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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
Whitehead and Roger Sperry. The negation of the instant and the free
will problem
Rémy Lestienne ............................................................................ 143
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Bibliography
Araújo, Arthur. “Qualia e Umwelt [Qualia and Umwelt].” Revista de Filosofia
Aurora. Curitiba, Vol. 22, n. 30 Jan/Jun, 41-68, 2010
(http://www2.pucpr.br/reol/index.php/RF?dd1=258).
Araújo, Arthur. “Significação sem representação: a Teoria da Significação de
Jakob von Uexküll [Meaning without representation: Jakob von
Uexküll’s Theory of Meaning].” Ciência e Cognição — revista
interdisciplinar de estudos da cognição. Rio de Janeiro, Vol. 17, n. 2,
98-114, 2012 (http://www.cienciasecognicao.org/revista/index.php/
cec/article/view/796).
Berthoz Alain and Petit, Jean-Luc. Phénoménologie et Physiologie de l’Action.
Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006.
Berthoz Alain and Christen, Yves. Neurobiology of Umwelt: how living beings
perceive the world. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009.
Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an empirical point of view. Translation by
Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell and Linda McAlister. New York:
Routledge, 2005.
James, William. The Wrintings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition.
Edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago: The Chicago University
Press, 1977.
James, William. Pragmatism and other writings. New York: Penguin Books,
2000.
James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1909.
James, William. “Are we automata ?” [Mind, 4, 1-22, 1879] Green,
Christopher D. Classics in the History of Psychology. New York: 2003
(http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/automata.htm)
McDermott, John J. “Introduction.” In: The Writings of William James: A
Comprehensive Edition. Chicago: The Chicago University Press,
1977.
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435-450, 1974.
Nagel, Thomas. The view from nowhere. Oxford (USA): Oxford University
Press, 1986.
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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
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Issue: 120, 403-419.
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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
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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.
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.
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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“Cognitive time scales in a Necker-Zeno model for bistable
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58 Harald Atmanspacher and Thomas Filk
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
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
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.
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
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.
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. 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
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and the mystic. Studies in Indian and comparative mysticism, edited
by K. Werner, 54–68. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1994.
Bradford, D.T. “Microgenesis of mystical awareness.” In Neuropsychology and
philosophy of mind in process: Essays in honor of Jason W. Brown,
Process in Vedantic Mysticism 73
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
9.1. Development
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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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Simultaneity and Serial Order 111
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
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
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
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
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
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
Bibliography
Agger B, 1989 Fast Capitalism (University of Illinois Press, Urbana IL)
Bartholomeusz T, 1998, “Spiritual wealth and neo-colonialism” Journal of
Ecumenical Studies 35(1) 19-32
138 Adrian J. Ivakhiv
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
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).
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).
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
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.
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
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).
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).
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
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.
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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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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(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
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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
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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).
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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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Bibliography
Abram, D. (1997) “The Spell Of The Sensuous: Perception And Language” In
A More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.
Bohm, D. & Hiley, B. (1993) The Undivided Universe. London: Routledge.
Bohm, D. (1985) Unfolding Meaning. London: Fontana.
Brooks, R. (1991) “How to build complete creatures rather than isolated
cognitive simulators.” Chapter 8 in Architectures of Intelligence.
Edited by Van Lehn, K. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Chalmers, D. (2013) Panpsychism and panprotopsychism. The Amherst Lecture
in Philosophy 8: 1–35.
Clark, A. (1997) Being there: brain, body, and world together again. London :
MIT Press.
Deleuze, G. (1992) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. University of
Minneapolis Press,.
De Quincey, C. (2002) Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter.
Chicago: Invisible Cities Press.
Dewey, J. & Bentley, A. (1973) “Knowing and the Known.” In Handy, R. and
Harwood, E. (eds.), Useful Procedures of Inquiry. Great Barrington,
MA: Behavioral Research Council.
Gibson, J. (1952) The Perception of the Visual World. London: Allen & Unwin.
Goodwin, B. (1999) Reclaiming a life of quality. Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 6(11–12): 229–236.
Gottlieb, R. (2003) This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. London:
Routledge
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Gray, J. (1995) Enlightenment's Wake: politics and culture at the close of the
modern age. Routledge: London.
Griffin, D. (1984) Animal Thinking. London : Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1954) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,
trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. 1977.
Hayek, F. (1982) “The Sensory Order after 25 Years.” In Cognition and the
Symbolic Processes, Vol. 2. Edited by W. Weimer & D. Palermo.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hayek, F. (1952) The Sensory Order. London: Routledge.
Heschel, J. & Rothschild, F. (1997) Between God and Man. London: Simon and
Schuster.
Hoffmeyer, J. (1996) Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Hurley, S. L (1998) Consciousness in action. London : Harvard University
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Kelso, J. (1997) Dynamic Patterns : The Self-Organization Of Brain And
Behavior. London: MIT Press.
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And Its Challenge To Western Thought. New York : Basic Books,
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Langton, C. (1995) (Ed.) Artificial Life, An Overview. London: MIT Press.
Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There.
Republished 1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mace, W. (1977) “Don’t ask what’s inside your head, ask what your head’s
inside of.” In Perceiving, Acting And Knowing: Toward An Ecological
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Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1992) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots
of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala Press.
McLuhan, T. (1994) The Way of the Earth. London: Simon & Schuster.
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16:492–497
On SIgns 201
Notes
1
See http://www.chromatika.org/spip/spip.php?rubrique37.
What is Called “Feeling”?
Lure and Certainty in Whitehead and Descartes
Pierre Rodrigo1
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
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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
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’.
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).
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
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.
Bibliography
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Gennep, A. Van. (1909/2004). The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge.
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Stenner, P. (2011). “James and Whitehead: Assemblage and Systematization
of a Deeply Empiricist Mosaic Philosophy.” European Journal of
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Stenner, P. (2016) “On standards and values: between finite actuality and
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Szakolczai, Á. (2009) “Liminality and Experience: Structuring transitory
situations and transformative events.” International Political
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Thomassen, B. (2009) “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International
Political Anthropology, 2(1): 5–27.
Turner, V.W. (1974) Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human
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Turner, V.W. (1969/1995) The ritual process: structure and anti-structure,
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Turner, V.W. (1977) “Process, system, and symbol: A new anthropological
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Whitehead, A. N. (1922/1997). The principle of relativity with applications to
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226 Paul Stenner
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
1
Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa.
228 Maria Teresa Teixeira
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
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.
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Minkowski, Eugène, Le temps vécu, Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de
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1997.
The Relevance of Process Philosophy to Psychology 237
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.
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
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.
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.).
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
(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
(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
Bibliography
Erickson, Milton H. and Rossi, Ernest L. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Milton H.
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.
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
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
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
Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, National Yang-Ming
University (Taiwan).
288 Karen Yan
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.
Bibliography
Bechtel, William. 2008. Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on
Cognitive Neuroscience. Taylor & Francis.
Bechtel, William. 2015. “Generalizing Mechanistic Explanations Using Graph-
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.
History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. Netherlands:
Springer.
Bechtel, William, and Adele A. Abrahamsen. 2013. “Thinking Dynamically
About Biological Mechanisms: Networks of Coupled Oscillators.”
Foundations of Science 18 (4): 707–23.
Bechtel, William, and Robert C. Richardson. 1993. Discovering Complexity:
Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research.
Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
Bickle, J. 2003. Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account.
Springer Netherlands.
Chang, Hasok. 2011. “The Philosophical Grammar of Scientific Practice.”
International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (3): 205–21.
294 Karen Yan
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
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
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.”
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
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
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.
Bibliography
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Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library.
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304 Denys Zhadiaiev
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
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
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
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. Creative evolution. London: Methuen, 1954.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1953.
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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
Contents.............................................................................................. 7
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
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
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