular those
related to the production of speech. Staton taught Sperry experimental
psychology, training him, in particular, to use kymographs to record muscular
motions and muscular action currents. After leaving Oberlin in 1937, Sperry
went to Chicago, where he worked with the renowned biologist Paul Weiss.
There he performed experiments on rats, which led in 1941 to his PhD on the
“Functional results of crossing nerves and transposing muscles in the fore and
hind limbs of the rat.”
He excelled in performing a delicate transposition of nerves in the hind
limbs of young rats. More specifically, he cut the sensitive nerve of both hind
limbs, and then sutured the sensitive nerve of the right hind limb onto the
ascending nerve of the left hind limb, applying after full recovery of the
animal a light shock to its right paw. From this, he observed that it always
raised the other, non-shocked, limb, and for that purpose leaned, on the
contrary, onto the right limb (Figure 2). This observation was for Sperry a
clear indication that the association of the sensations with a member was
centrally, not peripherally, fixed. Once acquired, this association remains
intact and endures forever after the transplantation. As he commented years
later, “The main point […] is the contention that the animal responds in
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 149

protectively holding up the wrong foot and in yipping and licking the wrong
foot, caused directly in brain function by the subjective pain property itself,
rather than by the physiology of the nerve impulses […].” (Sperry, 1976).

 
Figure 2. A small shock is given to the hind limb of a rat, the sensitive nerve
of which had been sutured onto the ascending sensitive nerve of the other
hind limb. Such an operation performed in the young animal results in the de-
crossing of this ascending pathway. The animal raises the other limb (Sperry,
1959). Sperry concluded that the association of the pain with a member, once
acquired, is fixed for ever in the central nervous system.

During this period, the imprint on Sperry of the behaviorist mode of


thought is still clearly visible. The experiment itself can be characterized as
the mere observation of input (shock to the paw)—output (behavior)
correlation. To be sure, in the first paper he wrote for a general audience,
Sperry did not hesitate to tackle a problem that was forbidden from the point
of view of behaviorism. But after attempting to open a window beyond
behaviorism, he still conceded that “the entire output of our thinking machine
consists of nothing but patterns of motor coordination,” “the entire activity of
the brain, so far as science can determine, yields nothing but motor
adjustment,” and “any separation of mental and motor processes in the brain
would seem arbitrary and indefinite” (Sperry 1952).
150 Rémy Lestienne

5. Pain as a clue to the mind-body problem


However, Sperry for some time had not been fully satisfied with the limits
that behaviorism put on physiological research on the brain and its higher
functions. He had the feeling that behaviorism's refusal to explore the
territory of consciousness was exaggerated. Experiments on de-crossing
sensitive nerves on the rat, extended to a number of similar observations
involving other species, all demonstrating the innate character and strength of
the associations between one side of the central nervous system and the
opposite side of the body or of the visual field. They seemed to show that, in
each species, the association between a nerve and a subjective feeling of part
of the body endured forever, in spite of any transposition of nerve channel
that might be performed surgically. It endured even though animals could see
what Sperry had done and could observe the unsuitability of their motor
responses!
The first clue for a breakthrough seemed to be offered by the qualia, i.e.,
subjective sensations resistant to any attempt to analyze them in solely
physical terms. The standard example of qualia often discussed is that of the
redness of red objects. Redness, however, was not Sperry's first choice.
Perhaps because of the kind of experiments he had so far performed, he
privileged the sensation of pain. He was convinced that pain was not
reducible to the excitation of special nerves or specific places in the brain;
rather, the feeling of pain was linked to a special patterning of cerebral
excitations in time and space. There was nothing strange in this assertion.
Think of the pain sometimes suffered by patients who have had an arm or a
leg amputated: they feel pain, for instance, from the missing hand of their
amputated arm, as strongly as if their hand was still there. Nervous
excitations are multivalent: neural action potentials can engender feelings of
pleasure or of pain, depending of which nerve lines or networks are excited,
and according to which spatio-temporal patterns. This patterning is normally
determined by the excitation of peripheral pain receptors, which in
amputated members are missing. That this patterning could be excited by
chance in the CNS seemed quite improbable to Sperry:
“In regard to the pain in a phantom limb, my contention is
that any groans it may elicit from our patient and any other
response measures or behavioral outputs that may be taken to
be the result of the pain sensation are indeed caused not by the
biophysics, chemistry, or physiology of the cerebral nerve
impulses as such, but by the pain quality, the pain property, per
se” (Sperry, 1966).
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 151

6. From periphery to the brain


Experiments about transposition of peripheral nerves could not, however,
entirely satisfy Sperry. As is well known, reflex responses in the limb, for
instance, do not necessarily mobilize the brain, but are usually initiated at the
level of the spinal cord. Sperry soon became convinced that new experiments
were needed, clearly linked to the functioning of the brain itself. After his
move from Chicago to Pasadena (CalTech) in 1954, he began experiments on
sectioning the corpus callosum4 on cats and monkeys. In addition to the
corpus callosum, Sperry cut also the other minor commissures crossing over
the hemispheres, and the optic chiasm that in binocular vision ensures the
complete partition of the cortical processing of the visual scene, the left side
of it towards the right hemisphere of the brain, and vice-versa (Figures 3 and
4).

 
Figure 3. Sagittal cut of the brain along the central fissure, showing the
convolutions of the internal left hemisphere, the split stem, and the various
commissures that connect the two brain hemispheres: the large bundle of the
corpus callosum and the smaller anterior and posterior commissures.
152 Rémy Lestienne

 
Figure 4. The brain vision pathways in man. The optic chiasm ensures that
the nerve fibers coming from both eyes and corresponding to the left visual
field project onto the right hemisphere. Conversely, the nerve fibers coming
from both eyes and corresponding to the right visual field project onto the
left-brain hemisphere. Fibers coming from the left eye retina but
corresponding to the right visual field, or from the right eye retina and
corresponding to the left visual field do not cross at the optic chiasm, ensuring
that the entire right or left visual fields are both processed in the contralateral
hemisphere of the brain.

7. Commissurotomized patients
In 1962, Sperry realized that he might learn a lot by testing patients from
whom surgeons had surgically cut the bridges between the right and left
cortical hemispheres: the corpus callosum and the minor commissures,
except the optic chiasm. Some time before, Dr. Bogen, a colleague and
neurosurgeon, introduced a man aged 43 to another surgeon from Los
Angeles, Dr. Philip Vogel. The man was a veteran from the Second World
War, during which he had received a piece of shrapnel in the head. For about
ten years, this man had suffered from epileptic attacks, the severity of which
progressively increased, to such an extent that drugs could no longer control
them. Drs. Bogen and Vogel decided to perform the operation described in an
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 153

attempt to prevent the epileptic crises extending from one cortical


hemisphere to the other. The operation was a success, beyond the physicians’
hopes, since the epileptic attacks practically stopped. As in previous historical
cases, the operation had not changed the man’s personality, nor his I.Q.,
which was excellent. With the surgeon’s and patient’s consent, Sperry
organized a series of psychophysical tests on the man, with the help of a
young researcher of his lab, Dr. Michael Gazzaniga. He later expanded this
type of inquiry to a cohort of about twenty patients.
A sketch of the testing arrangement is presented in Figure 5. The patient is
sitting at a table with an opaque screen that stops him seeing his hands and
objects which he can explore only by touch. The projector can project images,
usually for a very short time (< 100 ms), onto the translucent screen in front
of his eyes, on the right side of his visual field or on his left visual field, so that
the patient (who has been asked to look straight in front) does not have
enough time to perform a saccade towards the image as it flashes on (this is
to ensure that the image will be processed solely in the contralateral side of
his brain).

 
Figure 5. The arrangement of a general testing unit to demonstrate the
symptoms produced by commissural section on patients. After Sperry, 1970.
154 Rémy Lestienne

The series of tests indisputably showed that the right cerebral hemisphere
perceives, memorizes, categorizes, recognizes objects and people including
the patient himself —as well as the left hemisphere. They also demonstrated
that the right hemisphere is equally capable of firing emotions and of
reasoning, in spite of the absence of any communication with the left
hemisphere, which is the hemisphere of language. For instance, if an image of
a doll is presented on the left side of the screen, so that it is processed with
the patient’s right hemisphere, he can choose a doll on the table with his left
hand (but not with his right), to show that he has identified the image (but he
is unable to name it with words). He can even perform associations by
analogy: for instance, associate an image with an object identified by touch
with his left hand and which is related to but not identical with the image (for
instance, he can associate a bolt with the image of a screwdriver).

8. The unity of consciousness


In addition, Sperry was astounded by the fact that, in these ‘split-brain’
patients, consciousness, or more precisely the reconstructed perception of the
world and of the self, nevertheless maintained a solid and coherent unity. Any
dissonance between what was seen in the right visual field, for instance, and
the emotional responses prompted by what was projected onto the left visual
field, were promptly erased, so that when asked they always justified their
emotion with regard to the scene projected to the right side, the only one
about which they could speak. All these observations led Sperry to envisage
consciousness as something unique, beyond mere neuronal excitations.
Sperry reports: “my long-trusted materialistic logic was first shaken in the
spring of 1964. [In September 1965], I openly changed my alignment from
behaviorist materialism to anti-mechanistic and non-reductive mentalism —as
the term ‘mentalism’ is used in psychology in contrast to behaviorism; not, of
course, in the extreme philosophic sense that would deny material reality”
(Sperry, 1980).
According to Sperry, the main reason for considering consciousness as an
emergent, global entity with its own special properties is the unity of
consciousness, not only in normal subjects, but also in split-brain patients. For
instance, these patients do not complain about their psychological perception
of the visual space: they still have perfect continuity of vision across the
midline of the visual field. Of course, in ourselves as in other normal humans,
processing by the right and left hemispheres is matched and merged thanks
to the communication channel constituted by the corpus callosum, but not in
the case of split-brain patients: in all cases the result is a perfectly unified
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 155

perception. Consider also the merging of different modalities of perception,


which leads to the perfect consistency of the overall perception of the external
world. We have already discussed the case of sight and sound of a cymbal
strike in a large concert hall. The conscious perception is rescaled by
combining the two kinds of stimulations!
Sperry thus admits that consciousness must exert a causal, reorganizing
power on subsequent physiological processes. An idea that he developed in
his Nobel lecture:
“The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of
the brain process, become themselves explanatory causal
constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with
their own laws and dynamics. […] Basic revision of concepts of
causality are involved in which the whole, besides being
‘different from and greater than the sum of parts’, also causally
determines the fate of the parts, without interfering with the
physical or chemical laws for the sub-entities at their own level”
(Sperry, 1981).
Sperry’s stand regarding consciousness opens the paradoxical possibility
of a consciousness that has specific power over neural processes but remains
purely in the biological realms. It is thus an example, probably the most
paradigmatic one, of strong emergentism, which is opposed to Cartesian
dualism as well as to materialistic reductionism. It differs also from the soft,
so called weak emergentism claimed by many philosophers and scientists
who would like to confine emergentism into the epistemological domain and
deny specific top-down causal power to emergent entities.

9. Criticisms of Sperry’s position


Roger Sperry's stand on the mind-body problem provoked and continues to
provoke objections, not only from those who, for their own reasons, still
consider that, granted the successes of reductionism, one should not give up
the hope of reducing all physical, biological, and psychological events to
ultimate physical causes at the lowest level, but also from a number of
colleagues who, while they accept the idea of special properties of
consciousness, nevertheless refuse Sperry's monistic and materialistic view.
Among the latter were John Eccles and Karl Popper, both of them Sperry's
friends, who apparently attempted to attract him towards a dualistic view of
the world (if not a threefold view, in the case of Karl Popper).
For Eccles and Popper, consciousness is what selects from the neural
networks and patterns of neuronal excitation those networks and patterns
which must be composed in order to obtain unity of consciousness. In
addition, because consciousness is in their view totally language-dependent,
156 Rémy Lestienne

they thought that the notion of 'being conscious' should be restricted to the
left hemisphere alone (in right-handed people). On the basis of his
observations of split-brain patients, Sperry refused the hierarchy of the
cerebral hemispheres. The publication by Sperry's friends of The Self and Its
Brain (1977) unleashed a somewhat fierce response: “Mind-Brain interaction:
mentalism, yes; dualism, no” (Sperry 1980). After conceding certain points of
convergence between the authors’ ideas and his own, this paper strongly
upholds determinism against the indeterminism extolled by Eccles, and
monism against the dualism of both authors. It also contests materialistic
reductionism and behaviorism.
In recent years, one difficulty has been raised by philosophers: that of the
coherence of Sperry’s and other scientists’ unimodal, emergentist view of
consciousness (in the strong variety of emergentism): This is particularly the
case of Jaegwon Kim (Brown University). His position is all the more
interesting given that for many years he had been attracted to the monist
emergentist position on the mind-brain debate, probably thinking with Fodor
that “if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my
reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my
believing is causally responsible for my saying, […] if none of that is literally
true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the
end of the world” (Fodor, 1989).
But Kim stays in line with the classical, physicalist view of time, impedes
his escape from a logical contradiction. In short, Kim claims (Kim, 1999;
2006; 2008) that it is logically impossible to admit the emergence of radically
new causes at one upper level, if one accepts the monism of causes and
effects, in this case if one believes that the content of our consciousness is
and only is the result of neural processes in the brain. As a matter of fact, if
one admits the transitivity of sufficient causes, then: if the state N of the
neurons is sufficient to produce the state C of consciousness, and if C is
sufficient to produce the subsequent state N* of the neural network, which in
turn is sufficient to produce the corresponding state C* of consciousness, then
one is entitled to say that N is sufficient to produce the state N* of the
neurons: the apparent causation link from C to N* is illusory (see Figure 6A
for illustration). This state of affairs is general in the philosophy of the strong
versions of emergentism (which claims the original top down causation of the
wholes on the parts).

10. Free will restored?


Unless, perhaps, we accept a temporal solution of continuity in the processes
in question in a diachronic approach to emergentism, “this leaves diachronic
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 157

downward causation as the only player on the scene —up to this point, at any
rate. One might say that this is all that the emergentists need— the diachronic
causal influence of emergent phenomena on lower-level phenomena. But the
problem is that this apparently unproblematic variety of downward causation
is beset with difficulties “ (Kim, 2008, p. 149). The difficulties Kim is referring
to, however, are linked to the continuity of time and of the chain of sufficient
causes, which are absent in Whitehead’s philosophy of nature.
After all, this would not be the only claim in science of such temporal
solution of continuity: think of the collapse of the wave function in the
standard quantum theory that says that in each measurement process the
deterministic sequence of quantum states is broken.
What is the situation within the Whiteheadian time frame? Consider the
sketch of Figure 6B. The quantization of the concrescences between states N
and N* of the brain allows us to consider that the state C of the consciousness
is the real cause of the state N* of the brain. The emergent properties of the
consciousness seem to allow for a true causal effect onto the subjacent neural
activity in the brain. I believe that Whitehead would explain that the base of
the concrescence of N is narrower than the base of concrescence of N*, that
encompass C as well as N.


Figure 6. A) the neuronal state N is the base of the ‘supervenient’ state C of
consciousness (it is not a true cause in the sense that C is not reducible to N,
but N is sufficient to entail it). The alluded-to causal chain from the state of
consciousness C to the modified neural state N*, which is the base of the state
of consciousness C*, signifies that C is sufficient to cause N*. It seems that
there is no reason for not taking N as the cause N*, bypassing C and treating
it as a mere epiphenomenon (Kim, 2008). B) In the Whiteheadian approach,
the causal link from N to N* may be broken, given the quantization of
concrescences between states N and N*, while the causal link C to N* may be
functional, due to a ‘prehension’ between N* and C, restoring the claim that C
is the true cause of N*.
158 Rémy Lestienne

This short inquiry has presented a possible extrapolation of the


Whiteheadian philosophy toward the old and painful problem of free will.
Whitehead himself had not the luck to know the work of Sperry: his early
public paper of 1952 came five years after Whitehead’s death. Conversely,
Sperry was quite aware of the work of the British founders of modern
emergentism (Conway Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander and Charles Broad),
but was apparently unaware of Whitehead’s literature. I attempted to point
out the far-reaching consequences of the denial of instants and the
recognition of the complexity of the passage of nature, as opposed to the
artificial simplicity of the physical notion of time, based solely on the notion
of the propagation of causes (an abstraction, as Whitehead would insist). The
link between Sperry and Whitehead may attract the attention of philosophers
and scientists to the possible renewal it offers of the question of free will. As
Sperry remarked: “Of all the questions one can ask about conscious
experience, there is none for which the answer has more profound and far-
ranging implications than the question of whether or not consciousness is
causal. The alternative answers lead to basically different paradigms for
science, philosophy, and culture in general” (Sperry, 1980).

Bibliography
Fodor, J., 1989. “Making Mind Matter More,” Philosophical Topics, 17: 59-80.
James, W., 1890. The Principles of Psychology, New York: Henry Holt
&Company.
Kim, J., 1999. “Making sense of Emergence,” Philosophical Studies, 95:3-36.
Kim, J., 2006. “Being realistic about emergence,” in: The Re-emergence of
Emergence, P. Clayton & P. Davies ed., Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
pp. 189-202.
Kim, J., 2008. “The nonreductivist’s troubles with mental causation,” in:
Emergence, Contemporary Readings in Philosophy of Science? M.A.
Bedeau & P. Humphreys ed., Cambridge: the MIT Press, pp. 427-
445.
Lestienne R., 2001. “The Duration of the Present,” in: The Study of Time X.
Greenwood Publishing Group, pp.141-156.
Lestienne, R. 2013. “Emergence and the Mind-Body Problem in Roger
Sperry’s studies,” Kronoscope, 13:112-126.
Lestienne, R., 2016. Le Cerveau Cognitif. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Lestienne, R., 2017. « In support of Whitehead’s Time », Kronoscope, in print.
Lowe, V., 1985. A.N. Whitehead: The Man and his Work. Vol. 1: 1861-1910.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Popper, K.R., and Eccles, J.C., 1977. The Self and its Brain. An argument for
interactionism. Berlin: Springer International.
Russel, B., 1901. “Review of Kant’s cosmogony,” Mind, vol. 10, No 39, 405-
407.
Whitehead and Roger Sperry 159

Sperry, R.W., 1952. “Neurology and the mind-brain problem,” The American
Scientist, 40: 291-312.
Sperry, R.W., 1959. “The growth of nerve circuits,” Sci. Amer., 201:68-75.
Sperry, R.W., 1966. “Mind, brain, and humanist values,” Bull. Atomic Sci.
22:2-6.
Sperry, R.W., 1970. “Perception in the absence of the neocortical
commissures,” in: Perception and its disorders, Percept. Disor. 48:
123-138.
Sperry, R.W., 1976. “Mental phenomena as causal determinants in brain
function,” Proc. Stud., 5: 247-256.
Sperry, R.W., 1980. “Mind-Brain interaction: mentalism, yes; dualism, no,”
Neuroscience, 5: 195-206.
Sperry, R.W., 1981. “Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral
hemispheres,” Nobel Lecture of 12/8/1981, The Nobel Foundation.
Watson, J.B., 1930. Behaviorism (revised edition). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Whitehead, A.N., 1906. “On mathematical concepts of the material world,”
Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. London, series A, 205:465-525.
Whitehead, A.N., 1919. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural
Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Whitehead, A.N., 1920. The Concept of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press.
Whitehead, A.N., 1925. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press.

Notes

1
Let us note, incidentally, that long before Whitehead some philosophers had
questioned the reality of instants. We know today, for instance, that in a
letter dated 1663, Spinoza had written: “Wherefore many, who are not
accustomed to distinguish abstraction from realities, have ventured to
assert that duration is made up of instants, and so to wishing to avoid
Charybdis have fallen into Scylla. It is the same thing to make up duration
out of instants, as it is too make number simply by adding up noughts.”
This letter XII from Spinoza to Louis Meyer has only recently been
discovered. On the other hand, while Spinoza has certainly inspired
Whitehead in his search for countering the dualism of Descartes, the
Spinoza’s vision about time was in many respects opposed to that of
Whitehead.
2
This shows that, contrarily to a commonly held opinion, Whitehead was
paying close attention to the developments of the new discipline and to its
implications for the philosophy of nature.
3
For Whitehead, the persistence of particles and other ‘things’ depends on
their relation with other ‘things’ that, from near or far, influence their
successive concrescences.
160 Rémy Lestienne

4
The corpus callosum is the large bundle of nerve fibers (more than 200
million fibers in man) that connects left and right hemispheres of the
brain. Sectioning the corpus callosum had been since some decades
practiced by surgeons on some patients suffering from severe epileptic
crises, in the hope —often fulfilled— to prevent the propagation of
epileptic crises from one hemisphere to other one, with no or little
noticeable effects on the patient’s sensory-motor or cognitive functions; so
much so that in 1951 McCulloch, a renowned theoretician of the brain,
suggested that the mere function of the corpus callosum was perhaps just
to prevent the hemispheres from sagging!
Re-thinking the Self: Process philosophy in
Murray and Morgan’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Eleonora Mingarelli1

Abstract
Process psychology is a new growing field where process principles are
applied to psychological research. The combination is a particularly fortunate
one, for process philosophy offers important insights on the nature of the self
(e.g., relation between individual and environment, memory, identity). One
unique example of fruitful co-operation between process philosophy and
psychology can be found in the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a
personality test co-authored by the American psychologists Christiana Morgan
and Henry A. Murray. Morgan and Murray studied psychology at Harvard
during the years when Alfred N. Whitehead was appointed William James’s
chair of philosophy. Aside from the historical connection, the test is drafted
on a process view of reality and the self (e.g., theory of organism, temporality
and memory, creativity and freedom). Thus, an analysis of the theoretical
framework behind the TAT, and a comparison with Whitehead’s process
philosophy, provide a luminous example of the great result that can be
achieved when the process view is combined with psychological investigation.

1. Introduction
Recent decades have seen many developments in the new field of process
psychology, a discipline that aims at grounding psychological investigation on
process principles (e.g., Roy 2000; Cobb 2000; Riffert & Cobb 2003; Weber &
Weekes 2009). In this paper, I will explore the relevance of the process
framework in the domain of psychology by focusing on one example of a
fruitful co-operation between process philosophy and psychological research:
the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a personality test co-authored by the
American psychologists Christiana Morgan and Henry A. Murray.
To my knowledge, the only attempts to highlight this connection are in
two articles, by Charles Laughlin (1973) and Michel Weber (2008). Laughlin
traces the historical and theoretical influence of Whitehead on Murray’s
psychology, and concludes that “the effect of his [Whitehead] thoughts is
nowhere more pronounced or acknowledged than in the development of H.
Murray’s ‘personology.’”1 Weber, instead, sheds light on the fascinating figure

1
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven & Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.
162 Eleonora Mingarelli

of Christiana Morgan whose role in drawing up the TAT is as important as it is


neglected. For Weber, Morgan is actually the one who was in close contact
with Whitehead, and, therefore, the one who brought process ideas into the
creation of the TAT. “It is about time,” says Weber, “that her work is
acknowledged, especially in the context of Whiteheadian studies, which is
already so rich in existential speculations—archetypal or otherwise.”2
In this paper, I will first elucidate the type of personality test the TAT is,
and will then analyse the conceptual affinities between the TAT and process
philosophy, paying attention to specific aspects of the test that link the figure
of Whitehead to the genesis of this test.

2. TAT: Its origin and function


The TAT is classified as a projective test of personality and appeared for the
first time in Harvard in 1935, following a long experimental study made by its
two co-authors, Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray, and the staff of the
Harvard Psychological Clinic.
The idea underlying projective tests is that visual stimuli (whether the
ambiguous Rorschach’s inkblots or more sophisticated images such as those
adopted in the TAT) elicit certain emotions in the patient, who is thus able to
“project” her inner tendencies, motivations, and unconscious thoughts into
the image. The purpose of this type of test is to make one able “[…] to expose
the underlying inhibited tendencies which the subject, or patient, is not
willing to admit, or cannot admit because he is unconscious of them.”3
Projective tests, thus, allow access to the inner feelings of the patient in a
short period of time, unlike the longer period required by psychoanalytical
therapy.
The person who undergoes the TAT is exposed to a number (generally 20)
of defined and complete images (structured stimuli) representing scenes of
everyday human life. The patient, unaware of being subjected to a personality
test, is then asked to make up full stories about the pictures, which function to
elicit one’s imagination and, thus, to overcome the boundaries of rational
thinking. In fact, in fantasy stories the patient is able to express more than
conscious thought and social decency would allow. By examining the plot and
details of the stories, the therapist should then be able to recognize distinctive
personality traits, and to detect particularly influential (even shocking)
experiences or remarkable (if not even dangerous) psychological tendencies
in the patient’s life.
Unlike other personality tests, the TAT is not based on quantitative
measurements, but on human experience in its various aspects. Not only
strictly psychological features (e.g. neurological structure, feelings, emotions,
Re-thinking the Self 163

unconscious tendencies), but also literature, the arts, personal beliefs and
goals, intellectual ideas and conscious thoughts have to be accounted for in
any satisfying psychological analysis.
Yet, the attempt to account for the different facets of the human being had
to be combined with the necessity to organize all these elements in one
coherent system, and thus “[…] to arrive at a systematic description that gave
these diverse interests their new creative shape.”4
So, at a preliminary methodological stage, we can detect a certain affinity
between the approach of Murray and Morgan and that of Whitehead. For him,
speculative philosophy is an attempt to find general ideas through which
reality can be described in the most adequate way. Abstract thinking, then, is
only secondary to experience; whereas categories and schemes help in
interpreting reality, they do not exhaust the fullness and complexity of life:
“Philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness.”5 In a
similar way, the general categories, with which Morgan and Murray operate,
form an adequate interpretative system for organizing the plurality and
variety of human experiences, without stereotyping the patient.

3. The TAT and process philosophy


Murray’s controversial remarks on his relation with Whitehead and the lack of
historical evidence make it very difficult to identify the exact influence of
process philosophy on the genesis of the TAT. However, an intellectual
exchange between Murray, Morgan, and Whitehead, is undeniable,6 as well as
as the remarkable conceptual affinities between Whitehead’s process
philosophy and the TAT. In fact, on a close analysis, the structure of the TAT
presupposes a process understanding of reality.

3.1. A force-based framework

In order to understand the structure of the test, one should look at how
Murray and Morgan thought of a person. Murray defines a person as a
“temporal integrate of mutually dependent processes (variables) developing in
time.”7 These processes are to be conceived as dynamic forces, which “impel
the individual person to pursue a certain course of activity.”8 In other words,
the complex of personality is to be conceived as a field of forces, constantly
changing, and that propel the individual to act in a certain way.
Such force-based view contrasts with the traditional substance-based
psychological framework, which would postulate an unchanging principle as
the base for personhood and selfhood. Inspired by the Polish psychologist
Kurt Lewin and his dynamic theory of personality,9 Morgan and Murray reject
the idea that the individual is a self-enclosed entity, determined in all its parts.
164 Eleonora Mingarelli

Persons are rather dynamic processes that strive to find unity under the
pressure of different forces.
This notion evinces a striking affinity with Whitehead’s metaphysics,
which re-conceives of substance in a dynamic way. As Emmet points out,
“Whitehead defines it [substance] as Creativity; […] Creativity, then, is the
notion of pure activity underlying the nature of things.”10 According to
Whitehead, the smallest particles of the universe are actual entities; they are
neither static atoms nor windowless monads, but rather events, happenings, or
occasions, which constitute themselves as unities in a process of creative
interaction (prehension) with other occasions. Thus, actual entities are
activities, or processes, which interact with one another, and, from their
interaction, unified forms emerge like magnetic fields. In this sense,
Whitehead’s metaphysics takes distance from a substance-based framework
and promotes a concept of the universe as composed of processes of
unification of mutually dependent forces.
In this system also the notion of person is revised. Whitehead defines
persons as societies, i.e., ordered series of actual entities, bound by the same
defining characteristics. That is, a person is composed of different actual
entities which share certain qualities or defining characteristics, which are
passed on from occasion to occasion, determining a single stream of events
that constitutes the personal history of a person.
Thus, one’s identity is nothing apart from our personal history, that is, an
ordered succession of occasions. However, a personal history is not merely a
linear succession of events, for it involves the progressive growth of occasions
one on top of the other: “a man,” says Whitehead, “is more than a serial
succession of occasions of experience.”11 Each new element thus is not only
added, but involves the reconfiguration of the whole succession of actual
occasions.
This implies that one’s individuality is not given once and for all, but
evolves with the realization of fuller forms of definition. This realization also
occurs in communication with the surroundings, that is, the settled past.
Individuals realize themselves in the interplay with what is outside, which
they integrate in personal and new forms. In a sense, then, persons become
what they are, in a process where their identity constantly grows, developing
in more and more defined forms. In this way, for both the philosopher and
the two psychologists, persons are not independent structures but processes
of unification of different elements.
Re-thinking the Self 165

3.2. Need, Press, and Thema

In Murray’s personology, the dynamic forces that govern one’s life can be of
different types and intensity; they come both from the push (or press) of the
environment and from inner needs (or drives), which act upon the subject,
both consciously and unconsciously. The interaction of these forces leads one
to a specific unified act, and the way the act is performed determines a
particular trend of action (or thema).
The need-press-thema triad does not substitute the richness of the concrete
situation, but constitutes the conceptual tool with which the examiner
interprets the stories made up by patients undergoing the TAT. The
interpretations of patients’ plots reveal recurrent themas in their lives, which
provide material for the analysis of personality. By collecting different themas,
the examiner is thus able to distinguish the main traits of a character, his
tendencies stemming from the past or from anticipating future goals, and her
images of the world; for this reason, the test was called “thematic.” The study
of the thema-need-press structure in each image drawn by patients gives the
examiner a picture of the forces at stake in their own lives. The recurrence of
certain patterns of actions and their significance for the plot are taken as signs
of the most problematic knots in a person’s life.
In more detail, the need can be thought of as the baggage that the person
carries within herself, as a result of forces that “determine a certain trend or
major effect.”12 This dynamic whole is composed of images, the heritage of
the past, pathways, goals, unconscious tendencies, in general everything that
has the power to influence the action of the subject. While inherent in the
subject, the need is not something determined a priori, but can change from
situation to situation; in fact it is a directional trend of activity rather than a
necessary (and necessitating) constriction. The need exhibits both qualitative
and quantitative aspects. The quality of a need can be identified with the
particular way in which the subject is led from a beginning situation (BS) to a
final stage or end situation (ES);13 the latter, is the energy and force that
determine the intensity of the performed action. The need is engendered by a
BS and tends to induce activity and to persist until an ES is reached. In short,
it is “the hypothetical link between what we observe and the resulting
action.”14
The need can be also understood in terms of response to an external input
that provokes the subject. This external stimulus is what Murray and Morgan
call press; deriving from the environment, the press is formed by the whole
complex of external factors (e.g., personal history, culture, physical condition,
environmental conditions) which affect the self. Differently from the
behaviourist’s stimulus-response, the press is not a single, enclosed,
independent stimulus that asks for a simple reaction, as if the relation
166 Eleonora Mingarelli

between the two were one-on-one. As Morgan and Murray describe it, the
press is “a temporal Gestalt of stimuli which bear the same dynamic
meaning,” and, they add, “and with us the response is ordinarily represented
not as a particular muscular movement or reflex but as a need or general
course of action, the tendency of which is to produce a certain effect.”15 The
press can be thus understood as the ensemble of all forces (“kinds of
environmental forces or situations”16) that have an influence on the individual,
some more intensively than others. We cannot think of these trends as being
separated, as they are intertwined and constitute one structured situation. A
person is always immersed in a situation with specific directions and
conditions, to which she either conforms or from which he takes a distance.
In any case, every situation calls for some sort of reaction from the individual,
and in this sense “presses” a personal response.
The resulting combination of inner drive and environmental press is the
thema. The thema is defined as the “abstract formula for a single event.”17 In
other words, the thema is the general structure of every individual experience
(i.e., an inner field of forces encountering an external field of forces), which is
however articulated each time in concrete situations. In its concrete
manifestation, the thema “consists of a particular press-need combination;”18
thus, it is not the simple sum of two fields of forces, but rather the original
way in which the two combine with each other. The thema represents then a
third element, distinct and not to be derived deterministically from the
previous two —neither the environment constraining the self to a particular
action nor the person acting independently of her surroundings. The thema
constitutes therefore a new form, or trend of action, which cannot be
predicted with absolute certainty. The press and the need together form a
magnetic field of forces of which the person is the centre, and which propels a
reaction according to a certain thema. Though this field surrounds the person,
she is not necessarily aware of all the forces at work in her life, though they
can be revealed through the interpretation of TAT stories.
The structure of “need-press-thema” strongly re-echoes Whitehead’s triad
“subject-object-superject.” In Whitehead’s non-substantial metaphysics, an
actual entity, i.e. the ultimate thing in nature, is a “concrescence of
prehensions,”19 that is the point at which many possibilities (what it could be)
come together in one actuality. Prehensions are the bonds, as it were, among
the many that constitute an actual entity and each is composed of three
elements: “(a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in
which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is
prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form which is how that subject prehends that
datum.”20 In other words, an actual entity stands for a process where two
poles interact with each other, i.e. the subject and the object, whose
interaction gives rise to a new form, that is, the “superject.” According to
Re-thinking the Self 167

process philosophy, subject and object are interrelated parts of the same
event, two faces of the same actual entity, united by prehensive feelings. The
difference between the two lies in their roles: whereas the object, coming
from the past, has the task of provoking and stimulating a reaction, the
subject is the provoked side which appropriates, or integrates, the objective
stimulus in specific forms imposed by its subjective aim. The result is the
emergence of a new occasion, the superject, which adds a novel feeling to the
universe and throws itself, as it were, towards the future, as an object for
subsequent prehensions. Thus, in any occasion of experience there are three
elements involved: a provoking objective datum, a provoked prehending
subject that spontaneously reacts to the object, and the achieved form of
unity that adds a novel element to the whole, while perishing as a subject and
becoming object for the coming occasions.
If we combine Whitehead’s triadic scheme with that of Morgan and
Murray, we can see that the two mirror each other: the need can be identified
with Whitehead’s subject, the press with the object, and the thema is the
subjective form. The press, as a complex of forces acting upon the individual,
stimulates and elicits a response from the person, who answers according to
her inner drives and needs. The upshot is a new situation, that is, a superject
which re-configures the assets of the entire scene. Thus, each moment, as
well as each actual entity, presents a dynamic structure, where different
forces and potentials come together. However, the elements of each situation
are aspects of the same whole, distinct and yet inseparable, just as the
provoked subject is not separated from its provoking object. For Whitehead as
well as for Murray and Morgan, the smallest unit to be considered is the
whole situation, the whole event or actual entity, as the unity of a variety of
elements that come together and, by coming together, break the stability of
the actual present and direct themselves towards the future.

3.3. The epochal theory of time

The triadic system and the force-based framework of personality is sustained


by on a certain view on temporality, one close to Whitehead’s epochal theory
of time. In fact, one guiding idea of the TAT is that images have the power to
recall feelings and emotions (both conscious and unconscious) experienced in
the past, which are then transposed by the patient into stories. By examining
these stories, the therapist should be able to recognize sentiments and
attitudes that, more strongly than others, pervade the life of the patient. But
how is it possible that an image from the present can elicit a past event that
we may even not be aware of, something which is then, in a sense, lost? The
explanation lies in a specific understanding of time as epochal. According to
this view, time is made up of “epochs,” or drops of experience;21 as Wallack
168 Eleonora Mingarelli

puts it “the epoch is a quantum, or atom, of time […] thus, an epoch is an


atomic unit of time, atomic in the case of time meaning an indivisible arrest:
there are no further units of time within this atomic or arrested unit.”22
Each unit is not a simple one, but a complete whole, constituting the entire
history, or thread, of all the occasions that have led to the present moment. In
fact, the history of an epoch is the reason for its actual emergence, so that
what a moment is in actuality is intrinsically related to its way of becoming.
More specifically, Whitehead’s epochal theory of time entails that the present
arises from and is settled on the immutable given past (objective immortality)
—in the same way that the subject is actually conformed to the object. Thus,
the past is present in the actual moment but not as an actuality; it is not the
very same past, it does not exist in the present, and yet it enters into the
present, it is something for the present.23 Not only can the present potentially
recall past memories, but, more than that, it is ontologically conformed to the
past and thus carries in itself the traces of what has happened.
Over time, the present both conforms itself to the immutable past and,
simultaneously, re-appropriates the past in a new form, which then aims at
the attainment of future goals. Thus, the present is not entirely determined by
the past, but it is adjusted to it in a way that is creatively directed towards the
future. The future, then, plays a role too in the constitution of the present,
although in a very different way from the past. If the past is re-appropriated
(re-enacted) in the actual moment, so that the present displays the traces of its
origin, the future is instead anticipated. The future is the vehicle for the
creative push towards novelty, which allows the present to reshape the past in
a new form. In a word, the present is conformed to what has passed and is
lured by what is still to come. Thus, both past and future are immanent in the
present, in a form of an existence that is not merely that of actuality.
In psychological terms, this means that the past never really disappears,
even when we do not consciously remember it, and still plays a role in the
present, in that the actual moment is relentlessly shaped on what has passed.
Thus, in the present, the past is brought, in a sense, back to a new life. The
patient will never experience the very same occurrence again; however, what
happened in the past influences the present, and can be actualised in the
present moment. Not only can the past be thus recalled (something that
would be possible even with an imaginative leap), but, more than that, the
form of the present can actually be traced to its origin. And here lies the
novelty of the process perspective: being actualized means that the past is not
simply remembered, but is re-adjusted (and yet not merely repeated) in the
actual moment for, in the process of creative appropriation, the present
integrates the past in a new form. In the case of the TAT, the stories of the
patient recall past events, and are vehicles for the past to “come back,” as it
were, into the present. As the present contains a space for the creative
Re-thinking the Self 169

appropriation of the past, the patient has thus the possibility to re-appropriate
his/her past in a harmonious way.
Thus, the epochal theory of time explains not only the evocative power of
images, but also the possibility of real healing. In fact, Whitehead’s
understanding of temporality integrates individual freedom —and thus the
possibility of changing— with those objective constraints (e.g. past
experiences, environment) that have led the patient to the present disturbed
condition.24

3.4. Corollary: Freedom and Necessity

Although the single experience is influenced by the past (and so the patient’s
whole life, as the history of past experiences), it is not entirely determined by
it, for in the present moment the past is re-appropriated in light of the future.
Thus, freedom acquires a new meaning in process philosophy: freedom
entails the possibility of re-adjusting the past to conform to new goals and
aims. Freedom is thus not intended as “pure spontaneity” (or pure
autonomy), as the possibility to escape from what has happened, and thus
living without bonds and constraints. In fact, the present is never disengaged
from its history, and yet is not entirely determined by its past either for the
present has the power to re-appropriate the past, to give the past a new form.
Freedom, then, is understood in terms of acceptance of and adjustment to
what has passed. It is actually a necessitated freedom, a freedom that is both
aware of the limits imposed by any finite experience, and yet capable of
creatively appropriating the given situation. The immutable past, the objective
datum, is thus the “material” for freedom to be actualized in a concrete form
of novelty.
In this regard, a psychology that is founded on process principles takes a
step further than other traditional schools, such as psychoanalysis and
behaviourism. On the one hand, process philosophy spurns the
psychoanalytical idea that the past determines the development of the
individual, whose life is completely shaped by the relationship established
with the parents during infancy. However, psychoanalytical introspection
does not explain how changing in the present is possible, in spite of external
influences. On the other hand, process philosophy rejects any merely future-
directed view, such as is largely espoused by behaviourist psychology. What
the person wants to achieve (e.g. a better life, healing) has to be confronted
with what has occurred, and cannot be disengaged from the understanding
and acceptance of what happened in the past that has led to the present
condition. In the view of process psychology, a therapy predominantly
focused on correcting a present behaviour in light of future fitness cannot be
170 Eleonora Mingarelli

successful, nor can a therapy that merely examines the past, without actually
looking at the possibility of changing.
Process therapy combines the best aspects of these two psychological
lines, accepting and integrating the past in light of future purposes. This is
precisely how Murray and Morgan envisaged their own psychological therapy:
the examiner, able to analyse the problematic themas and tangles in a life,
could help the patient to re-appropriate such events in more healthy forms.

4. Conclusion
A comparative analysis of the intellectual presuppositions of the TAT and
process principles not only shows Whitehead’s contribution to the creation of
the test, but also highlights some of the main contributions that process
philosophy can offer to psychological inquiry.
First, a person cannot be conceived of as a static pre-formed entity, but
must be considered in the process of becoming one individual. In this
process, all variables are included, both internal (need) and external (press).
The subject, therefore, is not conceived of as an isolated entity, but rather as
in a relation of mutual dependence with the environment. Second, process
philosophy proposes an epochal theory of time where past, present, and
future become intertwined, in a chain of events that overlap one another.
Whitehead’s view on temporality allows for re-thinking the freedom-necessity
dialectic, which is essential in therapeutic treatment. The patient might have
been influenced, even heavily, by the past, and yet she holds a space of
freedom for the harmonious re-organization of the past in the present
moment in light of future wellness.
The connection between Murray, Morgan, and Whitehead is then not only
of historical interest, but is utterly compelling in showing the forms and
directions a potential process psychology could take.

Bibliography
Cobb, John B., Jr. “Process Psychotherapy: Introduction.” Process Studies 29.1
(2000): 97-102.
Douglas, Claire. Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.
Emmet, Dorothy (1932). Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1966.
Laughlin, Charles Jr. “Discussion: the Influence of Whitehead’s Organism
upon Murray’s Personology.” Journal of the History of the
Behavioural Sciences 9. 3 (1973): 251-257.
Lewin, Kurt. A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw Hill, 1935.
Re-thinking the Self 171

Lowe, Victor. Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and his Work, Vol. I-II.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Mingarelli, Eleonora. “Re-thinking the self. Process Philosophy in Morgan and
Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test,” 157-172. In Chromatikon X.
Annales de la philosophie en process. Edited by Michel Weber, and
Vincent Berne. Les Editions Chromatika, 2014.
Morgan, Christiana and Henry Murray. “A method for investigating fantasies:
the Thematic Apperception Test.” Archives of Neurology and
Psychiatry 34, 1935: 289-306.
Murray, Henry. “Facts which support the concept of need or drive.” Journal of
Psychology 3 (1937): 27-42.
Murray, Henry. Exploration in Personality. New York: Oxford University Press,
1938.
Murray, Henry and the Staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Thematic
Apperception Test. Manual, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1943.
Riffert Franz, and John B. Cobb. “Reconnecting Science and Metaphysics:
General Considerations and Pioneer Works on Process Psychology”
in Searching for New Contrasts, Franz Riffert and Michel Weber
(eds.), New York: Lang, 2003: 19- 35.
Roy, David. Towards a Process Psychology: A Model of Integration. Fresno:
Adobe Creations Press, 2000.
Santos, Ferdinando and Santiago Sia. Personal Identity, the Self, and Ethics.
New York: Macmillan, 2007.
Teixeira, Maria Teresa. “The Stream of Consciousness and the Epochal
Theory of Time.” European Journal of Pragmatism 3:1 (2011): 131-
145.
Wallack, Bradford F. The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s
Metaphysics. Albany: SUNY, 1980.
Weber, Michel. “Christiana Morgan (1897-1967).” In Handbook of
Whiteheadian Process Thought. Edited by Michel Weber, and Will
Desmond, 465-468. Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag, 2008.
Weber, Michel and Andrew Weekes (eds). Process Approaches to
Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind.
Albany: SUNY, 2009.
Whitehead, Alfred N. (1925) Science and the Modern World. New York:
Macmillan, 1967.
Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1928-29).
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Whitehead, Alfred N. (1933) Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1985.

Notes

1
Charles Jr. Laughlin, “Discussion: the Influence of Whitehead’s Organism
upon Murray’s Personology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioural
Sciences 9.3 (1973): 251.
172 Eleonora Mingarelli

2
Michel Weber, “Christiana Morgan (1897-1967),” in Handbook of
Whiteheadian Process Thought, eds. M. Weber, W. Desmond,
(Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag, 2008), 467.
3
Henry Murray and the Staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Thematic
Apperception Test. Manual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), 1.
4
Robert White, cited by Claire Douglas, Translate This Darkness: The Life of
Christiana Morgan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 194.
5
PR, 20. See also: “Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a
coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which
every element of our experience can be interpreted,” PR, 3.
6
For more details on the historical relation between Murray, Morgan, and
Whitehead I refer to Mingarelli 2014.
7
Henry Murray, Exploration in Personality (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1938), IX.
8
Christiana Morgan, and Henry Murray, “A method for investigating fantasies:
the Thematic Apperception Test,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 34
(1935): 289.
9
Lewin taught seminars in Harvard during the spring semester of 1938,
during which Morgan and Murray might have been introduced to the
dynamic theory of personality.
10
Dorothy Emmet, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1966), 72.
11
AI, 263.
12
Murray, Exploration, 61.
13
Murray presents this example: from a BS of hunger we can reach an ES of
satisfaction either by devouring food (A1) or by eating tidily with a fork and
knife (A2). The difference between A1 and A2 is played out in terms of
subjective need. For instance, if we arrive after running a marathon, we
will probably tend to eat food more quickly, but if we are at the dinner
table with our boss, we will tend to use a fork and knife. The external
situation does not impose any fixed rule, as I can devour food in front of
my boss, but our desires and feelings will push us towards certain actions.
14
Murray, “Concept of need,” 30.
15
Morgan, “The Thematic Apperception Test,” 293.
16
Murray, TAT Manual, 10.
17
Morgan, “The Thematic Apperception Test,” X.
18
Ibid.
19
PR, 23.
Re-thinking the Self 173

20
Ibid.
21
“Drops of experience” is an expression coined by William James, which
however can legitimately be also applied to Whitehead; see Texeira 2009.
22
Bradford Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics
(Albany: SUNY, 1980), 170.
23
Cfr. AI, 235.
24
However, certain disturbances in personality are particularly complex and
their treatment requires more than individual freedom. Nevertheless, the
lesson that can be learnt from process philosophy is that what we often
call “mental illnesses” are in fact not diseases as such but rather
maladjustments between the past and the present. See Cobb 2003.
On Signs: Hayek's Surmise,
Process Philosophy & Biosemiotics
John Pickering1

Abstract
Embodied cognition has opened up lines of inquiry that have moved on from
computational metaphors for the mind. Cognition and the structure of
behaviour are now treated as shaped by activity directed towards the external
world as it presents itself than by internal processing of information that
represents it. The emphasis is on direct engagement with the real world and
natural use of the senses. In the light of this, both Dewey and Bentley’s
Knowing and the Known and Hayek’s The Sensory Order can be re-visited and
extended, in the spirit of Whitehead and Peirce. To extend Dewey & Bentley's
transactional approach we need also to recognise that its starting point, the
detection of a problem, needs to be given a more extended treatment. Peirce,
and more recently David Bohm, propose that thought and causality, are
essentially semiotic and present at all levels of the natural order. Whitehead
too proposed that the nature is in fact organically integrated. Accepting this,
the detection of a problem, is broadened and re-cast as a matter of semiotic
interpretation, in line with the deeper project of biosemiotics. The chapter
firstly sketches embodied cognition, then develops some issues in Dewey &
Bentley and in Hayek and finally, after some remarks on biosemiotics,
explores how embodied cognition and biosemiotics are relevant to
environmental concerns.

1. Introduction
This paper is based on one that was written around 2003 but was never
published. While it’s sources are now naturally somewhat out of date, the
ideas in it are as current now as they were then. But when it comes to climate
change, which was then a relatively minor theme in the paper, the issue is
actually far more pressing now. A final section has been added to update
things a little and to relate them to discussion at the meetings of the
Psychology and Whitehead Nexus1 which have helped me gain some
understanding of process thought.

1
Psychology Department, The University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK,
j.a.pickering@warwick.ac.uk.
176 John Pickering

2. Moving on from Mechanism


Psychology is moving on from the mechanistic worldview which it inherited
from the nineteenth century. This view shaped cognitive science's
computational metaphor for the mind and behaviourism's reflex arcs before
it. Both metaphors left psychology at an explanatory impasse. Reflexes and
computation may capture something of how mental life proceeds, but, being
mechanistic, they have little to say about why it proceeds in the first place.
Now, new lines of inquiry are opening up around this impasse.
Embodied cognition is one of these lines and is in some ways a return to
the concerns of Whitehead and Dewey. Both, in their different ways, treated
mental life as an organic transaction between a knowing agent and a world
that is both shaped by that agent and by which that agent is shaped.
Cognition thus cannot usefully be reduced to reflexes or computations since it
necessarily reflects the particular forms of life in which it is expressed and the
particular circumstances in which it is embedded. This attitude is expressed
too in embodied cognition's treatment of mental life as part of the creative
adjustment made by organisms to the objects they encounter and events in
which they participate.
In the human case, the most open and productive part of this adjustment
is consciousness, which, after being marginalised during the Behaviourist era,
is now back at the centre of psychology’s research arena. But, although it is
uniquely accessible, to investigate it effectively will require an enlargement of
psychology’s methodological and conceptual resources. Both Dewey and
Bentley’s Knowing and the Known and Hayek’s The Sensory Order are helpful
here. This article will briefly examine issues raised in these works before
extending them, in the spirit of Whitehead and Peirce.
The proposed extension has two elements. The first, reflecting
Whitehead’s deeply organic view of the world, is that experience is
ontologically fundamental. That is, the ultimate constituents of nature are
subjects, not objects, meaning that the creative advance of the natural order
arises from actions led by experiences. The second element, following Peirce
(1906) and Bohm (Bohm, 1985, pages 72–99) is a semiotic understanding of
the causal structure of Nature.
This semiotic stance advances some of Dewey & Bentley's general
objectives. More specifically, it helps to avoid compromising the continuity of
the natural order by imposing false boundaries and hence adding useless
names to our procedures of inquiry. It also helps develop a proposition made
by Hayek that: “[…] the process of experience […] does not begin with
sensations or perceptions but precedes them […]” (Hayek, 1952, page 166;
1982).
On SIgns 177

What follows firstly sketches embodied cognition, then develops some


issues in Dewey & Bentley and in Hayek and finally offers some remarks on
the similarities between embodied cognition and biosemiotics.

3. What is Embodied Cognition?


The essence of embodied cognition is that mental life serves to engage with
the world, not to represent it. This distinguishes it from cognitive science, the
approach that has dominated studies of perception, memory, thought and
attention for the past four decades or so. This approach, which here will be
broadly termed ‘Cognitivism’, treats the activity of the nervous system as if it
were carrying out information processing functions similar, or even identical,
to those carried out in computers. The functions operate on internal
representations of the external world to provide the basis for intelligent
action. Thus, what Cognitivism claims about the mind can be made explicit,
for instance, as statements in a programming language.
The hope was that artificially intelligent systems could be made to carry
out functions similar or even identical to those supposed to occur in natural
cognitive systems. This functionalist approach to mental life would have
practical utility because it would produce devices able to carry out tasks that
require intelligence. It would also have theoretical utility because building
artificial intelligence systems would help to understand how naturally
intelligent ones worked.
This approach has had some success. Artificial intelligence systems can
play games which present a real intellectual challenge well enough to defeat
even the best human players. Other systems can conduct simple
conversations in natural language, occasionally doing well enough to be
mistaken for real people. Yet other systems learn, solve problems, plan
actions and so on.
But critics of artificial intelligence have objected that this is only a
simulation of 'real' intelligence. To date, this criticism remains substantially
unanswered. Although the research programme of artificial intelligence is
vigorous, this is because of its practical significance. As theoretical
psychology, the functionalist approach, and the stricter forms of Cognitivism,
seem to be in decline.
However, they have had a major influence on psychology. One reason for
this is because they enhanced the image of psychology as a natural science.
The principals of information processing could be mathematically expressed
and, hence, were taken to be universal, independent of any differences
between organisms. Just as, say, the laws of physics or chemistry helped to
understand how any organism moves or respires, so it was assumed that
178 John Pickering

framing laws of information processing would help to understand how any


organism cognises.
These laws being primary, they were what psychologists should aim to
discover first, as a necessary preliminary to understanding the rest of mental
life. That, in some sense was secondary, depending on the peculiarities of
particular minds and the particular situations in which they were embedded.
The latter, being circumstantial and in the human case culture-bound, were
more appropriately dealt with using the resources of social rather than natural
science.
Now rules and representations are, of course, central to human mental life.
Language and reflexive thought make it possible to form mental
representations of the world and of ourselves, and to externalise them in the
form of words and pictures. But considered phylogenetically, this ability is a
very misleading exception. The capacity explicitly to represent the world,
crucial to what it is to have a human mind, has been mistaken for what it is to
have any sort of mind at all.
This is the anthropocentrism of the cogito writ large. Descartes pointed out
that people cannot doubt that they think. Indeed not, since they are able to
represent themselves to themselves and hence experience themselves as
thinking. But animals and young human beings who cannot do this are
nonetheless experiential, and hence thinking, beings. As Nagel (1974) points
out, it seems reasonable to believe that there’s something that it’s like to be
another species even if human beings cannot know it directly. How could it
be otherwise, given the overwhelming evidence for continuity between
human and non-human life? Non-human thought and experience is clearly
different from human thought and experience, perhaps by being more
context bound and less flexible, but it is thought nonetheless.
Animals for the most part act adaptively without consciously representing
the world around them, or themselves in relation to it. They know things
about it, but don’t know they know it. Perceiving directly what the
immediately perceptible world affords is enough to guide action directly. The
presentation is enough, representation is superfluous. Action and perception
are mutually constitutive, there is no need to interpose an additional level of
internal representations to link them in an active, experiencing organism.
That level exists in the human case, but it is neither phylogenetically typical
nor conceptually fundamental. Experience does not require representation or
even, as Hayek claims, perception or sensation.
Variations on this theme can be found in many of the overlapping projects
that make up the field of embodied perception. Some of them have been
around for some time, Gibson's ecological approach being an example
(Gibson, 1952). More recent ones seek a new rapprochement between
objective studies of cognition and phenomenology (e.g. Clark, 1997; Varela et
On SIgns 179

al., 1991). Yet others attempt to repair Cognitivism's fragmentation of mental


life; to start, as one philosopher puts it, “Putting Ourselves Together Again”
(Midgley, 1998). Hurley (1998), likewise, criticises what she calls the “classical
sandwich,” an implicit assumption that the mind is somehow isolated
between systems responsible for perceiving the world on the one hand and
acting towards it on the other. Instead, she proposes that perception and
action are mutually constitutive and that what is perceived is not realistically
separable from what is being done. Indeed, under this view perception itself
is a form of action.
Conceptual revisions like these have influenced the research programmes
of psychology and artificial intelligence. Cognition and the structure of action
are now more likely to be attributed to active engagement with the external
world as it presents itself than to internal processing of information that
represents it. One critic of the artificial intelligence put it: “AI as a discipline
has gotten bogged down in sub-problems” (Brooks, 1991, page 225). Brooks'
aim is to build complete creatures rather than to extract from intelligent
action some computational essence and hold it in calculo, much as early
chemists hoped to extract the essence of living systems and hold it in vitro.
This is part of the shift from artificial intelligence to artificial life, described by
one of its practitioners as “life made by humans rather than nature” (Langton,
1995, page ix). In this project, and in embodied cognition, action is taken to
be more fundamental than representation.
The impact of embodied cognition on human experimental psychology is
illustrated by research on attention. During the heyday of Cognitivism many
experiments were carried out on selective attention. Subjects were required to
monitor multiple sources of information and to process some while rejecting
others. What they heard and saw was tightly controlled, for example, by
requiring them to listen through stereo headphones to different streams of
information played to the different ears. Their task might be to monitor one
of the streams for a target while ignoring the other one. The assumption was
that this required something rather like an internal switch or filter, that
controlled the transfer of information from raw sensory storage to short term
memory. Although there was much discussion about how, where and when
the filter operated, that something like a filter was involved in selective
attention seemed uncontroversial.
Recent work on attention is rather different. Experiments tend to be more
naturalistic and the people who participate in them are more able to pay
attention in whatever way they choose. Rather than being required to select
some types of information and reject others, people are more likely to be
asked merely to report whatever they see or hear. For example, in this spirit,
many experiments have now been carried out on change blindness’ (Simons,
2000). Here, people look at or participate in events, and report what they see,
180 John Pickering

often with the object of establishing whether some event or change has been
noticed. For example, someone who is momentarily out of view may
reappear wearing different clothes or even may even be replaced by an
entirely different person. The counter-intuitive finding here is that given the
right circumstances, people can remain unaware even of quite major changes
to something to which they are paying attention. This can be true even when
people are told that there will be change or when their metacognitive stance
would lead one to expect the change to be obvious. That is, observers, when
told about upcoming changes are confident they will spot them, yet they do
not.
Findings from these experiments are significant in their own right, but
what is also salient here is the shift in experimental style and in conceptual
vocabulary. Instead of supposed internal information processing stages, such
as filtering and selective transfer between different types of memory, the
emphasis is on active engagement with the external world and natural use of
the senses. The world itself is what is processed, rather than some internal
representation of it held in memory. What reaches consciousness depends on
the activity of the whole organism and not just on what is presented by the
experimenter.
One could say this is a shift in power, from those who design conduct
experiments to those who take part in them. The typical Cognitivist
experiment was one in which a subject was constrained to wait for
information that the experimenter imposed upon them. Participants in
experiments on embodied cognition are likely to have more natural control
over what they process, and hence what they experience, actively looking,
listening and obtaining the information they process for themselves. This shift
in the style of investigation mirrors a shift in understanding of what is being
investigated. Our sense of what it is to perceive is shifting towards the active,
the embodied and the situated.
A good example of this shift is the sensory-motor theory of visual
consciousness proposed by O’Regan & Nöe (2001). Like Hurley, they oppose
the idea that perception is essentially about the making of representations
and propose instead that ‘seeing is a way of acting” (page 939). What reaches
visual consciousness is not imposed on perceivers so much as obtained by
active exploration. That is, perception is not only for action, but is an action in
itself. This idea is prefigured in Dewey’s critique of the reflex arc and in
Gibson’s ecological approach to perception. Instead of considering sensory
systems as passively matching imposed inputs to representations, they are
considered to be part of the active engagement by an organism with the
world it encounters.
Aside from perception, the shift towards embodiment has had an effect on
Cognitivist theories more generally. For example, the work of Lakoff &
On SIgns 181

Johnson (1999) shows that the very conceptual structures used by people to
give order to and to examine their own experience are themselves derived
from action and the nature of the human body. This is in sharp and
productive contrast to many, if not most, cognitivist accounts of knowing and
remembering. In these accounts knowledge was treated as if it could be fully
captured in abstract propositions, much as information may be held in
computer systems (Rosenboom et al., 1991) As a general theory of cognition
this seems too abstract and too little concerned with the origins of knowledge.
It turns knowing into an abstract exercise in information processing, not
essentially connected to any particular cognitive system or form of life.
Considered in a wider phylogenetic context it seems clear that what is known
cannot be abstracted away from the organism doing the knowing.
In sum, embodied cognition is a start on rebalancing the anthropocentrism
of the cogito and correcting the mistake of taking the abstract uniformity of
computation for the diversity of natural cognition. The experimental
programme of embodied cognition strikes a more even balance between
human and non-human cognition. There is now little interest in framing a
unified theory of cognition based on computation. Minds do not hold
representations in order somehow to compute from them how to act. From
the perspective of embodied cognition, action comes first. As Goodwin puts it
“Organisms live their lives, they don’t compute them” (Goodwin, 1999, page
231).
This observation can serve as a motto for embodied cognition. It signals a
turn away from the abstractions and formalism of the computational
metaphor. It helps psychology to move forward, around the impasse of
mechanistic metaphysics towards to the more biologically plausible project of
creating a natural history of cognition. Here, the objective is to describe and
relate the diverse forms of mind that come with diverse forms of life (Griffin,
1984). We are beginning to address the why of mental life as well as the how.
The answer is: to permit interaction within a system comprising both
organism and environment, guided by the feelings that are intrinsic to being
alive.

4. Knowing is doing, doing is knowing


Embodied cognition thus resembles both the autopoietic theory (Maturana &
Varela, 1992) and the dynamic systems approach to mental life (e.g. Kelso,
1997). They both redress cognitivism's over-emphasis on treating separately
what is internal and it's relative lack of concern with the origins of cognition.
In different ways, they both rebalance the science of mental life by attending
to the dynamic properties of the larger system of which the organism is part
182 John Pickering

and to how those properties came to be what they are. This larger system
comprises both what is inside an organism, what it outside it and the history
of interaction that creates a relationship between the two. In dynamic
systems theory, the drawing of sharp qualitative boundaries between
organisms and their environments is seldom done.
What an organism does, what it knows and how it knows it cannot be
usefully abstracted away from the history of how it inhabits the niche to
which it is adapted. That history produces what Maturana and Varela call
‘structural coupling’ (Maturana & Varela, 1992, page 75). This renders the
internal functional architecture of an organism a reflection, although not a
representation, of the world towards which it is adapted to act. Cognition,
thus, cannot be treated just in terms of what maybe inside the head but
something that actively relates what’s inside the head to what’s outside. Both
the internal structure of the mind and the external structure of the world must
figure in any complete psychological theory. As an advocate of Gibson’s
ecological theory put it: “Don’t ask what’s inside your head, ask what your
head’s inside of” (Mace, 1977). Embodied cognition, like ecological
psychology, deals with interactions with the real world. The roles played by
rules and representations in cognitivism are taken over by actions and their
results.
Dewey and Bentley’s project anticipated some of the central features of
embodied cognition. Active knowing is a common concern, linked to which is
a distaste for the addition of unnecessary concepts that obscure rather than
reveal what is going on. Just as Gibson distrusted the in-between things with
which cognitivism filled the head, so Dewey & Bentley remind us that: “The
living, behaving, knowing organism is present. To add a “mind” to him is to
try to double him up.” (Dewey & Bentley, 1973, page 141).
The mind for cognitivism was, in essence, the internal rules and
representations that were assumed to be the basis of intelligent adaptive
action. Now, as embodied cognition takes hold, psychological inquiry
proceeds at a broader and more realistic grain. As a result of what Wheeler
and Clark have called ‘causal spread’ intelligent action is now taken to depend
both on what the environment provides as well as what the organism makes
of it (Wheeler & Clark, 1999). Knowledge is not just produced by or expressed
in activity but is activity itself. As Maturana & Varela put it: “All knowing is
doing and all doing is knowing” (Maturana & Varela, 1992, page 27). Palmer,
in comparing the transactional approach with autopoietic theory points out
that both take the basis for intelligent to be transactions within a dynamic
system comprising both actors and acted upon, knowers and knowns and
within which clear boundaries between the two cannot be drawn (Palmer,
2003).
On SIgns 183

Embodied cognition helps to take psychology on beyond the


foundationalism of both Behaviourism and Cognitivism. Although these two
schools are often presented in histories of psychology as an example of a
paradigm shift, the continuity between them is clear. Both used mechanistic
metaphors for mental life and both, in their rigid adherence to the
methodology and ethos of the natural sciences, clearly reflected psychology's
struggle for status and recognition in the academic world (e.g. Pickering,
2000; Valsiner, 1991).
While the transactional approach also places great value on scientific
methods, these, perhaps as an expression of Dewey’s residual Hegelianism,
are not regarded as closed or final. In Dewey’s letter to a friendly critic of his
Theory of Inquiry he is clear that science need to resist finalism and to remain
in direct contact with the world of everyday action and the problems that are
to be solved there (Dewey & Bentley, 1973, page 204). However, Dewey and
Bentley elsewhere treat the scientific method with near-reverential
enthusiasm, especially when it comes to establishing the terms to be used in
any inquiry: “The name “Specification” is applied to that most efficient form
of Designation which has developed in the growth of modern science”
(Dewey & Bentley, 1973, page 136).
But to privilege science in this way may be to close down rather than to
open up our methods of inquiry. To take scientific inquiry as the “most
efficient” and as implicitly superceding all others, is an unhelpful variety of
finalism. As a historian twentieth century ideas has pointed out: “[…] the
Enlightenment's ascription to science of a prescriptive authority whereby
other forms of knowledge can be humiliated is itself an illusion […] a unitary
scientific method, even a scientific world-view, is merely one of the many
superstitions of enlightenment cultures.” (Gray, 1995, page 154). Gray does
not regard science as a ‘superstition’ but correctly warns against elevating
what science reveals to near-religious status. It is in something of this spirit
Dewey and Bentley that come rather close to methodological scientism.
However, this is something that their inheritors, such as Rorty, find easy to
avoid. He, like Lyotard and other postmodernists, recognise that pluralism an
inherent condition of knowing anything. What you want to know, how you go
about finding it out and how you present it once you have found it, all depend
on the values and assumption that accompany the act of knowing, and most
of which are implicit.
This recognition underlies the extension to Dewey & Bentley’s project
mentioned in the introduction. To following Peirce we need also to recognise
that a ‘problem’ is a matter of interpretation. Dewey, elsewhere in his letter to
the friendly critic, defines a problem as something that is: “confusing,
perplexing, disturbed, unsettled, indecisive […]” that “[…] jars, hitches,
breaks, blocks —in short, all incidents occasioning an interruption of the
184 John Pickering

smooth, straightforward course of behaviour […].” (Dewey & Bentley, 1973,


page 200).
But behaviour seldom if ever follows a smooth straightforward course. The
postmodern turn has revealed the nested and indefinitely layered ambiguity
of perception, interpretation and behaviour. Moreover, that ambiguity is
deeply connected with exploration and the exploratory investigation of the
world which is so rewarding to humans and non-humans alike. Inquiry, both
scientific and not, is based on curiosity as well as necessity; as Popper pointed
out, human beings are not only problem solvers but also problem finders.
Now what one person finds to be a problem depends upon their unique,
dynamic web of knowledge, values and tastes. What is a problem to one
person may not be to another or, if it is a problem to both, it is not
necessarily the same problem.
Taking Dewey and Bentley’s project forward in a postmodern framework
requires recognising that what people take to be problems is a matter of
interpretation. This is aptly illustrated by the environmental crisis that is said
to face us due to the growth of technology. We will return to this below, but
for the present we can note that a huge range of attitudes are in play here.
The range stretches from claims that we are permanently degrading the
capacity of the biosphere to support life, to those who dismiss
environmentalism as mere alarmism that will hinder human achievement.
Given the welter of conflicting values, interests and assumptions here,
consensus cannot be expected, either on what 'the problem' is or on what, if
anything, needs doing about it.
The problem here is rather a long way away from a mere “hitch” in the
“[…] smooth, straightforward course of behaviour […].” Such a course is not
possible in a world known to us via evidence and interpretations that are
deeply ambiguous. Language, writing, scientific data are nothing in
themselves but signs of relationships and we can never be sure what things
'mean'. For Dewey & Bentley meaning arises from action. But as Bohm points
out, meaning is a semiotic matter in two senses (Bohm, 1985). What things
“mean” to us is a matter of interpretive perception. What we aim to achieve
with our actions is what we “mean” by them. Thus “meaning” locates
subjectivity by pointing both away from and towards the subject.
Hence Dewey & Bentley's assumption that the recognition of a problem is
itself unproblematic, seems too literal and even limited. It does well in
mundane cases of a momentary hitch in our flow of action, for example when
we try to open a door and discover by active investigation that is bolted. Here,
since what we mean to do is fairly straightforward, the problem is
correspondingly obvious and so is the solution. This is not the case within the
layers of multiple ambiguity surrounding most human action and interaction.
There, what is taken as a problem crucially depends on signs interpreted in
On SIgns 185

situations. The facts of experience are always signs of something else and to
usefully extend Dewey & Bentley's transactional approach we need also to
recognise that its starting point, the detection of a problem, is a matter of
interpretation.
The evidence for the environmental crisis that is said to be facing us is just
such a matter. Some interpret the climate change and the loss of diversity of
the last few centuries to mean that we are heading for disaster. Others say it
means nothing since timescales of really significant environmental change is
orders of magnitude greater. Even when it is agreed that adverse changes are
taking place, there is no agreement about their cause or about what actions, if
any, will do any good. Solutions, like problems, are also matters of
interpretation.
A somewhat similar problem was encountered following the second world
war, which was in some ways like an ecological disaster. The problem was
how best to encourage the economic growth on which recovery depended. At
this time Friedrich von Hayek was a major and a distinctive figure in political
and economic debates. As well as his work in economics, he had made
important contribution to psychology and his economic views were based on
his psychological theory, which is the subject of the next section.

5. Hayek's Surmise
In The Sensory Order Hayek makes a systematic survey of theories of brain
function and, finding them unsatisfactory, makes a powerful surmise (Hayek,
1952). This is that the functional architecture of the brain creates the structure
of experience automatically and pre-consciously. That structure is not
prefigured either in the organisation of the brain, nor in the information that
reaches the brain via the senses. Rather, it arises in the interaction between
the nervous system of an active organism and the world towards which it
acts. The networks comprising the nervous system have been shaped by
evolution to enable the organism to survive. They are in effect a hard wired
epistemology and store of knowledge. For Hayek, as for Popper (1990) and
Polanyi (1958, 1983), this store is not in the explicit forms dealt with by
cognitivism. Rather, it is implicit and emerges in the encounter between an
organism and the world with which that organism strives to interact
effectively. As in the autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela, it is the
history of this interaction that shapes the functional architecture of the
nervous system which in turn produces the sensory order.
Although the workings of this functional architecture may be understood in
some detail this does not mean that the sensory order could thereby be
reduced to neuropsychological data or made predictable. It is the interaction
186 John Pickering

between the nervous system and the environment, both of them parts of the
physical order of things, that produces the mental order of things, the sensory
order of experience. But how it does so cannot be explained by quantitative
data about either the brain or the environment. Dynamic systems theory too
shows that systems in which there are multiple, autonomous non-linear
interactions are inherently unpredictable.
This is not to make a mystery out of mental life. Hayek was quite explicit
that his project was just the reverse, a systematic attempt to naturalise the
mind: “[…] mental events are a particular order of physical events within […]
an organism [… which …] enable that organism to survive.” (Hayek, 1982,
page 288) It does, however, rule out the reduction of mental life to any
system of laws or rules that human beings could frame. Here Hayek,
acknowledging a debt to Gödel, claims that the activity in the brain is so
complex that even if we were able to somehow able to frame a set of rules to
describe how it worked, those rules would be beyond human comprehension.
In short, the brain is too complex to understand itself.
Hence, the dynamic unfolding of the human sensory order is carried in
transactions between a brain that is too complex to be known and an
environment that is too complex to be predicted. This led Hayek to conclude
that the experiences and actions of human beings are not determined by and
nor are they reducible to their biological or physical constitution or to the
physical facts of the world that they encounter. In this, Hayek anticipates the
connectionist and selectional theories of recent years, both of which approach
the brain historically. These theories, like Whitehead's organic view of the
creative advance of nature, mean that any abstraction from the historical
processes which have shaped the brain can only be part of the story. Hayek
also shares with the autopoietic theory, with dynamic systems theory and
with embodied cognition the insight that the sensory order cannot be ‘read
off’ from data about the brain or the information that reaches the senses.
Wittgenstein also questioned whether the external orderliness of behaviour
necessarily implied internal orderliness in the nervous system: “[…] if I talk or
write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and
correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system
continue further in the direction of the centre? Why should this order not
proceed, so to speak, out of chaos?” (Wittgenstein, 1981, paragraph 608). The
'chaos' in the nervous system may be unknowable, but it is productive. The
external order of behaviour comes into being, with the sensory order, as part
of the transaction between an organism, a 'form of life' in Wittgenstein's
terms, and the environment in which it is striving to survive.
The transaction is preconscious: “[…] experience does not begin with
sensations or perceptions, but necessarily precedes them: it operates on
physiological events and arranges them into an order which becomes the
On SIgns 187

basis of their 'mental' significance.” (Hayek, 1952, page 166). This


significance is close to what Gibson and others refer to as affordance: signs
which allow an organism to perceive directly what can be done as it
encounters the world. The phenomenology of the encounter, Hayek's sensory
order, is, like Dewey & Bentley's 'problem', the product of interpretation.
What an organism makes of the encounter is a semiotic not a mechanistic
matter.
It is this incorrigibility of the sensory order that makes Hayek’s views on
political economy and on psychology all of a piece. His distaste for planning
and his enthusiasm for laissez-faire are natural outcomes of his view of the
brain as open, adaptive and productive. It would be pointless to try to
improve the spontaneous, self-organising and adaptive workings of the
nervous system by intervention. To discover, store and organise the amount
of knowledge that would be required to do this is beyond the capacity of
human intelligence. Likewise, since it is not possible to know in sufficient
detail what people will do, either individually or collectively, it is pointless to
try to improve what they do when left free to pursue their own interests. This,
after all, is what evolution has equipped the brain to do.
How well these political conclusions follow from the psychological theory
is not so much of interest here as the theory itself. It provides a way of
understanding the activity of the nervous system that has a lot in common
with embodied cognition. For example, it opposes the idea that the brain is a
holder of representations or a processor of information in any formal sense.
The nervous system expresses knowledge in interaction with the world rather
than storing it in internal structures. The vehicle for the internal components
of this interaction, the networks of the nervous system, have been shaped by
selective evolution in the service of survival. But so have the external
components. Not only is the cultural world an accumulation of the products of
human interaction but the many examples of mutual evolution elsewhere in
the phylogenetic order are also accumulated products of pre-human
interaction.
Hayek took it that the free pursuit of self interest worked best within a
framework of rules. This framework was produced by human agreement and
stored in cultural notions like rights and obligations and in cultural practices
such as laws. Now these, like problems, are matters of interpretation and are
usually considered as somehow apart from the natural order. However, to
naturalise the notion of interpretation is the project of biosemiotics, which is
the subject of the next section.
188 John Pickering

6. Biosemiotics
Hayek traces the evolutionary origins and behavioural significance of the
sensory order. At the same time he acknowledges the limitations to what we
can know about it. He also says relatively little about what the sensory order
is actually an order of. That is, there is little phenomenology, in the Husserlian
sense, to be found in it. Which is not surprising, since it was not Hayek's
objective to enquire into what the sensory order felt like, only what produced
it. But for Brentano, Husserl and others in the phenomenological lineage the
principal point of interest about the human sensory order is that it is
intentional. That is, it is primordially about something and seldom, if ever,
neutral. This aboutness is intrinsically to do with value and meaning. This
applies both to states of consciousness that arise from contact with the world
and from thoughts we may have about it.
Now Peirce identified the aboutness of thought with signification. This
broad semiotic stance is perhaps hard to place in a scientific worldview that
takes nature to be inert and incapable of action unless acted upon by a living
system. However, the distinction between living and non-living was one that
Peirce was wary of making. It is a tribute to Peirce's foresight that an
increasing number of contemporary scientists are likewise wary. Work in
artificial life, in genetics, in evolutionary theory, thermodynamics and
microphysics are pointing beyond the mechanistic metaphysics of the
nineteenth century.
For those seeking a new metaphysical framework, Pierce's semiotic stance
towards nature and Whitehead's organic mechanism are an attractive
combination. In Whitehead's view, and contrary to the assumptions of most
natural scientists over the past couple of centuries, nature cannot be captured
in static particulars or by measuring the state of a system at a particular point
in space and time. “[…] In truth there is no nature at an instant […]” as he
put it (Whitehead, 1920, page 61). He also warned against what he called
“fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Whitehead 1929, page 66). This is to
take the regularities natural science abstracts from reality, for reality itself.
This fallacy takes nature to be, primarily, inert particles of matter that are
only externally related by mechanical pushes and pulls, sometimes mediated
by fields of force. While technological achievements show this view is reliable
and productive it does not guarantee that it is ontologically significant. This
mechanistic worldview denatured nature, disenchanted the world and
rendered life and lived experience something secondary and even alien.
Whitehead, like Bergson and William James, found this view limited and
sought to extend it. In his organic worldview experience was the primary
feature of nature, which he took to be a process made up of patterns of
relationships between subjects. Nature is active, its creative advance depends
On SIgns 189

on action taken in the service of feelings of meaning and value. These feelings
are not confined to those which, for example, human being experience and
are able to observe and describe. They are present at every level of nature,
from organisms to atoms. In this metaphysical framework scientific inquiry
into nature takes on an organic character. As he put it: “Biology is the study of
large organisms, physics is the study of smaller ones” (Whitehead 1929, page
125).
Causality in this view, is more appropriately treated in terms of a
neglected member of Aristotle’s system, namely formal causation, rather than
in terms of the material and efficient categories of causation that are
principally the concern of the physical sciences. Formal causation depends on
the flow of information rather energy or the transmission of mechanical force.
Matter is not merely acted upon but is bound up in evolving patterns of
organic interaction within which structured causes produce correspondingly
structured effects. Although the physical laws that can be abstracted from
nature are not broken within these patterns, they are nonetheless secondary.
They describe merely the vehicle for the primary causes at work in organic
systems. These causes, as Peirce proposed, need to be placed within a
semiotic framework.
Take the case of a driver who looks at a passing road sign. The laws of
physical optics can describe how light that falls on the sign and afterwards on
the retina creates an image. The laws of ecological optics proposed by Gibson
describe how transformations of the image on the retina unambiguously
signify the relative motion of the observer and the sign (Gibson, 1952). How
the retinal image leads to neuropsychological activity can also be captured in
physical terms. However, the laws of natural science, although able to
describe what is happening in different parts of this process, would not be
able to explain the whole. They would have little to offer in explaining how
reading sign makes the driver realise she has been misdirected, and how this
leads to the family bickering that accompanies so many car trips. The nested
levels of causation in that vignette would run from the purely physical into the
deeply tangled web of human psychological life without any qualitative
boundary. To seek a unified theory that somehow explains what is happening
at every level of the vignette is unrealistic. However, while it is not a causal
theory in the conventional sense, a semiotic theory has much to offer here.
Peirce sought such a theory in creating the semiotic foundations of
pragmatism (Peirce, 1906). The theory holds that there are no brute facts of
nature. The world means nothing until interpreted. Interpretation is however
not a human monopoly: “Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It
appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical
world […]. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there.”
(page 95). This is not to say that bees and crystals think in anything like the
190 John Pickering

way that human beings think. They surely cannot know they are thinking, as
Descartes realised human beings can. It is to say, though, that thought does
not come into existence with the human condition. It is graduated and is
prefigured in the operations of the pre-human and the pre-organic world.
Indeed, in Whitehead’s view, there is no pre-organic world. To believe that
there was would be to add an unnecessary boundary to our view of reality in
toto. What Peirce proposes is that thought and causality, are essentially
semiotic and present at all levels of the natural order. Accepting this, the
boundary dissolves.
David Bohm also put forward a view of the world comprising two
ontological orders enfolded in each other without boundaries. These orders
are the material or ‘somatic’ order and the order of meaning or ‘signification’.
The two orders are in a continual process of enfolding into and unfolding out
from each other. Enfolding renders one order implicit in the other, whilst the
complementary process of unfolding makes the emerging order explicit. What
appear to be material objects or events emerge from the order of signification
while, in complementary fashion, what we take to be mental events emerge
from and are inseparable from the somatic order that produces or supports
them (Bohm, 1985). Bohm’s treatment of what he refers to as the ‘unbroken
wholeness of nature’ is thus boundary free (Bohm and Hiley, 1993, pages
381–388) The biologist Jacob von Uexküll too used semiosis as the means by
which to understand the continuity of the pre-organic and organic orders of
nature, although he like Bohm made no qualitative distinction between them.
Von Uexküll's notion of the Umwelt is the sphere of meaning around all
sentient beings that makes the world comprehensible (Von Uexküll, 1982).
What things ‘mean’ to an active organism is a matter of interpretation, not
merely a matter of a reflex or brute physical causation. What the active
organism ‘means’ to do is guided and energised by signs in its surroundings.
In turn, these signs are the traces of a history of transactions between active
organisms and their surroundings, which are mutually evolved. Thus bees
perceive in the ultra-violet range and flowers have patterns in that range that
act as guide paths to their nectar. The bees perceptual system and the
flower's pigmentation are the semiotic complements of each other. The
transactions of meaning that have accompanied the co-evolution of all levels
of the natural order are the semiotic deep structure of reality.
While no clear boundary can be drawn between natural and conventional
signs, the interactions of animals, plants and their surroundings are the
concern of biosemiotics, the study of natural signs (e.g. Sebeok & Umiker-
Sebeok, 1992). Recent work by Hoffmeyer (1996) combines Pierce and Von
Uexküll to create a theory of organic order that resembles that of Whitehead:
“Subjectivity has its roots in the cosmos […]. We need a theory of organisms
On SIgns 191

as subjects to set alongside the principle of natural selection; Jacob von


Uexküll’s Umwelt theory is just such a theory” (page 57).
Hoffmeyer’s semiotic interpretation of nervous activity also resembles
those of Hayek, albeit that he adds the missing phenomenology: “[…]
intentionality is the idea that our mental states are always “about” something
“out there.” […] From a biological point of view there is nothing surprising in
this […] animals have nervous systems and brains; […] and from the dawn of
evolution their purpose has been to control bodily actions, behaviour.” (page
47). Human intentionality, a product of the transition from biological to
cultural evolution, is atypical in being reflexive, but primordial pre-reflexive
intentionality, according to Hoffmeyer has been present from the ‘dawn of
evolution’. He chides philosophers who find intentionality problematic. They
only do so, he points out, because: “[…] they never consider that mental
“aboutness” —human intentionality— grew out of a bodily “aboutness” (i.e.
the behaviour necessary to ensure reproduction and survival) —what could be
described as evolutionary intentionality, the anticipatory power inherent in
living systems. We still cannot escape the fact that our minds remain
embodied.” (page 47). The similarities between biosemiotics, Hayek and
embodied cognition turn on just this: what we are conscious of is shaped both
by what we are intending to do in the present and by traces of what we have
done in the past left in the nervous system and in the environment.
Thus it is not helpful to try to formalise cognition as computation nor to
abstract it from the forms of life in which it occurs. It functions as part of a
semiotic system by which organisms interpret the signs in their surroundings
that indicate how they may act adaptively. This, for Hayek and for those
exploring embodied cognition, is the origin of mental life: the ability to solve
the problems of existence by recognising what the environment means. Thus,
if Peirce’s insight is to be given its proper due, the problems identified by
Dewey & Bentley as that which drives the transactional approach should, be
seen as matters of interpretation.

7. The More than Human World


Applications of the transactional approach mostly concern the rational
behaviour of human beings as they act within the social world. There is less
concern with the actions of other forms of life as they act within their natural
settings. These are generally treated as instinctive or reflexive. Hence, in a
somewhat Cartesian manner, they tend to be taken as not as worthy of
attention as the actions and mental lives of human beings. These, being
shaped by beliefs and preferences, are not only more directly relevant to
human concerns but also reflexive and hence uniquely knowable. This
192 John Pickering

naturally tend to steer the attention away from what Abram reminds us is a
‘more than human world’ (Abram, 1997).
But it is a mistake to neglect the actions and experience of other mental
beings. They are a vast backdrop to human mental life, even though that
takes centre stage for most philosophers and psychologists. They have
produced the organic world of mutually evolved orders, including the sensory
order. That, after all, is the matrix from which the human social world
emerged, and only very recently in the vast sweep of evolutionary time. That
matrix, the biosphere, still surrounds and supports the world of human
affairs.
In any case, to neglect non-human mental life would not do justice to
Dewey’s enduring concern with how it is that consciousness renders the
world open and productive of novelty when thermodynamics tells us should it
be running down into mere uniformity. This openness was there prior to the
emergence of human beings and unless we are to take the human
experiential condition as sui generis, the continuity of the human and pre-
human psychological worlds needs to be recognised more fully. Hayek’s
evolutionary account of the sensory order, the emphasis placed on action in
embodied cognition as well as the treatments causality found in Peirce and in
contemporary biosemiotics will all help to do this.
This will in turn help psychology to avoid the “doubling-up” mistake
against which Dewey and Bentley warned. Reifying cognition as internal rules
and representations is precisely such a mistake. Not only that, it draws
attention away from the external framework of mutually evolved meaning
from which mental life emerges. In the human case, that framework
comprises meanings that range from those of the pre-human biosphere to
those carried by the artifacts and practices within which the contemporary
human mind arises and by which it is shaped.
Hayek too recognised that to be fully productive the play of human self
interest needed a framework of rules and conventions. Some of these, like
contracts, were rational agreements. Human beings acquire such rules
because they pragmatically discover that they are helpful. However,
agreements and practices based on beliefs are, in the broader perspective of
human history, just as important. Many of the beliefs and practices of pre-
modern cultures concern the relationship between the human and non-
human worlds. For example, hunter-gatherer societies have conventions to
divide rights to environmental resources, while agrarian societies too regulate
their practices in ways that avoid over-exploitation of resources held in
common (Reader, 1988). These practices and conventions rely on the
interpretation of ecological signs indicating how close a human group may be
to the carrying capacity of their surroundings. What is to be done if the
capacity looks as if it will soon be exceeded is a matter of agreement.
On SIgns 193

But disputed interpretation rather than agreement on action dominates


contemporary environmental debates. Whether or not technology is
responsible for environmental changes and whether these changes are
adverse, are contested. What the problem is, and whether there is a problem
at all are matters of interpretation. Contradictory conclusions are drawn from
the same data by groups with different interests. People are concerned, but
uncertain.
Underlying this concern, though, is an intuitive sense that the ecological
signs look bad. Many people, especially those in technologised societies,
believe that the carrying capacity of the environment is being exceeded and
that more sustainable ways of life need to be found. Reconceptualising our
relationship with the more than human world is a crucial step in doing this.
The conceptual schemes of pre-modern societies can be seen as pragmatic,
but in a deep and long term sense. The problem to addressed was of
providing for their needs in an uncertain world while balancing exploitation of
the environment against sustainability. Their solutions seem to have been
based on a subtle attention to ecological signs and a sense of being embedded
in the environment.
If the ecological signs are as bad as they appear to be, it is important to
recover some sense of how deeply embedded the human condition is in the
ecological systems that support it. The image of mental life given by
embodied cognition, being participatory, will help to do this. Hoffmeyer too,
reminds us that while human meanings are naturally the most immediate and
salient to human concerns, they are neither the first nor the only meanings in
the biosphere: “We did not invent meaning. This world has always meant
something. It just did not know it.” (Hoffmeyer, 1996, page 146). Realising
this, we will be better able to decide whether there is an ecological crisis and
if there is, what to do about it. Biosemiotics may just be the difference that
makes a difference.

8. The view from 2018


The 2003 text above had two sorts of ideas in it. The primary ones concerned
an embodied approach to mental life, especially human mental life, and a
semiotic approach to causation. The remarks on the evironmental situation
were somewhat secondary and appeared as part of the concluding section of
the paper. But now the ecological crisis is the major geopolitical issue of our
time, and it is imperative find a way for the primary ideas to be used to
address it. This is what this last section of the present paper aims to do, by
incorporating ideas from papers written by the author since 2003. (Pickering,
2016a; 2016b).
194 John Pickering

The embodied approach has become the central paradigm of cognitive


psychology and biosemiotics is now a well established, vigorous reseseach
programme. This, as well as developments elsewhere in the natural sciences,
makes the process approach of Whitehead and Peirce seem more relevant
than ever. But a process worldview that takes signification to be primordial is
too academic to have much direct influence in the debates over climate
change. What is needed is to find some way to make its central characteristics
relevant in the arena of political debate and policy making. For many
decades, commentators have pointed out that science or technology are not
the direct cause of the ecological crisis. The root causes lie in the alienated
state of human consciousness they create and the insensitive over-
consumption that results (Heidegger, 1954; Schumacher, 1979 ; Roszak 1955;
Snyder, 1955). It is a collective mental disorder resulting from a mechanistic
metaphysics which reduces the organic world to a mere standing resource for
human use. What is needed is to take the process/semiotic views set out here
and make from them something that will help counter alienation.
Here, it is notable how much emotional engagement there is with TV
programmes on the natural world, especially those that tell an evolutionary
story with a moral message which is: stop harming it. Many of these
programmes show rather well just how interdependent is the natural world.
Now this is just the message of the thoroughgoing evolutionary metaphysics
which, taken together, Peirce and Whitehead provide. From Whitehead
comes the picture of a world of process that advances without repetition.
From Peirce comes the picture of signification as formal causation that has an
irreducible experiential component to it. In this framework, subjectivity is
fundamental to evolutionary change in the natural order. Consciousness
drives and directs evolution. It is not something that only appeared once
evolution had produced sufficiently complex forms of life to host it.
With the appearance of the enigmatically reflexive form of human mental
life, consciousness itself has come under scrutiny, but it has always been
there, as the quotation from Hoffmeyer above points out (Hoffmeyer, 1996, p.
154). Although Hoffmeyer does not take sentience to be an ontological
primitive, as Whitehead and Peirce do, he nonetheless observes that:
“Subjectivity has its roots in the cosmos and, at the end of the day, the
repression of this aspect of our world is not a viable proposition.” (Hoffmeyer,
1996, p. 57). This metaphysical gambit prefigures more recent advocacy of
panpsychism, which despite being marginalised in the late nineteenth
century, has returned as an idea worthy of serious consideration (e.g. Skrbina,
2009, 2005; Strawson, 2006). What has appeared, or re-appeared, is the idea
that the psychic domain, and with it subjectivity, is as ontologically
fundamental as the physical domain (e.g. Chalmers, 2013). What Bohm, and
Peirce before him, add to Hoffmeyer’s position is that signification, meaning
On SIgns 195

or intentionality is the essence of causality in both physical, organic and


psychic domains, since they are all different aspects of one domain. This in
turn is the fundamental message found in all of Whiteheads work.
If signification is taken to be the means by which all levels of the natural
order influence each other then proposing strong functional boundaries is an
unproductive abstraction. It also shows how true novelty and creative
advance can be part of nature, something central to the philosophy of
Bergson and the inheritors of his project like Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze are both drawn to Whitehead’s but make
somewhat limited use of his central notions. Deleuze seems to use the notion
of process and creative advance as merely the division of intensive forces,
rather like the steam in the boiler of a locomotive. What gives evolution a
direction in his scheme appears to be a series-like process of self-organisation
marking the transition from the virtual to the real. The nature of the series is
unclear and seems to rest on an obscure mathematical analogy (Deleuze,
1992, p. 105). It is here that Bohm’s and Peirce’s notions of semiotic
causation are crucial. If instead we take the series to reflect the inheritance of
semiotic qualities by each virtual-becoming-actual member from the
preceding now-actualised member then the series acquires a direction. Here,
the inheritance of qualities appears to be another example of formal causation
similar to Whitehead's ‘prehension of subjective form’.
Merleau-Ponty, too, takes from Whitehead the idea that the ‘internal
activity’ in nature implies an advance. But, like Deleuze, he leaves open what
might direct that advance. He seems to approach this issue when enquiring
into the human phenomenological encounter with nature. There he says: “I
am, through my body, part of nature, and the parts of nature admit between
them relations of the same type as those that my body has with Nature.”
(Merleau-Ponty, 2000, p. 159). Whitehead says something similar to this and
to the definition of embodiment offered by Rowlands above: “Human
experience is an act of self-origination including the whole of nature, limited
to the perspective of a focal region, located within the body, but not
necessarily persisting in any fixed coordination with a definite part of the
brain.” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 290).
To propose that a localised experience could be related to the whole of
nature is incompatible with the disjointed mechanistic metaphysics of
modernity. But compatability is restored if the relations between parts of
nature are taken to be of the same quality as those that the body itself has
with nature, since they are thus rendered as relations of meaning. Here
‘meaning’ is the possibility for action. Meaning in this sense is what a form of
life, human or not, resonates to and retains from its engagement with what
Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘flesh’ of the world. The flesh is not a pre-existing
196 John Pickering

world waiting to be known, but the arena of mutual activity in which


perceiver and perceived are co-created.
What is being proposed here is that this co-creation is mediated by signs.
Signification is intrinsic to the flesh of the world, to borrow Merleau-Ponty's
term. This proposal opens the way to an evolutionary metaphysics based on
Bohm's and Peirce's semiotic understanding of causation. Conceived in this
way, subjectivity evolves within nature and cannot be separated from its
organic vehicles. While this is still somewhat abstruse and academic in the
restrictive sense, it should not be too difficult to translate this into something
that could be more broadly accessible and hence which could take on some
role in contemporary geopolitics.
To do it requires bridging a gap which David Hume proposed was
unbridgable. Namely, that between what science says the world is like and
what human beings decide what ought to be done. Now, Peirce felt the gap
did not exists and Whitehead also sought to bring together matters of fact and
matters of value in a fundamental way in his organic metaphysics. How
familiar Whitehead was with Peirce’s work isn’t clear. He played some role in
editing Peirce’s papers at Harvard, but he makes little or no reference to
Peirce in his writings. However both Whitehead and Peirce saw little value in
making a distinction between areas of science that deal with what is
conventionally seen as the physical, or non-living, world and those that deal
with living processes. Like Peirce, Whitehead rejected a purely mechanistic, or
materialistic, view of nature as patently inadequate to account for living
processes including subjective mental life and the values that come with it.
Aim, purpose, and intentionality, all qualitative aspects of mental life, cannot
be understood if the only way they could have come to exist, according to the
mechanistic view, is to somehow appear, ex nihilo, from a cosmos that is in
reality totally dead.
Instead they propose a living cosmos. Within such a panpsychist
framework, it is possible to see how nature could express value, however
vestigially, at all and every level. To accept this is to cross the Hume’s gap.
The re-appearance of more informed versions of panpsychism reflects a shift
in contemporary metaphysics.
The grounds for taking some form of panpsychism seriously are in fact
quite simple. Rather than being unparsimonious, it is in fact the reverse, since
it is a solution to an enduring and important problem—the mind-body
problem. The material world clearly exists, albeit that we may have to accept
some form of Kantian limit to what we can know about it. Experience, in the
form of qualia, also exists, even more clearly, since the fact of conscious
experience is what human beings are most certain about. As Nagel points out,
qualia are what make the mind-body problem intractable. If our worldview
On SIgns 197

offers only insensate ultimate elements, then metal experiences become


inexplicable (Nagel, 2012).
Without adopting a panpsychist position of some sort, the emergence of
mental life is rendered mysterious. It requires the assumption that things
which are essentially dead, and which can only be known quantitatively, can
give rise to living qualitative experience. If anything is unparsimonious, it is
this. Moreover, a panpsychist worldview is fundamentally relational. That is,
the interactions between different levels and parts of the cosmos are based on
meaning and on the inner natures of the interacting parts. This idea is clearly
expressed by Peirce, Whitehead, Bohm, Uexküll, and other advocates of
panpsychism old and new. Whitehead, like William James, criticises the
destructive analysis advanced by Hume that would deny the relations
between things any ontological significance.
To contemporary panpsychists, the entire world, not just what’s
commonly called the ‘living’ world’, is result of mutually evolved patterns of
actions which survived because they were compatible with a wider order of
being. Here it is a small step from compatible to beneficial. A small step
perhaps, but one that bridges Hume’s gap since ‘beneficial’ could be defined
as preserving Uexküll’s patterns of reciprocal signification that are in
themselves good since they express the harmony of nature and harmony is
intrinsically good.
If this step is being taken why is it happening now? Science has so rapidly
developed techniques for investigating the world that there is a sense of
having reached various conceptual limits. The large hadron collider and its
massive instruments buried in underground chambers the size of cathedrals,
oddly symbolise the religious status that science has had thrust upon it.
A panpsychist view of the cosmos like Peirce’s took it that that evolution
was not shaped by physical and biological forces alone but was also an
expression of selfless love (Peirce, 1897). A world view in which takes nature
to be creative, benign and in some sense sacred, appears so commonly in all
the worlds cultures that it may be considered a human universal (McLuhan
1994, Gottlieb 2003). Something like this view is now to be found, not only in
popular accounts (e.g., de Quincey 2002), but also in the work of scientists
themselves who are exploring science’s ethical and even spiritual dimensions
in order, as Stuart Kauffman puts it, to “re-invent the sacred” (Thompson
2010, Kauffman 2010).
This points the way to using the primary ideas of process and signification
above, to address the ecological crisis. That panpsychism fell from fashion
reflected the constriction on the scientific imagination that followed the swing
towards positivism in the early twentieth century. But that is not typical of
Western thought considered in the longer term (see Skrbina 2005, Sprigge
1984), nor is it typical of worldviews found outside the Western cultures,
198 John Pickering

Daoism and Hinduism being clear examples. For example, the Sanskrit
phrase Vasudhaiva kutumbakam is found in the earliest Vedic hymns is
translated as, “The earth is one family,” with the implications of co-operation,
cherishing, and harmlessness. In contemporary Judaism too, we find
Abraham Joshua Heschel saying something very like this: “The good does not
begin in the consciousness of man. It is being realised in the natural
cooperation of all beings, in what they are for each other. Neither stars nor
stones, neither atoms nor waves, but their belonging together, their
interaction, the relation of all things to one another, this constitutes the
universe. No cell could exist alone, all bodies are interdependent, affect, and
serve one another” (Heschel and Rothschild 1997: 106).
Panpsychism rests on the idea that patterns of activity are continuous
across what we see, incorrectly, as separate domains of mind and matter.
Patterns survive if they mesh with what is around them. Here ‘survive’ is not
a Darwinian competition for existence, but more like the search for harmony
found in Uexküll and in Goodwin. Harmony in and of itself is positive. It
opens up the way to novel and more developed patterns of harmonious
existence. Here we find a view of evolution, perhaps akin to that of Teilhard
de Chardin’s or to Bergson’s, which takes evolution to be purposive and to
progressively increase what is of value. This re-insertion of value into nature is
not so much to “re-invent” the sacred as to place it at the heart of the cosmos.
This blending of scientific and religious or spiritual matters cannot, of
course, fit with Hume’s division of the factual from the normative. Yet it may
not seem as inappropriate as it might have done in the past. Given the dark
geopolitics of our time, a metaphysical shift of the sort that has been sketched
here, along with its ethical implications, is sorely needed. It is vital that we
move on from the mechanistic metaphysics of the nineteenth century that
has helped human beings to damage the biosphere. Some form of
panpsychism that combines Peirce and Whitehead would be intrinsically
evolutionary and would be the basis of a reasoned environmental ethic. While
it would be scientific, it would also permit what we might call the re-
sacralising of the cosmos. To do so would be to recover the intuitive surmise
that the cosmos is perfused with value and that value has to do with inter-
relatedness, what Uexküll called harmony.
Environmentalists whose writings were easily received in and outside the
academic world, such as Arne Naess and Aldo Leopold likewise recognised
what is needed to avoid damaging the living systems on which human life
depends. It is to have a value ethic of harmony at the heart of our implicit
metaphysics. Leopold was particularly clear on this: “A thing is right when it
tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1949: 262).
On SIgns 199

What has been proposed here, and elsewhere (Pickering 2016a, b) is a


process metaphysics based on signification, that takes the cosmos to be
animated by meaning. It rests on the idea that there are signs in what
Merleau-Ponty called ‘the flesh of the world’ and that subjectivity guides
nature's creative advance. The purpose of proposing it is to help renew our
experience of the world as coherent and that coherence is in some sense
benign. Such a change will help repair the ecological damage presently being
done to the living systems of the world by a mechanistic metaphysics which
reduces the organic world to a mere standing resource for human use by an
over-consumptive human culture driven by insensitive technology. Choosing
to see past that to see the cosmos under the aspect of semiosis will require
practicing a new and very different habit of mind that would return to nature
its more-than-human meaning.
To experience the world this way, and act on it accordingly, may help to
repair the alienation of humans from nature, and the disenchantment of
nature itself, that has been a pernicious legacy of modernity. To recognise,
both intellectually and more deeply, that the particular reflexive form of
human subjectivity is a variety of more fundamental forms of subjectivity
may help to bring us towards more sustainable ways of living.

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Notes

1
See http://www.chromatika.org/spip/spip.php?rubrique37.
What is Called “Feeling”?
Lure and Certainty in Whitehead and Descartes
Pierre Rodrigo1

The notion of feeling has, quite obviously, a truly remarkable role in


Whitehead's magnum opus, Process and Reality. Indeed, it is not only the
cornerstone of the theory of prehensions and of the theory of propositions,
but of the very concept of God itself. Such a specification of “feeling,” that
could be called “cosmo-theo-logical” if we were allowed to take some freedom
with Heidegger’s technicalities, raises endless questions. The present paper
will propose one possible interpretation with the help of a Cartesian cross-
elucidation.1
In order to specify the speculative territory we are about to pace, let us
first remind ourselves of three important passages:
Here “feeling” is the term used for the basic generic
operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the
subjectivity of the actual entity in question.2
It is an essential doctrine in the philosophy of organism that
the primary function of a proposition is to be relevant as a lure
for feeling.3
He [i.e., God] is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of
desire.4
Numerous other texts could be summoned,5 but we need to insist on the
“extension” of the concept of feeling less than grasping its “intension” (or
“comprehension”), its semantic focal point. From that perspective, there is
one key passage in Process and Reality (1929):
This use of the term “feeling” has a close analogy to
Alexander’s use of the term “enjoyment” ; and has also some
kinship with Bergson’s use of the term “intuition.” A near
analogy is Locke’s use of the term “idea,” including “ideas of
particular things.” But the word “feeling,” as used in these
lectures, is even more reminiscent of Descartes. […] In Cartesian
language, the essence of an actual entity consists solely in the
fact that it is a prehending thing (i.e., a substance whose whole
essence or nature is to prehend). A “feeling” belongs to the
positive species of “prehensions.”6
But is the Cartesian overtone of Whitehead’s theory of feeling, which is made
pretty straightforward here, not utterly surprising? It is undoubtedly more
surprising than Process and Reality’s references to Alexander, Bergson and

1
Université de Bourgogne, Dijon.
204 Pierre Rodrigo

Locke. All the more so since Descartes’ quote, as it stands in the final
parenthesis, is obviously wrong and that—a very unusual fact—Whitehead
acknowledges this ingenuously in the footnote:
For the analogue to this sentence cf. Meditation VI;
substitute ‘Ens prehendens’ for ‘Ens cogitans’ 7!
The discovery of such an apparently casual note could transform the
amazement of the reader into indignation… It is however our contention that
Whitehead's interpretation is exemplarily lucid here. What is Descartes’
meaning of the concepts of cogitare and sentire? It goes without saying that
“sentire” refers first of all to sense-perception, to that same “physical”
experience that always has to be understood as an ontological lure. Such is
the work of the “hyperbolical doubt”: even though sense-perception has
proven to be misleading only in some circumstances, it cannot be trusted ever.
But this meaning is far from being the only one present in Descartes’ corpus:
in his Méditation II, after that the hypothesis of the “evil genius” has
eventually lead to the thesis of the certainty of the proposition “ego sum, ego
existo”—whereas all the other propositions, including the mathematical ones,
and all the sensations, are henceforth qualified as illusory—and after that he
has deduced that he is only “one thing that thinks” (sum igitur praecise tantum
res cogitans),” Descartes asks:
Qu’est-ce qu’une chose qui pense? C’est-à-dire une chose
qui doute, qui conçoit, qui affirme, qui nie, qui veut, qui ne veut
pas, qui imagine aussi, et qui sent. Certes ce n’est pas peu si
toutes ces choses appartiennent à ma nature.8
The philosopher makes it his duty to verify that each of these predicates truly
represents, in all certainty, one aspect of his nature, i.e., of his thought. As a
result, he gives the following crucial information regarding the notion of
feeling:
Enfin je suis le même qui sens, c’est-à-dire qui reçois et
connais les choses comme par les organes des sens: puisqu’en
effet je vois la lumière, j’ois le bruit, je ressens la chaleur. Mais
l’on me dira que ces apparences sont fausses, et que je dors.
Qu’il soit ainsi, toutefois à tout le moins il est très certain qu’il me
semble que je vois, que j’ois, et que je m’échauffe, et c’est
proprement ce qui en moi s’appelle sentir; et cela pris ainsi
précisément n’est rien autre chose que penser.9
This means that, within the framework defined by the evil genius, the
primordial meaning of “feeling” is to be authentically constitutive of my
existence. In other words, feeling is a power (virtue) that strictly belongs to
me and that allows me to move and to enjoy myself [« de m’auto-affecter »]
on the occasion of any sense-perception, whether the latter is imaginary or
not is irrelevant at this point of the argument! This is, still according to
What is Called “Feeling”? 205

Descartes, patently obvious (the second Latin edition reads: “hoc falsum esse
non potest”) and absolutely without doubt, even if there were no visible,
audible things, etc. To put it differently: even if all my sense-perceptions and
all my thoughts are lures, the fact remains that a certain feeling imposes itself
on me—I see, I hear… in brief I prehend. In Whiteheadian terms: even if all
my positive prehensions—physical and conceptual feelings10 alike—are lures,
they still make up the ens cogitans that, as a matter of fact, I am.11
Now, it is highly significant that Whitehead quotes this passage of the
second Méditation relative to the unwavering certainty of the videre videor, in
the debated text—this being is precisely the fragment that we have
intentionally put into brackets earlier.12 To fit this quote in the text definitely
revokes the apparent casualness of the footnote: to “substitute ‘Ens
prehendens’ for ‘Ens cogitans’” undoubtedly cannot be reduced to an “ad
hoc” use of Descartes. On the contrary, considering the nature of the
Cartesian quote itself, Whitehead is here strictly following the Cartesian spirit
in giving an ontological meaning to the sentire qua aspect of the cogitare!
His nuanced reading of the French philosopher is definitely remarkable,
especially since Whitehead quotes the second Méditation according to the
translation of Haldane and Ross, which is quite misleading:
Let it be so; still it is at least quite certain that it seems to me
that I see light, that I hear noise and that I feel heat. That cannot
be false ; properly speaking it is what is in me called feeling
(sentire); and used in this precise sense that is no other thing that
thinking.13
It is with great self-confidence that Whitehead corrects the translation’s
wrongness and restores the original meaning of the Cartesian sentire : “I see,”
“I hear” instead of “I see or hear something”… As a result, Whitehead properly
rediscovers the pristine prehensive dimension—in the sense of a primordial
unity of the sensible and the intelligible and of the true and the delusive—so
important for the “organic” philosophy. Feeling has thus to be understood, in
conformation with the zest of PR 40 quoted supra, as the “basic generic
operation”14 in the process of actualities: only feelings enable us to
understand how the objective data are integrated in a given becoming. In
other words, the actual occasion is only made of “feelings”; feelings are
needed for its experiential intensification, a little bit like “life” needs to be
nurtured to develop itself.15 This is why all the proposals made to the
concrescing actuality are only relevant as lures for feeling.16 And this is why
the prepredicative understanding of the concept of “feeling” allows the
philosophy of organism to exploit an ontological overcoming of the purely
logical treatment of the “propositions.”17
Ultimately, Whitehead argues that all true creation, i.e., all radical
innovation, should find its final satisfaction as well as its initial momentum (or
206 Pierre Rodrigo

“élan”) in a God that is the seat of its principle (in the Greek sense of arkhè).
More precisely, the primordial God is the “lure for feeling” and “the eternal
urge of desire.”18
It should be obvious by now that the so peculiar expression lure for feeling,
attempts to provide the best possible name for the correlate of the
concrescent feelings. Since Whitehead's “feeling” (just like Descartes’
“sentire”) operates at an ontological level deeper than the “classical”
bifurcation, it does not matter at all whether that correlate is sensible or
intelligible. And it does not matter either whether that correlate is efficacious
or imaginary, real or chimerical. As a result, it is the internal necessity of
Process and Reality’s categories itself that leads Whitehead not only to name
the object of an appetite (a bit like Spinoza had to name the object of an
appetite favourable or harmful to the conatus’ endurance) but, more
originally,19 to name “what” can work as a lure for a primordial feeling that is
indifferent to truth and error on the one hand and to reality and chimera on
the other. In its fundamental indeterminacy that “item” cannot be either an
object or an idea, but, as a matter of fact, it can be a “lure,” i.e., something
that can be an object as well as a trickery—a ghost of an object or a ghost of
an idea. By definition, a lure is neither objective nor subjective, neither
sensible nor intelligible.
One still might be amazed by the apparent inconsistency of a thought that,
on the one hand, admits the possibility of a lure at the very level of feelings
and, on the other, denounces the ontological lure that is the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness.20 How can we both reject the latter and accept the
former? But this trial is itself inconsistent, precisely because “lure” does not
always means error or chimera; we are not necessarily lured into fallacies.
The ontological status of the lure is first and foremost ambiguous. It might
convey truth or error, it might charm or seduce.
Exactly, apatè is—and Whitehead knew it for sure—the Greek term that
precisely corresponds to this concept of a “lure.” Is it not the case that “the
safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that
it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”21? Does Whitehead not give us
here a hint with regard to the royal path to his categoreal renewal—a path
that has appeared to so many readers so completely foreign to their (modern)
worldview? But a path that would not have surprised minds like Homer or
Hesiod very much.
Marcel Detienne has shown that, in archaic Greece, the Muses, as well as
the Poet or the King-Judge, utter the “Truth” (Alètheia) by manipulating the
sweet words of spellbinding, seducing and cunning discursivity: le “Maître de
Vérité connaît aussi l’art de tromper […]. Il n’y a pas d’Alètheia mantique sans
une part d’Apatè.”22 He continues:
What is Called “Feeling”? 207

Le monde divin est fondamentalement ambigu […]. Les


Muses <d’Hésiode> savent dire l’Alètheia, et l’Apatè qui
ressemble à s’y méprendre à l’Alètheia […]. C’est ce caractère
fallacieux de l’ambigu que cherche à exprimer la formule <de la
Théogonie d’Hésiode> : ‘les choses trompeuses semblables à la
réalité’. Dès l’Odyssée, cette formule définit la puissance de la
‘rhétorique’, celle d’Ulysse aussi bien que celle de Nestor, les
deux maîtres en mètis.23
Such a celebration of Apatè and Mètis, of their stratagems and raptures, is not
meant to praise falsity, but to acknowledge that what raptures actually
rescues us from is the worst of evils—forgetfulness (Lèthè)—that smothers all
propensity for change. If this is the case, even though the object of the apatè
could be nothing more than a ghost, like the ones Achilles attempts to
embrace in Hell,24 it nevertheless always opens the desire for the unknown
and the unheard. When Whitehead claims that his God is the lure for feeling,
the eternal urge of desire, one can safely guess that the “primordial nature”
belongs to the Greek pantheon,25 not to the Christian Heaven. And the last
hesitations—if any—should be easily swept aside by contemplating the
famous passage of the Function of Reason (a text contemporary or Process and
Reality), where it is claimed that:
There is Reason, asserting itself as above the world, and
there is Reason as one of many factors within the world. The
Greeks have bequeathed to us two figures, whose real or
mythical lives conform to these two notions— Plato and Ulysses.
The one shares Reason with the Gods, the other shares it with
the foxes.26
It is there, in the heart of the world, of course, but also in the divine
ambiguity, that the possibility of a radical novelty is sealed, independently of
any loving principle and of any rationalization: “this subjective aim is not
primarily intellectual; it is the lure for feeling. The lure for feeling is the germ
of mind.”27 Let us conclude with Whitehead evoking Ezekiel:
The miracle of creation is described in the vision of the
prophet Ezekiel: “So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the
breath came into them, and they lived and stood up upon their
feet, an exceeding great army.28
Ultimately, Whitehead’s cosmo-theo-logy neither spells some awkward form
of mysticism or of scientism, nor (a fortiori) a clumsy second-rate fusion of
these. It is rather the bold statement of a certainty—the certainty of a
prehendere, sive cogitare, sive sentire—intimately linked to his consent to the
mundane charms of appearances.
208 Pierre Rodrigo

Bibliography
FR = Whitehead, Alfred North, The Function of Reason [Louis Clark Vanuxem
Foundation Lectures, Delivered at Princeton University, March
1929], Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1929. Reprint:
Boston, Beacon Press, 1958.
PR = Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology.
Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the
Session 1927–28. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin
and Donald W. Sherburne [1929], New York - London, The Free
Press. A division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. - Collier
Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
SMW = Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Lowell
Lectures, 1925, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1925;
Cambridge, Cambridge Universty Press, 1926. Reprint: New York,
The Free Press, 1967.

Notes

1
With regard to Whitehead’s theory of feeling, see Alix Parmentier, La
philosophie de Whitehead et le problème de Dieu (Paris, Beauchesne, 1968,
p. 219-23); Félix Cesselin, La philosophie organique de Whitehead (Paris,
P.U.F., 1950, p. 32-36); and JeanWahl, Vers le concret (Paris, Vrin, Études
d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine, 1932, p. 162-176).
2
PR40.
3
PR25.
4
PR344.
5
See esp. PR85 (“subjective aim” and “lure for feeling”), PR163 (“primitive
experience” and “vector feeling”), PR185 (“lure for feeling” and final
cause), PR193 (judgment et “synthetic feeling”); etc.
6
PR41 (emphasis is ours). Please notice that the passage we intentionaly
ommit now will be discussed in detail infra.
7
PR41 n. 6.
8
“Quid est hoc ? Nempe dubitans, intelligens, affirmans, negans, volens,
nolens, imaginans quoque, et sentiens. Non pauca sanè haec sunt, si
cuncta ad ma pertineant.” We quote the French translation of the Duc de
Luynes, corrected by Descartes and published in Paris in 1647.
9
“Idem denique ego sum qui sentio, sive qui res corporeas tanquam per sensus
animadverto : videlicet jam lucem video, strepitum audio, calorem sentio.
Falsa haec sunt, dormio enim. At certe videre videor, audire, calescere ; hoc
est proprie quod in me sentire appellatur ; atque hoc praecise sic sumptum
nihil aliud est quàm cogitare.” (emphasis is ours; the Latin text comes from
the first edition: Paris, Michel Soly, 1641).
What is Called “Feeling”? 209

10
Cf. PR23 : “Prehensions of actual entities—i.e., prehensions whose data
involve actual entities—are termed “physical prehensions” ; and
prehensions of eternal objects are termed “conceptual prehensions.”
Consciousness is not necessarily involved in the subjective forms of either
type of prehension. […] There are two species of prehensions: (a) “positive
prehensions” which are termed “feelings,” and (b) “negative prehensions”
which are said to “eliminate from feeling.”
11
On this see the beautiful pages of Michel Henry in Généalogie de la
psychanalyse. Le commencement perdu (Paris, P.U.F., Épiméthée, 1985,
chap. I : “Videre videor,” p. 17-52); and of Pierre Guénancia, in Lire
Descartes (Paris, Gallimard, Folio-Essais, 2000, I° Partie, chap. IV, p. 156-
160).
12
Cf. supra n. 6. Whitehead is precisely citing the text we have just quoted.
13
Quoted by PR41 (we underline “light,” “noise” and “heat” to make the
unfortunate additions of the translators.
14
PR40
15
Cf. PR105/191 : “all societies require interplay with their environment ; and
in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The
living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food
which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is
robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber
requires justification.” From a wider perspective, every positive prehension
increases the intensity of the concrescing actuality (cf. PR83-86). This
“enjoyment” (Whitehead is here using Alexander’s concept) has nothing to
do with an univocal moral ideal that would be “transcendentally imposed,
it is “the breath of feeling which creates a new individual fact” (PR85).
16
Cf. supra n. 3.
17
Cf. PR184 : “It is evident, however, that the primary function of theories is
as a lure for feeling, thereby providing immediacy of enjoyment and
purpose. Unfortunately theories, under their name of “proposition,” have
been handed over to logicians, who have countenanced the doctrine that
their one function is to be judged as to their truth or falsehood.” (see also
PR25).
18
Cf. supra n. 4, and PR343: “In the first place, God is not to be treated as an
exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He
is their chief exemplification. Viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited
conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect,
he is not before all creation, but with all creation. But, as primordial, so far
is he from “eminent reality,” that in this abstraction he is “deficiently
actual” — and this in two ways. His feelings are only conceptual and so
lack the fulness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from
complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in
their subjective forms.” From the perspective of the “primordial nature,”
210 Pierre Rodrigo

God is neither the ultima ratio rerum (Leibniz) nor the embodied Love (cf.
p. 105), but an uncompromising principle of innovation (cf. p. 350).
19
More originally because Spinoza remained dependant on the usual
dichotomies (substance/modes and to feel/to know. See Whitehead’s
critique of the introduction of the modes in PR7.
20
SMW51, 55; PR7
21
PR39.
22
Marcel Detienne, Les maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris,
Maspéro, 1967, p. 73-74).
23
Detienne, ibid., p. 76 citing Hésiodes’ Theogony, v. 27. The ref. to Homer is
Odysseus XIX, 203. On all this, see also Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre
Vernant, in Les ruses de l’intelligence. La mètis des Grecs (Paris,
Flammarion, 1974, chap. I. 2 : “Le renard et le poulpe,” p. 32-57).
24
Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, in Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris, Maspéro,
19853, pp. 325-351).
25
God is here a sort of “unintellectualized” version of the Aristotelian
“supreme Desirable” evoked in PR344 (cf. his last remark: “Aristotle had
not made the distinction between conceptual feelings and the intellectual
feelings which alone involve consciousness”).
26
FR11.
27
Cf. PR85: “This subjective aim is not primarily intellectual ; it is the lure for
feeling. This lure for feeling is the germ of mind.”
28
PR85 quoting Ezekiel, xxxvii:10.
Whitehead and liminality
Paul Stenner1

Abstract
Although he did not use the term, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism
provides a way of thinking liminality in an ontological way. In making the
case for ontological liminality, the chapter begins by considering Whitehead’s
claim that human beings ‘became artists in ritual’ and from there proceeds to
unfold the sense in which the philosophy of organism is a philosophy of
limitation. For Whitehead, finitude, in its most general sense, is a species of
limitation. From its partial perspective, each finite actual occasion of
experience implicates the whole of reality within itself such that ‘each event
signifies the whole structure’ (Whitehead, 1922, p.26). This means that no
event is inherently isolated. The ontological liminality at play in this
philosophy of limitation helps to make broader sense of the anthropological
account of liminality advanced by Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner and
others within the social sciences, where the word 'liminal' refers to the
middle, 'transitional' phase of a rite of passage. The aim is to lodge their
peculiar type of processual social psychology within a broader process
ontology. From this perspective, rites of passage and other rituals show up as
particular ways of ‘occasioning’ liminal experiences of becoming.

1. Introduction
Although he did not use the term, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism
arguably provides us with a way of thinking liminality in an ontological way.
This ontological liminality helps to make sense of the specifically
anthropological account of liminality provided by the process anthropology of
Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Although it is crucial, this is not simply
a matter of the importance Whitehead’s philosophy gives to the concept of
process. For Whitehead, finitude, in its most general sense, is a species of
limitation. From its partial perspective, each finite actual occasion implicates
the whole of reality within itself such that ‘each event signifies the whole
structure’ (Whitehead, 1922, p. 26). This means that no event is inherently
isolated. It is Whitehead’s philosophy of limitation that provides the basis for

1
School of Psychology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK;
paul.stenner@open.ac.uk.
212 Paul Stenner

an ontological liminality consistent with the way that concept is understood


within the social sciences.
‘Mankind became artists in ritual.’ (Whitehead (1926, p. 21). This
profound statement has been all but ignored. And yet, for a philosopher who
considers creativity (or the principle of novelty, or ‘the production of novel
togetherness’), to be ‘the universal of universals characterizing ultimate
matter of fact’ (Whitehead, 1929, p. 21), we should not ignore this suggestion
that the human species became artists and did so in ritual. Whitehead surely
intends both meanings: that our capacity for the arts arose from our
involvement in ritual, and that we perfected ritual into something like an art
form. Writing as a social psychologist, I find in this combined proposition an
exciting potential for unraveling some of the implications of Whitehead’s
thought for the social sciences, and for an inherently historical and cultural
understanding of human psychology. This, in turn, might open new means for
integrating psychosocial science with natural science and the humanities.
Such integration at the level of cosmology is, of course, Whitehead’s chief
preoccupation. In his analysis of rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep (1909,
p. 194) also points in this direction when he discovers within these rituals ‘a
cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of plant
and animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the
great rhythms of the universe’.
Building on my applications of Whitehead’s philosophy within social
psychology (Stenner, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2017, Stenner and Moreno,
2013, Greco and Stenner, 2017), this paper explores just one aspect of the
problem: namely, how process thought provides us with a way of thinking
about the liminal — a concept introduced by van Gennep— in an ontological
manner. This can be useful for psychologists, not least because a concern
with liminality leads us to think about the nature of actual occasions of
experience, and, indeed, about the different ways in which experiences can
be occasioned, especially the notion of liminal experience. The advantage of
an ontological concept of liminality is that it promises relevance beyond the
anthropological situation of human experience, and lodges the notion of
‘liminal experience’ within a broader processual account of nature and the
cosmos. In broadening the concept beyond anthropology, it should
nevertheless accommodate the anthropological use in which the occasions of
experience in question are occasioned by forms of social and cultural activity
mediated by communication (and presupposing more or less conscious
human actors). All kinds of psychological phenomena can then be illuminated
as experiences of liminality.
Whitehead and liminality 213

2. Whitehead’s philosophy as a philosophy of limitation


It must be remembered that Whitehead is a metaphysician and so deploys
terms in unfamiliar ways that are maximally general. Liminality is not in fact
a term that he uses, but he does describe his philosophy as a philosophy of
limitation: ‘I use the term “limitation” for the most general conception of
finitude’ (Whitehead (1922, p. 16). This is because, for Whitehead, finitude in
its most general sense is a species of limitation. From its partial perspective,
each and every finite actual occasion that ‘happens’ in the universe implicates
the whole of reality within itself such that ‘each event signifies the whole
structure’ (Whitehead, 1922, p. 26). This means that no event is inherently
isolated, and yet each event is what it is (as a finite entity) on account of its
limits.
The concept of finitude implies that of infinity, and hence something finite
is a limitation with respect to the infinite. Instead of infinity (and, indeed, the
related but distinct concept of ‘totality’), Whitehead prefers the word factuality
to express the inexhaustibleness of all that is and all that is becoming in the
universe. If factuality is unlimited, then any given ‘factor’ we encounter can
be grasped as a limitation of factuality. A factor qua limitation is something
carved out of factuality or canalized within factuality. Importantly, this means
that ‘limitation’ is not just a negative concept, but has positive content. A
living organism, or a conscious experience, is a limited factor within factuality
in the sense that it is a specific canalization of the wider physical universe.
This is what allows Whitehead to ‘get rid of the notion of consciousness as a
little box with some things inside it’ (Whitehead, 1922, p. 17). A philosophy of
limitations thus escapes the bifurcation into inner and outer that has plagued
psychology since its inception: ‘the abstract is a limitation within the concrete,
the entity is a limitation within totality, the factor is a limitation within fact’
(Whitehead, 1922, p. 16).
This perspective abolishes any notion of nature as an aggregate of self-
contained entities, each isolatable from, and independent of, the others, and
hence each ‘event signifies the whole structure’ (Whitehead, 1922, p. 26).
This is why the notion of an isolated event (a simple occurrence in a simple
location) is a contradiction in terms. Any finite entity is part of a broader
factuality, but it can participate more fully in that factuality, and perhaps even
grasp the nature of its participation, only by overstepping the limits that made
it what it was. Limitation, for Whitehead, never refers to a fixed boundary,
but to something more like a threshold of transformation. Whitehead (1929,
p. 327) is clear, for example, that the first meaning of the word ‘process’ is
the ‘expansion of the universe with respect to actual things’. The basic atoms
of the universe (the ‘actual entities’ or ‘actual occasions’) are not unchanging
substances but fluences that emerge as concrete only through their own
214 Paul Stenner

internal process of concrescence, through which ‘prehensions’ they selectively


feel the broader factuality of the universe to which their concrescence
contributes.
A philosophy of limitation might thus be said to consider each and every
entity as situated ‘betwixt and between’ a finite limit and limitless infinity. It
is in this sense that a concept of liminality shows itself as a transformation of
the limits that form any given factor in the universe. Liminality is the passage
from finite form to finite form, but in this passage between forms of finitude
an entity is also exposed to the formless infinity beyond itself. We might say,
to shift vocabulary, that the pristine individuated forms proper to Apollo thus
encounter Dionysian transformation. Whitehead’s philosophy of limitation is
thus revealed as a liminal philosophy since it is less concerned with the finite
forms as such than with their transformation, the passage of their movements
and their relations to the infinite totality. The ontological scope of this mode of
thought makes it applicable even to molecules, although molecules —whose
capacity for transformation is relatively trivial— remain incapable of
punctuating their limit-crossing passages with ritual:
Consider one definite molecule. It is part of nature. It has
moved about for millions of years. Perhaps it started from a
distant nebula. It enters the body; it may be as a factor in some
edible vegetable; or it passes into the lungs as part of the air. At
what exact point as it enters the mouth, or as it is absorbed
through the skin, is it part of the body? At what exact moment,
later on, does it cease to be part of the body? Exactness is out of
the question. It is only to be obtained by some trivial convention.
(Whitehead, 1938, p. 21)
When dealing with the ‘betwixt and between’ of such molecular occasions
of passage, exactness is out of the question. In the following quotation, which
deals with the anthropological level, however, Whitehead shows himself to be
particularly interested in those more ‘dramatic’ liminal occasions during
which forms of process go through rapid and profound transformations,
because the usual limits are swept away:
Nothing is more interesting to watch than the emotional
disturbance produced by any unusual disturbance of the forms
of process. The slow drift is accepted. But when for human
experience quick changes arrive, human nature passes into
hysteria. For example, gales, thunderstorms, earthquakes,
revolutions in social habits, violent illnesses, destructive fires,
battles, are all occasions of special excitement. There are
perfectly good reasons for this energetic reaction to quick
change. My point is the exhibition of our emotional reactions to
the dominance of lawful order, and to the breakdown of such
order. When fundamental change arrives, sometimes heaven
dawns, sometimes hell yawns open. (Whitehead, 1938, p. 95)
Whitehead and liminality 215

3. Anthropological liminality
It was Victor Turner who first proposed an approach called process
anthropology, also called the anthropology of experience (Turner and Bruner,
1986). There is no evidence that he was directly influenced by Whitehead’s
philosophy, and I suspect that he did not have a significant reading
experience of Whitehead. The obvious inspirations within his process
approach are Dilthey, Dewey and Schutz, and in his essay Process, system,
and symbol: a new anthropological synthesis he also discusses Sally Faulk
Moore’s legal anthropology of process (Turner, 1977). Both Schutz and Moore
certainly were influenced by Whitehead, and so it is possible that Turner
absorbed Whitehead only indirectly.
Regardless of the nature of the influence, Turner articulated a process
approach to anthropology that is in many ways very consistent with the
philosophy of organism. He wrote of an intellectual shift ‘from a stress on
concepts such as structure, equilibrium, function, system to process,
indeterminacy, reflexivity —from a being to a becoming vocabulary’ (Turner,
1977, p. 61). Turner nevertheless reminded his readers that: ‘It has
sometimes been forgotten by those caught up in the first enthusiasm for
processualism that process is intimately bound up with structure and that an
adequate analysis of social life necessitates a rigorous consideration of the
relation between them’ (Turner, 1977, p. 65).
It was in this intellectual context —which complements a broadly
Whiteheadian approach to psychosocial science grounded in concepts of
process and relationality —that Turner made the concept of liminality
famous. The term ‘liminality’ derives from the Latin word ‘limen’ meaning
‘threshold’ (Schwelle, seuil). The outer limits (Schranke, frontier, marge) of the
Roman empire, for instance, were marked by fortifications known as ‘limes’.
As Thomassen (2009) points out, there is thus a clear spatial meaning in
which liminality refers to borderlands, thresholds or other in-between spaces
whether these be thresholds between rooms in a house, thresholds between
houses in a street, zones between streets, borders between states, or even
wider geographical areas. This spatial meaning makes the concept relevant to
sciences like geography and archaeology, as when Pryor (2004, p. 173)
describes the causewayed enclosures of prehistoric Britain in relation to the
‘special status of physical liminality’: burial areas are liminal with respect to
living areas, for instance. Liminality entails much more than this observable
spatial meaning of a border between states or a threshold between rooms. It
also conveys the less tangible temporal sense of something that happens: an
occurrence, event or phase. As Thomassen (2009) suggests, this temporal
dimension is also remarkably fluid, varying from moments (the liminality of
sudden events like earthquakes or road accidents) to periods (the liminality of
216 Paul Stenner

a summer holiday or the French revolution) to entire epochs (the ‘axial age’ or
the Renaissance). The concept of the liminal did not begin with Turner, and
nor did the idea of a processual anthropology. Turner discovered both in the
anthropology of Arnold van Gennep who introduced the liminal in his book
‘Rites of passage’ from 1909. It is telling that Turner (1977, p. 66) referred to
van Gennep as ‘the first scholar who perceived that the processual form of
ritual epitomized the general experience in traditional society that social life
was a sequence of movements in space-time, involving a series of changes in
pragmatic activity and a succession of transitions in state and status for
individuals and culturally recognized groups and categories’.

Van Gennep’s Rites de Passage

Van Gennep (1909) first introduced the concept of rites of passage. He


showed that they were pervasive throughout all the cultures that had been
studied by anthropologists at the turn of the 20th Century, and are
characterised by a specific pattern. Rites of passage are rituals or ceremonies
associated with significant turning points in the life of a society and in the
lives of individuals. Their purpose is transformative in that they function to
prepare, enact and commemorate transitions from one state or status to
another, or between one world of ‘pragmatic activity’ and another. Rites of
passage are many and varied. For example, van Gennep first discusses what
he calls the ‘territorial passage’ where the crossing of frontiers of various
kinds is accompanied by ceremonial rites. He goes on to describe rites
associated with pregnancy, childbirth and childhood, before discussing
initiation rites, ceremonies of betrothal and marriage and funerals. These are
not entirely distinct from territorial rites, since in many societies a change in
state, status or social position will be accompanied by a territorial change in
dwelling place, and hence a literal territorial passage will also be involved.
Other relevant ceremonies include those rites which ‘accompany and bring
about the change of the year, the season, or the month’, and, as van Gennep
points out, these are also related to notions of birth, death and rebirth.
In sum, whether territorial rites, seasonal (or other temporal) rites, life
stage rites, or rites associated with changes of office, rituals of passage mark
circumstances of transformation or becoming. Van Gennep’s chief
contribution was his identification of a three-fold pattern of the rites of
passage. This pattern has three phases which he called pre-liminal, liminal and
postliminal. Each is a necessary stage in a process of becoming or
transformation:
—First there are rites of separation in which the previous state or social
position is, as it were, broken down. These ceremonies often involve symbols
Whitehead and liminality 217

of cutting or incision, as when a boy is circumcised or hair is cut during the


separation phase of an initiation rite.
—Then there is a middle transition phase of passage, which might often
involve a trial or test that must be successfully completed. The symbolism
here is often of movement, as when a bride is carried across a threshold or an
initiate must make a dangerous leap from a high structure.
—The passage then ends with the rites of incorporation during which the
new status, position or identity is established and recognized. Here a wedding
ring or crown may symbolize the unity of a new bond, as might the tying of
fabrics or the knotting of belts.
Van Gennep used the word ‘liminal’ to refer to the middle, transitional
phase of this pattern. What is distinctive about this middle phase is that
during it the usual limits imposed by the rules and norms of social structure
have been temporarily removed. This suspension of the usual order of things
is symbolized by the preliminal rites of separation, but during the liminal
phase, a new order has not yet been reinstated by the rites of incorporation.
That is to say, the rules, norms and expectations that applied to the previous
social identity or status have been broken down in the rites of separation, but
those appropriate to the new identity or status have not yet been established
in the rites of incorporation. The participants thus find themselves exposed to,
and sometimes put to the test within, a strangely unlimited situation. To use a
phrase that Turner would make famous, they are ‘betwixt and between’.
In Rites of Passage, then, van Gennep gives us an image of society, not just
as a set of positions, structures, states and statuses, but also as a constant and
shifting set of movements from one position, structure, state or status to
another. This is the image of society summed up by the children’s rhyme
about a man who went through all his rites of passage in one week: ‘Solomon
Grundy: born on Monday, Christened on Tuesday, Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday, Worse on Friday, Died on Saturday, Buried on Sunday.
That is the end of Solomon Grundy’. ‘Life itself’, van Gennep writes, ‘means to
separate and be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be
reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then to begin acting
again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross:
the thresholds of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month or a
night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity, and old age; the
threshold of death and that of the afterlife —for those who believe in it.’
(1909, p. 189-90).
An important point that van Gennep makes is that the transformations at
stake in rites of passage bring into play a relationship with the sacred in
contrast to the profane, a relationship which is always relative: ‘Whoever
passes through the various positions of a lifetime one day sees the sacred
where before he has seen the profane, or vice versa. Such changes of
218 Paul Stenner

condition do not occur without disturbing the life of society and the
individual, and it is the function of rites of passage to reduce their harmful
effects’ (van Gennep, 1909, p. 13).

Turner on liminality, anti-structure and communitas


[…] ritual processes contain within themselves a liminal
phase, which provides a stage (and I use this term advisedly) for
unique structures of experience (Dilthey’s Erlebnis) in milieus
detached from mundane life and characterized by the presence
of ambiguous ideas, monstrous images, sacred symbols, ordeals,
humiliations, esoteric and paradoxical instructions, the
emergence of symbolic types represented by maskers and
clowns, gender reversals, anonymity, and many other processes
which I have elsewhere described as “liminal.” The limen, or
threshold, a term I borrowed from van Gennep’s second of three
stages in rites of passage, is a no-man’s-land betwixt and
between the structural past and the structural future as
anticipated by the society’s normative control of biological
development. (Turner, 1986, p. 41)
Victor Turner’s development of van Gennep’s notion of liminality was
clearly inspired by this dual image of society as composed, on the one hand,
of relatively enduring structures, states and statuses, and, on the other hand,
of the becomings or transitions that occur at the joints, interstices or cracks of
structure, and through which those structures are renovated and, as it were,
‘peopled’. Turner was particularly struck by the recognition that liminal
phases involve the temporary and ritual suspension of social structure. For
him (e.g. Turner, 1969), van Gennep’s idea of a liminal situation points to a
quite particular and peculiar situation in which the usual limits that apply to
recognizable social identities, positions and offices —including rights and
responsibilities— are temporarily removed. The suspension of these limits,
when all goes well, is what allows those involved to ‘pass-through’ a transition
to a new set of limits. So, for example, in liminal ceremonies a person who is
soon-to-be a king may be treated like a servant, or males and females maybe
treated indiscriminately, and so forth.
Turner was concerned that most social scientists pay almost exclusive
attention to social structure and that this focus ignores the vitally important
contribution made to wider society by the formative experiences that occur
during these liminal, transitional moments in which social structure is
suspended. To mark the importance of liminality he used the phrase anti-
structure, and indeed gave his 1969 book The Ritual Process the subtitle
structure and anti-structure. This emphasis on anti-structure does not denote a
lingering ‘structuralism’ in Turner’s thought, since he was well aware of the
immanent and processual nature of structure. Rather, it shows an awareness
Whitehead and liminality 219

of the importance of those many circumstances of rupture, transition and


uncertainty that are not reducible to repeatable patterns of order and without
which the advent of genuine novelty would remain inexplicable. During a
liminal passage, the ‘passengers’ are directly exposed to the transient nature
of the social differentiations that make up the familiar subject positions of
social structure. Differences of status, of gender, of family rank and so forth
are, for a short but intense time, de-differentiated into a relatively
unstructured limbo.
For Turner, then, liminal situations are not just important because they
function to reduce the harmful effects of disturbance to social and individual
routines. They are also important because they create the conditions for an
experiential confrontation with what it means to be a human being outside of
and beyond the limits of a structurally given social position or state. If the
usual position or status that one occupies provides one, metaphorically
speaking, with a pair of blinkers that limit one’s focus to better enable the
fulfillment of one’s duties, then a liminal experience involves the temporary
removal of those blinkers. Such moments or episodes of exposure tend to be
highly affectively charged, and for Turner, they can be enormously valuable
formative experiences. For this reason, liminal experiences can give rise, he
suggests, to a ‘sentiment of humankindness’. They can help to generate a
sense of equality and of the common purpose of the society taken as a whole,
rather than as a collection of structural positions. Liminal ‘anti-structure’, in
short, is for Turner the source of those experiences that allow people to
recognize the generic human bonds that make social structure possible and
sustainable. This insight of Turner’s is clearly a development of van Gennep’s
observations (cited earlier) about the sacred. As Turner (1969, p. 97) puts it,
‘Something of the sacredness of that transient humility and modelessness
goes over and tempers the pride of the incumbent of a higher position or
office’. This gives liminal situations a decisively important psychosocial
function, since in forming the character of individuals, they also serve to
revitalise, rather than simply reproduce, social structure. Again in Turner’s
words, through liminal experiences, people are temporarily released from
social structure ‘only to return to structure revitalized’ (1969, p. 129).
Turner uses the word communitas to capture this combination of valuable
features associated with liminality and missed by those who concern
themselves only with structure. The relatively formless flux of a liminal
transition is the stuff out of which structure is formed. As he puts it, liminality
is a ‘realm of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and
relations may arise’ (Turner, 1967, p. 97). What is decisive, however, is the
dialectic involving the alternation and interweaving of liminal communitas
and structure. Communitas emerges where structure is not. Without
communitas social structure will become inflexible and corrupt. Without social
220 Paul Stenner

structure, communitas would be chaotic. We thus have an account of social


order that juxtaposes two ‘alternating models of human inter-relatedness’.
The first is structured, differentiated and hierarchical, and the second is a
‘relatively unstructured communion of equal individuals submitting to the
authority of the elders.’
To rapidly summarise Turner’s dense arguments, we could say that
liminality is a) about ‘event’ or transition rather than ‘structure’; b) it is about
residual potential that has not yet been captured and externalized in concrete
social structure; c) as potential, it evokes a potency that can revitalize or
disrupt existing structural arrangements; d) it is about the vivid immediacy of
the now, with all of its spontaneity; e) it is pre-personal to the extent that it
cannot be reduced to existing social identities with their allocated rights and
duties; f) it engenders a general sense of anonymous and shared participation
in a broader unity; g) it allows a glimpse at the kind of generalized egalitarian
social bond; h) it points towards an open future with no borders; and i) it is
about community rather than society.1

4. Ontological liminality
I have noted that Van Gennep and Turner were anthropologists and not
philosophers, and the concept of liminality they developed was designed to be
applicable to human social existence. Nevertheless, we have seen that this
special focus fits neatly in the broader context of Whiteheadian ontology. A
key point of communality here is to be found in the concept of experience. In
his book From Ritual to Theatre (1982), Turner offers an etymology of the
word experience and points to its use of the Indo-European root ‘per-,’. Per-
means to venture or to risk, and hence is also found in words like peril.
Experience thus conjures the sense of a passing-through which is risky.
Szakolczai’s (2009, p. 148) observations about the relationship between
liminality and experience in general also provide an important clue to an
ontological account of liminality.2 To have ‘an experience’, he suggests,
‘means that once previous certainties are removed and one enters a delicate,
uncertain, malleable state; something might happen to one that alters the
very core of one’s being’. In other words, the concept of experience, thought
in this way, is synonymous with the concept of liminality, since a liminal state
is precisely a ‘delicate, uncertain, malleable state’. This definition of
experience fits with the way Turner defines ‘an experience’ as distinct from
‘mere experience’ in his co-edited volume from 1986 The Anthropology of
Experience (1986):
Mere experience is simply the passive endurance and
acceptance of events. An experience, like a rock in a Zen sand
Whitehead and liminality 221

garden, stands out from the evenness of passing hours and years
and forms what Dilthey called a ‘structure of experience.’ In
other words, it does not have an arbitrary beginning and ending,
cut out of the stream of chronological temporality, but has what
Dewey called ‘an initiation and a consummation.’ (Turner and
Bruner, 1986: 35)
‘An experience’, then, is something that ‘stands out’ because it introduces
a rupture in the fabric of ‘mere experience’. We might call ‘an experience’ an
event, in the same way that historians talk about historical events as
significant moments of transformation. Liminal rites, in Turner’s view, are
valuable precisely because they enable and generate such experiences. If we
juxtapose this insight with Whiteheadian process philosophy, we encounter
an ontology in which experience (in the form of actual occasions of
experience) as such is fundamental to all forms of reality.
Like Turner, Whitehead insists upon a pulse or rhythm which he calls the
‘rhythm of the creative process’. This rhythm ‘swings from the publicity of
many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private
individual to the publicity of the objectified individual’ (Whitehead, 1929, p.
151). Process thought, then, gives a fundamental role to the process of
experience, but experience conceived as a liminal going through. In this
respect, Whitehead distinguishes two related meanings of process:
concrescence and transition. The first is the process through which an actual
occasion converts its merely real data into determinate actuality (the actual
occasion, strictly speaking, is that ‘converting’). The second is the process
whereby the new and concrete ‘particular existent’ that is created by
concrescence is taken up in turn as new data for the constitution of the next
actual occasion. These are, however, two sides of a single process which
allows Whitehead to simultaneously conceptualise both the expansion of the
universe towards the infinite (where the ‘infinite’ is immanent within
experience, and not an external ‘goal’) and the actual finite nature of the
universe-awaiting-expansion.
As I put it earlier, Whitehead’s philosophy of limitation considers each and
every entity as situated ‘betwixt and between’ a finite limit and limitless
infinity. I stated that liminality is the passage from finite form to finite form,
but also that this passage between forms of finitude exposes an entity to the
formless infinity beyond itself. This was the basis for my ontological definition
of liminality as a transformation of the limits that form any given factor in the
universe. Turner’s notion of communitas, and van Gennep’s comments about
the sacred, can be viewed in this light as precisely the exposure of a
previously limited form to a de-differentiated factuality beyond those limits,
and hence to the possibility of an experience precisely of those limits. In his
last work, Modes of Thought Whitehead would characterize this same swinging
222 Paul Stenner

rhythm in terms of a movement between experience and expression. In the


course of an actual occasion of experience the expressed data of the world is
prehended into a unity. The result is a new expression which can in turn be
data for the next moment of experience which, upon its satisfaction, will itself
yield an expression. Hence for Whitehead (1938, p. 23)
‘Feeling […] is the reception of expressions’ and ‘Expression
is the diffusion, in the environment, of something initially
entertained in the experience of the expressor’.
Although he is talking about the more limited domain of anthropology,
Turner endorses a similar position when he describes expressions as the
‘crystallized secretions of once living human experience’ (Turner, 1982, p.
17). Again, he is here influenced by Dilthey for whom, as Turner puts it,
‘experience urges towards expression’ (p. 37). Whitehead’s focus is naturally
much broader, since his concept of experience is designed to be applicable to
any and every actual occasion of experience. The actual occasion is the
atomic unit in Whitehead’s philosophy, meaning that all reality is ultimately
composed, not of brute matter, but of occasions in which the potentialities of
the world are recurrently actualised. Actual occasions are the experiences
which give rise, through their infinite iterations, to the patterned expressions
of the external world. Actual occasions of experience are thus events of
transition from actuality to actuality. Structural patterns are the result of
multiple, various and recurrent events of patterning (actual occasions of
experience) in the course of which the ‘data’ of the world are lent pattern
through a process of feeling. Feeling is not just an accompanying ‘quality’ but
literally a process of grasping (positive prehension) whereby an actual
occasion/entity patterns the heterogeneous data of its actual world into a
unity (including what is not felt since it is ‘negatively prehended’). As
Whitehead (1929, p. 41) puts it:
Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience
arising out of data. It is a process of ‘feeling’ the many data […]
Here ‘feeling’ is the term used for the basic generic operation of
passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the
actual entity in question. Feelings […] effect […] a transition into
subjectivity.
Feelings —as ‘vectors’ or transitions effecting concrescences— are thus
liminal in the sense that they concern movement across a threshold from
objectivity to subjectivity and back again. Whitehead puts this most clearly
when he describes feelings as ‘vectors’ since ‘they feel what is there and
transform it to what is here.’ These feelings, however, are intensive,
subjective, transitive affairs, which can be experienced by others only once
they have actualised into concrete expressions, and hence become part of the
data of the universe (only once they have, in short, perished). The inert facts
Whitehead and liminality 223

of structure, like bones and teeth, are simultaneously the dead products of
previously living immediacies of becoming, and the data that make possible
the living events of the now.
In sum, there is a direct parallel to be drawn between the
state/status/position  transition  state/status/position pattern of
anthropological liminality, and the public expression (datum)  private
experience (subjective transition)  public expression pattern of a
Whiteheadian version of ontological liminality. The pre-liminal, liminal and
post-liminal pattern of separation  transition  incorporation thus shows up
as an anthropological echo of Whitehead’s ontological trio of perishing 
transition  concrescence, and both concern a certain ‘objective immortality’
whereby what is dead, and hence divested of its own becoming, is
appropriated as a component in the vital immediacies of the living.

5. Conclusion: artists in ritual


For convenience we can distinguish three broad ways in which liminality
becomes relevant as an ontological concept within process thought. The first
way concerns relationality. For Whitehead, things are relational in that they
are ultimately defined by their relevance to other things, and by the way other
things are relevant to them. This gives a decisive importance to relations
‘betwixt and between’ spatial things, or spatial liminality (something liminal is
both x and y).
The second way concerns temporality. For Whitehead, things are
constituted in and by their temporal relationship to a past that is giving rise to
a future. From a process perspective, all things perish and recur (Brown,
2012, p. 31), and all of nature is understood as a rhythm of arising, perishing
and replacement. This gives a decisive importance to relations ‘betwixt and
between’ times, or temporal liminality (something liminal is both no longer
and not yet).
The third way, which is a combination of both, is that process thought
emphasises creativity and emergence. Thought and experience can never be
understood merely as representations or reflections of a pre-existing reality,
since at stake is the emergence of new forms of reality. Process concerns the
emergence of novelty: the ‘expansion of the universe with respect to actual
things is the first meaning of “process”’. This expansion occurs through the
process of concresence during which a ‘particular existent’ is constituted in
the fluency of an actual occasion. By way of an actual occasion of experience,
something new is added to the data that are patterned into a unity, since what
is added that was missing before is precisely this element of pattern: ‘[T]he
many become one and are increased by one’ (Whitehead, 1929, p. 21).
224 Paul Stenner

It is now possible to see the extent to which Whitehead’s philosophy is


replete with liminal themes. He recurrently draws attention to the mixed,
mediating spaces and times between phenomena. His key concepts tend to
encourage paradoxical ‘both / and’ thinking rather than discrete ‘either / or’
thinking. The concept of the actual occasion, for example, is both subject and
object since it is defined in relation to a subject concerning itself with its
objects and in so doing, creating itself and objectifying itself in the expression
of a superject. In the same way, where many styles of thought would oppose
teleological and efficient modes of causation, Whitehead crafts the concept of
the actual occasion precisely to combine teleology with efficient causation:
futural subjective aim and brute fact from the past are fused in a liminal
present of becoming. The concept of the bifurcation of nature likewise warns
against the separation of subject from object, and encourages liminal modes
of thought.
A liminal philosophy of becoming like Whitehead’s can accept no absolute
divisions between human and animal, conscious and unconscious, living and
non-living, internal and external since the starting point is an immanent unity
of nature composed of a multiplicity of experiences/expressions. This is why
Whitehead blurs distinctions as soon as he makes them, drawing attention to
the exceptions and to the impossibility of ultimate clarity. The human body is
ultimately indistinguishable from its physical environment. It is ‘that region of
the world which is the primary field of human expression’ (Whitehead, 1938,
p. 22). At the same time, our bodies are liminal in that they ‘lie beyond our
own individual experience […] and yet are part of it’ (1938, p. 21). Life is
ultimately indistinguishable from non-living regions of nature, although
‘Where ever there is a region of nature which is itself the primary field of the
expressions issuing from each of its parts, that region is alive’. ‘Life’, writes
Whitehead, ‘lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of
the brain’ (Whitehead, 1929, p. 105-6). Or again, it is ‘a characteristic of
“empty space” and not of space “occupied” by any corpuscular society’
(1929, p. 105). If something lives, then that means it is forever managing the
permanent liminality of its own constant break down.
If humankind became artists in ritual, then this is because ritual provided a
means to grasp and collectively transfigure this constant break down that is
life, and to find in that transfiguration the means for a rejuvenated future:
ultimately, to be reborn from death. The ritual madness of Dionysiac rites is a
matter of finding rapture in the rupture of death and rebirth just as the wine
of which he is also the deity is born from the crushed grape. If art in the form
of tragedy was truly born from the matrix of Dionysiac ritual, then this is
because such revels permitted the reveler —transformed into a satyr— to see
‘a new vision outside himself’ (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 43). This close encounter
with ones own limits affords a view —no matter how blurred— from beyond.
Whitehead and liminality 225

Wrapped in the bitter-sweet beauty of tragedy, the weight of life’s torments is


carried aloft on the wings of art.

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Notes

1
That is to say, community, not as something that is, but as something that
happens: ‘Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might
add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons.
And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences
everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I
to Thou. Community is where community happens’ (Martin Buber [1961],
cited by Turner, [1969] 1995).
2
Szakolczai (2009) also points out that the famous “first word” of Greek
philosophy, apeiron, is equivalent to the latin liminality in referring to in-
between moments when conventional limits are removed.
The Relevance of Process Philosophy
to Psychology and Philosophy of Mind
Maria Teresa Teixeira1

Process philosophy takes the stance that fragmentation and specialisation of


knowledge can lead to incoherence. A system requires being whole and
entire. Partition and decomposition are not reversible procedures. Whitehead
writes in Process and Reality: “incoherence is the arbitrary disconnection of
first principles.”1 He then says that Descartes’ system “makes a virtue of its
incoherence” because in Cartesian philosophy entities need “nothing but
themselves in order to exist.”2 The question of consciousness should be taken
in its entirety without being subject to disconnected views. Process
philosophy can thus be of great relevance to psychology and philosophy of
mind.
The work of French/Polish psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski clearly illustrates
how psychology and psychiatry directly relate to key concepts in process
philosophy. On the other hand, the examination of Bergson and Whitehead’s
writings on consciousness bring forward novel insights into what is currently
called the mind-body problem. In process philosophy foundational notions
such as creativity and élan vital can enhance psychological theories. The very
notion of process sheds new light on key issues in neuroscience.
The work of Eugène Minkowski is rooted in Bergson’s philosophy and also
in clinical observation. The examination of time is of great importance to
psychological theory. Time is considered to be a primeval phenomenon, one
that cannot be accounted for by logic.3 A logical and deterministic analysis of
mental phenomena reduces them to epiphenomena. An authentic intuition of
time is needed because mental phenomena are temporal.
The relation of what comes before to what comes after requires a
reference point: the present. But the present is not a primary notion. On the
contrary, it is introduced into temporal analysis in order to situate the past
and the future. Becoming dispenses with the present, as much as it dispenses
with the past and the future taken as reference points. There is no
commencement and no end to be found in the flux of reality. Time is not a
succession of geometric points; lived time is becoming. Our present is given
at a stroke and remains indivisible because it is lived in its very thickness.
Also, it includes memory. And it unfolds and sets a direction towards the
future. The present time cannot be determined by measurement. It has its
own duration. Time endures.

1
Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa.
228 Maria Teresa Teixeira

Bergson’s vital impulse or élan vital draws us towards the future. It


enhances the indivisibility of the present and founds the creativity of the
future. This is also true for Whitehead’s philosophy. Eugène Minkowski’s main
concept of vital contact with reality (contact vital avec la réalité) is inspired by
Bergson’s élan vital. It is related to everyone’s personal élan.4 We can
penetrate becoming and be part of it. But at the same time we are drawn by it
and absorb it, so that we establish a perfect harmony living in and being part
of becoming.
In Minkowski’s theory there is this harmonious ambience around us that
keeps us in close touch with reality. We progress with becoming and are in
synchrony with it in one single rhythm. It is important to notice that Bergson
holds in Duration and Simultaneity (Durée et simultanéité) that there is a
universal time that comprises all different durations belonging to each and
every being. Those different rhythms of being do not compromise a
temporality shared by all the existents.5
In his study of schizophrenia Minkowski describes the disease as the loss
of vital contact with reality. Schizophrenic patients have no trouble with
memory or intellect. It is their connection with the surrounding ambience that
is at risk.
The environment is not a set of stimuli that force themselves upon us. It is
an enveloping whole with a durational character that draws us forward into
the future. We are included in this whole in such a way that we can say we
coincide with it. Our durational empathy with ambient life permits this
harmonious temporal advance. The vital contact with reality is a kind of inner
dynamism that is synchronous with life itself. It is thus that schizophrenia
does not affect intellectual faculties or memory; it is rather the weakening of
life’s dynamism and a cut-off with the pragmatic aspect of life. Minkowski
speaks of a pragmatic deficit (déficit pragmatique).6 Creativity “emerges” from
the élan vital and is required for future enterprises. For Minkowski,
schizophrenics lack creativeness and envisage the future as mere repetition.
Their ideas have a static character and lack realisation. They fail to consider
movement and duration and draw a lot on logic and even mathematics. For
they tend to consider the natural on-flow of life from a rationalistic, purely
logical point of view. This can be dangerous, once the field of pure logic and
mathematics is abandoned. It gives rise to a “morbid rationalism”7 that can
lead to disproportionate and inadequate action. Normal individuals are in
accord with the vital impulse, not with the rules of logic. It is a sort of
empathy with ambience.
Minkowski founds this empathy on Bergson’s intuition. It is an immediate
apprehension of things. When we intuit things, we grasp them from the
inside. We are in accord with life in such a way that it is impossible for us to
look at it from a distance and simply apply the laws of logic. Our grasp of life
The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology 229

is whole and entire. Indivisibility places us within life at a stroke. We are in


perfect unison with other human beings and even with other creatures,
because our mode of being comprehends their mode of being. In
“Introduction to Metaphysics” Bergson writes: “We call intuition here the
sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to
coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.
Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to
elements already known, that is, common to that object and others.”8
The Bergsonian intuition anchors itself to his particular notion of psychic
states. Bergson does not envisage psychic states as the fragments of one
personality: each state of consciousness reflects the whole personality to
which it belongs and cannot be dissociated from it, or considered separately
from the entire personality. This is why we are in complete unison with
ambience. Empathy emerges because reality does not allow for fragmentation
and partition.9
The ontological wholeness of psychic states is thus of great importance to
psychology and psychiatry. States of consciousness cannot be taken
separately because mental states interpenetrate in such a way that each one
of them includes the whole person’s character. The symptoms of a particular
mental disease are thus an inextricable totality that must be approached from
a global standpoint. They transform the human personality in its entirety.
Patients suffering from different mental diseases may exhibit common
symptoms. For example, anxious hypochondria may look the same as
schizophrenic hypochondria. However, Minkowski holds that each patient
must be treated in accordance with her/his altered personality. The use of a
classification of symptoms in psychiatry cannot replace a complete and
individual evaluation of each patient.10 Common symptoms may affect mental
patients suffering from different diseases. In other words, symptoms per se
are not a reliable source for the diagnosis of mental disease.
In this way, Minkowski’s idea of lived time (temps vécu) introduces process
ontology into psychiatry. A live personality is always to be found in its
entirety behind the symptoms of mental disease. (As we have seen above,
according to Bergson’s teachings every mental state reflects the whole
personality and different states of consciousness cannot be separated into
fragments.11) Although the flow of consciousness is continuous, it is also
heterogeneous. And heterogeneity requires wholeness and indivisibility.
It is here that Whitehead’s concrescence can be a good means to illustrate
how an indivisible state of consciousness grows into a new state of
consciousness. Whitehead employs the word “concrescence” to designate the
process of becoming, the process of the many turning into the one. It
captures the temporal, ontological process of the unravelling of states of
consciousness; Whitehead writes in Process and Reality: “A duration is a
230 Maria Teresa Teixeira

complete locus of actual occasions in ‘unison of becoming’ or in ‘concrescent


unison.’ It is the old-fashioned ‘present state of the world.’”12 The durational
character of actual occasions mirrors their indivisibility and wholeness.
Whitehead speaks of the concrescence and of its relation with physical time.
He writes: “This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time:
the exactly converse point of view expresses the relationship of concrescence
to physical time. It can be put shortly by saying, that physical time expresses
some features of the growth, but not the growth of the features.”13 In the
same way, we could say that Bergson’s states of consciousness “are not in
physical time” and that they are a good example of “the growth of the
features” but not of “the features of the growth.” Bergson’s durée expresses
the entirety and inextricability of consciousness. Different states of
consciousness do not represent fragmented and decomposed parts that can
be added back into the same initial whole. The flow of consciousness cannot
be measured while it unfolds and becomes; this is the reason why a
concrescence is not in physical time. Consciousness is rather an endless
process, always giving rise to novel entities in virtue of creativity.
Going back to Whitehead, he writes in Process and Reality: “a set of all
actual occasions is by the nature of things a standpoint for another
concrescence which elicits a concrete unity from those many actual
occasions. Thus we can never survey the actual world except from the
standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed
completion.”14 The same applies to Bergson’s flow of consciousness; the
ceaseless flow never reaches its end. Completion is presupposed and falsified
in order to appease our ordinary logical ways of thinking. But becoming,
itself, excludes a definite, clearly marked completion. It requires a
synchronism between lived experience and the flow of time only to be found
in an ever becoming, never completed reality. In this way, Minkowski’s lived
time is not a relationship between being and non-being; it is rather pure
becoming.15
Thus, the diagnosis of mental disease should not rely on artificially isolated
symptoms, but on a global evaluation of the patient’s personality and
examination of the past. Whitehead would have spoken of an historic route
that could not be ignored. Each state of consciousness is constitutive of
character so that there is a sort of ontological incorporation as consciousness
flows and comes into existence. The individuation of one state of
consciousness is not a separation from the flux, and it carries with it the
whole personality. Mutual inextricability of states of consciousness does not
imply the exclusion of identity or individuation of each one of them. But there
is no loss of integrity or entirety in the heterogeneous process: each state of
consciousness expresses the whole personality. Mental disease is thus an
affection of the whole personality, not a collection of severed symptoms that
The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology 231

add up to form a symptomatology exhibited by a patient. There is a reciprocal


ontological implication of states in the flow of consciousness. They progress
into the future as an indivisible whole that grows with the unbroken flow of
reality. There is no addition of new, separate parts that would thus augment
consciousness. It is an ontological growth, and as such it is already in
existence as process unfolds and develops.
The ontological, temporal development of consciousness is also an
important key to the understanding of what is currently designated as the
mind-body problem. The materialistic consensus ignores the holistic stance of
process philosophy, as well as the temporal character of consciousness. It
further relegates becoming and evolution to the background and often
considers mental states as isolated phenomena, which can be pinpointed as
static entities. In recent years, a few neuroscientists have developed different
theories that have been inspired by or can be connected, in some way, to
process philosophy: Marc Jeannerod, Francisco Varela, Jason Brown, and
Gerald Edelman. This kind of theory can be ultimately connected to the
philosophies of Bergson and Whitehead. Bergson’s book Matter and Memory
(Matière et mémoire) focuses on the mind-body problem. On the other hand,
Whitehead did not concern himself with the mind-body problem as such,
although his thinking can be used to found new theories of the mind. Process
views on freedom and determinism can also be useful to our enquiry.
Bergson’s notion of a heterogeneous flux of consciousness is at the root of
his philosophy. It serves as the paradigm for change and movement. It also
coincides with our inner life and unravels itself in a continuous, indivisible
flow. Change is indivisible. In The Creative Mind (La Pensée et le mouvant),
Bergson writes: the “indivisible continuity of change is precisely what
constitutes true duration. […] real duration is what we have always called
time, but time perceived as indivisible.”16
Creation and novelty happen within pure duration. An act of freedom,
which is a novel creation, is also the result of the indivisible flux of reality. The
free act is wholly temporal and emerges as the matured outcome of a
blooming process. The indivisibility of the flow of consciousness leads to the
appearance of freedom. Self-determination is a temporal process. An act of
freedom builds itself in time and gains self-determination as it develops,
individuates and presents itself as real. In Time and Free Will (Essai sur les
données immédiates de la conscience), Bergson writes: “Freedom is the relation
of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable,
just because we are free. For we can analyse a thing, but not a process; we
can break up extensity, but not duration.”17 The free act cannot be foreseen
and its conditions are not given in advance; otherwise we would have a
necessarily determined act. In the same way, the Whiteheadian concrescence,
232 Maria Teresa Teixeira

which is self-determining, cannot be broken into parts because it is whole and


indivisible.
Our ability for self-determination shows how important free will can be in
the causation of different mental states. In other words, it seems that free will
can produce states of consciousness that can cause states of the brain to
develop. This is easily verifiable when we raise our arm, or stand up and walk.
We do so because we want to. But this kind of decision is close to
automatism. It is not authentic freedom, in the Bergsonian sense. “Freewill is
the very nature of our lives as individual wholes, the expression of the
individuality of life.”18 It bears the mark of our whole personality. To illustrate
Bergson’s free act and how free will influences consciousness, we can turn to
the more intricate example of people who undergo altered states of
consciousness, such as near-death experiences; these people frequently report
that they have turned back, at a certain point of their experiences, because
they freely decided not to leave their loved ones behind. Recent research has
established a connection between these experiences and a rise in the level of
carbon dioxide in cardiac arrest survivors. But the very act of will seems to
invert the near-death experience, and with it the accompanying mental and
physical phenomena. Thus free will seems to relate to the emergence of novel
states of consciousness, and also to novel states of the brain and body.
The flow of consciousness is heterogeneous, and the self-determined act of
freedom is an individuation in the Whiteheadian sense. This does not mean
that the free act is severed from the on-flow of reality, but simply that it
attains completion and as such can be identified and distinguished from other
states of consciousness of the same kind. (The same can be said of neural
dynamism; the brain adapts and moulds new models in the architecture of
the brain that are distinguishable from other states, but those new models
cannot be separated and isolated from the dynamics of the brain. Once again,
these are temporal processes generating duration.)
Temporal processes while they unfold “are not in physical time”; Bergson
would say they are not in geometrical space. Only after the conclusion of the
process can we trace back their trajectory; this is a retrospective and artificial
procedure because it is nothing but the result of our intellectualisation of a
temporal and lived development.
Vladimir Jankélévitch, a French process philosopher, speaking of the
Bergsonian free act says that deliberation does not precede decision; on the
contrary, it presents itself only after free decision has been taken and as a
surreptitious legitimization of any free decision-making. He further speaks of
a “retroactive illusion” (illusion de rétroactivité) that arises in the process of
decision-making; it conveys the illusion of rational self-determination. Actually
it is nothing but self-deceit; the free act is not considered from a rational point
of view before decision is taken. The free act is temporal and emerges from
The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology 233

an indivisible act of full maturation that presents itself in its very spontaneity.
Rationalisation comes after the emergence of the free act. Freedom and time
are the same; we are immersed in our freedom because freedom is
becoming. The free act is contemporaneous to experience; this is why
deliberation comes after decision-making. The subsequent rationalisation
through a late deliberation leads to a delayed, retrospective life that also
delays real life. Becoming and freedom are both whole and indivisible and as
such lay the foundations of freedom.19
The indivisibility of becoming is thus of great importance to a process view
of mental phenomena. In Creative Mind Bergson writes about change and
movement: “There are changes, but there are underneath the change no
things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements,
but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not
imply a mobile.”20 This passage reflects the indivisibility of becoming i.e. the
persistence of the past in the present and the continuous unfolding of reality.
According to Whitehead, it is “how an actual entity becomes (that) constitutes
what that actual entity is; […] Its being is constituted by its ‘becoming.’”21
Whitehead’s notion of change, however, does not match Bergson’s. For
Whitehead, change is the transformation of something into something else
which is differentiated from the initial something, whereas becoming is the
unfolding of something that was there from the very beginning. Whitehead
writes: “Actual entities perish but do not change; they are what they are.”22
Becoming presupposes that actual entities that become are whole and
indivisible: the process of becoming unfolds as one and allows for the course
of coming into being. Where Bergson speaks of a philosophy of change and
movement, Whitehead speaks of a philosophy of becoming; but they are
actually speaking of the same thing. In so doing Bergson and Whitehead both
reject the philosophy of substance and ipso facto dualism and materialism.
Whitehead, referring to the vibratory nature of matter, could be said to
pick up from Bergson in The Creative Mind, when he writes in Science and the
Modern World: “[…] when we penetrate to these final entities, this startling
discontinuity of spatial existence discloses itself. […] With this hypothesis we
have to ask, what are the ingredients which form the vibratory organism. We
have already got rid of the matter with its appearance of undifferentiated
endurance. Apart from metaphysical compulsion, there is no reason to
provide another more subtle stuff to take the place of the matter which has
just been explained away. The field is now open for the introduction of some
new doctrine of organism which may take the place of materialism […]. It
must be remembered that the physicists’ energy is obviously an abstraction.
The concrete fact, which is the organism, must be a complete expression of
the character of a real occurrence. Such a displacement of scientific
234 Maria Teresa Teixeira

materialism, if it ever takes place, cannot fail to have important consequences


in every field of thought.”23
The rejection of materialism is also essential to the examination of the
relation between the mental and the physical. According to Whitehead
subjectivity is inherent in all actual entities: “the subject emerges from the
world” and “the object is a mere potentiality for being a component in
feeling.”24 It is not the thinker who creates the thought; it is the thought that is
constitutive of the thinker.25 Occurrences are at the base of reality and they
emerge from the world that has been formed. In the same way, mental
activity creates its bearer. The thought and the thinker are inextricable. The
emergent organism is a superject, not a subject. It comprehends all the
antecedent events and synthesises them. “The creative process is rhythmic”26
alternating the many with the one. This creative, primordial subjectivity
founds the mental and the physical. It excludes materialism because reality is
occurrence; it excludes dualism because rhythm validates a kind of monistic
diversity of reality. And yet the subjectivity of every actual entity is ever
present in its own becoming; it makes it possible for every actual occasion to
come into being. The soft transition from the physical to the mental
emphasises the wholeness and indivisibility of becoming.
We can find a similar doctrine in Bergson’s philosophy: the indivisibility of
reality and its continuous development validate Bergson’s thesis of a subtle
and quiet transition from matter into mind, at the end of Matter and Memory.
For Bergson all kinds of dualism be they materialism or idealism reflect a
philosophy of substance. This leads to a duality of substances, which are
considered to be of the same kind, and also parallel manifestations of the
original principle. These substances are also pre-determined for they are
characterized in advance. Their reciprocal influence is thus denied; and
freedom is rejected as an illusion.27
Bergson holds “that the cerebral states which accompany perception are
neither its cause nor its duplicate,”28 and also that there is no accumulation of
memories in the brain. Pure memory has not a material character and is not
impressed in the brain. Nowadays, some facts still seem to corroborate
Bergson’s position. In retrograde amnesia, for example, no cerebral lesion is
observed and the spontaneous recovery of memories cannot be accounted for
in the light of today’s neuroscience. The same can be said about selective and
verbal amnesias. Bergson holds that it is not memory that is affected but only
the faculty of remembering.29 A brain state is not a mental state; in the same
way the brain is an organ, but not the faculty of remembering.
The Bergsonian relation between matter and memory is based on “the
threefold opposition of the inextended and the extended, quality and
quantity, freedom and necessity.”30 The first opposition relates to the
indivisibility of becoming and the way we currently conceive space and the
The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology 235

objects located in it. We normally oppose perception to matter. According to


Bergson this is an artificial procedure. Our way of understanding reality
through decomposition and recomposition of its parts excludes becoming and
immediate intuitions. What is given to our perception is not a bunch of
separate, inextensive sensations. “That which is given, that which is real, is
something intermediate between divided extension and pure inextension. It is
what we have termed the extensive. Extensity is the most salient quality of
perception.”31 This opposition between the infinitely divisible and the purely
inextensive sheds some light on the nature of sensation. Sensation is not fully
inextensive neither is it isolated from the flow of reality; it can thus bridge the
gap between matter and mind.
Another relevant opposition is that between quality and quantity. The
heterogeneous character of reality brushes aside the apparent homogeneity of
space and movement. Indivisibility of reality reveals itself again of great
importance. Movement does not require a mobile. It is not made up of a
collection of immobile points of reference, like the line drawn on a piece of
paper representing the trajectory of a mobile. We can come nearer to
homogeneity when we approach matter, or we can draw near heterogeneity
as we turn to memory. In the real world there are differences in rhythm of
duration, i.e. different entities have different internal tensions. We can
therefore overcome the opposition between quality and quantity. “Extension
and tension admit of degrees, multiple but always determined.”32 Multiple
degrees of extension and tension thus bridge the gap between matter and
mind.
Finally, the opposition between freedom and necessity again emphasises
duration. Different rhythms of duration are the foundations of nature. There is
no absolute necessity, although we can find an almost complete determinism
in the laws of matter. On the other hand, consciousness retains the past and
integrates it in the present; it also contracts, through memory, the present
experience. This includes what we may call the exterior moments of matter,
as is illustrated in the example given by Bergson of a consciousness capable
of contracting, in one second, trillions of vibrations found in red light.33
Consciousness has thus deep roots in matter, and freedom in necessity. This
is another way of bridging the gap between matter and mind.
We can now return to Whitehead’s philosophy and examine his notion of
subjectivity in the light of Bergson’s solution to the mind-body problem.
Whitehead speaks of subjectivity and self-determination, whereas Bergson
mentions consciousness and freedom, but there is a strong parallelism
between these terms. For both philosophers, the mental and the physical are
present in every entity, and manifest in various degrees of tension. The
spectrum of variation goes from an almost inflexible determinism to a
spontaneous and matured free act. There is a reciprocal influence, so that
236 Maria Teresa Teixeira

causation may work both ways, from the physical to the mental and from the
mental to the physical. Becoming is whole and indivisible; and transition is
subtle and continuous. Bergson’s heterogeneity and Whitehead’s atomism
permit differentiation and self-determination but retain the wholeness and
indivisibility of reality that convey coherence and consistency to all its facets,
be they of a physical or mental character.
To sum up: process philosophy is characterised by the discovery of the
wholeness and indivisibility of becoming. Consciousness can thus be
considered in its entirety. This is a new insight, most relevant to psychology,
psychiatry and philosophy of mind.

Bibliography
Bergson, Henri, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Quadrige,
Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1997.
Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will, Elibron Classics, London, 2005.
Bergson, Henri, Matière et mémoire, Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de
France, Paris, 1997.
Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, Forgotten Books, Classic Reprint Series.
Bergson, Henri, La pensée et le mouvant, Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de
France, Paris, 1998.
Bergson, Henri, The Creative Mind, Dover Publications, New York, 2007.
Bergson, Henri, Durée et simultanéité, Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de
France, Paris, 1998.
Bergson, Henri, Œuvres, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2001.
Brown, Jason, Time, Will and Mental Process, Plenum Press, New York, 2010.
Carr, H. Wildon, Henri Bergson The Philosophy of Change, Forgotten Books,
Classic Reprint Series, 2012.
Gallois, Philippe, et Gérard Forzy, Bergson et les neurosciences, Les
empêcheurs de penser en rond, Le Plessis Robinson, 1997.
Jaffard, E., B. Claverie, B. Andrieu, Cerveau et mémoires, éditions Osiris, 1998.
Kelly, Edward F., Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Allan Gauld, Michael
Grosso & Bruce Greyson, Irreducible Mind, Toward a Psychology for
the 21st Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Lanham, 2010.
Klemenc-Ketis, Zalika, et all, “The effect of carbon dioxide on near-death
experiences in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors: a
prospective observational study,” Critical Care,
http://ccforum.com/content/14/2/R56
Minkowski, Eugène, Le temps vécu, Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de
France, Paris, 1995.
Minkowski, Eugène, La schizophrénie, Petit Bibliothèque Payot, Paris, 2002.
Minkowski, Eugène, Traité de psychopathologie, Les empêcheurs de penser en
rond, Le Plessis Robinson, 1999.
Minkowski, Eugène, Au-delà du rationalisme morbide, L’Harmattan, Paris,
1997.
The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology 237

Teixeira, Maria Teresa, Consciência e Acção, Bergson e as neurociências, Centro


de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, 2012.
Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World, The Free Press, New
York, 1967.
Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, The Free Press, New York,
1985.

Notes

1
Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, p. 6 [9].
2
Ibid.
3
Le temps vécu, p. 17-19.
4
Ibid. p. 58.
5
Durée et simultanéité, p. 42-45.
6
La Schizophrénie, p. 124.
7
One of Minkowski’s books is entitled Au-Delà Du Rationalisme Morbide.
8
The Creative Mind, p. 135. « Nous appelons ici intuition la sympathie par
laquelle on se transporte à l’intérieur d’un objet pour coïncider avec ce
qu’il a d’unique et par conséquent d’inexprimable. Au contraire, l’analyse
est l’opération qui ramène l’objet à des éléments déjà connus, c’est à dire
communs à cet objet et à d’autres. » La pensée et le mouvant, p. 181/1395.
9
Cf. Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience).
10
Au-delà du rationalisme morbide, p. 95-97.
11
Le temps vécu, p. 209-214.
12
Process and Reality, p. 320 [487].
13
Process and Reality, p. 283 [434].
14
Ibid. p. 211 [322].
15
Le temps vécu, p. 25.
16
The Creative Mind, p. 124. « C’est justement cette continuité indivisible de
changement qui constitue la durée vraie. […] la durée réel est ce que l’on a
toujours appelé le temps, mais le temps perçue comme indivisible. » La
pensée et le mouvant, p. 166/1384.
17
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, p. 219. « On appelle liberté
le rapport du moi concret à l’acte qu’il accomplit. Ce rapport est
indéfinissable, précisément parce que nous sommes libres. On analyse, en
effet, une chose, mais non pas un progrès ; on décompose de l’étendue,
mais non pas de la durée. » (Essai sur les données immédiates de la
conscience, p. 165/143-144)
238 Maria Teresa Teixeira

18
H. Wildon Carr, Henri Bergson The Philosophy of Change, p. 62.
19
Henri Bergson, p. 28-79.
20
P. 122. « Il y a des changements, mais il n’y a pas, sous le changement, de
choses qui changent : le changement n’a pas besoin d’un support. Il y a
des mouvements, mais il n’y a pas d’objet inerte, invariable, qui se meuve
: le mouvement n’implique pas un mobile. » La pensée et le mouvant, p.
163/1381-1382.
21
Process and Reality, p. 23 [34-35].
22
Ibid., p. 35 [52].
23
P. 35-36.
24
Process and Reality, p. 88 [136].
25
Ibid., p. 151 [228].
26
Ibid., p. 151 [229].
27
Matière et mémoire, p. 255/353; Matter and Memory, p. 302.
28
« Que les états cérébraux qui accompagnent la perception n’en soient ni la
cause ni le duplicat […]. » Matière et mémoire. p. 265/363. Matter and
Memory p. 313.
29
Ibid. p. 266/364. Ibid. p. 315.
30
Ibid. p. 275/373-374. Ibid. p. 325.
31
« Ce qui est donnée, ce qui est réel, c’est quelque chose d’intermédiaire
entre l’étendue divisée et l’inétendue pur ; c’est ce que nous avons appelé
l’extensif. L’extension est la qualité la plus apparente de la perception. »
Matière et mémoire, p. 276/374; Matter and Memory, p. 326.
32
« Extension et tension admettent des degrés multiples, mais toujours
déterminés. » Matière et mémoire, p. 278/376 ; Matter and Memory, p. 330.
33
Ibid. p. 230-231/340-341; Ibid. 272-273.
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection
Xavier Verley1

Abstract
Since Descartes, mental life has found its source in consciousness. In his
Meditations, he begins by purifying the soul of everything that came from the
senses, from tradition, and from memory. Thus reduced to a point related
only to the thinking subject, the mind is disclosed as a consciousness that
judges, senses, wills, and desires. Reduced to a pure act of the mind,
consciousness is a relation of itself to itself. One might thus suppose that what
is at issue here is a return to a deeper foundation within oneself [en soi], and
solipsism would thus appear as a return to the primordial form of the subject.

0. Introduction
The Cartesian approach illustrates the procedure of reversal that implies the
passage from exteriority to interiority, from the world to the “me” [le moi]
and the self [le soi].1 But the beginning of the Meditations reveals that for
Descartes hyperbolic doubt poses the question not only of the relation to the
senses, but also of the relation to good sense. By doubting too much what the
senses teach us, one ends by losing one’s sense and becoming literally
senseless (insane):
But even though the senses deceive us sometimes
concerning things scarcely perceptible or very distant, perhaps
many others are met with about which one cannot reasonably
doubt, although we know them by means of the senses: for
example, that I am here, seated near the fire, dressed in a
dressing gown, having this paper between my hands, and other
things of this nature. And how is it that I could deny that these
hands and this body right here are mine? Unless perhaps I
compare myself to those who are insane, of whom the brain is
so far disturbed and clouded by the black vapors of bile that they
assure themselves constantly that they are kings when they are
very poor, that they have robes of gold and crimson when they
are naked, or imagine themselves to be ceramic or to have a
head of glass.2
Since the subject and consciousness rise up from doubt, doubt ends by
reducing the “me” [le moi] to a point, to knowing the “I” [le “je”], which is

1
Université de Toulouse le Mirail.
240 Xavier Verley

different from the “me” [le moi] and the self [le soi]. Identifying itself with the
consciousness it has of itself, the subject reduces itself to the “I” [le “je”]
grasped in the instant, and it ends by losing any relation to its memory, which
links it to its past and to its habits. It exists only in the present reflection of
the “me” [le moi], isolated from the world, from others. In such a case, its
solipsistic and narcissistic existence becomes incapable of integrating
memory and self-consciousness, and it is able to advance in the creation of
itself only by dint of the freedom which the understanding must concede to
the will insofar as the infinite scope of willing exceeds the limited scope of the
understanding.3 Without this relation to itself, to others, and to God,
consciousness risks disappearing in an alienated existence.
Whitehead inverts this perspective completely. For he admits that it is
futile to look for the clear and distinct in connection with the self-
consciousness of the one who is engaged in scrutinizing experience. If
consciousness is a light, it is shrouded in darkness. How to escape the
impasse of solipsism that threatens us with madness? How to regain in
perception and in memory a relation to oneself [a soi] that would not be a
simple consciousness of oneself in the other. We would like to show that
consciousness can regain its relation to itself only by way of memory and can
achieve self-consciousness only by recollection.

1. Consciousness and the power of judgment


Whitehead mentions Descartes often, sometimes to underscore the difference
that separates them in their understanding of matter or the nature of the
mind, sometimes to make him a sort of precursor to the philosophy of
organism. In Science and the Modern World he reminds us how modern
philosophy and theology are imbued with subjectivism. While the Catholic
Church taught what believers were required to think about the nature of God
and the mysteries (the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Redemption), the
Reformation turned to the existence of the individual in order to elucidate its
relation to justification and faith, thus restoring a meaning to the individual
experience of believers:
At the Reformation, the Church was torn asunder by
dissension as to the individual experiences of believers in respect
to justification. The individual subject of experience had been
substituted for the total drama of all reality. Luther asked, ‘How
am I justified?’; modern philosophers have asked, ‘How do I
have knowledge?’ The emphasis lies upon the subject of
experience. (SMW 140)
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 241

But before highlighting the “subject of experience,” the return to the


individual had paved the way for the advent and supremacy of consciousness
in the life of the mind.
Whitehead thinks that Descartes played a primary role in the new
orientation assumed by modern philosophy. The author of the Discourse on
Method identifies the subject of experience with the subject that speaks of its
intellectual life in the first person. Subjectivity comes to light in the “I” [le
“je”], the concentrated locus of past and present life. But Whitehead interprets
the Cartesian cogito not as an act tied to pure consciousness, but as an act of
experience: “For each time he pronounces ‘I am, I exist,’ the actual occasion,
which is the ego, is different; and the ‘he’ which is common to the two egos is
an eternal object or, alternatively, the nexus of successive occasions.”4 Thus,
Whitehead conceives the subject that says “I” [“je”] not as the subject of a
thinking substance, but as an index that changes with time. The possibility of
an “I” [“je”] that transcends what changes in experience depends on an
eternal object—not on the universal subject, but on the “it,” a subject that is
anonymous and as impersonal as the green perceived when I look at the
leaves of a tree.
The identification of the subject with the “I” [le “je”] that speaks of its
spiritual search reveals that the “I” [le “je”] is no longer the simple
individuality or personality of Descartes, but the most intimate source where
the union of thought and being is realized, and because of this transcendence
in relation to his individuality, the “I” [le “je”] that speaks is united to that self-
consciousness which every human being can retrieve from within.
The soul that Descartes discovers is no longer the one that is gripped in the
drama of the universe, but the one which, anxious about its immortality and
its justification, finds itself gripped in the interior drama of its responsibility in
the face of falsehood and error.
Accompanying the discovery of the identity of the “I” [le “je”] and the
universality of consciousness is that omnipotence attested by the will, that is,
by the freedom dwelling in the very heart of all the soul’s activities. Thus, the
consciousness of wanting or feeling imply not only the capacity of judgment,
but also the intervention of the will, which always has the power of approving
or disapproving what consciousness envisions. It is in this relationship that
spiritual freedom is constituted.
From this involution of interiority there results the opposition between the
soul and the body, mind and matter, but also the separation of metaphysics
and science. If philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz did not follow
Descartes on this subjectivist path, others, such as Hume, Locke, and Kant
continued to be imbued with the belief that the reality of the mind comes
from its self-consciousness at the moment of thought. The power of judgment
proper to the mind implies that the ego which thinks is the subject and that
242 Xavier Verley

the consciousness which accompanies thought depends on a predicate


inwardly attached to the subject so that one can say that to think is to judge.
Whitehead disputes that perception and sensible impressions of which the
mind can be conscious depend on the power of judgment alone. At issue is a
prejudice based on the dualism of the universal (the subject that thinks) and
the particular (the sensible impressions as attributes of the soul). Thus, the
universality of the subject that says “I” [“je”] rests on a logico-metaphysical
prejudice according to which every judgment assumes a subject and a
predicate.
Subjectivism, understood as a theory of mind identified with subjective
consciousness, implies the substantial character of the subject and of its
consciousness.5 Even if, like Kant, one rejects the substantiality of the “I
think” in order to retain only the form, prefixed to every judgment, the
consciousness of oneself at the moment of judgment is indispensable for
comprehending how certitude accompanies consciousness and how there can
be truth. Thinking consciousness remains the universal form inherent in all
consciousness.

2. Subject and Primary Substance


Descartes’ idea of thinking substance and extended substance proceeds from
prejudices that are unacknowledged but which, according to Whitehead, have
continued to influence subsequent ideas. Convinced that the act of thought
can be only an act of experience, Whitehead believes that the analysis of this
experience yields premises that explain why consciousness can be interpreted
as a substance or a form.
Not only does Descartes adopt the dyad substance-quality as the
foundation of his ontology, but he also takes up the Aristotelian theory
according to which primary substance is always a subject and never a
predicate. Descartes is thus able to make of the subject of experience a
primary substance. Whitehead recognizes the importance of subjectivity in
the synthesis of experience, but he shows that from Descartes to Kant the
“subjectivist principle” is based entirely on what he calls the “sensationist
principle.” According to the first principle, the act of experience implies the
relation of a particular, the Ego of Descartes, to a universal, the idea that he
has of a thing. Perception of things and others happens by a sort of inspection
(inspectio) that is not yet an intuition (intuitio). The power of judgment, which
connects the universal to the particular—just as much as the consciousness
that accompanies it—is indispensable for compensating for the gaps and the
passivity of the eyes’ vision. The second principle, the sensationist principle,
interprets the act of perception as a simple receptivity to the given, in order to
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 243

exclude more effectively the subjective forms of apprehension, such as


emotion, attraction, aversion, so that the illusion of a pure sensation is
created.
In a general way the principle of subjectivity appeals to an ontology of
substance that implies, first, the substance-quality dyad in the analysis of
experience, then the theory of primary substance, which is always subject
and never attribute, and, finally, the theory according to which the subject
that experiences is always a primary substance. Whitehead never ceases to
remind us that the analysis of experience that begins with the dyads
“universal-particular” and “substance-quality” results from a prejudice
because experience (in the sense that he gives to this term) implies, to
paraphrase Aristotle, an act common to what is sensing and what is sensed.
Whitehead’s critique of the logical analysis of experience proceeds from
this principle: the community of the sensing and the sensed in the act of
experience. If one takes this principle seriously, then it is necessary to
renounce the identification of substance and subject and to conclude, quite
contrary to the doctrine of Aristotle, that even though a substance is not
present in a subject, nevertheless, an actual entity is truly present in the heart
of other actual entities. It is appropriate then for Whitehead to substitute for
the metaphysical principle that starts by opposing substance to accident and
then shows the necessity of including the multiplicity of accidents in the unity
of a substance a principle of relativity that shows how an entity can be
present in another entity.
Whitehead criticizes Descartes, Locke, and Hume, but accords them a
place in the philosophy of organism. Of Locke, he says:
The philosophy of organism in its appeal to the facts can
thus support itself by an appeal to the insight of John Locke, who
in British philosophy is the analogue to Plato, in the epoch of his
life, in personal endowments, in width of experience, and in
dispassionate statement of conflicting intuitions. (PR 60)
If the author of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding had been able
to free himself from the subject-predicate thought scheme, which entails the
adoption of certain metaphysical categories, he would not have retained the
opposition perception-understanding.
Whitehead recognizes in Locke the merit of having carried out an analysis
pertinent to the type of experience had by an actual entity: the complete
experience of such an entity shows that there isn’t anything more in
understanding than in perception, which obviates the necessity of an
intervention by the will in order to apprehend from the side of understanding
what is missing from the grasp of perception.
Consequently, each entity “possesses its own measure of absolute self-
realization,” and Whitehead proposes the term “prehension” to signify both
244 Xavier Verley

the process of each thing’s self-realization in experience and at the same time
the synthetic activity by which other things intervene in the concrescence of
that experience. In order to account for the fact that the relation of things in
experience is not static, but dynamic, Whitehead speaks of transaction:
The ‘prehension’ of one actual entity by another actual
entity is the complete transaction, analysable into the
objectification of the former entity as one of the data for the
latter, and into the fully clothed feeling whereby the datum is
absorbed into the subjective satisfaction—‘clothed’ with the
various elements of its ‘subjective form.’ (PR 52)
If experience implies a synthesis, this synthesis can only come from the
act of a subject that unifies the multiplicity of impressions that would be the
predicates: the synthesis is more than a union, it is a transaction.
Hume inherits the logico-metaphysical prejudice founded on the dualism
of the subject-predicate opposition, which entails the soul-body dualism. In
maintaining that mind is a subject and that its contents are its predicates, he
has accentuated the subjectivist conception of the mind by dividing the
totality of the mind’s perceptions into impressions and ideas:
The perceptions, for Hume, are what the mind knows about
itself; and tacitly the knowable facts are always treated as
qualities of a subject—the subject being the mind. His final
criticism of the notion of the ‘mind’ does not alter the plain fact
that the whole of the previous discussion has included this
presupposition. Hume’s final criticism only exposes the
metaphysical superficiality of his preceding exposition. (PR138)
The impressions of sensations are the predicates of the soul. In other
words, the mind is only a substance passively receiving the impressions that
will become “phenomena” in Kant.
Such a doctrine implies that, similar to substance, only the subject can
integrate its accidents. And as the subject is a substance only if it is present to
itself, subjectivity ends by identifying itself with the fact of being itself [soi-
meme] at the present instant. Whitehead often evokes the formula of
Santayana on the “solipsism of the present moment” which makes the
impressions of memory an attribute of subjectivity:
Even memory goes: for a memory-impression is not an
impression of memory. It is only another immediate private
impression. (S 33)
In order to comprehend the relation of the universal to the particular, Kant
gives to the subject and to the consciousness present in every judgment a
function of synthesis that is brought about with representation as its starting
point.
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 245

3. Repetition and Memory according to Hume


From the notion of substance as from that of modality, Hume retains the idea
of collections of simple ideas, united by the imagination, and to which one
attributes a specific name. Hume maintains that the simple ideas are copies of
simple impressions, but he has to admit that one can perceive the nuances of
color that are missing on a graduated scale. This applies also to the sensations
of sound, to odors, and to all the registers of sensations. Can these nuances
be derived from the simple power of imagining? Hume believes in the
freedom of the imagination, but Whitehead remarks that “[i]magination is
never very free.”6
When the issue is to understand how simple ideas get united in a complex
idea, Hume appeals to customary conjunction. Ideas can copy impressions
only if the latter are repeated. But in the relation of cause to effect repetition
does not allow us to understand how one passes from the multiplicity of the
impressions to the idea of necessary connection among them. Experience
reduced to sensible impressions and to images of memory allows nothing but
a multitude to come before consciousness. The repetition of impressions and
ideas does not suffice to produce the unity of a new idea. In other words,
Hume seems to confuse memory and imagination just as if he conceived a
progression going from impressions to memories and to ideas.
Whitehead denies the Humean analysis in the name of facts:
This doctrine is very unplausible; and, to speak bluntly, is in
contradiction to plain fact. But, even worse, it omits the vital
character of memory, namely, that it is memory. In fact the
whole notion of repetition is lost in the ‘force and vivacity’
doctrine. What Hume does explain is that with a number of
different perceptions immediately concurrent, he sorts them out
into three different classes according to force and vivacity. But
the repetition character, which he ascribes to simple ideas, and
which is the whole point of memory, finds no place in his
explanation. Nor can it do so, without an entire recasting of his
fundamental philosophic notions. (PR135)
Thus, Hume, who has divided the life of the mind into impressions and
ideas, brings in the notion of repetition, which does not correspond to any
impression. If repetition comes from memory, it can only be considered as
bound to a particular impression. Whitehead faults the Humean analysis for
being too narrow a conception of experience, reducing it to a mass of
impressions and in the end making memory useless and inactive. In other
words, repetition is possible only because it is fundamentally associated with
memory. Had Hume set out from the experience of feeling, he would not
have been able to effect this division and he would not have been able to
isolate the impressions as one isolates the grains in a pile of sand. The
246 Xavier Verley

experience of feeling reveals the primordial character of memory as


repetition:
The first point to notice is that Hume’s philosophy is
pervaded by the notion of ‘repetition,’ and that memory is a
particular example of this character of experience, that in some
sense there is entwined in its fundamental nature the fact that it
is repeating something. Tear ‘repetition’ out of ‘experience,’ and
there is nothing left. On the other hand, ‘immediacy,’ or ‘first-
handedness,’ is another element in experience. Feeling
overwhelms repetition; and there remains the immediate, first-
handed fact, which is the actual world in an immediate complex
unity of feeling. (PR 135)
Whitehead speaks of persistence in change rather than of repetition. This
Humean doctrine, which pulverizes becoming into instants and the
experience of the mind into a scattering of impressions and ideas proceeds
from the Cartesian precept that enjoins us to begin with the simple in order to
obtain subsequently what is complex. But this precept also assumes that what
is given in experience presents itself to us as individual, independent entities,
which removes any possibility of becoming and repetition: “These various
aspects can be summed up in the statement that experience involves a
becoming, that becoming means that something becomes, and that what
becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy.”7 In order to
understand how something novel appears, it is important to understand that
repetition is closely connected with becoming and that it exists in the very act
of becoming. Thus, Whitehead can say that repetition is fundamental in the
philosophy of organism.
The Humean doctrine, which divides the givens of the mind into
impressions and ideas, is only an extension of the idea of a matter divisible
into points that one can localize, and this theory is only another expression
for what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of simple location.” This prejudice
concerning material things extends also to the experience we have of them.
Humean impressions, elements of the subject analogous to the points and
instants of extension, fragment and deform perceptual experience and the
knowledge we can have of it. Against Hume, Kant, and Descartes, Whitehead
holds that we have a direct intuition of inheritance and memory—but these
philosophers do not succeed at integrating these data in their description of
experience.
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 247

4. The Reformed Subjectivitst Principle and Its Impact on the


Concept of Consciousness
Whitehead says occasionally that a philosophy concerned with preserving the
relations between the concrete and the abstract in experience cannot bypass
subjectivity. If he criticizes the principle of subjectivity, it is because it is
associated with an erroneous logic founded on the substance-attribute dyad
and with a metaphysics that identifies logical subject and primary substance.
But the universal-particular dyad is of scarcely greater value for describing
experience. If the universal serves to qualify particulars, particulars cannot
serve to describe other particulars. Like primary substances, particulars do not
enter into the composition of other particulars:
An actual entity cannot be described, even inadequately, by
universals; because other actual entities do enter into the
description of any one actual entity. Thus every so-called
‘universal’ is particular in the sense of being just what it is,
diverse from everything else; and every so-called ‘particular’ is
universal in the sense of entering into the constitution of other
actual entities. (PR 48)
From this critique of the universal-particular dyad there results for the
philosophy of organism the necessity of reforming the principle of
subjectivity, which rigidifies the description of experience and prohibits the
perceiving subject from being in harmony with the rest of the universe. If one
adopts the principle according to which it belongs to the nature of a being to
be a potential for every becoming, one rejects the doctrine of primary
substance, which makes an entity into a being in itself and for itself. One
ought thus to admit that an actual entity can be present in the heart of other
actual entities.
Such a principle, called the principle of relativity, combined with the
ontological principle—which says that everything is positively situated
somewhere in actu, and everywhere in potency—, permits the
reinterpretation of the principle of subjectivity. At the heart of the subject,
delivered from the guardianship of substance, what is revealed is not the
identity of thought and being, but the identity of being and becoming, which
erupts from the deepest stratum of experience:
The way in which one actual entity is qualified by other
actual entities is the ‘experience’ of the actual world enjoyed by
that actual entity, as subject. The subjectivist principle is that the
whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of
the experiences of subjects. Process is the becoming of
experience. It follows that the philosophy of organism entirely
accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy. (PR 166)
248 Xavier Verley

Whitehead proposes a recasting of the principle of subjectivity in order to


render it more in conformity with the description of what is given in
experience: “Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated:
that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing,
bare nothingness.”8 The reform of the principle of subjectivity entails in turn a
reevaluation of the role of consciousness in experience. For Descartes and
Kant, the subjectivity inherent in experience would be incomplete without
consciousness. Whether it be inspectio or intuitio, perception implies
consciousness and the power of judgment; also, the foundation of all
synthesis, that of pure intuition as well as that of the understanding which
judges, is the “I think” that accompanies not just judgment, but all
representations. Instead of making consciousness a center of experience,
Whitehead sees in it only a particular element in the midst of experience:
The principle that I am adopting is that consciousness
presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness. It is
a special element in the subjective forms of some feelings. Thus
an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of
its experience. Its experience is its complete formal constitution,
including its consciousness, if any. (PR 53)
For Whitehead, William James represents a decisive step in the evolution
of the critique of consciousness in that he considers consciousness as a
function of knowledge and not as a substance. In this reassessment of
consciousness, the role of sciences such as medicine and physiology were
decisive. James maintains a monistic doctrine intended to resolve dualisms—
those of subject and object, but equally those of the image and the thing. He
praises Berkeley for having reminded us that our sensations are not some
interior doubles of the things, but the things themselves. The concern is to
show that the reality of the thing is in its image:
I conclude then that—although there is a practical dualism,
since images are distinguished from objects, take their place,
and lead us to them—there is no need to attribute to them a
difference in essential nature. Thought and actuality are made of
one and the same stuff, which is the stuff of experience in
general.9
Whitehead, too, shares this conception of experience, which no longer
permits opposing the knowing subject to the object known, the interiority of
consciousness to the exteriority of the object. But now is the appropriate time
to evaluate the function of consciousness in experience.
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 249

5. Consciousness as the Power of Contrast


If for Descartes the cogito is dedicated to consciousness as the source that
illuminates experience and makes it possible, the act of consciousness is an
act of synthesis that springs from pure thought. Whitehead envisions
consciousness only as a stage in a process of integration or again as an
attribute of certain perceptions:
Descartes’ ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ is wrongly translated, ‘I think,
therefore I am.’ It is never bare thought or bare existence that
we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions,
enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives,
decisions—all of them subjective reactions to the environment as
active in my nature. My unity—which is Descartes’ ‘I am’—is my
process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent
pattern of feelings. (MT 166)
Thus, the unity of what one calls the “me” [le moi], does indeed spring
from a synthesis, but one that is less a synthesis of consciousness than a
synthesis of becoming or of a causal activity that comes from the experience
of the body and produces the “me” [le moi]. Perception no longer depends on
judgment, but on an activity that arises in the experience of things without
my knowing whether it is the things that act on me [moi] or I [moi] who acts
or reacts upon things.
If one set out from the proposition “This stone is gray,” the analysis of this
proposition in the context of the principle of subjectivity shows that
perception consists of grasping a universal quality at the moment when the
quality is in the process of determining a particular substance:
Now if we scan ‘my perception of this stone as grey’ in
order to find a universal, the only available candidate is
‘greyness.’ Accordingly for Hume, ‘greyness,’ functioning as a
sensation qualifying the mind, is a fundamental type of fact for
metaphysical generalization. (PR 159)
According to Whitehead, Hume limits himself to deducing consciousness
from the perception of the gray stone whereas in fact the consciousness
appears negligible. To say that it is negligible is not to deny it, but to reduce it
to the role of a resultant:
Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a
small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral
region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim
apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no
measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this
character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the
crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its
necessary base. (PR 267)
250 Xavier Verley

Elsewhere Whitehead says that consciousness appears only after


syntheses and integrations are formed. In other words, consciousness cannot
intervene in the physical composition of experience:
Blind physical purposes reign. It is now obvious that blind
prehensions, physical and mental, are the ultimate bricks of the
physical universe. They are bound together within each actuality
by the subjective unity of aim which governs their allied genesis
and their final concrescence. (PR 308)
Conscious perception is characterized by negation. In perceiving this stone
as gray, the gray, an eternal object, makes an incursion into my experience
and compels me to decide between gray and non-gray. The eternal objects
constitute potentialities for the actual entities given in experience. Potentiality
makes up part of what is given; and being that is given insofar as it is
potential implies being limited, possibly denied, in order to be capable of
being sensed in experience: “‘Potentiality’ is the correlative of ‘givenness.’
The meaning of ‘givenness’ is that what is ‘given’ might not have been
‘given;’ and that what is not ‘given’ might have been ‘given’.”10 In the
proposition affirming the gray character of the stone, the gray is detached as
something novel in experience, at the same time that it is in conformity with
what is given; thus its character is accentuated. An alternative discloses itself
in experience and it makes the given appear as being capable of not being
given in such a way; consequently the given appears as something novel that
cannot be explained simply as the product of the past. Consciousness belongs
to the subject whenever it perceives a “contrast between the eternal objects
designated by the words ‘any’ and ‘just that.’ Conscious perception is,
therefore, the most primitive form of judgment.”11 It remains to be
considered why certain eternal objects are prehended positively and other
negatively, or again why certain ones are felt and other not.
Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception
of ‘the stone as grey,’ such feeling is in barest germ; in the
perception of ‘the stone as not grey,’ such feeling is in full
development. Thus the negative perception is the triumph of
consciousness. It finally rises to the peak of free imagination, in
which the conceptual novelties search through a universe in
which they are not datively exemplified. (PR 161)
Thus, consciousness illuminates or highlights only the higher phases in the
genesis of experience and leaves in the shadows what is more primitive and
accessible only to memory. If consciousness is light, illumination, it is
necessary to add that it illuminates only what is recent and near to the
present, but it cannot reach what is long past or future.
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 251

6. Memory, Causal Efficacy of the Body


Whitehead accords the greatest importance to the problem of causality, but
he thinks that it was posed altogether badly by Hume and by Kant. If one
concedes to credit perceptual experience with our power of learning
something in the external world, then it appears that in regard to the external
world we have at our disposal two sources of information of different origin.
The perception of external things is given under two modalities,
presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. In perception by presentational
immediacy we apprehend things given in space-time with their qualities,
colors, flavors, sounds, etc. From perception by presentational immediacy we
discover that the sensuous data depend upon the perceiving organism and its
relations to other organisms. This form of perception, which allows us to
localize things in space, makes its appearance only in a small number of
higher organisms.
In perception by causal efficacy, the accent is placed on the action of the
body that makes possible the representation of the data of experience. If, in
the eyes of Whitehead, Hume and Kant had good reason to bring the role of
causality into the foreground, they did not see its true place in experience.
They situated causal action at the level of the relations of things that are given
in space-time. Hume sees in it only a habit of thinking and Kant a category of
the understanding. Both have rightly seen the link of causal efficacy to time,
but they have proceeded from a false conception of time—time reduced to
pure succession. In other words, these two philosophers reduce causality to
the projection of an intuition, a habit, or a judgment, onto the data of
experience, and they do this because, under the pretext of apprehending
what is immediate in experience, they grasp only what consciousness would
see there. If time is given to us from experience, it is not the consciousness of
the succession of acts and events relative to them that is capable of giving us
that which is primordial in time. Whether it concerns impressions or
phenomena, nothing given in experience is simple or pure. This pure
succession, the object of a specific intuition according to Kant, results from an
abstraction:
Time is known to us as the succession of our acts of
experience, and thence derivatively as the succession of events
objectively perceived in those acts. But this succession is not
pure succession: it is the derivation of state from state, with the
later state exhibiting conformity to the antecedent. Time in the
concrete is the conformation of state to state, the later to the
earlier; and the pure succession is an abstraction from the
irreversible relationship of settled past to derivative present. The
notion of pure succession is analogous to the notion of colour.
There is no mere colour, but always some particular colour such
252 Xavier Verley

as red or blue: analogously there is no pure succession, but


always some particular relational ground in respect to which the
terms succeed each other. The integers succeed each other in
one way, and events succeed each other in another way; and,
when we abstract from these ways of succession, we find that
pure succession is an abstraction of the second order, a generic
abstraction omitting the temporal character of time and the
numerical relation of integers. (S 35)
Hume and Kant thus did not grasp the true nature of time because they
were prisoners to the principle of subjectivity, which binds the subject to
consciousness.
If one adopts along with Whitehead the reformed subjectivist principle,
then the truth issuing from experience can no longer come from a subject that
receives impressions or that, setting out from its experience, represents
objects as phenomena.
The principle of relativity, which governs all subjective experience, implies
that all truth bearing on a thing is relative to all the other things that are
produced in the universe. Experience can present the subject with something
given only because the actuality of the act of experience does not simply
imply the habits of experience or the conditions of its possibility, but
fundamentally refers the source of every condition back to the universe.
In adopting the reformed subjectivist principle, it appears that efficient
causality, independent of logical thinking, is given from an experience of time
that is the experience of the conformity of the immediate present to the
immediate past. From there one will be able to recognize as well the
conformity of a fact connected with present action to the fact which
immediately precedes that action. Contrary to perception by presentational
immediacy, this perception does not turn the subject toward space, but to its
body, and so perception by causal efficacy acts in every organism, however
elementary it may be:
My point is that this conformation of present fact to
immediate past is more prominent both in apparent behaviour
and in consciousness, when the organism is low grade. A flower
turns to the light with much greater certainty than does a human
being, and a stone conforms to the conditions set by its external
environment with much greater certainty than does a flower. A
dog anticipates the conformation of the immediate future to his
present activity with the same certainty as a human being. When
it comes to calculations and remote inferences, the dog fails. But
the dog never acts as though the immediate future were
irrelevant to the present. Irresolution in action arises from
consciousness of a somewhat distant relevant future, combined
with inability to evaluate its precise type. (S 41-2)
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 253

If this givenness of the experience of time escaped Descartes and his


posterity, this is because the consciousness that conditions every act of
perception and judgment implies attention and is therefore possible only from
the starting point of the moment in which time is immobilized in a present
lifted out from the pure intuition of time.
The reformed subjectivist principle thus comprises not only a principle of
relativity but also a principle of conformity, which stipulates that what has
been determines what is actual and what shall come. This conformity
presents itself at once as a primitive experience of time referring to the
continuity of corporeal life and ultimately to the continuity of the universe,
but it is also given as an experience of the agreement between the
presentational immediacy of things, according to which they appear as
“partes extra partes,” and the experience of causal efficacy. Whitehead gives
the name symbolic reference to the agreement between the two aspects of
perception which show at the same time the completion and the incompletion
of the process: indeed, in presentational immediacy things follow one another
in succession and perish, while in the experience of causal efficacy we get the
experience of a continuity. Hence the diversity of subjective forms in feeling,
which is always bipolar, namely, mental and physical.
This double aspect of perception eludes us in everyday perception, which
is given most often as presentational immediacy, but sometimes it wells up
from artistic and poetic experience. Art has the ability to rouse this double
aspect of life, which is made of permanence (space) and becoming (time):
‘Pereunt et imputantur’ is the inscription on old sundials in
‘religious’ houses: ‘The hours perish and are laid to account.’
Here ‘Pereunt’ refers to the world disclosed in immediate
presentation, gay with a thousand tints, passing, and intrinsically
meaningless. ‘Imputantur’ refers to the world disclosed in its
causal efficacy, where each event infects the ages to come, for
good or for evil, with its own individuality. Almost all pathos
includes a reference to lapse of time. (S 47)

7. Consciousness and Recollection


Thus, the continuity of experience does not come, as with Descartes, from a
God who welds acts and instants together, or, as with Kant, from a pure
intuition of succession as the form that orders empirical diversity. The body
and time are not objects—or even subjects—of experience, but they enable us
to understand how the life of the body actualizes what is given to us in
experience. One can no longer say with Descartes that there is a body, and an
environment that acts on it, and consciousness, which, at a distance,
objectifies and neutralizes all these factors. Descartes, Hume, Locke, and Kant
254 Xavier Verley

do not seem to have understood the true nature of time. Reduced to the
repetition of sensations, the subject—caught in the contradiction between
finite understanding, which sees, and infinite will, which affirms or negates—
cannot act, or create, for it is outside of time. Only the divine will can
reassemble the instants and the points of extension because the existence of
the subject (just as that of extension) remains suspended in the continual
creation accomplished by the divine will. But the continual creation secures
only the continuity of the creation willed by God in the beginning. It does not
extend to the “I” which is at once both substance (being in itself) and freedom
(being for itself). To the extent that consciousness identifies itself with the “I,”
it presents as a relation between freedom, by which it can provisionally
suspend the evidence coming from the understanding, and necessity, which
comes from that same understanding when the truth guaranteed by God is
imposed upon it. This relationship between freedom and necessity makes
possible a creation of the subject that comes from the subject itself without
having to realize an essence that God would have conceived at the moment of
creating the world. Consciousness then appears as a relation between the will
and the understanding that isolates the subject in a sort of solipsism and ends
by making it a stranger to itself, namely, to its past and its body.
Consciousness thus springs from a progressive purification that reduces time
to the present instant and knowledge of time to the certitude of being in the
present.

8. The Transmission of Feeling and Corporeal Inheritance


If Whitehead eschews this solipsistic conception of mind, it is because the
conservation of the past does not isolate it from the present and the future as
a truncated experience of time might make us believe. Whitehead’s thesis
begins from a physical experience of time. Indeed, if he were to adhere to this
thesis strictly, his naturalism would become indistinguishable from a
materialism that supposed memory derives its foundation from the fact that
causal efficacy applies not only to phenomena, but also to the body and to the
brain, without which there would not be any presentational immediacy.
The experience of the perceiving subject is no doubt an experience of
feeling, but for higher beings it is both physical and mental at the same time.
The perception of the gray stone is more than a simple visual display: “The
‘stone’ has a reference to its past, when it could be used as missile if small
enough, or as a seat if large enough. A ‘stone’ has certainly a history, and
probably a future.”12 Thus, the physical feeling, when it is not reduced to the
visual display of the qualities of things, reveals that nature—both physical and
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 255

physiological—is not reducible to pure receptivity, but that it is transmission


as well.
This is what gives perception is vectorial character:
Pure receptivity and transmission give place to the trigger-
action of life whereby there is release of energy in novel forms.
Thus the transmitted datum acquires sensa enhanced in
relevance or even changed in character by the passage from the
low-grade external world into the intimacy of the human body.
The datum transmitted from the stone becomes the touch-feeling
in the hand, but it preserves the vector character of its origin
from the stone. The touch-feeling in the hand with this vector
origin from the stone is transmitted to the percipient in the
brain. Thus the final perception is the perception of the stone
through the touch in the hand. In this perception the stone is
vague and faintly relevant in comparison with the hand. But,
however dim, it is there. (PR 119-20)
From the fact of this receptivity and this transmission, rendered possible
by the causal efficacy that acts as much in nature as it does in the body, one
can say that direct perception is inheritance.13 If perception is not simply
presentation but prolongation of the past, it is because things are given to us
with their history. Whitehead even speaks of a physical memory. Causality
and subsistence in time concern physical nature as well as organic nature:
Again fatigue is the expression of cumulation; it is physical
memory. Further, causation and physical memory spring from
the same root: both of them are physical perception. Cosmology
must do equal justice to atomism, to continuity, to causation, to
memory, to perception, to qualitative and quantitative forms of
energy, and to extension. But so far there has been no reference
to the ultimate vibratory characters of organisms and to the
‘potential’ element in nature. (PR 239)
What is true of physical feeling, which experiences causal efficacy with the
body, is also true of mental feeling, which apprehends the contemporaneity of
things in space. When mental feeling becomes a conceptual feeling, the
subject experiences a perception of objects that would not be possible without
an internal relation to eternal objects.
In this case perception preserves the character of receptivity and
transmission originally manifested in physical feeling in the function of
corporeal inheritance. Perception of the object through presentational
immediacy calls for a decision that makes it possible to define what is given
and delineate it from what is not given. In order to define the object starting
from the representation, it is necessary to bring in positive prehensions when
the object approximates to the datum, and negative ones when it deviates
from it. Consciousness comes about when a decision obtains on whether or
256 Xavier Verley

not the potentiality of the eternal object is actualized in the experience of the
object represented in space-time.

Conclusion
According to Whitehead, the alienation of consciousness isolated like a point
springs foremost from a bifurcation of nature into what is in itself and what is
for us. This bifurcation is repeated by a split in the mind between what the
mind is in itself and what it is for itself. The reconciliation of mind with itself
requires a dialectical movement in the course of which the mind finally
recovers its lost unity while preserving the history of its odyssey. In the case
of bifurcation, the subject that is a relation of consciousness to self-
consciousness needs an infinite time in order to realize itself. It is the end that
pilots the process.
For Whitehead, self-realization concerns nature as well as spirit, for they
are inseparable. In maintaining the thesis that every actualization is bipolar, at
once both physical and mental, Whitehead exorcises the madness that
menaces the mind when it doubts and reflects the doubt by a doubting of that
doubt. Reflection and critique do not convey the true nature of the mind,
which is a relation between becoming and permanence, a connection of the
self [le soi] of memory and the self of my consciousness [le moi de la
conscience].
If consciousness is only a modality of the life of the subject and not a
center, one can perhaps better understand how the return to oneself is
accomplished by memory and how memory acts in every actualization in the
occasion of experience.

Bibliography
Descartes, René. 1953. Œuvres et Lettres, Textes présentés par André Bridoux
(Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade).
Descartes, René. 1964–76. Œuvres de Descartes. Edited by Ch. Adam and P.
Tannery. Revised Edition (Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S.).
Descartes, René. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Three
Volumes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald
Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
James, William. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans,
Green and Co.).

MT = Whitehead, Alfred North, Modes of Thought [Six lectures delivered in


Wellesley College, Mass., 1937-1938, and two lectures delivered in
the University of Chicago, 1933], New York, Macmillan, and
Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection 257

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1938. Reprint: New York,


The Free Press, 1968.
PR = Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology.
Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the
Session 1927–28. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin
and Donald W. Sherburne [1929], New York - London, The Free
Press. A division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. - Collier
Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
SMW = Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Lowell
Lectures, 1925, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1925;
Cambridge, Cambridge Universty Press, 1926. Reprint: New York,
The Free Press, 1967.
S = Whitehead, Alfred North, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (Barbour
Page Lectures, University of Virginia, 1927), New York, The
MacMillan Company, 1927. Reprints: Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1928.
258 Xavier Verley

Notes

1
A previous version of this paper, translated by Anderson Weekes, has been
published in Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process
Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of
Mind, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 2009, pp.
387 sq. The translator would like to thank Michel Weber for invaluable
assistance with the translation, and Xavier Verley for graciously answering
so many questions about argument, interpretation, and phrasing.
2
Descartes 1953, 268/ Descartes 1964-76, VII 18f./ Descartes 1984, II 12f.
(Méditations métaphysiques).
3
Descartes understands freedom as the result of an asymmetrical relationship
between will and understanding: “So what then is the source of my
mistakes? It must be simply this: the scope of the will is wider than that of
the intellect; but instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its
use to matters which I do not understand” (Descartes 1953, 306/
Descartes 1964-76, VII 58/ Descartes 1984, II 40).
4
PR 75.
5
“The simple notion of an enduring substance sustaining persistent qualities,
either essentially or accidentally, expresses a useful abstract for many
purposes of life. But whenever we try to use it as a fundamental statement
of the nature of things, it proves itself mistaken. It arose from a mistake
and has never succeeded in any of its applications. But it has had one
success: it has entrenched itself in language, in Aristotelian logic, and in
metaphysics” (PR 79).
6
PR 132.
7
PR 136-7.
8
PR 167.
9
James, “La notion de conscience,” text written in French, in: James 1912,
216.
10
PR 44.
11
PR 161-2.
12
PR 121.
13
“The crude aboriginal character of direct perception is inheritance. What is
inherited is feeling-tone with evidence of its origin: in other words, vector
feeling-tone. In the higher grades of perception vague feeling-tone
differentiates itself into various types of sensa—those of touch, sight,
smell, etc.—each transmuted into a definite prehension of tonal
contemporary nexs by the final percipient” (PR 119).
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action
Michel Weber1

Abstract
Hypnosis ranks amongst the most fundamental ideas that made the Victorian
age and that marks out contemporary psychotherapies. Its efficacy is not to
be doubted, but theories still lack to clarify its modus operandi. This paper
seeks to contrasts two ways of understanding consciousness and hypnosis: a
substantialistic interpretation that paves the way to Brave New World (1932);
and a process one, that is central to Huxley’s last essay, Island (1962). First,
we define the normal state of consciousness, that we choose to call “zero-
state” in order to avoid the derogatoriness of the concept of “normality” and
to suggest straight away the existence of a hierarchy of states. We
furthermore underline the presupposed non-dualism of common-sense and
the consequent theoretical dualism of substantialism. Second, we peruse
again the same steps, but this time from a process standpoint. Consciousness-
zero is then relativized with the help of a genetic perspective that is anchored
in the presupposed common-sense through what has been called the
“biological theory of knowledge.” The consequent processism is sketched as a
theoretical non-dualism. Third, the main consequences of this
processualization of the concept of consciousness are specified in two steps:
the existence of a field of consciousness, that is structured by the concept of
threshold, and that can be cautiously interpreted with the introduction of a
scale of consciousness, and of a spectrum of vigilance. Fourth, the main
consequences of this processualization of the concept of consciousness is
examined from the perspective of Whitehead’s panexperientialism

1. Introduction
“You have in me a typical example of the Victorian Englishman,” writes
Whitehead in 1932 (ESP 115) and hypnosis ranks amongst the most
fundamental ideas that made the Victorian age. Together with progress,
creativity, techno-science and industrialization, evolutionism and its by-
product eugenism, and, last but not least, the emergent feminist movement, it
gave a peculiar flavour to its main trait: the faith in the superiority (if not the
superior rationality) of Western civilization and in its colonial duties.1

1
Centre for Philosophical Practice (Brussels) and Department of Educational
Foundations of the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon).
260 Michel Weber

Although for the vulgus pecum, it was (and, to a great respect, remained in
popular media) at best a new form of entertainment, and at worst a
dangerous manipulation, it attracted the attention of major thinkers of that
time, who got a clearer grasp of the stakes. For renowned scientists and
philosophers such as J. Ward, W. James and H. Bergson, hypnosis and the so-
called paranormal events were facts of the highest speculative interest.
Interestingly enough, Peirce, who has alledgedly written on all subjects —
besides imperialism—, has underestimated the significance of hypnosis for
philosophy.2
As such, the question of its nature and of its conditions of possibility
deserve to be raised, especially since hypnotic phenomena bring to the fore
conundrums that are unlikely to be settled outside of a panpsychism of sorts.
Moreover, the socio-political correlation of the discussion of the nature of
consciousness and of its possible technical manipulation (in all senses) should
be underlined. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is an important figure with that
regard, both because of his representativeness of the late Victorian agenda—
featuring eugenics and dysgenics (Darwin, Galton, Malthus)—and of the depth
of his insights. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–
1895), the great Victorian biologist; his brother Julian (1887–1975) was the
well-known evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist; and
prominent intellectual figures such as J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell and J.
W. N. Sullivan were his friends. Not only has Huxley seen clearly the
correlation between substantialistic consciousness, consumerism and
totalitarianism, but hypnosis played a key-role in both his dystopic World
State of Brave New World (1932) and his utopic Kingdom of Pala in Island
(1962).3
Brave New World puts on stage mass-production under three main guises
sealing the totalitarian order: eugenics, eupaedia and soma. “A love of nature
keeps no factory busy:”4 only artificial processes are deemed worthy (most
being named with the suffix “-surrogate”). Eugenics is actualized through bio-
engineering and contraception. Eupaedia amounts to emotional-engineering
and (subliminal) conditioning through hypnopaedia.5 Soma is the omnipotent
drug: besides all sorts of surrogates, omnipresent music, tap-tv, feelies (or
tactile talkies: films with physiological effects) and other overwhelming
presences, the state drug provides peace ad libidum—from a punctual stress-
relief to a longer “soma-holiday” from reality. Even religious experiences are
conditioned to suppress unwelcome emotions. In sum: human beings are
simple instruments for engineers who have been themselves duly
programmed; fully-fledged consciousness is to be avoided.
The motto of the World State is Community, Identity, Stability. Community
means social utility: when we are told that “Everyone belongs to everyone
else,”6 it means that the basic rule is purely utilitarian. Identity is the main
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 261

keyword: thanks to the bio- and emotional-engineering, each citizen is


confined within a very precise circle; there is (almost—depending on the
grade) no elbow-room given to individual action. Stability is the sine qua non
of civilization; total order is guaranteed by water-tight structures. Even science
has to be carefully monitored. Stability is the highest social virtue because it
leads to lasting happiness.
In Island, Huxley insists in a radical empiricist manner that “nothing short
of everything will really do.”7 The total consumerism has been substituted for
a scientific culture of awareness secured by a synergy between Western
science and Buddhist culture that especially emphasizes the presence
(attention) to the present moment: “here and now boys.”8 Its three main tools
are: birth control, holistic education and moshka. Birth control is
indispensable to avoid the Malthusian explosion of misery on the island: it is
achieved through the yoga of love, contraception and, more curiously given
the context, artificial insemination.9 Holistic education10 works on all fronts,
verbal and non-verbal, prevention and cure,11 consciousness and subliminal
awareness. It is in this context that use is made of hypnosis,12 described as
“psychological facts of applied metaphysics”13 and of spiritual exercises.
Philosophy qua symbol-manipulation is of no use to attain paradoxical wake.14
Moksha15 is the community drug that is used on special, ritualized, occasions
to opens the way of liberation from the prison of oneself and to encounter
reality, which is described as luminous bliss, timelessly present Event,
perpetual creation.16 In sum: human beings are treated as unique individuals;
total consciousness is the key to individual and social harmony.
The specular motto can be spelled with the same categories. Community
means now that everyone and everything belongs to everyone and everything
else. “Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism” —and vice-
versa. No means but only ends—the ultimate one being the fundamental
global harmony. Identity refers to true individuals; maximum elbow room is
provided for each person to find peace; no complete adjustment is expected:
even to a sane society, it would not be sound. Stability names peacefulness
harmony, perfectly indifferent transience.
Expect the best, prepare for the worst could be Huxley’s own conclusion. His
two major works make clear, at least from the perspective of the present
argument, that the question of the nature and conditions of possibility of
consciousness, far from being a puzzle for iddle philosophers, engage our
entire existence and especially our socio-political status. To do justice to the
wealth of our experience, we need to adopt a systemic understanding of
knowledge and action that boils down to two correlates: the empirical origin
of cognitive functions and the fact that cognition serves to engage with the
world, not to represent it. As Whitehead says “we cannot think first and act
afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can
262 Michel Weber

only fitfully guide it by taking thought.” (SMW 187) If experience is broader


than cognition, it becomes urgent to adopt a critical panpsychist onto-
epistemology. Such seems the price to pay to make sure that no worldview
endangers the Urdoxastic vital—carnal—link we maintain with the world at-
large.

2. Consciousness-zero and Substantialism


Our discussion has inevitably to start with a heuristic definition of
consciousness that will provisionally collapse all intensities of experiences and
shades of meaning displayed by our everyday interactions with our human
and non-human environment.

1.1. Definition of Consciousness-zero

Let consciousness-zero be defined by (solely instantiated in) public debate or


conversation. It thus demands at least two interlocutors, present in person
and sharing the same rationality, i.e., the same language. In other words, it is
unsurprisingly characterized by two main dimensions: rational and physical.
This is no doubt a very restrictive definition that is likely to be found prima
facie unacceptable: is it not obvious indeed that our conscious experience is
far more ambivalent and rich than the one put here in the hot seat? Far from
neglecting this variegatedness, our argument actually exploits it
systematically—but the need from a sharp starting point remains
nevertheless.
On the one hand, consciousness-zero per se demands the extensive use of
a refined form of language; on the other, it requires intersubjectivity in a
particular environment, the key-concept being the Agora. A perfect historical
exemplification is indeed available: the Greek citizen debating political issues
with his peers in the Market-place. The use of reason is as essential as the
actual presence of the individuals. Neither the public use of irrationalities, nor
the private use of reason (for familial or rumination purposes) qualify.
The physical requirement is rather straightforward, but the rational one is
far more nebulous, hence the following propositions: is rational what is
congruent with a set of given rules of relevance; is irrational what is not
congruent, but could become so, once some fixing-up is provided; is non-
rational what is definitely incommensurable with reason.17 In other words,
there is always a measure of contingency in all rational systems. The simplest
way of exemplifying this in the case of consciousness-zero is to give a quick
look at Aristotelian logic with the help of the three “principles” or “laws”
defined by Boole18 (independently of Leibniz’ conceptual renovation in terms
of principle of sufficient reason and identity of indiscernibles and of
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 263

Schopenhauer’s synthesis). The principle of identity states that we come to


know all things in so far as they have some unity and identity.19 It has
naturally to be linked with the substance-attribute ontology granting
permanence amid flux. The principle of contradiction is somewhat the
negative side of the principle of identity: it claims that the same attribute
cannot, at the same time and in the same respect, belong and not belong to
the same subject.20 According to the principle of excluded middle (or “tertium
non datur”), there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories: of one
subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate.21 There is no third
possibility: either it rains or it does not. Consequently, any proposition that
does belong to the territory marked out by these three principles is, from an
Aristotelian perspective, rational; if it does not, it is irrational. A contradiction
is not irrational, since it possesses a clear status in the system: it is a
statement that is always false and everybody agrees that it is so because some
mistake must have occurred in the chain of reasoning. A paradox, however, is
irrational: as its etymology shows, it is a contradiction that has the
appearance of truth, with the result that there are numerous opinions
regarding the way of understanding them; no consensus prevails. The
arational is for him matter (the complementary of form in his hylemorphism).
In sum: objectifying rationality and political environment circumscribe
consciousness-zero and its practical dualism. To define consciousness with
the help of the concept of intentionality (cf. Husserl after Brentano and the
Scholastics) or with the concept of contrast between a fact and a possibility
(cf. Whitehead in Process and Reality)22 lures us too quickly towards a
sophisticated understanding of consciousness (or even towards an idealist if
not solipsistic one—remember Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and Whitehead
claiming a proximity with Bradley23). According to the common-sense
interpretation unfolded here, it is primarily an intersubjective phenomenon.
Without intersubjectivity, no consciousness-zero, and without embodied
presence or interobjectivity, no intersubjectivity.

1.2. Common-sensical Non Dualism

When the conscious interplay of embodied rational citizens is contextualized,


we find uphill a practical non dualism, and downhill a theoretical dualism.
The threefold meaning of sensus communis is helpful to name and specify
the non-dualism that is presupposed in practice: according to Arendt’s fresh
reading of Kant and Aquinas, common sense is made of three threads: the
concerted functioning of the five senses (more precisely, cœnæsthesia); the
sharing with other humans of the world qua context; and the sharing with
other living creatures of the world as environment.24
264 Michel Weber

Let us also pin-point a similar attempt in the Whiteheadian studies: Griffin


speaks of hard-core common-sense notions25 to qualify the universal and
primordial beliefs that human beings do not question in practice: humans
share an “animal faith” of sorts in their fundamental freedom, in the causal
efficacy of their actions, in the existence of values and of a temporal drift. All
these occurring in a realistic atmosphere: idealism is not to be found at this
pre-rational level. Soft-core common-sense notions belong for their part to
doxa: they are culturally contingent and philosophically (and scientifically)
insignificant.
In conclusion: the dualism at work in consciousness-zero is buttressed on a
“world-loyalty” that is commonly ignored and philosophically obliterated by
substantialistic dualism. The goal of the process ontological renewal is to
firmly anchor everyday consciousness in this deep experiential structure and,
thereby, to reenchant the world (cf. M. Berman and D. R. Griffin).

1.3. Substantialist Theoretical Dualism

Whereas, volens nolens, consciousness-zero springs from a non-dualistic social


network (in the broad, experiential, sense of the word), it brings forth, by the
sheer power of its abstractions, a fully-fledged dualistic theory otherwise
known as substantialism. Here also a quick overview of Aristotle is relevant to
specify its applicability.
Most of Aristotle’s categories—starting with the category of substance
itself—are wedged to consciousness-zero. In other words, they are adequate
to depict the type of rationality exploited in everyday life (cf. Piaget), not the
Ultimate. If one follows again Boole’s definition, we obtain an acute depiction
of the raw understanding of consciousness presupposed in most literature.
The principle of identity requires that there is only one such thing as
“consciousness”; the principle of contradiction claims that one cannot, at the
same time and in the same respect, be conscious and not-conscious; the
principle of excluded middle adds that there is no third possibility: one has to
be either conscious or unconscious. The overall intuition of consciousness
substantialism is a two states system of the “on/off” type: the subject is either
totally conscious or totally unconscious.
In conclusion, the virtue of Aristotle’s system has to be reframed. On the
one hand, his ontological pretensions have to be limited to the mesocosmos,
that names the world of “middle dimensions” where humans dwell (i.e.,
neither the microcosm nor the macrocosm)—and process thought has thus to
provide a way of recovering them—; on the other, one can show that
concepts such as Poiesis/Praxis and Dynamis/Energeia possess a broader
applicability than their substantialist cradle, i.e., that they are crucial to all
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 265

forms of philosophical systematization and, as such, constitute the true


Aristotelian legacy.26

3. Consciousness in Process
The process understanding of consciousness not only aims at doing justice to
all the facets evoked so far (to consciousness-zero as it is empirically available,
to its presupposed non-dualism, and to its consequential theoretical dualism):
it enlarges the scope of the discussion with the help of a premise shared with
radical empiricism (all experiences—including relations—have to be taken at
face value). By doing so, it enables itself to systematically meta-analyze all
these facets. The focus on the Agora remains but at the same time it is
relativized with the help of the concept of mesocosm.
In order to understand what is at stake, a short Jamesean digression is
needed. James’ insistence on the difference between two basic type of
philosophical thinking is well-known: on the one hand, rationalism and its
monistic trend; on the other empiricism and its pluralism. But the exact
significance of his radical empiricism is often taken for granted. A close
reading of rationalists and empiricists arguments reveals that both
philosophical streams share the exact same substantialism. Accordingly,
James’ radical empiricism is designed to overcome both rationalism (with its
innate general ideas formatted by calculus) and empiricism (with its acquired
particular ideas put together by association). It claims that primitive
experience is not equivalent to elementary experience: empiricists have
mixed up the source or origin and the element. Experience qua experience—
”pure experience” as James calls it—does not have at all the simplicity, the
atomicity, the individuality that is presupposed by rationalists and empiricists
alike: it is vague, confused (neither clear nor distinct), above all relational.27 In
the same way that Locke has improperly imported in psychology Boyle’s
corpuscular paradigm, Spencer has wrongly used Laplace’s cosmogenetic
model of the solar system to understand psychogenesis. We do not prehend
parts but the Whole in its complex opacity. From that prehended Whole, we
discriminate parts that are eventually organized by a triple genesis (onto-,
phylo- and koino-).28 In brief: fragmentary experience is not amalgamated by
calculus or by association from simple to complex, but emerges from complex
to simple. Parts are not given from the beginning because they do not exist
independently of the relations which unite them.
This standpoint opens two new process perspectives: the neutral monism
of the pure flux (cf. James’ Principles of Psychology or Whitehead’s London
epoch) and the neutral pluralism of the bud-like eventfulness (James’
Pluralistic Universe and Whitehead’s Harvard epoch “epochal theory”). In both
266 Michel Weber

cases the pure experience thesis holds: we have a direct, indiscriminate


experience of the world (by acquaintance29), i.e., discriminations between
perceiving “subject” and perceived “objects,” and between “objects”
themselves have yet to be made… The difference lies in the assessment of the
question of novelty: if processes are continuous, no genuine novelty is
possible and we remain in a neutral monism that nevertheless offers the
solution to most epistemological puzzles (such as the mind-body problem).

2.1. Re-definition of Consciousness-zero: Relativization of Practical Dualism

Our heuristic definition of consciousness-zero underlined its intersubjectivity


and its rationality: in one word, its public or political dimension (in the Greek
sense). There are two direct correlates to this very limited view: first, the
physical kinship, second the rational one. Consciousness-zero takes place
among fellows for whom reason is a shared evidence. (Typically: the Greek
citizen and his cosmos ruled by one single logos.)
The first move that is required by process radical empiricism is to
acknowledge the relativity of our own conscious standpoint. This requires to
substitute the Market-place by Hans Reichenbach’s (1891–1953) mesocosm.
The evolutionary process of adjustment of the cognitive forms to the general
structure of reality is only partial: it is (somewhat) adequate only to the
mesocosm. By doing so, one opens the public sphere: consciousness-zero is a
function (cf. James’ “Does Consciousness Exist?”) of the interaction between
emergent rational creatures whose practical dualism has to be
recontextualized. Whitehead inherits from Bruno and Darwin the destruction
of the cosmos (i.e., the opening of the world, first spatially and second
temporally) and the geometrization of space (i.e., its homogenisation). Helio-
cosmo-centrism institutes an infinite mechanical universe, free from the
Aristotelian hierarchy (i.e., topology) of natural laws—Whiteheadian
organicism seeks to re-animate it.

2.2. Common-sense (non dualism)

The process standpoint provides the most adequate tools to understand the
threefold meaning of sensus communis: the triple genesis that was
presupposed—but not thematized—by substantialism comes now to the fore.
First, the cognitive functions of the human mind are not static operators at
all, they are the transient phylogenetical result of a long adaptive process
(Spencer). Under the pressure of environmental adjustment (better knowledge
allows a better chance for survival), the human intellect has become a master
in the logic of solid bodies (linear causality, Euclidean geometry, etc.). But this
is just an evolutionary adjustment to a limited—perceived—segment of a
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 267

throbbing and coalescing world. In sum: the categories that are a priori for the
individual are a posteriori for the species.
Second, these functions result furthermore of an ontogenetical process:
individuals are not born fully equipped with the rational apparatus embodied
in consciousness-zero. Four temporally and logically sequenced stages can be
distinguished (Piaget): the sensorimotor stage (ages 0-2), the preoperational
stage (ages 2-7), the concrete operational stage (ages 7-11), and the formal
operational stage (ages 11-adult).
Third, the evolutionary success of humans also lies in the fortunate
oversimplifications the species has achieved and perpetuates through cultural
endeavours (Bateson). Koinogenesis30 is the process of convergence of
individual consciousnesses through learning. It is a process of integrative
synchronic tuning that can be contrasted with schismogenesis—or
progressive (pathological) differentiation.31 Evolution in the biosphere and
education in the ethosphere are intertwined in individual ontogenesis.

2.3. Processism (theoretical non-dualism)

The theoretical non-dualism enforced by process thought leads straight to the


relativization, not the destruction, of Aristotelian substantialism. Whitehead’s
goal is not to revoke the category of substance, but to reconstruct its limited
applicability from an eventful perspective. It basically amounts to explain
mesocosmic substance with the help of societies (or trajectories) of “bud-like”
events. Interestingly enough, the process standpoint can be characterized as
the very one rejected point-blank as unscientific by the Aristotle himself: the
event or accident (“sumbebekos”) comes first, essences, substances and the
like are secondary. We are looking for an accidental science.
This brings us to the contrast we have already introduced between neutral
monism and neutral pluralism. Process is a very old concept that can take two
main guises: weak (trans-formative) and strong (creative).
The weak concept—that already speaks in terms of event, flux, instability
and the like—puts becoming before being; “being” is understood as the
surface effect of ever-changing underlying relationships. This
conceptualisation may occur solely at the phenomenological level, i.e.,
without involving ontological problematization. Whitehead's “London epoch”
is a good example of such an attitude. It is a continuist concept that sees
Nature’s unrest as a “perpetual transition into novelty.” Change is
morphological: new patterns are made of old ones.
With the strong concept, not only is the question raised at the ontological
level, but it is now bolder: there cannot be a continuous stream of events
progressively disclosing new cosmic features. So Process and Reality’s (1929)
“creative advance” claims that genuine novelty can only enter the World in a
268 Michel Weber

disruptive, bud-like manner. Its point is to secure true becoming, to make the
emergence of the unexpected possible within the fabric of the universe.
“Process and individuality require each other” (MT 97): change is creation.
Obiter scriptum, let us notice that this brings to the fore two main paths to
rethink therapy. Psychotherapy is no doubt in need of new foundations: to
start with, dualism and materialistic reductionism still cripple its efficacy. The
question is whether one requires an open universe—and belief in the
possibility of self-creation—in order to make sense of the cure, or not.
According to Whiteheadian processism, there is simply no way to represent,
and even less to actualize, the expected psychological change without
epochality. Total consciousness is liberation. According to transformative
processism such as the one advocated by François Roustang,32 the epochal
theory is not needed to bypass the deterministic universe and creation is too
remnant of outdated metaphysics—spontaneity is more than enough.
Realizing Emptiness is liberation.

4. Processism and Spectral Consciousness


Unlike substance psychology, process psychology sees consciousness as a
function that accepts a third option (tertium datur): we can be both conscious
and unconscious at the same time, especially since there is a continuum of
levels of awareness possible. We now have all the elements to show how and
why panpsychism (lato sensu) appears to be the only viable (i.e., coherent and
applicable) response to the question “what is consciousness”—whether one
accepts the process worldview or not. It should not be forgotten indeed that
panspychism has, until the early XXth century, always been one among the
most respected mainstream philosophical positions. Its frequent present day
characterization as the fringe position of an idiosyncratic few is demonstrably
false (unless one considers the Scholastics). The best recent study on that
topic is David Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West,33 which is a scholarly survey
of panspychism from the pre-Socratic philosophers up to and including the
present day discussion. The most compelling and relevant part of Skrbina's
exposition is his treatment of the XIXth and XXth centuries, where he
documents panpsychist thinking, especially among respected natural
scientists, with a degree of prevalence so widespread that even its present
supporters will be surprised. Let us resume our argument with three last
points.

3.1. The Field of Consciousness

First, radical empiricism claims that all experiences—and only experiences—


have to be taken at face value in philosophical speculation:
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 269

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its


constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor
exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.34
Doing so brings to the fore a variegated cluster of experiences that constitutes
the field of consciousness. Whitehead was fully aware of this:
In order to discover some of the major categories under
which we can classify the infinitely various components of
experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety
of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and
experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking,
experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-
conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual
and experience physical […].35
Accepting all these experiences is an essential step but by no means the most
problematic. Here is a recent authoritative account of the stakes:
There is such overwhelming evidence of unconscious
cognition inferred from its conscious products that to deny its
occurrence is either an admission of ignorance concerning the
origin of conscious thought, or taking the indefensible position
that all thought arises in consciousness. In addition to dream,
this includes hypnotic and mystical states, creativity, myth, non-
intentional moods or objectless states, such as diffuse anxiety or
unresolved conflict, drive and motivation, sleepwalking and
other dissociative states, “slips of the tongue,”36 obsessions,
compulsions, not to mention the whole “storehouse” of
grammar, memory, beliefs and values that account for thought,
acts, objects and language. There are also experimental probes
of non-conscious processes, such as masking, tachistoscopic
presentation (percept-genetic and related studies), priming,
learning during anesthesia, split-brain cases, incidental and
procedural learning, conditioning, habit and skill formation. To
dismiss the unconscious as physiology avoids the obligation to
go beyond negation to a more exact account of the transition to
consciousness, its immediate precursors and evolutionary
ancestry.37
The speculative function of reason requires indeed that we order all these
evidences somehow, i.e., that we make sense of their variety. What does it
mean in practice? The history of ideas has been working so far with an
apparently unbeatable cleavage between two fields: rationalism and
empiricism. The former claims that the only experience that matters is a
mental one (perception being notoriously unreliable); hence, it operates with
general (innate) Ideas. The latter claims that the only meaningful experience
is perceptual (mentation being subsidiary); hence, it postulates the existence
of particular (acquired) ideas. As a result, (at least) two openings are required
to refresh philosophical debates: on the one hand, not to start theoretically
270 Michel Weber

from atomic ideas but from vague perceptions, as they are disclosed in
everyday life; on the other, to accept, in practice, data coming from all
experiences.
First, one speaks of vague perceptions to emphasize that the core of our
experience of the so-called external world is not a clear and distinct one, but a
“perception without concepts,” as Kant could have claimed,38 a “pure
experience,” that James defines as a “that which is not yet any definite
what.”39 Russell is here, volens nolens, in tune with James and Bergson, and in
agreement with the late Whitehead. Here is the example he mentions:
If you watch a bus approaching you during a bad London
fog, you see first a vague blur of extra darkness, and you only
gradually become aware of it as a vehicle with parts and
passengers. According to Hegel, your first view as a vague blur is
more correct than your later impression […]. This point of view
was temperamentally unpleasing to me. Like the philosophers of
ancient Greece, I prefer sharp outlines and definite separations
such as the landscapes of Greece afford. […] It was Whitehead
who was the serpent in this paradise of Mediterranean clarity.
He said to me once: “You think the world is what it looks in fine
weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early
morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.” I thought this
remark horrid, but could not see how to prove that my bias was
any better than his. At last he showed me how to apply the
technique of mathematical logic to his vague and higgledy-
piggledy world, and dress it up in Sunday clothes that the
mathematician could view without being shocked.40
To repeat, Russell’s claim is rooted in the work of two of his peers, with
whom he had a rather conflicting relationship: James and Whitehead. On the
one hand, the experience he describes is typically Jamesean:
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at
once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and
to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is
due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the
sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together
into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this
why “the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I
immediately feel.41
On the other hand, Russell refers to Whitehead’s Method of Extensive
Abstraction, developped before his London years (1910–1924). Obiter
scriptum, it seems that we have here one of the reason of the breaking up
between the two authors of the Principia Mathematica: Whitehead showed his
work in the making to Russell, who published it, with acknowledgment, in
Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). Whitehead’s own Enquiry
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 271

Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge came about only four years
later.42
Second, to accept all experiences as worthy of philosophical speculation
means, of course, to rehabilitate first all of the five external senses, also
known as exteroception. But it also means to take into account internal
perceptions, i.e., interoceptive and proprioceptive data, that both occur at the
fringes of our normal state of consciousness. Interoception names the internal
sensitivity complementing the exteroceptive one. Its messages, coming from
receptors housed by all organs and tissues, are, through reflex (i.e., non
conscious) action, the source of a harmonious bodily life. One can distinguish
internal pains (cephalalgia, 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 œsophagus, determining the nausea
feeling).43 Proprioception names the messages of position and movement
allowing, with the help of the internal ear’s semi-circular canals a
spatialisation—i.e., a full (ap)propriation—of the body. Proprioceptive
perception grows from sensorial receptors44 delivering data about the position
and the relative movements of the different parts of our body. Through reflex
action, it regulates the muscular tone and helps us to localise 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 and/or moved
object. The structuration of our proprioceptive field provides for the
fundamental organic anchorage of our identity.
Just like cœnæsthesia, Whitehead’s withness of the body can be said to
emerge out of the togetherness of all three of these perceptive modes,
internal as well as external. He has repeatedly remarked that “Philosophers
have disdained the information about the universe obtained through their
visceral feelings, and have concentrated on visual feelings.”45 (Since Jonas
read Whitehead before creating an organic philosophy of his own, it is likely
that his argument on the nobility of sight sprang from here.)
There remains however a third cognitive field that has been scrutinized, a
bit shyly, by Whitehead’s Religion in the Making (1926) and explored, this
time extensively, by James’ Varieties (1902) and Bergson’s Deux sources
(1932): the altered or modified states of consciousness that pave the way to
mysticism and constitute it (James’ first-hand religious experiences) and
thereby ground religion itself (second-hand religious experience). At the fringes
of the Mediterranean beauty of exteroception lays not only the cognitive and
emotional vagueness of the withness of the body but also, beyond it, the
religiosity’s Dark Night, during which one embraces the void and its heirs
(nihil videt et omnia videt). But there is no need to be dramatic either about all
272 Michel Weber

the shades of consciousness: any form of inattention or mild hypnosis or


dream-like state is full of lessons for the apprentice philosopher.

3.2. Subliminal Consciousness

The key that Whiteheadian process thought promotes in consciousness


studies is straightforward: consciousness-zero has to be profiled against a
scale that embodies the various degrees of awareness, value and complexity
that human experience can reach. There is little doubt that the complete
systematization of such a scale is a tricky business: there are serious
theoretical problems involved, such as focus, typology and adequacy. Should
we focus on the state itself, i.e., on intrinsic value (cf. James’ “immediate
delight” and “enormous sense of inner authority and illumination”) or on its
consequences, i.e., extrinsic value (cf. “good consequential fruits for life”:
spiritual riches, bodily strength, actual dispositions)?46 Typologically speaking,
should we proceed a posteriori (and this would require an experimental
protocol) or a priori (only with speculative categories)? With regard to
adequacy of the scale: should it have an individual or an universal scope ? (In
such a case, how to treat Laing’s “metanoia” or Plato’s “theoria”?). Moreover,
the issue of measurement is, as usual in psychological matters, highly
problematic.47
Nevertheless, all this does not imply that the definition of the scale’s
general appearance is useless. In order to screen the issue, we need to sketch
the concept of threshold that has been introduced to operationalize the
nucleus/fringe contrast James used as early as his 1890 Principles. Until the
XVIIIth century, Western philosophy and psychology have totally insulated the
so-called normal state of consciousness from its roots, its lures, its complex
variations and its pathologies. From that perspective, consciousness-zero
constitutes yet another example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Instead of understanding consciousness-zero as being part of a continuum, it
has been severed from it and this pure abstraction has been seen as the sole
reality.
Things have changed gradually, but a double inflection point is noticeable:
Leibniz (Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain, 1704) for theory and
Mesmer (Schreiben über die Magnetkur, 1775) for practice. Leibniz introduced
the contrast between sense-perception and apperception, which will have an
important conceptual legacy in Kant, Herbart, Weber, Helmholtz, Fechner,
Wundt, Lotze and Münsterberg. Its correlate—Herbart’s threshold
[Bewussteinschwelle]—is directly responsible for the theoretical discovery of
the unconscious realm. For his part, Mesmer developed a new therapeutical
practice inspired by a Newtonian speculation on animal “magnetism.” The
two conceptual legacies unite with Puységur (Du magnétisme animal, 1807)
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 273

and later in the Salpêtrière school, which saw the completion of its program in
Janet’s work.
The understanding of the unconscious realm(s), however, remained
limited by the complementary premises of two streams: positivistic and
nosological. On the one hand, the German scholars of the Psychologie als
Wissenschaft type were basically concerned with Kant’s injunction: since
psychology does not work with any objective data (measurements), it is not a
science (a status that Comte still refused to her in 1870). On the other hand,
the French scholars of the psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures
de l'activité humaine type (Richet, Charcot, Binet, Janet) were basically focused
on the pathological (hysterical) dimension of corrupted or abnormal forms of
consciousness. According to Charcot, hypnotism is abnormal, fundamentally
related to hysteria, and consequently useless for therapy. Although the three
stages of lethargy, catalepsy and somnambulism were soon undermined by
Bernheim’s criticisms, consciousness is still understood as substantial.
The need of a holistic approach promoting a hygiology manifested itself in
two waves. One is represented by the Nancy school (Liébault, Bernheim,
Forel, Liégeois), which normalized hypnotic phenomena and allowed for the
existence of a nebulae of states of consciousness centred on the zero-state,
and actually in constructive interplay with it. The other is represented by the
work of F. W. H. Myers (1841–1901), that recapitulates and supersedes all
previous conceptual trajectories with the help of the vertiginous wealth of data
disclosed by the works of London’s Society for Psychical Research (founded in
1882).
Myers is, in other words, one of the main forgotten actor in the emergence
of radical empiricism in psychology; as such, his influence on Bergson and on
William James should not be underestimated. According to Taylor, James's
attraction to Myers' lay in his emphasis on growth-oriented aspects of the
subconscious—not in psychic phenomena themselves.48 Neither should be
forgotten James Ward (1843–1925), who coined the term “subliminal” in
1886 in the course of a discussion of Herbart49 and who also had a
tremendous influence on James. Not insignificant is perhaps the fact that
Ward had one very important friend in common with Myers: Henry Sidgwick
(1838–1900), the prominent Cambridge Apostle who co-founded the Society
for Psychical Research.

3.3. Scale of Consciousness and Spectrum of Vigilance

The concept of threshold allows the representation of the levels of awareness


and of their lability. Although the speculative definition of a meta-criteriology
granting the systematization of an univocal spectrum of consciousness is no
easy task, it remains reasonable to sketch a rough scale.50 Whiteheadian
274 Michel Weber

processism is here in the good company of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Dionysius


and their kins… Needless to say that if its attempts do not have much in
common with the various quantitative “scales” used by clinicians (such as the
Glasgow Coma Scale, the Rancho Los Amigos Scale, the Mini Mental State),
some complementarity must be secured.
To assess the position of a given experience on the scale of consciousness,
the following criteria are worth considering: (i) the experience’s cash-value (a
necessary but not sufficient criterion), be it practical (an improved mundane
efficacy: a particular behavioural—in the broad sense of the word—change
that is valuable) or semantic (retrospective clarification of a past experience);
(ii) the level of intellectual and perceptual discernment (the intellectual and
perceptual acuteness in terms of discrimination, sharpness and freshness);
(iii) the feeling of interconnectedness and duration (the process awareness of
actuality in the making and of its relativity); (iv) authenticity (general
qualitative features such as emotional intensity or the sense of value and
novelty).51
The most important problem lies in the assessment of the grade of the
experience independently of (but not necessarily without) measurement. The
issue is to do justice to the qualitative dimension of experience—its pure
existential tone—together with its quantitative dimension, that is no doubt
accessed, but always at the cost of reductionistic working hypothesis, by
science. Existence is concrescing, hence sepulchral; being is transitional,
hence public.
Whitehead works with the qualitative criteria of novelty, beauty, intensity,
complexity and value to discriminate the level of the awareness of
experience.52 The hierarchy that he technically specifies in Process and Reality
is the following: higher-grade actuality, living person (enduring object with
conscious knowledge), enduring living object, enduring non-living object
(society with personal order), corpuscular society, society (nexus with social
order), (non-social) nexus (“electromagnetic” occasions in so-called “empty
space”), low-grade actualities. To grasp Whitehead’s intention is more
important here than to unfold the full technical apparatus: there is a
continuous thread running through all forms of existence in our cosmos. To
simplify: the basic—epochal or pulsative—structure of existence of an
electron and of a human mind is the same; there is “only” a difference in
intensity and in complexity. One can thus speak of a monism in order to
make plain the ontological unity of all beings and becomings—but it is a
pluralistic monism in the sense that all beings and becomings are epochal or
bud-like (which does not amount to say that they are atomic in the Daltonian
sense):
Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a
small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 275

region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim


apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no
measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this
character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the
crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its
necessary base. (PR267)
Although Whitehead does not specify a spectrum of vigilance centred upon
human’s consciousness-zero, one can cautiously speculate that the following
approximation might have been acceptable to him: mystical states (“oceanic”
or “theistic”53), paradoxical or generalized wakefulness (hypnotic state),
consciousness-zero in the rationalized mesocosm, somnolescence
(drowsiness, daydreaming), paradoxical sleep, NREM sleep, coma.54
Whitehead nevertheless warned us: everything that is simple (or clear) is
false but usable—while everything that is complex (or obscure) is so to speak
adequate but unusable.55 Two questions will suffice to illustrate the limitation
of our linear sketch: where exactly could near death experiences fit in such a
spectrum?; does this scale do justice Advaita Vedanta’s arguments? First, NDE
phenomena display a problematic double dimension: on the one hand, they
belong at the bottom of the scale to the extent that physical death is further
down than coma; on the other, they are akin to the so-called mystical. Second,
Advaita Vedanta proposes a complex set of arguments to show that the most
important awareness takes actually place in the NREM state.56 The immediate
solution consists in ignoring the fringes of the spectrum, especially since they
deal with the ineffable, i.e., the non-rational. The mediate solution is to turn to
recent speculations in neuropsychology, such as the microgenetic theory
developed by Jason W. Brown, since 1972, after Gestalt theory and the
genetic theories of Jean Piaget and Heinz Werner.
Microgenesis is the basic pattern of the brain activity;57 it is a wave-like
arborisation of processes that unfolds from depth to surface, i.e., from the
upper brain stem to the neocortex, from subconscious layers to
consciousness-zero. The usual (cognitivist) substantialist paradigm is replaced
by a process one: “things” are not “out there” waiting for us to be
“discovered,” they arise. Microgenesis basically argues for two main thesis:
the reversal of the current cognitivo-connectionist interpretation and its
rhythmization.
It is a reversal because there is progressive lateralization. Four steps pacing
the gradual transition from raw flux (where vagueness and complexity dwells)
to constructed stasis (displaying clear and distinct objects) are to be
distinguished: (i) upper brain stem: pure (unfocused) wakefulness, without
self-awareness or even mental content (the corresponding pathology being
coma); (ii) limbic structure: image awareness disclosing a plastic and shallow
world (cf. dreams and hallucinations); (iii) parietal cortex: object awareness
276 Michel Weber

(exteriorized, i.e., spatialized world featured with stable entities) and self-
awareness; (iv) neocortex: genuine analytic perception granted by a
bifurcation between the perceiver and the perceived (fully independent
external world); it is here that consciousness-zero spreads its wings.
At each step of this transition (from one mental state to another) that
builds a progressive differentiation, sensations act as input 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 creation of perceptions. On
the other hand, motor outputs corresponding to the level of activity
participate in the life of the individual, in its 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 construction of the other. Better: “action and perception are
ab origo a single form, a unitary act-object”58 The pattern repeats itself
endlessly (within the boundaries given by the life of an individual, of course).
Furthermore, it does not only recapitulates previous (partially faded) phases, it
retraces phylo-ontogenic growth planes. Cognition is evolution compressed:
evolution delivers the structure of behaviour, ontogenesis refines it, and
microgenesis operationalizes it.
Here we reach the second thesis: microgenesis advocates a rhythmization.
The mind/brain state growths 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 unfoldment. In this context, freedom is being aware on all
levels.

5. Conclusion
As a result of this processualization—be it speculative or clinical—, the
concept of consciousness can be now refreshed. At a theoretical level,
Whitehead’s panexperientialism is to be differentiated from panpsychism; at
the practical level, the nature of hypnosis is specified.

Panexperientialism

We have seen that the (subjective, human-centred) spectrum of vigilance


corresponds to an (objective) scale of consciousness or scala naturæ: the
various types of experiences we enjoy on an everyday basis can be put on a
scale and this scale provides evidence for a continuity of levels of
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 277

(un)consciousness that goes all the way down and up. Thanks to
panexperientialism, the two concepts engineer so to speak a unipolar reality.
But how exactly does panexperientialism differ from panpsychism? Let us
examine two main sources of difficulties.
On the one hand, the prefix “pan” can either refer to the Whole (cf. the
concept of World-Soul) or to all parts (cf. the concept of hylozoism). On the
other hand, the root word “psychism” works at various stages or levels that
can be heuristically identified and hierarchized in the following way. First, it
stands for psyche itself and, in conjunction with the prefix “pan” leads
irresistibly in the direction of animism. Second, it stands for subjectivity, i.e.,
for consciousness-zero or at least for an awareness of some sort: self-
experience is its key-word. Third, it stands for some mental activity, which
means capacity of abstraction, of valuation, together with some freedom (or
spontaneity, depending on how you define your variables). Fourth, it stands
for pure experience, in the sense that everything that “is” either experiences or
is experienced.
Hence a 2 x 4 matrix that allows a sharper understanding of the shades of
meaning provided by panpsychism. From that perspective, Whiteheadian
panexperientialism is a pluralism that defines existence by non-conscious—
pure—experience; it does not argue for the universality of some form of
psychism or even of mentation.
This perspective discloses furthermore an abstractive progression:
psychism/subjectivity/mentality/experience. As usual in philosophy, the use of
abstractions is quite paradoxical: it means both the quest for the ultimate
generalities—that are not (necessarily) obvious for common sense, i.e., there
is a distantiation from immediate experience—and it claims that, by doing so,
it reveals the very marrow of any experience whatsoever. A good example is
Plato, whose arguments lead him to claim that solely the contemplation of
pure forms is meaningful… because they are what is most concrete! This
paradox, which stems from the disregard for sense perception inherited from
Greeks, should lead us to be exceedingly careful in the handling of daring
generalities. One could claim nevertheless that the above abstractive
progression is indeed at work in James, who first (already in the Principles)
embraced a rather non technical (or gut) panpsychism—in 1909, he is still
speaking of “mother-sea” or “common reservoir of consciousness”59—and
later (in the Essays in Radical Empiricism) spelled the (dry) basics of a
panexperientialist framework.60 The quest for higher generalities and the
striping of immediate (sometimes naive) experience of its “obvious” and
“subjective” features are the two faces of the same coin. At any rate, these
various conceptual stops do make sense from the perspective of the “infinite
number of degrees of consciousness, following the degrees of complication
and aggregation of the primordial mind-dust.”61
278 Michel Weber

Understanding Hypnosis

Hypnosis ranks, with hysteria and dreams, among the main clues that put
psychologists on the path of the extra-marginal. Whitehead takes here for
granted the works of his Harvard peers. Whereas the Principles of Psychology,
because of its topic, refers mostly to Alfred Binet and Pierre Janet,62 the
Varieties of Religious Experience, again because of its focus, mainly refers to
Myers, while “the wonderful explorations” of Binet, Janet, but also of Étienne
Azam, Hippolyte Bernheim, Josef Breuer, Jean Martin Charcot, Richard von
Kraft-Ebbing, Auguste Liébeault, Rufus Osgood Mason, Morton Prince,
Théodule Ribot, and of course Sigmund Freud are selectively mentioned.63 In
order to refresh James’ own endeavours in the field of hypnosis (see
especially PP II, ch. XXVII), we propose to use François Roustang’s recent
powerful speculations, inspired in part by Léon Chertok and Milton H.
Erickson.64 He will help to display the correlation between the ladder of states
of consciousness and the hierarchy of beings.
Chertok proposes a few provisional definitions of the hypnotic state
stemming from the old—but still actual—concept of animal magnetism65 and
insisting on the affective core of the hypnotic trance; it is a natural potentiality
that manifests itself already in the relation of attachment to the mother; it is
the matrix, the crucible in which all subsequent relations will come within the
scope; its essence is very archaic, pre-linguistic, pre-sexual.66
Keeping this in mind, let us first sketch the induction of the hypnotic state
(or “trance” as it is called by James). For the sake of the present argument, we
can bypass the distinction between self-hypnosis and hypnosis suggested on a
willing and co-operative subject by a clinician. The basic conditions for
entering hypnosis are fairly simple: it is just a matter of fixation of ones own
attention. As one concentrates on a single stimulus by gradually bracketing
most of the other afferent stimuli, attention becomes more and more invasive
and the waking state gets dramatically transformed: sense-perception is now
nuclear, while action becomes cataleptic and reason drifts from its judgmental
concern to get closer to affects. Discussing the related topic that is attention, a
major mystic of the XXth century—Simone Weil—puts it this way:
attention consists in the suspension of one’s thought, in
letting it available, empty and penetrable by the object; it
consists in keeping in oneself the proximity of thought and of the
various acquired knowledge that one is usually forced to use, but
at a lower level and without contact with it.67
What about the characteristics of this gradual relaxation or sleepiness?
Hypnotic wakefulness features indeed, as its etymology suggests, “many
affinities” (PP II 599) with ordinary sleep: muscular relaxation and
redistributed brain activity (patterns that remind us of paradoxical sleep as
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 279

disclosed in EEG and EMG), anæsthesia and/or hyperæsthesia (although not


genuinely sensorial), amnesia (while hypermnesia is possible), perceptive
distortions (including hallucinations), increased suggestibility (besides post-
hypnotic—i.e., deferred—suggestions) and the possibility of role-enactment
and of alteration of the personality.
But it features as well remarkable differences (that James would claim are
only of degree) with ordinary sleep; to outline them coherently, it is essential
to go through the four (non-necessary) steps to full hypnotic actualisation.
First, the induction of the hypnotic state occurs through perceptive fixedness;
fascination starts where ordinary perception stops. Second, the hypnotic state
installs indetermination: all customary differences can be abolished, paving
the way for confusion, blindness, loss of reference point and possibly feeling
of helplessness. Third, the positive side of the dispersed attitude of the
attention (PP II 599) is the opening of the possible: resting on this
indeterminate waiting, spring dissociations, withdrawal and hallucinations;
and with them the possibility of transforming one’s appraisal of life.
Everything can be reframed: percepts can be put in a wider context by
reverie, absence, or imagination. Fourth, the hypnotic trance displays itself as
enhanced vigilance, mobilised power, energy ready to implement action, i.e.,
to shape the world. All the acquired knowledge is gathered, actively taken in,
and one has them at one’s disposal. This explains why the hypnotherapist
suggests only what is possible for the patient, s/he reveals the power the
patient has on its own becoming.
Roustang concludes: “to understand something of paradoxical
wakefulness, we have to do violence to ourselves and—at a great expense—
invent in our culture a new cosmology and a new anthropology.”68 All the
consequences of the contiguum of the states of consciousness and of the
levels of beings, i.e., of bodies, have to be thought. This is exactly what
panexperientialism provides: one single onto-psychical field that allows, so to
speak, only unwillingly, the bifurcation of subject and object. Since there is
one organising and differentiating power endowed by many centre of forces,
the mesocosmic perception of an object by a subject ceases to be mysterious:
in pure experience, subject and object, subject and subject, grow together and
reciprocally (com-)prehend themselves.69 Each experience has both a physical
and a mental dimension that can be pulled apart only in abstraction. The
concreteness of experience, in other words, goes beyond the limited
perspectives of “physicality” and “mentality.” After many others, Deleuze has
suggested the metaphor of the fold to intuit how such a bimodal ontology is
possible; James provides us with a concept, and Whitehead with a cosmology.
280 Michel Weber

Bibliography
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Erickson. I, The Nature of Hypnosis and Suggestion; II, Hypnotic
Alteration of Sensory, Perceptual and Psychophysical Processes; III,
Hypnotic Investigation of Psychodynamic Processes; IV, Innovative
Hypnotherapy, New York, Irvington Publ., 1980.
Sherburne, Donald W. (ed.), A Key to Whitehead's « Process and Reality », New
York - London, The MacMillan Company, 1966.

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introduction by David Bradshaw, Hammersmith, HarperCollins,
1994.
Isl = Huxley, Aldous Leonard, Island. A Novel, London, Chatto & Windus,
1962.

ESP = Essays in Science and Philosophy, New York, Philosophical Library,


Inc., 1947. Reprint: London, Rider, 1948.
MT = Whitehead, Alfred North, Modes of Thought [Six lectures delivered in
Wellesley College, Mass., 1937-1938, and two lectures delivered in
the University of Chicago, 1933], New York, Macmillan, and
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1938. Reprint: New York,
The Free Press, 1968.
PR = Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology.
Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the
Session 1927–28. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin
and Donald W. Sherburne [1929], New York - London, The Free
Press. A division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. - Collier
Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
SMW = Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Lowell
Lectures, 1925, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1925;
Cambridge, Cambridge Universty Press, 1926. Reprint: New York,
The Free Press, 1967.
S = Whitehead, Alfred North, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (Barbour
Page Lectures, University of Virginia, 1927), New York, The
MacMillan Company, 1927. Reprints: Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1928.

Weber, Michel, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas


Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, Ontos Verlag, 2006.
Weber, Michel, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. Jamesian Applications, Frankfurt /
Paris, Ontos Verlag, 2011.
Weber, Michel, The Political Vindication of Radical Empiricism. With
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Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind,
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Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 281

Notes
1
A previous version of this paper has been published in Michel Weber and
William Desmond, Jr. (eds), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought,
Frankfurt / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, Process Thought X1 & X2, 2008, I, pp.
395-414.
2
Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion. With an Introduction by Prof.
William James, New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1898.
3
Aldous Leonard Huxley, Brave New World, 1932; With an introduction by
David Bradshaw, Hammersmith, HarperCollins, 1994; Island. A Novel,
London, Chatto & Windus, 1962. Hereafter, respectively BNW and Isl.
4
BNW 19.
5
“Sleep-teaching” (BNW 21, 24, 38, 91, 101, 234) or emotional-engineering
(BNW 58); “engineer into feeling” (BNW 163): (subliminal) conditioning
(BNW 214) and scientific propaganda. Non-rationality of the “words
without reason” (BNW 24; cf. 23).
6
BNW 38.
7
Isl 141.
8
Isl 21 & passim.
9
Isl 187.
10
Isl 203.
11
Isl 68-9, 132, 141, 150, 208-9, 220.
12
Isl 2, 32, 59, 93, 95, 123, 180, 203.
13
Isl 76, 221.
14
Isl 185.
15
Meaning “liberation, release”: it is a toadstool, mescaline-type of substance
that works holistically, unlike any pharmaceutical drug (Isl 135 sq., 168,
261, 263-286).
16
Cf., respectively, Isl 263 and Isl 269.
17
See A Pluralistic Universe’s concept of “non-rational.”
18
George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded
The Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (1854), New York,
Dover Publications, Inc., 1958, cf. Chapter XV, On the Aristotelian Logic,
pp. 174 sq.
19
Metaphysics Beta, 4.
20
Metaphysics Gamma, 3; Posterior Analytics I, 77a10-22.
21
Metaphysics Gamma, 7; Posterior Analytics I, 77a22-25.
22
Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, and New York, Macmillan, 1929. Reprint: New York,
282 Michel Weber

Macmillan Free Press, 1969. Corrected edition: Edited by David Ray Griffin
and Donald W. Sherburne, New York and London, The Free Press. A
division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. and Collier Macmillan
Publishers, 1978.
23
A careful analysis would be needed in both cases. On the one hand, the
development of Husserl’s concept of intentionality is complex and it
progressively leaves the scene for the concepts of temporality and
intersubjectivity (cf. J. English, Sur l'intentionnalité et ses modes, PUF, 2006,
pp. 155 sq. and Jean-Marie Breuvart, “Husserl et Whitehead, sur
l’Intentionnalité,” in Michel Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (sous la
direction de), Chromatikon III. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès—
Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires
de Louvain, 2007, pp. 45-56. On the other, Whitehead’s appeal to Bradley
in the Gifford context seems quite rhetorical.
24
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind [1971]. One-volume edition, San Diego,
New York, London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978.
25
David Ray Griffin and Huston Smith, Primordial Truth and Postmodern
Theology, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1989,
esp. pp. 90-91.
26
It is worth underlining that some Aristotelo-Thomists claim that the concept
of substance has to be interpreted in a processual manner: cf. James W.
Felt s. j., “Whitehead's Misconception of “Substance” in Aristotle,” Process
Studies, Vol. 14, N°4, 1985, pp. 224-236; Reto Luzius Fetz, Whitehead.
Prozeßdenken und Substanzmetaphysik, Freiburg und München, Verlag Karl
Alber, 1981; William Norris Clarke, s. j., The One and the Many. A
Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of
Notre Dame Press, 2001.
27
“Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by
discriminative attention, and, on the other, united with other totals,—
either through the agency of our own movements, carrying our senses
from one part of space to another, or because new objects come
successively and replace those by which we were at first impressed. The
'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are both
abstractions, never realized in experience. Experience, from the very first,
presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the
world which envelops them in space and time, and potentially divisible
into inward elements and parts. These objects we break asunder and
reunite. We must treat them in both ways for our knowledge of them to
grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which way preponderates. But
since the elements with which the traditional associationism performs its
constructions—'simple sensations,' namely—are all products of
discrimination carried to a high pitch, it seems as if we ought to discuss
the subject of analytic attention and discrimination first. The noticing of
any part whatever of our object is an act of discrimination.” (The Principles
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 283

of Psychology [1890]. Authorized Edition in two volumes, New York, Dover


Publications, 1950, I, p. 487.)
28
Cf. James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism [Posthumously published by Ralph
Barton Perry], New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912, p. 145 and our
next section.
29
“Through feelings we become acquainted with things, but only by our
thoughts do we know about them. Feelings are the germ and starting point
of cognition, thoughts the developed tree. The minimum of grammatical
subject, of objective presence, of reality known about, the mere beginning
of knowledge, must be named by the word that says the least. Such a
word is the interjection, as lo! there! ecco! voilà! or the article or
demonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, as the, it, that.” (The
Principles of Psychology, op. cit., I, p. 222)
30
From koinos, meaning “common,” “public.”
31
We borrow of course Bateson’s term: cf., e.g., “Culture Contact and
Schismogenesis,” Man XXXV, 1935, pp. 178-183, reprinted in Steps to an
Ecology of Mind, op. cit., pp. 61-72. See also Cornélius Castoriadis,
L'institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1975 (The
Imaginary Institution of Society, Translated by Kathleen Blamey,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press).
32
See infra our discussion of the status of hypnosis.
33
David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, Cambridge, The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 2005. The depth of Skrbina's scholarship in
this area is astonishing: the cumulative weight of his documentations
makes it impossible to deny the seriousness of panpsychism as a
philosophical position, and his erudition makes it impossible not to take
his own book seriously. His treatment of Whiteheadian panpsychism is
however a little bit weaker.
34
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 42.
35
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, New York, Macmillan Company and
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1933. Reprint: New York, The
Free Press, 1967, p. 226; cf. p. 222 and of course James’ Principles of
Psychology, op. cit., I, 232.
36
The idea of slips of the tongue developed on Freud’s observation of aphasic
errors, though he considered the account of aphasic errors irrelevant to the
more colorful interpretations of the slips.
37
Jason W. Brown, forthcoming, ch 8.
38
“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without
concepts are blind.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781], trans. Norman
Kemp Smith, N.Y., St. Martins, 1965), A 51/B 75.
39
William James, Pluralistic Universe, 348, cf. p. 217.
284 Michel Weber

40
Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, New York, Simon
and Schuster, 1956, pp. 38-39.
41
William James, Principles of Psychology, 488.
42
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific
Method in Philosophy. Delivered as Lowell Lectures in Boston, in March and
April 1914, Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Co., 1914. Whitehead,
Alfred North, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge [C.
U. P., 1919], sec. ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1925. Cf.
Whitehead, Alfred North, « La Théorie relationniste de l'espace » [Paris,
Congress on mathematical philosophy, April 1914], Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale, vol. XXIII, Paris, 1916, pp. 423-454.
43
H. Bergson alludes to these messages when he speaks of “sensations de
‘toucher intérieur’ émanant de tous les points de l’organisme, et plus
particulièrement des viscères.” (Henri Bergson, L’Énergie spirituelle, p. 91;
in Œuvres, p. 883.)
44
Articular capsule, periosteum, tendons, joints, muscles house sensitive
corpuscles and nerve endings similar to the skin’s one. See Sir Charles
Scott Sherrington’s The Integrative Action of the Nervous System [1906]
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1947, pp. 132-133) and his Man
on his Nature. The Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh 1937-1938 (Cambridge, At the
University Press, 1940, p. 309.)
45
PR 121 ; cf. PR 118, 122, 141, AI 189, MT 29; cf. Emmet, Dorothy M., “A.
N. Whitehead: The Last Phase,” Mind, 57, London, 1948, pp. 265-274.
46
This criteriology is inspired by William James’ Varieties of Religious
Experience. A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural
Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902, New York, London,
Bombay, and Calcutta, Longman, Green, and Co., 1902, pp. 15-19.
47
Cf., e.g., the Glasgow Coma Scale, that is based on motor responsiveness,
verbal performance, and eye opening to appropriate stimuli: G. Teasdale
and B. Jennet, “Assessment of coma and impaired consciousness: a
practical scale,” Lancet 2, 1974, pp. 81-84.
48
Eugene I. Taylor [Reconstructed by], William James on Exceptional Mental
States. The 1896 Lowell Lectures, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons,
(Amherst, University of Massachussetts Press, 1984), 1982.
49
James Ward, “Psychology,” in Thomas Spencer Baynes (ed.), Enclycopædia
Britannica, 9th ed., 1886, vol. XX, pp. 37-85. & Johann Friedrich Herbart,
Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neugegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und
Mathematik [1824].
50
Cf. our “La conscience spectrale chez James et Whitehead,” in Guillaume
Garreta et Mathias Girel (dir.), William James et l’empirisme radical. 1904-
2004, Éditions du CNRS, forthcoming.
51
“The subjective aim […] is at intensity of feeling (a) in the immediate
subject, and (b) in the relevant future.” (PR 27) “Each occasion exhibits its
Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action 285

measure of creative emphasis in proportion to its measure of subjective


intensity.” (PR 47)
52
Cf., e.g., PR 177.
53
The rational discrimination, save the hierarchisation, of impersonnal and
personnal mystical experiences is a problem that would send us straight
back to Aquinas and Echardus.
54
A more detailed argument can be found in M. Weber, “James’s Mystical
Body in the Light of the Transmarginal Field of Consciousness,” in Sergio
Franzese & Felicitas Krämer (eds.), Fringes of Religious Experience. Cross-
perspectives on William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, Frankfurt /
Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2007, pp. 7-37.
55
“Seek simplicity and distrust it.” (The Concept of Nature [1920], Cambridge
University Press, 1964, p. 163) “Exactness is a fake.” (“Immortality,” in
Essays in Science and Philosophy, 1947, p. 96.)
56
Arvind Sharma, The Experiential Dimension of Advaita Vedanta, Delhi,
Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1993.
57
The term “microgenesis” was originally coined to render Heinz Werner’s
1956 Aktualgenese, referring to the process by which a mental state is
formed in the present moment. Cf. Michel Weber, “Alfred North
Whitehead's onto-epistemology of perception,” New Ideas in Psychology,
24, 2006, pp. 117-132.
58
Jason W. Brown, The Self-Embodying Mind. Process, Brain Dynamics, and the
Conscious Present [Revised and expanded version of Self and Process, Brain
States and the Conscious Present, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1991],
Barrytown, Station Hill, 2002, p. 9; cf. p. 123.
59
William James, “Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’ “[1909], in Essays
in Psychical Research. Fred. H. Burkhardt, gen. ed.; Fredson Bowers, text.
ed.; Ignas K. Skrupskelis, ass. ed., Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University
Press, 1986, pp. 361-375.
60
Griffin proposed the concept of “panexperientialism” in 1977 to name
Whitehead’s attitude: cf. David Ray Griffin, “Whitehead’s Philosophy and
Some General Notions of Physics and Biology,” in John B. Cobb, Jr. &
David Ray Griffin (eds.), Mind in Nature. Essays on the Interface of Science
and Philosophy, Washington D. C., University Press of America, 1977. For
a more recent discussion, see David Ray Griffin (ed.), Founders of
Constructive Postmodern Philosophy. op. cit.
61
James, William, The Principles of Psychology, op. cit., Volume One, p. 149.
62
Cf. Alfred Binet, La psychologie du raisonnement. Recherches expérimentales
par l'hypnotisme, Paris, Éditions Alcan, Bibliothèque de philosophie
contemporaine, 1886; Pierre Janet, L’automatisme psychologique, Paris,
Éditions Alcan, 1889.
63
Cf. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 115, 125, 233-5, 240-241, 269-270,
401, 413, 484, 501, 516.
286 Michel Weber

64
See especially François Roustang’s Qu'est-ce que l'hypnose? (Paris, Éditions
de Minuit, 1994).
65
The concept, of course present in PP, has been recently reboosted by Boris
Cyrulnik (cf., e.g., his L’ensorcellement du monde, Paris, Éditions Odile
Jacob, 1997).
66
“On peut seulement affirmer que c'est au niveau de l'affect, c'est-à-dire de
la réalité la plus évidente, puisqu'elle est de l'ordre du vécu, et la plus
difficile à comprendre. […] C'est un quatrième état de l'organisme,
actuellement non objectivable (à l'inverse des trois autres: veille, sommeil,
rêve: une sorte de potentialité naturelle, de dispositif inné prenant ses
racines jusque dans l'hypnose animale, caractérisé par des traits qui
renvoient apparemment aux relations pré-langagières d'attachement de
l'enfant et se produisant dans des situations où l'individu est perturbé dans
ses rapports avec l'environnement. L'hypnose garde sa spécificité par
rapport à la suggestion, bien que celle-ci, sous quelque forme qu'elle se
manifeste, soit nécessaire à la production de celle-là. La suggestion nous
apparaît ainsi comme la relation primaire, fondamentale entre deux êtres,
la matrice, le creuset dans lequel viendront s'inscrire toutes les relations
ultérieures. Nous dirons encore qu'elle est une entité psycho-socio-
biologique indissociable, agissant à un niveau inconscient très archaïque,
pré-langagier, pré-sexuel, et médiatisant l'influence affective que tout
individu exerce sur un autre.” (Léon Chertock, L'Hypnose. Théorie, pratique
et technique. Préface de Henry Ey. Édition remaniée et augmentée [1959],
Paris, Éditions Payot, 1989, pp. 260-261; see also Isabelle Stengers et Léon
Chertok, Le Cœur et la Raison. L'hypnose en question, de Lavoisier à Lacan,
Paris, Éditions Payot, Sciences de l'homme, 1989.
67
“L’attention consiste à suspendre sa pensée, à la laisser disponible, vide et
pénétrable à l’objet, à maintenir en soi-même la proximité de la pensée,
mais à un niveau inférieur et sans contact avec elle, les diverses
connaissances acquises qu’on est forcé d’utiliser.” (Simone Weil, Attente de
Dieu, Paris, La Colombe, Éditions du vieux colombier, 1957, pp. 76-77.)
68
“Pour comprendre quelque chose de la veille paradoxale, il faut nous faire
violence et inventer dans notre culture, à grands frais, une nouvelle
cosmologie et une nouvelle anthropologie.” (Qu'est-ce que l'hypnose?, op.
cit., pp. 98-99)
69
“Grâce à cette puissance qui organise et différencie, représentée par
l'anticipation, toute une série de faux problèmes tombent d'eux-mêmes. Il
n'y a plus à se demander comment un sujet peut percevoir un objet,
puisque l'un et l'autre grandissent ensemble et s'appréhendent dans une
action réciproque, ni comment un humain peut en comprendre un autre,
puisqu'ils n'existent dès l'origine que par cette compréhension, ni
comment peuvent se tisser entre eux des interrelations: l'identification et
le lien affectif n'ont dû être inventés que par la supposition erronée que les
individus d'abord confondus, ont été ensuite séparés.” (Qu'est-ce que
l'hypnose?, op. cit., p. 87)
How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Processual Self
Karen Yan1

Abstract
In this paper, I first distinguish two major metaphysical frameworks regarding
selves. One is a dualistic framework with the individuality assumption (DI).
The other is an anti-dualistic framework with the anti-individuality assumption
(Anti-DI). I present a case study from modeling practices in systems sciences
(e.g., systems biology and neuroscience), and argue that these practices
assume process ontology and call for a scientific concept of processual self. I
then argue that, for those who aim to develop a scientific metaphysical view
of selves based on the perspective of systems science, Anti-DI is a more
promising conceptual framework than DI. Finally, I conclude with my
analyses on how to use Anti-DI to develop a scientific concept of processual
self. Specifically, I show that why the individuality assumption should be
abandoned, and how to replace it with dynamical analyses of the
processuality of selves.

1. Two Major Metaphysical Frameworks


When it comes to employing a metaphysical framework to develop a position
with respect to the phenomena we call selves, there are two options.1 One is
what I call a dualistic framework with the individuality assumption (DI). The
other is what I call an anti-dualistic framework with the anti-individuality
assumption (Anti-DI).
Proponents of DI assume a dualistic framework to start their philosophical
analyses, typically involving the duality between the physical and the non-
physical or between the object and the subject. Moreover, their analyses are
also accompanied by the individuality assumption according to which the
identity condition of an individual can be determined in virtue of a fixed set of
non-temporal properties. For example, one could hold the view that the self is
a physical individual and its individuality is constituted by a fixed set of
specific non-temporal and physical properties that are intrinsic to its
existence. Or one could hold the view that the self is a non-physical individual
and its individuality is constituted by a fixed set of specific non-temporal and
non-physical properties that are intrinsic to its existence.

1
Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, National Yang-Ming
University (Taiwan).
288 Karen Yan

In contrast, proponents of Anti-DI assume a non-dualistic framework to


conduct their philosophical analyses, typically by abandoning the duality
between the physical and the non-physical or between the object and the
subject (or at least give them a non-primary status in their analyses). Instead,
they usually utilize notions of process or structure to analyze what selves are.
Moreover, they can, or perhaps should, abandon the individuality assumption
when they analyze what selves are. When they analyze the constitutional
condition(s) of a self, they need not assume that there is a fixed set of non-
temporal properties that are intrinsic to the existence of the self. In other
words, the constitutional conditions of a self are contingent, and the
constitutional relation is partly temporal. This view defies an entrenched
philosophical intuition about the necessity and atemporality of what
constitution is.
In this paper, I aim to argue that, if one aims to develop a scientific
metaphysical view of selves based on biological sciences, Anti-DI is a more
promising conceptual framework than DI. In section 2, I will first raise a
methodological question with respect to the current trend of using biological
sciences to investigate what selves are. I will use this to motivate why it is
important to investigate how to develop a scientific concept of self and its
underlying ontological assumptions.

2. How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Self


In the past two decades, there is a growing body of literature on how to
approach the issues about selves from the perspectives of biological sciences.
For example, Tauber (1997) approaches the issues from immunology. LeDoux
(2003) and Bechtel (2008) use recourses from neuroscience and molecular
biology. Damasio (2012) employs research from cognitive neuroscience. But
this trend of using resources from biological sciences to investigate selves
reveals a deeper methodological question. Biological sciences have their own
methodologies that govern how scientific concepts are employed and how
scientific reasoning is conducted. When scientists approach the issues about
selves, they have to employ a scientific concept of self in order to embed that
concept within a particular context of scientific inquiry, such as the context of
immunological research or neuroscientific research. If there is no appropriate
scientific concept of self to use, scientists have to construct one according to
some scientific criteria in order to employ it scientifically. Given this,
scientists cannot just directly employ philosophical concepts of self to conduct
their scientific research. They surely can be inspired by various philosophical
concepts of self, but when they employ any concept in their scientific
reasoning and modeling, those concepts must comply with some scientific
How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Processual Self 289

criteria, such as some kind of manipulability and predictability criteria. For


example, if one is employing immunology to investigate selves, one cannot
just employ a Cartesian concept of self to conduct scientific research. This is
because almost all philosophical concepts of self presuppose some specific
ontological assumptions that might contradict with the ontological
assumptions in immunology. This is why there is a deeper methodological
question that both scientists and philosophers have to address first. To
formulate that methodological question more precisely, it is a question about
how to choose or construct a scientific concept of self that satisfies a specific
set of scientific criteria governing a given context of scientific modeling and
reasoning.
That said, in section 3, I will first analyze a case study in order to
demonstrate an important methodological shift in biological sciences. I will
then point out what ontological implication this shift implies. In section 4,
having identified this ontological implication, I will argue that developing a
scientific concept of self using Anti-DI is a more promising strategy for
philosophers and biological scientists.

3. A Case Study from Systems Science: A Methodological Shift and


an Ontological Assumption
Biological scientists have been known for their reductionistic tendency
throughout the 20th century. But philosophers of science offer different
interpretations of this tendency. Some philosophers interpret the tendency
ontologically in the sense that those scientists aim to ontologically reduce the
non-biological entities to the biological entities (Churchland 1988; Bickle
2003). But some interpret it methodologically in the sense that they aim to
decompose a complex system into different sub-units in order to study them
in a detailed way (Richardson and Bechtel 1993; Wimsatt 2006). Moreover,
according to this methodological interpretation of the reductionistic tendency,
decomposing a complex system is only a first crucial step of biological
research. Both philosophers of science and scientists start recognizing the
importance of recomposition, that is, recomposing the decomposed units in
order to reproduce the phenomenon of interest (Bechtel and Abrahamsen
2013). Philosophers of science and scientists start realizing that the mode of
recomposing offers an indispensable understanding of how a complex system
produces the phenomenon of interest. The following case study shows exactly
how biological scientists shift their modeling perspective from decomposing
to recomposing.
The case study is about various modeling practices aiming at
understanding the phenomena called circadian rhythms. They are
290 Karen Yan

endogenously generated oscillations with a period of roughly 24 hours and are


found in various physiological and metabolic processes (Ueda, et al. 2005,
187). Scientists had first adopted a decomposing strategy to investigate
circadian rhythms. They decomposed the relevant biological systems into sub-
units. For example, researchers first located the critical mechanism
underlying circadian rhythms within individual cells. Then Konopka and
Benzer (1971) discovered a gene (period or per) within individual cells. As
more and more details are produced by applying decomposing strategies,
Hardin et al. (1990) proposed a detailed mechanistic model that involves the
per gene, per mRNA and the protein PER. Zhang and Kay (2010) later propose
a more complex mechanistic model that involves multiple interacting
feedback loops. But scientists start realizing that, even as detailed as Zhang
and Kay’s model, they still lack crucial information about how the oscillations
with a period of 24 hours are produced. As Bechtel (2015) points out, this is
because the previous models do not capture the temporal organization of the
relevant system. And, in order to capture that, Bechtel emphasizes that
modelers have to conduct their modeling from the perspective of systems
science, i.e., using a recomposing strategy to model how elements interacting
with each other produce a system-level phenomenon. By using the
recomposing strategy, Ueda et al. (2005) propose a graph-theoretic model that
captures some temporal organization of the mechanism. Their modeling
strategy provides a new understanding of how the oscillations with a period of
24 hours are produced.
This shift in modeling methodology also reflects an important change of
the ontological assumption underlying the modeling activities in biological
sciences. When scientists change from a decomposing strategy to a
recomposing strategy, they move from modeling the details of each specific
element to modeling the interactions among them. This brings out their
implicit ontological assumption about the relation between the system-level
phenomenon of interest and the mechanism underlying the phenomenon of
interest. The assumption is that the phenomenon is constituted at least partly
by the temporal organization of the mechanism. This ontological commitment
amounts to the commitment that the phenomenon is a processual existent
with an intrinsic temporal organization. It is worth emphasizing that when
scientists adopt a recomposing strategy, they have made their ontological
commitment practically in the sense that their commitment is made by
conducting modeling practices in a certain way (Chang, 2011). To commit to
something practically is different from committing to something discursively.
The commitment is made by performing activities in a certain way, not in
virtue of a set of descriptive statements. In fact, it is possible that agents could
make the commitment practically without being aware of it in a discursive
way.
How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Processual Self 291

Also inspired by the perspective of systems science, some philosophers


(Maturana and Varela 1980; Varela 1994; Thompson 2007) and biologists
(Ruiz-Mirazo, Peretó, and Moreno 2004, 330) work out detailed ontological
views of biological organisms. Their views all rely on the idea that biological
systems are spontaneously active or autonomous in the sense that they
organize, maintain, and constitute themselves with their activities
continuously. This idea centers on the processual nature of biological systems.
Because of the limitation of space, I will not go through details of their views,
but provide a simplified version of how they view biological systems as
follows:
Spontaneously active (or autonomous) biological systems are constituted
by a set of activities:
1) Endogenously generated activities
2) Exogenous activities
3) Interacting activities between 1) & 2) & Environment
4) At least multiple ways of expressing a basic system-level dynamics
According to this simplified version, it is clear that these philosophers and
biologists support the idea that the modeling practices in systems science
should assume a processual ontology, i.e., a system is constituted by a set of
activities and has an intrinsic temporal organization.

4. How to Use Anti-DI to Develop a Scientific Concept of


Processual Self
The above section shows that modeling practices in biological science start
shifting to the perspective of systems science. And my analysis shows that
this shift implies that either system-level phenomena of interest or biological
systems themselves are processual entities. In this section, I aim to argue
that, if one aims to develop a scientific metaphysical view of selves based on
the perspective of systems science, Anti-DI is a more promising conceptual
framework than DI.
Recall that Anti-DI is a non-dualistic framework in the sense that it
abolishes the duality between the physical and the non-physical or between
the object and the subject. Instead, Anti-DI utilizes notions of process or
structure to analyze what selves are. Moreover, it can, or perhaps should,
abandon the individuality assumption when they analyze what selves are. In
what follows, I will first suggest that when one uses the perspective of
systems science to develop a scientific concept of self, one should utilize
notions of processes as systems biologists have done. I will then suggest that
when one develops a scientific metaphysics of selves based on modeling work
from systems science, one should abandon the individuality assumption.
292 Karen Yan

First, from the perspective of systems science, a scientific concept of self


should be a concept of some sorts of processes, not structures. The difference
between the two turns on whether some temporal organizations are intrinsic
to structures or not. A structure with intrinsic temporal organizations is a
process. In other words, a process is a dynamic structure. Without capturing
how a structural dimension changes over time, one does not capture a
dynamic structure as it is. And in order to capture a dynamic structure, there
are two important steps. The first step is to find ways of modeling the
relevant structural dimension. This is where the duality in DI is abolished. In
principle, the structural dimension can involve existents at multiple scales.
For example, a molecule, a fiber connection (i.e., an anatomical structure), a
neuron, and an action potential (i.e., a process) together can constitute a
structural dimension. Thus, using structural modeling techniques, such as
structural equation modeling, there is not need to assume any sort of
ontological duality. The second step is to employ some kind of dynamical
analysis to analyze how the modeled structural dimension changes over time,
to identify its dynamic pattern. It is worth noting that, though this pattern is in
a sense another form of structure, it is a second-order structure, a structure
that has an intrinsic temporal organization. This is the dynamic structure one
has to capture when one models a process.
Second, in order to develop a scientific metaphysics of selves based on
modeling work from systems science, one should abandon the individuality
assumption that is inconsistent with processual ontology. The individuality
assumption involves the principle of individuation that is deeply entrenched
in analytical metaphysics. The assumption is that, for any existent, there is a
fixed set of non-temporal properties that can be used to individuate it. This
fixed set of properties is generally called intrinsic properties in the sense that
they atemporally constitute what an existent is. Because of this entrenched
intuition in analytic metaphysics, the notion of being intrinsic ties closely with
a fixed set of non-temporal properties. But, as the above analysis of dynamic
structure shows, the notion of being intrinsic can be dissociated from having a
fixed set of properties. For a dynamical existent, its ontological nature is its
patterns of change in its structural dimension. Though a second-order
structural analysis, such as dynamical system theory, can be used to capture
the relevant patterns of change, one should not conflate this second-order
dynamical structure with a fixed set of intrinsic properties as it is construed in
analytical metaphysics. One can hold that this second-order dynamical
structure is intrinsic to a dynamical being, but this structure on its own is not
sufficient for individuating the dynamical being again at another time period
that is different from the period in which one perform one’s dynamical
analysis. Given its dynamic nature, it is inconsistent to assume that this
dynamic being will hold the same dynamic patterns throughout its entire
How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Processual Self 293

period of existence. Without this assumption, one cannot merely use the
modeled dynamic pattern at the period P1 to individuate the modeled being at
the period P2.
Given this, one is probably left wondering that if there is no fixed set of
non-temporal properties that can be used to individuate an existent, how can
one provide an identity condition for it? One of the important lessons to be
learned from adopting processual ontology is that the identity condition is not
fixed, but something developed, learned, established, or earned via processes.
The identity condition thus becomes an achievement, not a criterion for
identification. This fundamental difference in identity condition between
processual ontology and static ontology is usually overlooked. One should
carefully examine whether one falls back to the individuality assumption and
the accompanying idea of the fixed identity condition qua a criterion for
identification. By adopting processual ontology, one has to hold onto the idea
that individuating a dynamic pattern can help one understand a dynamic
being, but this dynamic pattern cannot be an identity condition qua the
criterion of individuation for the entire period of existence of the dynamic
being. The identity condition itself is a dynamic condition. It can evolve, and
it has to be earned, not given. Thus, a dynamical modeling can help one
understand the identity condition achieved by a dynamical being at a given
period of time. And this is as good as it gets given its dynamic nature and the
limitation of our cognitive capacities.

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Theoretic Representations.” In Explanation in Biology: An Enquiry
into the Diversity of Explanatory Patterns in the Life Sciences, edited
by Pierre-Alain Braillard and Christophe Malaterre, 11:199–225.
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Churchland, Paul M. 1988. Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary


Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. MIT Press.
Damasio, Antonio R. 2012. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious
Brain. Vintage.
Hardin, P. E., J. C. Hall, and M. Rosbash. 1990. “Feedback of the Drosophila
Period Gene Product on Circadian Cycling of Its Messenger RNA
Levels.” Nature 343 (6258): 536–40.
Konopka, R. J., and S. Benzer. 1971. “Clock Mutants of Drosophila
Melanogaster.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America 68 (9): 2112–16.
LeDoux, Joseph. 2003. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.
Penguin.
Maturana, H. R., and F. J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The
Realization of the Living. Springer Science & Business Media.
Ruiz-Mirazo, Kepa, Juli Peretó, and Alvaro Moreno. 2004. “A Universal
Definition of Life: Autonomy and Open-Ended Evolution.” Origins
of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 34 (3): 323–46.
Tauber, Alfred I. 1997. The Immune Self: Theory Or Metaphor? Cambridge
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of Mind. Harvard University Press.
Ueda, Hiroki R., Satoko Hayashi, Wenbin Chen, Motoaki Sano, Masayuki
Machida, Yasufumi Shigeyoshi, Masamitsu Iino, and Seiichi
Hashimoto. 2005. “System-Level Identification of Transcriptional
Circuits Underlying Mammalian Circadian Clocks.” Nature Genetics
37 (2): 187–92.
Varela, Francisco J. 1994. “A Cognitive View of the Immune System.” World
Futures 42 (1-2): 31–40.
Wimsatt, William C. 2006. “Reductionism and Its Heuristics: Making
Methodological Reductionism Honest.” Synthese 151 (3): 445–75.
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Biology 11 (11): 764–76.

Notes

1
The author thanks Dr J. Brown for his generous hospitality.
Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance
Denys Zhadiaiev1

Abstract
One of the most important concepts in process philosophy is that of ‘balance,’
an aspect of which can be explained in the context of aesthetics. In particular,
aesthetics represents not only something real out there in the world, but an
ideal which we might recognize in it. In some way, aesthetics balances real
and unreal (truth and beauty). Moreover, the sense of beauty is often a kind of
drive for moral behavior. That is why, perhaps, Whitehead, considered this
aspect of reality, such as aesthetics, as central in his philosophy. Whitehead,
like the other philosopher-mathematician Leibniz, presumed harmony among
all elements in the universe. The concept of harmony which he used in
Adventures of Ideas is closely connected in its meaning to the concept of
balance in Process and Reality. No philosophical system can be considered
complete if any category dominates another. So, without understanding
balance we cannot conceive process philosophy as a complete system. The
point is that aesthetics can give more than language, for language sometimes
brings distortions in which words dominate feelings. That is why it is so
difficult to argue about any kind of pre-established harmony or balance. It
seems the only opportunity to “explain” balance is to manifest it for both
feelings and thought (again, for two opposed concepts at a time). In our view,
we cannot metaphysically explain balance in the universe unless we borrow
from aesthetics. If so, we have to develop supplementary methods of
explanation (visual, tactile etc.) of reasons that lead us towards an ecological
civilization that is more equal and just.

1. Introduction 
We are talking here about the balance itself, regardless of the abstract
character of this notion. When in the history of philosophy something has
been said about balance or harmony, it normally presupposes mental
operations —Xenophanes (of Colophon), Parmenides, Zeno (of Elea),
Leibniz— and absence of change. So far as everything is equal, there is no
change. But the lack of any change is a feature of the abstract world, not of
the real one where we have been born, grown, and will perish. The particular

1
Department of Philosophy, State HEI “National Mining University,”
Dnipropetrovsk, 49600 Ukraine.
296 Denys Zhadiaiev

character of existence of our children, for example, is the reason of their


importance for us and the reason to cherish them properly. However, on the
other hand, for the abstract notion of the state our children are merely
abstract statistics. But it is easy to comprehend that the abstract meanings of
the words such as “state” and “children” are only half of the truth. Our
children would never survive if they were sheer statistics. So far as the state is
each of us, it is not an abstract being (otherwise it would cease to exist). So,
both abstract and particular characters are just halves of one truth, or
opposite categories of one being. But in order to speak about this truth as a
whole we are inevitably inclined only to one of the halves —abstractive
character is a widely accepted way to explain something in any paper. This is
the difficulty we should keep in mind. 
Process Philosophy employs the crucial concept of ‘balance.’ One of the
aspects of balance can be explained in the contexts of aesthetics. In
particular, aesthetics helps because it represents not only something real in
the world, but an ideal which we may or may not recognize in it. In some
way, aesthetics balances real and unreal (truth and beauty). Moreover, the
sense of beauty is a kind of drive for moral behavior in some cases. That is
why, perhaps, Whitehead, considered this aspect of reality, aesthetics, one
that was central to his philosophy. 
Whitehead, like the other philosopher-mathematician Leibniz, presumed
harmony among all elements in the universe. The concept of harmony which
he used in Adventures of Ideas is closely connected in meaning to the concept
of balance in Process and Reality. No philosophical system can be considered
complete if any of the categories is dominant. Without understanding
balance, we cannot conceive process philosophy as an entire system. 

2. Conceptual Taxonomy
“The new occasion, even apart from its own spontaneous
mentality, is thus confronted by basic disharmony in the actual
world from which it springs. This is fortunate. For otherwise
actuality would consist in a cycle of repetition, realizing only a
finite group of possibilities. This was the narrow, stuffy doctrine
of some ancient thinkers” (Whitehead 1933, 333-334). 
Alfred North Whitehead, in Adventures of Ideas uses another term instead of
“balance,” which corresponds to the general definition. This is “harmony.” As
with many other thinkers, in his latest books he specifies more precisely some
of his ideas. In particular, balance is explained not only as a notion (if it is only
a notion it will contradict itself. Balance in its metaphysical meaning should
mean not only notion, but part of the actuality which we are about to apply).
By the similar notion of “harmony,” Whitehead means a balance expressed in
Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance 297

an analytical way, namely, balance without reference to reality or the physical


pole. “Harmony” is that kind of truth which is one-sided (propositional, not
actual) and this kind of differentiation arises from the format of our
argumentation —the possibilities not of an actual world with its cause and
effect. In order to compare this concept to realityi he develops a system of
different notions, explicated in the table below: 

BALANCE is defined in terms of:
BEAUTY is defined in terms of:
HARMONY is defined in terms of:
SUBJECTIVE FORM is defined in terms of:
STRENGTH
massiveness intensity
variety of detail (qualitative variety) comparative magnitude
clear foreground background (low intensity)
appearance ii
reality

Whitehead defines beauty in three stages:


Beauty as actual occasions which are “completely real things in the
Universe,” an absence of mutual inhibition among the various prehensions (as
an analysis, or definition of the beautiful, of actual occasions).
A contribution of the parts (objective content) to the whole (subjective
form of the complete occasion);
As an objective content (from which the actual occasion originates) and
spontaneity:
“Thus the immediate occasion from the spontaneity of its
own essence must supply the missing determination for the
synthesis of subjective form. Thus the future of the Universe,
though conditioned by the immanence of its past, awaits for its
complete determination the spontaneity of the novel individual
occasions as in their season they come into being” (Whitehead
1933, 328).
In order to explain this Whiteheadian division, we could classify it as
conjunction of dialectics as an interaction of two contrasts where the
domination of one leads to mutual annihilation or, on the other side, equal
coexistence leads to mutual progress (‘a’ and ‘b’) and temporality or
irreversibility (‘c’). An example of the first two (‘a’ and ‘b’) could be our
aforementioned interplay between both aspects of a state as an abstract idea
and particular persons (each of us) and children for the state which are being
considered as abstract statistics, and the very meaning of parental life which
could be defined only in terms of their particularity. Also, Whitehead calls
298 Denys Zhadiaiev

“various prehensions “positive” and “negative” prehensions. The third (‘c’)


point could be explained as an interchange between generations in the same
state or—what is the same—different needs of one person who grows from
childhood to adult age when earlier aspirations are gradually substantiated by
quite different and unpredictable experience. Love, for example, cannot be
planned, ordered. The novelty (which seemed initially as a kind of disorder,
eventually is order of a higher degree or qualitatively different order) always
takes place.
The interaction of these three elements has been summarized by
Whitehead in the next paragraph:
“In an individual experience there are three ways of dealing
with this disharmony of the world as given for initial prehension.
Two of these ways have been discussed under the general term
‘inhibition’. One way is termed ‘Anaesthesia’, and is the way of
mere negative prehension. The other way is by positive
realization with the positive feeling of discordance. In this case,
the elimination of the sheer incompatibility is accompanied by a
positive feeling of acute disruption of affective tone. This
experience is the prehension of a qualitative datum which also
imposes itself conformally on the subjective form. The third way
depends on another principle, that a readjustment of the relative
intensities of incompatible feelings can in some cases reduce
them to compatibilities. This possibility arises when the clash in
affective tones is a clash of intensities, and is not a sheer logical
incompatibility of qualities. Thus, two systems of prehensions
may each be internally harmonious; but the two systems in the
unity of one experience may be discordant, when the two
intensities of their subjective forms are comparable in
magnitude” (Whitehead 1933, 334).
Of course, these lines require more detailed consideration, but our main aim
is to compare this idea to aesthetics. A.N. Whitehead explains that perfection
or beauty can be achieved, but when perfection repeats itself it decays into
discordance. Sheer repetitions (like in mathematical forms) are meaningless.
That is why the ideals of Ancient Greek civilization unfortunately vanished. Of
course, an ideal is something unchangeable (it is an idea), but the sense of
beauty requires a kind of freshness: “Logicians are not called in to advise
artists” (Whitehead 1933, 336). That is why the “future saves the world” from
the one-sided domination of determinism. If parents of a child (past,
determinism) were not good persons that fact does not mean that their child
should not be better than they were.
In this regard, Whitehead makes a shift in determination of “evil.”
Normally in European culture the notion of “destruction” was associated with
the notion of “evil.” If this supposition is absolute truth, the child should be a
living example of evil that first, destroys the mother’s organism, breaks
Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance 299

laptops, bites mobile phones etc. Indeed, according to the third principle (‘c’)
temporality means that only
‘destruction as a dominant fact in the experience’ is the
correct definition of evil. (Whitehead 1933, 333)
So, dominance of negative prehension provokes so-called “Anaesthesia” and
dim experience of different feelings which inhibit one another fraught with
the “discordance.”

3. Aspects of Balance in Literature


It is interesting to note that these definitions are comparatively similar to
another aesthetical term, namely, the concept of “tragedy.” In literature, we
may find a definition that tragedy happens when a person knows that the
circumstances are enormously stronger than the efforts of that person to
overcome them, but the person, at the same time, continues to struggle not
recognizing the dominance of the whole. The person does not inhibit the ideal
and keeps going. Then, as illustrated in Greek myths or in European literature,
something new and unpredictable happens (sometimes, it happens in
contrast to logic and commonplace), a novelty, events that initially seemed to
crush planned results for one side (who thought logically and consistently in
terms of so-called “common sense”) and a kind of evil, but good for another
side, which followed their intuition in contrast to logic. This kind of “aesthetic
destruction” or “discordant feelings” is not only a retreat from perfection, but
also a wind of change, a fresh blow of the air. Also, this corresponds to our
concept of chaos:
“a complex datum is ‘objectively discordant’ when among
the type of percipients in question it will normally produce
discordant feelings” (Whitehead 1933, 330).
This analysis may seem a bit too sophisticated so far as it has a highly
abstract interpretation. However, this character is not failure, but an
advantage of philosophical discussion. The philosopher, in comparison to the
artist, scientist or prophet gives no fruits. He suggests tiny metaphysical
flowers from which a reader gets concrete, robust fruits of his own
experience. So to speak, philosophy does not misplace a reader’s experience
by other illustrations. The philosopher does not pretend to replace the
reader’s feelings by his own. That is why philosophical texts have their
peculiar attraction although they are difficult to comprehend in ordinary
consciousness. This is another example of balance. The balance here could be
represented in both the writer’s activity and the reader’s experience. The first
is conceptual, the second is emotional. The contrast and compatibility are
300 Denys Zhadiaiev

stronger than we may find them in art. Art is emotional in an artist’s activity
and in the connoisseur’s experience, but this twofold activity (or experience)
has no contrast. Probably, this is the reason we cannot observe one picture or
listen to one melody more than a half an hour (however lovely it might seem
to us), but we can read philosophy and take even more time to consider
philosophical issues —there is no conflict of abstract concepts by personal,
emotional experience. They rather enrich each other when the reader
compares his experience with the author’s intellectual scheme. Meanwhile the
concreteness of music and pictures produce an inhibition where we are struck
with a one-sidedness of concreteness of experience and perceive the flesh of
art which definitely differs from the ideal. And the more we peer into it, the
more obvious it appears. I am sure that most of us who liked a melody and
then saw a video clip to that melody have been disappointed by a producer’s
vision that designed it for the music.
So, going back to the role played by the philosopher and the concept of
balance, we should note that the third (‘c’) idea has been similarly expressed
by Kant in his Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?, where he
argues that no epoch should define a state of mind or dictate a culture and
manners for further epochs. He formulates the idea of novelty and relative
character of experience in the way that Whitehead does. The only difference
is the notion of experience in cosmology of Kant and in Whitehead. There is
only physical data which are real components of experience and a condition
to acquire knowledge. The other thoughts (not based and confirmed by
experience or physical data) are just beliefs. Kant does admit that we can
experience emotions, beliefs, our expectations for the future and so on, but
have no experience of belief, emotion, death etc. For Whitehead experience is
both physical and mental. The difference of Kantian and Whiteheadean
approaches could be illustrated as a road that has a particular distance, for
Kantian thought has and will have the same length, but the same road used
by a man who walks on it to his beloved mistress becomes shorter or longer
owing to his emotions: he is not interested in the proper length measured in
inches, so for different passers-by distance might be derived from the purpose
they used that road.
This definition of beauty Whitehead suggests is well-suited not only for
tragic events but to the path of the philosopher. Philosophers know that they
will probably never achieve the truth. Common sense would not suggest we
walk a hopeless path. But irony and careful introspection also say that we also
do not know that there is no answer at all. So, neither common sense and
logic, nor intuition inhibits the other in philosophical activity:
just as there is a positive integral feeling of Harmony lost, so
there is a positive integral feeling of Harmony attained.
(Whitehead 1933, 336)
Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance 301

This is another representation of balance. We may ask if philosophers are the


most beautiful persons in terms of looking for ultimate meanings of life owing
to a selectiveness (balance maintained) that avoids inhibitions.

4. The Difficulty of Interpretation


From the generalizations of Thales’ cosmology to modern times, philosophy
performed an ordering of reality (the notion of substance was crucial). But
since the 20th century, many authors started to talk about chaos,
irrevocability, and temporality. We believe that the proper point to start a
coherent and adequate cosmology is the notion of balance, not order or
disorder. So far as process philosophy has no ambition to “beat” previous
conceptions, but to find an order and scheme in relationships and events (not
in things and in the world as an object which exists somewhere), that is to
say, it avoids a categorical character and plays no partial role, but finds
connections between different aspects of potentiality and reality, we should
admit that it has a proper and contemporary philosophical vocabulary.
The broadest definition of balance is a
pre-established state of things that are both temporal and eternal, microscopic
and macroscopic.
The difficulty in definition is that, on the one hand, just when we
formulate this principle theoretically, it loses its vital, intuitive, and temporal
character. Just when, on the other hand, we find it in life, it turns to order or
harmony, but so far as we perceive only drops of experience (primarily,
without mental generalization) we lose the concept of balance and are stuck
with its counterpart —disharmony. Yet, so far as disharmony is just half of the
truth, epistemologically we end each act of experience with a kind of “ordered
disharmony” which, in its turn, is also balance. So to speak, we have two
kinds of balance: balance as a notion (with its counterpart, reality), and
balance in process, which is the “embodiment” of this notion. The last type of
balance has no counterpart for the individual in so far as individuals
themselves are counterpart components of “embodiment,” which is nothing
but the principle that “many become one and are increased by one.” But so
far as we consider the theoretical notion of balance, we are a priori involved
in a categorical and abstract character of language and thus, our theoretical
justification of the balance struck with its counterpart —injustice (as
disharmony) on the social level. Unfortunately, we cannot avoid the problem
of realism and nominalism. Yet, language as a tool of philosophy awaits
improvement.
302 Denys Zhadiaiev

5. Conclusion
The point is that aesthetics can give more than language —the tool we use in
science and philosophy. When language consists only in words, meanings and
context, and thus operates with concepts, there is a distortion in which one
category (word) dominates the other (feeling). That is why it is so difficult to
argue about any kind of pre-established harmony or balance. It seems the
only opportunity to “explain” balance is to manifest it for both feelings and
thought (again, for two opposed concepts at a time). In our view, we cannot
metaphysically explain balance in the universe unless we borrow some
aesthetics. If so, we have to develop supplementary forms of explanation
(visual, tactile etc.) or reasons that lead us towards an ecological civilization, a
more equal and just society.
Further research on this topic could be focused on the following ideas:
1) If there is a balance on social as well as on individual levels, could
positive and negative prehensions have a constant character (if so, one of the
conclusions that would influence change in the picture of the world could be
that we need no religious justification and promised paradise outside this
world. This promise is insufficient in so far as in this case the significance of
the living person decreases when it is mistakenly supposed to be an eternal
soul.
2) If there is a balance in positive and negative prehensions, then there
must be another kind of interaction (or causation) between microscopic and
macroscopic levels and this causation is supposed to have different modes of
interaction. If so, an individual could have influence on his actual world in an
indirect way (as in causal efficacy: paying money to get goods, passing exams
on-line or in person in order to be recognized etc.). But by means of self-
causation what could replace, for example, the necessity of a weapon (causal
efficacy as half the truth or a counterpart of internal action (i.e. self-causation,
ability to make a choice, thinking etc.)? Because the end of external war
(outside the state, community, or individual) provokes an internal one (within
the state in order to share the spoils of war, or within a community to get the
most of what has been achieved, or the internal anxiety of the individual who
has expectations of bad things that could happen due to his committed
actions, etc.), one, in so far as it is mistakenly supposed that physical being is
independent of relationships and ideas, is in danger. Moreover, the use of
causal efficacy for the sake of dominance of part over whole in a globalized
world is not sufficient in so far as it contradicts the very term “globus.” If
there is no such interaction, this investigation will be another proof that
humanity is transcendental and thus, a priori and totally unconditioned being.
Balance has not only been formulated in Whitehead’s cosmology, but also
represented in his philosophical activity where he admitted that the
Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance 303

categorical character of language is insufficient to replace the perception of


the world, but at the same time he courageously continued to develop his
trilogy Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality and Adventures of
Ideas.
We achieve the balance when we are ready to be crucified on the cross of
contrasts.

Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Michel Weber, Jason W. Brown and
Gary Goldberg without support of which this paper would not be accessible for
international community. Also, I should pay tribute to Julia Shabanova, who
constantly cares about my professional development as a scholar and
provides me sufficient time for doing research. Also, I should admit that I am
in debt to my Ph.D. supervisor Sergey Shevtsov whose art of presentations
cannot be surpassed and kindness underestimated.

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304 Denys Zhadiaiev

Plato, The Works. A new and literal version. By Henry Davis, M. A.


MDCCCXLIX. Vol 2. London: Henry G. Bohn, York street, Covent
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Whitehead, Alfred North. 1933. Adventures of Ideas. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1960. Science and the Modern World. New York:
Mentor Book.
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Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality”
in an existential philosophical context
Anastasiia Zinevych1

The basic concept of E. Minkowski’s (1885–1972) existential


phenomenological psychiatry is a “vital contact with reality.” He regards its
constant dynamics as an indicator of a psychological norm, while its lack is an
indicator of psychopathology, where norm is a measure of integration of
consciousness into life, and pathology is regarded as an isolation of
consciousness from life, as a morbid rationalism. We will see that behind
those opposite modalities of consciousness are to be found two general
attitudes towards life, which served as a basis for Albert Schweitzer's
classification of life-affirming and life-negating worldviews, as well as for G.
Marcel's and E. Fromm's attitudes on being and having. Today's virtualization
of reality and massive escapism of people from their life reality can be
explained by Minkowski's concept of “vital contact with reality.” Our paper
highlights Minkowski's comprehension of vital contact with reality, its cardinal
modalities and the psychopathological significance of its arrest. Furthermore,
it outlines the perspectives of existential philosophical comprehension of
“vital contact with reality” concept.
Studying the works of E. Minkowski, I have highly appreciated his main
concept of the “vital contact with reality.” In his opinion, the dynamics of this
contact are a source of mental health, while its violations are sources of
mental illnesses. But in order not to remain only within the framework of
psychopathology, I would like to use the term: “illnesses of consciousness.”
Then the violation of the contact of consciousness with the fullness of reality
can be translated into the quite common concept of alienation. Thus, we are
moving towards a widely understood existential issue.
Existential philosophy, whose founders in France are Eugène Minkowski
and Gabriel Marcel —both followers of Henri Bergson— is a philosophy of
concreteness, which struggles to overcome the power of abstractions. It is
about returning consciousness into being, about overcoming the gap between
the ideological consciousness of the individual and his real being, about a kind
of “existentialisation” of consciousness. But why did a gap between

1
Anastasiia Zinevych (Odessa, Ukraine), MPsych (Odessa I.I. Mechnikov
National University), is a graduate of the International Institute of Existential
Consultancy, and a PhD candidate of the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of
Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kiev). Fields of
interest: existential philosophy, phenomenology, existential therapy.
306 Anastasiia Zinevych

consciousness and existence occur? Why does consciousness, instead of


expressing a person's real life, his concrete existential experience, connected
with cognition as an experiencing of reality, begin to perform some other
functions, as if imposed on the individual from the outside? Why did it pose
itself as an outer observer regarding its own body, feelings, acts —as an alien?
I won’t give a “global” answer to this question, but I'll venture to turn to the
“historical background” of the question.
For the first time, the problem of the discrepancy between consciousness
and being was raised in Plato's dialogue The Sophist. Before Socrates, for the
preceding generation of philosophers (Parmenides, Heraclitus) —such
discrepancy was impossible. For mythological thinking it was evident that
what a person thinks about (and then what he/she says, declares, testifies)
corresponds with what truly is. The problematization of being, the
discrepancy between “reality” and “words,” or between “words and deeds”
—appears in the times of Socrates— in the situation of crisis of mythological
culture. In the archaic world, consciousness is not free. Strictly speaking, it
belongs not to the individual but to the collective. Now, having gained
individual reflection, the individual believes him/herself to be its rightful
owner.
Let me capture the issue: freed from the power of myth, consciousness
gains autonomy, freedom, but it can now abuse its own freedom. The abuse
of freedom just means the possibility of a radical fissure between
consciousness and being. Instead of serving the existential necessity of
comprehending the world as it is in its truth, consciousness can serve its own
purposes, for example, intent to lie for its own benefit. This is exactly what
the sophist does, using the methods of purification and search for the truth for
his own purpose.
Is someone able to prove that white is black? It's obvious for our sense
organs. But sophists no longer believe the senses; the sophisticated rhetoric
and sophistic logic of evidence, so to speak, the intellectual methodology are
coming to the fore. Mastering them enables making falsehood into truth, and
what has never happened to turn it into reality, depending on what the
sophist is paid. (Today they would be the lawyers, PR specialists, political
technologists and other media figures). From that moment the paradox,
typical for our era arises, when the sign/symbol reality displaces the sensual.
The sign/symbol reality of consciousness becomes independent from the
reality of life experience. In this sense, the sophist, producing ghosts instead
of images of reality is a prototype of the modern postmodernist producing
“simulacra.”
If there is no original identity of thinking and being that the guardians of
truth from Parmenides to Hegel had affirmed, then at least an ethically
responsible attitude of consciousness towards being is necessary, which
Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality” 307

would complement the usual methods of epistemology. In other words, the


capacity of cognizing, correct understanding, logical thinking is not enough.
However, historically, epistemology has been separated from ethics and in
this form has triumphed, while consciousness became an organ, pretending
to be autonomous from being, as in one Russian fantastic novel, Professor
Dowell's Head, where the head, being separated from the body, continued
thinking and solving problems. It is such an existentially deprived head,
“separated” from life that has caused many of today's problems.
In Minkowski’s concept of lived time, ethics plays a major role. According
to Minkowski, the highest form of living the future is an ethical act and a
prayer. Thus, the future is actual in the present to the extent that it obliges the
actual me to something. The future is the ideal. In the horizon of this ideal an
ethical attitude towards the present emerges. Here we come to the basic
relation of human to being, which we call the general life-attitude. It can be
selfish and nihilistic, world- and life-negating, in which a person affirms only
him/herself, denying the world in the fullness of its being. And it can be life-
affirming, in which a person affirms all being as a whole, together with his
own being.
The same attitudes toward being are formulated by G. Marcel as an
attitude of “having” and “of being,” which E. Fromm developed in the
application to psychotherapy. A. Schweizer distinguishes the affirmation and
negation of the world and life, so to speak, the ontological nihilism,
characterizing two opposite types of world views. Russian physiologist A.
Ukhtomsky discovered the neurophysiologic basis of two dominants: either
focused on myself or focused on the face of the other. The same attitudes are
to be found in Buber’s “I and Thou”: “Ich-Du” (“I-Thou” or “I-You”) and the
Ich-Es (“I-It”) relationship. Aren’t they a characteristic of the deep layer of
human existence: whatever my world view is, my general life-attitude is to be
found behind it in its base. If it is life-affirming, it is ethical in relation to life.
As we have said, the main symptom of psychopathology for Minkowski is
a violation of vital contact with reality. Such formulation puzzles us
immediately. Firstly, what is meant by norm and pathology? Secondly, what
is meant by reality? Modern works on psychotherapy (e.g. Martinez Robles,
2015), declare a necessity to abandon the model of “norm” and “pathology,”
as those models are public mental constructs (M. Foucault). This refusal is
motivated by a justified distrust of formal definitions of the norm and
pathology, the reduction of a unique person to the impersonal psychiatric
“diagnosis,” or “type” of disorder. In postmodern philosophy, this led to a
refutation of the concepts of “right” and “wrong” life/behavior, as ideological
ones. Along with this, a refusal to search for “truth” and “reality” has been
declared (Roland G. Barthes).
308 Anastasiia Zinevych

According to Minkowski, “vital contact” is understood as such a norm that


is not formal but dynamic, expressed in the degree of consonance (lived
synchronism) of the individual with life. Norm is understood as a measure of
the inclusion of consciousness in life. Pathology is the isolation of
consciousness from life, morbid rationalism. Normally, when a person is
growing up, he/she falls out of immediate unity with the world, and a certain
gap between him/her and the world emerges. A person is not included in the
whole automatically (organically), as living beings are included in nature. A
person has an “I,” separate from the world, which wants to affirm itself in it.
Returning to the world, restoring contact with the¸environment, becomes a
task. Each of us is familiar with longing for that blessed union with the
mother, pre-reflexive childish immediacy and freedom, love relationships
with nature. The freshness with which every day is experienced as new, the
joyful surprise which brings discoveries “behind the curve,” that longing
encourages us to seek for living through this unity with the world again:
“The fullness of life we long for without ever truly achieving
it, the living image that faces our eyes and does not originate
from our isolated empirical impressions… fullness comes to us
before everything, before the understanding as well.”
(Minkowski 1997, 199).
We can understand Minkowski as saying that we all came from being. And
in infancy the fullness of being is given to us directly. Minkowski calls such
reunification with the world as a life stream, acquired in sympathy or
contemplation: “syntony.” The essence of vital contact is that we respond to
life events and the challenges of fate:
“[…] in a personal way —not with muscle contractions, but
with deeds, feelings, laughter, tears […]. This is exactly where
this amazing harmony between us and reality is established, the
harmony that allows us to move in step with world, preserving
our personal life.” (Minkowski 1997, 38).
In the “Lived time” he describes vital contact as:
“[…] the same lived synchronism that we expect to find in
the general feeling of moving with time and in step with it that
invariably accompanies us. It is not only that we feel a general
progression, in us as well as outside us, but rather a unique
rhythm common to us and to ambient becoming that makes me
feel that I am advancing in my life simultaneously with time
beyond this attitude as well as beyond those interruptions,
whatever my attitude may be with regard to the facts of reality,
however I actually participate, or whatever interruptions are
imposed on my activity by unforeseen circumstances.”
(Minkowski 1970, 69-70).
Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality” 309

However, our “I” cannot be satisfied only with syntony, but wants to
transform the present in accordance with the ideal situated in the future.
Minkowski understands the life of a person as a continuous evolutionary
process of becoming. This movement in the future is provided by a personal
élan. Unlike the world's élan vital —the direction of the personal élan should
be set by myself. This is close to the concept of formation of Whitehead. Both
Bergsonians —Minkowski and Whitehead— follow their teacher, speaking
with one voice that “the very real essence of real actuality —that is, of the
completely real— is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood
in terms of its becoming and perishing” (Whitehead 1956, 354), and that life
is becoming. Both understand becoming not as a stream of change, where
transformation is the transition of one into something completely different,
but as development, as an actualization of what was originally there. Then the
natural dynamism of Bergson's life, continued by Minkowski and Whitehead,
is opposed by a morbid unnatural statics, a stop in development.
As we have already indicated, my “I” is not included in the life stream
“automatically.” Vital contact is the synchronization of my duration with the
duration of life flux. Personality, as a specific duration, must come into
consonance, into resonance with world duration, without loss of itself. This
requires solitude, a return to thyself, which Minkowski calls schizoidism.
Schizoidism and syntony, the two fundamental principles of human life,
complement each other, forming a single vital cycle of personal élan. And
here a danger exists: a person can interrupt this cycle, isolating in thyself.
This happens as an answer, if the personal élan, aimed at integration with the
world, is attacked.
Here an existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing, a follower of Minkowski,
continues his teacher, placing the person in the context of social relations.
The first “small” society in which a person is immersed since childhood is a
family. It is in the family that the child receives experience of human
relationships. The behavior of parents in relation to the child and to each
other is the cultivation of either healthy or pathogenic image, which the child
believes to be the only norm and imitates it reproductively in his/her
relationships with others (or finds the strength to question it). Ronald Laing,
Erich Fromm, Eugène Minkowski, Antoni Kepinski and James Bugental are
speaking with one voice that in a healthy environment a natural creative
activity (élan vital) is encouraged, while in pathogenic one it is subjected to
blocking (by overprotection, ridicule, punishment, rejection, ignorance, etc.).
As a result, a child reduces vital activity to a minimum in order to secure
thyself. He/she literally “freezes,” as any of his manifestations can be followed
by pain. The natural need to secure thyself develops into a painful fear of any
contact with world as threatening to “absorb” his/her “I.” Thus, the world
itself and other people, the “non-I” —are perceived as a threat to the “I.”
310 Anastasiia Zinevych

Therefore, person creates and strengthens a “wall” between thyself and a


hostile environment, which prevents any contact with the environment.
In the situation of loss of the vital contact with reality (happening to
varying degrees with neurotics, autistics, schizoids and schizophrenics), the
natural gap between human being and the world, which should have
encouraged him/her to manifest activity and establish dialogical relationships
with the others and the world, is filled with rational constructs, fantasies and
complex strategies for ensuring his security. Minkowski refuses to call such a
“detachment from reality” an “absolute predominance of the interior life” (as
Eugen Bleuler does), because the “I” runs away from contact not into the
“interior world,” but into the mind, alienated from experience. In the absence
of sensory contact with reality given in experience, the self becomes an
empty form without real content. In fact, there is a lack both of “exterior” and
“interior” life, which schizophrenic compensates by dreams, regrets and
interrogations.
According to Minkowski, a person who falls out from the life stream
becomes lifeless, static, incapable of change. The same is true for Laing: the
“inner self” hides behind a rationally constructed “false self,” formally
participating in life. Being alienated, it gradually becomes unreal, an
“imaginary self” and, eventually, becomes dead. “Hostile world” in his/her
mind is also completely static and doesn’t change. Therefore, the very
possibility of a new, non-painful, experience of contact with the world and
with others is rejected. Thus, a world- and life-negating attitude in relation to
the environment is formed. A person is in a state of “internal war” (Gabriel
Marcel) with the world. Therefore, he/she is self-centered on thyself. Two
existential psychiatrists —Eugène Minkowski and Alexander Alexeychik (the
founder of the Russian existential therapeutic school) equally characterize
schizophrenia as a state of “self-identity” or “egocentrism,” in which all
human activity is directed solely at oneself, and in which the “I” of the patient
is the only point of “reality” and the only victim and cause of the events.
The same is true for the psychopathology of “everyday life.” In
Minkowski's time, it looked like an inert existence in the here-and-now
moment, outside the horizon of the future and without memory of the past.
Now it looks like a general escapism to virtual reality. We can call this form of
escape a “daily autism.” Only here autism is “in turmoil”: instead of escaping
from the world into thyself in a consciously constructed reality, the human
constantly runs from thyself as a source of anxiety and other painful,
unpleasant feelings into the virtual world. He/she exists no longer in the
virtual world of his/her imagination, as an autistic but in a world technically
constructed for us and visually materialized in a monitor, called “virtual
reality.” Immersion in virtual reality allows individual to forget the very self, to
renounce it. Therefore, it turns out to be self-negation. This is the cardinal
Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality” 311

difference from the schizophrenic and neurotic defenses of one's self, which
affirms and saves his/her “I” at the cost of losing the world. Escaping to virtual
reality, the human is absent not only in the reality of life, but also in the
intellect, reminiscent of the one-dimensional man of G. Marcuse who exists
on the surface. However, Marcuse believed that one-dimensional existence is
a consequence of a lack of critical reflexive thinking, while Minkowski has
shown that even a significant development of rational mind doesn’t prevent
inability to establish vital contact directly bound to the ability to experience.
The parasitic growth of virtual reality is associated not only with the
emergence of virtual technologies, it is caused by the enormous existential
dissatisfaction of the modern individual, the lack of a fulfilled basic reality in
which he/she could genuinely take root and realize his/her being. In those
conditions, virtual reality plays a compensatory character, acting as a
substitute for real life. At the same time, it is very suitable for consciousness,
which has lost its ethical responsibility towards being, and helps exercise a
truly abundant excess of freedom. Here it can lie as much as necessary,
turning somersaults. Here it exists in the gap between being and non-being.
At the same time it can suppress suffering caused by its alienation. Thus,
virtual reality, in eliminating the pain of trauma and alienation, plays the role
of a kind of effective drug.
How is it possible to restore vital contact with reality? According to
Minkowski, the reunion of consciousness with life does not depend on either
physical or mental health: “Blind, disabled, paralyzed can live in a much more
intimate contact with the environment than individuals who haven’t lost sight
and whose limbs are not damaged. On the other hand, schizophrenics lose
this contact, without any violation of the sensor-motor apparatus, memory, or
intelligence.” (Minkowski 1997, 38).
Hence, the reunion does not take place on the biological or social level but
on the spiritual. The individual has to be born for a second time, spiritually.
Until spiritual birth happens, we live our life by inertia, automatically, without
realizing it as our own, without realizing the dramatic nature of our human
situation and the pricelessness of time:
“[…] we are in life to “live” life, to create it humanly, to fill it
with our best, deep and human notes, completely different than
just staying in life, be concerned about the thought that
eventually one day an end will come” (Minkowski 1997, 199).
Before this spiritual birth, the individual is only a potential human being:
“human in general,” an abstract representative of the biological species
“homo sapiens,” an abstract performer of social functions. Neither biologically
nor socially his/her humanity is assured. What makes him/her human is a
participation in the spiritual, that is, universal culture. A born-again human
places thyself in an unbroken chain of cultural continuity. Only in this sense,
312 Anastasiia Zinevych

and by no means in a biological sense, he/she becomes a participant in the


continuous flow of becoming. Thus, not only the continuity of the past-
present-future as a continuity of personal duration is important, but the
historical, universal continuity. Then the norm is a measure of humanity,
while the pathology of inhumanity is a falling out from the time of one’s life
and from human history.
In this case, existential therapy should not be directed solely at mental
pathologies; it must necessarily work with the spiritual and world view of a
person. Starting from Foucault, we regard mental illness as a sort of socially
conditioned construct invented by society as a manifestation of power
strategies. However, does this mean that there are only signifiers without
signified, only constructs and no diseases? In the spirit of Bergson and
Minkowski, we propose the following hypothesis: the norm of human
existence is development, creativity, evolution, while pathology is a delay, or
even a fatal stop in development. The transition of a person through the “dark
night of the soul” in previous cultures was fulfilled with the help of initiations
or within the framework of religious and mystical practices. The modern,
rationalistic culture cannot offer such cultural practices. Not accidentally,
Foucault at the end of his life turned to the ancient experience of taking care
of thyself. This indicates a tendency to restore cultural continuity. The culture
contains those models of the relationship (contact) with reality, which can be
inherited in spite of any pathogenic factors of one’s immediate situation
(genetic, family). Existential psychotherapy is aimed to cultivate a healthy (in
the ethical sense) relationship. The abuse of freedom of consciousness,
alienation from being, can only be opposed by the ethics of the total
responsibility of human towards being, including the responsibility towards
his/her own shaking humanity.

Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Creative evolution. London: Methuen, 1954.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1953.
Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric power. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–
1974. UK : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Fromm, Erich. To Have Or to Be?. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Laing, Ronald D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness.
London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Marcel, Gabriel H. Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary. New York: Harper
& Row, 1965.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society. London: Routledge Classics, 2002
Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality” 313

Martinez Robles, Yaqui A. Existential Therapy. Relational theory and practice


for a post-Cartesian world. Mexico: Circulo de Estudios en
Psicoterapia Existencial, 2015.
Minkowski, Eugène. Au-delà du rationalisme morbide. Paris: L'Harmattan,
1997.
Minkowski, Eugène. Lived time: Phenomenological and psychopathological
studies. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
Minkowski, Eugène. Vers une cosmologie. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot,
1999.
Schweitzer, Albert. The Philosophy of Civilization. New York: Macmillan
Company, 1949
Whitehead, Alfred N. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Macmillan
company, 1956.
Analytic Table of Contents

Contents.............................................................................................. 7

The Whitehead Psychology Nexus: Retrospect and Prospect


Michel Weber & Paul Stenner ........................................................... 9
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 14
Notes ....................................................................................................... 14

Introduction Some thoughts on the nature of existence


Jason W. Brown .............................................................................. 15
Abstract ................................................................................................... 15
1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 15
2. Can a thing exist as a concept or mode of thought? ............................. 15
3. Memory and perception ...................................................................... 19
4. The concept of self............................................................................... 24
5. Reality and the real.............................................................................. 27
Notes ....................................................................................................... 32

William James and Jakob von Uexküll: pragmatism, pluralism and the
outline of a philosophy of organism
Arthur Araujo .................................................................................. 33
Abstract ................................................................................................... 33
1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 33
2. Pragmatism and pluralism ................................................................... 34
3. Common Sense and Umwelt ............................................................... 36
4. Meaning and aboutness ....................................................................... 37
5. Pragmatism and pluralism: an outline of a philosophy of organism ..... 40
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 43
Notes ....................................................................................................... 44

Non-Commutativity and Its Implications in Physics and Beyond


Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk .......................................... 45
Abstract ................................................................................................... 45
1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 45
2. Non-commutativity, Incompatibility, Complementarity,
and Uncertainty .................................................................................... 47
3. Entanglement and Contextuality.......................................................... 50
316 Table of Contents

4. Non-Commutativity and Contextuality in Cognitive Systems ............... 52


4.1 Sequence Effects..................................................................... 53
4.2 Bistable Perception ................................................................. 54
4.3 Violations of Bell Inequalities in Cognitive Systems................. 54
5. Conclusions ......................................................................................... 55
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 56
Notes ....................................................................................................... 58

Process in Vedantic Mysticism: The Example of Ramakrishna


David T. Bradford............................................................................ 61
Abstract ................................................................................................... 61
0. Introduction......................................................................................... 61
1. Ramakrishna (1836–1886) .................................................................. 63
2. Nirvikalpa Samadhi .............................................................................. 64
3. Two Aspects of Brahman ..................................................................... 64
4. Saguna Brahman.................................................................................. 66
5. Psychology of the Nirguna State........................................................... 67
6. Troughs and Peaks of Mystical Process ................................................ 68
7. Mystical Process and the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC)................... 69
8. Mystical Process .................................................................................. 71
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 72
Notes ....................................................................................................... 75

Simultaneity and Serial Order


Jason W. Brown............................................................................... 79
Abstract ................................................................................................... 79
1. Introduction......................................................................................... 79
2. Conscious and unconscious ................................................................. 82
3. The perception of change .................................................................... 86
4. Perception and memory ...................................................................... 90
5. A note on dream report ....................................................................... 92
6. Unconscious categories and conscious parts........................................ 95
7. Seriality and the store .......................................................................... 97
8. Simultaneity and succession ................................................................ 99
9. Addendum: Summary of Microgenetic Theory................................... 101
9.1. Development ....................................................................... 103
9.2. The impact of sense data ..................................................... 104
9.3. Stages in memory and perception ....................................... 105
Table of Contents 317

9.4. Feeling in opposition to objects............................................ 105


9.5. Mind arises in experience of the world ................................ 106
9.6. Extension, causality, space and time.................................... 106
9.7. Transience and permanence ................................................ 107
9.8. Evolution and cognition ....................................................... 107
9.9. Agency and recipience ......................................................... 108
9.10. Knowledge and insight....................................................... 108
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 110
Notes ..................................................................................................... 112

Occult geographies, or the promises of spectres:


Science, politics, and religion at the margins of the Modern
Adrian J. Ivakhiv ........................................................................... 115
Abstract ................................................................................................. 115
0. Introduction ....................................................................................... 115
1. Economies of knowledge: Geographies of illumination and shadow .. 117
2. Economies of power-knowledge: Geographies of trust and suspicion 121
3. Economies of the sacred: Geographies of transcendence
and upheaval....................................................................................... 125
4. Modernity and its ghosts.................................................................... 127
5. Earth mysteries and life energies in late capitalism ........................... 131
6. Conclusion: Imaginality and the promises of spectres........................ 135
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 137

Whitehead and Roger Sperry. The negation of the instant and the free
will problem
Rémy Lestienne ............................................................................ 143
Abstract ................................................................................................. 143
0. Introduction ....................................................................................... 143
1. Instants do not exist. The Newtonian time is an abstraction
and a mutilation .................................................................................. 144
2. William James’ specious present........................................................ 145
3. The support of quantum mechanics................................................... 146
4. The Nobel award-winner’s career as a neuro-psychologist ................. 148
5. Pain as a clue to the mind-body problem........................................... 150
6. From periphery to the brain .............................................................. 151
7. Commissurotomized patients ............................................................ 152
8. The unity of consciousness ................................................................ 154
9. Criticisms of Sperry’s position ........................................................... 155
318 Table of Contents

10. Free will restored? ........................................................................... 156


Bibliography .......................................................................................... 158
Notes ..................................................................................................... 159

Re-thinking the Self: Process philosophy in Murray and Morgan’s


Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Eleonora Mingarelli ....................................................................... 161
Abstract ................................................................................................. 161
1. Introduction....................................................................................... 161
2. TAT: Its origin and function ............................................................... 162
3. The TAT and process philosophy ....................................................... 163
3.1. A force-based framework..................................................... 163
3.2. Need, Press, and Thema ...................................................... 165
3.3. The epochal theory of time .................................................. 167
3.4. Corollary: Freedom and Necessity ....................................... 169
4. Conclusion ......................................................................................... 170
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 170
Notes ..................................................................................................... 171

On Signs: Hayek's Surmise, Process Philosophy & Biosemiotics


John Pickering ............................................................................... 175
Abstract ................................................................................................. 175
1. Introduction....................................................................................... 175
2. Moving on from Mechanism .............................................................. 176
3. What is Embodied Cognition?............................................................ 177
4. Knowing is doing, doing is knowing .................................................. 181
5. Hayek's Surmise ................................................................................ 185
6. Biosemiotics ...................................................................................... 188
7. The More than Human World ............................................................ 191
8. The view from 2018 .......................................................................... 193
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 199
Notes ..................................................................................................... 202

What is Called “Feeling”? Lure and Certainty in Whitehead and


Descartes
Pierre Rodrigo ............................................................................... 203
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 208
Notes ..................................................................................................... 208
Table of Contents 319

Whitehead and liminality


Paul Stenner ................................................................................. 211
Abstract ................................................................................................. 211
1. Introduction ....................................................................................... 211
2. Whitehead’s philosophy as a philosophy of limitation ....................... 213
3. Anthropological liminality .................................................................. 215
Van Gennep’s Rites de Passage ................................................... 216
Turner on liminality, anti-structure and communitas .................. 218
4. Ontological liminality......................................................................... 220
5. Conclusion: artists in ritual................................................................. 223
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 225
Notes ..................................................................................................... 226

The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology and Philosophy of


Mind
Maria Teresa Teixeira.................................................................... 227
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 236
Notes ..................................................................................................... 237

Consciousness, Memory, and Recollection


Xavier Verley ................................................................................ 239
Abstract ................................................................................................. 239
0. Introduction ....................................................................................... 239
1. Consciousness and the power of judgment ........................................ 240
2. Subject and Primary Substance.......................................................... 242
3. Repetition and Memory according to Hume ...................................... 245
4. The Reformed Subjectivitst Principle and Its Impact
on the Concept of Consciousness ........................................................ 247
5. Consciousness as the Power of Contrast ............................................ 249
6. Memory, Causal Efficacy of the Body................................................. 251
7. Consciousness and Recollection......................................................... 253
8. The Transmission of Feeling and Corporeal Inheritance .................... 254
Conclusion ............................................................................................. 256
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 256
Notes ..................................................................................................... 258

Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action


Michel Weber................................................................................ 259
Abstract ................................................................................................. 259
320 Table of Contents

1. Introduction....................................................................................... 259
2. Consciousness-zero and Substantialism ............................................. 262
1.1. Definition of Consciousness-zero ......................................... 262
1.2. Common-sensical Non Dualism ........................................... 263
1.3. Substantialist Theoretical Dualism ....................................... 264
3. Consciousness in Process .................................................................. 265
2.1. Re-definition of Consciousness-zero: Relativization of Practical
Dualism ........................................................................................... 266
2.2. Common-sense (non dualism) ............................................. 266
2.3. Processism (theoretical non-dualism)................................... 267
4. Processism and Spectral Consciousness ............................................ 268
3.1. The Field of Consciousness .................................................. 268
3.2. Subliminal Consciousness .................................................... 272
3.3. Scale of Consciousness and Spectrum of Vigilance............... 273
5. Conclusion ......................................................................................... 276
Panexperientialism ..................................................................... 276
Understanding Hypnosis ............................................................. 278
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 280
Notes ..................................................................................................... 281

How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Processual Self


Karen Yan ..................................................................................... 287
Abstract ................................................................................................. 287
1. Two Major Metaphysical Frameworks................................................ 287
2. How to Develop a Scientific Concept of Self....................................... 288
3. A Case Study from Systems Science: A Methodological Shift
and an Ontological Assumption .......................................................... 289
4. How to Use Anti-DI to Develop a Scientific Concept
of Processual Self ................................................................................ 291
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 293
Notes ..................................................................................................... 294

Aesthetics as a Manifestation of Balance


Denys Zhadiaiev............................................................................ 295
Abstract ................................................................................................. 295
1. Introduction....................................................................................... 295
2. Conceptual Taxonomy ....................................................................... 296
3. Aspects of Balance in Literature ......................................................... 299
4. The Difficulty of Interpretation .......................................................... 301
Table of Contents 321

5. Conclusion ......................................................................................... 302


Acknowledgments ................................................................................. 303
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 303

Minkowski’s concept of “vital contact with reality”


in an existential philosophical context
Anastasiia Zinevych ...................................................................... 305
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 312

Analytic Table of Contents............................................................... 315

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