Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Bradford Books)

ONFLOW Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience Ralph Pred Onflow Onflow Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience ...

Author: Ralph Pred

73 downloads 1093 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

ONFLOW Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience

Ralph Pred

Onflow

Onflow Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience

Ralph Pred

A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142. Set in Stone sans and Stone serif by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pred, Ralph Jason. Onflow : dynamics of consciousness and experience / Ralph Pred. p. cm. “A Bradford book.” Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Consciousness. 2. Experience. 3. Pragmatism. 4. Intentionality (Philosophy). 5. James, William, 1842–1910. 6. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861–1947. I. Title. B808.9.P74 2005 128'.4—dc22 2004059260 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

vii

List of Abbreviations 1

xi

The Stream of Consciousness and the Concreteness of Experience

1.1

The Stream of Consciousness and “Transitive Parts”

1.2

Transitive Parts and Radical Empiricism

1.3

Radical Empiricism and the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”

1.4

A Survey of the Coming Chapters

2

3

6

13

James on the Stream of Thought and Experience

2.1

James’s Characters of Thought

2.2

James, as Psychologist, on the Stream of Consciousness

2.3

Habit, Action, and the Stream of Consciousness

2.4

James, as Philosopher, on the Stream of Pure Experience

3 3.1

21

21 22

36 42

Searle, James, and the Intentional Approximation Searle on Intentionality

9

55

56

3.2 Searle, the Intentional Approximation, and the Jamesian Characters of Thought 59 3.3 The Coordinated Flow of Action and Perception in the Stream of Consciousness 82

4

Intentional Processes and the Processual Approximation

4.1

Intentional Buds

4.2

The Formation of Intentional Buds: Acts of Perception

4.3

The Formation of Intentional Buds: Intentions in Action

4.4

The Formation of Intentional Buds: Prior Intentions

85

86 87 99

104

4.5 Co-Conscious Transition, Anticipation, and the Coordinated Flow of Action and Perception 107

1

vi

5

Contents

Whitehead, James, and the Concrescual Approximation

121

5.1

Toward the Concrescual Roots of Intentionality and Consciousness

121

5.2

James, Whitehead, Radical Empiricism, and Speculative Philosophy

134

5.3

Whitehead’s Categories

142

5.4

Naturalizing Whitehead

170

6

The Concrescual Approximation: Whiteheadian Applications

6.1

Perception

6.2

Propositions

6.3

Intellectual Feelings and Consciousness

6.4

Consciousness and Action

6.5

The Concrescual Approximation and James’s Characters of Thought

7

202 214

222

Edelman, the Neurobiological Approximation, and

Consciousness

245

7.1

The Concrescual Approximation and Neurobiology

7.2

Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection

7.3

Edelman’s Extended TNGS and Its Two Forms of Consciousness

7.4

Forms of Consciousness and Grammatical Voices

7.5

Edelman and Whitehead: Crucial Links and Parallels

7.6

The Extended TNGS and Concrescence

7.7

Onflow: An Organic Monism of Pure Experience

7.8

Actual Neurons and the Onflow of Experience

Notes

317

Works Cited Index

343

183

184

333

245

247

270 282

293 300 309

258

240

Preface

To understand the nature of consciousness and experience, we must avoid traps set for us by the syntax of language, wake from the spell cast over our intelligence by the subject-predicate and subject-verb-object forms of expression, and make conceptual contact with the raw unverbalized stream of experience. Claims like this are all but explicit in William James’s Principles of Psychology, and such claims led to James’s later formulation and adoption of experiential monism, a form of monism that has been neglected for too long in the philosophy of mind. This book attempts to present a revitalized monism in which the physical and mental are treated as poles within experience, as aspects of unitary moments that take shape in ongoing streams of experience. Onflow provides an accurate, general characterization and analysis of experience and a highly detailed rendition of experience from within. The characterization is applicable to every moment in anyone’s waking experience, anywhere, at any time, in whatever mood or emotional state or culture, in your body or mine, in your life or mine. Perhaps this claim seems inflated, but it crisply suggests what a philosophical account of consciousness and experience must achieve. In 1904, as an outgrowth of his work on the stream of consciousness (he coined the phrase), William James argued for a radical empiricism that differed from traditional (sense-perception- and observation-based) empiricism by also paying attention to the unobservable, felt, continuities in the stream of consciousness. Radical empiricists, who want to ground their analyses in the realities of experience and conscious life, must try to get as close as they can conceptually to the embodied, socialized, language-influenced stream of waking subjective life. In this book, which carries forward Jamesian radical empiricism, notable progress is made in the conceptual approach to the

viii

Preface

stream. As a result, readers may come to apprehend the formation of thoughts and perceptions, the intertwining of perception and action and the working of consciousness in the course of action, the functioning of value and memory in the moment, and may come to appreciate as well how language distorts our understanding of experience and subjectivity. To approach the elusive stream, I draw principally on the works of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. I also rely extensively on ideas and analyses presented in the works of John Searle and Gerald Edelman. My argument proceeds through a series of approximations intended to put the reader in close conceptual contact with the onflow of experience. The first approximation or conceptual model is “psychological” and is rooted in James. It provides radically empirical benchmarks that I take to impose criteria of accuracy and explanatory requirements on any theory of consciousness. (Note that James’s famous characterization of the stream of thought and his influential identification and description of the characters of thought remain phenomenologically sound. Among neuroscientists, Edelman and Antonio Damasio hold theories of consciousness that explicitly claim to accord with James’s analysis of the characters of thought.) To make James’s views more contemporary philosophically, I then employ methods of analysis developed by Searle in his theory of intentionality. En route to developing an “intentional approximation,” I give James an intentionality-based interpretation that enriches several of his central notions. Nonetheless, Searle’s theory of intentionality generally attends more to the logical structure of intentional states than to phenomenological questions, and was not conceived with express sensitivity to the continuities in the stream of experience. But, if one adopts a Jamesian, radically empirical, outlook, Searle’s tools of analysis are helpful in understanding fluid intentional phenomena, and in the subsequent “processual approximation” I use ideas from James and Searle to show how intentional states are embedded in the stream of consciousness and to treat the stream as a flow of intentionality. With this approximation, readers are prepared to make contact with the very formation of propositional (intentional) content and with the functioning of consciousness in onflowing experience. It is at this juncture that Whitehead becomes the central figure. For Whitehead, each moment is an “act of experience,” a process of formation of a concrete experience, a “concrescence.” As James had it too, although each such act comes as its own subjective unity, it arises within the stream,

Preface

ix

emerging from its direct and more remote antecedents, and carrying forward into and affecting its immediate and more remote successors. From a philosophical and radically empirical point of view, the Whitehead-based “concrescual approximation,” which defines consciousness in concrescual terms, arguably affords the best available analysis—perhaps the most fine-grained approximation possible—of the stream of consciousness. But how well does it sit with neuroscience, and neuroscience with it? Drawing on Edelman’s biological theory of consciousness, I outline a “neurobiological approximation” and demonstrate just how finely a Whitehead-based account of experience can mesh with a sophisticated neurobiological theory of consciousness. The Edelman-Whitehead correlations are striking, suggestive, and Jamesian in spirit. They arise from what may prove the most appealing piece of analysis in the book. I then argue for a form of monism that is opposed to familiar forms of dualism and materialism, as well as to the forms of “biological naturalism” espoused by Searle and Edelman. I am grateful to Anatole Anton, who, at the just right time, urged me to write this book and provided helpful criticism along the way; to Robert Bardell, who, over a 20-year stretch, challenged and helped refine many of the arguments that came to be central to the book; to my brother Allan, my son Noah, and the several other readers who commented with insight on draft portions of the manuscript; to the many people who took part with me in efforts at radical empiricism; and to my important teachers— Geoffrey Chew, John Searle, and the late Paul Feyerabend and Gregory Vlastos. I owe special thanks to Tom Stone of The MIT Press for his editorial guidance and for steadfastly seeing Onflow through from receipt of manuscript to publication. My gratefulness to Mallory exceeds all. Onflow is dedicated to her.

Abbreviations

AI

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

BA

Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind

CN

Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature

CSR

John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality

ERE

William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism

ESP

Alfred North Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy

FR

Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason

IS

Alfred North Whitehead, The Interpretation of Science: Selected Essays

Iy

John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind

J1, J2 William James, The Principles of Psychology, volumes 1 and 2 JB

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course

MC

John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness

MoT William James, The Meaning of Truth MT

Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

ND

Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection

P

William James, Pragmatism

PNK

Alfred North Whitehead, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge

PR

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

PU

William James, A Pluralistic Universe

R

Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science

xii

Abbreviations

RIM

Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making

RM

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind

RP

Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness

S

Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect

SA

John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

SMW Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World SPP

William James, Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy

T

Gerald M. Edelman, Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology

UA

Alfred North Whitehead, A Treatise on Universal Algebra, with Applications

UC

Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination

VRE

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

WtB

William James, The Will to Believe

Note concerning references: If two or more successive references within a single paragraph are clearly to the same work, the source is indicated for the first reference only.

Onflow

1

The Stream of Consciousness and the Concreteness of

Experience

As we live it, waking life is a stream of experiences—feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and actions. The particular experiences making up each stream are unique and embodied. They vary in countless ways: in intensity, focus, and operative interest, in felt detail of environs, in specifics and richness of association, in mood and emotional tone, in urgency and relevance to action, in freshness and ordinariness, in degrees and types of physicality and mentation and involvement of media and tools, in temporal orientation and scope, in complexity, in self-consciousness and self-restraint, and so on. Through all these momentary experiences, the hundreds and hundreds of millions of them in an extended life, we are unthinkingly certain of these things: that our experience is ours and within a surround and is what it is from moment to moment, and that the ebb and flow of waking experience is seamless, unbroken, and unresting. Yet much of philosophy proceeds with disregard for, and barely checked abstraction from, the stream of experience and the relatively accessible portion of it that is often characterized as the stream of consciousness. William James introduced his influential, metaphorical phrase “the stream of consciousness” in print in 1884, and his seminal account of the stream remains perspicacious. In 1904, after concern with the stream had indelibly influenced and informed much of his subsequent work in psychology and philosophy, James formulated a philosophy of radical empiricism founded on the importance of recognizing not just the discernible highlights but the continuities within the stream—continuities too concrete, embodied, protean, ephemeral, dynamic, and vital to yield their secrets to the oversimplifying, language-constrained techniques of British empiricists or to others who treat the content of thought in abstraction from the process of thinking (cf. J1 195–196).1

2

Chapter 1

Radical empiricism starts and ends with experience. Experience is embodied but not merely physical. It involves awareness but is not merely mental. Experience is what it is: it doesn’t even properly include the physical and the mental; rather, they may be said to be aspects together within it, and abstracted from it. Nonetheless, we can say much about experience without such abstraction, about how it is on “the inside,” in the living of it. In this book I deal concretely, in radically empirical fashion, with questions concerning consciousness and experience. In doing so, I contend that any philosophically adequate account of consciousness must be able to deal with the continuities in the stream of consciousness as well as the particularities of each experience. This means that such an account must show how experiences are constituted. Many influential accounts are sorely inadequate on this score: holding to methodological and ontological biases that concentrate overmuch on the objective and intersubjectively observable, they lose or eschew contact with the stream. The resulting over-rationalized renditions treat experience as variously, and unrealistically, depersonalized, disembodied, and detached from action and valuation. My account does not suffer from these deficiencies. Starting from James’s insights concerning the characters of thought and the stream of consciousness, this book represents a concerted attempt to give a comprehensive, process-based account of the stream of experience and of any moments arising in such a stream—an account that is coherent, that plausibly situates the stream of consciousness in the onflow of experience, and that treats the process of formation of moments of experience and relations among them, showing how moments of experience are connected in the stream, as each now opens into a next. The account developed herein addresses relevant concerns in phenomenology, epistemology, action theory, theory of intentionality, and neurobiology and identifies and assails linguistic and methodological impediments to efforts at making conceptual contact with the notoriously elusive stream of experience. In drawing close to the stream, it provides a basis for identifying unwarranted abstractions in the sciences and philosophy, and it transforms or dissolves several traditional philosophical problems. It clears a way for a Jamesian monism of pure experience, for appreciating the depth of actuality and intensity attainable in the moment, and for increasing one’s capacity for unsentimental empathy and compassion.


3

1.1 The Stream of Consciousness and “Transitive Parts” After covering many physiological preliminaries and issues concerning the nature of the science of psychology in the several opening chapters of The Principles of Psychology, William James, in a chapter titled “The Stream of Thought,” explicitly turns to his primary concern, the phenomena and conditions of mental life.2 He opens the chapter with the announcement “We now begin our study of the mind from within” (J1 224), and in the chapter he attempts to deal with the experienced continuities of consciousness. Why be concerned with the continuities? Because the stream is real, and without the continuities there cannot be a stream, or anything more than an assemblage of disconnected elements. James’s characterization of the stream directly challenges the view of traditional empiricists, who maintained that the stream was ultimately composed of disjoined elements. On the first page of “The Stream of Thought,” James, sometimes directly, sometimes implicitly, cites three interrelated and mutually supportive factors that serve to impede understanding of, or even an approach to, the relevant phenomena: •

the focus on sensation, characteristic of traditional empiricism

•

the assumption that what is disclosed to discriminative attention is fun-

damental to an understanding of experience •

limitations inherent in the English language (and in other languages).

In present-day dress, each of these factors continues to impede accounts of consciousness, but, following James, each of them can be superseded, leading to an accurate, general characterization of experience and a closely articulated apprehension of experience from within. The characterization is aptly applicable to my experience, your experience, anyone’s experience, in any walk of life, in any times, whether stable, fast-changing, or chaotic, in any cultural tradition, in any physical condition, in every moment, in the face of any novelty, all day long. This may seem a grandiose claim, but it is a naked indication of precisely what must be achieved by a philosophical account of consciousness and experience. In the two sentences following his chapter-opening declaration, James castigates as having abandoned the empirical method of investigation those who start with sensations as “the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher mental stage from those below it” (J1

4

Chapter 1

224). He soon states (230) that he counts John Locke and his successors among these latter, including philosophers who adopt a doctrine of “simple ideas,” invariant mental atoms which in combination form complex mental states. In this building-block approach to perception and thought, the active function of the body in the process of perception is minimized, as is the importance of valuation—purpose, desire, and interest. For James, what traditional empiricists “call simple sensations” are “results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree” and are treated in abstraction from the “teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” (224). Although he will and must situate sensation in the stream of consciousness, James will not start his study of the mind from within by examining sensation. Instead, he will start with the “only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset . . . the fact of thinking itself.” Here, James uses the word “thinking” to apply to “every form of consciousness” (J1 224), so that all manner of subjective experiences—beliefs, desires, intentions, imaginings, pains, perceptions, sensations, and the formation of each and every thought—may be included. James adds, in further contrast with British empiricists, that this experience is perforce fluid, continuous. Consciousness “does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits” or “jointed” but rather as flowing, and is most naturally described as “the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (239). With this, the immediate target is David Hume, for whom the mind is composed of distinct and disconnected “perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” (1739: 252–253, 635): “The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our ‘stream’ was adopted by all his successors as a complete inventory of the facts” (J1 353). For James, the chief limitation and underlying failure of traditional empiricism is that it neglects the continuities (or what James calls the “transitive parts”) in the stream of consciousness. To introduce that crucial phrase, I rely on James’s best-known characterization of the stream (J1 243): As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is [the] different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. . . . The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.


5

Let us call the resting-places the “substantive parts,” and the places of flight the “transitive parts,” of the stream of thought.3

Here, before discussing James’s thought closely in chapter 2, I construe ‘transitive parts’ broadly to begin with the transition beyond the attainment of a substantive part, with the readying for takeoff from a perch. James later named this transition the “co-conscious transition . . . by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self” (ERE 47). In varying forms throughout the Principles, James stresses the difference between those who would study the mind from within, sensitive to the transitive parts and other realities of onflowing experience, and those who adopt various withdrawn and analytic stances toward it, reviewing experience with an introspective or analytic detachment that separates mental states—substantive parts—from one another, from flows of awareness, activity, and action, and from the experience of the present as an experience of process (in a sense to be closely specified). One can trace the philosophical breakup of the stream to the technique of Cartesian doubt and to the Cartesian recipe for discriminating the substantive parts clearly and distinctly. For Descartes, securing a clear and distinct perception of ideas requires a withdrawal of the mind from the senses, along with the control of desire and volition so as to keep them from disturbing the effort (1641, Fourth Meditation). With this withdrawal, the content of perception is cut off from preceding and future states, as it is in Descartes’ radical skepticism. For Descartes, the experiencing of content also serves as the basis for the cogito: I cannot doubt that I am having this content, therefore, because there is this having, I exist. Our existence is therewith shrunk down to the experiencing of what is focused on in consciousness, to the mere having of content. The experiencing is considered in abstraction from other mental states, from the past, and from society, and it appears as an independent part. Such abstraction led Descartes to view “the whole duration of life” as “divisible into countless parts all mutually independent” (1641, Third Meditation). For Descartes, God preserves the “illusion” of connectivity between the independent parts of the stream of experience—the very parts that Cartesian doubt and the criteria of clarity and distinctness have rendered discrete (e.g. 1641, Third Meditation; 1644, I.XXI). For Hume, perceptions are the units of experience, and life and time are made up of mutually independent parts

6

Chapter 1

too, but Hume did not adopt any such divine option, although he was uneasy with his account (1739: 635–636). For James, the experiential flux cannot be approximated adequately by combining discrete, independent moments. The Jamesian shift, marking and honoring the distinction between experience as felt in the living of it and as thought about in subsequent acts of reflection, is profound and amounts to taking the stream of consciousness seriously. Once the shift is made and the importance of transitive parts is recognized, one may find all manner of considerations transformed. In views developed by James, by Alfred North Whitehead, the Anglo-American mathematician and philosopher of organism, and by others, it leads to a process-based or event-based ontology. 1.2

Transitive Parts and Radical Empiricism

Whereas James sought to study the mind from within and found the stream of thought “sensibly continuous,” Hume, who tried to “enter most intimately into what I call myself,” actually attempted to look at the stream from outside by means of introspection or self-observation and found the mind to be “a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance” (1739: 252, 253). In view of Hume’s uncritical reliance on the practice of self-observation, the stream thus consists of distinct and disconnected states, “loose and separate,” one following another with “inconceivable rapidity” (1748: 85; 1739: 252). Hume held that no “real connections” could be found between any two of these states or perceptions. James contrasts his radical empiricism with “the Humean type” (ERE 42). For James’s philosophy, ordinary empiricism has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections between experiences (43), but “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be [and are] experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (42; cf. MoT xxxvii). When Hume (1739: 635) takes up his stance toward experience—by applying what Berkeley (I.25) called “bare observation”—“no connections among distinct existences [perceptions] are ever discoverable.” Throughout, Hume remains unaware of any distinction between experiences as lived through and experiences as objects of reflection or self-observation. He thus falls prey to what James refers to as the “psychologist’s fallacy,” namely “the


7

inveterate habit, whenever we try introspectively to describe one of our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itself and talking of something else . . . [namely] the things that appear to the thought” (J1 278). Such describing provides a prime instance of not taking our experience of transition “just as we feel it” and of “confus[ing] ourselves with abstract talk about it” (ERE 48). By emphasizing the more substantive parts of the stream in this way, one may blithely treat experiences as states independent of person and context, so that the content of a state is in effect the same for anyone considering it (J1 196). But this approach sacrifices reality for seeming clarity: it mistakenly assumes that what is rendered clear and discriminable is fundamental to the understanding of experience. That is why James characterized it as a fallacy. For James’s radical empiricism, which aims to neither admit “into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (ERE 42), transitive parts must not be unduly abstracted from or neglected in any theory attempting to be adequate to our experience. To this day, one can attempt to sustain a Humean posture, complete with withdrawal from the phenomenological (the lived immediacy of actual experience, before any reflection on it) and consequent neglect of the transitive parts and of the transitions between individual experiences and their successors (so that the continuity of experience is held to be illusory, apparent only). This could be called an inveterate habit of many writers with behaviorist and functionalist inclinations, including Daniel Dennett (e.g. 1991: 356) and Marvin Minsky (e.g. 257). In Consciousness Explained, Dennett gives an account of consciousness that, as David Chalmers (190) notes, replaces the phenomenal seeming of things as the experiencing of them in a certain way with “a psychological sense of ‘seem’ in which for things to seem a certain way is for us to be disposed to judge that they are that way.” Consequently, Chalmers continues, Dennett’s theory deals with judgments concerning phenomena rather than with the experiences themselves. In effect, Dennett is turning what he calls his “intentional stance” on his own stream of experience, repeating the withdrawal made by Hume and by Berkeley and others. Adopters of Dennett’s stance believe they can most efficiently explain and predict the behavior of apparent agents, including humans, by treating them as if they were rational agents who harbored beliefs, desires, and other mental states and acted on the basis of the contents of such states (e.g. Dennett 1991: 76). In their attempt to put

8

Chapter 1

assertions to the test of intersubjective observables only, and their disregard for whether agents indeed have such mental states, or any correlate experiences, proponents of the intentional stance reveal their functionalist and possibly behaviorist orientations (Dennett 1978: 238). In keeping with his functionalist orientation, Dennett (1991: 364) espouses a position in which mental states are, in effect, physical or brain states that have causal relations to behavior but have no experiential component: “You seem to think there’s a difference between thinking (judging, deciding, being of the heartfelt opinion) that something seems pink to you and something really seeming pink to you. But there is no difference. There is no such phenomenon as really seeming over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case.” The abstraction from subjectivity that goes with the intentional stance involves, as does Hume’s self-observation, abstraction from transitive parts and the continuities in the stream. Thus, in keeping with his denial of the phenomenal seeming of things, Dennett (1991: 356) attempts to give the lie to the notion that continuity is a feature, let alone “one of the most striking features,” of consciousness. To be sure, consciousness may involve discontinuous aspects, but in normal waking life the stream of consciousness never seems broken or to be composed of discrete perceptions occurring with inconceivable rapidity. Thus, even if the “illusion” of continuity in perceived motion arises from the fusing of separate images, the perceiving of motion as continuous need not involve glossing over a break in experience, for the fusing may turn on the experiential functioning of aftereffects of stimuli as perceptual moments influence their successors (Sacks 2004: 44; J1 242): successive moments of experience really are conjoined. Furthermore, even apparent discontinuities in the visual field, associated with such abnormal phenomena as the experience of “flickering series of ‘stills’” during migraine attacks, or “motion blindness” (the lack of visual awareness of motion around one) (Sacks 2004: 41, 42), need not involve breaks in the stream of experience. In fact, while these abnormalities transpire, “the flow of thought and perception” may remain “otherwise normal” (42): one is, for example, aware of and disturbed by the flickering. Radical empiricism does not exclude from its concern any element or relation that is experienced (ERE 42), and these pointedly include the felt continuities in the stream of embodied experience. In the Principles, James explored those continuities, and I will attend to his insights concerning


9

them in later chapters. Suffice to add here that any analytical withdrawal from the onflowing stream of experience is itself the analysis of some portion of the stream other than the immediate present, yet each particular process of analysis itself unfolds within the ongoing stream—the continuities remain inescapable. 1.3

Radical Empiricism and the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”

If Hume neglects the transitive parts, and makes “perceptions” stand in for what would otherwise remain of the stream (the substantive parts), what does James make of the experience of those perceptions or substantive parts? For James, the perception or thought as it is in itself is a single pulse of indecomposable subjective unity, arising from and continuous with its predecessors in the stream, including the thoughts that went before, appropriating them and all that they contain (J1 278, 371, 339): The unity into which the Thought—as I shall for a time proceed to call, with a capital T, the present mental state—binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there. (J1 338)

The pulse is thus the formation of the Thought—the recognizing of the object, the recalling of the name, the arriving at the decision, for example— and the mental state qua substantive part or “stable psychic fact” (J1 253) appears in “a single pulse of subjectivity” (278), “one undivided state of consciousness” (276) not properly to be isolated from its forebears, including the transitive parts contributing to its formation, or from subsequent thoughts, which in turn appropriate them. So understood, “the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Consciousness [is] the ultimate fact for psychology” (360) and the stream of consciousness is a stream of pulses (PU 283–284). In Some Problems of Philosophy (his attempt, terminated by fatal illness, to formulate a coherent, systematic metaphysics), James introduced the notion of “buds of perception.” In a passage that encapsulates his descriptions of the process of thought-formation within the stream of experience and of the distortions introduced by traditional empiricists and by unwitting practitioners of the psychologist’s fallacy, he asserted: Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all. (SPP 155)

10

Chapter 1

The notion of a bud can be extended to include any occurrent thought, and it will in that fashion be carefully extended and applied in following chapters; in fact, the notion of buds, as acts of experience, will figure prominently throughout this book. The formation of a drop or bud is the formation of a substantive part, in the terminology of the Principles, and the flight to a new perching becomes the formation of the bud: if the philosopher, psychologist, or cognitive scientist reduces the stream to a series of substantive parts, perceptions (in Hume’s sense) or intentional states (in, say, Dennett’s sense), he does so by neglecting the formation of buds, the transitive parts, and the co-conscious transitions from one experience to the next. The failure to register these parts, to “give them their due,” and the laying of “a far too great emphasis . . . on the more substantive parts of the stream,” is the “great blunder to which all schools are liable” (James 1884: 3; J1 244). Nonetheless, although James highlights and in a sense discovers the transitive parts, he leaves to the side the question “as to the genesis and constitution of these . . . integral pulses of consciousness” (James, quoted in Perry 1935 II 102). Whitehead does not. Whitehead adopts the metaphorical notion of the bud, claiming James’s authority for treating it as an act of experience (PR 68). For Whitehead, the growth of a bud is the process of formation of a concrete experience. The process is a becoming concrete, a concrescence (derived from a Latin verb meaning “growing together”). As for James, although these acts come totally—as if in a moment of self-organization that brings many feelings into a unity of feeling—the acts are not separated from the stream; rather, they emerge from their immediate pasts, and they anticipate, carry forward into, and affect their immediate futures. The stream of experience is a stream of buds. Although consciousness and experience may seem intangible in the sense that they are ungraspable, invisible, silent, odorless, and, in fact, not sensually apprehendable, the actuality and onflow of experience is nonetheless concrete. I will propose that the standard for concreteness be the formation of a moment of conscious experience—the concrescence, for instance, of a perception or decision. It is conceptual withdrawal from the actuality of concrescence that makes us think of the material world (including, say, kicked stones), rather than experience (say, of pain felt fresh upon toe-stubbing), as paradigmatically concrete.


11

In sympathy with James, Whitehead ventures into areas little studied by James, including the formation of buds and the transitions from bud to bud. In so doing, Whitehead extends the scope of radical empiricism and, in effect, points to a way to overcome the limitations inherent in the spatiotemporal and sensory (visual, aural, tactile) metaphor of the stream. Instead of merely taking a “general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness” (J1 243), Whitehead goes “into” the moment. He refuses to abstract from the moment, any moment, understood as an act of experience issuing from and into other experiences, as an act occurring within the constraints of inheritance from all that is encompassed in the experient’s past and within the onflow of concrescences. By bringing philosophical analysis into the bud, Whitehead secures access to a post-Cartesian/Humean basis for ontology, and can characterize momentary consciousness as it arises from pre-conscious phases of synthesis and so as typical only of experiences involving sufficiently complex concrescences. Further, he can situate buds and each stream of consciousness within a broader stream (or, to use a term that is less spatial and less linked to sensory modalities, onflow) of activity. Whitehead applies the notion of buds not only to human moments of experience but also, more broadly, to actual entities or occasions—“the final real things of which the world is made up.” He elaborates the notions of actual entities and concrescence with rigor and thoroughness, “with the purpose of obtaining a one-substance cosmology” (PR 18, 19). Throughout the articulation of his philosophy of organism, Whitehead’s ontology and methodology, indeed his phenomenology, remain consistent with the monistic radical empiricist program initiated by James—the philosophy of pure experience, which incorporates a pluralism of pure experiences and streams of thought (ERE 4, 110; PU 321; J1 226). Our experience is everchanging, and upon suitable withdrawal one can regard each change as involving modification of mind and body. Mind-body dualism then appears as an artifact of (attempted) withdrawal from onflow and is typically associated with correlate misplaced attributions of concreteness, e.g. to physical objects, brain states, and to static contents of mental states. The radical empiricist recognizes the Cartesian withdrawal as an entryway to a mode of experience, an attitude one can adopt, a science-enabling game one can play. Moreover, experience in that mode in no way gives the lie to the Jamesian account of the stream: Cartesians in their withdrawals are nonetheless in their streams, experiencing, although such experience

12

Chapter 1

remains inaccessible to those in the grips of such withdrawal. The Jamesian thought “never is an object in its own hands” (J1 340): the thought as an object is not the thought from within, and the thinking about the thought as an object is the thinking and formation of a different thought with its own interiority and constitution. From a Whiteheadian vantage, James’s “psychologist’s fallacy”— the imposing of an intellectualized, after-the-fact account of how we feel things on “the primitive way of feeling them” (J1 522)—is an instance of Whitehead’s more general “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” For Whitehead, This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories. Thus the success of a philosophy is to be measured by its comparative avoidance of this fallacy, when thought is restricted within its categories. (PR 7–8)

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is not in the abstracting, which may after all generate new ideas or concepts that can serve practical ends and facilitate the new apprehension of connections and dynamics, but in the neglect of the degree of abstraction and of the substitution of the conceptual form for the actual (PU 272). Recognition of the fallacy is thus not meant to forestall abstraction. Abstraction is necessary for any theoretical activity, for any reasoning, that involves the treatment of an entire datum in terms of an extracted character (J2 340), and even for conception, perception, and consciousness. Recognition of the fallacy should provoke or foster inclinations to contrast the simplified and abstract with the concrete, to explore and characterize the limits of any idealization or systematization, to discover the limitations of the methodologies and assumptions on which any theoretical account relies, to appreciate senses in which the success of an account is merely approximate (cf. AI 221), and to “redescend . . . to the purer or more concrete level again” (ERE 97). When considering the stream of consciousness, critical awareness of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and commitment to radical empiricism are functionally equivalent; a principal task for both the fallacy-sensitive analyst and the radical empiricist is to avoid being misled by abstraction and to stay close to experienced actualities, to buds, to transitive parts and other realities of conscious experience, when considering particular mental


13

states—buds—and more generally what goes on in the stream of experience. Now, if on reflection you can divide buds into components, as James says, what are the components? The analysis of actual entities or acts of experience into their component elements will certainly deal with what James termed the transitive parts; these turn out to be numbered among feelings, which Whitehead (PR 19) called “the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities.” In approaching these feelings, the idea is to be alive to what is filtered out by various methods of analysis that rely on withdrawal from the stream, to be alive to the distortions such filtering introduces, to honor the felt continuities in the stream, and to be loose and gently attentive enough within the concrete to be able to freshly remember experiences as if from within the stream, rather than attempting to make contact with them by thinking about mental states, frozen substantive parts, or some language-mediated version of them. 1.4

A Survey of the Coming Chapters

Adhering to views associated with an outmoded and narrowly materialistic science, many philosophers deny or neglect the reality and efficacy of consciousness. Of those who pay attention to consciousness, too many deal with conscious states in abstraction from the onflow of concrete, embodied, practical experience. Understanding consciousness requires taking the stream of consciousness seriously and being able to situate each state of consciousness within the stream in ways that make genuine contact with the experiential realities of life as we live it through and that also afford an alignment of conscious states with relevant brain and bodily phenomena. Taking the stream of consciousness seriously means getting as close to it, and to the onflow of experience, as we can, conceptually, with a minimum of oversimplification and distortion and, as far as is possible, without submitting unwittingly to metaphysical presuppositions. My principal argument and textual strategy herein involves a series of approximations designed to bring the reader as close as possible, conceptually, to the onflow of experience. In chapter 2, I adopt as a first approximation of experience and consciousness within the onflow James’s psychological account of streaming consciousness. In that chapter I establish terms of discourse for refinement in the following chapters. There I first present and analyze James’s account of subjective life, focusing on the

14

Chapter 1

characteristics of the stream and of what he terms the characters of thought, namely that, most briefly, consciousness is personal, changing, continuous, intentional and selective. The James-based psychological approximation serves as a radically empirical baseline, imposing conditions of adequacy on any theory of consciousness. Thereafter, I use the notion of “approximating the stream of consciousness” to mean accepting James’s general description and then further characterizing the stream and the characters of thought: an effective approximation should enrich our understanding of the characters of thought and of major flow patterns in the stream of consciousness. In The Principles of Psychology, James laid a detailed groundwork for understanding human activity as embodied and as experienced. In so doing he elaborated a thoroughgoing mind-brain parallelism that indicates the sort of body-mind correlations a coherent neuropsychology must provide, but he stopped short of discussing the ontological status of consciousness. Later, in his radical empiricism and his attempt at an experience-based metaphysics, he moved beyond dualistic approaches to treat consciousness as a function and a process within experience. James’s work directly influenced several of the major figures of twentieth-century Western philosophy, including Dewey and Husserl (Edie 21, 23; Wild vii, 126; Husserl 295), but it was Whitehead who actually adventured along the path of development opened by James, formulating a “philosophy of organism” that meets Jamesian conditions of adequacy. Whitehead and James will prove the primary intellectual heroes of this book. In fact, the views I present here pretend to be no more than an extension of Jamesian and Whiteheadian approaches. Two other figures play prominent roles: the philosopher John Searle and the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. I focus on their views in chapters 3 and 7, respectively. James provides a phenomenologically satisfying, appealing, and groundbreaking account of the stream, but it contains some important notions that remained underanalyzed and some claims that are expressed more vaguely than is now necessary. In chapter 3, to give James a more current reading, I employ terms and methods of analysis developed by Searle, who independently describes, in his theory of intentionality, important counterparts to the Jamesian characters of thought. Consequently, in developing an “intentional approximation,” I provide an intentionality-based interpretation of James that enriches several central Jamesian notions. In this sec-


15

ond approximation, I treat the stream of consciousness as a stream of intentional states, with the obvious proviso that those states are not regarded as merely substantive parts. (An intentional state consists of propositional content—roughly, what the state is about or directed at—experienced in a psychological mode associable with a psychological verb such as ‘believe’, ‘desire’, ‘hope’, ‘remember’, or ‘perceive’.) Searle’s analytic notions help us to secure a firm analytic grip on James’s transitive parts and give us greater descriptive access to the stream than James’s notions alone provide. However, for my purposes, Searle’s analyses are not attentive enough to the formation of intentional states and to continuities in the stream of experience, even though his tools of analysis are readily applicable to fluid intentional phenomena. In my “processual approximation,” presented in chapter 4, I wed Jamesian and Searlean notions, conceptually embedding intentional states in the stream of consciousness and treating the stream as a flow of intentionality. This approximation examines the momentary formation and function of intentional states by focusing on the intentional aspect of consciousness in perception and action, the biologically primary forms of intentionality. It aims to refine our understanding of consciousness, to methodically add precision to our account of the experiential onflow, and to help us grasp some of the most elusive features of everyday experience. To move from the intentional approximation to the processual approximation, and thereby to improve our construal of intentional states by embedding them in the onflow of experience, I cast the experiential net more widely. One vehicle selected for accomplishing this is an account of perception in action and of action as lived. If during most if not all of our waking life we are doing things of one sort or another—scheduling a trip, mincing garlic, installing software, playing a sport, sowing seeds, participating in a job interview, you name it—and most of our waking life therefore involves action (and perception), then an “actional” condition of adequacy for a realistic account of the stream of subjective life is that it show how consciousness functions in the performance of the small tasks that consume so much of our daily lives and, more generally, in the course of action. In the processual approximation I pay attention to bodily and valuational activities associated with perception in action, draw nearer to the transitive parts conceptually, and move toward fulfilling the actional condition of adequacy on accounts of consciousness.

16

Chapter 1

Although the processual approximation can make substantial conceptual contact with the bud-based reality of experience, it ultimately remains within the bounds of intentionality-based analysis, it is on occasion too influenced by linguistic characterizations of relevant phenomena, and it does not place one within actual events as they take shape, at least not in any way we can generate schematically in terms of the elements and principles of a system of ideas. Following Whitehead, the concrescual approximation brings one inside the moment and stream. The relevant notions and principles from Whitehead’s philosophy are terminologically unique and can appear highly technical if not merely abstruse. Nonetheless, the processual approximation is elaborate enough to provide an effective context for introducing many essential ideas from Whitehead’s processual, organic metaphysics. Presented in chapter 5, those notions and principles provide the basis for the concrescual approximation. In chapter 6, I elaborate this Whitehead-based approximation by bringing it to bear on perception, action, and thought (the gamut of experience), by re-characterizing each stream of experience as an onflow of concrescences, and by defining subject-formation and consciousness in concrescual terms. The concrescual approximation accounts for the genesis and structure of any moment of experience, and it anchors the interpretation of the other approximations, treating them as involving abstractions from concrescence and experiential monism. Not only is the concrescual approximation realistic phenomenologically, it is neurobiologically feasible, and in a way that suggests how to correlate behavior and psychological phenomena with neurobiological phenomena. In chapter 7, I draw on the work of Edelman and other “brain scientists” to suggest neurobiological correlates for all leading distinctions invoked in the preceding chapters; the correlations link neurobiological processes with intentional and concrescual processes. I choose Edelman because he attempts to provide a detailed stream-sensitive analysis of consciousness based on brain structure—an analysis that deals with the evolution, ontogenesis, and momentary structure and function of consciousness—and because he draws extensively on James, starting from the properties of consciousness enumerated early in James’s chapter on the stream of thought. Edelman demonstrates that the Jamesian characters of thought provide an effective framework for aligning neurobiology with psychology and experience and for formulating exhaustive neuropsychological accounts of consciousness.


17

Moreover, Edelman turns out to be an astute observer of behavior. Although he is not wholly free from dualistic and traditional empiricist impulses and biases, he goes a long way toward putting the mind back in nature through a conception of consciousness that treats perception and action as unified in embodied and coherently unfolding multi-dimensional scenes of action. I provide a concrescence-based reconstrual of Edelman that takes him from his neuroscientist’s remove and puts him in vivid contact with the stream of experience. At the same time, Edelman, who is adept at associating complex neural phenomena with psychological phenomena, helps clarify the concrescence-based theory of action and perception, especially in drawing attention to the neural bases for the ordering of successive changes in movement and to the function of value in memory and action. Without embracing Edelman’s particular account of the correlation between brain processes and consciousness, I use that account to show in detail how far a neurobiological approximation can go in corroborating Whitehead’s account. I also use it to bring us close to the body as it is felt in action and to the stream, close enough to glimpse the working of consciousness and an experiential grounding for organism-environment, subject-object, agentpatient, and mind-body/brain polarities and distinctions emerging and functioning amidst the onflow of experiential events. If I use Whitehead to “concrescualize” Edelman, I also use Edelman to further “embody” Whitehead and the concrescual approximation. The strategy here is to show the merits of Whiteheadian phenomenology and action theory in bringing us close to experience, to map concrescual and neurobiological accounts onto each other in detail, and to treat them, in an analysis that is neuropsychologically sound, as affording “mental” and “physical” contours of experience. If I succeed in this, I may bring you as close to the raw unverbalized stream of experience (cf. PU 272; ERE 94) as one can get conceptually and put you in the mind of what it is like to be you as you live through your embodied moments. The radical empiricist takes one’s own unverbalized experience in the stream in the moment as a touchstone for one’s philosophical claims. To understand consciousness and experience and resolve perennial philosophical problems concerning them, one must get “beneath” language, wake from the bewitchment of our intelligence by the subject-verb-object form of discourse, and make conceptual contact with onflowing unverbalized experience. The subjective mark is there, but the subject is not withdrawn

18

Chapter 1

from the stream in the seizure of distancing Cartesian skepticism or Humean introspection4 or a functionalist’s intentional stance-taking: rather, the subject is awash in it, is in and of the irresistible, unrelenting onflow. No philosophy can safely start elsewhere; but if one can start there, one’s whole outlook, philosophical and practical, may change—a prospect that will lack appeal for some, and may seem utterly vital to some. Together, as I will argue, James and Whitehead effect an “experiential bouleversement” of traditional dualisms: if embodied experience is where we start then we can elucidate the mental and physical poles of experience, and see mind and matter as artifacts of withdrawal from experience, and the dualistic questions concerning how mind could emerge from or interact with matter are seen to be misguided. Thus, the concrescence-based approach developed here appears to have substantial and novel ontological implications, perhaps largely because it attempts to take up some “old advice” cited by Whitehead: “. . . the doctrines which best repay critical examination are those which for the longest period have remained unquestioned” (AI 177). In chapter 7, I attempt to engage in such critical examination by recurring to persistent Jamesian and Whiteheadian concerns with biases and limitations imposed by reliance on the subject-predicate and subject-verbobject forms of expression.5 These limitations and biases encourage neglect of the linguistic withdrawal from the onflux of experience, and the gaining thereby of an intentional capability, a power of mental representation which tends to preclude recognition that the withdrawn, language-using subject is typically at a remove from the relevantly experiential subject, the subject-in-formation. Each moment of consciousness involves the formation and projection forward of a (new) subject. Of course, newly formed subjects are of a piece with their inheritances: each new subject is consonant with characteristics of the person in whose life it arises, but the new subject does not predate and serve as the agent of the act of subject-forming experience. “I think,” as in “I think, therefore I am,” is too crude a formulation. No “I” does the thinking, even when the thinking is intentional, as when planning one’s activities. As James had it, and Whitehead too, the formation of the thought is the formation of the I, and that formation changes the history and memory of the living person. Reliance on the subject-verbobject and subject-predicate forms of discourse promotes disregard of subject-formation, concrescence, and onflow and so is deeply misleading to


19

those trying to understand the nature of consciousness and experience. These syntactic forms, and the intentional capability and power of mental representation intertwined with them, can be traced to technologyamplified biases that took hold in classical Greek in the fifth century BCE and symptomatically made the active voice the predominant voice distinction. (Here ‘voice’ refers to the relationship of the subject of a sentence to the action described by the verb. In the active voice, the subject or agent is not specified as affected by the action.6) That predominance is with us today. For example, almost all Western philosophers blithely employ activevoice-dominated language as the tool for verbal discourse as if its syntax were innocent of bias. But reliance on this language constitutes a very formidable obstacle to the understanding of experience and consciousness and of other general forms of natural process. In fact, I maintain that the very adoption of the dualizing Cartesian withdrawal is facilitated by activevoice-encouraged habits of thought: mind-body and related dualisms can be regarded as outgrowths of the unwitting decision to let active-voicebased language games establish boundary conditions for rational discourse. That decision, coupled with the eventual disregard for the simplifications it involved, constitutes the linguistic enthronement of withdrawal from onflowing experience. All of our waking lives are streams of experience, and all waking experiences—although they may each incorporate syntactical biases appropriate to and inherited from specific language-sharing societies—are assimilable to a single model of experience. Using the notions of onflow, concrescence, and related concepts, I attempt to give process-based accounts of subjectformation, consciousness, objects, and living bodies that render provincial the long-unquestioned active-voice-based outlook, and of course the philosophical dualisms it spawned. The result may provide a sound basis for conceiving the relation of language to experience and so for formulating an ontology relatively free from linguistic bias.

2

2.1


James’s Characters of Thought

In “The Stream of Thought,” James, writing as a psychologist, takes for his starting point the “only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset . . . the fact of thinking itself” (J1 224). As soon as he asks how thinking does go on he identifies five important and readily noticed characters in the thought process (225): 1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. 3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. 4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. 5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while.

James then organizes his chapter around these characters and proceeds in most of the remaining 15 chapters of Principles to treat what he regarded as the major psychological functions (e.g. attention, conception, association, memory, perception, imagination) in relation to the characters of thought and the roles they play in the stream. To the extent that the five characters accurately indicate ineluctable features of the stream of thought, they not only ground accounts of major psychological functions, they also serve as conditions of adequacy on philosophical accounts of consciousness. Consequently, for a Jamesian, any purported account of conscious experience must show, or provide a basis for showing, how the five factors function in each moment of thought, and in the onflow of thought and experience. That is, any purported account must show how the characters of thought are exemplified in any mental state under analysis and must also

22

Chapter 2

show, “from the inside,” how they function in the structuring of experience and contribute to the shaping of the actual world through which an embodied experient moves. In fact, the characters bring behavioral, physiological, and developmental accounts compatible with data available to the traditional empiricist together with a richly textured radically empirical phenomenology. They afford a needed dose of realism while setting out very useful terms for philosophical discourse concerning the characteristics of consciousness. They also anchor James’s later philosophy of pure experience, providing deep guidance for his final attempt at a metaphysics. How then do the five characters, which are after all abstracted from the stream, figure in the stream of experience? First of all, for James each and every thought is a single pulse of indecomposable subjective unity (J1 371, 278)—“however complex the object [of thought] may be, the thought of it is one individual state of consciousness” (276)—and the five characters of thought have purchase in each such unity. The picture that emerges from James’s elaboration of the five characters is that, for all of our species’ plasticity and the unending diversity of circumstance we encounter, our thoughts flow on in pulses or moments of experience that arise in the life of embodied, socialized persons and are shaped by value and directed on objects in ways that incorporate and reflect previous experience. This simple characterization can go a long way toward providing a first approximation of the stream of consciousness good for anyone—child, woman, man—anywhere. 2.2

James, as Psychologist, on the Stream of Consciousness

In Principles, James holds to a psycho-physical parallelism, an “unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain-processes” (J1 182). Throughout the book, James also explicitly accepts several other dualisms that he regarded as boundary conditions for the psychology of his day. He presents views in which, as a psychologist, he assumes that “a mind is an object in a world of other objects,” that where there is cognition there is a mind knowing and a thing known, that the dualism of subject and object is irreducible, no matter what “ulterior monistic philosophy he [the psychologist] may, as an individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician, have in reserve” (199, 218, 220). The monist has already been awakened in James, and the radical empiricist too, but James doesn’t explicitly advocate their positions


23

for over a decade. Although James’s later radical empiricism makes none of the psychologist’s dualistic assumptions, it challenges none of the psychologist’s insights concerning the characters of thought, to which I now turn. “Thought tends to personal form.” (J1 225) In saying that every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness, James has two principal meanings. First, each thought is personal in the sense that it is private, and as such cannot be directly experienced by anyone but oneself. I cannot experience your thoughts as you do, from your perspective or within your stream, any more than you can experience my thoughts. Experience is inescapably subjective. Second, each thought is felt to belong with one’s other thoughts, to be part of an onflowing stream of accumulating personal history: “Experience is remolding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date” (J1 234). James, who accepts Hume’s denial of the existence of a substantial self,1 defers until the following chapter an analysis intended to account for the sense of self in experience—“that appearance of never-lapsing ownership [of thoughts in waking experience] for which common-sense contends” (339). In that ensuing analysis, James finds that the personality and consciousness of self involve “the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time” (371, 400). James uses the word “me” to refer to the objective person “continuing in time,” and “I” to refer to the passing subjective thought, that which in its momentary activity appropriates its data (all that is given to it and taken by it) but cannot appropriate the act of appropriating without terminating it and initiating a new present moment of reflection or self-observation (341). Each bud or pulse of thought differs from the preceding bud, but is “appropriative of [it], together with all that the latter called its own” (401; cf. 340).2 The objective person or self is thus being modified continually, bud by bud, and in each moment the modifications and associations available are constrained by immediately and recently preceding, and deeply sedimented, moments (288, 594). Habit, Self, and the I-Me Dialectic

With the centrality this account of self

gives to the present moment of experience, James the psychologist foreshadows his later monism of pure experience, in which matter and

24

Chapter 2

consciousness and knower and known are viewed as concepts arising from an analysis of undivided experience (e.g. ERE 137–138; PU 264). Not only is there no separate self or knowing mental substance here, but “all the experiential facts find their place in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind . . . and psychology need not look beyond” (J1 401). Nonetheless, “the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves,” and a man’s self has a “sum total of . . . psychic powers,” including a memory, habits, dispositions, and a sense of personal identity (227, 291, 229, 296). Memory, dispositions, and habits may all be treated as habits, which, “from the physiological point of view,” consist of “pathway[s] of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents . . . tend to escape.” These include not just the bodily bases facilitating motor behaviors, for, in addition, “such functions as the association of ideas, perception, memory, reasoning, the education of the will, etc. etc., can best be understood as results of the formation de novo of just such pathways of discharge” (JB 1). We may then see the Jamesian self or me as a congeries of habits, each of them plastic, subject to development and change (J1 105), and each moment in the history of a self then involves an I arising out of a me and subsequently transforming the me, however slightly, in an instance of an ongoing “me-I-(new) me dialectic” (“I-me dialectic” for short). To appreciate this process, we must see the “I” as the outcome of a process, not the agent of it. Each passing thought or instance of thinking culminates in the formation of thought and thinker, it is a moment of subject-formation: “The unity into which the Thought . . . binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there” and that thought is itself the thinker and passes on into the me, at least as a memorable substantive part (J1 338; 401, 643), experience passing into memory. According to James, the I-me process of selfconstruction—the ongoing enabling and constraining structuring of the I by the me and the ongoing modification of the me by the I, of all that one has been by what one now is—is one in which the bodily and the social are principal constituents of the self (292). “The nucleus of the ‘me’ is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time.” (400; ERE 65) We always have some awareness of bodily position, attitude, and condition, and “as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking” (J1 241–242) and indeed “the nucleus of all reality” (J2 iv).3


25

Meanwhile, the social self is close by. First, in addition to the body, James counts clothes, those signifiers of material condition, social status, taste, and the like, and immediate family, as parts of the “material self” (J1 292), and these may certainly be regarded as elements of the social. Moreover, for James, one generally shows a different side of oneself in interactions with different people and people perceived as from different groups. An individual thus “has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares” or “as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (294). This recognition of the dependence of social selves on others is one more seminal idea embedded in James’s psychology, although it may be found earlier in C. S. Peirce’s work (Odin 1996: 22, 143 ff.). The notion of the dependence of the self on images carried by others clearly influenced the social philosopher G. H. Mead’s notion (154) of a generalized other, an “organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self,” although Mead may have had a more organic sense of the self as a participant in, propagator of, and product of society, of the social as constitutive of the individual, than James did. At any rate, generally, in each group in which one has a social self, one knows how to function and express oneself. One can participate in discourses and perform behaviors that accord with group beliefs, values, forms of relation and practices; once a person is a member of a social group, he or she doesn’t just behave in character when appropriate but takes on the character and taken-for-granted background of a group member without a thought and helps propagate the assumptions and character of relations within the group. One does this more or less effortlessly and habitually, and typically with some mark of the individual and personal, the particularities of one’s past experience, temperament and psychological makeup. Through our interactions with other persons, we grow up in and at home with the ways of distinct groups, institutions, and traditions—with our culture’s and subculture’s ways, power relations and all: “habit . . . the enormous flywheel of society . . . keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor” (J1 121; cf. J2 441). However, as the I-me dialectic plays out the I is not simply a prisoner of conditioning, not just the particular habit-manifesting me adjusting to the details of the immediate present. As James had it, one can take some steps

26

Chapter 2

to actively shape the self (J1 122ff.), that congeries of plastic habits: the awareness or discovery of possibility beyond habitual limitation affords opportunity to achieve richer, less habit-bound, more intense, experience or to attempt “pursuit of an ideal social self” (315). In effect, for James, life proceeds existential bud by existential bud, each concrete moment being a vehicle of both cognition and choice (340) and therefore a scene of potential contest of or resistance to the persistent force of societal inheritances and personal “neurotic” patterns. The Jamesian will can override impulse spawned of habit or instinct. “Effort is felt only where there is a conflict of interests in the mind,” the path supporting the more habitual interest keeps unfolding “of its own accord, whilst that of Z [a conflicting interest] needs incessant pulses of voluntary reinforcement” (451). Accordingly, Where thoughts prevail without effort . . . interest and association are the words, let their worth be what it may, on which our explanations must perforce rely. Where, on the other hand, the prevalence of the thought is accompanied by the phenomenon of effort, the case is much less clear. . . . We have now brought things to a point at which we see that attention [say, on the object of Z, or reasons supporting it] with effort is all that any case of volition implies. (J2 561)

The moment then is the locus for the exercise of agency and “free will” (ERE 185; J1 594), affording opportunity for character-shaping decisions, for selfredefinition, if not for erasing personal history. Nonetheless, conflicts may be resolved in fragmenting, compartmentalizing rather than integrative fashion. Thus, it is relevant to note here that the impression made on James by the efficacy of post-hypnotic suggestion, and other phenomena associated with “secondary personal selves,” led him to say that thought “tends to personal form” (J1 225) rather than “is personal.” This may have special importance in our so-called post-modern times when individuals may: change mates, jobs, or job status fairly frequently; move about with multiple socially constructed identities, temporarily taking on different setting-appropriate masks—social selves and roles—to suit different situations, doing all this with more or less adaptive aplomb, though not necessarily self-consciously and often merely habitually; espouse particular versions of (group-)identity politics and the casting off of confining practices and institutions and the internalizing habits they engender; and undergo identity crises as practices and social institutions that once afforded a basis for identity come under attack (Anderson; A. Pred 30). Our socialized habits work in the confines of streams of buds, and we


27

may regard each bud itself not only as an exchange station of immediate, environmental and possibly conflicting inherited influences (Feyerabend 248) but also as a locus or field of action, a zone of autonomy, in which habit need not determine the outcome. “Thought is in constant change.” (J1 229) A particular feeling may remind one of another feeling had before, an experience may even seem just like another one in important regards, without our believing the two exactly the same. No one thinks to have lived through the very same moment more than once: “it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought . . . is, strictly speaking, unique.” Here James avows accord with Heraclitus (J1 233; 1884: 11). You can’t step twice into the same river—different and different waters flow—and even we change, anew appropriating our pasts in each moment (K. Freeman 31; Kirk 196). Even when the thought of a single fact does recur, “we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared” (J1 233). Again, “nothing can be conceived as the same without being conceived in a novel state of mind” (JB 110; cf. J1 480). Novelty is perpetually entering one’s history. That claim is largely a matter of empiricism and common sense. In more theoretical dress, features of mentality distinguish moment from moment, so that peculiarities of content, mood, maturity, emotional tone, and context, for example, serve to ensure that no state of mind can be precisely repeated (cf. J1 230). Of course, James, as a dualistic psychologist, gives this a physiological reading too: “whilst we think, our brain changes” (J1 234) and every change “undergone by the brain leaves in it a modification which is one factor in determining what manner of experiences the following ones shall be” (499). Here we can see James’s I-me dialectic written in the brain. For James, “the whole internal equilibrium [of the brain] shifts with every pulse of change.” Outside objects certainly influence each particular shifting, but so does “the very special susceptibility in which the organ has been left at that moment by all it has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly determined by the nature of this entire past succession. . . . It is out of the question, then, that any total brain-state should identically recur.”4 (234) With the formation of each pulse, constrained though it be by the habitual

28

Chapter 2

and special neural excitements and inertias of the moment, our situation and personal history and brain change. Further, the changing world is of import here. For James (J1 6; cf. 302, WtB 113–123), “the mental life seems to intervene between impressions made from without upon the body, and reactions of the body upon the outer world again,” between data received via the sense organs, and muscular action. The unceasing change in the world affecting our senses, the correspondence of every sensation to some cerebral action, the changing of brain state and of the “whole internal equilibrium” of the brain while we think and with every pulse of change, and the physiological effects of all changes in the brain, even the “summation of apparently ineffective stimuli” suggesting that “none are bare of psychological result” (J1 232–235), all serve to ensure that thinking involves change and each formed thought or state of mind and each corresponding brain state is different from what went before (499). “Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.” (J1 237) This is the crucial character of thought in that, were thought not continuous, Hume would be right, and the Jamesian account of the stream would be defective, and radical empiricism would itself be misguided. The waxing and waning of nerve tracts are continuous, so to the foregoing argument for the constant change of thought based on “analogies of brain physiology” (J1 234) there is a parallel argument for continuity of thought: no brain process or state perishes instantly; each momentary internal equilibrium, which shifts with every pulse of change, has its own inertia and carries on to influence its successors (242). More importantly, quite apart from the physiological analogies, thinking feels continuous. For James, this means that the changes from one moment of waking thought to the next are never absolutely abrupt.5 Each moment of experience remolds the me as it is appropriated by its successors. Thus, for James, the substantive elements arising in each moment of thought to some extent become memorable—whether the memory be event-related, categorical, or procedural. For instance, memory (of an event) is knowledge of a former state of mind—a substantive part— that has dropped from consciousness but is nonetheless retained and liable to recall (J1 654); experiences of recall though not infallible tend to be


29

stronger the more vividly one was interested and attentive in a former state (643–644); and recall involves a personal familiarity characteristic of all experiences appropriated by the thinking self as its own (650). Likewise, when a particular movement has been learned through experience and entered memory “the movement can be desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willed” (J2 487) and can function in the course of action. But the continuity of personality or of an individual’s actual capabilities is not what is at issue here so much as the transition from moment to moment. It is at this juncture in his analysis that James has recourse to the substantive parts—those resting-places in the stream “usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing” (J1 243)—and the transitive parts, which embody the real connections between moments of experience, and render the Humean chain of distinct perceptions a defunct notion6: Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them . . . that it . . . eclipses . . . them. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought’s stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream. (J1 243–244; cf. 253, 644)

Having put the reader in conceptual contact with the stream of consciousness, by distinguishing the substantive and transitive parts, James then quickly passes on to two other principal features of the continuous flow of experience—the fringe, which helps illustrate how the embodied self and habitual association come into play in each passing thought, and feelings of tendency and direction, which link moments together in action. Although the transitive parts, feelings of tendency and direction, and the fringe are very closely related, they point respectively to concerns with psychological analysis, experiential or phenomenological accuracy, and neurological grounding for the distinctions. The transitive parts can be regarded as standing in for psychological functions that carry us from bud to bud, e.g., from thought to thought, perception to intention, or intention to perceived satisfaction. The feelings of tendency and direction figure in how we experience the transitive parts (J1 253). They are not merely “descriptions

30

Chapter 2

from without, but . . . are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within” (254). These are the kinds of feeling that Hume, traditional empiricists, and psychologists who withdraw from the steam and drop the thought as it is in itself and talk of something else (278), fail to acknowledge. James gives several examples to indicate the reality of these feelings, which, as psychologist, he says are “due to waxing and waning excitements of the brain” (250). He cites the following: •

attitudes of expectancy provoked by persons saying to us “Wait!” or

“Hark!” or “Look!” and in response to each our “sense of the direction from which an impression is about to come” (251) •

the active gap felt when trying to remember a name, “beckoning us in a

given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed for term” (251) •

the intention to say a thing before actually saying it, which involves a dis-

tinct state of consciousness hardly anything of which “consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things” (253, 567). These feelings of tendency are “often so vague that we are unable to name them at all.” But they and their correlate transitive parts play so pivotal a role in James’s enterprise that he views a substantial portion of his task as “the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life” (J1 254; 477 ff., which quotes 1884: 18–19) and the overcoming of the tyranny of the clear and distinct: “. . . the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live” (J1 255). A psychology or empiricism that recognizes feelings of tendency will be considerably broader in scope than one that does not. But if the feelings of tendency correspond to transitive parts, they are also linked to activities in the brain and so can constitute an important part of the fringe, a term introduced “to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly perceived” (258, 264), the influence being experienced in a variety of expectations, intimations, associations, and other subtle feelings. The Jamesian Neural Net

Now we may examine more closely the connec-

tions between brain processes and mental processes in James’s dualistic psychology. For James, as the brain changes continuously and states of con-


31

sciousness melt into their successors forming one unbroken stream, the law of “the summation of stimuli in the same nerve-tract” hold sway (J1 248, 82). According to this law, which underpins James’s mind-body or “psychoneural”7 (J2 164) parallelism, . . . a stimulus which would be inadequate by itself to excite a nerve-center to effective discharge may, by acting with one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselves alone) bring the discharge about. The natural way to consider this is as a summation of tensions which at last overcome a resistance. The first of them produce a “latent excitement” or a “heightened irritability” . . . ; the last is the straw which breaks the camel’s back. Where the neural process is one that has consciousness for its accompaniment, the final explosion would in all cases seem to involve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantive kind. But there is no ground for supposing that the tensions while yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, may not also have a share in determining the total consciousness present in the individual at the time. In later chapters we shall see abundant reason to suppose that they do have such a share, and that without their contribution the fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital ingredient of the mind’s object, would not come to consciousness at all. (J1 82; cf. 434)

The “final explosion” is the formation of a pulse, a unique relatively vivid substantive feeling or thought, say a recognition of an object or a decision to act. James related the pulse-by-pulse and neural buildup and transformation of self, and the momentary contribution of the fringe, to associationfacilitated changes in the patterns of excitation and discharge among nerve centers. He termed the elementary causal law governing the neural process linked with association “the law of neural habit”: “When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on reoccurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other” (J1 566). But each elementary process comes to be associated with several others; the more numerous the associations, the greater the number of paths of arousal and recall (566, 683). For James, “the amount of activity at any given point in the brain-cortex is the sum of the tendencies of all other points to discharge into it” (J1 567). We might now term this summation “self-organizing” in that its resultant spontaneously affords the global coherence of a subjective unity of thought. Moreover, James appears to leave ample room for the working of nonlinear interconnections common to models of self-organization by recognizing three factors affecting tendencies to discharge, and together allowing small changes to yield significant effects:

32

•

Chapter 2

The frequency of previous conjunction (nerve-currents propagating most

easily through the most-used tracts of conduction) (J1 563, 567). The stronger, and generally the more useful, the habit or association, the stronger its tendency to discharge once activated. •

The absence (or presence) of competitor tracts into which discharges

might be diverted (J1 567). If the relevant desire or intention is strong enough and anticipatory adaptation to circumstance adept enough, action unfolds smoothly and competition typically does not arise. If competition arises among the feelings “awakened by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract,” so that “nerve-processes are hesitant” (and one is momentarily indecisive) and some form of conflict resolution or other decisive choice is required, consciousness may be intense, causing a break in the discharge (142; 594). •

The intensity of excitement (J1 567). States are fringed with anticipation

of what is to come, and all nerve-currents “tend to run forward in the brain and discharge into the muscular system” (J2 69). The more intense the commitment sourced in some form of desire, or the “emotional interest” or enthusiasm and energy with which the feelings of direction carry forward, the greater the dedication to a dominant tract or a habitual pathway (J1 568). In action, the stimulation of a pathway is felt subjectively as expectant attention (91). Such stimulations are experienced as feelings of tendency, readinesses to respond, and correspond to activated associations that may function via the partial stimulation of neural pathways to provide “preliminary sub-excitement of motor tracts.” These latter, “even when not very strongly focalized, will prepare the motor centers, and shorten the work which a stimulus has to perform on them . . . to produce a given effect” (433–434). In James’s account, excitements, each incomplete or latent in itself, are summed into an open resultant, a conscious state which carries forward immediately into bodily or mental action and alters neural paths, connection strengths, memory, and the me (J1 654). The explosive resultants of summations are experienced, in conscious mental states, as fringed substantive parts. The processes of “summing” may be viewed as, in effect, the brain processes corresponding to the transitive parts, which are experienced in feelings of tendency, and which are “flights” to the fringed substantive parts. A Jamesian may even say that the flow of attention in the course of


33

activity can be approximated using the notions of substantive and transitive parts, and parallels the canalization of flows in the associative web of paths of arousal and recall (460) or the “Jamesian neural net.” Attention is the concentration of concern narrowly on some few things out of the wealth of incoming data, typically so as to deal with them effectively, said concentration involving characteristic “accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs” and readinesses to respond, “anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centers concerned with the object to which the attention is paid” (these preparations being comprised in transitive parts), or “pre-perception” (434, 439).8 Attention thus isolates an object of paramount interest at the time (139), an isolation that produces and is marked by a grade of clarity that strengthens perception, conception, distinction, or recall, or furthers the smooth flow of action, and in any case leads to the formation of a memorable substantive part (marking the formation of the passing thought or I) and corresponding changes in associative neural pathways. To recap: If the total of one’s “psychic dispositions” (J1 296) and powers to do, think, feel, remember, imagine—the whole range of potential actions available via memory—is correlate with associative brain connections and corresponds to the self, the excited neural substrate at a moment corresponds to the self or me functioning as one’s capacities come into play in that moment. Like the self, the substrate must advance or at least undergo modification moment by moment, as the brain’s internal equilibrium shifts. One’s powers and brain connections are always changing in waking life: with each moment of experience, the formation of each I, the connections in the Jamesian neural net and therewith the self are altered. Now, James’s dualistic scheme may be found too neatly associationistic, and the nerve cells too neatly connected in it—but such criticism is leveled primarily merely at his physiology. Although James worked hard to relate mental and brain processes, he regarded the physiology of his day as too superficial to be very helpful in dealing with “the intimate workings of the brain,” a subject he largely deferred to the “physiology of the future,” when it might be possible to “actually trace from cell-group to cell-group the irradiations” James invoked (81–82, 593). Edelman’s theory of consciousness explicitly offers a way to treat the Jamesian characters of thought in late-twentiethcentury neurobiological dress, and his theory of neuronal group selection (see chapter 7) implicitly offers an account of how embodiments of what

34

Chapter 2

James termed habit and association take shape and how the fringe comes into play. “Human thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing.” (J1 271) The Jamesian psychologist accepts a subject-object dualism and cannot help judging that individual humans can and do think of objects that exist outside the individuals. This judgment arises naturally for the individual non-psychologist as well: The judgment that my own past thought and my own present thought are of the same object is what makes me take the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangulation into an independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought. (J1 272)

For James, the ability to think of the same matters in different portions of the mental stream turns on the development and application of concepts (J1 459–461). In each act of conception, attention isolates in thought some matter out of the continuum of felt experience, and “hold[s] fast to it, without confusion” (461, 465). As a result, the same matters can figure, as topics of thought or discourse, in different pulses of thought or states of mind, even though each such repeated conception occurs in a unique mental state (480). This ability to form concepts and act with “constancy in our meanings,” constitutes “the most important of all the features of our mental structure” (J1 460). Conception is the mark of the mental: the ability to apprehend in accord with concepts enables one to affix “views taken on reality” (SPP 200), to perceive (recognize or interpret sensory stimuli), think (consider possibilities), and take effective action (bring about conceived states of affairs). Concepts thus are tools that function to connect sensation, perception, and action; thinking essentially involves nothing other than the ability to form and use concepts, which inevitably come to be associated and may be aggregated or integrated into a more or less stable cognitive framework. The ability to sustain constancy in meaning, to form substantive parts, and to “take cognizance of a reality, intend it, or be ‘about’ it” by leading actually or potentially to a subsequent state of mind which either acts upon the reality or senses, matches or symbolizes it (J1 471), makes it possible to lay hold of the novel, to test in living the adequacy of conception, and to build up, and act in accord with, and modify a “conceptual scheme,


35

. . . a sort of sieve,” which can serve to perform a preeminently cognitive function, “the translation of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world” (J1 482; cf. PU 272; SPP, chapter IV). Within that more or less coherent but unformalized scheme, each concept has schematic and accidental ramifications which may figure in the fringe when the concept is functioning in consciousness. Thus, just as the conscious state “‘corresponds’ to the entire activity of the brain . . . at the moment” (177), so the Jamesian object of “thought is really its entire content or deliverance” (275; J2 569) and if expressed in propositional form, “every word [is] fringed and the whole sentence bathed in . . . [a] halo of obscure relations, which, like an horizon, . . . spread about its meaning” (J1 275–276; cf. PU 289). The psychologist is bound to attend faithfully to the actual composition of the thought under review rather than sticking to the clear images and verbal formulations representing “the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought” (J1 269). The psychologist then is to make some effort to reinstate the vague to its proper place, to avoid being misguided by the misleading clarities of language (194 ff.) and to move toward regarding the object of each thought or bud of perception as “neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be” (276). But that thought is constituted in “a single pulse of subjectivity” (278), the novel formation of the substantive part and the thinker of the thought, the I, the subject. Each momentary thinker arises through the activity of its me— existing capabilities and associations, which themselves import value, operate in the processing of stimuli and the preparation of response. If we make contact with the process of subject-formation and with the I-me dialectic of ongoing experience, come to see what subject-formation involves, and what “subject raising” (understood as pivotal to the formation of a subjectpredicate or subject-verb-object sentence) leaves out, we may resist crucial impacts of submission to language-supported habits. “It is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.” (J1 284) In an act of consciousness, “what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous terms” (J2 559). Whether it arise in the course of action, with incoming data largely pre-selected by expectant attention, or not, each

36

Chapter 2

moment of consciousness, “consists in . . . the selection of some [among simultaneous possibilities], and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention” (J1 288). Emphasis, selection and neglect function in sensation, perception, theoretical reasoning, deliberation, and in fact in all conscious activity, so that objects of thought are always dealt with under selected aspects (284–287). Not only do the organs of sensation detect energy over what are in effect select ranges from the full electromagnetic spectrum, but every moment of experience involves a selective attention that “breaks through” the purported circle of passive sense-reception or bare observation constituting the traditional empiricist’s “experience” (402). We do not merely experience outward order: as attention focuses on an object it always does so “for the sake of some subjective interest, and . . . the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is really nothing but a teleological instrument” (482). Each moment of thought involves conceptual activity and each exercise of conceptual capability, each application of a conceptual scheme, reflective or not, is for the sake of some interest, lifting the object of cognition into sufficient clarity to serve some useful function, the conceiver invariably being a self-modifying creature with purposes and ends (461, 482). The mentation occurring at the heart of the bud, between sensation (stimuli) and action and the aftermath of associative effects, relies on concepts and distinctions that are retained precisely because they can make practical differences (cf. J2 13). In the moment, one perceives what is relevant to one’s intentions, desires, and interests, and in the course of interested activity one incidentally builds up or strengthens neural pathways correlate with habits of attention, perception and action (e.g. J1 456), modifying the conceptual sieve’s network so that order and the self is always in the making (482; Perry 1948: 275). 2.3

Habit, Action, and the Stream of Consciousness

As we have already seen, James attempts to give the five characters of thought clear physical correlates: thought is personal in that it is enabled and constrained by each person’s Jamesian neural net; novel thoughts are formed with the summing of stimuli along interacting nerve tracts; thought is sensibly continuous in part because no brain state abruptly dies away; and the neural net carries the associations and values that underlie and


37

propagate the value-laden conceptual scheme. In this account, “the whole neural organism . . . is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or ‘central’ portion of the machine’s operations” (J2 372). On occasion, James terms these organic operations reflex, semi-reflex, and voluntary acts (e.g. J1 13), but he views them all as of one type: The only conception at the same time renovating and fundamental with which biology has enriched psychology . . . is . . . that all our activity belongs at bottom to the type of reflex action, and that all our consciousness accompanies a chain of events of which the first was an incoming current in some sensory nerve, and of which the last will be a discharge into some muscle, blood-vessel, or gland. . . . (James, “What the Will Effects,” 1888, quoted in Perry 1948: 195)

Reflex actions are central to our activity for James because habits form the basis for the great bulk of our activity, and habits as construed by James, are unfolding chains of reflex actions (J1 108). Among actions, only the simplest willed actions—arm raisings and the like—which involve no chains of action, and the most conscious step-by-step actions, do not involve such habitual unfolding. As a psychologist, engaged in part in studying behavior “from an outward point of view,” James finds that habit, including instinctive and learned behavior, is a pervasive phenomenon among living creatures, and he terms the groundwork of habit “plasticity” (104, 646). Plasticity is the counterpart and facilitator, in organic matter, of the ongoing modification of the me or self by the I and the assimilation of newly extended and refined capabilities into previous structures of competence. In chapter 7 I give this a current neurobiological rendition, but the task at present lies in articulating the Jamesian account of the stream by showing how the characters of thought function in action, and so I turn to a pivotal definition of James’s: Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. . . . [T]he phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials [especially nervous tissue] of which their bodies are composed. (J1 105) . . . the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up . . . when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear. . . . a simple habit [is] nothing but a reflex discharge;

38

Chapter 2

and its anatomical substratum must be a path in the system. The most complex habits . . . are from the same point of view, nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centers, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, so organized as to wake each other up successively—the impression produced by one muscular contraction serving as a stimulus to provoke the next, until a final impression inhibits the process and closes the chain. . . . The entire nervous system is nothing but a system of paths between a sensory terminus a quo and a muscular, glandular, or other terminus ad quem. (J1 107–108)

These systems of paths are built up firing-of-nerves by firing-of-nerves, experience by experience: “A path once traversed by a nerve-current [is] . . . made more permeable than before,” so that our plastic nervous system grows pathways according to “the modes in which it has been exercised” (108, 112). This “expresses the philosophy of habit in a nutshell” (112) and also is an evident precursor of “the Hebb rule,” namely that when one nerve cell repeatedly takes part in firing another, some metabolic or structural change—probably synaptic, Hebb thought—takes place strengthening the connection between the two cells (Hebb 62; RP 38; Rumelhart 36). Habits develop, neural pathways grow, because they “simplif[y] the movements required to achieve a given result, . . . . economiz[ing] the expense of nervous and muscular energy” (J1 112, 113) and so are of practical value in helping organisms deal with frequently recurring situations and needs. Thus, habits also reduce “the conscious attention with which our acts are performed, . . . bring[ing] it about that each event calls up its own appropriate successor . . . without any reference to the conscious will. . . . Our lower centers know the order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their ‘surprise’ if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way” (114–115). Term the “altered” objects a form of “novelty” and each event (and its appropriate successor) a substantive part, and the calling up of the successor a transitive part. The transitive parts are largely the working of habit in the moment and as habit meets novelty a novel response is made and a new subject or I is formed, and the habit is altered by accommodating new possibilities. Moreover, the character of novelty involved in the formation of the subject in the course of activity is an exercise of freedom: “. . . the only ‘free will’ I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations” (ERE 185). For James, the moment, then, is a field of action in which a tradition of sorts encounters the new; conscious attention functions as the play of awareness within the joint constraints of habitual disposition and


39

surrounding realities. Should no surprises or novelties appear, contextadjusted habit unfolds smoothly, expectation and anticipation appropriating what is of interest and moving on. But with response to novelty (the novelty being relative to habitual expectation and competence), habits may then be extended, typically moving step by step out from a secure base, as when we learn how to perform routinely all manner of tasks, from bicycle riding to mental computation, enriching the basis on which we can meet novelty, adding new possibilities for routine action as the I-me dialectic unfolds. James next distinguishes habitual from voluntary action: In action grown habitual, what instigates each new muscular contraction to take place in its appointed order is not a thought or a perception, but the sensation occasioned by the muscular contraction just finished. A strictly voluntary act has to be guided by idea, perception, and volition throughout its whole course. In an habitual action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free. (J1 115–116)

For James, a habitual action is initiated by a conscious thought or perception, which functions as a “command to start,” and the action consists of a series of muscular contractions which lead to anticipated sensations, each of the sensations instigating subsequent movement (J1 116), each movement itself guided by “an anticipatory image, then, of the sensorial consequences of a movement” (J2 501; cf. 521). Habitual action calls on a general competence built into neural pathways and capable of delicate adaptation to situations (J1 79, 139). This know-how is embodied and when exercised the body takes over, complete with characteristic preparatory organic adjustments and sub-excitements of motor tracts, so that while one remains sufficiently attentive in what one is doing, one’s attention, though constrained by interest, habit, and factors in the surround, may be focused elsewhere, and the habit may discharge near-reflexively, without experienced activation of any association, or otherwise involving ideational centers (cf. S 83). In voluntary action the call for decisive or focused interaction shortens the stretches of thoroughly habitual action as, when cooking or doing carpentry, we may cut attentively but habitually for a few seconds and then make a decision concerning the next thing to do, and then draw on another habitual capability—in putting cut vegetables into a pan and stirring them or positioning a sawed board and hammering nails. James plainly uses the

40

Chapter 2

notion of habit generally, so that it functions or is drawn on in voluntary as well as in merely habitual action. In “the more complex and serially concatenated movements which oftenest meet us in real life,” James finds, the object of our will is seldom a single muscular contraction; it is almost always an orderly sequence of contractions, ending with a sensation which tells us that the goal is reached. But the several contractions of the sequence are not each distinctly willed; each earlier one seems rather, by the sensation [or “right-feeling impression”] it produces, to call its follower up, after the fashion . . . of habitual concatenated movements . . . [which are] due to a series of secondarily organized reflex arcs. . . . The phenomenon involves a rapid alternation of motor discharges and resultant afferent impressions . . . associated in one definite order [which] must once have been learned. (J2 586–587)

Moreover, mental habits and competences are embodied as well as those that are enacted in observable physical activity, for they too are marked in the brain tissue comprising the Jamesian neural net: “. . . the machinery of association, as we know, is nothing but the elementary law of habit in the nerve-centers. And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention also . . . [or] liability to recall.” (J1 654; 566) Likewise, in perception, “part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us,” and another possibly larger part “out of our own head” or alternatively from “the brain [which] reacts by paths which previous experiences have worn” (J2 103), for objects previously attended to remain in memory (J1 427; cf. 643). Experienced objects may thus subsequently figure in “preperception” or expectant attention affecting future perception (439), the “anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centers concerned with the object to which the attention is paid” (434) being “the creation of an imaginary duplicate of the object in the mind, which shall stand ready to receive the outward impression as if in a matrix” (439). It is as if one’s expectant anticipation or anticipatory ideational preparation were a set of pre-perceptual readinesses to perceive or respond to aspects of the type of object already experienced or associated with the object. In such dependence on previous experience and thought, perception is, like reasoning, one of the “co-ordinate varieties of that deeper sort of process known psychologically as the association of ideas, and physiologically as the law of habit in the brain” (J2 113; cf. 369). Let us return to the central case of habitual and habit-dependent voluntary activity, with the understanding that James thought the basic analysis applicable to all manner of recurring patterns of behavior including those


41

involving human interactions, and reasoning and other mental activity. In the types of action under review, the chain of muscular contractions and sensations arises from a command to begin that originates in an “ideational center” and ends in an “intellectual perception” also in an ideational center above those involved in the execution of the movements (J1 115–117). For James, the sensations in question are “accompanied by consciousness of some kind,” even in smoothly discharged habitual action, “yet they are sensations to which we are usually inattentive, but which immediately call our attention if they go wrong” (118). When sensations do call, those higher centers come into play, and relevant substantive parts are formed focally. The formation of subordinate sensations and muscular activity are physiological counterparts to transitive parts between two substantive parts, namely the command and the terminating perception, and those transitive parts are experienced with feelings of direction and tendency, functioning non-focally, on the fringe. With sensation as a guide, behavior and the conjoint stream of thought are channeled, with the intensity of excitement and the frequency of exercise affecting how smoothly the behavior unfolds. In such a context, “. . . even though there be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly not create ideas or summon them ex abrupto. Its power is limited to selecting amongst those which the associative machinery has already introduced or tends to introduce. If it can emphasize, reinforce, or protract for a second either one of these, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free will need demand; for it then decides the direction of the next associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized term” (J1 594; cf. 142). Thus, while habit, the great smoother of behavior, abates the need for focal attention or will or even for thinking, it leaves some room for volition, although consciousness only becomes intense within action “when nerveprocesses are hesitant” (J1 142). Moreover, although one may remain centered in such action, and attentive within the present, attention may also be absorbed elsewhere, with the relevant feeling of tendencies remaining out of the foreground on the fringe of consciousness. This occurs with the supervenience of thought on habitual action, thought which may intensify engagement in an aspect of the activity, or may be “miles away,” but which safely accompanies the performance of a sufficiently simple and familiar type of action, typically involving habitual, anticipatory movements guided by sensation and readinesses to respond—as for instance when one takes in the scenery while bicycling on a country road. Such thought thus in a sense

42

Chapter 2

overrides habit and perhaps starts one on a new habitual course, keeping the sensory and bodily on the fringe, as the Jamesian approximation has it, for so long as sensations are not “wrong-feeling” or indicative that the goal is near. By contrast, in other actions, you concentrate on the activity at hand, not letting thought wander too freely, although a radio or recorded music may be playing. This is true, for instance, in a whole host of activities that typically require closely watched coordination of perceptual and motor functions. Here I have in mind such activities as: cutting (of paper along a line, of facial hair while shaving, of foodstuff, in surgical operations, etc.), pouring fluids into vessels, attaching and fastening of all sorts, rockclimbing, and so on. And this is true during learning as well. When learning how to do something, one’s actions start out more stepwise than smooth. Sensations that will later mark the peripheral, sensible effects of movements are yet the objects of separate perceptions (J1 116; J2 521). As competence is gained, as pathways of discharge become established, behavior smoothes out. Perceptions that once were registered, as stimuli summatively exploded into consciousness, become more confidently anticipated—expectant attention prepares the nerve centers and shortens the work needed to produce a given effect—and drop from the center of consciousness, to become focal only if something goes wrong. In smoothly unfolding action, one typically has a feeling for what comes next, the body is ready to act before the apt perception or sensation. Prior to mastery, one acted, perceived, recalled what to do next, acted, etc. Now, what had been central to consciousness and relatively distinct during learning blends together—the distinctions are smoothed out, yet the concatenated action remains structured by sensory-action loops corresponding to reflex arcs. The sort of anticipation at work here is experienced through feelings of tendency and direction and these represent principal instances of the working of transitive parts so important to James, of the “me” enabling and constraining the forming subject, much as the learning itself illustrates the Jamesian I-me dialectic. 2.4

James, as Philosopher, on the Stream of Pure Experience

If habits are among the things that strike us when observing a living creature’s behavior (J1 104), and if we regard the exercise of a habit as the unfolding of an activated capability in a series of sensory-action loops,


43

modulated to momentary circumstances, and if we regard transitive parts largely as the operation of habit, and situate the operation of habit within a Jamesian I-me dialectic, with the play of value and cognition, we may achieve an understanding of behavior that seems rich with the detail of living, but may still seem removed from felt, experienced, realities. To suggest the nature of the move from James’s dualistic, psychological, “observerbased” vantage to a monism of pure experience, I start by contrasting this account of habit with how the working of habitual action is experienced in situations in which one is actually active. Habits and Personal Activity-Situations Consider some of what is involved in drinking from a glass whose contents—say, orange juice—one wants and intends to drink. Visual location of the glass may involve little more than context-enriched sensation: in this context, that orange blur is my juice/glass. If I have put the glass down recently I may know where it is simply via short-term, kinesthetic memory, or as a result of long-term familiarity with the physical setting and general situation I may be able to reach for it without having to locate it visually. In any event, whether or not I have to move and brace my legs and turn my torso or neck before locating and reaching for the glass, and whether or not I am doing something else at the same time, when I reach for the glass, whether I do so slowly or hurriedly, perhaps to get at it during a pause in another process, without conscious calculation, my arm is extended an appropriate distance, with the proper degree of force, and in anticipation of an appropriate sensation; by the time my hand nears the glass it is already opened appropriately in anticipation, and while some muscles are primed to contract others may be prepared to lift an object of suitable weight after receipt of sensory input indicating that the glass is gripped; as my hand closes on the glass, and not before, if I err not, hand, forearm, and glass begin to move toward my mouth at appropriate pace. As they approach, my lips part in anticipation and as the glass touches my lips my head and hand are already tilting appropriately. Normally, all of this happens without my thinking about whether or not to act or about the action itself, about how to accommodate action to situation, but rather simply by my acting to take a drink. One reaches, one knows that the glass is in hand, is at one’s mouth. The anticipations involved smooth out behavior, because action is flexibly prepared for before anticipated sensation is experienced and expectation is

44

Chapter 2

fulfilled. One action flows into the next, the perceptions (or in more habitual cases, the sensations, which signal perceptions) are integrated in smooth-flowing action. I don’t consciously ready my hand to grasp a glasssized object, nor do I consciously ready my muscles to lift an object of some estimated weight, nor do I consciously intend to open my mouth. I simply and intentionally reach for the glass and drink from it; the substantive part—the initial command—sets transitive parts to work, embodied habit takes over, even as we remain ready to adjust if something doesn’t feel right. Many, most, if not all, actions involving manipulation or handling fill this pattern. With this account, and the notion that transitive parts are experienced with feelings of tendency, we may recast Jamesian habits as they function in experience, typically to help bring about desired states of affairs. In James’s later work, as a philosopher, he termed the living through of behavior structured by habit in a concrete situation the experience of activity in an “activity-situation” (ERE, chapter VI) or a “personal activity-situation” (SPP 210). These terms emphasize the subjective, goal-oriented, purposive nature and the experiential constituents of habitual actions as they unfold, especially in flows coordinating perception and action, in which appropriate events take place in appropriate order in actual situations, each subordinate action terminated by perception and issuing into a following action. A habit is a capability to do something and when a habit is in operation, whether invoked by a desire, intention, or triggering perception, I shall talk of it as being enacted. When one is enacting a habit an observer might rightly call the behavior habitual, but our experience, grounded in the enaction is nonetheless subjective experience, with feelings of direction and aiming toward a goal or an end. Habit involves a series of reflex arcs that facilitates the accommodation of embodied (and possibly tool-extended) motion to environs perceived in ways relevant to action intended to fulfill purpose. In personal activitysituations, the arcs are not simply stimulus-response loops: they involve readinesses to respond, and anticipated motions, all of which show up in James’s feelings of tendency and when acted on call up their successors and, so, are within a coordinated pattern of action. As John Dewey (360) put it, and as James understood, “the reflex arc idea, as commonly employed, is defective in that it assumes sensory stimulus and motor response as distinct psychical existences, while in reality they are always inside a coordination.”


45

James understands that what looks like the unfolding of habit on the basis of reflex arcs is, from the inside, made up of buds, momentary formations of thoughts that are fringed and that carry feelings of direction as neural pathways are exercised and as we move through interest- and purposemolded environs. An enacted habit structures behavior or, to put it more practically, functions in the structuring of action. As we so act, we experience an actual world in the midst of purposive action rather than a merely physical world given to our senses. Now, no relevant observables, whether visible behavior, or brain processes associated with an enacted habit, even if made visible by functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, or some other technology, and no detailed verbal or mathematical descriptions of substantive and transitive parts, no matter how nuanced and convincingly suggestive of actuality, and no filmed or videotaped renditions of action, are the conscious moments themselves. Nonetheless, the disclosure of the nature of the transitive parts goes far to moving us from outside the stream to inside the onflow, and to giving the lie to those who are so overcommitted to the intersubjective standards of science as to deny the reality or efficacy of consciousness (RM, chapter 1). I have introduced the notion of enacting habits in personal activity-situations to note this change. Where the behaviorists see habitual behavior, we see intentional enaction, with a rich subjective interior. When an outsider would think that we are probably engaged in voluntary or habitual action we are moving through a shifting landscape that is shaped by surrounding “real-world” entities and activity, by our perceptual and conceptual capabilities, by our interests; we are picking out objects not to verify their characteristics but adaptively and typically with only as much detail as is needed to support action while progressing toward a goal; we are living through experiences coordinate with, and befitting, movement along general pathways of behavior for accommodating body to world and world to body in service of private purposes and ends. The pathways of behavior—both the actional pathways (largely observable routes through space) and the experience-incorporating and behavior-generating and -facilitating neural pathways—are adaptive pathways: the enaction of a habit is its end-serving functioning in transforming the subject’s novel environment into a landscape for, or scene of, novelty-sensitive action. Enacted habits accomplish this in a fashion involving the operation of canalized anticipations and readinesses to

46

Chapter 2

respond to stimuli, and as they unfold habits stir anticipations and associations that in effect call into relevance possible connections that may move from the fringe of sub-excitement into actuality and fully substantive consciousness. And as we move along pathways, loop after loop, objects are generally perceived to the extent that, and under the guises in which, they are useful, interesting, by means of serving an intention. And habits are plastic, as we are plastic: habits are modified and refined as new experience accrues and one’s powers and capabilities are modified. Plainly, then, introducing the term “personal activity-situations” to link James’s views of habit and of the stream of consciousness helps us see the five characters of thought at work in voluntary action. There are the felt continuities of experience, the play of interest in structuring perception of the world, the self-transforming play of the I-me dialectic as experience accrues, and, of course, each substantive part arising in the course of action is unique, arising just now in this body here. Co-Conscious Transitions and Causality-at-Work While James sought to study the mind from within and found the stream of thought “sensibly continuous,” Hume investigated the stream from outside by means of introspection or self-observation and found the stream to consist of distinct, disconnected, states, “loose and separate,” one following another with “inconceivable rapidity” (1748: 85; 1739: 252). Hume held that no “real connections” could be found between any two of these states or perceptions. James contrasts his radical empiricism with “the Humean type” (ERE 42, 47–49), which excludes the conjunctive relations that connect experiences. But if these relations are real and there is no break in the move from bud to bud, James must reconcile such continuity with his view that moments of thought are indecomposable unities. James devotes much of Some Problems of Philosophy to dispelling questions concerning the occurrence of both novelty and continuity within the stream, to giving an account of how concrete, novel buds of experience can run into their successors and yet be discrete (SPP, chapters IX–XIII) and thus to dealing with co-conscious transition, the conjunctive relation so troublesome to philosophy (ERE 47). So far as James is concerned, the relation is so troublesome because the traditional empiricist’s self-observational move results in the focusing on substantive parts and the neglect of the transitive parts including the co-


47

conscious transition. The substantive parts are described using concepts, which enable us to isolate and hold fast in thought factors occurring in the continuum of felt experience, the perceptual flux. But the transitive parts, which are so hard to hold fast and observe, escape notice and description and slip through the conceptual sieve, and as they are neglected so are causal relations between momentary perceptions in the stream: Conceptual treatment of perceptual reality makes it seem paradoxical and incomprehensible; and when radically and consistently carried out, it leads to the opinion that perceptual experience is not reality at all, but an appearance or illusion. Briefly, this is a consequence of two facts: First, that when we substitute concepts for percepts, we substitute their relations also. But since the relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled. Secondly, the conceptual scheme, consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely. The one is no full measure of the other, essential features of the flux escaping whenever we put concepts in its place. (SPP 80–81)

Given to such conceptual biases, Hume then did not merely chop up the stream, but he reduced causal relation to nothing more than priority, contiguity and constant conjunction, and Kant did likewise (SPP 85; Kant 139, 218 ff.). The conceptual withdrawal, when not redressed by radical empiricism, abstracts from the present experienced moment as caused by, conditioned by, and issuing from the past, which anticipates and contributes to or issues into its future. The withdrawn Hume sees discrete moments, not the present issuing from the past, nor anything in the present as genuinely caused by factors in the past; for Kant, transcendental egos subsume discrete subjective appearances, successive in time but not genuinely causally related, under the a priori concept of causation which binds discrete phenomena into what we take for objective causal relation. To make plain the inadequacies of those conceptual accounts which do not recognize real connections between discrete experiences, the smooth passing of one moment into the next in an ongoing present, and what he earlier termed feelings of direction, James turns to general examples of activity, each necessarily being lived through for James in the generic “dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome” (SPP 212; ERE 168). It is with those “personal activity-situations,” which are “continuously developing experiential series” (SPP 210, 211), that James grounded his monism in momentary activity, rendering the habitual experiential, and making the co-conscious

48

Chapter 2

transition almost palpable. Co-conscious transition affords the continuity, and to appreciate this form of transition is to achieve further conceptual contact with the stream. For James, activity-situations thus provide a radically empirical benchmark for co-conscious transition, a notion given more precision, below, in the processual and concrescual approximations: The word ‘activity’ has no content save these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of the life given us to be known. . . . our successive fields [of consciousness] continue each other. . . . [And the] movement from feeling to thought and thence to action . . . is everywhere going on. Our outcome so far seems therefore to be only this, that the attempt to treat “cause,” for conceptual purposes, as a separable link, has failed historically, and has led to the denial of efficient causation, and to the substitution for it of the bare descriptive notion of uniform sequence among events. Thus intellectualist philosophy once more has had to butcher our perceptual life in order to make it “comprehensible.” Meanwhile the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency. The transitive causation in them does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on. Rather does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality-at-work flavors the entire concrete sequence. . . . (SPP 212–214, 217–218; 198–199).

James on Consciousness and Cognition In Principles, James accepted a thoroughgoing form of psychophysical parallelism, in which physiological, psychological, behavioral and introspective accounts are aligned. In waking life, the stream of consciousness is composed of novel thoughts joined in a continuum of ongoing mental processes linked with brain processes. By holding to an “empirical parallelism” between brain-processes and states of consciousness, James intended to keep his psychology “positivistic and non-metaphysical,” explaining that “although this is certainly only a provisional halting-place, and things must some day be more thoroughly thought out, we shall abide there in this book” (J1 182). Thus, although he does typify consciousness, in Principles, in terms of the characters of thought, and as “at all times primarily a selecting agency” (139), he makes no attempt, reductionist or otherwise, to account for the ontological status of consciousness (cf. 220). In 1904 he declared: “For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities


49

of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.” To be sure, this discarding involves no denial that consciousness exists: “I mean only to deny that the word [‘consciousness’] stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function . . . in experience which thoughts perform” (ERE 3). James’s notion of consciousness as it functions in experience had been with him for 20 years. In the 1884 essay in which he introduced the streamof-consciousness metaphor, James elaborated on materials written in January 1883, in which he was working to bring forth (he said “was parturient of”) an account of a “psychological truth”—“the difference between feeling and thought” (to Henry James, quoted at Perry 1948: 187). The difference he pointed to became articulable as a result of identifying the substantive and transitive parts comprising the stream of experience and the fringe of feelings of relation surrounding the substantive center of the field of consciousness: The difference between thought and feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence or absence of “fringe.” And . . . in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub-excitements of an effective degree of strength in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the thought. (1884: 18)

The submaximal tensions are then the neural counterpart of the fringe, and recognition of their experienced influences so animated James for it marks recognition of the difference between feeling (as bare acquaintance “without knowledge-about” (J1 221)) and thought (as involving abstraction, association, analysis, and emotional tone). Now, although James may not yet have used the term in early 1883, the very notion of the stream of consciousness was at work then and it is highly plausible to suppose that it was this inchoate yet seminal notion, full with ideas concerning the temporal structure of the continuous, pulsed stream, the transitive and substantive parts, the linkage of brain processes with streaming mental processes, and a sense of how radical a departure these ideas marked for philosophy as well as psychology, that rendered James, as he put it to his brother Henry, into “one of my fevered states . . ., when ideas are shooting together and I can think of no finite things” (Perry 1948: 187). It is in this moment—this brief period—that he grasps and begins to verbalize the existence of a gulf between the living of life and philosophical conceptions of life, between life as conceived, and conception and perception as experienced, rich with

50

Chapter 2

embodiment, fringe, interest, purpose, activity, directedness, actuality, between consciousness as functioning in experience and, in analysis, as a two-term relation involving a conscious entity and a content of consciousness, thinker and thought (cf. ERE 9).9 This was indeed a defining episode in James’s life, affording the basis for articulating a coherent psychological and physiological approach that relied on a proto-phenomenological concern with the texture and flow of experience. This approach led directly to his subsequent pluralistic (multipulsed) monism of pure experience (PU 201, 326; ERE 4), in which there is a “confluence of every passing moment of concretely felt experience with its immediately next neighbors” (PU 326). Ultimately, it supported a metaphysics based on the primacy of the experiential, the pulses of which have “a fullness of content that no conceptual description can equal” (285). As a philosopher, James accepted the psychologist’s five characters of thought. He saw “‘personal consciousness’ [as] the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions” (ERE 80), thus in condensed form covering the first three characters. As for the remaining two, each conscious experience involves cognition—the function of knowing (4)—and interests and purposes: “It is by the interest and importance that experiences have for us, by the emotions they excite, and the purposes they subserve, by their affective values, in short, that their consecution in our several streams, as ‘thoughts’ of ours, is mainly ruled. Desire introduces them; interest holds them; fitness fixes their order and connection” (151–152). But James the philosopher did not accept the psychologist’s dualisms. Pure experience—the unmediated flux of life, whose salient or interesting parts variously become grasped, stabilized, identified, abstracted, named, substantivized, and associated in conceptual categories—is more primitive than the dualisms of conscious being and content of consciousness, knower and known, subject and object, representer and represented, thing and thought (ERE 93–94, 3–4, 23–25). Those dualisms arise when particular experiences (thoughts) are considered, in a fashion reminiscent of the psychologist’s fallacy, as content in a retrospective experience in which verbalized propositional content—representing the substantive part—typically stands out from the transitive parts, the feelings of direction and the fringe. By contrast James, as philosopher of pure experience, as radical empiricist, attempted to get back to raw unverbalized life, virtually conceivable and


51

classifiable as objective and subjective (74–75; cf. J2 244), but not directly so conceived and classified, and too rich with sensory content, association, and feeling for any amount of verbalization or conceptualization to fully describe or express, in which one experience passes into another belonging to the same personal consciousness, forming a stream of pure experience, in which each experience, each field of the present, is a place of intersection of processes—including processes arising in one’s personal history and processes arising elsewhere (ERE 12 ff.), “knit by different transitions” (88) or occurring along other “historic routes,” as Whitehead termed series of actual occasions forming continuous lines of inheritance, whether in animate or inanimate objects (PR 56; S 27). Of the many dualisms James rejected, I direct attention to his account of the knower and the known, because he asserts that the consciousnessengendering function in experience which thoughts perform is knowing, shortly thereafter (ERE 3–4) adding “In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the ‘passing thought.’” That is to say, knowing and consciousness function in the passing thought or bud of experience; “every segment of the stream is cognitive,” though possibly erroneous (1884: 10). My aim at this juncture is in no way to elaborate or criticize James’s theory of knowledge or his pragmatic theory of meaning, in which any difference in meanings or between concepts turns on the difference that that difference can make in concrete experience. My aim is rather to appreciate James’s understanding of consciousness as a function. James differentiates between perception, a kind of knowledge involving direct acquaintance with a present object, and conceptual knowledge, involving knowledge about an object not present (ERE 54). James wants to get at these types of knowledge as they function in experience rather than as traditional two-term relations between knower and known. In the type of conceptual knowledge which he uses as the central case for conveying his view of the cognitive relation, the knower and the known are “two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject [personal consciousness], with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them” (53). Here, the knower, an intender of an action or a thinker about an object, has in mind a terminal object and the known is the terminal object arrived at satisfactorily in experience. Given this distinction between knower and known, James also distinguishes completed from virtual cognition. Completed cognition is marked

52

Chapter 2

by termination of a series of experiences with an experience affording a sense of fulfillment of conditions, a confirmation that those experiences “had in view” (ERE 67, 88). The meaning of concepts extracted from the perceptual stream may then be understood in terms of what they can amount to practically, by leading towards and terminating in percepts arrived at through a series of transitional experiences supplied by the world (25, 60). The knowledge of a percept by a concept and the meaning of a concept turn on the possible transitions from the concept (e.g. of orange juice in one’s refrigerator or of boiling) to terminating percepts. In verifying the meaning of a concept or in any action initiated by a command with an end-in-view, knowledge involves the selective application of concepts to incoming data so as to move toward the end-in-view. “Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they develop towards their terminus, there is experience from point to point of one direction followed, and finally of one process fulfilled, the result is that their starting point thereby becomes a knower and their terminus an object meant or known.” (57; cf. 88) Virtual knowledge is of what is not retroactively validated (ERE 68), it is of remoter objects not brought into the range of direct perceptual knowledge, it is of possible experiences to which “conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged” (53): Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond [the] virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. I speak not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like ether-waves . . . [but] also of ideas which we might verify if we would take the trouble, but which we hold for true although unterminated perceptually, because nothing says “no” to us, and there is no contradicting truth in sight. To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. (68–69)

For James, then, consciousness is a function (or process) involving the operation of conceptual capabilities required to recognize an object or establish an end that is not perceptually present, even if it be but a bud away, and the operation of those capabilities of course need not be verbal and can function to call forth action. In action, the experient now anticipating a sensory consequent, a next, isn’t a knower until the terminus is


53

reached and a conscious, if fleeting, substantive part is formed. Here we have again “‘the principle of constancy in the mind’s meanings,’ . . . which may be thus expressed: ‘The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of the mental stream, and some of these portions can know that they mean the same matters which the other portions meant’” (J1 459). In this event, cognition, the function of consciousness, is the feeling of the immediately sensed and the to-be-sensed, the perceived and the anticipated. James thus tightly links the notions of knowledge or cognition and meaning to practical action. He does the same for truth, for instance, making conceptions functioning to signify particular things (461) true if in one moment they lead us from “next to next inside of concrete experience” (MoT xxxviii), so that truth like consciousness or cognition is a process or function, for “truth happens to an idea. . . . Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication (P 77–78). The notions of personal activity-situations and of flexibly enacted habits ground James’s account of consciousness as a function or process—an account linked in crucial details with Whitehead’s and Edelman’s accounts of consciousness (see sections 6.4 and 7.5 below). Consciousness functions paradigmatically in experience when we advance toward a goal in activitysituations. For James, consciousness is a function: it is the actual or virtual knowing involved in or capable of being involved in movements from thought to action to feeling to thought. It can guide and accompany action, enabling us to be effective in our worlds, which can only appear to us in accord with our socialized, perceptuo-cognitive capacities and our valuative patterns of interests, needs, and habits of attention. We thus see consciousness as it is ours from within, working in the course of action, functioning in the act of moving toward an end-in-view, often a near-term and trivial end-in-view involving only non-focal awareness. To the extent that we are almost always doing things, this even yields a general approximation of the stream of consciousness. The working of habit is in the transitive parts, felt as tendencies, anticipations, readinesses, and as lived habit meets novelty, a new subject, and a new yet anticipated substantive part, is formed, and co-conscious transition ensues as habit unrolls. With this brief account we are on the way to understanding consciousness as it functions in everyday experience, an understanding that undercuts traditional dualisms and that doesn’t glamorize or denigrate consciousness.

54

Chapter 2

James takes as the standard of concreteness the experienced interior of this sort of fluid personal activity, the reality of living through, of experiencing a stretch of real activity, of coping with actualities, in short, of what “our own activity-series reveal” (ERE 185). By doing so, James arrives at a philosophy of pure experience in which mind and matter are practical artifacts of conceptual withdrawal, so that his experiential monism is not a reductive materialistic or idealistic monism; it neither reduces nor withdraws.

3

Searle, James, and the Intentional Approximation

William James’s phenomenologically sound account of the stream of consciousness as personal and made up of thoughts or pulses of subjective unity includes several terms (including “substantive parts,” “transitive parts,” “the fringe,” and “causality-at-work”) whose treatment may seem too general and in need of elaboration and greater philosophical precision. In this chapter, I try to lend precision to James’s account and to several principal notions in it, and to draw closer to the stream conceptually by focusing on intentionality in thought, for the intentional aspects of substantive parts and buds are their most readily accessible aspects. I outline an intentionality-based account of the stream of consciousness—the intentional approximation—that construes Jamesian thoughts as intentional states and the stream of thought as a series of intentional states—perceptions, intentions, beliefs, desires, remembrances, and the like. To specify the intentional approximation, I draw on several ideas from John Searle’s theory of intentionality and employ some powerful analytic techniques of his. In Searle’s theory, one finds clear counterparts for many of James’s leading notions, including the five characters of thought. Also, Searle qualifies as a radical empiricist by Jamesian standards: he recognizes Jamesian conjunctive relations between experiences, in the form of experienced connections between intentional states and what he terms “transitivity of intentional causation” (Iy 94). Moreover, like James, Searle recognizes: the importance of distinguishing mental phenomena as experienced—the mental content in a “man’s head”—from sentences used to describe or express those phenomena (1981: 723–726; Iy 208–217); the epistemic inaccessibility of some empirical facts to competent “third-person” observers (RM 72); and the value of not “stand[ing] back a long way from . . . action . . . [but of getting] right up close to it [to] see what . . . descriptions [of it]

56

Chapter 3

are actually describing” (Iy 92). However, for my purposes herein, Searle’s approach should be applied more closely than it was to continuities of experience, so, in chapter 4, I combine it with James’s psychological approach and arrive at a “processualized” intentional approximation—the processual approximation—in which intentional states are embedded in intentional buds and intentional buds in the stream of experience. 3.1

Searle on Intentionality

To expedite discussion of the intentional approximation, I introduce a brief account of terms central in Searle’s theory of intentionality, principally as formulated in Intentionality. For Searle, intentionality is mental directedness; it is “that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world” (Iy 1). An intentional state consists of intentional content experienced in a psychological mode associated with a psychological verb such as believe, desire, hope, remember, perceive, or intend (intending to do something is just one form of intentionality) (5–6, 3).1 Although intentional content is, in Searle’s words (22), “internal to the intentional state,” and so can be enjoyed only by the subject associated with the state, the state, Searle insists, does not involve a two-term relation between a subject (in a psychological mode) and a representation (18–19). For instance, someone’s desiring a possible eventuality typically involves wanting some state of affairs to be realized, not a relation of that someone to a proposition to the effect that such and such be the case. That understood, Searle refers to the intentional content of a state as the “propositional content” of the state when it is properly expressible as a whole proposition. Even though the propositional content is expressible as a proposition, it need not be formed or rehearsed verbally. When I see a blue box, words need play no part in the perceptual experience. Likewise, I believe (remember) where I keep masking tape, and when I desire to use it I go to get it with the belief that it is there and the intention to get it and use it, without ever necessarily forming or rehearsing the “contents” of desire, belief, or intention verbally, even though the propositional content of each is expressible as a whole proposition. After all, my belief, for instance, is about a state of affairs, not that a proposition to the effect that the tape is in such and such drawer is true. Some states are said to not have propositional content: thus, the intentional content of states


57

such as love, and hate, which are typically termed affective or emotional, may simply be expressed by specifying an object. Also, Searle holds that some mental states, such as nameless anxiety or elation, are not directed at or about objects or states of affairs and so are not intentional (2, 1).2 For Searle, intentional content is had internally to a state and, putting aside questions concerning the suitability of the content metaphor, the content is identified by asking what must be the case if the state is to be satisfied or successful. That is, intentional content is typically representable in terms of the conditions of satisfaction of the state: beliefs are representable in terms of what will make them true, desires in terms of what will satisfy them, intentions in terms of what would count as their successful execution. But the question concerning what would provide satisfaction is not normally asked in the living; the intentional content is experienced in a moment of non-observational awareness—awareness internal to the state— of the current state’s conditions of satisfaction, an awareness independent of and contrasted with the detached self-observation long dear to philosophers. If asked, we can talk about the content of such awareness, but the content is had internally to the state and we are only non-observationally or virtually aware of it. Though Searle persistently stresses the difference between content internal to the state and representations of that content, and the inclination of philosophers to confuse features of the described content with features of the phenomenon that should be under analysis (1981: 723; Iy, chapter 7), his concerns lead him to focus overmuch on intentional content had in a mode, with little regard for the formation of the content or the mode. His primary interest is in understanding logical features of intentional states (Iy 47, 12), the meanings, entailments, and truth and fulfillment conditions of such states, and not in accounting for the coming-into-being of an intentional state or the concrescence of the momentary subject having it. In the next chapter, I show that this neglect led Searle into analytic errors; in the closing chapter I claim that the neglect led him to adopt misleading views concerning the nature of consciousness. Searle differentiates presentational from representational intentional states. Perception is presentational in the sense that one can focus on and perceive an object only if it is present to one, and so without recourse to mental representations. Memory of or belief about that object when it is not present requires representation (Iy 45–46). Despite the fact that we formulate them

58

Chapter 3

linguistically with the aid of general terms, the conditions of satisfaction of an intentional state always appear under particular aspects (16) and themselves function normally—are presented or represented—in non-verbal form. If an intentional state has conditions of satisfaction then that state is said to have a direction of fit. If an intentional state is assessable in terms of its truth-value as determined by reference to a determinate state of affairs then that intentional state is said to have a mind-to-world direction of fit. Beliefs and perceptions have such a direction of fit. If assessment is typically in terms of fulfillment, that is, by virtue of whether or not an eventually determinate state of affairs conforms to the intentional state’s conditions of satisfaction, then the state in question has a world-to-mind direction of fit. Desires and intentions have such a direction of fit. An intentional state is always somebody’s intentional state (RM 20). An intentional state always arises in the experiential stream of a subject, an intender—for our purposes, a person—in an actual situation. An intender has intentional capabilities which reflect and incorporate past embodied and socialized experience and enable one to perceive, think, and act. That is, every intentional state relies on a background of nonrepresentational capacities (practices, abilities, dispositions) which are not intentional states but which enable one to have intentional states and “provid[e] a set of enabling conditions for the operation of intentional states” (Iy 158). In Intentionality, an intentional state determines its conditions of satisfaction and is the state that it is not only “against” a background of capacities that are not themselves parts of the conditions of satisfaction of the state, but also in relation to a network of other intentional states that serve as contributors to the details of content, and as partial determinants of the mode, of the intentional state (Iy 19, 141; cf. CSR 132). When writing Intentionality, Searle thought that to have a belief or desire, one needed a network of other beliefs and desires which he distinguished from the background. Thus, if I were to decide to subscribe to a printed magazine, I would have related beliefs about my ability to pay, modes of payment, reliability of the publisher and of the banking and postal systems, and so on indefinitely. In effect, Searle thought such states were included in the mind’s inventory of largely unconscious mental states, and that they relied in turn on the background preconditions of intentionality (Iy 141–143). In The Rediscovery of the Mind, first published in 1992, Searle modified his views concerning network and background. There, he sees “memory [not] as a


59

storehouse of propositions and images. . . . But . . . rather as a mechanism for generating current performance, including conscious thoughts and actions, based on past experience” (RM 187; cf. RP 56).3 In this account, the network no longer draws on unconscious intentional states but rather draws on the background capacity to generate specific beliefs and other intentional states and so cannot be sharply demarcated from the background, which corresponds to “a set of neuronal structures, whose workings at present are largely unknown, that enable [one] to think and act, when [one] gets around to it” (RM 187; cf. J1 168). 3.2

Searle, the Intentional Approximation, and the Jamesian Characters

of Thought Searle’s analysis of intentionality can help elucidate several Jamesian characters of thought. First, the Jamesian self, seen as an ever-changing totality of habits and dispositions preserved in and sustained by neurological pathways and structures and coming into play in each moment of experience, is usefully compared with Searle’s background of intentionality—the ensemble of capacities, dispositions, and assumptions that enables us to have the intentional states we do have. Second, just as the uniqueness of each Jamesian thought stems in part from the focus/periphery structure of experience, and from the unique activation of the fringe of associations, so, in an intentional approximation derived from Searle, the field of consciousness has an intentionality-based center-periphery structure (RM 137) that is so complex as to not be precisely repeatable. Further, we can begin to offer an adequate description of the fringe of a state in terms of the network of associations activated by and contributing to the formation of the intentional core of that unique state (190). Third, the nature of transitive parts and felt transitions linking buds to their predecessors and successors may be clarified by expanding Searle’s notion of “intentional causation,” in which we directly experience something making something happen (Iy 123). Fourth, the claim that thought always appears to deal with objects independent of itself may be clarified by using the notion of conditions of satisfaction to examine the propositional contents of intentional states and by likening those contents to Jamesian objects of thought. Fifth, intentionality-based notions can help differentiate between the active and relatively passive operation of desire or interest in intentional states.

60

Chapter 3

Thought Is Personal For James, thinking is personal in two senses: it is inescapably subjective and each thought appears in the stream of consciousness of an embodied self, with its own characteristic powers, including memory, habits, dispositions, and a sense of personal identity. These two senses figure prominently in Searle’s approach to intentionality and the mind: I discuss his treatment of them under separate headings, with the aim of introducing or clarifying distinctions helpful in articulating an accessible, bud-based account of consciousness. Subjectivity and Non-Observational Awareness

For Searle (RM 93), “con-

scious mental states and processes have a special feature not possessed by other natural phenomena, namely, subjectivity.” Mental states are always subjective, always had by a “first person,” and there is “an asymmetry between the way that each person knows of his or her inner mental phenomena and the way that others from outside know of them” (20, 21). Subjectivity in the relevant sense thus involves a first-person privacy that precludes accessibility by others; mental states are precisely not observable by multiple subjects—intersubjective—but subjectivity nonetheless is a real feature of our world and experience, not to be left out or explained away. In championing subjectivity, Searle actively poses himself against Quine, Davidson, and more generally behaviorists, materialists, and functionalists, who eschew the mental and subjective and try to place ontology on an objective (intersubjective), third-person (observer-based) foundation in which all of reality is objective (1987; RM 19–21). One way to see what is involved in our knowledge of our mental phenomena is to recur to the notion of non-observational awareness (cf. Iy 90) or what James (J1 305) terms “direct awareness of the process of our thinking as such.” We may benefit from the directness of such awareness instead of trying to hold fast and observe the fleeting states and transitions in the stream of consciousness. We can get a quite direct account of specific intentional states and a good sense of the awareness internal to them by having someone ask us without warning about what we are doing or seeing or thinking. We might ask ourselves comparable questions directly, but the self-directedness tends to put us in a situation very like that of the selfobserving Hume: the questioning distances us from the state, we do not catch the transitive parts and feelings of tendency at play, and we focus on


61

the substantive parts of the stream, making them appear more static than they are. For many philosophers beside James and Searle, the answers to one’s own or another’s questions about our intentional states are available without observation, without directing awareness on the state. As to one’s main intentions, Hampshire (169–170) says the answers are available “immediately and naturally,” and Anscombe (13–15) includes “the class of intentional actions” in the “class of things known without observation.” Ryle (137) says that one can provide answers “without rummaging for evidence, without drawing any inferences and without even momentarily wondering what he should say.” Non-observational awareness is immediate and noninferential. The respondent doesn’t have to think about an answer and doesn’t rely on any mediating representation of the relevant case in order to frame an answer. (The least hesitation in answering may indicate reliance on intervening representations in the formulation of the answer.) Moreover, the awareness is quite independent of interrogation: we simply are nonobservationally aware of the intentional content of whatever state we happen to be in. This is what enables us to answer as easily as we do. As Searle puts it, concerning action and perception (1979: 263): “The knowledge of what one is doing . . . does not depend on any observations that one makes of oneself, [and] characteristically derives from one’s awareness of the conditions of satisfaction of the experience of acting. Again . . . just as at any point in a man’s conscious life he knows the answer to the question, what are you doing now?, so he knows the answer to the question, what do you see now? In both cases, the knowledge in question is simply an awareness of the conditions of satisfaction of a certain sort of presentation [or state].” In each moment we are non-observationally aware of the conditions of satisfaction—the intentional content, which constitutes the core of a Jamesian substantive part—of our current state, of what we perceive, of what we are doing, but the intentional approximation holds we may be non-observationally aware of transitions as well. In chapter 4, I build transitions into the conditions of satisfaction of intentional states. Doing so weds Searle’s proposition-based conditions-of-satisfaction approach (itself heavily influenced by linguistic formulations) and James’s phenomenology (which is attuned to unverbalized factors, such as feelings of direction), and thus serves to illustrate how reliance on language-based analysis can limit and confound our understanding of experience.

62

The Background and James’s Notion of Self

Chapter 3

For James, experience is not

only subjective as from a standpoint that only the experient occupies, but it is personally subjective: it is carried forward with a persisting sense of familiarity that makes one’s experience one’s own, it emerges from and belongs with one’s history, and the self is appropriated or activated by the thinking subject-in-formation as part of an onflowing stream of accumulating personal history. In each moment, what actions, movements, and powers are available for appropriation are constrained by the immediately and recently preceding moments. If one’s powers and potential actions available via memory are functions of associative brain connections constituting paths of potential arousal and recall, as they are for James, and if this “Jamesian neural net” corresponds to the self, the excited neural substrate at a moment corresponds to the self or me as one’s capacities come into play in that moment. As new connections are formed and connection strengths are altered, the substrate undergoes modification moment by moment. So, too, one’s powers are also always changing in waking life: the self is a selfin-the-making from moment to moment. In the Searle-based intentional approximation, Searle’s background is regarded as the Jamesian self presented in garb suitable for discourse concerning intentionality. The background “form[s] the preconditions for the functioning of intentional states” (Iy 143): its chief components are knowhow and the taken-for-granted, non-propositional knowledge of how things are and how to do things and these generate current performance, including conscious thoughts and actions—more generally, intentional states—based on past experience (RM 187). The background is counterpart to James’s collection of powers—memory, habits and dispositions—realized in the Jamesian neural net: the background corresponds to “a set of neuronal structures . . . that enable [one] to think and act,” so that the operation of the background corresponds to and is realized in neuronal or brain processes and the functioning of neurophysiological structures (187; CSR 129).4 If we equate the cores of substantive parts with those of correlate intentional states, as the intentional approximation does, then it is natural to equate the transitive parts, which carry us from substantive part to substantive part, with the operation of the background. Because the background is “the set of practices, skills, habits, and stances that enable intentional contents to work in the various ways that they do” (Iy 158), the


63

intentional approximation holds that the background enables us to form intentional states and to move from one state to another. With this, we can say that if some powers belonging to the totality of powers constituting the me are brought to bear in each present moment, in ways generally wellsuited to the event, to the formation of thought and thinker, then each thought involves the situation-appropriate exercise of activated background capacities. As James has it (J1 340), “the Thought is a vehicle of choice as well as of cognition; and among the choices it makes are these appropriations, or repudiations, of its ‘own.’ But the Thought never is an object in its own hands, it never appropriates or disowns itself. It appropriates to itself, it is the actual focus of accretion. . . .” This appropriative accretion is the operation of the part of the self—the capabilities—actually functioning in the moment; the background is at work in the formation of the thought and in the accretion of personal history. The intentional approximation sees the transitive parts as involving operation of the background, and now adds that when James says “the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another” we can, consistently with his views, say that the I (the momentary forming subject) relies on the me (the self) by appropriating some of its powers in the current context, adapting habit to novelty and accreting a new substantive part. Searle regularly talks of intentional states as determining their conditions of satisfaction “against a set of background abilities, dispositions, and capacities that are not part of the intentional content” of the states they play a role in generating (CSR 132; Iy 19). In so doing, he regards his subject matter at some remove from the phenomenological: in analysis, propositional content is too often highlighted against a background. However, as we enact habits or think things over we experience primarily from a background, and the relevant propositional content is constituted in part by the working of the background as it shapes what it meets. The operation of the background produces new intentional content and new (learned) or strengthened associations or habits and these can in turn figure, whether as detailed modifications in habitual capacities or as memorable content, in generating subsequent thoughts or moments of experience. Thus, the intentional approximation accepts the Jamesian I-me dialectic, although this dialectic is an interpretation of what is given in experience rather than a direct disclosure to radical empiricists as being at work throughout waking experience. Furthermore, James’s notion of the self as a congeries of

64

Chapter 3

powers, and Searle’s notion of the background as memory, not just of events, facts, and the like, but of how to do things, how to cope in different settings (RM 187), are supported by experience of some “tolerably definite things” (ERE 129): the ability to become a vehicle for one’s powers or habits and generate a boundless variety of performances; the availability of memories of past events; the capacity to learn. We can confirm many of these instantly, in ways to satisfy radical empiricists. To confirm the first, simply put this book aside and do something you think you’ve never done before, like jump up and down repeating some phrase picked from this book; the second, simply remember something you did last night. These powers are not credibly deniable: one can do things one has not done before, simply by drawing on well-established abilities; one can remember things; one can learn how to do things. Social Selves and Constitutive Rules

If it makes sense to equate James’s self

with the background, it must also make sense to interpret James’s social selves in terms of the background. This is an especially important point because focusing on the self may give a highly individualistic cast to the notion of the background, detracting from the importance of the social in constituting the individual, from the self as socially constructed, and from the very notion of the individual as a social-historic formation. Searle’s treatment of intentional states emerged and generalized from his work on speech acts. A speech act has both intentional and conventional aspects. It is intentional (in the sense in which an action is intentional): the speaker wants and intends to secure some effect by expressing some intentional content. It is conventional in the crucial sense that it presupposes an institutional background of constitutive rules (SA 51). In fact, the central explicit hypothesis of Speech Acts is that “speaking a language is a matter of performing speech acts according to systems of constitutive rules” (38). Without the mastery of background conventions conditioning movement from intentional contents to expressions of them neither linguistic communication nor proper speech acts would be possible. The mastery of these conventions (including those governing the meanings and uses of words, what counts as a promise, request, etc., and the commitments binding a promiser, requester, etc.) does not require that we can articulate the rules on which they can appear to rely. When we want someone within earshot to do something, we simply say things that count as attempting to get the


65

auditor(s) to do that something. Our utterance can count as that only for people who share a common background and can relevantly participate in what Searle (CSR 23) dubs “collective intentionality,” the ability to engage in mutually coordinated activity in which “the crucial element . . . is a sense of doing (wanting, believing, etc.) something together, and the individual intentionality that each person has is derived from the collective intentionality that they share” (24–25). Searle terms any activity involving collective intentionality a “social fact” and those social facts presupposing the existence of human institutions “institutional facts” (26; SA 51). The institutions in question “are systems of constitutive rules,” and “every institutional fact is underlain by a (system of) rule(s) of the form ‘X counts as Y in context C’” (SA 51–52). These constitutive rules are “matters of culture and society,” and, unlike regulative rules, like building, dress, and health codes, or boating or driving regulations, which regulate independently existing forms of activity, constitutive rules “create the very possibility of certain activities” (CSR 27; SA 33), such as buying and selling, marriage, parliamentary debate, speech action itself, and the playing of specific board or field games or of anything that we can regard in Wittgensteinian fashion as a game or a languagegame.5 In Searle’s formulation, the Y term in a constitutive rule has to assign a status (say, as a piece of money) to the X object (say, a stamped piece of metal) that the X object does not have merely by virtue of its physical features, so that the X term “symbolizes something beyond itself” (CSR 73). To the extent that people do make the symbolic assignment, whether explicitly or not, they share a common background and can engage in collectively intentional behavior arising on the basis of the taken-for-granted background, or from that taking-for-granted background. That is, to the extent that institutions are systems of constitutive rules, the basis for shared understandings among group members involves the recognition, not necessarily explicit, of course, that some objects, actions, or events in some more or less systematic contexts count as having some more or less systematic statuses and functions (44, 142 ff.). Now, for James, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. . . . But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares.” (J1 294) If we seek a Searlean

66

Chapter 3

counterpart to James’s social selves, we can say that for each group of persons (kin, users of money, speakers of one’s native tongue, adherents of belief systems, players of games) about whose “opinion” one cares in contexts C, one has or comes to have a set of background capacities that enable one to function as a member of the group. Therefore, we may say that whenever people agree however informally to share an interpretation of X as Y they are forming or participating in a group, each of whose members has a corresponding social self, and normally that membership contributes to one’s identity and self-identification. The social self (characteristic of group members) has the group’s characteristic background ability to perceive Xs as Ys, that is, to make distinctions based on socialized perceptual categories, so that objects and events may be perceived as with social meanings and uses that can facilitate cooperative, collectively intentional behaviors. Group members are able to act in accord with the system of constitutive rules and values constituting the group as an institution, that is, a group whose members do not unconsciously follow relevant rules but who “evolve a set of dispositions that are sensitive to the rule structure” (CSR 145). One’s perceptual and actional capabilities can then function in routines adapted for operation in actualized social landscapes and in service to one’s intentions, so that, for instance, one can use money to buy tickets (pieces of paper with markings on them) and then present the tickets on proper occasions to gain entry to appropriate venues. Coming into a world and growing to be at home in it is learning how to move about in it, to have intentional states incorporating the characteristic distinctions, but not with any requisite self-reflective capability, and to act and intend within the confines of the world. One’s coming into a socialized world may start with exposure to verbalized rules but such rules typically become interconnected in a system of capabilities, habits, associations, and symbolic meanings that are not realized linguistically. Such a set of background capacities enables one to function and behave appropriately within a social group, though not necessarily to feel comfortable in it. Whether or not we care to call a set of such capacities a social self is a matter of nomenclature.6 Thought Is in Constant Change Here, James is not concerned to establish that no state of mind can briefly endure, as perhaps in trance or meditation. The type of change of interest to James is that making for the difference between one thought and


67

another, and the point on which he “wish[es] to lay stress is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before” (J1 230). With the formation of each thought and a momentary subject, our situation and personal history change slightly, and because “. . . our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date” no conscious state can be repeated precisely (234). The counterpart claim in the Searle-based intentional approximation is that no two intentional or conscious states are identical. Although Searle may nowhere expressly assert that intentional states and the “unified . . . single conscious field[s]” (MC 200) or states in which they figure at a moment never recur, he would surely endorse the assertion that each concrete conscious state is unique. Here are some of the reasons for saying this, in capsule form: the sensible world is always changing and generating stimuli that affect us (3); our perceptual apparatus, posture, bodily sensations are always changing in waking life—in short, the body is always changing and “all consciousness begins with consciousness of the body.” Conscious experience of one’s own body “runs through all of our conscious experiences” (184–185); and neurobiological processes in one’s brain are ongoing; and since world, body, and brain play determinative roles in the formation of each conscious state, each mental state is unique if treated in sufficient detail or as experienced. Further, if Searle believes that conscious and intentional states are caused by the operations of the brain or neurobiological processes in the brain, and that conscious and intentional states are realized in brain structures (Iy ix; MC 192), then, given the complexity of the processes and structures involved, we may safely infer that Searle would agree with James that neither conscious states nor experienced intentional states recur. For James, even when we think of the same thing twice, so that the substantive cores of the two thoughts might be described by the same words, each time “we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared” (J1 233). We must therefore avoid being misguided by the apparent clarities of language, which encourage the “habit . . . of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone” and the replacing of “the continuous flow of the mental stream . . . [by] an atomism” (246, 196). The psychologist and radical empiricist should move toward regarding the object of each thought or bud of perception as “neither more nor less than

68

Chapter 3

all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be” (276). Only a simplistic account of mental states could foster the idea that the same mental state can recur. Searle concurs with James on several or even all of these points. For instance, he cites the misleading affects of conventional linguistic formulations on the analysis of intentional states (RM 193), and he offers this observation: The attempt to spell out the conditions of satisfaction of intentional states helps to dispel a certain naive conception of intentional states according to which they neatly and atomistically individuate and have clear conditions of satisfaction. It is less easy to combat this form of atomism as long as one confines oneself to sentences, for sentences do fairly neatly individuate and can be made to seem to have clear truth conditions. (1981: 730; cf. Iy 141)

In fact, intentional states cannot readily be individuated without referring to other states and the background: An intentional state only determines its conditions of satisfaction—and thus only is the state that it is—given its position in a network of other intentional states and against a background of practices and preintentional assumptions that are neither themselves intentional states nor are they parts of the conditions of satisfaction of intentional states. (Iy 19; cf. VRE 53–54)

Searle’s Network and James’s Fringe

Once these accounts by Searle and

James are juxtaposed, the move to align the substantive core of an intentional state with the central conditions of satisfaction, and the fringe with the activated network, is straightforward. For James, the fringe is an ingredient of, ingresses into, or influences the mind’s object. For Searle (1981: 731), each state is internally related to a network: it could not have the content it has or be the state it is apart from its relation to the network. The network may be indefinitely large; like the fringe, it may extend to all manner of affinities, anticipations, associations, and glimpsed possibilities (cf. J1 258–259, 265). Thus,“in any real life situation, the beliefs and desires [in the network of an intention] are only part of a larger complex of still other psychological states; there will be subsidiary intentions as well as hopes and fears, anxieties and anticipations, feelings of frustration and satisfaction. For short, I have been calling this entire holistic network, simply, the ‘network’” (Iy 141).


69

As was noted above, in Intentionality the network includes conscious and unconscious intentional states (Iy 151). In Searle’s later account, unconscious intentional states are nothing but capacities of the brain to generate subjective, conscious states, and are treated as part of the background; the network only includes states that have figured in consciousness (RM 186–190). The generative capacities involved are realized neurophysiologically, in “an enormous mass of neurons embedded in glial cells,” and they gain psychological reality only when elements of that mass behave so as to cause consciousness (188). Consequently, in the intentional approximation, only generated, conscious states are properly members of the network. For instance, depending on the actualities of the case, an intention to see a particular movie may include in its network beliefs, several of them perhaps newly generated in the momentary context, about where and when the film is showing, about how to get there, means of payment for entry, and so on, and these may be affected by desires associated with the particular film, say to see the works of a particular director or works recommended by a particular person, and perhaps to coordinate the movie-going with other activities, etc. Each of these may figure more or less centrally or peripherally in one’s thinking. Of course, those that do occur will rely on a background of practices and assumptions (e.g. the know-how one has concerning commercial transactions and navigating in the world, assumptions concerning the reliability of transportation systems, etc.), and these may figure in James’s fringe, but that point is to the side here. In the intentional approximation, the fringe includes any factors that might fairly be captured by the recall of non-observational awareness. Thus, timely interrogation can help specify the contours of a network. If, in the movie-going example, one thought, if only in a flash and not necessarily with the aid of words, that public transportation or walking could get one to the show on time, or remembered some aspect of another of the director’s films, then one could at least momentarily recall those thoughts and could say they figured in the network of the intention to go to the movie. Thought Is Continuous For Searle there plainly are continuities in experience, and his assertion that “intentionality occurs in a coordinated flow of action and perception” (RM 195) should suffice to establish that all or much waking thought is sensibly continuous on his view. To examine ways in which continuity functions in

70

Chapter 3

the intentional stream, I introduce some notions of Searle’s that I rely on and extend in the processual approximation. These include intentional causation and transitivity of intentional causation. The feeling of causality-at-work (“transitive causation” (SPP 218) in our own activity-situations), James’s principal instance of the co-conscious conjunctive relation, is a case of what Searle terms “transitivity of intentional causation” (Iy 94). Searle’s arguments regarding Humean and “regularity” causation and for the recognition of intentional causation (Iy, chapter 4) mirror James’s arguments against Humean and Kantian notions of causation and for the recognition of causality-at-work. Had Searle chosen to examine causality-at-work, and the role of intentional causation in it, rather than remaining focused on the logical structure of intentionality, he could have approached more closely to the dynamic aspects of intentional causation, and have built them into enriched conditions-ofsatisfaction-based analyses of perception and action, as I do in chapter 4. Regularity Causation and Intentional Causation

For James and Searle, and

they believe for common sense as well (SPP 198, 218; Iy 114), we are aware of causal relations all the time. As we have seen, for James, the conceptual account of causation loses contact with the relevant experiential actualities: it replaces the concretely experienced relation of causation by an abstract relation between the terms of causally unconnected series of antecedent and consequent conceptual objects (SPP 194 ff.). Likewise, for Searle the regularity or traditional view does not make contact with the basic form of causation, that of something making something happen—a relationship experienced in intentional causation (Iy 123). On the regularity view, in order to be justified in believing that one event causes another one must know a covering law which states a corresponding regularity or, that failing, one must believe that such a law exists, although it may apply to the events under different descriptions than those under which the events are being considered (Iy chapter 4; Davidson 1967: 701; Kim 288). For regularity causation to be recognized as such, one must take observed phenomena to be members of appropriate classes of ordered pairs of events. In phenomena involving intentional causation (as when a flash of light makes one blink) we are directly (non-inferentially, non-observationally) aware of causation without knowledge of—or even belief in the existence of—a corresponding covering law correlating types of events. We experience causation without recognizing causally related phenomena as mem-


71

bers of appropriate classes of ordered pairs. Rather, we are directly aware of something making something else happen, and, to repeat, this is the basic form of causation. One is directly aware of a flash of light making one’s eyes blink, of thirst causing one to drink, of a keyboard before one’s eyes causing one to see a keyboard, of anger making one slam a door, of the belief that a movie, which one wants and plans to see, is showing at 8 P.M. as a causal factor in one’s decision to eat supper by 7 P.M. Our knowledge of such causal relation is direct: if asked what made your eyes blink, you drink water, etc., your answers could be supplied without reflection, inference, or seeking evidential support, without any reference to a covering law, and without any confidence, or even belief, that any such law exists. These examples challenge the legitimacy of Hume’s unwarranted requirement of plain discoverability, according to which defenders of the view that causal relations are real must produce some instance, wherein the efficacy is plainly discoverable to the mind, and its operation obvious to our consciousness or sensation. . . . [They must] find some natural production, where the operation and efficacy of a cause can be clearly conceiv’d and comprehended by the mind, without any danger of obscurity or mistake. (Hume 1739: 157–158)

In each of the examples I gave above, we experience causal relationship, but our awareness of causation is internal to the experience, and not plainly discoverable. As Searle has it (Iy 125), “the causal nexus is internal to the experience and not its object.” As James has it (SPP 218), “the transitive causation in . . . [activity-situations] does not . . . stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on.” It is not plainly discoverable. Hume’s dogma of plain discoverability, like his dogma of distinct conceivability, whereby “every effect is a distinct event from its cause” (1748: 44; cf. Iy 121, SPP 213), does not tell against intentional causation; it merely presumes against it. The notions of something making something happen and of a causal regularity are different notions and the former is the more basic notion. Of course, there is no question that there are regularities that seem to lend some considerable force to the regularity view, but these can be related to the more basic notion, and besides are of no concern here.7 Intentional Causation, Propositional Content, and Perception

For Searle,

intentional causation is central to perceptions and “intentions in action,” the biologically primary forms of intentional states; internally to such states

72

Chapter 3

we are aware of intentional causation. Searle’s strategy for getting at just what we are aware of in an intentional state is to specify its conditions of satisfaction in propositional form. When Searle considers the conditions of satisfaction of intentionally causal intentional states one major division emerges, that between states that are self-referential and those that are not. Prime examples of the former are perceptions, intentions, and memories of events; prime examples of the latter are desires. Here, I deal only with the former types of state, deferring treatment of desires until section 4.4. For Searle, if an intentional state is self-referential it has conditions of satisfaction that cause or are caused by the rest of its conditions of satisfaction. That is, the specification of the self-referential aspect of a self-referential intentional state refers to the rest of the conditions of satisfaction of the very state in which the self-referentiality operates. To see how this works, first consider the conditions of satisfaction of a perceptual experience. Those conditions are what must be the case if we are to take the perceptual experience to be veridical. They are propositional in form—when expressed they stipulate that such and such is the case with regard to an object or a state of affairs. The following is an example: (1) a. that there is a yellow station wagon there, and b. that there is a yellow station wagon there is causing this visual experience (Iy 48). The general form of the self-referential aspect of perception may be displayed as follows: (2) a. that there is an object present in my perceptual field and that object has specific features, and b. the presence of that object with those features is causing this perceptual experience (that is, the experience of perceiving is caused by the rest of its conditions of satisfaction). (Iy 48, 61, 67, 91) These conditions require that the experience be intentionally caused by the rest of its conditions of satisfaction, namely the state of affairs as perceived. Now, (1) is illustrative and is intended to deal with logical aspects of the intentional content rather than with actual experiencing. Nevertheless, it encourages a delusive simplification. The experience seems to lack “temporal depth,” to be frozen in an instantaneous present, like the propositional


73

content of an intentional state treated in abstraction from the formation of the state. It is as if the person having the visual experience were a traditional empiricist with eyes fixed on an object present before his eyes in a moment of disembodied stasis detached from any taint of activity, even philosophical activity. Typically, formation of a visual perception involves a variety of capabilities, including the abilities to orient, to adjust focus, to make visual distinctions. These are nonrepresentational background abilities and are not to be included as part of the propositional content of visual experiences. Nonetheless, in visual experience one draws on such abilities; there is always a transition form a preceding state or substantive part to the present one, namely the relevant visual perception, and the transitive part joining those substantive parts involves intentional causation which results in the bringing of an object into sufficient focus for recognition. Focusing, which involves the body, and the object (and a hybrid medium of transmission including the air and parts of one’s body), jointly constitute the intentional cause of the visual experience or act. The intentional cause of my seeing X is, at least, X and the background-dependent active or reactive turning of attention toward X. In turns out that we need not neglect these formative aspects when formulating the conditions of satisfaction of a visual experience; in the processual approximation I will show how to build these factors into the conditions of satisfaction of perceptual experiences. Intentional Causation, Action, and Transitivity of Causation

In Searle’s

account of action, all actions are caused by either of two types of intention: prior intentions (intentions arising prior to attempted execution) and intentions in action. Intentions in action may arise spontaneously or operate in the service of a prior intention. Suppose you spontaneously scratch an itch, or raise your arm voluntarily but without forethought. Whatever the purpose of your arm raising—e.g., to attract someone’s attention, to pick an apple from a tree—it is distinguishable from involuntary raisings of your arm caused, e.g., by a physical therapist conducting an examination, or by electrical stimulation of the motor cortex (Penfield 76). Searle terms the distinguishable feature an “experience of acting” (Iy 88). When we have an experience of acting we are non-observationally aware of what we are doing; we know what we are trying to do, are conscious of the conditions of satisfaction of the experience of acting. Searle calls intentional content had in the mode of experience of acting an “intention in action,” and without an

74

Chapter 3

intention in action there is no action. The conditions of satisfaction of an intention in action are self-referential; the self-referential component causes the rest of the intentions’ conditions of satisfaction. For a simple action, like the intentional raising of one’s arm, these may be displayed as follows: (3) a. that there be an event of my arm raising, and b. this intention in action causes that event (Iy 97). In more general form, the propositional content of an intention in action may be displayed as having two components, the movement and the intention that causes it; sometimes, I term the latter the causal component: (4) a. that there is a movement of my body, and b. this intention in action causes that movement (cf. Iy 91).8 Conceiving action as a mode of experience encourages us to draw close to action from the inside, as it is experienced; we need no longer rely solely on observation of behavior, on traditional self-observation, or on ordinary language accounts of action as sources of data. Instead, given this contribution of Searle’s to action theory, we can articulate the conditions of satisfaction as they are experienced, using non-observational awareness as something of a radically empirical check against importing linguistic and observational biases into our account. But if we do that, we have to modify Searle’s account of intentions in action. In that account, Searle focuses on body movements such as arm raisings as caused by intentions in action, presumably because he was influenced by analytic philosophers’ concern with basic actions—the sorts of things we can do without intending to do anything by means of which we do them (Iy 100; cf. Danto, Goldman). In any case, the use of an arm raising as an example for study is misleading. One doesn’t intentionally raise one’s arm, or perform any so-called basic action, independently of any prior intention, desire, impulse, or the like, and any such dependence makes the raising purposive and typically serves to give the raising a target or guide for achievement that modulates the direction, speed, and force of the raising. Even in an arm raising that is not a reaching for something, one intends, for example, to stretch a muscle or to check one’s capabilities (say, after banging an elbow), or to attract notice, or to provide data for an experiment. We do not raise one of our arms, experience the raising as our action, and then discover why we are


75

raising or have raised our arm. The notion that an intention in action can have a simple bodily movement as its condition of satisfaction is indeed misleading. In fact, the notion of simple, purposeless action is as artificial as that of purely passive perception. In the midst of life we do not find ourselves acting without purpose, however fleeting, habitual, or trivial our purpose may be. An intended bodily movement is not just a movement; it is a constituent element of action and it is purposive—one focuses so as to recognize or to make out some feature; one stands up suddenly so as to pace or to express displeasure, one scratches to ease irritation. If one makes a movement purposelessly then we should call it involuntary and not say that one was acting. My claims here are consonant with views of James’s, as the following quotations demonstrate: An anticipatory image, then, of the sensorial consequences of a movement, plus (on certain occasions) the fiat that these consequences shall become actual, is the only psychic state which introspection lets us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary acts. . . . An end consented to as soon as conceived innervates directly the center of the first movement of the chain which leads to its accomplishment, and then the whole chain rattles off quasi-reflexly [sic]. . . . I trust that I have now made clear what that “idea of a movement” is which must precede it in order that it be voluntary. It is not the thought of the innervation which the movement requires. It is the anticipation of the movement’s sensible effects, resident or remote, and sometimes very remote indeed. (J2 501, 519, 521)9

There is no reason why Searle’s conditions-of-satisfaction approach cannot accommodate the end-viewing nature of intentions in action, especially since Searle allows the intention in action to extend to what the agent is trying to achieve by means of the action (Iy 128). First, perception of the anticipated consequent constitutes satisfaction of the intention, so the consequent should be included in the conditions of satisfaction. Anticipated and aimed-at consequents, which are distinct from actual sensory particulars and which normally function more by way of prepared readinesses to respond than by envisioned circumstances, may be realized in a variety of ways: for instance, when one is putting a cup down on a surface, hearing, touch, and vision may play various determinative roles in establishing success. Thus, where James regards the body movements involved in intentional actions as defined, guided and controlled by ends-in-view, or anticipatory

76

Chapter 3

consequents—as reaching for a nearby pencil differs from reaching for a nearby cup or guitar, and as reaching for an object to take it in hand and examine it differs from reaching for it to grasp and use it—Searle and the intentional approximation can include their counterparts in the conditions of satisfaction of intentions in action. Further, where James recognizes a fiat, which “constitutes the essence of the voluntariness of the act” (J2 501), the intentional approximation sees the causal component of the conditions of satisfaction of the intention in action. Where there is no fiat, there is no voluntary action. Thus, in the intentional approximation, Searle’s account is emended and the propositional content of an intention in action becomes (5) a. that there is a movement of my body with guiding or anticipated sensorial consequences, and b. this intention in action causes that movement. In addition to spontaneous instances, intentions in action may be caused by self-referential prior intentions, and the re-casting of intentions in action in the intentional approximation doesn’t alter this claim. For Searle, the self-referential component of a prior intention must cause the rest of its conditions of satisfaction or the intention is not satisfied. The representational content, or conditions of satisfaction, of a prior intention are, e.g., (6) That there be an action of raising my arm consisting of two components, the event of the arm raising and the intention in action, and this prior intention causes the action (Iy 97). As (6) indicates, prior intentions may cause intentions in action, which cause movements (or mental activity). But only a simple action (which we now know includes a perceptual aspect) is involved here. Yet the same relation between prior intentions and intentions in action holds for complex actions: the prior intention represents and causes the whole action, by transitivity of intentional causation; all voluntary subsidiary actions performed within the scope of a higher-level intentional action are nonetheless intentional, even though those actions (e.g. turning a doorknob to open a door) are not represented by the prior intention (Iy 93–98; RM 195). As we act we are non-observationally aware of our subordinate actions flowing out of our


77

prior intentions, of causality-at-work, and of continuity in the stream of consciousness. Now, reconsider James’s expectant attention—the preparation to react to anticipated impressions, which if the “nature and time of signal and reaction are foretold” consists in “premonitory imagination,” so that intentional movement is with an end-in-view, or with an “anticipatory image of [its] consequences” (J1 439; J2 501). Recall how anticipation figures in reaching for and drinking from a glass. When your hand touches the glass, your fingers, already curved, close around the glass and your action proceeds smoothly. Searle’s account of intentions in action abstracts from the most intimate linkage of anticipated sensations and readinesses to respond operating in so much of our prior-intended action. These could be incorporated in propositional content by such locutions as “that there be an event of my reaching (e.g. an anticipation-laden arm movement, so that it is a reaching for an object) whose completion is marked by an anticipated sensation or perception and this intention causes that event and readiness to perceive its completion.” Anticipation operates internally to the state, and the anticipatory workings of habit (the hand openings, the readinesses to respond), attuned to and in the personal activity-situation, help make the experience of acting the experience that it is, even though the subordinate hand movements typically lay outside the scope of intentionality. The transitivity of intentional causation as manifest in the unfolding of a prior intention is intentional causation at work, and it is James’s transitive causation, causality-at-work in personal activity-situations. Where such transitive causation is at work, the transitive parts are experienced as “the feeling of relation moving to its term” (J1 244), a feeling that points again to the dynamic—past-experience-dependent, present-experience-shaping, and future-experience-affecting—nature of intentionality as lived and to the temporal thickness of intentional states. Human Thought Appears to Deal with Objects Independent of Itself For the intentional approximation, this character of thought simply holds that thought is intentional, is “directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world” (Iy 1). The most crucial thing the intentional approximation takes from Searle is his use of conditions of satisfaction, to get at the contents of intentional states and of Jamesian thoughts. In fact, by properly specifying conditions

78

Chapter 3

of satisfaction we can approach the concrete nature of any conscious state. In order to draw close to an experience in a fashion acceptable to Searle or to a radical empiricist we must come back to those conditions of satisfaction as they functioned internally to the state, where they are not necessarily realized in linguistic form. It is convenient to begin the approach with substantive parts, recalling that an intentional state is not merely a substantive part and that, if we are to deal with questions concerning the structures and flow patterns of consciousness and experience, we must respect the richness of actual experiential contents, including propositional contents, the networks associated with them, and the formation of them—not just the central intentional contents. Substantive parts are “resting-places” and are indeed susceptible to conceptual analysis: concepts function in them and enable us to hold them fast before the mind, but linguistic accounts of substantive parts put us at a remove from raw unverbalized life, in which, for instance, we perceive and act conceptually but wordlessly. Searle’s notion of conditions of satisfaction provides a powerful heuristic for developing adequate accounts of momentary states, namely, by seeking to identify what conditions of satisfaction and concepts were operative in the moment. Suppose you are raking leaves off a pathway, or for that matter toweling off after a shower, or, more generally, performing any task involving surface preparation. Raking up leaves, you need never explicitly specify whether you want every last leaf off the pathway, or what will count as off the pathway, or whether some sections bordering the pathway are to be left free of leaves, and so on. One can specify those things beforehand, but often one simply carries out an intention (say, to rake a path) and in the course of so doing one makes decisions, possibly muttered but not necessarily verbalized, affecting the conditions of satisfaction or the end-in-view of the intention. All that is necessary, on Searle’s account, is that “for any intentional state with a direction of fit, a being that has that state must be able to distinguish the satisfaction from the frustration of that state. This follows from the fact that an intentional state is a representation of the conditions of its satisfaction” (Iy 177). To operate with specific conditions of satisfaction one must be able to make, to perceive and conceive, relevant distinctions. One must have learned how to make the distinctions and one must be able to act involving them, to determine experientially what counts as succeeding and what


79

counts as a mistake, and come to retain such know-how in the form of background capacities (cf. Iy 37, 38). For the intentional approximation, the ability to apply a concept internally to a state is to be able to be in a state whose intentional content involves conditions of satisfaction counterpart to the concept. In this sense, a concept is a distinction that can function in intentional content, something one can, say, act on or perceive in accord with—a possible contributor to conditions of satisfaction but not normally verbalized in actual functioning. If the conditions of satisfaction of a visual experience include there being a yellow car in front of the experient then in the actual visual experience the concepts yellow and car are in play, and the experient must have the ability to sustain conceptual constancy, namely a readiness to respond to or recognize something “singled out and marked” by these concepts (J1 462), as when a claim is to be verified, or more commonly when an anticipated consequent guides action and is reached. “All that a state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a reality, intend it, or be ‘about’ it, is to lead to a remoter [subsequent] state of mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles [is sensed and matched] to it” (471). The Jamesian end-in-view is had, functions nonverbally, within experience, but the exercise of articulating the counterpart conditions of satisfaction may be of considerable aid in making conceptual contact with the experienced end-in-view and with experienced intentional contents generally. From there, should we want to recall or analyze the experience as lived through, we can build in feelings of direction, using notions like those of intentional causation and directions of fit as heuristic devices; when appropriate we can examine the transitive parts associated with the feelings of direction as the operation of the background, and can approach the fringe by way of the network, and can consider, as well, ways in which social selves may have affected content. Human Thought Is Always Interested More in One Part of Its Object Than in Another Here, James is concerned with the selective, reinforcing, and inhibiting agency of attention in each passing moment: emphasis, selection and neglect are at work in all conscious states, and objects of thought are always dealt with under selected aspects in keeping with subjective interest, where interest is understood in a sense that is very general and renders James’s claim very nearly tautological (J1 284–287, 482; J2 559). Searle recognizes

80

Chapter 3

that “all intentionality is aspectual” (RM 131) and that all “consciousness of is consciousness as” (136). He also holds that “whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others. These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is” (156–157). Drawing on Searle, the intentional approximation accepts James’s characterization concerning interest, and sees it exemplified in all presentational and representational intentional states. Of presentational states, consider perception in the course of action first. Searle (RM 195) allows that “in general, there is no action without perception, no perception without action.”10 By transitivity of causation, “all voluntary subsidiary actions performed within the scope of a higher-level intentional action are nonetheless intentional” (195). Thus, we may say that selective attention incorporates objects in ongoing action aimed at realizing the intention and bringing about a desired state of affairs, and that, in general, subordinate perceptions and actions will carry forward and reflect the value-engendering intention. Valuation and interest are also at work in the making of practical and aesthetic distinctions, and so in perceptions often had other than in the evident course of action. Thus the eye of the fashion-conscious may frequently be caught by and actively notice details in the dress of other persons, the mycologist features of fungi, the craftsperson niceties in the craft of interest, the farmer or gardener the prospects of rain, and so on. Each such case instances the working of one or more of “a set of motivational dispositions, [which] condition the structure of our experiences” (CSR 135). It is as if motivating dispositions are background dispositions to respond to matters of potential personal interest, provided one is not preoccupied with something more interesting. This is in keeping with Searle’s “dispositional analysis of unconscious mental phenomena . . . [in which the] concept of unconscious intentionality is . . . that of a latency relative to its manifestation in consciousness” (RM 160–161), and it suggests a mode of operation for dispositions that extends to matters of slight interest. Thus, some initially passive cases of perception may be treated as exemplifying a disposition to note differences from the taken-for-granted: the unusual is more interesting than the usual, perhaps because it may figure in some subsequent project or reveal some potential hazard. The response to a sudden movement in one’s visual field


81

seems born of a deep disposition to remain on the qui vive and note change on the periphery; it may be seen as an evolved sensitivity to potential threats to well-being or survival.11 Furthermore, perception may serve an orienting function, say upon entering an unfamiliar space, or when checking on one’s whereabouts or scanning for obstacles while walking. Finally, an aimless, dull, idle perception may signal an escape from an unpleasant state. So, then, the aspects of things operative in presentational intentional states generally reflect the play of interest, preference, intention, or desire. However habitual, trivial, merely purpose-serving or attenuated the play, the states are more or less tinged or shot through with value—personal, social, cultural, biological. We develop abilities to make distinctions that can serve desire, interest, intention, survival; distinctions will not arise or persist in a person’s repertoire if they cannot figure in the realization of intentions or satisfy practical or aesthetic interests (J1 285, 515). Moreover, and finally, the intentional approximation simply accepts James’s equation of “what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us” (J2 559); to attend to anything, have attention move to it or be directed on it, is to be interested in it. As for representational intentional states, Searle offers a way to analyze them in terms of their cognitive and valuational aspects. He construes belief very broadly, to include states involving degrees of conviction ranging from feeling certain, to having a hunch, to entertaining a supposition or hypothesis, and construes desire very broadly to include “wanting, wishing, lusting and hankering after, and many other degrees of desire” (Iy 29). After dubbing the two broad cognitive and desiderative categories Bel and Des—designations I employ later—Searle examines how basic they are to intentionality and ends up hypothesizing that “all [representational] intentional states, even those which do not have a direction of fit and those which do not have a whole proposition as content, nonetheless contain a Bel or a Des or both” (35) as a fear contains a belief about possibilities and a Des that those possibilities not occur. If cognition and valuation are as tightly linked as perception and action are, perhaps every representational state contains both Bel and Des elements, the latter being valuative, of course. If there are representational states without Des components evident in analysis then, if the object of any Bel component nonetheless appears under aspects of interest to the thinker, serving some intention or disposition of the thinking person, valuative elements operate in all

82

Chapter 3

moments of representational experience. Consequently, although the conceivable occurrence of an interest-free state would not threaten the analysis, the intentional approximation holds that value and interest function in all representational intentional states, all intentions in action and perceptions in action, and in simple perceptions too, and terms the generic source of interest “Des,” extending Searle’s usage. 3.3

The Coordinated Flow of Action and Perception in the Stream of

Consciousness In addition to elucidating James’s characters of thought, Searle’s conditionsof-satisfaction approach can, as variously suggested above, help specify what is going on in the course of action on James’s account. For James, action arises from a command to begin that originates in an “ideational center” and ends in an “intellectual perception” also in an ideational center above the “lower centers” involved in the execution of the movements (J1 115–117). Initiated by a conscious “command to start” (116), each action enacts habits embodied in neural pathways and adapted to concrete circumstance (79, 139; cf. Iy 150). When this know-how is exercised the (know-how embodying) body takes over, and a chain of muscular contractions and sensations unfolds. The unfolding is replete with characteristic preparatory organic adjustments and sub-excitements of motor tracts. For James, the action-serving sensations are “accompanied by consciousness of some kind” even in habitual action, yet they are sensations to which “our higher thought-centers” are “usually inattentive, but which immediately call our attention if they go wrong” (J1 118; 115). At this high level of description, the fit with Searle, and so with the intentional approximation derived from Searle, is precise. The overarching unit of action is given in the propositional content of the prior intention, and the intentionality of an action carries along in the chain of sensoryaction loops, making it a flow of intentions in action and perceptual experiences. The Jamesian command to begin is equivalent to an initial intention in accord with a prior intention or to a spontaneous intention in action and the terminating perception is equivalent to a perceptual experience marking fulfillment of the conditions of satisfaction and completion of the intended action. The action itself consists of a series of bodily movements which lead to sensations that instigate subsequent movements


83

(J1 116) and we are to some degree aware of these sensations as “we are conscious of a very large number of things that we are not attending to or focusing our attention upon” (RM 137). Such action typically involves a rapid alternation of motor discharges and resultant afferent impressions and anticipatory images associated in a definite, learned order (J2 587). The rapid alteration relies on expectant attention, readinesses to respond, and anticipated motions, all of which show up in James’s directions of feeling. Through transitivity of causation, the subordinate sensory and muscular activity are intentionally caused by the command or prior intention. This subordinate activity is causality-at-work, providing anticipatory feelings of direction and experiences of action as it functions and as we move through interest- and purpose-sculpted environs. The actual feelings of direction are correlate with transitive parts describable as movements between substantive parts, along the pathway from command to terminating perception. In keeping with the notion that we have consciousness of some kind concerning “each movement of the chain” (J1 118), we may introduce notions of peripheral substantive (and transitive) parts, applicable wherever sensory input from the world or body or operating in short-term memory suffices for non-observational awareness of propositional content, e.g., where some sensation suffices to identify an object having an anticipated, felt character which merely releases the prepared muscular response. For instance, one may be tying one’s shoes attentively and in doing so consciously performing a series of subordinate actions, some separately intended, or one may be tying them peripherally, say, while conversing: we usually don’t attend to what the background enables us to do in habituated fashion. Nonetheless, as one peripherally ties one’s shoes, one performs a series of movements that are intentional. Subsidiary, peripheral perceptions abound too.12 Although a conditions-of-satisfaction analysis can lend precision to James’s account of action, in Searle’s hands it lacks James’s sensitivity to the operation of the background in anticipation and expectant attention and, more generally, in the formation of intentional states or buds. As a result, when Searle says that “intentionality occurs in a coordinated flow of action and perception, and the background is the condition of possibility of the forms taken by the flow” (RM 195), he offers no detailed analysis of the flow. Yes, action involves perception and perceptual experience involves

84

Chapter 3

action (195), and they both involve the working of the background, but although he could have done so within the spirit of his approach, Searle did not turn his acumen to the experience of the background in operation in the flow of action and perception: his analysis includes no transitive parts, no anticipation, no co-conscious transition, his perceptual experience doesn’t explicitly involve focusing, bodily feeling, or recognition. Among other things, the processual approximation will build anticipation, bodily feelings, the ground of perception, “pre-propositional” awareness, and other dynamic, transitive factors into the stream, yielding a fuller, intentionality-based account of the coordinated flow of action and perception.

4


It is almost indecent to draw the attention of philosophers to the minor transactions of daily life, away from the classic sources of philosophic knowledge; but, after all, it is the [traditional] empiricists who began this appeal to Caesar. —Whitehead (PR 174)

The processual approximation starts from the intentional approximation, that Searle-influenced version of the stream of consciousness in which Jamesian thoughts are construed as intentional states. Searle’s analyses helped, and will do more to help, clarify James’s notions, but Searle’s views are solidly in a tradition of twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy concerned with language, meaning and the world, and Searle does not concertedly try to reckon with the fluid and temporal aspects of intentionality and consciousness so vital to James. The processual approximation amends this. It re-integrates intentional states into the Jamesian stream by treating them as abstractions from “pulses of thought” (J1 371) or “intentional buds.” Most of this chapter is devoted to providing detailed accounts of two principal processes involving intentional buds: the formation of buds, and the co-conscious transition from an intentional bud to its sequel. By showing how intentional buds form and issue into futures, I intend to develop your ability to draw conceptually closer to the stream of your consciousness, with a gentleness that would minimize distortion of the processes and experiences in question, so that you may then use your own radically empirical findings in assessing phenomenological and theoretical claims about consciousness and experience. In this chapter, I do not deal one by one with James’s characters of thought; the processual approximation implicitly takes on views of them developed in earlier chapters, except as variations are noted. Moreover, it also functions as a way station

86

Chapter 4

and transition to the concrescual approximation, in which all the characters of thought are considered anew. 4.1

Intentional Buds

The processual approximation accepts the Jamesian view of the stream of consciousness as composed of thoughts, “single pulse(s) of subjectivity,” “undivided state(s) of consciousness” that are “the ultimate fact(s) for psychology” (J1 278, 276, 360) and which James later termed buds of perception (SPP 155). This approximation treats buds of perception as intentional buds: the formation of an intentional bud terminates with the formation of a substantive nucleus (1884: 18) characterizable as a presentational or representational intentional state. The notion of an intentional bud integrates the intentional approximation’s account of intentional states and the Jamesian, phenomenological treatment of the bud or of the state as following and deriving from a transitional, subject-forming process. Thus, an intentional bud is more than an intentional state: it is process and product. As a momentary act of experience, an intentional bud is both the process in which transitive parts lead to substantive conclusions (cf. J1 243) and the culmination of that process of formation. It typically comes not only with an intentional core, and with a fringe approximated in part by the network, but with all the rich texture of the fringe, including feelings of direction and the seemingly inexhaustible detail of lived moments. When examining the formation of intentional buds, the processual approximation provides an account of how what the intentional approximation treats as the conditions of satisfaction of intentional states take shape in experience, and something of how the psychological modes in which the experiential counterparts of conditions of satisfaction are experienced are constituted. In addition, the processual approximation extends Searle’s notion of intentional causation, still analyzed in terms of conditions of satisfaction, in such a way as to articulate how concrete, novel buds of experience can run into their successors and yet be discrete, so that, as James put it, in each “new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty” (ERE 95). This approximation thus enables us not only to embed intentional states in intentional buds conceptually but to likewise embed intentional buds in the stream of experience, and to eluci-


87

date the “co-conscious transition” central to radical empiricism (47–48). By blending together Searle and James, the stream of consciousness may thus be understood as a stream of intentionality or of intentional states, properly construed, namely as embedded in and abstracted from intentional buds, which buds are linked by co-conscious transitions to their predecessors and successors, and are themselves formed by the operation of the background in transitive parts. 4.2

The Formation of Intentional Buds: Acts of Perception

In the processual approximation, a perceptual experience is the process and outcome of its formation. In the run of daily activity we pay attention to the things being perceived far more than we do to the process of perception, but that process nonetheless is directly experienced and lived through and may not be neglected by a radical empiricist. In this section, I offer the processual approximation’s account of perceptual experience and of the formation of perceptual content concluding the act of perception. For Searle, and the intentional approximation, the conditions of satisfaction of perceptual experiences are self-referential in the sense that the objects or states of affairs perceived as having certain features cause the perceptual experience of the objects or states of affairs having those features. In citing the basis for his claims as to the self-referential aspect of perception, Searle maintains that “when one sees anything, the visual experience occurs as caused by the thing one sees” (1981: 728). Elaboration of this claim here involves giving a process-sensitive account of perception. The specific account given is concerned with the genesis of visual experiences, although, as it is all too easy to say, the account can be adapted to other sensory modes and can be generalized to cover any mode of perceptual experience. Just as visual perceptions do not spring into existence independently of direct experiential antecedents (including bodily feelings and sensory functioning), so the objects of perception do not seem to either. When visual perceptual contents are new, they typically arise from a “pre-presentational” portion of the perceptual field, a portion on which one had not focused or concentrated in the immediately preceding moment. In the case of vision, a portion of the pre-presentational is transformed continuously—that is, without sensible break—into the presentational component of a visual experience (e.g. that there is an object present before me in my visual field

88

Chapter 4

and that object has specific features). When one sees an object with one or more features, the visual experience occurs as largely caused by an object which is taken to be identical or continuous with whatever it was that caused one’s correlate prefocused awareness. As an object gains definition when you focus on it, you do not experience a disjunction between the prefocal awareness of the entity and the focused perception or the recognition of it; the absence of such disjunction is manifest in the apparently continuous existence of the relevant entity as well. The transition from a state in which there is non-focal awareness of an object to a focal perception of that object involves focusing and, typically, recognizing and is experienced as continuous while the object is visually experienced as continuous and numerically identical with its more vaguely perceived forerunner. This will be so whether the focusing proceeds upon a turning of the neck or head, or of the eyeballs in their sockets, toward what was the periphery, or whether it involves focusing on what was directly in front of one when one had been, say, talking intently on the phone, or listening with concentration to a piece of recorded music, or in the grip of emotion, or thinking or otherwise engaged in some form of representational intentionality and not primarily perceiving visually. Focusing and recognizing are part of the experiential basis, in the case of perception, for accepting James’s citation of inapprehendable feelings of direction, feelings of transitive parts that embody the continuous, fluid, temporal aspect of perception. Feelings of direction associated with perception derive from immediately prior experience, and are felt as movement toward a momentary end-in-view. The end-in-view is conceptual and might be to locate a specific (conceived) object or to identify the (unknown) cause of a sensation, and fulfilling it coincides with the termination of a perceptual experience, an act of seeing. This is a flight to a perch, where we may pause and inspect. Of course, when seeing is in the service of a prior intention, we typically take flight from the seeing into a consequent bud, with an orientation to some further perception or end-in-view. Pre-Propositional Awareness and Perception in the Mode of Causal Efficacy James recognized the body as the nucleus of the self, and accordingly that “bodily feelings and images . . . form the incessant background of . . . awareness of [oneself]” (J1 400, 303). However, he notes in Principles (299) that the feeling of the body is an abstraction, “because never is the body felt all alone.


89

. . . [B]ut always together with other things.”1 For Searle “all consciousness begins with the experience of the body by way of the body image,” of the world having impacts on our bodies, of moving our bodies and of our bodies having impacts on the world, so that, as he puts it, revealing an objectivizing tendency, “my conscious experience of my own body as an object in space and time . . . is the basic element that runs through all of our conscious experiences” (MC 185). In the processual approximation, awareness of the body within a surrounding world is the prime source of continuity in the stream of experience. Throughout normal waking life we enjoy a sense of our body and its surrounds as ongoing: even when some loud sound suddenly rends our attention, our awareness of body and surround continues without a total break. In each moment, one is perceiving from one’s body—one’s immediate standpoint—where one’s body is at the moment, where it is functioning, quite often in purposive activity. Ordinary language reflects the central role of the body, the felt centrality of the sense organs: we see with our eyes, we hear with our own two ears, and so on. This “withness” of the body (cf. PR 62) operates in all perceptual experience, as it does in active movement too. The processual approximation includes withness of the eyes in the very notion of visual experience. Moreover, it treats the actions of directing gaze or focusing as playing some part in all forms of visual perception, and these actions, and recognition, indicate the temporal thickness of visual experience. Of course, the efforts of focusing, head-turning and the like vary from visual experience to visual experience, but normally these efforts are quite slight. When one focuses more or less narrowly on a central object, a margin of items not so clearly discriminated or attended-to as the central item also normally takes shape between foreground and background or periphery; as central focus shifts from one object to an adjacent one, the shift in this margin is often very slight. It is natural if not tautological to say that we are more vaguely and less intensely aware of objects on the periphery or fringe of our visual field than of central items—items in and near the foreground. In fact, some objects in the visual field are not discriminated as specific objects or experienced in a way that would support saying one had identified the objects as such and such. In order for an object to figure in the propositional content of a visual experience, perception of it must include some relevant reference (locating or situating the object), and predication (recognizing a feature of or fact

90

Chapter 4

about the object). If an object is central to a visual experience, it can be included in the relevant propositional content: typically, it is in front of one and has some feature. By contrast, there are objects on the periphery of the visual field of which one is not thus perceptually aware but which could be brought into the center of attention without any appearance of experiential or spatial discontinuity. I term such objects pre-propositionally present to the percipient. Either they do not involve reference, in the sense that they are without connection to a delimited or specifically indicated object clearly located in relation to the percipient or positioned in the percipient’s visual field, or they do not involve predication, in the sense that they are not assuredly describable by a definite predicate, without inspection or further mental activity. That which is pre-propositionally present is not experienced as having a determinate, differentiated content; it has vague contours and color, is not in focus and is not of central interest in the moment. To the extent that “what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous terms” (J2 559) (with concentration of attention being synonymous with an increase in interest), the pre-propositional is unattended to and the unattended-to is the not-currently-interesting or relevant, nor is it “controllable, apt for immediate enjoyment” (PR 179), “manageable” (S 43), or available for immediate incorporation in action (unless through familiarity with the setting or through short-term memory). I term this non-central awareness pre-propositional in part because its “content” is quasi-predicative and quasi-referential. Its content can be described by means of a noun phrase: one sees, say, a generally located visual expanse of uncertain color—“a reddish patch over there”—but that expanse is only vaguely discriminated, and while it is off in some specific direction it is at an indefinite distance. With adequate discrimination, there is, at once, reference and predication, propositional content, perceptual experience, and intentionality, directedness on an object. By contrast, pre-propositional awareness is not properly intentional, directed; it cannot be represented, accurately, as involving referential and predicative components. For example, one’s peripheral, quasi-predicative and prepresentational, awareness of shape and color frequently (as when walking) is not the awareness of objects with such and such features even though one can focus on objects passing in the peripheral flow and then perceive them as having such and such features and as continuous with what caused prior non-focal awareness of peripheral shape or color. Further,


91

note that peripheral awareness is distinct from lack of awareness or noninclusion in the perceptual field, whether the exclusion be due to the limited extent of that field or to our insensibility. I also label pre-propositional awareness “pre-presentational.” Perceptual experience is presentational; one can focus on and perceive an object only if it is experienced as present, as stimulating or affecting one’s senses. In the visual mode, the pre-presentational “content” is experienced as the more or less vague and undistinguished contours, shadings, and colors toward the fringe of one’s visual field, and not as constituting part of the positive, memorable structure of consciousness. Although some items in the visual field do not figure in propositional content, everything in the visual field—whatever is sensed or perceived through or with the eyes—is experienced as caused by something in the visual field. A seen object differs from a sharply imagined version of an object, and this difference is reflected by the nature of the intentionally causal component: the seen object is experienced as causing the visual experience. There is a like difference in kind between blurred, unfocused visual content and imagined patches of color. In the former case, we feel that things are there causing this peripheral visual content. Although prepresentational awareness is not awareness of objects with such and such features, it does involve a causal component and on that basis it may be taken to qualify as a kind of perception of something in the world. As you read this book, and keep your eyes on the text, do you not sense or feel a world of objects, a familiar surround, about you? I take such feelings for instances of what in later chapters is termed perception in the mode of causal efficacy.2 We may describe our surrounding environment in any moment as causally efficacious; we experience it as real. We don’t raise the question of its reality any more than we raise the question of the reality of what we actively perceive. Likewise, we may describe our body in any moment as causally efficacious; we experience it as real, although with a degree of intimacy and potential for direct movement or expression that sets body apart from surroundings. Again, we don’t raise the question of its reality any more than we raise the question of the reality of what we actively perceive. Thus, if we don’t abstract from perception in the mode of causal efficacy, we can say that we perceive indefinite things—we cannot say just what they are without turning toward them or recalling or inferring what they are. Likewise, we have a sense of our own embodiment: “Our

92

Chapter 4

own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know” (J1 241). We are always embodied and within a surrounding multiply sensible environment. With this understanding, the notions of transitive parts and of causal efficacy can both be brought to bear on our understanding of perceptual experience. Focusing typically involves a transition from an intentional bud involving more or less clear intentional content and more or less unclear perception of some non-definite object to one involving more or less clear perception of that object; the move is not from sense-data to a constructed object. The relevant transitive parts involve movement from perception in the mode of causal efficacy to perceptual experience involving intentional causation, and these transitive parts usually are deep habits at work. In focusing, and seeing, background capacities are in operation, enabling us to direct attention to objects in the visual field, to adjust focus to distance, to discern outlines and salient qualities, and to perceive objects as three-dimensional. These capacities are not part of the content of visual experience. Nor are the capacities that enable us to recognize different types of objects part of the content of experience. Just as pre-presentational awareness is not properly propositional or intentional, so perception in the mode of causal efficacy is not intentional perception and causal efficacy is not intentional causation. We may reserve the latter term for causal efficacy as it functions with appropriate intentional content. In perception, the intentionally causal is connected with that which is more or less actively isolated or called forth, focused on with an intention in action and a commitment to recognize, that is, to realize the end-in-view of the focusing, namely to identify an object or the cause of an intrusion on awareness. Awareness of the causally efficacious perceptual periphery is non-active in several related senses. The awareness involves no eye strain or effort directed on that periphery: we see it with, not through, the eyes. Also, the periphery is what is “cast into shadow” by the active isolating of the visual core: focusing occludes, so we don’t have to do anything constructive in addition to the focusing to experience the periphery.3 And experience it we do: in waking life, one is ever aware of the ground of perception (including one’s body) and a full characterization of one’s mental state would include it. However, the causally efficacious ground is not specifiable in detail and we lose contact with it if we concentrate on the clear and


93

distinct content of perceptions, which are then seemingly discrete precisely because they are not treated as arising from their immediate forebears. It was Hume’s concentrating on the clearest features of perceptions, and forsaking the peripheral ground of perception and the formation of perceptual experiences, that led him into the error of treating perceptions, and so moments, as independent; his treatments of causation and of perception are equally abstract, and misbegotten. If portions of Searle’s account do not escape taint by Hume, Searle’s analytic tools are nonetheless adequate to the task of building transitive parts, perception in the mode of causal efficacy, and portions of the perceptual ground into the conditions of satisfaction of a visual experience. A Conditions-of-Satisfaction Account of Perceptual Processes In highly conscious visual experience presentational content is sharp—perception is of distinct objects with clear features. Vague masses, shapes, and colors characterize the periphery, which one perceives predominantly in the mode of causal efficacy. In cases where what was perceived in the mode of causal efficacy in one visual experience becomes central to the subsequent experience, the movement of attention or the interested act of focusing carries the “rising” or “clarifying” content from low definition to definition adequate for one’s immediate purposes or needs. The continuity in the content is counterpart to the continuity in the experience of focusing. The perceptual event, which has its own conditions of satisfaction, satisfies the aim of the focusing. That satisfaction is a substantive part and marks the termination of a transition. Focusing and recognition are achieved and there is perception. The formation of the perception of an object with specific characteristics (including relative location) is, as it was for James, the formation of a thought and in the same moment the formation of the thinker, percipient or subject. The formation is not instantaneous; it has duration or experiential thickness. Consider two successive clearly focused visual perceptions, say one of your hands, second one of something unclear in the first perception. A shift of focus is required, a shift that affords a good general case of a transitive part— a flight between substantive parts. When the transition is completed you perceive, under an aspect, what had been perceived in the mode of causal efficacy. Speaking a little loosely, the transition is from pre-presentational awareness of some relatively indeterminate content of a preceding visual

94

Chapter 4

experience to clear focus on that content. It involves the transformation of content that was not discerned as having specific clear form, and this proceeds simultaneously with the deformational passing from focus of the prior central content. The processual approximation maintains that a state is an outcome of a process of formation and that all visual experiences emerge from transitions involving bodily activity and changes in content. The transitions may be between sharp perceptions, or simply to single, focused perceptions, after being wrapped in thought, with perceptual experience occurring on the fringe of consciousness. In any event, the transitive parts are inaccessible to self-observation, and they are not evidently reflected in Searle’s perceptual experiences. But they are not inaccessible to non-observational awareness. For instance, the formation of a visual experience involves the transitive operation of the background, in that it draws on the ability to focus, whose functioning is generally introspectable, and on capabilities, e.g., to detect edges and interpret shading, whose functioning is generally not so readily introspectable. Moreover, focusing is coupled with the readiness to categorize, whose functioning may on occasion be felt and so be seen as somewhat introspectable, and the power to classify something as a type of object or event or as having such and such features functions in producing recognition, completing the experienced move—of the pre-presentational to the presentational and propositional. If we include these transitions—involving bodily movement and changes in content—in our analyses, then we move to fulfill radically empirical conditions of adequacy by beginning to accommodate the real and felt continuities of experience. The transitions in question here may be thought of as movements from the start to the finish of an intentional bud, and are to be distinguished from the co-conscious transition by which an experience passes into its successor—from the end of one bud, say, the recognition of an object, to the start of another. Can we credibly incorporate the transitive parts in the representation of the propositional content of the perceptual experience? We can do so in an expanded, accurate, process-sensitive account of perceptual experience if we include two features that figure in the intentional buds as experienced. The first of these is the act of perceiving—of focusing and recognizing—constituting the formation of the propositional content of a visual experience. If I see something—a girl jumping rope, a staircase, a lamp, sunset reds


95

reflected in windows, a train departing from a station—the conditions of satisfaction of the visual experience need not take verbal form, but they need be propositional in form. In the formation of the visual experience— that is, of the seeing, which the articulated propositional content represents in verbal form—there must be a turning of attention and some focusing and recognizing, the analysis of which identifies locational, object-delimiting, referential, components and predicative or categorizing elements. The conditions of satisfaction, the applicable concepts as they come to bear, rest on a second feature, the undoubted endurance of the sensed content in what is taken to be the same location—that is, as emanating from or caused by the same entity—as the seen entity comes or is brought into focus and becomes an intentionally causal intentional object. The inclusion of this complementary pair, of recognizing and recognized, of perceiving as a process and of the perceived as enduring, may be displayed as follows, in the conditions of satisfaction for a case of visual perception involving shift of focus to a surface or area that had been within the visual scope of the preceding bud: (1) a. that there is an object present before me in my visual field and that object has specific features F b. the presence of that object with those features is causing this visual experience c. this visual experience emerged, and is inseparable, from, and is caused by, a focusing on something that was perceived in the mode of causal efficacy and so was perceived vaguely immediately beforehand, and d. the object with specific features F whose presence is causing this visual experience is continuous or identical with what caused my unfocused visual perception in the mode of causal efficacy We need something like c and d if we are to capture the direct experience of continuities familiar to common sense. The working of the background— e.g., our exercised abilities to orient to movement, to focus, to perceive colors—is not part of the content of experience or the conditions of satisfaction, but the change in the field, the persistence of the object, the intentional focusing, and even the sense of our visual system at work, that we are seeing with our eyes, are actually experienced, however marginally, and are not to be discounted as mere theoretical constructs.

96

Chapter 4

Also, we can now see what Searle’s notion of self-reference abstracts from or conceals. When he says that there is a state of affairs that an object O with features F is present and that this state of affairs is causing this visual experience (Iy 97), the dependence of the visual experience on the previous perception of O in the mode of causal efficacy as well as on the acts of focusing and recognizing is unstated. A perceptual experience is indeed caused by its self-referential conditions of satisfaction, but the self-referential component has duration. Are c and d conditions of satisfaction? Yes; when I include them in the conditions of satisfaction of the intentional bud, I am stating that they are part of what must be the case if the correlate perception is to be true. The two conditions, c and d, indicate factors in the process of seeing and if they failed to obtain, while a and b did seem to obtain, we would feel that something was amiss. After a moment, we might think that the immediate perceptual content looked as if it were objective but hesitate to take it for objective without investigation and explanation, for the apparent object will have appeared “out of the blue,” and could perhaps be a hallucination, a play of lighting, or a holographic projection. In fact, the suddenness of appearance would likely be the most forceful element in the experience, and preclude feeling that one had had a normal perception of a normal object, and all the while, albeit on the periphery of awareness, one would be having more or less normal, grounding, feelings of bodily position, attitude, and condition. With the addition of c and d we have made a big step at once toward processualizing the intentional approximation and toward embedding perceptual experience in the stream of experience. For a perceptual content will always (absent artificial, exception-proving-the-rule, holographic image cases) arise from something previously efficacious and will carry forward a ground, including bodily feelings (e.g. of workings of eye muscles, eyestrain, changes in neck position, body posture, or facial tension), that arises smoothly from the prior ground. To leave these factors out of the account is to neglect intentional processes and directly experienced continuities that the radical empiricist cannot exclude. To bring them into the account brings us closer to the visual experience, to the object of thought as experienced, and to the transitive parts as the formation of the substantive part, with its core propositional content, and it does this in a way that can serve as a benchmark instance of the contribution of transitive parts to the for-


97

mation of intentional content. Notice that if we include these factors in the account we draw closer to the stream of experience in which entities are “practically objectified,” that is, dealt with in some practical fashion as objects in the flow of non-reflective activity, rather than linguistically or representationally objectified in discourse, or objectivized, extracted from the flux and conceptualized for theoretic review. With c and d, the intentionally causal factors become correspondingly complex, and this is so even without trying to make evident the functioning of desire or interest. As far as the transitive part, or focusing, goes, it discharges an intention by carrying one from pre-presentational “content” perceived in the mode of causal efficacy to the intentionally causal, presentational content of visual experience. The intention in action causing the visual action aims at focusing on an entity, with a readiness to categorize it, so as to perceive it. So the experience of action is of moving (intentionally) so that one may have—as indeed one is readied to have—a perceptual experience of an object and that perceptual experience will have a “mind-toworld” direction of fit and a “world-to-mind” direction of causation. As one focuses, one’s intention in action causes a re-constellation of the seen around an object whose contours and colors constrain one’s seeing. The single perceptual act is finished when “mind” fits “world.” The whole process is an act of perception. What is regularly taken as perception always has an actional component. Moreover, recognition is also typically involved in the transition to the intentional content. The processual approximation here reverts to James’s “general law of perception,” according to which “whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes . . . out of our own head,” or, in a mixed, body-mind account, from the “brain [which] reacts by paths which previous experiences have worn” (J2 103). For James then, in perception we are played upon from two directions: the object first perceived in the mode of causal efficacy excites us from without and brain-paths (as vehicles of memory and dispositions) arouse us from within—and the act of perception is the memory- or background-enabled adaptation of attention to world (J1 441). Here, and more clearly in perception in the course of action, where anticipation is at work and an enacted habit is guiding action, there is a metaphorical carving out or sculpting of what may be relevant or salient, of locating it and bringing it into relief, through a purposive scanning that is

98

Chapter 4

shot through with readiness to respond. What we have there is a raising of what is perceived in the mode of causal efficacy into something seen under an aspect and in a visual experience whose conditions of satisfaction involve intentional causation; at the same time the irrelevant is chipped away or filtered out. What we have, for James, is a raising of what had been “merely present” but not attended to into an “object fully perceived” (441), recognized, and available for incorporation in action. And one is indeed ready to incorporate it, and normally does so in the onflow of events. Finally, James believed that the adjustment of sensory organs and ideational preparation or pre-perception “probably coexist in all of our concrete attentive acts” (J1 434), including instances of active perception. In active cases, as when we are looking for something, typically with some of the urgency of action, we are primed to apply Jamesian concepts: this is what it means to anticipate sensory consequents. That is, we have categories coming to the ready and are, in effect, looking for an object to latch one or more of them onto. When I’m looking for my eyeglasses, I’m ready to notice them, to classify an object as eyeglasses, by any of several visible cues—lens shape, telltale reflection, curved earpiece, etc.—and then as mine upon further inspection, if necessary. In such cases, readinesses to categorize are active calls or “requests” for triggering sensations which render the world—the more or less man-made, man-used surround—a potential supplier of value. Some such priming may also occur in passive or responsive cases. A shadow cast from above catches my eye; given available attention, to see the moving shadow is to move to identify the overhead source; my neck, head, eyes turn quickly in the direction of what my responding capacities take for a likely location of the shadow-casting entity; my gazing seeks out, fixes on, and starts tracking a large bird; and on seeing the large bird, if not before, I look, perhaps with eager urgency, for indicators that would answer the typically unverbalized question “Eagle, vulture, raven, hawk?” and I am non-observationally aware of my doing this, of responding, and then, slave to a motivating disposition of mine, becoming actively engaged. In both the action-based and responsive cases the formation of a visual experience involves the conjoint emergence of presentational content from the pre-presentational, and of intentional causation (that the perceived object caused this experience) from the more general causal efficacy. These emergences define the perceptual bud and the experient of it.4


4.3

99

The Formation of Intentional Buds: Intentions in Action

I have processualized the intentional approximation’s account of perceptual experiences by adding to the conditions of satisfaction of the experiences and transforming them conceptually into buds of perception. That is, I built into the account the notion of transitive parts carrying a state forward from a relatively inchoate portion of a preceding intentional bud to a new substantive conclusion, and showed how perception involves action and changes in the visual field attendant on or correlate with that action. In the intentional approximation, I amended Searle’s account of intentions in action to include an aim at a sensory consequent, but it now remains to more fully processualize the intentionality-based account of action, first by indicating an intention in action’s causally efficacious discharge in subsequent transitive parts aimed at a sensory consequent and second by incorporating the process of formation of an intention in action in its conditions of satisfaction. Intentions in Action and Experiences of Acting In the intentional approximation, perception in the mode of causal efficacy does not figure in the propositional content of perceptual experiences. In the intentional approximation also, the self-referential component of the propositional content of an intention in action causes a bodily movement aimed at a sensory consequent. In the processual approximation now being elaborated, an intention in action is causally efficacious in two ways: it causes movement and it causes a correlate experience of acting. This differs from the view of Searle, who is more concerned with the logic than with the phenomenology of intentionality, and who says that “as far as intentionality is concerned, the experience of acting just is the intention in action” (Iy 91). Searle treats the intention in action and the bodily motion with an experience of acting as aspects of a state, rather than as an intention issuing in action discharged in bodily movement with an experience of acting. In the processual approximation, the experience of acting is the way in which we experience the immediate causal efficacy of the intention in action, largely in the feeling of direction of a transitive part aimed at a sensory consequent. The movement of my arm, the “flight” toward the grasping of a cup, for example, occurs with an experience of acting, but is

100

Chapter 4

intentional from its inception, its aiming at a sensory consequent, a “forerunner of our voluntary acts” (J2 501). In the processual approximation, the propositional content of an intention in action incorporates this distinction of experience of acting from intention in action: (2) a. that there is a movement of my body with guiding or anticipated sensorial consequences, and b. this intention in action causes that movement, which is carried out with an experience of acting (the processual approximation’s addition in italics) What this does is make intentions in action substantive parts with specifiable contents but it differentiates them from experiences of acting, which then become prototypes of feelings of direction—movements from intentions in action, themselves substantive parts, toward new substantive parts, namely perceptions of anticipated sensory consequences. An intention in action aims at an anticipated consequent and there is transition as the intention in action functions in the stream of experience, and that transitive part is felt with an experience of acting with a feeling of direction: hand moves toward particular seen cup, and the action is modulated, but this happens within the scope of the intention in action and with an experience of acting. Without an intention in action there’s no movement with an experience of acting, because without an intention in action there’s no action, no initiation of action. This account gives temporal thickness to intentions in action. An intention in action then is a sort of mini prior intention, one with an intentional scope extending only to the start of the next bud, while a prior intention aims at a satisfaction not so immediately available. Thus, I can have a prior intention to drink from a cup, involving a reaching out and a returning, or to reach for a cup in the near future, but these, unlike, canonical intentions in action extend beyond the ensuing bud. Spontaneous Intentions in Action An intention in action may be caused by a prior intention or occur spontaneously. When caused by a prior intention, it may occur at the onset of the action or in the course of action. In this section, I deal with the formation of spontaneous intentions in action and of the initial intentions in action in a course of action intended beforehand. In section 4.4, I will deal with


101

the formation of prior intentions themselves. I will treat the formation and function of intentions in action in the course of action when I deal with the coordination of perception and action in section 4.5. To perform an intentional action one does not need to form an intention to do it before starting to do it, but one does need some aim, an end-inview, if a movement is to be carried out with an experience of acting and to constitute part of an action. Ends-in-view typically serve to guide movement by providing a basis for the adaptation of a general background ability to generate a performance (e.g. a reaching, gripping, or handling) in actual circumstances. Each successful intention in action has conditions of satisfaction that are experienced by means of concepts functioning in the anticipation and recognition of a sensory consequent, the concepts sustaining constancy in meaning from end-in-view to perceptual experience. If a bodily movement occurs with no guiding or anticipated sensorial consequent, it is not voluntary (J2 521) and involves no experience of acting. Thus sub-cortical reflex actions, and bodily movements triggered by electronic probes implanted in one’s brain, are not intentional. Where James regards the body movements involved in intentional actions as guided by ends-in-view, or anticipatory images of sensorial consequents, the intentional approximation includes counterparts of those images in the conditions of satisfaction of intentions in action, and where James recognizes a motor fiat, which “constitutes the essence of the voluntariness of the act” (501), the intentional approximation sees the functioning causal component of the conditions of satisfaction of the intention in action. To processualize these conditions of satisfaction of intentions in action, embedding them in the stream of experience, I must provide some general account of the formation of the propositional content—including the sensorial anticipation—and of the experience of acting on the intention in action. For the processual approximation, and implicitly for James, no intention in action can be spontaneous, arising full-blown, unannounced, without precursor. Even apparently spontaneous actions are caused by some nonpropositional feeling—some external, emotional, or bodily prompting (stimulus). For instance, the intention in action involved in focusing on a movement that attracts our attention is caused in part by pre-propositional awareness of movement. In other cases of simple spontaneous action that are often on the responsive or passive side, with no intervening thought, familiar to us in moments when we start to scratch an itch, flex our fingers

102

Chapter 4

to relieve cramping, move away from a source of discomfort, or step lively to catch a falling toddler, internal promptings and sensations—including bodily discomforts, rising emotions—and associated dispositions supply the relevant antecedents. Thus, like perceptual experiences, intentions in action do not arise in experience instantly and wholly unprepared. Minimally intentional, “spontaneous” actions emerge from, and are responses to or expressions of prepropositional, causally efficacious, bodily, sensory, or emotional stimuli or promptings. Thus, each minimal intention arises from the perceptual ground of bodily awareness, and each aims at a terminating perception. To show this, let us expand (2), so that the conditions of satisfaction become the following: (3) a. that there is a movement of my body with guiding or anticipated sensorial consequences b. this intention in action causes that movement, which is carried out with an experience of acting, and c. this intention in action took shape in response to an impulse, urge, prompting or other feeling felt however vaguely immediately beforehand Here c distinguishes spontaneous actions from subcortical reflex actions, such as one’s jumping back from a snake-like form in one’s pathway before one consciously sees it, reacting automatically, with a movement that is instinctive, involves no end-in-view, and is not intentional (see LeDoux 166).5 Intentions in Action at the Onset of Prior Intended Action A prior intention exists prior to action and may be thought of as an activated disposition to begin action given an appropriate initiating perception; it may also include a broad disposition to notice and consider factors felt to be relevant to the prior intention, including threats to its success. Typically, acting on a prior intention requires perception or belief that an appropriate state of affairs obtains, that the circumstances are suitably ripe for action. For example, since we often structure our day by the clock and according to the schedule of public events, we often act on prior intentions shortly after we see that it is time, by the clock, to do so. But if such perception is necessary it is not sufficient to trigger action. The perception may remind one


103

of some reason to suspend the prior intention: one may have second thoughts. Although one has laid the ground for action and has what could have been an action-initiating perception, intentional action may not begin to unfold, the transitivity of intentional causation may never get started, because no intention in action initiated the more or less short or long, simple or complex, punctuated or continuous, series of intentions in action that cause physical movements leading toward realization of the conditions of satisfaction of the prior intention. For the originally intended action to ensue there must be the experiential equivalent of a decision to act that issues in or may consist of nothing but an intention in action that causes a movement that commences the unfolding of the intended action. In James’s terms, a “now” (correlate for James with the reaction or discharge following the explosive summation of nerve stimuli in the formation of a substantive part) is needed: “A resolve, whose contemplated motor consequences are not to ensue until some possibly far distant future condition shall have been fulfilled, involves all the psychic elements of a motor fiat except the word ‘now’. . . .” (J2 561) In this passage, “resolve” and “motor fiat” may be understood as prior intention and of intention in action. The “now,” like the intention in action, sets one’s capabilities—appropriated “psychic powers”—to work and commences the experience of acting in accord with a prior intention.6 In the processual approximation, the following seems a plausible rendition of the conditions of satisfaction for such experience: (4) a. that there is a movement of my body guided and controlled by the aim to realize anticipated consequences (as reaching, e.g., for one type of object differs from reaching for another type of object, and as reaching for an object to take it in hand and examine it differs from reaching for it to grasp and use it), b. this intention in action causes that movement, which is carried out with an experience of acting, and c. this intention in action took effect in accord with a prior intention and an activating perception or belief What the parenthetical content in item a indicates is that in prior intended action the sensory consequent and the overall aim often affect body set and muscular preparation.

104

4.4

Chapter 4

The Formation of Intentional Buds: Prior Intentions

If the processual approximation is to embed prior intentions in the stream of experience, it must deal with how they form. In the intentional approximation, prior intentions have cognitive and desiderative (Bel and Des) components. If I have a prior intention to do A, I must have some desire or inclination to do A, and must believe that I can do A, that is, that I can embark on a course of action the success of which would satisfy the conditions of satisfaction of the prior intention. The prior intention only determines its conditions of satisfaction given its position in a network of other intentional states and “against” a background of practices and assumptions (cf. Iy 19). The processual approximation addresses the way in which the network takes shape and contributes detail to the prior intention. Formation of a prior intention may be rapid, for example, from feeling thirst, through initial conception of slaking and recall of refrigerator contents, to decision—prior intention—to get a drink from the refrigerator. The formation may take place in a context of urgency, with inevitable limitations on energetic, reflective, and other resources, suggestive of what Cherniak (8) calls “a fundamental feature of human existence, that human beings are in the finitary predicament of having fixed limits on their cognitive capacities and the time available to them.” Alternatively, the process may be open-ended and involve several trains of highly deliberative decision making, and some tangential considerations as well, and several modifications of the prior intention, or the process may range anywhere between the hurried and the comfortably extended. Just as a prior intention combines Des and Bel elements, so the process of its formation may be thought of as starting with a desire (provoked, e.g., by feeling thirst or by a perception of something attractive) or a belief (e.g. that one can readily attend an event, provoked, say, by an offer to make use of someone’s extra ticket to the event). The process may also on occasion be taken to commence with some idea of a possibility that comes to mind and draws one’s interest and attention. Consider formation starting from a Des element. In the intentional approximation, there are two types of intentionally causal states: those that are self-referential and those that are not. So far, the former have been treated at length, the latter not at all. The prime examples of the latter are desires. Desires can be intentionally causal in Searle’s sense, in that they can


105

be leading causes of prior intentions that stem from them: a desire to perform an action “may cause an action even though it is not part of the intentional content of the desire that it should cause the action” (Iy 122). In cases where a desire leads to the formation of or causes a prior intention to take action to satisfy the desire, the desire intentionally causes a self-referential intentional state, but it is not part of the conditions of satisfaction of a desire that it cause the formation of a prior intention to satisfy the desire. In the processual approximation, which aims to be sensitive to how any type of state functions in intentional processes, a desire may be seen to trigger or intentionally cause a Des-specific “calling into relevance,” a stirring of associations and thoughts which may flicker on the fringe of consciousness or take more substantive form, in the process of accommodating the desire. Calling into relevance is the principal notion the processual approximation introduces to embed the formation of prior intentions in the stream of experience. The processual approximation does this with a radically empirical confidence that the phenomena it names are experienced and exemplify the irrepressible onflow of mental activity in waking life. Notice that it is the more or less incipient Des, not an agent, that does the original calling into relevance or, interchangeably if that term seems too agentive, the “relevating.” In the course of formation of a prior intention, what is called into relevance affects the content of intentional states along the path to a prior intention and, typically, the strength and refinement of the Des. Throughout, the “relevance” is specifiable in relation to the Des as it develops. During the possibly extended process, informal techniques of practical reasoning may come into play, so that one may ask questions like “What do I want to do and how can I best achieve it?” and “How does this sit with my values and other intentions?” and contending “voices” may become engaged in “debate.” Finally, note that each actual question, whether verbalized or not, typically marks a substantive part, and the ensuing transitive parts are the forming of thoughts and feelings being called into relevance, often with an evident feeling of direction. If the original Des is not suppressed or rejected then, on the view expressed in this paragraph, intentional states brought into play and contributing to a decision or prior intention to act on that Des are best construed as contributing causally relevant aspects to the intentional content of the prior intention or to the coloring of the mode (strengthening the commitment, or tingeing it say with misgiving) and to thus function as part of the full intentional cause of the prior intention and of what ensues from it.

106

Chapter 4

Even as we hold to an adopted prior intention before satisfying it, other intentions, desires, feelings, ideas, may come to affect that prior intention, so that we may talk, as suits our purposes, of the conditions of satisfaction of a prior intention as changing again and again, or of its central conditions of satisfaction as remaining substantially unchanged. Further, some items called into relevance may be in the nature of stray associations that merely “bubble up,” just as ideas may bubble up while conversing without getting expressed. Finally, while desires can call forth beliefs contributory to an intention to do something to fulfill or alleviate the desire, and so lead to or intentionally cause prior intentions, they can lead to the formation of fears and other representational states as well, and can also directly call forth fantasies or other forms of sublimation. The causation in these latter cases too is intentional. In short, the network of a prior intention takes shape in a process involving calling into relevance, a calling which, in theory, may bring into relevance or relevate anything in memory. Each network element may contribute some detail to and be an intentional cause of the resulting prior intention. Of course, these elements need not be in verbal form, but to the extent that they form stable contents, they may be termed substantive parts, terminating intentional buds which may then be thought about as they run on into and call forth their successors. The whole process of calling into relevance seen here then is intentionally caused and this form of intentional causation may also be seen at work in hypothesis-formation, event-interpretation and, generally, in the formation of any intentional buds. I have concentrated on desires when talking of the formation of prior intentions, but beliefs (and perceptions) can lead to the formation of desires and intentions. For instance, as was noted earlier, the formation of one’s prior intention can “start” with a received invitation (e.g. to dinner, a party, a sporting event, show, or concert), or with a belief, following the audition of a request, that the speaker wants someone to do A, or with a mere hypothesis that it is possible to do A, as say when, with time on one’s hands, one thinks about things one could do of an evening. I say ‘start’ because these beginnings generally lead nowhere if they make no contact with one’s own recurring interests and desires—motivational dispositions, practical or aesthetic interests, purposes, or commitments—all of which pre-date the invitation. At any rate, upon receiving an invitation, say, one


107

may find one’s already-formed desire to attend the particular event at the ready and accept the invitation without delay, possibly accompanied by pleasant feelings or emotions, or one may find oneself a vehicle for mental activity—calling into relevance—that combines “scanning” for reasons to go and for reasons not to (e.g. conflicts with other intentions, and possibly unappealing side effects). In fact, when calling into relevance is going on in what may be the formation of a prior intention some awareness of or fallible concern with actual or potential conflict with other prior intentions, desires and commitments seems to be in play regularly, as a piece of unreflective practical reasoning. Generally, formed and as yet unsatisfied prior intentions may come to be modified, but they remain in effect until discharged, unless rejected or forgotten, and together constitute a bundle of activated propensities that, in the processual approximation, is termed the intentional bundle.7 In addition to prior intentions governing actions currently being performed, whether singly, in series or in parallel in a multi-tasking familiar to many caught up in fast-paced “post-modern” life, the bundle will also include standing and readily activatable long-term intentions, such as those concerning the completion of projects or the meeting of goals. Moreover, even as we act and carry prior intentions that amount to dispositions (to act as and when appropriate, to notice things that may bear on success of action in accord with the prior intentions), we are live with dispositions that can emerge rapidly from our background. 4.5

Co-Conscious Transition, Anticipation, and the Coordinated Flow of

Action and Perception As psychologist, James maintains that “if a new [brain] state comes, the inertia of the old state will be there and modify the result accordingly,” and that successive thoughts “shade gradually into each other, although their rate of change may be much faster at one moment than at the next. . . . When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or between it and something else” (J1 242–243). At that point he introduces the notions of substantive and transitive parts, of flights and perchings, proposing that “the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from

108

Chapter 4

which we have been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another” (243). Evidently, James here treats both the transition from the object of our thought and the flight between it and the next resting place, as transitive parts. Movement to a resting place forms a unified Jamesian thought, a moment of unitary experience with core and fringe. As James later explicitly asserts, each such moment passes into the succeeding moment by a continuous, co-conscious transition (ERE 47–49). If the processual approximation can give an account of the experience of co-conscious transition, the case for radical empiricism would be enriched and strengthened, and the approximation would have made a significant step toward establishing an experientially adequate, conceptually sound, general account of the full continuity of the experiential stream. Thoughts would be seen to arise from their predecessors by co-conscious transition, take shape as transitive parts move to substantive conclusions, and issue into their successors, again by co-conscious transition. Co-Conscious Transitions in the Course of Action In the processual approximation, the co-conscious transition, which James views as essential to the continuity of the stream of consciousness, is taken to involve the functioning of the content of a single substantive element of consciousness in two adjacent buds. The easiest place to see this is in actions where causality-at-work functions in accord with a prior intention. At junctures in the course of such action, perceptual content functions to call forth or release consequent, often anticipated, acts. James found the coconscious transition, that most short-lived of transitive parts, most palpable in those “continuously developing experiential series” that he termed personal activity-situations (SPP 211, 210). In these situations, “our successive fields [of consciousness] continue each other. . . . [And the] movement from feeling to thought and thence to action . . . is . . . going on” (213–214). For example, the satisfaction of an intention in action to grasp a seen cup is a perceptual experience of the cup grasped, but the grasping was anticipated, so the grasping releases a readied intention in action, and another subsidiary action within the scope of an effective prior intention. For James, action typically involves a series of reflex arcs facilitating the accommodation of embodied (and possibly tool-extended) motion to environs sensed as relevant to action intended to fulfill purpose. The arcs are not simple


109

mechanical stimulus-response loops of the sort dear to behaviorists. They involve readinesses to recognize anticipated states of affairs, recognitions which arise from sensations or feelings, however scant, fleeting and peripheral, that complete the flight to perception (thought) and thus mark the termination of a bud. Moving from formation of intentions in action to perceptual experiences, the buds involve readinesses to respond to recognitions with anticipated or readied-for (intentional) movements. The processual approximation treats these readinesses to respond as so extremely well coordinated with the sensori-perceptual and the overarching prior intention to immediately form an intention in action upon perception, and that new intention in action causes new movement aimed at a sensory consequent and carried out with an experience of acting. Each of these movements completes the arc or sensory-action loop from sensation or feeling to thought to action, and the action proceeds with a guiding end-in-view, which brings forth readinesses to recognize and respond anew as the series of Jamesian reflex arcs unfolds. The formation of and action on an intention in action upon perception is a principal instance of co-conscious transition, the conjunctive “relation experienced between terms that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other” (ERE 45), the former as anticipating the latter, the latter as arising from, caused by, or released by, the former. James understood that the readiness to respond is the readiness to initiate a next, often already-prepared-for, movement aimed at a new sensorial consequent. What looks like habit unfolding on the basis of reflex arcs is lived through as a sequence of buds. As Dewey (360) put it, sensory stimulus and motor response are organized within an organic unity: reflex arcs occur inside a coordination; sensory-action loops occur sequentially within unified, habitual action. In this sense, a habit is a general background ability to generate performance suited to circumstance and to sensed or perceived bodily and environmental novelty. It is a nonrepresentational, general pattern for coordinating action/movement and perception that can be adapted to an unlimited range of appropriate circumstances. A habit is organized itself and can organize or canalize performance. As abilities to repeat performances, habits make it possible for past experience to guide present experience. When a habit, activated by an aim or intention, helps generate current unfolding action and perception, it is enacted. Now, the processual approximation recasts Jamesian habits as chreods (from the

110

Chapter 4

Greek for necessary pathways)—useful or well-worn pathways, beaten tracks in a variety of actional, mental, and symbolic behavior spaces.8 The term “chreod” is used to emphasize the goal-oriented nature and the experiential constituents of neural-pathway-facilitated habitual actions as they unfold, especially in flows coordinating perception and action in personal activity-situations. Chreods range upwards in complexity from those drawing on simple movements to those involving combined movements or sequences of sensory-action loops linked in flexible action routines, readily invocable in situation-specific service to prior intentions. The processual approximation treats the background as a system of generative capabilities and dispositions (cf. RM 188), and so as a system of habits or chreods. Some of these capabilities and dispositions are primarily physical and biological (reaching, chewing, walking, etc.), some are primarily socialized or cultural. However, the former often bear cultural characteristics: even in one’s early years, how one walks, eats, the sounds one becomes adept at making, the color distinctions one makes, are not merely outcomes of processes of biological development, or, in a larger time-frame, of evolution. As we act from the background, which is generative and enabling and is, in function, in the nature of general patterns, schemata, and capacities, we do so in the unique actuality of enaction.9 When we act from the background, as it functions in service to prior intentions, desires, stimulated dispositions, we surpass it, for the background only enables, and projects, with the generality of the conceptual, much as an anticipated sensory consequent is not an actually sensed particular: the appropriated background is an activated capacity functioning in an actual situation. The activated background is the me functioning in the moment where the novel is encountered and met freshly. We are always situated in a world of actual experience, and what takes place for us moment to moment depends largely on the detailed unfolding of operative chreods, and correlatively on the actual physical and social environment.10 To use an example involving a long-standing but possibly obsolescent technology, for all the times we have inserted keys in familiar (and unfamiliar) locks, enacting doorunlocking chreods or action routines, each occasion is unique. From start to finish. From, say, the particular taking of key ring in hand in some micro-unique grip, to the isolation of the proper key, the viewing of the keyhole from some precise angle and distance under specific lighting con-


111

ditions or the feeling for the keyhole in the dark, the moving of key to lock at varying speed and angle and with some degree of attentiveness, to the actual placement of key tip in keyhole, the accompanying doings or inaction of the other hand, the feeling of insertion and sliding home aimed at sensory consequent—a characteristic sound, the feeling of engagement— sufficient to occasion turning of the key; and, incidentally, all the while one can be humming a tune, conversing, remembering a recently heard joke, thinking ahead to what one will do once inside the door, and so on. It is, as ever, the me functioning adaptively (in relation to an end-in-view) in the moment, where the novel is encountered and adjusted to freshly, the momentary subject taking shape as the chreodic anticipations unfold at the pace of this particular piece of causality-at-work, which may be hastened by desire or fear, affected by mood, etc. I will discuss chreods at some length in section 6.4. With this account of enacted habits or chreods we can processualize Searle’s insufficiently elaborated notion of the coordinated flow of action and perception: “Intentionality occurs in a coordinated flow of action and perception, and the background is the condition of possibility of the forms taken by the flow. . . . In each case the condition of possibility of the performance is an underlying background competence” (RM 195). From the “inside,” this coordinated flow unfolds in buds, joined through co-conscious transitions: the perception of the cup-as-gripped terminates an intention in action and the intentional bud thus terminated is a perceptual experience, but the perception doesn’t typically function to slow action. Although it has its own inertia and also has some role in memory, within the enacted chreod—the enacted underlying background competence making the performance possible—the perception influences its successors, primarily by releasing or disinhibiting an intention in action, and the consequent action is experienced as a transitive part in flight to the next perch. The disinhibited intention in action flows from a readiness to respond triggered by perception. The processual approximation takes this sort of relation of perceptual experience to action as the prototype of co-conscious transition and “two-way functioning.” The intentional content of the perceptual experience functions in two ways within the unfolding chreod: the perceptual experience is not just of an object plain and simple, but it is rather of an object in the course of action in which one is anticipating perceptual experience and is poised to respond with appropriate perception-guided action;

112

Chapter 4

objects when they are thus perceived are perceived in relation to agentive functions, and perceptions are transitional toward the realization of ends. The intentional content may be of a glass containing wine and to-bereached-for, of a shirt being tucked into one’s pants adequately for proceeding to button the pants, of a key fitted into a lock or an ignition switch, so that one may turn it, and so on and on. In each case, one typically doesn’t have to ask “What next?” Activity simply flows on, the motoric awaiting the sensory and flowing on from it anew within one concrete and unique appropriation of a complex chreod. Again: One looks with expectant attention for a particular something, and as soon as one sees the thing sought one can and very often does act on the basis of the seeing, and the processual approximation calls the transition to the start of that acting a co-conscious transition. Here, co-conscious transition is a conjunctive relation conjoining perceptual experience and action. “Transitive causation,” James says in his final discussion of activitysituations (SPP 217–218), “does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on. Rather does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality-at-work flavors the entire concrete sequence. . . .” This is just what I mean to say is going on in the cases I have depicted here. The causation doesn’t stick out (or “stand out by itself”) (200), but one is aware of the perception that concludes the moment of looking and causes ensuing action. We are aware of this and of things like this throughout our daily life. The fitting of the key in the lock, the perceptual experience that the key is properly inserted, the interest in opening the door, and the enacted chreod itself, shaped in and by previous experience, all contribute causally to the turning of the key. The chreod organizes experience bud by bud, each bud’s terminus having two-way functioning so that objects categorized trigger anticipated actions, all the way down the chreod-facilitated path of action. This can go on quite peripherally and habitually, while one does other things, but in each case perception and action are conjoined. Finally, through it all, we act not only with expectations and with readinesses to respond to data that fall in ranges filling the bill of those expectations (cf. SPP 214), but with readinesses to accommodate unexpected data and stay on course within the chreod after faltering slightly. However, if anything contrary to expectation arises in the course of action, it is likely to


113

draw our attention and figure centrally in consciousness. Like the pea for the princess, it doesn’t take much of a variation from expectation to call our attention to it, though thresholds will vary. James puts it (J2 501–502; cf. Iy 157) as follows: “We have a most extremely delicate foreshadowing of the sensory effects. . . . Surprise can only come from getting a sensation which differs from the one we expect. But the truth is that when we know the objects well, the very slightest difference from the expected weight will surprise us, or at least attract our notice.” Co-Conscious Transitions in Simple Perception and Thought Two-way functioning in which perceptual experience of a categorized object triggers readied-for intention in action provides an almost-tangible, prototype instance of co-conscious transition. Cases involving co-conscious transition in action are as myriad and multiform as the couplings of perception and action in coordinated actions. However, if co-conscious transition is to operate at the start and end of all buds, each co-conscious transition terminating a bud and functioning in the opening of a new one, then cases plainly involving such transition must extend well beyond mere sensorimotor or perceptuo-actional coordination. In sections 6.3 and 6.4 I will give a general account of what is going on in all such cases. Here I will simply provide a few examples: •

At several points in this book, I have distinguished perception that is sub-

ordinate to action from other perceptual experiences. Now, consider any perceptual experience involving some movement from perception in the mode of causal efficacy to perception that is both propositional and presentational. Well, what happens next? Perceiving a glass in order to reach for it is different from perceiving a glass apart from an extended action. In the latter event, perception may lead to observation of further detail or to some renewed association or consideration of possible use or to novel thought or aesthetic or interest-based enjoyment or appreciation as a motivating disposition takes hold, or one may simply run one’s eyes over the surface of the glass, while thought on some unrelated topic begins or resumes. In the processual approximation, all these examples involve twoway functioning, of the object as perceived and as opening or stirring, relevating, or yielding to associations and thought of possibilities in the onflow of experience. That is to say, even simple perceptual experiences function to terminate buds and in the start of the next, and this is so even when a

114

Chapter 4

perception fails to be interesting in the face of competing data, like a knock at the door, so that it falls away. •

Representational memory or thought is often coupled with ensuing

action, as when, for example, after an effort at remembering a telephone number, one promptly starts punching the appropriate key sequence upon recall, or when one who is asked to decide on something gives voice to the decision straightaway, upon and by co-conscious transition from one’s initial understanding of the request. Also, co-conscious transitions are involved in the formation of subsequent representational states when a thought occurs in a chain of reasoning or extended reflection about something or when a thought causes us to remember something practically related to our intentions and interests or to infer or wonder something. As thoughts take shape, we can pursue them or think about acting on them or directly act on them, or our thoughts can go off on barely associated tangents or, again, be interrupted and fall away. No matter. The important thing here is the two-way functioning, the terminating, the starting. Co-Conscious Transition: A Conditions-of-Satisfaction Account The co-conscious transition is so troublesome to philosophy because though we feel the continuity of waking consciousness as unmistakably as we do, when philosophers try to capture momentary thoughts or perceptions by way of self-observation, in the influential way that Hume tried, they have lost the quarry. In the processual approximation, the conditions of satisfaction (of, e.g., a visual experience) are understood to be derived by analytic abstraction from lived buds (actual seeings) within the stream of experience. I have already shown that the conditions of satisfaction of visual experiences should be expanded to reflect the role of the body in, and other aspects of, the formation of the visual content and experience, if they are to truly reflect the actuality of seeing, of visual experience as it occurs. Furthermore, seeing influences events in the experient’s stream of consciousness: the conditions of satisfaction are abstracted from a lived satisfaction, the substantive conclusion of an act of perceptual experience, and the functioning of that satisfaction is a two-way functioning. Can we credibly incorporate this two-way functioning—the co-conscious transition—in the representation of the propositional content of the perceptual experience? This is easiest to do for perceptual experience in action in an activitysituation, where such experience is anticipated, so that the perception of an


115

object is an intentional cause of the sequel motion—the sight of the glass is an intentional cause of the reaching, the touching of the glass runs into the tightening of the grip, the perceptual experience of the vessel as firmly grasped runs into subsequent motion of the forearm. . . . When Searle articulates the conditions of satisfaction of a perceptual experience he gives them the form: that there is an object (with features F) there and the fact that there is an object (with features F) in one’s perceptual field is causing this perceptual experience (e.g. Iy 61). But, in perception in an activity-situation, it is not, say, that there is that cup there and that fact causes this perception of it, but that the perception is in the very onflow of the action, the cup is perceived while acting. If you make the propositional withdrawal, separate perception from action and focus on the conditions of satisfaction of the separated states, Searle’s account is compelling. But to give an account adequate to perceptual experience in action, one has to add several other factors. Within the unfolding, enacted chreod, the perceptual experience typically involves the sort of rising of propositional content from a perceptual ground that is characteristic of presentational perceptual experiences, and the perceptual experience is in turn the prompt of the consequent intention in action, for which one was readied, expectant attention having prepared “the motor centers and shorten[ed] the work which a stimulus has to perform . . . in order to produce a given effect” (J1 434), so that the perceptual content has a double function. The following standardized representation is intended to capture the heart of the conjunctive relation between perceptual experiences and intentions in action occurring in such enaction, and so of the coordinated interplay of perception and action in activity-situations; it takes into account the formation and aftermath of each perceptual experience and intention in action, shows the two-way functioning of intentional contents, and goes a long way toward displaying the coordinated flow of action and perception and clarifying James’s benchmark account of co-conscious transition in activity-situations (SPP, chapter XIII; ERE, chapter VI): The perceptual experience in action (e.g. the seeing of the soon-to-bereached-for cup), may be represented as having these conditions of satisfaction: (5) a. that there is an object (O) present before me in my visual field and O has specific features F

116

Chapter 4

b. the presence of O with features F is a cause of this visual experience, V c. V was caused, in part, by a focusing (with an operating intention in action and an experience of acting) on something that was perceived in the mode of causal efficacy and so was perceived less clearly immediately beforehand, but the focusing was with a sensory readiness to perceive or recognize the object—it aimed at a sensory consequent d. O with features F present before me is continuous or identical with what caused my less clear visual perception in the mode of causal efficacy e. V occurs subsidiarily to a prior intention, P, with readiness to perform an anticipated action consequent to seeing the object with features F Suppose my activity is interrupted, and then I see the cup, which seeing leads me to resume activity and reach for it. In this event, I do not anticipate reaching for the cup at the time of perceiving it and condition e does not hold, so the perceptual experience is not a straightforward perception in the course of action. The conditions of satisfaction of the intention in action (e.g. the reaching for the now-seen cup) include the following: (6) a. that there is a prepared-for movement, M, of my body, which is carried out with an experience of acting b. this intention in action is a cause of M c. this intention in action took shape in response to, and was in part intentionally caused by, the intentional content of visual experience V, had immediately beforehand d. this movement, M, is guided and controlled by the aim to realize an anticipated sensory consequent, which will intentionally cause ensuing actions directed at satisfying prior intention P In the case at hand, the intentional content shared by the two experiences terminates the visual experience and figures in the conditions of satisfaction of the consequent intention in action carried out with an experience of acting in the new bud. This goes on down the chreodic line. Normally, at each juncture, one arrives at unreflective recognition of the anticipated consequent and unreflective consequences of the recognition ensue. In this form, intentional causation connects a bud with its successor, affording a primary example of something making something happen. However, we don’t have to have causality at work in a personal activity-


117

situation to see co-conscious transition in play. The ringing phone is causally relevant to my getting up from my chair, the feeling of chill makes me close the window, and so on, and each of these cases may be parsed as involving two-way functioning and co-conscious transition, with the dual functions linked by intentional causation. This analysis, and these examples, may seem on the simplified side, too linearly causal (and with too narrow scope to capture the play of novelty realistically) to apply to transitions in activity involving the nuanced richness of social interaction, but chreods may incorporate symbolic distinctions and constitutive rules, and these may afford a basis for analyzing such activity in a similar conditions-ofsatisfaction-based manner. Moreover, the analysis of co-conscious transition offered here is strengthened in the concrescual approximation. Prior intentions (e.g. to go to a specific movie) represent whole intention-serving actions, and cause them by activating action routines and by driving the ensuing unfoldings, representable as transitivity of intentional causation. The notion of causality-at-work helps us appreciate how these things are. The notion of transitivity of intentional causation represents an attempt to get at the logical structure of the relevant phenomena. The locating, reaching, grasping activities, for instance, going on below the level of prior intention and on the periphery, are nonetheless intentional, for we are aware of what we have noticed and of what we are doing. They are also chreodic: they draw on background capabilities, which may combine chreods in a single act, as when turning a faucet handle and placing a cup under the tap simultaneously, or serially, as when leaving one’s residence, walking, entering a car, driving. . . . These background capabilities operate throughout unfolding sequences of sensory-action loops, and the transitive parts then carry us from perception and intention in action through experience of acting to anticipated perception and consequent intention in action. These transitive parts involve the moment-by-moment adjustments of general background capabilities to the novel surround and bodily feelings: chreods generate current canalized improvisational performance suited to the immediate situation. In fact, such chreods are general, performable sequences of sensory-action loops, of intentional buds describable as having conditions of satisfaction, of intentions in action and perceptual experiences linked by co-conscious transitions and adaptable to particulars, as say a chreod useful for putting on a shirt is enacted with one particular shirt or another in one particular situation or another (and

118

Chapter 4

subordinate chreods, say of cuff-fastening, may be incorporated in the action or not as apt). Viewed in this way, chreods are concepts of actions, in the sense that concepts, like categories for Searle, are “the conditions of possibility of having just these experiences” (RM 136). Just as having a cup-concept is a condition of possibility for having a perceptual experience of a cup, so having a concept of a generatable performance is a condition of possibility for having intentions that take for granted the capacity to enact appropriate chreods and generate suitable performance. As enacted chreods or action routines coordinate the smooth flow of perception and action in successive sensory-action loops, they are background capabilities adapted to context and at work. This indicates why it is often misleading to say that intentional states determine their conditions of satisfaction against a background of practices and pre-intentional assumptions (Iy 19). In the case of perception in action and causality-at-work it puts it too passively. Here, rather, the background is active, it works, it operates, it guides action and perception, it structures, is the organizing center of, current experience; experience is had not against a background of presuppositions and habits grounded in prior experience, but from the activated background. When, in the service of a prior intention, one is enacting a chreod, a habit-based way of coping with a situation, one is, in effect, smoothly adjusting embodied action to contacted and perceived surround. As we enact chreods, we are sensibly aware of our subordinate actions flowing out of our preceding actions, of causality at work, and of continuity in the stream of consciousness. Each intentional bud, once shaped, marks by coconscious transition the inception of the next intentional bud, which will have its own process of formation. In this sense, the notions of buds and two-way functioning indicate that substantive parts are themselves transitive: waking experience always flows on. Within the stream of experience, this two-way functioning is inescapable and does not involve stasis or rupture; the stream is seamless. But it is not simply an undifferentiated streaming of experience. The dense ongoing interconnectedness that is waking life is continuous, but it comes nonetheless in unique, indecomposable buds or unitary pulses of conscious thought. The radical empiricist recognizes all this. The traditional empiricist, who relies on the deliverances of the five senses and classic self-observation, does not admit or understand the nature of onflow. He habitually avoids thought about unreflective experience, and


119

instead of returning to the stream as best he can, stumbles around in a make-believe of misplaced concreteness. Even if perception arises in the course of a traditional empiricist’s philosophical action, perceptual experience of the object is conjoined, in co-conscious transition, with the consequent functioning of the intentional content of the perceptual experience. In the fine-grained radically empirical analyses essayed in this chapter, I hope to have begun to show how a collection of all-too-influential dualisms are grounded in unwitting withdrawals from intentional buds and processes. Buds and the stream of experience involve the interpenetration of what have been treated traditionally in abstraction from experience as: action and perception, subject and object, organism and environment, the physical and the mental, the cognitive and the valuative, the neurobiological and the intentional, self and other, and so on. The concrescual approximation will hold that these dualistic abstractions are best understood as grounded in polarities within concrescual processes, and thus as abstractions from concrescence and concrescual processes. If we are to carry our analysis farther, we must go off the dualistic “scale” of intentionality and of intentionality-based philosophical psychology and further into the moment of experience. The processual approximation has prepared us for this task. In developing an account of concrescence, Whitehead extends the scope of radical empiricism. Instead of looking at the wonderful stream of consciousness, and instead of going from the propositional content of the substantive core of a state back into its formation, Whitehead places us in the moment, treating it as an act of experience issuing from and into other experiences, an act occurring within the constraints of inheritance from all that is encompassed in one’s past and within the onflow of concrescences. Having extended philosophical analysis into the experiential bud, Whitehead can characterize momentary consciousness as it arises from preconscious phases of synthesis and thereby can situate the stream of consciousness within the stream of embodied, socially conditioned experience, and within broader onflows.

5


5.1

Toward the Concrescual Roots of Intentionality and Consciousness

Advancing beyond the intentional approximation, which is ultimately a statebased account of experience, the processual approximation situated intentional states in the stream of experience by showing how the central contents of intentional states take shape in and influence intentional processes. The notion of concrescence enables us to further connect intentionality and experience, so that we can see intentional content as abstracted from the outcome of the process of concrescence, and can also see the experiential counterpart of intentional content as it arises in that very process. To simplify somewhat, the processual approximation characteristically treats intentional states as having propositional content and works backward from after-the-fact formulations of that content to the activity constituting the experience. The concrescual approximation characteristically treats propositions as they figure in experience, as the data of propositional feelings, which arise from simpler concrete elements—feelings or “prehensions”—and so can only take form in a late phase of concrescence (PR 260). In effect, the processual approximation starts from conscious states and works to embed them in streams of experience, while the concrescual approximation starts within embodied experience and deals with conscious states largely as they emerge from and function in experience. The concrescual approximation draws heavily on Whitehead. It is Whitehead who enables us to get into the bud, or “actual entity,” conceptually, to feel into it and talk of it from the inside out by giving a coherent account of its real internal constitution. Whitehead’s is the best account I know of the factors and dynamics at play in concrescence, the formation of moments of experience, but it is a demanding account, so I introduce it

122

Chapter 5

carefully, initially presenting some of its principal terms, distinctions, and turns of thought in this section. In section 5.2, I emphasize some Jamesian aspects of Whitehead’s thought, with the intention of easing the reader’s entry into Whiteheadian philosophy. In section 5.3, I present Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, the formal core of his philosophy of organism, with emphasis on its account of concrescence as applicable to questions concerning experience and consciousness. That account makes it possible to see in just what senses buds of experience are indecomposable and to characterize their formation through a general account of the elements, stages, and possibilities of concrescence. In section 5.4, I naturalize elements of Whitehead’s account, yielding a version of Whitehead’s thought that serves as the basis for the concrescual approximation. In chapter 6, the concrescual approximation is applied to perception, thought, action, the whole stream of experience, in a fashion that elucidates Whitehead’s categoreal scheme; only then will some readers begin to grasp the force of Whitehead’s analysis. Whitehead on Concrescence—an Introduction Whitehead cites James’s authority in support of “the presumption that an actual entity is an act of experience,” quoting the passage in which James first wrote of buds (PR 68). In the concrescual approximation, the conscious moments comprising the stream of consciousness are acts of experience, concrescual buds, buds constituted in concrescence, and the stream of consciousness is a stream of such buds or actual entities. In Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, “the process of concrescence is divisible into an initial stage of many feelings, and a succession of subsequent phases of more complex feelings integrating the earlier simpler feelings, up to the satisfaction which is one complex unity of feeling” (220). A concrescence involves three phases: one of initial physical feelings; a second phase involving conceptual feelings,1 some derived from physical feelings, progressively coordinated or integrated into more complex feelings; and a final phase involving the integration of many feelings into one feeling, the satisfaction, felt with a “subjective form,” which is “determined by the subjective aim at further integration, so as to obtain the ‘satisfaction’ of the completed subject” (19). In turn, the satisfaction conditions what follows. In short: actual entities, moments of experience, are to be treated as acts of synthesizing the welter of feelings of data from the actual world, under the guidance of past experience


123

and momentary aim, into a unitary outcome of complex feeling or satisfaction that is in turn felt by its successors. The processual approximation has laid the way for understanding such a summary statement with reference to human experience. Recall, for example, that approximation’s account of the formation of a visual perception as involving focusing and recognition, and think of feelings as including sensations related to physical causes, perceived in the mode of causal efficacy, which our background capabilities enable us to process in accord with occurring intentions and interests, so that a complex perception (whose core is a substantive part) emerges from transitive parts and passes by co-conscious transition into its future. Perhaps Whitehead’s account, as foreshadowed above, sounds not only laden with obscure terminology—physical feeling, conceptual feeling, subjective form, subjective aim—but overly conceptualized in the sense that it seems to pack more into a bud than actually figures in experience, but I aim to bring his account down into denser-than-you-may-think, denser-thanordinary-language-suggests, lived details, to show “how Whitehead works” in the sorts of concrete moments and experiences I have been treating earlier in this book. I will use Whitehead’s tools to present plausible, concrescual accounts of perception, action, activity-situations, intention-formation, and so on. Moreover, I will use examples from the processual approximation to put Whitehead, whom I regard as a radical empiricist, to an extended radically empirical examination: since Whitehead’s metaphysics generalizes crucially from human experience, it is pivotal to ascertain whether he got human experience right. Let us first look at the final phase of a momentary act of experience, at what Whitehead calls a satisfaction, for it is there that intentionality-based accounts start. “The notion of ‘satisfaction’ is the notion of the ‘entity as concrete’ abstracted from the ‘process of concrescence’; it is the outcome separated from the process, thereby losing the actuality of the atomic entity, which is both process and outcome” (PR 84). Each satisfaction is a fully determinate feeling and has a more or less complex objective datum: the satisfaction may initially be likened to a Jamesian substantive part, and the objective datum to the sensorial or other stable images forming the core content of the substantive part. However, as James saw it, the Object of your thought is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less. It is a vicious use of speech to take out a substantive kernel from its content and call that its object. (J1 275)

124

Chapter 5

Likewise, Whitehead noted that we constantly fall into the error of thinking of the sense-awareness of a particular factor in nature as being a two-termed relation between the mind and the factor. For example, I perceive a green leaf. Language in this statement suppresses all reference to any factors other than the percipient mind and the green leaf and the relation of sense-awareness. It discards the obvious inevitable factors which are essential elements in the perception. I am here, the leaf is there; and the event here and the event which is the life of the leaf there are both embedded in a totality of nature which is now, and within this totality there are other discriminated factors which it is irrelevant to mention. Thus language habitually sets before the mind a misleading abstract of the indefinite complexity of the fact of sense-awareness. (CN 108)

The notion of propositional content of an intentional state, with its linkage to settled reference and predication, tends to simplify one’s notion of the objective datum of the satisfaction, for that objective datum is an integration of all the experient has felt of its world. The referring and predicating take shape in experience and the simplifying abstracts from the formation of referent, predicate, propositional content, satisfaction, and subject. The simplification I can immediately decry. But to provide a less impoverished account, an adequate, process-sensitive, account, of proposition-formation requires that I present Whitehead’s account of concrescence. The Whitehead-based concrescual approximation will supply the conceptual wherewithal for stealing up on unverbalized propositions as they take form, with reference often deriving from myriad unverbalized physical feelings of entities in the actual world, and with predication deriving in part from unverbalized conceptual feelings. An initial consideration of Whitehead’s account of propositions should begin to suggest how much closer to experience and more concrete the concrescual approximation is than the intentional and processual approximations. On Whitehead’s view, “the ordinary logical account of ‘propositions’ expresses only a restricted aspect of their role in the universe, namely, when they are the data of feelings whose subjective forms are those of judgments” (PR 25). A proposition is entertained when it is admitted into feeling, regardless of the form of feeling involved (188). Similarly, Searle knows that the same propositional content can function in types of speech act other than judgments or assertions, i.e., in speech acts with different illocutionary forces (e.g. SA 31), whether, say that of a promise or request, and in intentional states with different psychological modes, whether, say, hope or sorrow.2 What Searle does not much concern himself with is the proposi-


125

tion and the psychological mode as they figure subjectively, with how they interpenetrate and take shape within concrescence. The heart of the move from the intentionality-based processual approximation to the concrescual approximation, is the shift from treating the relatively clear, distinct, and isolated intentional content of a substantive part as the object of analysis to treating the (typically nonverbal) proposition as it takes shape, is felt, and functions in experience. For Whitehead, “those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts: they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process” (PR 162). The task for Whitehead and for concrescual analysis then is to grasp the nature of the basic facts of experience and to see the role of the early stages of concrescence in experience, and thereby to reinstate the vague—the unclear and indistinct—to its proper place in philosophy. The contrast with the Western philosophical tradition is stark: When Descartes, Locke, and Hume undertake the analysis of experience, they utilize those elements in their own experience which lie clear and distinct, fit for the exactitude of intellectual discourse. It is tacitly assumed, except by Plato, that the more fundamental factors will ever lend themselves for discrimination with peculiar clarity. (AI 175; cf. 217)

The process of concrescence may indeed introduce clarity and distinctness, but the consequences of the neglect of this law, that the late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements, have been fatal to the proper analysis of an experient occasion. In fact, most of the difficulties of philosophy are produced by it. Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsyturvy fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume’s impressions of sensation. (PR 162)

Traditional empiricism doesn’t admit that “the conscious recognition of impressions of sensation is the work of sophisticated elaboration” (PR 315), or that “what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree” (J1 224; cf. AI 263). Intentionalitybased analyses of conscious experiences often encourage the same error, by neglecting the process of thought-formation, and concentrating on late, derivative elements. Just as the foregoing approximations tend to simplify the full objective datum of a satisfaction, reducing it to clear and distinct intentional content,

126

Chapter 5

so they tend to simplify what Whitehead terms the subjective form or the “emotional complex” (PR 41) of the final feeling of satisfaction, reducing it to the psychological mode in which the simplified intentional content is had. A satisfaction is a fully determinate feeling configuring the total field of experience. Subjective form—how something is felt—and objective datum cannot be blithely abstracted from the whole complex process in which the subject comes to be the experient of the objective datum and from “the togetherness of things in occasions of experience” (AI 233), but they often are. Accordingly, “the conventionalized abstractions prevalent in epistemological theory are very far from the concrete facts of experience. The word ‘feeling’ has the merit of preserving this double significance of subjective form and of the apprehension of an object” (233). For instance, in the structuring of perception by desire or attraction, the formation of the final objective datum is of a piece with the formation of the final complex feeling. As the objective datum forms—e.g., as a sought-for object is recognized—the subjective form becomes determinate, not just as a perceptual experience but as a perceptual experience of the thing sought. For Whitehead (AI 176–177; cf. PR 162–163), “the basis of experience is emotional. . . . The basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given. . . . The subjective form [of each feeling or prehension] . . . is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience. How the experience constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms.” Whitehead regularly uses the word ‘emotion’ broadly, to suggest feelings of concern, purpose, involvement, entwinement with things based on past experience (cf. AI 4, 262), and aversion, at play in each moment of human experience, thus making of the emotional aspects of experience something more fundamental than the intellectual. The concrescual approximation concurs regarding the importance of emotion and affective tone, but does not flaunt the meaning-laden word ‘emotion’, recognizing that Whitehead uses it in a technical sense. Thus, even he cautions (PR 163), “that emotion in human experience, or even in animal experience, is not bare emotion. It is emotion interpreted, integrated, and transformed into higher categories of feeling. But even so, the emotional . . . elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience.”3 Now, in each bud of human experience, not only do complex objective datum and subjective form become definite, so does the subjective aim and,


127

in fact, the momentary subject. The subjective aim “controls the becoming of a subject” (PR 25) and may here be thought of as the ideal of what the subject could become. The immediate subjective aim is initially relatively vague, with the vagueness or conceptuality of the ideal, and lacking the specificity of the actual, just as a sensory consequent aimed at lacks the particularity of actual perception, or as a nascent desire lacks the relative specificity of an intention, or as an intention to recall something lacks the determinateness of what is recalled. The realization of the subjective aim in satisfaction then is a synthesis of the possible and the given: the concrescence is a convergence on an outcome, in which final subjective form (say, loosely, this particular perceptual feeling), final objective datum (say, the perceived as a central factor in this particular complete object of thought), and satisfaction are formed, and these instance the togetherness of cognitive and valuative aspects or factors in moments of experience. As the subjective aim takes definite shape, contents of feelings are integrated into a complex “contrast”—an objective datum. Whitehead uses ‘contrast’ in a way that begs for specification, even at this early point; furthermore, contrasts are essential in Whitehead’s understanding and analyses of the phases involved in concrescence. For Whitehead, “whatever is a datum for a feeling has a unity as felt. Thus the many components of a complex datum have a unity: this unity is a ‘contrast’ of entities,” whether actual or conceptual, which have a ground of identity (e.g. being colored), so that they may be contrasted (e.g. as of two colors or shades in the same visual field), and a ground of difference (e.g. in color or location) so that the contrasted entities may be distinguished or appear distinct (PR 24, 249; RIM 111). Thus, the visual field in ordinary visual perception appears as a unified complex datum, with many of the subordinate contrasts not figuring in consciousness and with important figures standing out from—contrasted with—a background. Whitehead takes pains to ensure that his readers do not treat the complex datum in abstraction from the unity as felt, that is, as if it were actually constructed out of universals or general qualities: . . . the real synthesis of two component elements in the objective datum of a feeling must be infected with the individual particularities of each of the relata. Thus the synthesis in its completeness expresses the joint particularities of that pair of relata, and can relate no others. A complex entity with this individual definiteness . . . will be termed a “contrast.” A contrast cannot be abstracted from the contrasted relata. (PR 228; cf. AI 157)

128

Chapter 5

For Whitehead, the notion of contrast is opposed to that of incompatibility. A contrast is a real synthesis, a bringing together of compatible elements and, for Whitehead, the more elements an actual entity can bring into explicit feeling by way of contrasts, rather than dismissing them into “negative prehensions” as incompatibilities (because they cannot be held in contrast in that moment), the more is the intensity and breadth of the concrescence enhanced. As the contents of feelings—the contrasts—are progressively integrated into an objective datum, the subjective forms of the feelings become synthesized into a complex unity of feeling. In each concrescence, the subjective forms become adapted with mutual sensitivity to each other under the coordinating guidance of the subjective aim, which is likewise becoming determinate as it conditions feelings being integrated in the concrescence. Throughout the process, the subjective aim, like a desire, urge, or prompting with indefinite goal, shapes and takes shape as it calls elements of past experience and contextual details into relevance and leads to a coherent satisfaction that can affect consequent action. This account is introductory and is perforce abstract: it is to apply to all buds of experience and, as stated earlier, I will give it several concrete elaborations below, especially in chapter 6, and will relate it in detail to an Edelman-based, James-influenced neurobiological approximation in chapter 7, where neurobiological counterparts are provided for all terms adopted from Whitehead and of import in the concrescual approximation. Concrescence as Subject-Formation With the foregoing condensed treatment of the bud as involving the integration of data and of subjective forms in its formation, we are beginning to arrive at a detailed account of the provocative Jamesian notion that the formation of the thought is the formation of the thinker. In each moment of thought in the stream, James and the radical empiricist can discern no subject that is doing the thinking. For them, the formation of the thought or bud, the flight to a perch, is the formation of the thinker. This is the central notion linking Whitehead and James and setting them apart from traditional empiricists who likewise find no substantial self in experience but who in their withdrawal from flux too readily slip into treating propositional content as entertained by a thinker, in a two-term relation of thinker and thought. For James, each instance of thinking culminates in the formation of thought and thinker: “The unity into which the Thought . . .


129

binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there,” and “that thought is itself the thinker” (J1 338, 401). Likewise, when diagnosing the Cartesian philosophy in which the ego creates its thoughts, Whitehead declares (PR 151) that “the philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional [momentary] thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought. In this inversion we have the final contrast between a philosophy of substance and a philosophy of organism.” The formation of a satisfaction, aimed at by a subjective aim, is also the formation of a thinker or feeler, the “subject-superject.” These claims have ultimate reference to Whitehead’s general principle that the one subject is the final end which conditions each component feeling. Thus the superject [or satisfaction] is already present as a condition, determining how each feeling completes its own process. Although in any incomplete phase there are many unsynthesized feelings, yet each of these feelings is conditioned by the other feelings. The process of each feeling is such as to render that feeling integrable with the other feelings. . . . No feeling can be abstracted from its subject. For the subject is at work in the feeling, in order that it may be the subject with that feeling. . . . This doctrine of the inherence of the subject in the process of its production requires that in the primary phase of the subjective process there be a conceptual feeling of subjective aim. . . . This basic conceptual feeling suffers simplification in the successive phases of the concrescence. It starts with conditioned alternatives, and by successive decisions is reduced to coherence. (PR 223–224; cf. 25)

It bears restating that “the subject is at work in the feeling, in order that it may be that subject with that feeling” (PR 224). The aim may be at doing x, at saying or writing something, but what is done or said is at once the determination and the satisfaction of the aim. For instance, when people start to speak they have “anticipatory intention[s], . . . rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate” (J1 253; SPP 210) and as the words are spoken intentions are progressively defined, and satisfied too, in the sense that each utterance integrates an aim with a variety of feelings concerning topic, addressee, and so on. In the process, grammatical and other speech act conventions contribute structure to articulation as the background operates in service to the intention; if the articulation does not feel right, subsequent aim may be at issuing a corrective utterance. Likewise, in an unspecified aim at a sensory consequent, the aim becomes fully determinate upon perception. Thus, the process

130

Chapter 5

of saying or perceiving involves the working of subjective aim, and is properly the subject-in-formation, with the subject at work in the feeling, as Whitehead says. However, focusing on the product of process, the satisfaction or substantive conclusion, obscures the transitive parts constituting the process that produces the satisfaction, the subject, the subject-superject,4 and it abstracts from the superject carrying forth into its future. We all go through subject-formation as our subjective moments are taking form, but this is beneath the mention of our language. In fact, subjectformation is obscured by subject-verb-object expression (e.g. “I see a green leaf”), which often expresses the propositional content of the satisfaction, grammatically abstracted from its formation, and in which expression the subject (say, the I) is raised out of the flux, as if the subject created the perception. So any radically empirical attempt to indicate subject-formation remains not just incomprehensible but ever inaccessible to one maintaining a detached, self-observational, transition-masking, and ultimately language-constrained, stance. To such a stance, perceptions typically are had as clear and distinct substantive parts without recognition of transitive parts. The notion of momentary process as subject-formation is the most revolutionary aspect of James’s and Whitehead’s thought. It requires thinking without unquestioning reliance on habits of thought fostered by our activevoice-dominated grammar and its ally, the subject-predicate form of expression. It requires thinking outside the long-reigning syntax. Whitehead, extending James, has given us the tools for getting outside of or beneath the subject-predicate form of expression to arrive at an understanding of subject-formation that enables us to become sensitive to the process and be attentive within it. The I of the subject-superject is not an agentive I that built a mental scene out of discrete sensations and associations and saw the concrescence through to its end: We do not initiate thought by an effort of self-consciousness. We find ourselves thinking, just as we find ourselves breathing and enjoying the sunset. (AI 47; cf. ERE 37)

In this sense, insofar as it encourages belief in a homuncular, agentive I, subject-predicate-based discourse is thoroughly misleading. In addition, it abstracts from relation (of, say, knower and known); in James’s words,


131

We are so befogged by the suggestions of speech that we think a constant thing, known under a constant name, ought to be known by means of a constant mental affection. The ancient languages, with their elaborate declensions, are better guides. In them no substantive appears “pure,” but varies its inflection to suit the way it is known. (1884:11; cf. SMW 24)

And Whitehead believed, as he said in the course of a general criticism of Humean atomism, that If you once conceive fundamental fact as a multiplicity of subjects qualified by predicates, you must fail to give a coherent account of experience. The disjunction of subjects is the presupposition from which you start, and you can only account for conjunctive relations by some fallacious sleight of hand, such as Leibniz’s metaphor of his monads engaging in mirroring. The alternative philosophic position must commence with denouncing the whole idea of “subject qualified by predicate” as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language. (R 13–14; cf. e.g., CN 108)

Bud formation is utterly commonplace. Thinking and experiencing do go on incessantly in waking life, and as we attend to this we find, as did James, processes of formation and terminal, decisive formations: thoughts take shape; something draws our attention and gets identified; potential threat is sensed and responded to; “memory goes to work” and a name is remembered; during conversation a mot juste is cast about for and found, some candidates perhaps eliminated with silent rapidity; in response to requests or possibilities or evident impasses, things are decided on the spur of the moment; after feeling, say, conflict or puzzlement, the bright idea for problem resolution appears; even when we weigh alternatives, the decision, no matter how rational or revisable, in favor of one alternative comes to us or over us totally or not at all. Ultimately, to put it simply, we do not decide to make the specific decisions that are made. These examples seem paradoxical only because the syntax of language bewitches us (cf. PR xiii; Wittgenstein 47). Of course, any intention or perception is consonant with characteristics, including background capacities, of the socialized person who relevantly predates the intending or perceiving. But as to the formation, the subjectverb-object form of discourse is misleading. Go to the moment of experience as experienced. As experienced, not as replayed on the screen of visual memory, although possibly recalled as a result of such replaying, or as a result of re-enacting the remembered posture and movement of that moment. You’ll find no agent outside taking action, no executor dispassionately conducting the business of deciding, and no thought or idea qualifying an

132

Chapter 5

unchanged mental substance, no perception leaving the percipient unaffected. No experience is formed by an agentive, homuncular, subject. This is so notwithstanding the fact that the grammar of our language is an activevoice grammar which all but requires the operation of such a subject in descriptions of experience and in thinking about action. Thus, not only will the understanding of subject-formation developed in the remaining pages of this book show what is missing in traditional accounts; it will also show how language systematically reinforces the omissions. If, as Whitehead does, we call the elements being synthesized into a unity in the course of concrescence feelings, then the feelings are influenced by and inseparable from the end at which they aim, and this end is the feeler. When I am looking for my sister at a gathering, if no distraction intrudes, all my feelings are coordinated with or subordinated to the aim to become a feeler of a feeling of seeing her. The end of action, what the action is aimed at or attracted by, is a subject feeling a feeling, namely the satisfaction of an aim at a sensory consequent, in this case one in which my sister as located is a principal component of the complex objective datum. Here, one’s habitual language games can plainly constrain one’s understanding: If the subject-predicate form of statement be taken to be metaphysically ultimate, it is then impossible to express this doctrine of feelings and their superject. It is better to say that the feelings aim at their subject, than to say that they are aimed at their subject. For the latter mode of expression removes the subject from the scope of the feeling and assigns it to an external agency. (PR 222; cf. 234)

But we do find that a subject was being formed, and that the subject, once formed, issues into a new subject-in-formation, who typically acts on and from the just-completed act of experience. Even though this often happens in accord with an overarching intention, the feeler of which may be taken for a persisting subject, each momentary subject is in formation “inside” a process, concrescing anew. This signals immediately that the usual subjectverb-object formulations of these matters are misleading and inadequate. Recognition of this constitutes the Jamesian-Whiteheadian bouleversement of post-Aristotelian thought. It enables us to render Cartesian and postCartesian habits of thought provincial, and to require their conceptual overthrow, for inside the process there is no dualism of subject and object, of mind and matter, or disconnection of organism from environment, of human experience from nature. This gives further bite to James’s 1884


133

recognition and articulation of a gulf between life lived and conceptions or thoughts about life. Perhaps Whitehead’s most penetrating, most basic recognition is that we find in the moment not quality inhering in substance, not thought qualifying mind, but “the underlying substantial activity of individualization” (SMW 123). What constitutes the subject is the momentary yet onflowing interplay of received data, subjective aim, and one’s real potential (the present Jamesian me, one’s activated background) in the momentary actual situation—a situation bearing connectedness to all that has gone before, to influencing culture, to nature. Of course, as James well knew, it can be very difficult, introspectively, to apprehend the transitive parts contributing to the process of subjectformation: to attempt to observe them is to accord with a new subjective aim that disrupts the workings of the former subjective aim, so that trying to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. This exemplifies a familiar type of complementarity between selfobservation (or for that matter any feeling felt with a subjective form of reflection) and pre-reflective experience, and is reinforced by active-voicedominated discourse. With some understanding of this, and with some commitment to radical empiricism, one can try to get down into the bud and onflow conceptually, taking the bud as an act of subject-formation and, honoring the continuity of experience from bud to bud, of superjectformation as well. One can take any buds one wants or happens to take, as they occur in experience, and go to work on them. One can readily escape the orbit of jejune cases commonly treated. Thinking of examples, feeling one’s way into them, can help put one right down in the moment, can get one below the linguistic formulation or expression—just where a radical empiricist wants to be able to get to readily. When one gets there, one sees that the philosopher’s beloved clarity and distinctness arise late in concrescence. One can then go into the moment as Whitehead does, and characterize how inevitable constraints and flows affect what goes on there. Once one does that, one can see the momentary subjective aim take shape with the subjective form of the satisfaction, as syntheses are attained and as what is irrelevant (vis-à-vis the subjective aim) falls away: the radical empiricist can become non-observationally aware of feelings aiming at their subject, of the interested movement of attention, and such aiming and movement is what is most intimately, concretely, and directly our experience.

134

5.2

Chapter 5

James, Whitehead, Radical Empiricism, and Speculative Philosophy

I believe that James had a more significant and pervasive influence on Whitehead than is often acknowledged.5 Victor Lowe, a philosopher and Whitehead’s authoritative biographer, may have addressed the question of James’s influence on Whitehead more seriously than any other Whitehead scholar (see, e.g., Lowe 1941a, 1962). Lowe (1962: 264, 263) maintains that, although according to Whitehead in conversation “there was no question of James affecting the direction of his thinking,” nonetheless “James’s unmatched psychological observations provide the chief outside evidence to show that Whitehead’s theory of prehensions is not a castle in the air.” Lowe (1962: viii; cf. 1941a) favors using James as “a vestibule” to Whitehead, and I do use him that way: as a conceptual and historical passageway into Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Whitehead as Radical Empiricist The core of Jamesian radical empiricism is the recognition of the coconscious transition between moments of experience in the life of a person, or along a historic route, and of the running in each moment of transitive parts into a substantive conclusion (PU 326; ERE 86). Whitehead developed an account of transition that moves beyond James on co-conscious transition and transitive parts, as it moves beyond James’s unity of passing thought to examine the formation of that unity. As Lowe (1990: 226) noted, “the doctrine that experience comes in drops or pulses, each of which is an indivisible unity, is to be found in the psychology of William James; but James never outlined a system of the world on this basis.” Whitehead did engage in metaphysics, and he systematically took on, as Lowe (1962: 263) put it, “the problem of how pulses of experience are formed.” Whitehead wrote all his metaphysical works after he left England in 1924, at age 63, to join the Philosophy Department at Harvard. Principal among these works are Science and the Modern World (1925), a sometimes overly dense book bristling with the energy of a first, rich expression of his philosophy of organism; Process and Reality (1929), a difficult work that presents a systematic formulation of that philosophy; and Adventures of Ideas, (1933), a mature restatement of his philosophy, covering its implications in several domains, including the aesthetic and the sociological. Whitehead cites James several times in these books, typically to introduce central


135

notions from James’s philosophy of radical empiricism. On the second page of Science and the Modern World, Whitehead refers to James as “that adorable genius” and quotes from a letter William wrote to his brother Henry in which he says (SMW 2–3) “I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.” Whitehead uses the phrase “irreducible and stubborn facts” repeatedly in the book to indicate the need to balance the general and the concrete. Now, Whitehead is a great systematic philosopher, a rationalist who pursues “speculative philosophy . . . the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (PR 3), and he hopes that we will “fail to find in experience any elements intrinsically incapable of exhibition as examples of general theory” (42). Thoroughgoing radical empiricism is a check on speculative philosophizing, a safeguard against committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. In this vein, Whitehead characterized James’s “intellectual life” as “one protest against the dismissal of experience in the interest of system” (MT 3). To the extent that one’s rationalism is a “true rationalism,” Whitehead writes (SMW 201), it “must always transcend itself by recurrence to the concrete in search of inspiration. A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of antirationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions.” Whitehead’s radical empiricism regularly brings his rationalism back down into the concrete moment, for testing against stubborn fact. Here the analyst wanting to avoid committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness joins cause with the radical empiricist trying to stay close to experience. However, although Whiteheadian speculative philosophers, like Jamesian radical empiricists, will not exclude from their systems any element that is directly experienced, and therefore will regard stubborn fact as including the Jamesian transitions, Whitehead never explicitly associates the devotion to stubborn fact with radical empiricism as such. Nonetheless, that association is evident when he cites as stubborn fact “the givenness of the actual world, considered as [that] which at once limits and provides opportunity for the actual occasion” (PR 129; cf. AI 193, 293), the actual world being the collection of actualities given for a particular concrescence, the concrescing entity’s immediate predecessor being including preeminently among these actualities. Whitehead continues: . . . in our experience, we essentially arise out of our bodies which are the stubborn facts of the immediate relevant past. We are also carried on by our immediate past of

136

Chapter 5

personal experience; we finish a sentence because we have begun it. The sentence may embody a new thought, never phrased before, or an old one rephrased with verbal novelty. There need be no well-worn association between the sounds of the earlier and the later words. But it remains remorselessly true, that we finish a sentence because we have begun it. We are governed by stubborn fact. It is in respect to this “stubborn fact” that the theories of modern philosophy are weakest. Philosophers have worried themselves about remote consequences, and the inductive formulations of science. They should confine attention to the rush of immediate transition. Their explanations would then be seen in their native absurdity. (PR 129)

James too uses the phenomenon of uttering a sentence as a chief example of the transitive efficacy of the past as it carries smoothly into the present in activity-situations. James cites this derivation of present from past to illustrate “the truth . . . that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts. . . . These bare images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic transitions” (J1 252–253; 278 ff.). Whitehead cites the phenomenon elsewhere too, taking as an example the utterance of the phrase “United Fruit Company,” in which act the speaking of the first word involves “non-sensuous anticipation” of the upcoming uttering and occurs with “non-sensuous perception” of what was uttered just previously (AI 182; cf. IS 255–256). He generally uses nonsensuous perception (and non-sensuous anticipation) to refer to the type of perception disclosing the continuities from moment to moment of experience. It pertains to awareness of the continuity of subjective form from one moment to the next, as when “subjective forms of intention to procure [an] utterance” drive us to complete the utterance (AI 182), or in the case of a man moved by anger, insofar as this has “fallen within the illumination of consciousness” (183–184). The case of anger provides an example not just of continuity of subjective form—“between the subjective form of the immediate past occasion and the subjective form of its primary prehension in the origination of the new occasion” (183)—but of what James Joyce, recognizing that emotions arise, affect consciousness and behavior, and then are discharged or dissipate, termed the “curve of an emotion” (Ellmann 150), and what Damasio (43, 341) calls “cycles of emotions,” with their “temporal profiles” involving onset, peak, and decay. We can broaden the


137

notion of a curve of an emotion to that of a curve of affective tone or subjective form, taking the broader notion to embrace modes of receptivity (e.g. grogginess, alertness) and moods as well as emotions and desires.6 Nonsensuous perception also pertains to “our sense of unity with the body” and the derivation of immediate experience from our causally efficacious bodily feelings (AI 189). This Whiteheadian extension of non-observational awareness thus opens the field of experience for analysis in radically empirical fashion, and names the type of awareness in which we know of causal transitivity or intentional causation between buds conjoined in experience. Whitehead as Experiential Monist Radical empiricism can admit nothing that does not figure directly in experience and, for James, is naturally allied with a philosophy or monism of pure experience (ERE 86). The philosophy is pluralistic, for there are countless moments of experience. It is monistic, for “there is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff . . . ; but the same identical piece of ‘pure experience’ (which was the name I gave to the materia prima of everything) can stand alternately for a ‘fact of consciousness’ or for a physical reality, according as it is taken in one context or another” (137–138; cf. 12). I have laid stress on Whitehead’s radical empiricism, which he never explicitly avowed, and now I lay some stress on his monism of pure experience, which he never explicitly avowed as such. Whitehead took James’s definition of buds or drops of perception to support the view that each momentary experience, or actual entity, is in fact an act of experience (PR 68). The radical empiricist’s bud of human experience is the prototype of a generic “actual entity,” and actual entities, as understood in Whitehead’s philosophy, are the final realities: “Actual entities”—also termed “actual occasions”—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. (PR 18)

The generalized drop or bud is an actual entity, and these final things, in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism or panexperientialism (Griffin 78), are each interconnected with all other actual entities (PR 41, 50); each actual

138

Chapter 5

entity prehends—physically feels—all other actual entities, and each has the metaphysical character of an occasion of experience. These acts of experience then are the realities, the dynamic processes, in which creativity, “the general metaphysical character which underlies all occasions” (SMW 177) in Whitehead’s “one-substance cosmology” (PR 19; 31, 7), is manifest; they are the primary actualities in his process-based monism of creative feeling. In it, Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of ‘feeling’ the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual ‘satisfaction.’ Here, ‘feeling’ is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. (PR 40)

Whitehead’s monism flows from his radical empiricism. It starts with his “reformed subjectivist principle,” which “fully accepts Descartes’ discovery that subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation which is presented to metaphysics for analysis” (PR 160). There is no place else to begin: “. . . apart from experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (167). Whitehead’s move from that which is disclosed in the experience of subjects (that is, from the grounds of radical empiricism) to speculative philosophy involves an explicit generalization of his radically empirical notion of experience. The various feelings contributing to a moment of human experience are generalized to prehensions, the most concrete elements in the nature of any actual entity (19). Remember, ‘feeling’ signifies both the how of feeling, or subjective form, and the apprehension of an object; the datum is not separable from the way it is felt. Therefore, when treating of these prehensions or feelings, the “word ‘feeling’ is a mere technical term . . . chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own” (164). Moreover, the whole process of concrescence in human experience—the constituting of a Jamesian bud or drop of perception—is generalized, so that all actual entities are conditioned by the principles governing concrescence—the “categoreal obligations” (26)—and no actual entity, no matter how refined or complex its concrescence, can violate them. That is, “if we hold, as for example in Process and Reality, that all final individual actualities have the metaphysical character of occasions of experience, then on that hypothesis the direct evidence as to the connectedness of one’s immediate present occasion of experience with one’s immediately past


139

occasions, can be validly used to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature” (AI 221).7 James contemplated the generalization from such radically empirical conjunction or connectedness in the concluding two paragraphs of the uncompleted work Some Problems of Philosophy: . . . the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activitysituations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency. The transitive causation in them does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on. Rather does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality-at-work flavors the entire concrete sequence as salt flavors the water in which it is dissolved. If we took these experiences as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our own life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature. In other words we should have to espouse a so-called “pan-psychic” philosophy. (SPP 218; cf. ERE 88–89, 189)

Whitehead’s metaphysics generalizes factors in Jamesian buds of human experience to factors entering into the description of all actual entities, no matter how much simpler and less specialized than those arising in the life of a “high-grade” organism. If he is to generalize from human experience it is imperative that he get that experience right: to assess his success and adequacy, his account must be subjected to radically empirical scrutiny, as it shall be in this and the next chapter. Further, even if he seems to get it right, it must be clear that his findings and my assessments of them are not unnecessarily limited by reliance on a generalization grounded in what is but one major, culturally, linguistically, and otherwise conditioned form or habit of life. In generalizing from human subject-formation, Whitehead specifies a metaphysically general, categoreal structure of process that is common to all concrescences, to the real internal constitution of every actual entity— and this will be treated in section 5.3. That section provides the analytic terms of reference for the concrescual approximation, so it must be introduced before I present that approximation. Whitehead, James, and the Idea of Concrescence The fruits of Whitehead’s major work in the philosophy of science appear in his pre-metaphysical trilogy: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle

140

Chapter 5

of Relativity (1922). For Whitehead in those books, “natural science is concerned with nature which is the terminus of sense-perception, it is not concerned with the sense-awareness itself,” so that the percipient and the mind remain outside nature (CN 4; PNK 202). Also (CN 29), “we do not ask about the percipient or about the process, but about the perceived. . . . For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature.” Thus (28), “the philosophy of science . . . is the philosophy of the thing perceived, and it should not be confused with the metaphysics of reality of which the scope embraces both perceiver and perceived.” In this vein, Whitehead acknowledged in 1924 in the notes to the second edition of the Enquiry (the last published piece of work in his pre-metaphysical trilogy) that in that work “the true doctrine, that ‘process’ is the fundamental idea, was not in my mind with sufficient emphasis” (PNK 202; see Lowe 1941b: 87), although it was strongly in evidence in places (e.g. PNK 14, 198).8 To the extent that the idea of process is grounded in notions of subjectformation and experience, it falls outside the scope of Whiteheadian philosophy of science and is a metaphysical idea. At the end of his longest discussion of James, in which he treats James’s claim that consciousness is a function and contrasts James and Descartes (SMW 143 ff.), Whitehead finds that “the organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realization of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real.” The event (or, later, concrescence) occurs within the ongoing life history of an enduring organism that retains its identity but undergoes changes as a result of each momentary process. In enduring organisms characterized by cognitive capabilities, “cognition is the emergence, into some measure of individualized reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality, and purpose” (152). Cognition—for James, the function of consciousness—is then purposeful (aim-serving), and involves a contrast of actuality and potentiality (minimally, of now and next). Hearkening back to his pre-metaphysical work, Whitehead then states that “it is equally possible to arrive at this organic conception of the world if we start from the fundamental notions of modern physics, instead of, as above, from [Jamesian] psychology and physiology. In fact by reason of my own studies in mathematics and mathematical physics, I did in fact arrive at my convictions in this way.” I do not presume to suggest that Whitehead would not have arrived at his organic conception without the influence of James, but I do not mind


141

raising such a possibility. Although in 1925 Whitehead discriminated the event, as the unit of experience, as unifying in itself a “multiplicity of relationships,” and as the outgrowth of a “process of realization, which is the adjustment of the synthetic activities by virtue of which the various events become their realized selves” (SMW 123), earlier he acknowledged, as I just noted, giving insufficient emphasis to process in his pre-metaphysical works. Notwithstanding this acknowledgment, he had given it some emphasis. Thus, although in 1925 he specified that such realization of an event as a totality is a constituting of itself within a specious present (104), he had, in 1919, employed a notion of an extended “specious,” as opposed to an instantaneous, present (e.g. PNK 8). Also, in 1925 he treated the present as not essentially disconnected from the rest of the universe. He believed, to wit, that events are not simply located, in the sense that “a bit of matter . . . is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time” (SMW 58). But in 1920 he had held, for example, that “the false idea which we have to get rid of is that of nature as a mere aggregate of independent entities, each capable of isolation” (CN 141). However, even though he then also had an unelaborated, arguably concrescence-presaging notion of “a passage of mind” (e.g. CN 69), he kept his focus on the perceived, not on the percipient or the process of perception, and so did not yet explicitly articulate a notion of the specious present as the locus of subject-formation. As Lowe (1941b: 95) saw it, Whitehead’s arrival at his “organic theory of nature” from his premetaphysical works centrally involved “thinking of their ‘percipient event’ as a temporal process with an internal constitution.” This phenomenon of internal constitution is subject-formation, and the inspiration for recognizing it might well have been Jamesian.9 Yet no doubt Whitehead went much farther into the formation of the bud than James knew was possible and elaborated a comprehensive monism that was beyond James’s reach. James, a pioneer, opened the study of the stream of consciousness and of the buds constituting individual streams of experience, using notions of transitive parts, feelings of direction, the fringe, co-conscious transition, the characters of thought, and the bud or pulse as involving formation of thought and thinker. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism deals fully and systematically with the internal constitution of actual entities. To that

142

Chapter 5

philosophy I now turn, concentrating on the aspects of his thought that are most relevant to my aims. 5.3

Whitehead’s Categories

Early in Process and Reality, the most systematic presentation of his philosophy of organism, Whitehead summarily presents the categoreal scheme in terms of which he frames that philosophy. His metaphysical framework comprises four categories: the category of the ultimate, categories of existence, categories of explanation, and categoreal obligations. In introducing the scheme, Whitehead specifies the following: Every entity should be a specific instance of one category of existence, every explanation should be a specific instance of categories of explanation, and every obligation should be a specific instance of categoreal obligations. The Category of the Ultimate expresses the general principle presupposed in the three more special categories. (PR 20–21)10

In effect, the categories of the ultimate and of existence and explanation provide notions necessary for understanding process by way of the categoreal obligations, which turn out to be the principal tools for understanding concrescence, experience, and consciousness. In this section I discuss Whitehead’s scheme, concentrating on implications for the concrescual approximation, the articulation of which will render this quite abstract sketch relevant to ordinary human experience. Also, the synopsis provided here is intended primarily to indicate the scheme’s relevance to matters concerning the nature of consciousness and experience, and only incidentally to suggest the scope of Whitehead’s thought. Therefore, even though some quotations from Whitehead indicate the full generality of his philosophy, I keep concern with Whitehead’s broader metaphysics on the periphery. However, remember, the concrescual approximation, which is based on a naturalization of Whitehead’s philosophy (discussed in section 5.4), focuses on buds of human experience, the basis for Whitehead’s account of concrescence in all actual entities. To the extent that the concrescual approximation is Whiteheadian and aptly adequate to stubborn fact, it may also serve as a brief for considering Whitehead’s full philosophy of organism.11 If this section, which contains fairly technical material central to the understanding of the concrescual approximation, proves difficult on first reading, I ask the reader to remember that the import of the notions intro-


143

duced here, many of which were meant by Whitehead to apply to all possible actual entities, may well become clearer once application of the concrescual approximation to concrete human experience is presented in chapter 6. Moreover, in drawing on the concrescual approximation, the neurobiological approximation, treated in chapter 7, may make the import of Whitehead’s notions still clearer. The Category of the Ultimate The category of the ultimate represents the underlying, energetic, creative ground for process, for concrescence, and for the ongoing flow or advance of events. This ground does not exist apart from its activity and has three basic inseparable aspects: creativity, diversity, and unity. I open by letting Whitehead speak for himself: ‘Creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one’ are the ultimate notions involved in the meaning of the synonymous terms ‘thing,’ ‘being,’ ‘entity.’ These three notions complete the Category of the Ultimate and are presupposed in all the more special categories. The term ‘one’ . . . stands for the singularity of an entity. The term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one,’ and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many.’ The term ‘many’ conveys the notion of ‘disjunctive diversity’; this notion is an essential element in the concept of ‘being.’ There are many ‘beings’ in disjunctive diversity. ‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, becomes the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. . . . ‘Creativity’ is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the ‘many’ which it unifies. Thus ‘creativity’ introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The ‘creative advance’ is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. . . . The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction. . . . The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. (PR 21)

Exemplifying the creativity, “that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality” (PR 31), each actual entity, each concrescence, actively passes from a disjoined multiplicity of initial feelings (236) to a unified satisfaction. For Whitehead, “experience is not a relation of an

144

Chapter 5

experient to something external to it, but is itself the ‘inclusive whole’ which is the required connectedness of ‘many in one’” (AI 233). There is no experient-experienced dualism here. In fact, in Whitehead’s philosophy, subject and object, mind and matter, organism and environment are aspects functioning, united, within process (190). Nor is creativity disjoined from concrescence, “an external agency with its own ulterior purposes” (PR 222). Creativity is the energy felt in the momentary formation of the subject, as if it were the blood, the vitality, of concrescence. We feel it in intentional action with “the energizing of the immediate past [compelling us] in the immediacy of the present” as the subjective form of intention carries us toward intention-fulfillment (AI 182–183), and in the racing of feelings and thoughts, as well as in perceptual shifts from the pre-presentational to the presentational and in any movement of attention. We feel it as we are vehicles for it, in every waking moment, in all our waking buds, those conjoinings of diverse feelings. We know it as we live it in a world persistently in change, onflowing. Again, there is no experient-world dualism here. We are all immersed in “the one all-embracing fact which is the advancing history of the one Universe. This community of the world . . . is the matrix for all begetting, and [its] essence is process with retention of connectedness” (AI 150; cf. PR 79). The creativity itself at work in each concrescence is affected by constraints on possibilities of feeling within any concrescence. For Whitehead, these include all that precedes the concrescence and so has lasting, “objectively immortal,” effect as stubborn fact (PR xiv), and the categoreal obligations discussed below. Further, no concrescence can escape the extensive relationships constraining the ways in which things may be arranged if they are to be coordinated and objects are to endure. In his metaphysics, Whitehead views the spatiotemporal continuum as abstracted from an extensive continuum and more generally from extension, which “apart from its spatialization and temporalization, is that general scheme of relationships providing the capacity that many objects can be welded into the real unity of one experience” (67). On this view, concrescence does not take place in space-time but each actual entity in the “temporal” world is associated with a location in space-time (e.g. 68), just as our consciousness is. In what Whitehead designates perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, “there is clear, distinct consciousness of the ‘extensive’ relations of the world. These rela-


145

tions include the ‘extensiveness’ of space and the ‘extensiveness’ of time. Undoubtedly, this clarity, at least in regard to space, is obtained only in ordinary perception through the senses” (61). When you see a table before you or a whale in the sea, you are, in effect, at the far end of a process in which actual entities associated with photoreceptors in the eye feel—physically prehend—photons reflected off the surface of the table or the whale. The actual entities associated with photoreceptors in the eye transmit feelings, through a chain of actual entities, each of which may transform the data they receive and transmit them, with thus transformed feelings eventually reaching actual entities associated with neurons in the brain, which physically prehend the data transmitted to them and in their turn integrate them and realize a satisfaction whose objective datum includes the table or the whale, extended and locatable before one, so that things seem to be where we experience them as being (118). The table you see, like anything you see, is as in an appearance, a complex, projective perception, rather than as it is “in itself.” Whitehead’s account of the extensive continuum is designed in part to explain how the physical sciences have the widespread application they do have when one adopts specific science-appropriate but limiting boundary assumptions, methods, and practices, including the reliance on observations made exclusively in the mode of presentational immediacy (309, 333). The extensive relationships at play here enable the many actual entities to be “welded into the real unity of one experience” in a coordinated fashion that retains and transmits those extensive relationships, which “are more fundamental than their more special spatial and temporal relationships. Extension is the most general scheme of real potentiality, providing the background for all other organic relations” (PR 67). Jorge Nobo, one of Whitehead’s most sensitive and unstinting expositors, holds that Whitehead’s creativity and extensive continuum are distinguishable but inseparable aspects of an ultimate reality, and thinks Whitehead’s scheme incomplete for not explicitly including the extensive continuum within the categories (Nobo 54, 400). Together the two aspects “in their unity,” for Nobo (54, 258), “constitute an eternal extenso-creative matrix which is the ultimate metaphysical ground for the becoming, being, and the solidarity [or connectedness] of all actual entities . . . [and] in which the dynamic solidarity of the universe is rooted.”12

146

Chapter 5

The Categories of Existence and of Explanation In Whitehead’s scheme, there are eight categories of existence, or types of things involved in creative advance. Five of them, namely actual entities, prehensions, subjective forms, propositions, and contrasts have already been introduced. A sixth, multiplicities, consists of “pure disjunctions of diverse entities” (PR 22), each with a unity “constituted by the fact that all its constituent entities severally satisfy at least one condition which no other entity satisfies” (24); the unity is not the outcome of a genetic process. A mathematical set is an example of a multiplicity; the initial data for an actual entity provide another example (30). The remaining two categories of existence—nexu ¯s and eternal objects—will be introduced later in this subsection. Principles among the Categories of Explanation

The 27 categories of

explanation present principles and terms of relation used to understand or provide explanations of processes involving instances of the various types of existents, and so of events and phenomena, and “every element of our experience” (PR 3). The central reason to discuss the categories of explanation here is to begin to deepen and clarify understanding of Whitehead’s account of concrescence, preparatory to adopting important parts of it in the concrescual approximation. As a radically empirical monism of pure experience, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism gives central place among the types of existent to actual entities. The two most important principles among the categories of explanation clearly indicate this centrality. First, the fourth category, dubbed “the principle of relativity,” specifies “that the potentiality for being an element in a real concrescence of many entities into one actuality is the one general metaphysical character attaching to all entities, actual and nonactual; and that every item in its universe is involved in each concrescence. In other words, it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’” (PR 22). To be an entity is to be able to contribute determination to actual entities, or, if you will, to figure within the scope of concrescences. To be is to be feelable, prehendible, experienceable, a potential for inclusion in acts of experience. Category of explanation xviii, known as “the ontological principle,” specifies that “every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason either in the character of some actual


147

entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in the process of concrescence” (PR 24). All reasons or causes then are to be sought in one or more actual entities, whether in actual entities prehended by a specific actual entity or in that actual entity itself, specifically, in the subjective aim at satisfaction conditioning its process. The third named principle introduced among these categories also deals with concrescence or becoming. It says that “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is. . . . Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the ‘principle of process’” (PR 23). Once become, actual entities pass from immediacy of being. But their “perishing . . . does not mean that they are nothing. They remain ‘stubborn fact’” (AI 237). Actual Entities, Prehensions, Nex¯ us, and Actual Worlds

The real internal

constitution (Locke III, III, 15) of an actual entity, the becoming or process that constitutes its being, is “a concrescence of prehensions” (PR 23), and a concrescence proceeds from an initial stage of many feelings or prehensions through a succession of integrations of feelings to a satisfaction. At the start of his account, Whitehead specifies the following: Each actual entity is analyzable in an indefinite number of ways. In some modes of analysis the component elements are more abstract than in other modes of analysis. The analysis of an actual entity into ‘prehensions’ is that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities. (PR 19) . . . every prehension consists of three factors: (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. (PR 23) Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other. There are thus real individual facts of the togetherness of actual entities, which are real, individual, and particular, in the same sense in which actual entities and the prehensions are real, individual, and particular. Any such particular fact of togetherness among actual entities is called a ‘nexus’ (plural form is written ‘nexu ¯ s’). The ultimate facts of immediate actual experience are actual entities, prehensions, and nexus. All else is, for our experience, derivative abstraction. (PR 20)

The multiplicity of actual entities felt by an actual entity in its initial, receptive, phase comprises a togetherness in experience. The real individual fact of togetherness of actual entities uniquely “correlate to a concrescence is termed ‘the actual world’ correlate to that concrescence” (PR 23). Each

148

Chapter 5

actual entity has its unique standpoint and correlate unique actual world of data given for and prehended in the initial phase of concrescence. Simple Physical Prehensions and Objectification

The two main species of

“primary” prehensions or feelings are conceptual prehensions and simple physical prehensions (PR 239): Prehensions of actual entities—i.e., prehensions whose data involve actual entities— are termed ‘physical prehensions’; and prehensions of eternal objects [to be defined shortly] are termed ‘conceptual prehensions.’ Consciousness is not necessarily involved in the subjective forms of either type of prehension. (PR 23) A simple physical feeling is an act of causation. The actual entity which is the initial datum is the ‘cause,’ the simple physical feeling is the ‘effect,’ and the subject entertaining the simple physical feeling is the actual entity ‘conditioned’ by the effect. . . . All complex causal action can be reduced to a complex of such primary components. Therefore simple physical feelings will also be called ‘causal’ feelings. (PR 236) An actual entity has a perfectly definite bond with each item in the universe. . . . All actual entities in the actual world, relatively to a given actual entity as ‘subject,’ are necessarily ‘felt’ by that subject, though in general vaguely. An actual entity as felt is said to be ‘objectified’ for that subject. (PR 41)13

An actual entity, considered “formally,” is that actual entity in its own concrescual immediacy of self-realizing becoming (PR 51). Consequently, “actual things are objectively in our experience and formally exist . . . in their own completeness” (S 25). As a process, each actual entity involves prehension of the actual entities in its actual world, from its own standpoint, and incorporates in its constitution objectifications of those other entities. Each actual entity would not be the actual entity it is if the entities in its actual world were different. Thus, the Cartesian notion of a self-sufficient thinking substance is of necessity inadequate. The definite bond or prehension “of one actual entity by another actual entity is . . . analyzable 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). Thus, in addition to a formal description in terms of the process constituting its becoming, an actual entity may be described in terms of its potentiality for objectifica-


149

tion in the concrescence of other actual entities (23). Each actual entity has the potentiality for being prehended in a variety of ways and actual entities have the potential to objectify actual entities in a variety of ways, e.g., in the form of “those abstractions usually called sense-data” (S 25). Eternal Objects and Conceptual Prehensions

Eternal objects are “pure

potentials for the specific determination of fact, or forms of definiteness” or “Platonic forms” (PR 22, 43). Eternal objects are potential forms of realization that may be realized in indefinitely many occasions or nexu ¯ s. For Whitehead (23), “an eternal object can be described only in terms of its potentiality for ‘ingression’ into the becoming of actual entities; and . . . its analysis only discloses other eternal objects. It is a pure potential. The term ‘ingression’ refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity, contributing to the definiteness of that actual entity.” Eternal objects may be conceived without reference to any actual entities (PR 44) and so in this sense are pure potentials. While they are potentials for realization in more than one occasion, and for specifying the character of multiple actual occasions, they lack the full concrete particularity of actuality. “Eternal objects are . . . abstract. . . . [W]hat an eternal object is in itself . . . is comprehensible without reference to some one particular occasion of experience” (SMW 159).14 Eternal objects may be classified into sensa, which constitute the lowest grade of eternal objects, and into grades of increasing complexity, with the complexity of an eternal object based on its analyzability into a relationship of component eternal objects (PR 114, SMW 166–168). An eternal object can only ingress or “function in the concrescence of an actual entity in one of three ways: (i) it can be an element in the definiteness of some objectified nexus, or of some single actual entity, which is the datum of a feeling; (ii) it can be an element in the definiteness of the subjective form of some feeling; or (iii) it can be an element in the datum of a conceptual, or propositional, feeling” (PR 290).15 In the naturalization of Whitehead that serves as a basis for the concrescual approximation, Whitehead’s eternal objects in their third mode of ingression, namely, as they figure in conceptual prehensions, are replaced by concepts.16

150

Nex¯ us, Societies, and Defining Characteristics

Chapter 5

Prehension or feeling is the

primary form of relatedness, and any feeling of one actual entity by another conjoins the emerging subject and the actual entity felt in a nexus, a particular case of togetherness among actual entities. A nexus may be as fleeting as a momentary conjunction, or may have enduring order: A nexus enjoys ‘social order’ where (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings of that common form. Such a nexus is called a ‘society,’ and the common form is the ‘defining characteristic’ of the society. . . . The reproduction of the common form throughout the nexus is due to the genetic relations of the members of the nexus among each other, and to the additional fact that genetic relations include feelings of the common form. Thus the defining characteristic is inherited throughout the nexus, each member deriving it from those other members of the nexus which are antecedent to its own concrescence. A nexus enjoys “personal order” when (α) it is a ‘society,’ and (β) when the genetic relatedness of its members orders these members ‘serially.’ (PR 34) 17

Whitehead calls personally ordered nexu ¯ s “enduring objects” or “enduring creatures”; all real things that endure—share a defining characteristic throughout a series of concrescences—are societies (PR 34; cf. 198, AI 204). Human beings and other organisms are enduring creatures, and the life of a man, for example, is “a historic route of actual occasions” (PR 89, 92). These concrete occasions “are bound together into one society by a partial identity of form, and by the peculiarly full summation of its predecessors which each moment of the life-history gathers into itself” (S 27). Whitehead later noted that personal identity serves “as a natural matrix for all transitions of life, and is changed and variously figured by the things that enter it; so that it differs in its character at different times” (AI 187). The concrescual approximation takes this statement to articulate the Jamesian I-me dialectic, with the me being the natural matrix for all transitions in one’s life—one’s “personal matrix” for short—and the basis for Jamesian personal identity, and the I being the outcome of transitions, the emergent subject who with superjection enters and reconfigures, however slightly, the identifying matrix, so that as one acts from, manifests, and alters, one’s own characteristics, so is one’s personal identity altered.


151

Whitehead sometimes distinguishes defining characteristics from these identifying matrices or personal orders, labeling the former “essential” and referring to the latter as having “accidental qualities which vary as circumstances alter” (AI 204, 205; ESP 85). Nevertheless, the concrescual approximation treats Whitehead’s defining characteristics as including personal matrices, so that the defining characteristic of a human is that individual’s personal matrix, and is transformed, however slightly, by each occasion of the individual’s experience. Each actual entity arising in the life of a human inherits its defining characteristic, and may contribute by acquisition or disuse to modification of that characteristic, for instance, by taking on subordinate characteristics, many generally associable with social selves (like those involved in knowledge of a language) (PR 89–90). In fact, while being a society, a human may belong to indefinitely many societies and have indefinitely many social selves. Each society elicits its defining characteristic “into importance for its members, and secures the reproduction of its membership” (PR 92). Thus, to belong to a society, an actual entity must order its experience in membership-securing characteristic ways. “A society is only efficient through its individual members. Thus in a society, the members can only exist by reason of the laws [cf. constitutive rules] which dominate the society, and the laws [cf. constitutive rules] only come into being by reason of the analogous characters” of its members (91). Finally, “every society requires a social background, of which it is itself a part. In reference to any given society the world of actual entities is to be conceived as forming a background in layers of social order, the defining characteristics becoming wider and more general as we widen the background” (PR 90), on out to “a society of electromagnetic occasions” (92) and beyond. Hybrid Physical Prehensions

While physical and conceptual feelings are

the primary forms of prehension, other feelings, labeled “impure” prehensions, arise in each concrescence with the integration of conceptual prehensions and physical prehensions (PR 33, 184). In addition, both conceptual and physical feeling are at play in hybrid physical prehensions, which can arise at the start of a concrescence, prior to integration. “A hybrid physical feeling originates for its subject a conceptual feeling with the same datum as that of the conceptual feeling of the antecedent subject” (246), including the very appearance of the world, as felt immediately before; it “is the prehension by one subject of a conceptual prehension, or

152

Chapter 5

of an ‘impure’ prehension, belonging to the mentality of another subject” (107); “a pure physical prehension is the transmission of physical feeling, while hybrid prehension is the transmission of mental feeling” (308). Further, as a consequence of hybrid prehension, one may directly or in memory prehend one’s former buds, thoughts, or satisfactions. In fact, for Whitehead, hybrid prehension transmits a living person’s defining characteristic from moment to moment of its existence (107). Although hybrid prehensions (of God) play an essential role in Whitehead’s account of human experience, and in his monism, as will become clear, Whitehead did not mention them in his categoreal scheme. As noted already, Whitehead also calls simple physical feelings “causal feelings.” For the concrescual approximation, hybrid prehensions are causal feelings too. For the processual approximation, the basic feeling of causation is of intentional causation, of something making something happen, and this includes co-conscious transitions in which the outcome of one intentional bud is an intentionally causal factor in a subsequent intentional bud. The concrescual approximation construes Whitehead’s notion of simple physical feelings as a generalization, in part, of feelings of intentional causation in human experience, often involving the sort of impingement sometimes associated with sensation, and the causally efficacious feeling of the functioning of the body. Further, as specified in chapter 6, it views Jamesian co-conscious transition as involving hybrid physical feeling of one bud by another along the same personal historic route. Given the notion of hybrid prehensions along a historic route, we can readily appreciate the smooth flow of waking experience, which includes no drop off to a zero degree of mental feeling after each perception, thought, or bud. When thinking, each momentary satisfaction achieved figures in the start of the next bud, each conclusion is a perch for a new flight. Thus, it is arguably an explanatory deficiency of Whitehead’s principal metaphysical works that he does not explicitly point out the importance of this form of hybrid prehension in sustaining action and sequences of thought and reasoning and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. The Categoreal Obligations If the phenomenon of onflow—as concrescence issuing into concrescence within one’s own life amid surroundings—is the ultimate given of radical empiricism, a principal task for the radically empirical philosopher is to


153

describe the most general constraints operating in ongoing concrescence. Whitehead was arguably the first metaphysician to attempt this, although he credits Kant with being the first philosopher to conceive “of an act of experience as a constructive functioning,” albeit one that reduces experience essentially to knowledge, and that views experience as moving from the subjective to the objective rather than, as Whitehead has it, from the objective to the subjective (PR 156, 155). Whitehead’s nine highly abstract categoreal obligations are meant to do nothing less than state the requirements conditioning all concrescual processes, and thus governing every actual entity, every act of experience. In chapter 6, I use a variety of readily understandable examples to show how these obligations, which are described compactly in the following pages, function in our everyday experience. The order in which Whitehead presents the categoreal obligations loosely corresponds to the sequence of concrescual phases. The first three categoreal obligations have significant application to the initial or transitional stage of physical feelings—alternately called the conformal, dative, primary, or responsive phase of concrescence—in which prior actual entities are physically prehended. The next five obligations cover the ingression of eternal objects in the initial and supplementary phases, involving simple conceptual feelings, comparative feelings (the simplest of which integrates a conceptual feeling with a physical feeling from which it derives) and, in “high-grade” organisms, intellectual feelings. A supplementary phase succeeds to the initial purely physical phase. This supplementary phase starts with two subordinate phases of conceptual origination, and then passes into phases of integration, and of re-integration, in which propositional feelings, and intellectual feelings, may emerge. . . . [T]he first two [subordinate] phases . . . are not phases of conceptual analysis, but of conceptual valuation. The subsequent analytic phases involve propositional feelings, and in certain circumstances issue in consciousness. (PR 247)

Throughout the supplementary phase, with its subordinate phases, concrescence proceeds in accord with the subjective aim; the seventh and eighth categoreal obligations, the Categories of Subjective Harmony and of Subjective Intensity, deal importantly with subjective aims. (i) The Category of Subjective Unity. The many feelings which belong to an incomplete phase in the process of an actual entity, though unintegrated by reason of the incompleteness of the phase, are compatible for integration by reason of the unity of their subject. (PR 26)

154

Chapter 5

This category is one expression of the general principle that the one subject is the final end which conditions each component feeling. Thus the superject is already present as a condition, determining how each feeling conducts its own process. Although in any incomplete phase there are many unsynthesized feelings, yet each of these feelings is conditioned by the other feelings. The process of each feeling is such as to render that feeling integrable with the other feelings. (PR 223)

This first categoreal obligation establishes concrescence as a process of subject- (superject-) formation, a valuative process unified by its aim at a subject, an aim that affects all feelings arising or figuring in the initial phase and in all subsequent phases of concrescence. The data of physical feelings are compatible for integration with conceptual feelings in integrated feelings whose datum will be some form of contrast (PR 240), and which may be integrated into more complex feelings. The process of integration eventually culminates with the aim-conditioned satisfaction, and concrescence is a process of value-compatible integration. The basis for valuation—the initial subjective aim, as we shall see—is there at the start, aiding in the treatment of initial data: This doctrine of the inherence of the subject in the process of its production requires that in the primary phase of the subjective process there be a conceptual feeling of subjective aim: the physical and other feelings originate as steps towards realizing this conceptual aim through their treatment of initial data. This basic conceptual feeling suffers simplification in the successive phases of the concrescence. It starts with conditioned alternatives, and by successive decisions is reduced to coherence. . . . In each phase the corresponding conceptual feeling is the “subjective end” characteristic of that phase. The many feelings, in any incomplete phase, are necessarily compatible with each other by reason of their individual conformity to the subjective end evolved for that phase. (PR 224; cf. 45, 150)

The concrescual approximation does not accept Whitehead’s account of how the initial conceptual feeling of the subjective aim originates; I continue presenting Whitehead’s account here, and discuss this difference in the next section. It is crucial to note here that, for Whitehead, the primary phase in the concrescual process of all temporal actual entities (all actual entities but God) is a phase of physical feelings, where a “physical feeling” is defined as the feeling of another actuality (PR 225). For Whitehead, but not for the concrescual approximation, “the primary phase is a hybrid physical feeling of God . . . which reproduces for the subject the data and valuation of God’s conceptual feeling” and functions as the initial subjective aim (225) or “lure for feeling” (85). The initial subjective aim, which


155

“suffers simplification in the successive phases” (224), is not determinative of the outcome of concrescence, and therefore the functioning of Whitehead’s God is compatible with concrescual freedom and creativity. The initial subjective aim, and each subsequent incomplete phase of concrescence, “is a lure to the supervention of those integrating feelings by which the mere potentiality of the proposition [that this subjective aim be realized in this actual world], with its outstanding indeterminations as to its setting amid the details of the universe, is converted into the fully determinate actuality” (224). This category does not say that each actual entity realizes the widest possible integration of feelings compatible with the initial subjective aim, but that wide integration is not precluded at the outset of concrescence. The category of subjective unity admits the full range of possible depth and scope or balanced complexity of the concrescual process. “Here ‘complexity’ means the realization of contrasts, of contrasts of contrasts, and so on; and ‘balance’ means the absence of attenuations due to elimination of contrasts which some elements in the pattern would introduce and other elements inhibit” (PR 278). Each occasion, with its initial subjective aim functioning as an ideal in a physically felt actual world is “a synthesis of the ideal with the real” (AI 277), and the elimination of contrasts is inevitable: “Every occasion of actuality is in its own nature finite. . . . Whatever is realized in any one occasion of experience necessarily excludes the unbounded welter of contrary possibilities” (276). Sometimes the excluded is simply irrelevant and not felt (PR 148), and often the excluded is reduced to a felt background factor, as the perceptual background is in most of our normal experience and quite plainly when one is thinking “hard” about something and is very inattentive to the surround. Further, a feeling—say, an itch— may be pushed into the background, yet held in harmony as deferred to a later moment. Also, a pain or strong emotion may make for a narrow, intense satisfaction, in which many feelings initially capable of being integrated in one contrastive feeling are eliminated. But, sometimes exclusion occurs with a sense of discord—distaste, repulsion—that plainly influences affective tone: “The more intense the discordant feeling, the further the retreat from perfection [i.e., from absence of mutually inhibiting feelings]” (AI 256). Here, data that are prehended negatively are eliminated from feeling in such a way as to hold them inoperative, although the subjective forms of those negative prehensions have some affect on the subjective

156

Chapter 5

form of the emotional complex with which the satisfaction’s objective datum is felt (PR 23–24, 41). For Whitehead, the first three categoreal obligations “have an air of ultimate metaphysical generality.” The first category “has to do with selfrealization” (PR 222). It allows for the onflowing synthesis of feelings functioning in incomplete phases; the second and third categories, respectively of Objective Identity and Objective Diversity, impose constraints on the outcome of concrescence but are given little explicit application in the concrescual approximation. The second category requires that many feelings of an object—say, via both hybrid physical prehension and direct physical prehension—in the early phases of a concrescence be integrated into a single feeling of that object in the satisfaction. Thus, if actual entity C initially feels another actual entity, A, physically, in direct fashion, and mediately through its prehension of yet another actual entity, B, and B’s physical prehension of A, the feelings of A will be integrated into a single coherent objectification of A in C’s final satisfaction (226). The third category requires that each concrescence provide a definite but diverse status for each of its diverse elements (227).18 As diverse elements are integrated in contrasts leading to the satisfaction, each contrast thus “must be infected with the individual particularities of each of the relata,” so that the contrast expresses their particularities “and can relate no others” (228). With the fourth categoreal obligation, Whitehead’s focus passes from concern with the most general aspects of concrescence to phases in the evolving of the concrescual process and to categories governing the role of conceptual feelings, and “according to which some eternal objects are prehended positively and others are prehended negatively” (PR 248). “Some are felt and others are eliminated” (248) as the actual world becomes contoured by value, as abstraction, association, and imagination come into play, or not, and thought and satisfaction take shape. The later categoreal obligations will play a more prominent role in the concrescual approximation than the first three obligations. (iv) The Category of Conceptual Valuation. From each physical feeling there is the derivation of a purely conceptual feeling whose datum is the eternal object determinant of the definiteness of the actual entity, or of the nexus, physically felt. (PR 26) The mental pole starts with the conceptual registration of the physical pole. This conceptual registration constitutes the sole datum of experience according to the sensationalist school. Writers of this school [including Hume and Kant, specifically]


157

entirely neglect physical feelings, originating in the physical pole. . . . The subjective form of a conceptual feeling is valuation. . . . Thus the conceptual registration is conceptual valuation; and conceptual valuation introduces creative purpose. The mental pole introduces the subject as a determinant of its own concrescence. (PR 248)

The category is termed that of conceptual valuation, not conceptual registration although it involves registering eternal objects determinant of the definiteness of physically felt entities. When a conceptual feeling appears by derivation from the physical pole, it appears with the initial subjective aim already functioning to determine subjective form (PR 19, 224), so that the conceptual feeling has a valuational aspect: conceptual feelings involve not just blind registration of eternal objects exemplified in felt entities but valuation of them, up or down, in a way that is compatible with the nascent aim. Here the concrescual approximation sees interest, linked with attention in preceding approximations, at work: “The integration of each simple physical feeling with its conceptual counterpart produces in a subsequent phase a physical feeling whose subjective form . . . has gained or lost subjective intensity according to the valuation up, or the valuation down, in the conceptual feeling.”19 (248) The valuation up is a kind of selection that embodies value, as in the service of a subjective aim, or of a motivating disposition which happens to have been awakened. Part of what we prehend comes from the prehended entity and is physical in nature and part of it is conceptual in nature, coming “out of our own head,” as James put it when talking of human perception, from past experience, memory, and from chreods serving operative subjective aims and motivating dispositions. In this sense, concrescence involves an internalization of the external, a taking of the physically prehended into a form susceptible to conceptual integration. Nonetheless, the physical and conceptual prehensions themselves are always within experience. There is no shift from one domain, the physical, to another, the mental or conceptual. Rather, the mental and physical are poles within experience, the physical feeling here being integrated with a conceptual counterpart, although “in the complex subsequent integrations, we find that the conceptual counterpart has a role in detachment from the physical feeling out of which it originates” (249). (v) The Category of Conceptual Reversion. There is secondary origination of conceptual feelings with data which are partially identical with, and partially diverse from, the eternal objects forming the data in the primary phase of the mental pole; the determination of identity and diversity depending on the subjective aim at attaining depth of intensity by reason of contrast. (PR 249; cf. 26)

158

Chapter 5

The reversion here may be read as a reverting or opening to past practices and associations, which can then originate new conceptual feelings. Skipping several steps in the embodied process, it is, for example, as if physical prehension involving a “red” sensum associable with electromagnetic radiation of a suitable wavelength was followed by a seeing of red with conceptual valuation up or down, and then with reversion, by way of a readiness to perceive that red within an ongoing course of action, or via an association called into play by that red, so that, for example, one thinks of it as blood red or begins to recall an event involving that red, or by way of disposition and imagination conceives a desire to capture that very red in paint. The operation of this category constitutes the second phase of the mental pole, following the first phase of conceptual registration, and may involve the prehension of eternal objects related to but other than those having ingression into, exemplified in, and determinant of the definiteness of, the actual entity or the nexus, physically felt and conceptually valuated. With categoreal obligation v then we are in the supplementary phase “governed by the private ideal, gradually shaped in the process itself; whereby the many feelings . . . are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation immediately felt as private” (PR 212). In this second phase the proximate novelties are conceptually felt. This is the process by which the subsequent enrichment of subjective forms, both in qualitative pattern, and in intensity through contrast, is made possible by the positive conceptual prehension of relevant alternatives. . . . It is the category by which novelty enters the world; so that even amid stability there is never undifferentiated endurance. But, as the category states, reversion is always limited by the necessary inclusion of elements identical with elements in feelings of the antecedent phase. By the Category of Subjective Unity, and by the seventh Category of Subjective Harmony, to be explained later, all origination of feelings is governed by the subjective imposition of aptitude for final synthesis. (PR 249)

For Whitehead, the notions of compatibility for synthesis in contrasts and of proximacy hinge on “the hybrid physical feeling of the relevancies conceptually ordered in God’s experience” (PR 250) and thus on the initial subjective aim; the concrescual approximation does without hybrid prehensions of God, and defines proximate novelties, and derives initial subjective aims, otherwise than Whitehead does (see section 5.4), but it otherwise adopts much of Whitehead’s concrescual analysis, including giving prime importance to initial subjective aims. Also, for Whitehead, while


159

the phase of reversion realizes direct connection with the antecedent phase, it aims at contrast, because contrast promotes depth of intensity in the satisfaction, “subject to the conditions of its concrescence” (249; cf. 277). The phrase “conditions of its concrescence” allows for an interpretation of proximate relevance, which for Whitehead is “relevance as in the primordial nature of God” (46), without reference to God. The concrescual approximation treats the proximate relevancies—the relevant alternatives comprising the overall “lure for feeling”—as having much to do with the conditions of concrescence, that is, in human experience, with the operating chreods, the activated propensities and variety of things on one’s mind, and the intentional bundle (introduced in the processual approximation), as well as with the experient organism’s habits, dispositions, memory, in short, its defining characteristic or personal matrix. That is, the proximate relevancies are all the conceivable relevant alternatives, compatible for synthesis given the forming subjective aim, the actual world, and the personal matrix inherited by the subject actually in formation. In the concrescual approximation, reversion often involves a drawing on (or reverting to) past experience in the form of memory as enshrined in Jamesian “paths of irradiation” (J2 112), or other vehicles of canalization.20 With conceptual reversion a concrescence may become autonomous, selfcreating, moving beyond inheritance of “the past as an objective constituent . . . surviving objectively” in the earlier phases of the experient (AI 218). Nobo (86–87) observes that “the occasion’s three earlier [subordinate] phases of existence are devoid of novelty, whether physical or conceptual. This is why the dative phase, the conformal phase, and the phase of conceptual reproduction, are construed as unoriginative; they are really involved in the creation of a new occasion, but the content they give to that occasion—physical or conceptual—is not new. The truly originative phases are the supplemental phases that begin with the phase of conceptual reversion.”21 This phase marks the start of an “autonomous process of selfrealization” (Nobo 122) or of “autonomous concrescence.” That is, conceptual reversion marks the start of an intermediate stage of concrescence “constituted by the acquisition of novel content, which is the individual contribution of the immediate subject for the re-shaping of its primary phase of re-enaction into its final phase of anticipation” (AI 192). Here one’s past experience, enlivened memory, may begin to contribute to originating conception as intelligence manifest in the heart of flux meets

160

Chapter 5

novelty in a present that is at once a remembering and a creative act. At a minimum, as adjustment to novelty begins, as inherited expectancies and the hybridly prehended appearance of the world absorb detail of new physical prehensions, aims are modulated, defined. The drawing on past experience is energized by and under the impress of subjective aim, and the proximate relevancies function in “a ferment of qualitative valuation” (210–211), in which combinations and syntheses of new or re-versions of available concepts may arise. That is, starting with reversion, concepts felt in previous buds may, in interplay with physical and conceptual feelings, contribute to the origination of new conceptual feelings, newly feelable concepts and images, by combining, synthesizing, and enriching concepts felt earlier, as well as by extrapolating or interpolating from them into new domains. Although the possible combinations and concepts may be felt, conceptually prehended, they may not happen to be included in conscious contrasts, functioning instead “in a halo of obscure relations” on the fringe of experience (J1 276). However, they may be called into active relevance or may lure and secure attention, and in either case may affect subsequent integration.22 (vi) The Category of Transmutation. When (in accordance with category [iv], or with categories [iv] and [v]) one and the same conceptual feeling is derived impartially by a prehending subject from its analogous simple physical feelings of various actual entities in its actual world, then, in a subsequent phase of integration of these simple physical feelings together with the derivate conceptual feeling, the prehending subject may transmute the datum of this conceptual feeling into a characteristic of some nexus containing those prehended actual entities among its members, or of some part of that nexus. In this way the nexus (or its part), thus characterized, is the objective datum of a feeling entertained by this prehending subject. It is evident that the complete datum of the transmuted feeling is a contrast, namely, “the nexus, as one, in contrast with the eternal object.” This type of contrast is one of the meanings of the notion “qualification of physical substance by quality.” (PR 27) Such a transmutation of simple physical feelings of many actualities into one physical feeling of a nexus as one is called a “transmuted feeling.” (PR 251)

Whitehead’s process of transmutation, treated at length in chapter 6 as central to perceptual experience and to proposition-formation, is a process of simplification and abstraction in which a nexus is perceived “as a unity, characterized by qualities derived from its individual members and their interconnections” (AI 213). The process involves a subject-in-formation


161

physically prehending a multiplicity of actual entities scattered through a nexus, conceptually valuating those feelings, and then, by analogy based on the eternal object implicated in those several conceptual feelings, fusing them into a derivate but dominant conceptual feeling, and relegating into irrelevance, or negatively prehending, differences between the definite actual entities. The eternal object impartially characterizing the actual entities serves to introduce an impartial reference to a whole nexus and the subject prehends the transmuted physical feelings of the nexus as qualified by that eternal object. In short: “The qualities shared by many individuals are fused into one dominating impression. This dominating prehension is integrated with the nexus, or with some portion of it, perceived as a unity illustrating that quality” (AI 213). Transmuted physical feelings constitute “our usual way of consciously prehending the world” (PR 253), and the integration constituting their formation is effected in accord with subjective aim: to move from many conceptual feelings to a dominant conceptual feeling that characterizes the nexus of concern involves valuation up intensely enough to secure nexus identification—to raise figure from ground—and, normally, the discrimination of objects. Thus, while the analogizing involved in transmutation is not done by a reflecting subject, it is typically influenced, even guided by, the subject-in-formation with its expectancies poised for application. (In instances that are not so action-based, the analogizing may be thought of as dependent on a kind of harmony or coherence arising from resonance among similar feelings.) To the extent that discernment or coming to be aware of pattern characterizes understanding, then prehending a nexus as unified by a sensum or relational pattern may be felt and/or described as an interpretative act of understanding. However, Whitehead’s category of transmutation appears to be restricted to the derivation of conceptual feelings from simple, not hybrid, physical feelings. In the concrescual approximation, although the category of transmutation has its plainest application in sense-perception, it also applies to other forms of abstraction, generalization, and conceptformation, each involving the contrast of nexus and qualifying eternal object (cf. PR 254). If a prehending subject derives one and the same conceptual feeling from analogous physical feelings of nexu ¯ s (enduring objects)—say, humans as wearers of a common uniform—then the prehending subject may subsequently transmute the datum into a conception

162

Chapter 5

characterizing a nexus—say, membership on a team (cf. AI 213). And one may then proceed to higher-order transmutations, with which general observations or hypotheses take shape. Moreover, one may have hybrid physical feelings of former buds or thoughts involving transmuted feelings; with them, one may turn away from connection with physical nexu ¯ s and, with “indifference to truth or falsehood” (PR 275), may entertain imaginative propositional feelings with predicates derived by reversion from those of earlier propositional feelings (cf. 263). That is, one may generalize (transmutatively) from already general observations, and so, as for instance a radically empirical speculative philosopher might, one may proceed to develop “self-justifying thoughts . . . by the complex process of generalizing from particular topics, of imaginatively schematizing the generalizations, and finally by renewed comparison of the imagined scheme with the direct experience to which it should apply” (16). Finally: “Conceptual feelings and simple causal feelings constitute the two main species of ‘primary’ feelings. All other feelings of whatever complexity arise out of a process of integration which starts with a phase of these primary feelings” (PR 239). The categories of transmutation and conceptual reversion may, at this juncture, be thought of as indicating the principal modes of forming contrasts and integrating feelings, namely, abstraction (including imaginative generalization) and association (including imaginative origination of concepts, partially diverse from and partially identical with concepts prehended earlier). Thus, with these two categories, which often function together, Whitehead has presented crucial combinatorial tools for generating the objective data of the boundless variety of integrative feelings, tools that may yield conjunctions and arrangements of data in higher-order contrasts constituting new perceptual, analytic, theoretical, or imaginative syntheses. Note that in addition to these tools one requires the operation of hybrid prehension of one’s preceding buds, e.g. of “conceptual relationships in antecedent mental occasions” (IS 245), if one is to generate an account of the formation of complex thoughts with propositional content, and to handle streams of such thoughts. With the operation of conceptual reversion and transmutation we also witness the further play of interest, first evident with conceptual valuation. There is further selection, a further strengthening of the mental pole felt in focusing, investment, as attention elicits the determinate objective datum of satisfaction, possibly on the way to integration in conscious, intellectual feelings, which, “in their


163

primary function, are concentration of attention, involving increase of importance” (PR 273). What interests and becomes important in the moment is what attracts us—whether in the likes of relatively active seekings or in relatively passive responses to stimuli that awaken dispositions.23 Categoreal obligations v and vi focus on the data of integrative feelings; the next two categories deal centrally with the subjective forms of integrative feelings. (vii) The Category of Subjective Harmony. The valuations of conceptual feelings are mutually determined by the adaptation of those feelings to be contrasted elements congruent with the subjective aim. (PR 27)24

In accord with categoreal obligation i, the valuations compatible with the shaping aim are available for further integration. As synthesis proceeds, as the data of integrable feelings had in supervened phases are integrated into complex contrasts, the subjective forms of those integrated feelings are mutually adapted to the subjective aim, rendering it more determinate. A conceptual feeling arises in some incomplete phase of its subject and passes into a supervening phase in which it has found integration with other feelings. In this supervening phase, the eternal object, which is the datum of the conceptual feeling, is an ingredient in some sort of datum in which the other components are the objective data of other feelings in the earlier phase. This new datum is the integrated datum; it will be some sort of ‘contrast.’ . . . But in the formation of this integrated datum there must be determination of exactly how this eternal object has ingress into that datum conjointly with the remaining eternal objects and actual entities derived from the other feelings. This determination is effected by the subjective forms of the component conceptual feelings. (PR 240)

As the data of feelings become integrated in contrasts, the subjective forms of the supervened feelings themselves become adjusted into coherence, to procure the subjective aim: “. . . by the first categoreal obligation, this [supervening] subjective form is not independent of the other feelings in the earlier phase” (PR 240). Whitehead terms this “correlation of subjective forms . . . ‘the mutual sensitivity’ of prehensions” (235). The subjective form of the integrated feeling secures a patterned intensiveness that regulates the relative importance of elements of the datum felt in that integrated feeling. Generally, any conceptual feeling, which is itself a valuation of a qualitative eternal object, subsequently functions in an integrated feeling felt with a subjective form that enhances or attenuates the importance of the eternal object felt earlier, depending on whether it is valued up or down.

164

Chapter 5

The mutual sensitivity will also reflect the strength or intensiveness of the subjective forms brought interdependently into adjustment. Whitehead maintains that these three characteristics—the qualitative, relating to how the eternal object is “to be utilized,” its function relative to the subjective aim; the “intensive, determining what importance that utilization is to have,” its weight, central or peripheral, in the moment; and the interdependence of valuations, the dependence of each on “the other feelings in its phase of origination”—are “the outcome of the subjective aim of the subject, what it is itself integrally to be, in its own character of the superject of its own process” (241). Thus, recurring to the general example of perception in the course of action, as focus shifts from one object to another, we can discern in analysis: the sensory recognition of a qualitative aspect of the latter object, serving to identify the object; the focusing on it with sufficient intensity to further action, but not necessarily so as to disrupt thinking; and the adjustment of other physical feelings and sensations. All three characteristics contribute to the specificity of concrescence and satisfaction, as the world is reconfigured into fresh “‘appearance’ [, which] is the effect of the activity of the mental pole, whereby the qualities and coordinations of the given physical world undergo transformation” (AI 211). The momentary subjective aim itself is an aim at an end (whether some state of affairs in the world, knowledge, understanding, imaginative achievement) which takes shape in the process of concrescence, and is not fully determinate until the subject and satisfaction are formed. As the subjective aim takes shape, contents of feelings, including physical feelings of actual entities in the subject’s actual world, are integrated into a complex contrast—the objective datum of the satisfaction—while the subjective forms of those feelings become synthesized under the guidance of the subjective aim into an emotional complex. This process may include experiencing what gets reported as the adjudication of conflicting aims, the conciliation of incompatibles, so that, for instance, conflicting possibilities or subjective aims become harmonized under a prevailing preference. Throughout the process the subjective aim, like a desire shaping and taking shape in an experience, is indivisible in the sense that it concerns the experient as a final superject, and dominates the determination of feelings contributory to the synthesis of the many feelings into a final satisfaction. As our perceptions and thoughts take shape the dominating value of the concrescence takes shape and defines itself as it governs interest in the field of


165

experience and possibility; any element in the formation is in actuality inextricable from and flavored by the subjective aim. With this category, Whitehead thus emphasizes the role subjective aims have in ensuring the harmony of each concrescence. Because that harmony is an aesthetic one, of feelings, Whitehead on occasion termed the category that of Aesthetic Harmony (e.g. PR 255). This category accounts for the adjustment of subjective forms so as to arrive at a definitive subjective aim and subject fulfilling an ideal of aesthetic adaptation in which diversities are brought into compatible contrast (255); the first categoreal obligation (that of subjective unity) affords the potential for integrating the data of component feelings into complex contrasts. With the next, eighth, category, Whitehead introduces concern with another “element in the immediate feelings of the concrescent subject . . . [namely] the anticipatory feelings of the transcendent future in its relation to immediate fact” (278), and so with how a concrescence affects its immediate successor and conversely with how each concrescence bears the charge of its immediate inheritance, as James had it, each moment appropriating the preceding moment together with all that it called its own (J1 401). (viii) The Category of Subjective Intensity. The subjective aim, whereby there is origination of conceptual feeling, is at intensity of feeling (α) in the immediate subject, and (β) in the relevant future. This double aim—at the immediate present and the relevant future—is less divided than appears on the surface. For the determination of the relevant future, and the anticipatory feeling respecting provision for its grade of intensity, are elements affecting the immediate complex of feeling. The greater part of morality hinges on the determination of relevance in the future. The relevant future consists of those elements in the anticipated future which are felt with effective intensity by the present subject by reason of the real potentiality for them to be derived from itself. (PR 27) The ‘subjective aim,’ which controls the becoming of a subject, is that subject feeling a proposition with the subjective form of purpose to realize it in that process of selfcreation. (PR 25)

If the intensity with which a subjective aim is felt is weak—in terms, say, of strength of relevant emotion or desire, or depth of commitment, or detail of anticipation—then the relevant future to be derived from the aim is relatively weakly ordered, where the meaning of order is with respect to purpose or “adaptation for the attainment of an end,” a specific satisfaction (PR 83, 84). The intensity may be strong when we are engaged in purposive action: perceptually, the surround is structured purposively, into an appearance

166

Chapter 5

functioning for the attainment of an end. Anticipatory feelings are pivotal in this. The appearances congruent with a subjective aim and realizing it or carrying it forward are purposive, and because they are transmitted via hybrid physical prehensions, are physical as well. These anticipatory feelings include “physical purposes,” which, by their valuations, “determine the relative efficiency of the various feelings to enter into the objectifications of that subject in the creative advance beyond itself” (277), most notably in the ensuing bud. Subsequently, Whitehead explicitly connected such functioning with that of Appearances, which “by a process of emphasis and combination,” simplify the initial data constituting the “primary Reality” for an actual entity (AI 281; cf. 213). Thus, the anticipating subject—whose satisfaction Whitehead calls an anticipation (192)—projects forward or superjects a world and the ensuing re-enactive subject (193) inherits a world that is consonant with the world as physically and then conceptually and integratively prehended in the subjective harmony of the preceding bud. The world thus configured, as organized by subjective aim, is what is superjected, and the objective datum of that superjecting bud is typically so powerful in the subsequent, hybridly prehending, bud’s actual world that appearance has shed the note of derivation. It lives in our consciousness as the world presented to us for our enjoyment and our purposes. . . . The present occasion in this personal life inherits with peculiar dominance the antecedent experiences in this succession. But these antecedent experiences include the ‘appearances’ as in those occasions. These antecedent appearances are part of the real functioning of the real actual world as it stands in the primary phase of the immediately present occasion. It is a real fact of nature that the world has appeared thus from the standpoint of these antecedent occasions of the personal life. (AI 212)

Meanwhile, the forming bud’s inherited subjective form re-enacts or carries forward that of the preceding bud, for the overarching subjective aim is at significant intensity in both buds, ensuring that there is continuity of subjective form from one bud to the next (AI 183). Inherited appearance, the world perceived under influence of aim, is felt in the appropriate hybrid physical prehension with the inherited subjective form of purpose, which functions, often via anticipation, in the valuation and integration of new data. If some feelings should break in upon a dominant aim from other avenues (such as bodily disturbances, the functioning of “sensitive nerves”) (189), these may be rendered compatible with the inherited aim by accommodation, as if with the clause ‘to be attended to very soon’; if they are so


167

disruptive as to unseat the initial subjective aim that aim is nonetheless reflected in the final subjective form of the concrescence. Now, as Whitehead’s category of transmutation will be instrumental for the concrescual approximation’s treatment of perception, so the Category of Subjective Intensity will be instrumental for the concrescual approximation’s treatment of action, and the coordinated flow of perception and action will become a flow involving transmutation-based perception, anticipatory subjective intensity, and outward or actional transmutation (introduced in section 6.4). Perceptions then are substantive parts extracted from processes, but each perception is felt in an actual entity that incorporates anticipation. The subjective aim carries into the relevant future, as ensuing action is derived from anticipatory feeling, and as inherited appearance carries forward an environment immediately structured by aim—an aim that calls into relevance lures for feeling, which function via readinesses to perceive and act. Thus, with the Category of Subjective Intensity, one can account for James’s causality-at-work in personal activity-situations and Searle’s transitivity of intentional causation due to an operative prior intention. According to a relatively easy-going account of Whitehead’s, if the mental activity involved in a concrescence introduces conceptual novelty, and if that novelty is “made effective by its re-iteration and by the added emphasis on it throughout a chain of coordinated occasions” then “we have the aspect of an enduring person with a sustained purpose [read: prior intention] originated by that person and made effective in that person’s environment. Thus in this case the anticipation of kinship with the future assumes the form of purpose to transform concept into fact” (AI 194). When one acts in accord with a prior intention, anticipation is the principal vehicle for transitivity of intentional causation in the unfolding of the intention, and the anticipatory feelings are indeed “elements affecting the immediate complex of feeling” (PR 27). Hybrid physical feeling is the vehicle for this: A hybrid physical feeling originates for its subject a conceptual feeling with the same datum as that of the conceptual feeling of the antecedent subject. But the two conceptual feelings in the two subjects respectively may have different subjective forms. (PR 246)

As elaborated in section 6.4, in co-conscious transition in the course of action the same datum may function in a bud-terminating perception and

168

Chapter 5

in the initiation of action, and hence with different subjective forms. But the re-enactive subjective form derives from and is in accord with ongoing re-enaction of the dominant subjective aim or prior intention determining the relevant future. Further, the notion of an intentional bundle, introduced in the processual approximation, can be revised, with the formation of a prior intention treated as the formation of a subjective aim that endures, possibly with modification, until satisfied, rejected, or forgotten. In the concrescual approximation, the intentional bundle then becomes a bundle of such aims, each with its propensities to initiate action or to notice and consider factors relevant to it. Now, since subjective aims may be interwoven, and are capable of functioning as if mutually sensitive, as one aim may accommodate or adjust to new data or another aim (one subjective aim, e.g., incorporating, reflecting, being postponed for, coordinated with, or superseded by, some newly formed subjective aim), this bundle may better be termed a web of subjective aims. Whitehead’s account is flexible enough to get at the workings of practical near-term prior intentions each persisting with adjusted intensity of feeling in its relevant future, and of longer-term prior intentions that are in the nature of objectives (e.g. to become an architect), which have relevant futures spreading over much of one’s life and may become manifest in and function as dispositions (e.g. to pay attention to matters appropriately architectural). In addition, a recurrent aim at “attaining depth of intensity by reason of contrast” (PR 249), or at “harmonized width” (111) or “wide purpose” (AI 266), may yield commitment to ethical or social ideals or to possibilities envisaged in particularly meaningful, intense experiences. An effective wide ideal will often turn out to support an enduring subjective aim, with fluctuating intensity of feeling carrying into a relatively distant relevant future; by contrast, narrow interest may foreshorten the temporal horizon. Here “the dimension of width arises out of the higher levels of coordination,” and that of “narrowness refers to the intensities of individual emotions” (PR 166), which (like time pressures and fatigue) can inhibit contrast. The removal of narrowing inhibition may result “in a wider sweep of conscious interest,” may broaden “the field of attention” and may lead to what Whitehead terms “Peace,” which is “selfcontrol at its widest,—at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. . . . It is the barrier against narrowness” (AI 285–286).


169

(ix) The Category of Freedom and Determination. The concrescence of each individual actual entity is internally determined and externally free. This category can be condensed into the formula, that in each concrescence whatever is determinable is determined, but that there is always a remainder for the decision of the subject-superject of that concrescence. . . . This final decision is the reaction of the unity of the whole to its own internal determination. This reaction is the final modification of emotion, appreciation, and purpose. But the decision of the whole arises out of the determination of the parts, so as to be strictly relevant to it. (PR 27–28)

This categoreal obligation adds little or no detail to the description of concrescence flowing from the other categoreal obligations, but it does emphasize the novel nature of the unity secured in concrescence: the creative emphasis, the valuational aesthetic adjustment of feelings, takes a novel shape that cannot be known beforehand. The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence— its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim—beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause. Each occasion exhibits its measure of creative emphasis in proportion to its measure of subjective intensity. (PR 47)

Although each of our acts of experience arise within and from the constraining and enabling armature of our conditioning and inheritance, the resulting concrescence is free and not deterministically foreordained. Thus, constrained by the habits of the experiencing organism, most immediately by its operating context-sensitive chreods, and by the actualities of the surrounding environment in the momentary situation—“its subjective aim originates novelty to match the novelty of the environment” (PR 102)— each moment is thus non-social too, in the sense that it is not merely habitual, tradition- and context-bound and, more generally, may even involve some “venture along the borders of chaos” as new types of order are arrived at (111). Ultimately, Whitehead’s evidence for including this category is empirical: . . . the final decision of the immediate subject-superject, constituting the ultimate modification of subjective aim, is the foundation of our experience of responsibility, of approbation or of disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of freedom, of emphasis. This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. (PR 47)

170

Chapter 5

Here Whitehead opens consideration of the moral aspect of concrescence, of the potential for endorsing, or not, the outcome of each concrescence: autonomous decisions come freely and then one may flow on with them or not (cf. PR 222). Free will thus has two components: the spontaneous, constrained self-organizing outcome of categoreal obligation ix, and the endorsement (or not) of that hybridly prehended outcome in subsequent buds. However, Whitehead’s view of freedom and the very experience on which it is grounded, when subjected to scrutiny, may be regarded as deeply language-influenced (as may be materialistic views that try to eliminate the notion of freedom), and one may ask whether human experience structured in accord with the first eight categoreal obligations may be more deeply subject to cultural variation than Whitehead may have considered. I will return to questions implicit here in section 7.4. 5.4

Naturalizing Whitehead

For James, radical empiricism must not “admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced” (ERE 42). The concrescual approximation finds that Whitehead admits terms and principles into his rationalist scheme that are compatible with experience and fit the facts, but whose existence may be challenged precisely because one fails to find them, as characterized by Whitehead, in direct experience. Consequently, the concrescual approximation modifies or replaces with more naturalistic notions several Whiteheadian notions, including those of eternal objects, the primordial nature of God, and creativity. These more naturalistic notions introduce nothing not occurrent in “natural” experience. The resulting naturalization is largely a de-supernaturalization: naturalizing Whitehead here means naturalizing those functions of Whitehead’s God that are functions admitted by radical empiricism without recourse to a God, but this is done without ruling against Whitehead’s metaphysics. Moreover, the concrescual approximation as presented below nowhere attempts to eschew the epithet ‘Whiteheadian’. In fact, it shows how well accounts grounded in Whiteheadian philosophy of organism deal with issues in several areas of philosophy, including action theory, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind or consciousness studies. Moreover, in elaborating the concrescual and neurobiological approximations, I will extend Whitehead’s account of perception into an account of perception in action,


171

present Whiteheadian applications in neurobiology, and sketch some Whitehead-influenced lines of cultural analysis. From Eternal Objects to Concepts When we address the function of Whitehead’s eternal objects in human experience we find them as elements in the definiteness of subjective form, and, of more interest here, in the third mode of ingression, namely, as they register physical feelings and figure in conceptual and integrated prehensions. In the concrescual approximation, eternal objects functioning in this third mode are equated with, and replaced terminologically by, Jamesian concepts, which enable us to take, class, and, to the extent that words exist for concepts, name as the same, matters in different portions of the experiential stream (cf. J1 459, 272; AI 224; PR 44). For Whitehead too, “recognition is an awareness of sameness” (CN 143; 124–125). If we can recognize something, we have a concept of it, and we can perceptually categorize factors in experience as exemplifying the concept. To perceive something is to recognize it under the aspect of some concept(s) or another. So understood, Whitehead’s eternal objects and Jamesian concepts are the data respectively of conceptual feelings and acts of conception, which are “part of the flux of feeling” (SPP 48); these feelings hardly need involve conceptual analysis. To be sure, Whitehead’s eternal objects have other functions too: they contribute to the definiteness of actual entities and nexu ¯ s quite apart from their function in human experience. James does have his concepts fulfill such a function—“physical realities are constituted by the various conceptstuffs of which they ‘partake’” (SPP 106)—but does not give this much attention. He also affirms “the platonic doctrine that concepts are singulars, that concept-stuff is inalterable” (106), so eternality is not in question, except insofar as it conjures pictures of a separate realm of Platonic objects. While a radical empiricist inclined to a monism of pure experience would balk at the notion of a realm of eternal objects outside experience (cf. PU 218), Whitehead avoids disjoining eternal objects from experience. He avows a realm of eternal objects (SMW 161), but he keeps it in the ambit of God’s experience, and through his notion of the primordial nature of God, as prehended by all actual entities, he binds God with temporal actual entities so that the eternal objects are not isolated in a disjunct Platonic realm.25

172

Chapter 5

Thus, even without naturalization, Whitehead’s doctrines concerning eternal objects do not disqualify him from membership in the class of experiential monists. His experiential monism admits God as an experient. For James, concepts are abstract, and “since the relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled” (SPP 81). However, James, applying a pragmatic rule (“anything is real of which we find ourselves obliged to take account in any way”), finds that “concepts are thus as real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment without taking account of them.” But though James grants that concepts have a reality and even an “eternal’ kind of being,” he adjudges this kind of being “inferior to the temporal kind, because it is so static and schematic and lacks so many characters which temporal reality possesses” (101). Although Whitehead says that actual entities and eternal objects are the fundamental types of entities, and that “the other types of entities only express how all entities of the two fundamental types are in community with each other, in the actual world” (PR 25), he too regards actual entities as the final realities (18), presumably, in part, because eternal objects are dependent on an actual entity, namely God, for subsistence, realization, and relationship (46, 257). Having established, albeit roughly, that concepts and eternal objects are indeed equivalent notions in several important aspects, I must turn attention to a principal function Whitehead gives eternal objects in concrescence, namely in the formation of subjective aims. This function involves the primordial nature of God, which the concrescual approximation does not admit into its constructions. The task for the concrescual approximation here is to show how this function can be fulfilled or explained away, while holding to a radically empirical line. Doing Without the Primordial Nature of God In Process and Reality, the principal role God plays in the formation of temporal actual entities is in the formation of their initial subjective aims, which shape the subsequent concrescence of the multiple feelings in the incomplete phases into the unity of the final satisfaction. These initial subjective aims arise with a hybrid physical prehension of the primordial nature of God in the form of a complex lure for feeling, present at the start of each bud as a conceptual aim that is the source of valuation and order throughout the concrescence (PR 224).


173

Temporal actual entities move from initial subjective aim and physical feelings to conceptual feelings and then to integration, satisfaction, and superjection. “Thus an actual entity has a threefold character: (i) it has the character ‘given’ for it by the past; (ii) it has the subjective character aimed at in its process of concrescence; (iii) it has the superjective character, which is the pragmatic value of its specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity.” (PR 87) In the case of God, the sole non-temporal actual entity, “there is no past. Thus the ideal realization of conceptual feeling takes the precedence. . . . There is still, however, the same threefold character” (PR 87). That character consists of (i) the primordial nature of God, which conceptually realizes “the absolute wealth of potentiality” (343); (ii) the consequent nature of God, “the physical prehension by God of the actualities of the evolving universe” (88), so that, putting aside questions concerning how God gets to prehend actualities (Sherburne 1971: 308), God is in process rather than merely transcendent, and (iii) the superjective nature of god, which works in such a fashion that the primordial nature of God is rendered relevant to temporal actual entities which hybridly prehend that nature in what Whitehead calls a lure for feeling.26 “The ‘lure for feeling’ is the final cause guiding the concrescence of feelings,” and “the primary element in the ‘lure for feeling’ is the subject’s prehension of the primordial nature of God” (PR 185, 189). God’s primordial conceptual valuation establishes, in Nobo’s words (168), a “graded realm of achievable values, with each possible value discriminable in regard to its . . . relevance to any specific, actualized conditions.” This graded or proximate relevance provides the datum of each actual entity’s hybrid physical prehension of God and serves to define each actual entity’s initial subjective aim. Whitehead calls the gradation of eternal objects in respect to relevance to each actual entity an “objective lure.” The lure consists of “eternal objects introduced into the universe by the real internal constitutions of the actual occasions forming the datum” of a concrescence (PR 185). From that lure “the concrescent process admits a selection . . . into subjective efficiency” (87). For Whitehead, this selection yielding the lure for feeling is the actual entity’s experience of the primordial nature of God from its finite perspective, and is sometimes labeled the conceptual aim. “Those of God’s feelings which are positively prehended are those with some compatibility of contrast, or of identity, with physical feelings transmitted from the temporal

174

Chapter 5

world” (247). The objective lure, then, is a conceptual environment or nimbus of momentarily feelable eternal objects, each with graded relevance to each actual entity, and the lure for feeling selected from that objective lure functions in the datum of each actual entity’s subjectively efficient initial subjective aim. In the concrescual approximation, which replaces eternal objects as they function in human experience by concepts, and does without the primordial nature of God, Whitehead’s objective lure can be treated as comprising all concepts that could be felt by an actual forming experient in a specific moment, with a specific standpoint but without operating subjective aim. Only some of these concepts do become included in what Whitehead calls the lure for feeling felt by an experient who inherits a web of aims, an actual world, and a defining characteristic, including the capacity to make all the conceptual distinctions one can make. For the radical empiricist, the decisive question concerning Whitehead’s account has to do with the alleged contact with—the hybrid prehension of—the primordial nature of God in each act of experience: it is there that Whitehead sources the subjective aim and has a divine element come to bear on each concrescence. The radical empiricist, I allege, finds no such element discernible (directly experienced) in each moment of experience and need not feel compelled to adopt it as an inferred entity on the basis of Whitehead’s impressive philosophy. Therefore, the concrescual approximation holds to an account that does not admit moment-by-moment recourse to God. It finds no need to adopt Whitehead’s move, since it can deal with the formation of initial subjective aims by recourse to operating aims and to one’s background and conceptual capabilities, complete with habits and dispositions, as personal memory comes to bear in the moment, contributing to the generation of a penumbra of possibilities, some of which may figure in conscious feelings. Then, like Whitehead’s “timeless world of mere possibility acquiring temporal realization,” timeless concepts are realized temporally as actual entities achieve definiteness by realizing specific value, giving final shape to subject and subjective aim, and in that form affecting all that comes after—“the mortal world of transitory fact acquiring the immortality of realized value” (IS 254). Many commentators27 have questioned the function not just of eternal objects but of God in Whitehead’s metaphysics, and Lowe (1962: 88) expressed interest in naturalizing Whitehead’s metaphysics. Given its own limited purposes, the concrescual approximation lays aside the questions of


175

whether a realm of potentiality-ordering possibilities similar to Whitehead’s primordial nature of God is necessary to an understanding of consciousness and experience, or of whether a Whiteheadian God sustaining such a realm is needed in a monism of pure experience. Nonetheless, the concrescual approximation recognizes that the act of thinking about possible contact with God in each moment in the stream of experience may offer some benefit insofar as it reminds us of the full range of our experience, its peaks and depths, its times of joy and despair and peace, the wonder and fullness and losses of life, every so often felt right here, in the moment, as we are vessels for and within the onflow. Whitehead’s emphasis on the hybrid prehension of God reminds us of the full range of creative potential available in the moment and so may be precisely a call to widen our capacity for openness, adventure and intensity at the start of each bud. Consonantly, the concrescual approximation holds that in each moment of experience we may have access to a vast panoply of possible feelings. Suffice it to say that, as Jones (147) said, “the primordial functioning of God as the actuality in virtue of which the realm of possibility is relevant to each occasion individually does not have to be given the name ‘God’ except [perhaps] in so far as we address ourselves to issues broader than the conditions governing the coming to be of events.” Assuredly, Whitehead’s act of labeling the non-temporal actual entity God can be read as an expression of preference (cf. ESP 36–37). In Process and Reality (31–32) he writes: “It is here termed ‘God’; because the contemplation of our natures, as enjoying real feelings derived from the timeless source of all order, acquires that ‘subjective form’ of refreshment and companionship at which religions aim.” This is in evident keeping with James’s tolerance for the holding of beliefs from which such useful consequences flow as the securing of comfort, so long as the beliefs are not readily disconfirmed (e.g. P lecture viii). At any rate, for Whitehead, an actual entity’s hybrid prehension of God constitutes a lure for feeling compatible with that entity’s actual world; Whitehead also refers to this lure as the “urge of desire” (PR 344); it attracts, it urges and leads one on. If the concrescual approximation is to strip God from the account of concrescence, and otherwise remain Whiteheadian, this aspect of valuation must be naturalized, along with the content of the lure, and the formation of the initial subjective aim. To this I now proceed. As noted earlier, Whitehead recognizes another type of hybrid physical prehension than that involving God, namely the hybrid prehension of

176

Chapter 5

temporal actual entities (PR 246). In the concrescual approximation, “hybrid prehensions along [a] historic route” or “hybrid prehensions of self” (cf. 107) are crucial in the formation of initial subjective aims. Hybrid prehensions along a historic route include prehensions of conceptual and impure feelings of the preceding bud, so that, for instance, the perception of an object or the formation of an intention in one bud may function in, have aftereffects in, a subsequent bud without any need to newly perceive the object or form the intention. But they also bring the full of one’s personal matrix, one’s capabilities and web of aims, into each moment, in a way befitting the actualities of the moment. Such hybrid prehension may occur in a chain of buds with activated chreods and socialized orientations in however full and particular effect they happen to be. Doing without the primordial nature of God does mean doing without what Whitehead asserts is “the ultimate, basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends [and which] constitutes the meaning of relevance” (PR 32; cf. 344). The concrescual approximation does not accept or reject this assertion. With its focus on experience and consciousness, it instead treats relevance, which conditions what can be called into relevance, as conditioned by the actual conditions of concrescence (cf. 249). What is called into relevance in any discernible way is in effect selected from the lure for feeling, which is itself a subset of the objective lure. The lure for feeling, like relevance, is conditioned by the actual world; by the web of subjective aims, effective in accord with the Category of Subjective Intensity and affecting prehension of the onflowing surround, understanding that “our dominant inheritance from our immediately past occasion [may be] broken into by innumerable inheritances through other avenues” (AI 189); by “the various possibilities of initial subjective form available for the initial feelings” (PR 244), given the operating curves of affective tone; and by the experient organism’s associations, habits, and dispositions. We act within and from the full constraint of our conditioning. Except for immediate factors, that conditioning is incorporated in the background or defining characteristic, generally termed memory. The lure for feeling then is an organic matrix of possibilities, a memory-influenced array of possibilities in which valuation is a factor—one’s own aims, dispositions, preferences, and capabilities affect what is admitted into the lure. At its start, each concrescence “has the character ‘given’ for it by the past” (PR 87), and this character includes both what is physically and hybridly


177

prehended. In most of our waking life we are doing things, and it is an easy thing to account for the initial subjective aim of a bud arising within the compass of a dominant subjective aim. In moments where no aim is dominant and no aim in the web of subjective aims comes sufficiently to the fore, motivating dispositions (including dispositions to respond to disturbances with interest) fill in quickly as sources of initial subjective aims. How does this work? The triggerings of these dispositions result in the conceptual valuation of physical feelings, which we are disposed to valuate, and the conceptual valuation felt in one bud will be included in the successor bud’s hybrid prehension of that bud. That is, the physical feelings, or promptings, can arouse feelings subsequently felt as general, initial conceptual aims. This is instructively clear in cases where one is intently engaged in one activity and feels some irritation which the current subjective aim accommodates, renders compatible in mutually sensitive fashion by admitting it to be acted on, dealt with, in that aim’s relevant future. As a consequence, the triggerings, experienced physically, and functioning conceptually, result in feelings characterizable as urges to alter conditions or satisfy organic dispositions or needs, e.g., “to alleviate thirst,” and when no longer deferred take on the context-sensitive and concrescence-specific form of subjective aim in the process of concrescence. The momentary bud then rises into coherence with that urgent feeling. Typically, then, when a conceptual aim forms in this way in response to physical feeling, some other subjective aim is dominant and a few buds may be formed before the prompting emerges from the fringe; we might suppose that it is always so, so that the triggered conceptual stirring, the initial subjective aim, is indeed hybridly prehended at the start of the bud it comes to define. Here it must be said that the concrescual approximation is not opposed in principle to saying that one can be awake and in a “rest state,” albeit a short-lived one, say a prolongation of satisfaction, with no discernible concrescence likely to begin until some perturbing stimulation is felt or some lure begins to attract, as when an obligation or recurring wish reappears to function as a lure for feeling, rising from the hybridly prehended fringe of a preceding concrescence. In fact, one can, and the concrescual approximation does, treat such rest, if such there be, as a prolonged satisfaction and adds that, indeed, the start of a new bud, with some urge, is deferred until some stirring begins, as if the initial subjective aim is another name for initial unrest. Thus, assertions in the concrescual approximation may be made

178

Chapter 5

verbally harmonious with assertions of Whitehead’s that place the initial subjective aim at the start of concrescence. Interestingly, in keeping with some meditative practices, one can prepare to avoid giving energy to nascent desire or interest and to prevent formation of propositional content. Such preparing, which may help generate a prolonged rest state, is intentional insofar as it involves the working of aim derived from commitment to the value of exploring or adhering to a specific practice. Given the foregoing considerations, we can challenge a Whiteheadian to find a case where the working of aims and dispositions do not suffice to source an initial subjective aim. Here we might think of occasions when a bright idea, an inspiration, or a sharp memory leaps to mind, seemingly out of nowhere: the concrescual approximation admits such occurrences, as sourced in the broader objective lure rather than from the lure for feeling. That is, we may think of the objective lure as a domain inclusive of all potentially luring possibilities—all that we could possibly imagine—and dub it the space of “full conceptual possibility” or of “creative imagination” (which might even be taken to include the “collective unconscious”—see Odin 1982: 5, chapter 11), rather than “the primordial nature of God.” In moments when we want to brainstorm, be creative, imaginative, we may, perhaps without avail, employ ways of opening ourselves to this domain, of becoming unencumbered by habitual ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and so momentarily widening the horizon of subject-formation. In some rare occasions, access to this domain may simply be experienced, as if a gift. In the concrescual approximation, the various functionings, via hybrid prehension of self, of subjective aims and triggered dispositions, do the job of Whitehead’s urge to desire: initial subjective aims arrive with some urge to realization, with associated ordering and relevation. Consequently, when Whitehead says “if there be a relevance of what in the temporal world is unrealized, the relevance must express a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a non-temporal actuality” (PR 32), the concrescual approximation takes pause. It agrees with Whitehead that “any condition to be satisfied by one actual entity in its process expresses a fact either about the ‘real internal constitutions’ of some other actual entities, or about the ‘subjective aim’ conditioning that process” (24), but instead of having recourse to the primordial nature of God it relates the relevance of what is unrealized to the initial subjective aim, and so to hybrid feeling of self, and to the memory and imagination, stirred by aim in the concrescence in question.


179

Finally, and this is crucial, the concrescual approximation does hold that Whitehead is right about the function of the initial subjective aim; by its nature it grows more determinate as it holds sway over concrescence and shapes satisfaction, which is the wedding of potential (the lure of relevant possibilities) and actuality (the actual world). From “Creativity” to “Onflow” In Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, unrest is the urge to realize the initial subjective aim (PR 32), and the realization, in the working of creativity in the immediate occasion, is “in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty” (349). Creativity, thus, is that ultimate principle by which the disjunct many becomes a definite complex unity, one actual occasion (21). The complex unity is a subjectsuperject, which upon its becoming is immediately part of the subsequent universe: The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of ‘primary substance.’ (PR 21)

This makes the primary substance in Whitehead’s one-substance cosmology the energy of concrescual advance, from initial conceptual aim to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to subsequent concrescences. If one adopts Whitehead’s understanding that all actual entities are experiential, are acts of experience, one might call this concrescual energy experiential, and call Whitehead’s experiential monism a monism of onflowing experiential energy. Whitehead gives license for such a use of ‘energy’: The notion of physical energy, which is at the base of physics, must then be conceived as an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful, inherent in the subjective form of the final synthesis in which each occasion completes itself. It is the total vigor of each activity of experience. (AI 186; PR 309)

For Whitehead, the vigor or creative intensity is inherent in the subjective form of the satisfaction, in how the final objective datum is felt in the novel togetherness that is the subject-superject.

180

Chapter 5

Thus the “production of novel togetherness” is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence’. These ultimate notions of “production of novelty” and of “concrete togetherness” are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition. (PR 21–22)

For those unable to admit intuitions, direct experience, of the onflow and concrescence, the outlook of Whiteheadian philosophy, and of this book, and the very flows familiar to the radical empiricist must be as mystery. The process by which the many become one is concrescence, “effected by a process of feeling” (PR 211), and may innocently be called creative in that it synthesizes a novel satisfaction out of what it starts from. Moreover, the creativity involved in Whitehead’s philosophy is an ultimate principle, of dynamic energy furthering ongoing concrescence and the superjective transition to subsequent concrescences, “the transition from attained actuality to actuality in attainment” (214). Thus the concrescual approximation understands onflow, as inherent in momentary buds of human experience, each with its actual world, and passing into the actual world of subsequent actual occasions. However, Whitehead holds that In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed “creativity”; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident. (PR 7)

The operation of Whitehead’s creativity is inseparable from this primordial, non-temporal accident. God is “the actual but non-temporal entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom” (RIM 88), and God’s primordial nature is that factor “whereby the creative advance ever re-establishes itself endowed with initial subjective aim derived from the relevance of God to the evolving world” (PR 347). The concrescual approximation does without the primordial nature of God and Whitehead’s account of how initial subjective aims are formed. To signal such provisional distancing from these concepts of Whitehead’s, which are so tightly linked to his concept of creativity, the concrescual approximation replaces ‘creativity’ with ‘onflow’. The latter is arguably a less interpretive name for the ultimate, and is less susceptible to a reading in terms of divine purposiveness, or an evolutionary accrual of value,28 even


181

though the notion of onflow leaves room for the creative and purposive in momentary experience and may as a word suggest an element of directionality. In using ‘onflow’ I mean to indicate nothing less primary in experience than Whitehead’s creativity. The notion of onflow would not do away with novelty; it purports to not include the role of the divine element in Whitehead’s novelty. Finally, onflow, like Whitehead’s notions of passing on (PR 213), of the passage of nature (PNK 14), or of general activity (SMW 177), has a more experientially direct import than creativity: I believe it makes more palpable sense to talk of the onflow of concrescual energy and events than to talk of the creativity, which is, finally, an evaluative and interpretive term. The intuition of onflow in human experience is unassailable. We feel the fluent encompassing onflow, and our becoming in onflowing concrescence amid a community, a world of changing “permanences,” in which onflow itself affords the ultimate permanence: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The very word ‘onflow’ secures reference to the growing together, the becoming, and to the perishing, characteristic of process, and to experiential, not merely physical, energy, without imputing overarching creativity or directedness to the general flow. Onflow is available to the radical empiricist as the feeling of ongoingness in one’s own stream, of experience as streaming and eventful and as amid the multiplicity of activity and change in the onflowing surround; each experient has a perspective on the world and is equally an element in the onflowing world which transcends the experient.

6

The Concrescual Approximation: Whiteheadian

Applications

The concrescual approximation is based on a naturalized version of Whiteheadian philosophy. It takes over, sometimes with little modification, many of Whitehead’s applications of his categoreal scheme and many crucial aspects of his analyses of experience, including those of perception and conscious feeling. It often takes Whiteheadian analyses as guides to the experiential “interior,” as tools for a concrescual phenomenology, for getting in touch with the details of concrescence as they are lived through and for determining whether the Whiteheadian characterizations have adequate purchase in concrete experience. Without question, Whitehead’s phenomenology appears astute, perhaps ultimately because it is consistent with James’s core insights concerning the nature of the stream of consciousness, the formation of a bud as the formation of a subject, the pivotal function of co-conscious transition, and the five characters of thought. Although it modifies Whitehead’s account in some important details, diverging from it here and extending it there, the concrescual approximation nowhere forsakes Whitehead’s categoreal scheme as adopted in chapter 5 above. One of the first tenets of the concrescual approximation is that experience is embodied. By calling experience embodied I don’t mean to give disproportionate emphasis to the body: experience as it is lived through is embodied, but that hardly means that it is not mental and valuational as well. The concrescual approximation holds to a monism of experience for which the mind-body distinction is not an ultimate or metaphysical distinction. The mind-body distinction has its motivations and uses, and may have some lasting pragmatic value, but as a metaphysical distinction it invariably runs into difficulties, chiefly concerning the interaction of body and mind. These perennial difficulties stem from an insurmountable conceptual incoherence and are not overcome by sophisticated versions of materialism.1

184

Chapter 6

But what can embodiment mean in an experiential monism, and how can that monism be experiential without introducing some form of an experiencebody dualism? To answer these questions, the concrescual approximation must draw closer to the realities of embodied experience, show the bodily at play in concrescence, and show the senses in which experience is embodied, without adopting a mind-body dualism. Once one has arrived at such a vantage, one can consider the metaphysical import of one’s empirical findings, and also what aesthetic and ethical implications they have for being and action, for if one appreciates how things really are with regard to experience, one has a better chance to appreciate what one can experience and do. In the remainder of this chapter, I elaborate the concrescual approximation by presenting its applications to embodied perceptual experience, to the formation of propositional content and consciousness as they arise within embodied experience, and to action, as well as to an appreciation of James’s characters of thought. These accounts draw heavily on Whitehead, and they overlap each other, for the phenomena are tightly interwoven. For instance, perceptual experience is embodied experience, typically involves propositional feelings and consciousness, and is regularly linked with action. 6.1

Perception

The concrescual approximation takes over a great deal from Whitehead’s modal theory of perception, but it regards this theory as somewhat infected by practices of traditional empiricism and scientific observation, with their detached, passive observer and their artificial, isolated acts of perception. The concrescual approximation takes perception in the course of action as the central case of perception and places each act of such perception within the stream of experience, paying far more attention to perception in activity-situations and the coordination or integration of perceptual and motor processes than Whitehead does, but it nonetheless does so in distinctly Whiteheadian fashion. Here I begin with Whitehead’s treatment of the role of physiology in perception, before discussing Whitehead’s modal theory of perception. Physiology, Concrescence, and Perception In treating perception, the concrescual approximation essentially accepts a combination of “common sense, physical theory, and physiological theory,”


185

which point out a “route of inheritance,” as Whitehead wrote, “from actual occasion to succeeding actual occasion, first physically in the external environment, then physiologically—through the eyes in the case of visual data— up the nerves into the brain. The donation—taking sight as an example—is not confined to definite sensa, such as shades of color: it also includes geometrical relationships to the general environment” (PR 171). The concrescual approximation, like Whitehead, brings this very general account into contact with the stream of consciousness by treating it in terms of prehensions, the most concrete elements in experience, and concrescence, the synthesis of a multiplicity of prehensions in a unity of feeling. That is, the many physical feelings or prehensions integrated into a prehensive unity of satisfaction include sensations as effects of stimuli, or rather sensa felt as vector transmissions, with, for instance, the stimuli exciting actual photoreceptors or actual receptor neurons in the actual nose and passed along the actual relevant nerves to the actual brain (118). I use ‘actual’ here to emphasize the distinction between the merely material entities of traditional scientific observation and the actual living cells, which include “subservient inorganic societies, such as molecules and electrons” (104), all associable with pertinent actual entities. The stimuli, first felt physically, are conceptually valuated, and in the actual brain some data of conceptual feelings are transmuted into features and integrated with geometrical feelings, so that there is a rising of a projective reference beyond the body, as well-defined qualities are referred by projection onto a region, yielding an appearance which makes the felt surround into a coherent space almost always matching well with what must “really be there.” In common-sense terms, signals from the world are very rapidly transformed by sense receptors, relayed to the visual cortex, where input is categorized in conceptual terms, and unified somehow into coherent, projected, three-dimensional images, scenes, with focuses reflecting our aims, interests, and capabilities, and, as well, normally, what is really there. But this means that the roadways and automobiles and streams and clouds that we see are not the things as they are. We may say we see real things, but rather what we see is how we experience those real things. In Whitehead’s projective account, and in actuality, images of the world are constructed in experience, and those images are central to how we experience the world. Francis Crick admits: We really have no clear idea how we see anything. . . . By the standards of the exact sciences (such as physics, chemistry, and molecular biology), we do not yet know,

186

Chapter 6

even in outline, how our brains produce the vivid visual awareness that we take so much for granted. . . . Loosely speaking, . . . “it’s all done by neurons.” (Crick 24; cf. Damasio 322)

The move from neurons to seeing is precisely the difficulty for materialistic scientific accounts of vision, which latter often rely on a faith that an explanation will soon enough be provided by “not yet identified but presumably identifiable physical phenomena” (Damasio 323; cf. 9, 159). Further, this difficulty, like those associated with the generation of a feeling of self and the connection of thought and action, constitutes a real problem for bodymind dualism, but it is graver and seldom fully recognized. I say it is graver because you might contend that the efficacy of consciousness or of free will is illusory, that consciousness and will have no causal influence, are epiphenomenal, but you cannot call the phenomenal image—not just these qualia or those, but the whole blooming streaming world as experienced—epiphenomenal; it is phenomenal and constitutes an arena or field of action that bears and facilitates decision, the autonomous coordination of data and value. In concrescual terms, the inherited actual world, itself shaped by a subjective aim, includes an initial subjective aim that takes determinate shape as it guides a concrescence, producing an appearance, an objective datum with subjective form, and that whole concrescence and satisfaction is the way we momentarily experience the world. There is no move from merely physical neurons to seeing or visual experience: all that goes on is within and of experience. So far as visual experience is concerned: loosely speaking, it’s all done by actual neurons—counterparts in experiential monism, as I present it, of neurons in neurobiology.2 The Organic Body as a Structured Society

Whitehead believed that “The

germ of an organic theory of nature is to be found in Locke,” but that Locke wavered in his grasp of the relation of consciousness and organism, partly because physiology had not yet served “to put mind back into nature” (SMW 148; cf. RP 3). Whitehead held that “we have direct knowledge of the relationship of our central intelligence to our bodily feelings. According to this interpretation, the human body is to be conceived as a complex ‘amplifier’. . . . The various actual entities, which compose the [actual, organic] body, are so coordinated that the experiences of any part of the body are transmitted to one or more central occasions to be inherited with enhancements accruing upon the way, or finally added by reason of the final inte-


187

gration. The enduring personality is the historic route of living occasions which are severally dominant in the body at successive instants.” Furthermore, Whitehead continues (PR 119; AI 211; cf. AI 208), “the whole body is organized, so that a general coordination of mentality is finally poured into the successive occasions of this personal society.” The whole body is itself a “structured society,” providing “a favorable environment for the subordinate societies which it harbors within itself” (PR 99), including organs, groups of cells, single cells, and molecules. The human body is a highly complex structured society favoring “intensity of satisfaction for certain sets of its component members.” This intensity “arises by reason of the ordered complexity of the contrasts which the society stages for these components” (100), with “the higher contrasts depend[ing] on the assemblage of a multiplicity of lower contrasts” (95). For Whitehead, “the predominant basis of perception is perception of the various bodily organs, as passing on their experiences by channels of transmission and of enhancement” (PR 119), from the external world to the ultimate percipient. Even at the “higher” (conscious) end of the chain, the peripheral feeling of impact or vectorial directedness may remain. From that peripheral feeling, The neurologist traces first the effect of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centers, and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation of the whole organism is detected. Thus, the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity [or concrescence] of the patterned aspects of the universe of events. (SMW 148; cf. J1 82)

But derivation from the body is hardly the sole story: Our experience in the present discloses its own nature as with two sources of derivation, namely, the body and the antecedent experiential functionings . . . our own state of mind directly preceding the immediate present of our conscious experience. (MT 160, rearranged)

In the immediate present we hybridly prehend the outcome of our antecedent experiential functioning(s), including the surround as it is ordered in projective appearance, and the state of mind typically reflects the dominant subjective aim as it operates in a habitual sequence or chreod in

188

Chapter 6

play in an activity-situation. But the operative aim or intention, which may arise from or be driven by bodily needs for food, warmth, etc., is not strictly determinative. While each new subject-in-formation is super-jected or arrives already “thrown” into its experience and continues it, it does so with new, intervening elements provided by bodily (including sensory) functioning: Our dominant inheritance from our immediately past occasion is broken into by innumerable inheritances through other avenues. Sensitive nerves, the functionings of our viscera, disturbances in the composition of our blood, break in upon the dominant line of inheritance. In this way, emotions, hopes, fears, inhibitions, sense-perceptions arise, which physiologists confidently ascribe to the bodily functionings. So intimately obvious is this bodily inheritance that common speech does not discriminate the human body from the human person. (AI 189; cf. MT 159, 160)

Then, in accord with categoreal obligation ix, the category of freedom and determination, the outcome arises, novel, out of all that figures in the process of formation, all that comes in through the body and out of one’s functioning, activated, memory. The characteristic of a living society is that a complex structure of inorganic societies is woven together for the production of a non-social nexus characterized by the intense physical experiences of its members. But such an experience is derivate from the complex order of the material animal body, and not from the simple “personal order” of past occasions with analogous experience. (PR 105)

In the concrescual approximation’s reading of this, the “physical experiences” at play in the moment involve the personal matrix as appropriated and functioning in the context and immediacy of the present, not the simple personal order mechanically producing merely analogous responses to analogous experience. Rather, “there is intense experience without the shackle of reiteration from the past, and “this is the condition for spontaneity of conceptual reaction” (PR 105). The unshackled, vigorous “living nexus, though non-social in virtue of its ‘life,’ may support a thread of personal order along some historical route of its members. Such an enduring entity is a ‘living person.’ . . . a living person requires that its immediate environment be a living, non-social nexus” (PR 107). Here we have the maximal example of categoreal obligation ix: the mutually implicated members of the nonsocial nexus, functioning in a structured society that shelters them, are not rigidly carrying forth or thoroughly canalized by tradition (FR 40), but rather have freedom to respond to novelty with conceptual spontaneity, and their efforts, not determined by all that has gone before, conclude with the


189

formation of a new subject, carrying along and adding to the thread of personal order in an instance of the general I-me dialectic. The organic body is structured so that a general coordination of mentality flows into the successive occasions—the ultimate percipients or presiding occasions—of the enduring, living person. The successive occasions and conscious processes are not associated with a particular set of neurons or a single part of the brain. In a living body of a high type there are grades of occasions so coordinated by their paths of inheritance through the body, that a peculiar richness of inheritance is enjoyed by various occasions in some parts of the body. Finally, the brain is coordinated so that a peculiar richness of inheritance is enjoyed now by this and now by that part; and thus there is produced the presiding personality at that moment in the body. Owing to the delicate organization of the body, there is a returned influence, an inheritance of character derived from the presiding occasion and modifying the subsequent occasions through the rest of the body. (PR 108–109; cf. 339)

Perception and Concrescence: Whitehead on the Three Modes of Perception Since “subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation which is presented to metaphysics for analysis” (PR 160) and all subjective experiencing is to be understood in terms of concrescence (e.g. 145), Whitehead’s account of perceptual experiences must be in concrescual terms and must show how their final objective data and subjective forms arise from primary feelings—physical and conceptual prehensions—and subsequent integrative prehensions. (Because the final data include propositions, a full account of the process will not be provided until proposition-formation is treated. See section 6.2.) Whitehead distinguishes three modes of perception, two of them “pure,” namely perception in the mode of causal efficacy and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, and one of them “impure” or “mixed,” namely perception in the mode of symbolic reference. Take a case of simple visual perception unrelated to any ongoing course of action. Some movement or brightening catches your eye, your gaze quickly turns, and comes to rest on a shaped patch of color, which, possibly with other features, serves to identify a specific object. In traditional language we have sense impression, sense perception proper, and object recognition (and conscious perception). In Whiteheadian language: perception in the mode of causal efficacy (sense perception—roughly, impressions of sensation; see PR 316, 113), perception

190

Chapter 6

in the mode of presentational immediacy (perception involving a located qualitative image), and perception in the mode of symbolic reference (interpretation of image as object). Three modes of perception, each taking place at a characteristic stage in concrescence. Later in this chapter, the reader will be in a position to treat our perceptions in the mode of causal efficacy as instances of physical purpose, perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy as instances of propositional feeling, and perceptions in the mode of symbolic reference as instances of intellectual feeling. Perception in the Mode of Causal Efficacy

Of the three perceptual modes,

causal efficacy is the most primitive. In our experience, in essence, it is physical prehension coupled with immediately derivative conceptual prehension and integrated in physical purpose. Perception in this mode is the direct feeling of the surround, including “the animal body [which] is only the more highly organized and immediate part of the general environment for its dominant actual occasion, which is the ultimate percipient” (PR 119). It is of vague, ill-defined sensa, “combined with geometrical relationships to the external world of the settled past” (171) of a split second ago. It is also “of the conformation of the present to the immediate past” (S 46), and it provides “the vast background and foreground . . . with which senseperception is fused” (AI 181). Perception in the mode of causal efficacy produces “a sense of influx of influence from other vaguer presences in the past, localized and yet evading local definition, such influence modifying, enhancing, inhibiting, diverting, the stream of feeling which we are receiving, unifying, enjoying, and transmitting. This is our general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious actual world” (PR 178). This feeling of derivation from the past demonstrates that “sense-data . . . are given by the causal efficacy of actual bodily organs (S 51), and thus includes “our sense of unity with the body” (AI 189). Then, as conceptual validation up or down decides the efficacy of the physical purpose beyond itself, concrescual process passes toward oneself in the future and the efficacy of satisfaction returns influence into the organic body. For Whitehead and the concrescual approximation, all physical prehensions are causal: A simple physical feeling is an act of causation. The actual entity which is the initial datum is the “cause,” the simple physical feeling is the “effect,” and the subject enter-


191

taining the simple physical feeling is the actual entity “conditioned” by the effect. This “conditioned” actual entity will also be called the “effect.” All complex causal action can be reduced to a complex of such primary components. Therefore simple physical feelings will also be called “causal” feelings. (PR 236) 3

Although my discussion in this section focuses on human perceptual experience, I note that the notion of perception in the mode of causal efficacy may have a pivotal position in establishing a metaphysical monism of pure experience (cf., e.g., Kraus 78 ff.). Perception in this mode involves the felt efficacy of the surrounding environment as transmitted through the organic body (PR 119). The notions of physical feeling and of perception of causal efficacy are of an experience of transfer of energy, as a feeling with a vector character (116). This affords perhaps the most readily acceptable basis for Whitehead’s generalization from our experienced feelings to prehensions, so that all actual entities are taken to have physical feelings and “conceptual” responses (276) correlate with the relevant organism’s prehensional capabilities or natural matrix of transitions and to be processes involving the transmission of energy. With that generalization, perception in the mode of causal efficacy puts us, all experients, each with our extensive standpoints, in communities of experients, each concrescing while one’s momentary contemporaries concresce, in independence from each other but arising, with unique standpoint, from a common world and adding to it as it is rejoined and as the onflow of energy carries us each into ensuing concrescences. Perception in the mode of causal efficacy thus puts us in experiential contact with our surround, as felt through our bodily efficacy. In Whitehead’s philosophy the community of experients is not a collection of subjects in a world of objects. Nor are the feelings of embodiment and bodily efficacy aspects of a mind-body dualism. Feelings of causal efficacy, physical feelings, causal feelings, are our feelings of the surrounding recent past, including our bodies, and these feelings are but factors in the physical pole of each moment of experience. Our physical feelings are not our experience of a concrete physical world; they constitute the physical pole of our concrete experience. It is experience which is concrete, and physical feeling represents but a pole or aspect of experience (cf. AI 190). Perception in the Mode of Presentational Immediacy

Perception in the

mode of presentational immediacy “is an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy. But, by the originative power of the

192

Chapter 6

supplemental phase, what was vague, ill defined, and hardly relevant in causal efficacy, becomes distinct, well defined, and importantly relevant in presentational immediacy” (PR 172). It “is our perception of the contemporary world by means of the senses. It is a physical feeling [i.e., its data involve actual entities]. But it is physical feeling of a complex type [in] the formation of which conceptual feelings, more primitive physical feelings, and transmutation have played their parts amid processes of integration” (311). In contrast with percepta in the mode of causal efficacy, those in this mode “are distinct, definite, controllable, apt for immediate enjoyment, and with the minimum of reference to past, or to future” (PR 179). Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy transforms the sensa felt in the mode of causal efficacy into clear, well-defined qualities that are “projected” into, or experienced as located at, a contemporary region. It thus involves a predicative element and a locational, indicative or referential element and so is propositional in nature. For Whitehead, it gives us the awareness, in say, the case of vision, of a patch of color in a specific region, a place relative to the percipient’s standpoint. In cases of simple visual perception, our eyes respond to light (perception in the mode of causal efficacy), and with the sharpening of focus and relative location, we distance ourselves (di-stance, stand apart) somewhat dis-connecting from the field—the qualitative shift is readily discernible (and although attending to the experienced shift may change its very character, one need not deny that such shifting is an exceedingly common occurrence). In perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, an act of transmutation (in accord with categoreal obligation vi) makes of the actual entities whose sensa are felt physically and causally a nexus of actual entities, and in this simplifying, abstractive transmutation it makes of the sensa, which initially were “emotional forms transmitted from occasion to occasion,” a common quality characterizing the nexus (114), which is felt more as “out there” than as affecting the experient’s sense organs.4 Of course, one may return with renewed connection to the perceived nexus. Thus, with olfaction, “the experience starts as that smelly feeling, and is developed by mentality into the feeling of that smell” (AI 246), and with that feeling one may come back (revert) afresh to that smelly feeling as one sniffs a flower or what’s cooking. The transmutation arises with the relegating into irrelevance (or negative prehension) of the differences between the definite prehended actual entities, the entities thus objectified reinforcing each other by their likeness:


193

there is thus “narrow concentration on a limited set of effects” (PR 111–112). With visual perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, there is at once a concentering of attention on a focal region; a recognition of more or less precisely discriminated features (e.g. color, textural qualities) and of a more or less definitely contoured shape (the recognition involving, e.g. edge detection, shadow interpretation) that sharpens contrast between figure and ground; and a lifting of geometrical relationships into prominence to form one complex datum, an appearance. An appearance is “the effect of the activity of the mental pole, whereby the qualities and coordinations of the given physical world undergo transformation” (AI 211).5 In this process, “the sensa derived from bodily activities in the past are precipitated upon the regions in the contemporary world. The note of hypothesis, the note of mere suggested possibility is eliminated. The regions appear to the percipient as in their own right associated with the sensa. The Appearance now is, that the sensa qualify the region.” (245) The disclosure of physiology and of reflective common sense is that to the extent our sensory perceptions are of the world they are based on fresh but dated data— data perhaps as much as 500 milliseconds old (Damasio 128; UC 68–69). Yet the perception is as of what is contemporary, happening right now.6 With perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, we come to a slight divergence between the concrescual approximation and Whitehead’s modal account. Because perception typically occurs in the midst of life, the concrescual approximation, like the processual approximation, makes perception in activity-situations the central and basic case of perception. That is the form of perception to understand if we are to come into conceptual contact with the stream of experience and consciousness. Whitehead’s modal account will prove helpful in securing such understanding. However, Whitehead remains captive to traditional Anglo-American philosophy in its concern with perception and epistemology, and its inattention to what would later be called philosophy of action. Of course, perception in action is to radical empiricism as bare sense-perception is to traditional empiricism, but here Whitehead, who is a radical empiricist at heart, seems unduly influenced by traditional empiricism. Although he recognizes that “the concept of completely passive contemplation in abstraction from action and purpose is a fallacious extreme” (AI 264; cf. 180) and that “to find examples of the pure mode of presentational immediacy we must have recourse to so-called ‘delusive perceptions’” (PR 122), he too

194

Chapter 6

readily treats perception in the mode of presentational immediacy in abstraction from action and purpose. Thus, concerning his treatment of such perception, Kraus (83) sensibly cautions that “Whitehead is deliberately isolating this mode of perception from its existential context as an outgrowth of causal efficacy, but that this isolation is methodological and not ontological.” For instance, he claims (PR 168; cf. AI 214–215), “the pure mode of presentational immediacy gives no information as to the past or the future. . . . It . . . defines a cross-section of the universe: but does not in itself define on which side lies the past, and on which side the future.” This is talk of a datum stripped from connection with the causal efficacy of the past, pre-propositional feelings, expectancies, anticipations, and the subjective aim taking shape in and shaping the present moment. It is a datum extracted from the stream, and treated as if it were experienced as a frozen, uninterpreted image. For the concrescual approximation, perception of the presentationally immediate in such a pure mode, rather than as “an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy” (PR 172) or as a factor in symbolic reference, rarely, if ever, figures in experience. The seen image is not held up “outside of time,” for it emerges from physical feeling, is felt as emerging from there, as felt through the eyes, and whether pre-prepared for or not, with the directedness of attention is recognized as an object and/or incorporated in action. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy does entail some withdrawal from the grip of the physical, and, with its onset, conceptual reversion begins to come into play. It is as if the “part of what we perceive [that] comes through our senses from the object before us” involves perception in the mode of causal efficacy, while the part which “comes out of our own head” (J2 103) involves perception in the modes of presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy entails some conceptual prehension of sensa, and transmutation, as well as some experience of spatial relatedness correlate with the projection of sensa. But neither of these entails withdrawal from purpose or immediate subjective aim. To the contrary, such withdrawal would neither sit well with the category of subjective intensity (which would have perception in the mode of presentational immediacy occur under the influence of a subjective aim, and inseparably from purpose) nor with the actualities of perception in action.


195

Although Whitehead argues against the primacy of presentational immediacy, and despite such remarks as “throughout this discussion of perception there has been excessive emphasis on the mental phase in the experiential process” (PR 179), his doctrine of presentational immediacy lends too much weight to the notion that abstraction from action and purpose characteristic of pure perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is a factor in all human perception. The way to rescue him from the taint of any such bias is by simply saying that, in context, projected images and object perceptions arise without the strained withdrawal common to traditional empiricism, “in abstraction from our private way of subjective reaction” (AI 224). Within ongoing action in accord with a dominant subjective aim, perception transforms a whole inherited appearance into a new one, with its own relevant center, and typically with only as much focusing as is needed to further the action, especially if one is engaged in another activity as well. Perception in the Mode of Symbolic Reference

Perception in the mode

of presentational immediacy of sensa qualifying regions, is not object perception: What is directly perceived, certainly and without shadow of doubt, is a gray region of the presented locus. Any further interpretation. . . must be put down to symbolic reference.” (PR 172)7

As the interplay of the two pure modes of perception, symbolic reference constitutes our ordinary mode of awareness of the external world: “When human experience is in question, ‘perception’ almost always means ‘perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference’” (PR 168). This is what we typically refer to as perception of objects with qualities. When we first encounter an object visually, it is perceived in the mode of causal efficacy and is not yet seen as an object. As we come to perceive it in the mode of presentational immediacy, it becomes clear—in vision, a region demarcated by a feature. Then, as perceptions in the two modes are felt together in a unifying contrast, in which the source of the vague is interpreted as continuous with that of the relatively clear, we perceive in the mode of symbolic reference, but of simple symbolic reference. Beyond that we arrive at more complex symbolic reference involving conceptual reversion or association and object recognition.

196

Chapter 6

For Whitehead, the symbolic reference linking the two perceptive modes affords the primary illustration of principles governing all symbolism and of experience involving the correlation of symbols and meanings: The requisites for symbolism are that there be two species of percepta; and that a perceptum of one species has some ‘ground’ in common with a perceptum of another species, so that a correlation between the pair of percepta is established. The feelings, and emotions, and general characteristics associated with members of one species are in some ways markedly diverse from those associated with the other species. Then there is ‘symbolic reference’ between the two species when the perception of a member of one species evokes its correlate in the other species, and precipitates upon this correlate the fusion of feelings, emotions, and derivate actions, which belong to either of the pair of correlates, and which are also enhanced by this correlation. The species from which the symbolic reference starts is called the ‘species of symbols,’ and the species with which it ends is called the ‘species of meanings.’ (PR 180–181; S 8; cf. UA 3)

Accordingly, for symbolic reference between perceptions in each of the two pure modes to occur, those perceptions must share some common ground so that they may be correlated, unified in contrast. For Whitehead, in the concrescual progression from physical prehension to perception of localized quality, the same eternal object is ingredient in both perceptual modes (PR 170)—the vaguely dark or greenish shape becomes the clearly green treeshaped thing in front of me—and thus provides a common ground for symbolic reference. In this account, quality, rather than being an attribute of a substance becomes a relational characteristic: to possess a quality is to have the power to affect potential percipients so that they in the course of concrescence have conceptual feelings involving the concept (or eternal object) for which the physical feeling is the perceptual basis. Geometric relationships provide another main element in the common ground for symbolic reference. In perception in the mode of causal efficacy, the pertinent field is perceived indistinctly, its regions remain generally indistinguishable, and “the detailed geometrical relationships are vague” (PR 169–170). But perceptions in the two modes share “homology of status” (127–128) within a presented experiential field: the processual approximation attempted to capture this aspect of perceptual experience in that component of the conditions of satisfaction of visual experience which stipulates that “the object with specific features F present before me in my visual field is continuous or identical with what caused my (counterpart) unfocused visual perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” In perception in the mode


197

of causal efficacy, vaguely sensed qualities are localized but do not yet have “local definition.” In perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, geometric feelings are far clearer than in perception in the mode of causal efficacy: Whitehead terms these latter feelings, involving the implication of sensa in geometric relations to the experient, “strain” feelings. The process of formation of strain feelings is transmutative (310), and constitutes the characteristic, distancing, geometrical aspect of the movement from perception in the mode of causal efficacy to that in the mode of presentational immediacy. Strain feelings amount to spatiotemporal feelings that are treatable in abstraction from the sensa-based data of physical purposes, but that actually are integrated with transmuted feelings of sensa, so that regions are characterized and perceived as exemplifying qualities.8 Notwithstanding the importance of eternal objects and geometric relationships in perception in the mode of symbolic reference, the animal body functions as “the great central ground underlying all [simple] symbolic reference.” The causal efficacy of bodily feelings plays the central role here: “. . . the animal body of the percipient is a region for which causal efficacy acquires some accuracy in its distinction of regions” (PR 170). For example, we see with our eyes, with some peripheral experience of focusing or what Whitehead terms “eye-strain.” The experience of eye movement and activity provides a basis for regional definition within the body: “The obvious correlation of the eye-strain with sight arises from the perception, in the . . . mode [of causal efficacy], of the eye as efficacious in sight” (170). In visual perception, the eye is felt to be a reason for a specific sight-sensum, and in perception by touch the hand or specific expanse of skin for a specific touchsensum. Thus, “our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of presentational immediacy upon causal efficacy” (176). On the basis of these common grounds, “by symbolic reference the various actualities disclosed respectively by the two modes are either identified, or at least correlated together as interrelated elements in our environment” (S 18; PR 180). In short, in the progression from perception in the mode of causal efficacy to perception in the mode of presentational immediacy in, say, the visual mode, the spatial regions characterized by sensa become much clearer, the color as perceived becomes more definite, so that the prehensive relation involved in physical feeling becomes with transmutation a feeling of relation involving a “seat” (roughly, the standpoint of the actual entity or percipient, often felt to be within the skull) and a “focal region” (a

198

Chapter 6

definite spatial region external to the percipient actual entity), treatable as the “in front of” relation in the intentional approximation’s account of visual experience. Visual perception in the mode of presentational immediacy thus lifts into prominence some region adorned with sensa and felt as in geometric relation to the experient, as “there,” “straight-away in suchand-such a direction” (AI 216), at some felt distance, definitely removed and distinct.9 It thus geometricizes or spatializes the surround, subordinating fluency, which had been relatively potent in physical feelings of derivation from the past. It may also replace contact, and feelings of mutual implication with other entities in a community of common activity (PR 79, 178), with disjunction, and neglect of interaction. In this process, the datum of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy becomes stable; if the perceived object is then categorized in an act of object recognition, the qualities and geometric feelings involved in the prior perception in the mode of presentational immediacy are often not altered. By paying attention to the role of physical prehensions in perception, Whitehead accomplishes in exemplary fashion what James termed restoring the vague to its proper place in mental life. It is instructive to try to catch the move from causal efficacy to presentational immediacy, say by sensitively and gently attending to the experiential phenomena involved when one sits in the dark and then switches on a light, and feels the impact of incoming data, or walks down a hallway and suddenly turns one’s gaze through an open door into a fresh expanse, noticing the glimpse (possibly after a bouncing from potential focus to potential focus) of, then the palpable fixing on, a newly seen patch, and the recognition of what it is. The movement of feeling and attention that carries us from sensation to perception, from perception in the mode of causal efficacy to clearer perception and the flow from such clearer perception to object recognition and beyond can be felt, caught, although, as Damasio (126) notes in discussing object perception, “there is no noticeable process of inference, no out-inthe-daylight logical process.” Such transitions function regularly in concrescence and perception. On various occasions, you can feel the bringing or rising into focus, the separation of seat and focal region, the moment of object recognition (cf. PR 314, 310). At least, so it is for me, and you will have to judge for yourself. If you’re skeptical, have someone set a brightly colored object at a distance behind you and then turn around, locate and turn your gaze to it, and see if you wish to dispute my claims concerning


199

these transitions, which are attention at work in the formation of conscious experience. The detachment characteristic of traditional self-observation involves focus on the stable content—as a substantive part. It renders transitive parts, associated with focusing and recognition, inaccessible and leads to and supports such clear-cut, dualistic outlooks as that of Descartes (PR 209). In addition, to concentrate on the isolated disclosures of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is to neglect the bodily as the vehicle of physical prehension. When one adopts a stance in which the feeling of derivation of visual experience from physical feelings drops out of the analysis, when causal efficacy is neglected, as it is by traditional empiricism, perceptual experience becomes disembodied, and mind-body and subjectobject dualisms come to seem inescapable. It is here that subject-predicate and subject-verb-object formulations can do their damage for philosophy, as with “I see a green leaf.” These formulations encourage us to abstract what is perceived in the mode of presentational immediacy or symbolic reference from what is perceived in the mode of causal efficacy, thus abstracting from relation and making substance void of actuality (PR 137, 167). Symbolic Reference, Subjective Aim, and Conceptual Reversion

Although

perception in the mode of presentational immediacy deals with data perceived in the mode of causal efficacy, the two modes express the same data “under different proportions of relevance” (PR 173). The later perception involves a valuative lifting into relevance or importance, in accord with the subjective aim.10 The lifting or transmutation is a functioning of attention and we can experience this functioning. Of the multiple items and qualities visual attention could fix on—as if those items were poised in superposed competition—it typically focuses on one central item at a time, and of the multiple conceivable associations and imaginings—as if they were poised in superposed competition—only one cluster is principally selected typically. What we attend to and perceive is what is important, what we value, in the moment. The lifting of a perceptum from causal efficacy to presentational immediacy involves transmutation and proceeds in accord with the subjective aim that is taking shape: the multiplicity of disjunct prehensions are being integrated into transmuted feelings and a complex objective datum that has import for the experient’s future. With the transmutation of many actual entities into a nexus sharing a characteristic, the perceptual withdrawal

200

Chapter 6

from conformal physical feelings allows the immediately dominant subjective aim to influence or guide conceptual reversion and the move to object recognition and appearance-formation. The flow of attention is a gathering of contrasts toward determination of a final subjective aim in a satisfaction. In fact, the lifting occurs at a phase in the concrescence where the initial subjective aim, which has been functioning as inherited and causally, is on the verge of entering from transitional (pre-autonomous) concrescence into an originative phase of autonomous concrescence, marked by conceptual reversion and adaptation to novelty in the moment. To repeat: the progression from perception in the mode of causal efficacy to perception in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in the transitional phase of concrescence, and once you have perception in the mode of presentational immediacy conceptual reversion can freely come into play, typically with a subjective aim regnant and ready to adapt to novelty. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy can mark the pivotal shift to conceptual reversion and autonomy and perception in what the concrescual approximation calls the complex mode of symbolic reference. It is a good working rule, borne out by practice of radical empiricism, that the transitional phase of concrescences involving perception centrally extends from the onset in physical feelings to perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy completes perception in the simple, as opposed to complex, mode of symbolic reference. In perception in the complex mode of symbolic reference presentationally immediate percepta—the perception of located features—are linked with symbolically referential percepta, resulting in object recognition. In activity-situations, our expectations of perceiving objects facilitate the requisite level of perceptual categorization and the lifting of objects into a distinctness from which they can function as a guide or control of subsequent action in ensuing sensory-action loops, so that upon object recognition there is normally little hold up on the object and, instead, a direct, streamlined flow on from co-conscious transition. This is what happens when one is acting at a relatively fast pace. In the event of perception of an object apart from perception in action, the recognition introduces or permits some reversion (whether imaginative, associative, or memorial), yielding appreciation, whether emotional, aesthetic, or intellectual. The coordination of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy via symbolic reference directly and in object recognition is constrained prag-


201

matically: coordination must be adequate to the exigencies of practical life (PR 168). The ability to coordinate perceptions in different modes, and sensory experiences in different modalities, with geometrical feelings builds up bud by bud, starting at an early age, and as experience with objects is assimilated capabilities of object recognition grow, yielding further conditions of possibility for perceptual experience and integration of perception in performance. Whitehead spelled out part of the process involved here in The Concept of Nature, indicating how hand-eye coordination, and categorization of entities as objects on the basis of scant sensory data, develop; I will recur to this treatment in chapter 7. “Sense-objects” here correspond to the sensa of later works: they are particular sorts of colors, sounds, smells; “perceptual objects” are the objects of everyday perception—black cats, blue coats, and the like (CN 149, 151). For any one percipient event, the situation of a sense-object of sight is apt also to be the situations of sense-objects of sight, of touch, of smell, and of sound. Furthermore this concurrence in the situations of sense-objects has led to the body—i.e. the percipient event—so adapting itself that the perception of one sense-object in a certain situation leads to a subconscious sense-awareness of other sense-objects in the same situation. This interplay is especially the case between touch and sight. There is a certain correlation between the ingressions of sense-objects of touch and sense-objects of sight into nature, and in a slighter degree between the ingressions of other pairs of sense-objects. I call this sort of correlation the “conveyance” of one sense-object by another. . . . The peculiar fact, posited by this sense-awareness of the concurrence of subconscious [later “mental,” as opposed to “conscious”] sense-objects along with one or more dominating sense-objects in the same situation, is the sense-awareness of the perceptual object. The perceptual object is not primarily the issue of a judgment. . . . The element of judgment comes in when we proceed to classify the particular perceptual object. For example, we say, that is flannel, and we think of the properties of flannel, and the uses of athlete’s coats. But that all takes place after we have got hold of the perceptual object. Anticipatory judgments affect the perceptual object perceived by focusing and diverting attention. The perceptual object is the outcome of the habit of experience. (CN 154–155)

Integrated conveyances, say, visual ones linking shape, color, direction of movement, and those drawing on or enmeshed in systems of social symbolism, result, via habits of experience—associations facilitating conceptual reversion—in the experience of perceptual objects. In his next premetaphysical book, Whitehead termed such subconscious concurrence “canalization,” using the word to encompass all manner of Jamesian habit and association, but crediting Bergson with introduction of the “very

202

Chapter 6

convenient term” (R 17).11 Whitehead later generally termed these habits of experience, symbolic reference. With that terminological change, habits and experience-based connections facilitating conveyance, become capabilities of carrying out, and so potentials for, symbolic reference. Symbolic reference is an “active synthetic element contributed by the nature of the percipient,” i.e., in accord with his prehensional capabilities as they function in the concrescence, in the supplemental, synthetic phases (S 8). In symbolic reference the perception or conception of one member of a species of prehended objects evokes its correlate in a second species, “and precipitates upon this correlate the fusion of feelings, emotions, and derivate actions, which belong to either of the pair of correlates, and which are also enhanced by this correlation” (PR 181). Functionally, conveyance or complex symbolic reference is a form of calling into relevance, for each functioning of a symbol or concept involves the activation of associations. When any concept or feeling comes into play, members of the correlate species may be evoked, and whether or not they are depends on such factors as the strength of the dominant subjective aim, and of desires, emotions, and motivational dispositions associated with the concept, relevance to the efficacy of functioning chreods, and so on. One’s capabilities for symbolic reference may be taken to include the associations and understandings essential to one’s membership in different societies and are an important part of one’s personal identity. Whitehead’s concept of symbolic reference includes the social as well as the “purely” perceptual (PR 181–183), and his account of symbolism expressly extends to the social: “. . . our vast system of inherited symbolism [is] an intricate expressed symbolism of language and act, which is spread throughout the community, and which evokes apprehension of the basis of common purposes” and through the instrumentality of which “a society bends its individual members to function in conformity with its needs” (S 73). The symbolically referential connections of the “perceptual” and the “social” include linkages between words and objects in language and between the physical and the symbolic in the institutional meanings discussed in section 3.2. 6.2

Propositions

In his analysis of the formal constitution of an actual entity, Whitehead discerned three chief phases: the responsive phase of pure reception; the


203

supplemental phase of conceptual feelings and comparative feelings, governed by the subjective aim as it takes shape in the process; and the satisfaction. Conceptual feelings are derived from physical feelings (categoreal obligations iv and v) and, in accord with categoreal obligation i, these conceptual and physical feelings are compatible for integration. Their integration constitutes the formation of comparative feelings, each with an objective datum termed a contrast, and a subjective form compatible with the concrescing actual entity’s subjective aim (categoreal obligation vii). The simplest comparative feeling integrates a conceptual feeling with a physical feeling from which it derives, forming a “physical purpose” felt with a simple subjective form of aversion or adversion. Propositional feelings and “intellectual feelings” comprise the two more complex types of comparative feelings. Intellectual feelings integrate propositional feelings and feelings of facts, and involve consciousness. With an understanding of the nature of these three general types of comparative feeling, a full-blown concrescual approximation may be elaborated, covering the formation of any bud in normal waking experience. Physical Purposes For Whitehead, in physical purposes, physical feelings are integrated with the conceptual feelings derived from them, but the eternal object or concept involved in the conceptual feeling does not escape from its exemplification in the physical feeling; rather, it sinks back into immanence. It is as if you saw some visual patch as of a somewhat specific color, registered it conceptually, but paid it no notice. The reader will initially do well to think of physical purposes as feelings of entities pre-propositionally present to a human percipient, but as appearing in a field being organized by the forming subjective aim of the forming, momentary subject. As intermediate between pure physical feeling and propositional feeling, physical purposes may involve the simplifying transmutation that makes of the actual entities whose sensa are felt physically and causally a nexus of actual entities, but they do not involve a concentration of attention that leads to sharpened qualitative and geometrical feelings, propositionality, and consciousness (PR 273). Physical purposes are termed “physical” because physical feelings are at their core: conceptual feelings integrated with those physical feelings remain in the grip of the physical and immanent. They involve no “definiteness of enjoyment and purpose” (PR 280), but they are purposive in the

204

Chapter 6

sense that they are affected by the subjective aim, which makes the conceptual feeling valuative. Physical purposes are integral to the emergence of the subsequent field or appearance from the antecedent, and in its organization as a field of action. In the concrescual approximation, this organizing function will afford the primary application of the notion of physical purpose, and I will return to it when discussing the concrescual approximation and action in section 6.4. Things perceived in the mode of presentational immediacy and, so, available for further symbolic reference, may in effect be passed over, and relapse into the status of physical purposes. Alternatively, physical purposes may in turn lead to or pass into propositional feelings—feelings whose objective data are propositions—if the qualitative concepts involved do not lapse back into immanence but instead “go indeterminate,” i.e., escape the grip of the physical and become connected with possibilities that transcend immediate exemplification, as physical purpose is integrated with distancing strain feelings (PR 323). Propositions and Propositional Feelings Propositions are commonly treated as having referential and predicative components. Given the modal account of perception, perceptual experience provides a prototype of concrescual integration and of the genesis of propositional feelings, and we may associate corresponding degrees or modes of reference and predication with each mode. Accordingly, with perception in the mode of causal efficacy feelings of localization (read ‘reference’) and of sensa (read ‘predication’) are vague, but conceptual valuation is in play. With perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, the localization and sensa become clear, as transmutation is in play. With perception in the complex mode of symbolic reference the subject-object distinction comes into play, the perceived or projected region being recognized as an object—not just a nexus—qualified by a predicative pattern, and conceptual reversion is in play. Beyond that, in judgment and the use of words to articulate and represent the data of propositional feelings we arrive at the objects of analysis dear to logicians, among other philosophers. Propositions

Whitehead regards propositions as hybrid entities in which

actual entities and nexu ¯ s are combined with eternal objects (concepts) or potentialities. “A proposition is the abstract possibility of some specified


205

nexus of actualities realizing some eternal object, which may either be simple, or may be a complex pattern of simpler objects. . . . [It] is the abstract possibility of an assigned nexus illustrating an assigned pattern” (AI 243). The actualities involved “are termed the ‘logical subjects,’ the complex eternal object is the ‘predicate’” (PR 24). Each proposition “shares with an eternal object [or concept] the character of indeterminateness, in that both are definite potentialities for actuality with undetermined realization in actuality. But they differ in that an eternal object refers to actuality with absolute generality, whereas a proposition refers to indicated logical subjects” (PR 258). Propositions function in experience by means of propositional feelings. A proposition figuring in experience is the datum of a propositional feeling felt by an actual entity. Just as propositions are unities of actualities and eternal objects, so propositional feelings arise by the characteristic integration of physical feelings—prehensions of actual entities or nexu ¯ s—and conceptual feelings—prehensions of concepts. The interest in logic, dominating overintellectualized philosophers, has obscured the main function of propositions in the nature of things. (PR 186) The primary mode of realization of a proposition in an actual entity is not by judgment, but by entertainment. A proposition is entertained when it is admitted into feeling. Horror, relief, purpose, are primarily feelings involving the entertainment of propositions. (PR 188)

Horror, relief, and purpose are examples of the subjective form of a propositional feeling, and a proposition entertained as a datum cannot be separated without heed from the subjective form with which it is felt. Entertainment here does not imply appreciation from some remove, some abstract consideration, but rather entry into feeling. In a proposition, a predicative pattern—a simple or complex concept—is conjoined with a referent—an actual entity or nexus of actual entities. The nexus may be felt directly, or may secure referential status via a presupposed system of indicative relations, spatio-temporal or otherwise (PR 195). In abstraction from propositional feeling, a proposition is “the potentiality of the objectification of certain presupposed actual entities via certain qualities and relations, the objectification being for some unspecified subject for which the presupposition has meaning in direct experience” (196–197). Whitehead takes all actual entities having these certain presupposed actual entities in their actual worlds to be within the “locus” of the proposition and, conversely, regards propositions as elements in the “lure for feeling” of

206

Chapter 6

actual entities in their respective loci (186). Although a particular actual entity is within the locus of a proposition, that entity need not entertain the proposition. “Of those actual entities which fall within the locus of a proposition,” Whitehead says (260), “only some will prehend it positively.” The concrescual approximation, concerned primarily with the function of propositions in experience, places emphasis on the experient and the subject-in-formation rather than on the proposition. It holds that of those actual entities which fall within the locus of a proposition, and which can therefore feel that proposition, each one will be in the locus of indefinitely many other propositions. Each actual entity has a vast range of conceptual or propositional possibilities in the moment (including feeling singular propositions and general propositions concerning any set of entities belonging to an appropriate kind of set). For instance, in a given moment we may have perception-based propositional feelings of all manner of things nearby, and these may be felt with all manner of conceptual reversion involved. In other words, if we take an objective, observer-based view of the sensory field in the actual world of an experient, we could regard the experient as in the locus of each apprehendable object in that field, and what I will term the objective or, more restrictively, the perceptual lure would include all the possible propositions involving each object in the field. Here, imagine yourself in a relatively relaxed state, with no momentarily dominant subjective aim: anything in the surround may strike you, present itself, disclose itself, and, given your dispositions and recent experience and web of aims, without even courting the imagination, anything may come to mind from within too. Now, recall that, in the concrescual approximation, an “objective lure” is taken to include all that may be conceived, proposed, concerning the actual entities or nexu ¯ s felt in a specific moment from a specific standpoint, by an abstract, potential experient, one with no subjective aim operative. A concrete, momentary subject-in-formation, with its initial subjective aim and its conceptual capacities, is capable of feeling only some of the concepts, propositions, included in its correlate objective lure. Each of those is a separate lure for feeling and together the separate lures make up what may be labeled the overall lure for feeling. Only some of them are actually called into relevance and eventually function whether at the core or toward the fringe of the concrescing entity’s final objective datum. The lure for feeling, as actually relevated, then, is a selection from all the possi-


207

ble propositions a particular subject-in-formation could feel, given its conditions of concrescence, principally its actual world (the actual entities felt in the initial phase of concrescence); its subjective aim, whose complexity and emotional charge affect details of what is admitted into feeling from the lure; the experient organism’s memory, and its conceptual repertoire, the distinctions it can make, including all manner of conceptual combination, many of course not ever actually made. On the Formation of Propositional Feelings

The account offered here of

how propositions come to figure in subject-formation is meant to enable readers to make intimate conceptual contact with the formation of propositional feelings and so, incidentally, to recognize that felt propositions typically are nonverbal. If successful, the account will enable readers to get in attentive touch with the level of raw unverbalized feeling central to James’s notions of pure experience and radical empiricism and enable them to appreciate the confidence of many Whiteheadians “that no philosophical explanation which renounces the appeal to ‘experience too concrete to be expressed in language’ can be adequate” (Rorty 146). In any moment, you may happen to think of (have propositional feelings concerning) just about anything you can think of or remember, and within limits imposed by your conceptual capabilities you can think just about anything about anything you do happen to think of. In each moment, any of the propositions in the overall lure for feeling may not enter experience recognizably, although potential predicative patterns may be flickering images in whatever modality, some of them as-if clamoring for entry into propositional feeling. To enter experience recognizably they must be stabilized by the grasp of concept and referential indication; for this, some investment of committed or attracted interest is required. For Whitehead (AI 244; PR 259), “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.” The importance of a proposition to feeling or action in the relevant future is largely determined by compatibility with subjective aim. In his account of propositional feelings, Whitehead has recourse to a God whose “particular relevance to each creative act as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world constitutes . . . the initial ‘object of desire’

208

Chapter 6

establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim” (PR 344). The object of desire is constituted by “the subject’s prehension of the primordial nature of God. Conceptual feelings are generated, and by integration with physical feelings a subsequent phase of propositional feelings intervenes” (189). The concrescual approximation also treats proposition-formation as linked with an initial desire or attraction (Des), however inchoate or well formed. In this approximation, such desire arises in each bud from temporal causes, typically inherited subjective aims or initial subjective aims associable with the response-provoking triggering of dispositions, or the initial grasping of a possibility for action or appreciation. The initial subjective aim of the subject-in-formation “determines the initial gradations of relevance of eternal objects [concepts] for conceptual feeling; and constitutes the autonomous subject in its primary phase of feelings with its initial conceptual valuations, and with its initial physical purposes” (PR 244). And then there is the unrest, the urge to realize the aim. The subjective aim, in league with memory, past experience, including common routes of association, brings concepts associable with felt actual entities (including one’s hybridly prehended predecessors) into relevance. The subjective aim is at becoming a feeler of a feeling that realizes the relatively unformed aim. As the subjective aim becomes determinate so does the central propositional feeling. At successive phases of an actual entity’s concrescence the number of propositional loci within which a subject-information is included shrinks, its lure for feeling is narrowed (although the scope of the felt proposition may expand), until with satisfaction there is the one actual entity feeling that propositional feeling, which may by then be integrated in more complex comparative feelings. The shrinking proceeds as the subjective aim becomes clarified and what is not sufficiently important, or compatible with what is important, falls away into negative prehension. The felt propositions, and the satisfaction, may not be the ideal resolution of the aim, perfect realization of the Des, but the concrescence is dominated by the aim-based unrest and realizes the aim as it does. The functioning of the valuative in the admission of selected propositions into feeling may also be seen from the ground up in an account of the formation of the objective data of perception-based propositions, taken apart from perception in action. This is the primary type of example Whitehead provides of proposition formation.


209

A propositional feeling . . . arises from a special type of integration synthesizing a physical feeling with a conceptual feeling. The objective datum of the physical feeling is either one actual entity, if the feeling be simple, or is a determinate nexus of actual entities, if the physical feeling be more complex. The datum of the conceptual feeling is an eternal object which is referent (qua possibility) to any actual entities, where the any is absolutely general and devoid of selection. In the integrated objective datum the physical feeling provides its determinate set of actual entities, indicated by their felt physical relationships to the subject of the feeling. These actual entities are the logical subjects of the proposition. The absolute generality of the notion of any, inherent in an eternal object, is thus eliminated in the fusion. In the proposition, the eternal object, in respect to its possibilities as a determinant of nexu ¯ s, is restricted to these logical subjects. . . . The proposition is the potentiality of the eternal object, as a determinant of definiteness, in some determinate mode of restricted reference to the logical subjects. This eternal object is the “predicative pattern” of the proposition. . . . Thus the physical feeling indicates the logical subjects and provides them respectively with that individual definition necessary to assign the hypothetic status of each in the predicative pattern. The conceptual feeling provides the predicative pattern. Thus in a proposition the logical subjects are reduced to the status of food for a possibility. Their real role in actuality is abstracted from. . . . Each logical subject becomes a bare “it” among actualities, with its assigned hypothetical relevance to the predicate. (PR 257–258)

In contrast to its function in propositional feelings, in physical purposes the conceptual feeling is integrated with the feeling of a nexus, with no further abstraction from the actualities felt in the nexus so as to render them into logical subjects or from the conceptually felt eternal object as contributing to the definiteness of the nexus to the eternal object as indicating some possibility or hypothesis. Likewise, in perception in the mode of presentational immediacy there is little note of hypothesis or suggested possibility. The move from this juncture to a propositional feeling or perception in the mode of symbolic reference with the nexus qualified by that eternal object involves the treatment of the felt nexus as a logical subject (or as composed of logical subjects) and one or more general possibilities opened by the eternal object or predicative pattern are restricted to this logical subject, so that it is conceived as illustrating the predicative pattern (AI 244). When we go on to think about an object we retain reference to the logical subject and thereby the particularity of actuality, even as the concepts involved indicate general possibilities. It is evident that the datum of the conceptual feeling reappears as the predicate in the proposition which is the datum of the integral, propositional feeling. In this synthesis the eternal object has suffered the elimination of its absolute generality

210

Chapter 6

of reference. The datum of the physical feeling has also suffered elimination. For the peculiar objectification of the actual entities, really effected in the physical feeling, is eliminated except in so far as it is required for the services of the indication. The objectification remains only to indicate that definiteness which the logical subjects must have in order to be hypothetical food for that predicate. This necessary indication of the logical subjects requires the actual world as a systematic environment. For there can be no definite position in pure abstraction. The proposition is the possibility of that predicate applying in that assigned way to those logical subjects. (PR 258)

The formation of a perceptual propositional feeling thus involves a withdrawal in which feelings coming through our senses from the object before us lose some of their primitive character and connection with felt actualities—which are withdrawn from in transmutation, and therewith reduced to logical subjects—and in which our valuative conceptual repertoire, our memory, our defining characteristic, taken as a mechanism for generating current recognition, comes into play in specific enaction. Once perceiving has moved from the mode of causal efficacy to that of presentational immediacy, the datum is stable, persisting into the phase of autonomous concrescence involving conceptual reversion, perception in the mode of complex symbolic reference, and object recognition, anticipated or not. The withdrawal characteristic of propositional feeling thus involves two critical eliminations. The first results in the feeling of a nexus as a potentiality for the ingredience of an applicable concept rather than as the felt relation among actualities constituting the nexus.12 The second elimination concerns the applicable concept, whose status as a general potentiality is restricted to its applicability to the nexus in question. In the case of ordinary perception, a propositional feeling is the outcome of a focusing that transmutes actual entities into a nexus, feels them at a distance and as manifesting a quality that is not to be mistaken for the general potential that an eternal object represents. This transmutative move from the pre-propositional to the propositional begins to open the way for the psychologist’s fallacy. One takes the data of the physical feelings as a nexus, that is to say, as a placeholder for a predicative pattern, and with the conjunct propositional feeling one can move to linguistic conception or articulation, and then to a potentially deleterious acceptance of and focus on the linguistic. In fact, the progression is from physical feeling, to conceptual valuation, to qualified nexus, and proposition, and thence to intellectual feelings, without ever leaving the


211

monistic realm of feelings. But even for those inattentive to propositionformation, the sequence is nonetheless as it is, up to linguistic conception or articulation. The analysis working from that clear, distinct, verbal datum back to its sources is typically misguided, and, for instance, leads to the doctrines of sensationalism, of pure entertainment of data, and the analysis of it in terms of universals (PR 157). Instead of an organic genesis of an objective datum, a genesis we can approximate by means of concrescual analysis or “deconcrescence,” we have an artificial account of intentional content. As Whitehead noted, the withdrawal to the level of verbalized conception tends to impose a syntax-affected structure on thought, namely that of “‘subject qualified by predicate’ as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language” (R 14). Instead of making a predicate or quality a characteristic of how a percipient organism experiences another entity or enduring object, it makes the quality inhere in a separate thing or substance. In this way, the subject-predicate form of expression tends to abstract from physical feeling, to disembody perception, and to isolate or disconnect the experiencing subject from the experienced object. It appears plausible, and important, to assert that perhaps members of some cultures or societies under the sway of different syntaxes might not normally experience the distancing (or geometric removal) characteristic of focusing familiar to us. Perhaps then perception in the mode of presentational immediacy can be less vivid and perception in the mode of causal efficacy steadier, figure and ground less distinguished, geometrical feelings generally less enhanced, and the apparent division of feeler and felt, of subject and object, and of organism and environment decidedly weaker. We know that in states of relaxed alertness experience can be more open and sensuous, in the sense of not rushing on in service of practical aim, not rendering the surround in agentive terms, so that instead one may feel objects less as instrumental than as affecting the experient’s sense organs and as having “lives” of their own in “a community of common activity involving mutual implication” (PR 79). So even we can sit quietly, settle down, and let attention go where it goes among the perceptual and propositional lures for feeling. Accordingly, we understand that perhaps people in some cultures need not withdraw quite as we do from the wraparound volume of sensory prehension, so that, for them, shapes and flow patterns need not solidify into objects in the ways that they do for people who speak one of the languages that the linguist Benjamin Whorf (138 ff.) labeled “standard average

212

Chapter 6

European.” Even so, the concrescual approximation holds that the experience of such exotic people would be amenable to concrescual analysis. Cultural variations may perhaps be reflected in characteristic emphases within the phases of concrescence, and in distinctive subjective forms and distinctive balances of perceptual modes, but such differences, as well as social and cultural features and practices generally, can only take shape within the constraints of the categoreal obligations. At any rate, we can now begin to imagine a vantage from which instead of having language have a determinate influence on the standards for our ontology, we can imagine a philosophy in which experience and general principles of experience are given primary importance and languages are seen as emerging in experience and propagating their own syntactic and other distinctions. Mastery of syntax may then be seen as a boundary condition requisite for and constitutive of membership in a group of relevant language speakers. I return to several of these important themes in section 7.4. But the role of value in the formation of propositional feelings requires further elucidation. Thus, now let us look more closely at perception in action, with attention to the role of an initial subjective aim in the formation of a propositional feeling, in a concrescence that is largely the giving of shape to aim—say, very particularly, to locate my eyeglasses. If asked an apt question, I might say, “I want to find my glasses,” but what I want immediately is the experience of seeing them, the relevant subjective aim is at being the experiencer of that experience. Of course, the aim at that experience or feeling, or at finding my glasses, is not at an end-in-itself, but is typically in the service of a further aim. Nevertheless, the aim to locate the glasses rouses lures for feeling in the form of readinesses to recognize some factor on the way to finding the glasses. In concrescences subordinate to the momentarily dominant aim, the aimed-at sensory consequent functions in one’s being poised to conceptually valuate the right physical feelings; the subject-information seeks out and awaits those feelings, which, when they arrive, upon one scanning and focusing or another, are valuated swiftly, the nexus rising as rapidly into prominence upon the recognition of an appropriate factor or predicative pattern. Here, all feelings are coordinated with or subordinated to the aim to become a feeler of a feeling of seeing my glasses. I do not say we are often aware of lures for feeling as we act, and if, when looking for an object, you were to be asked just what you were looking for, I hold you would find the anticipated sensory consequent is indeterminate,


213

as much so as your concept of the object: what you are about to do or say is normally non-sensuously anticipated and only partly prefigured. You do not have a fully determinate image of the entity you were in fact looking for, although you might readily specify some features of the sought object. You do not normally bother to explicitly remember what an object looks like before looking for it. At any rate, with object recognition we have the achievement, as it were, of propositional status. The progression from a recognized presentationally immediate factor to object recognition—from the arrest on a presentationally immediate glinting to perception in the mode of symbolic reference, “Ah, there they are,” is swift too. After all, this happens with aid from expectant attention, which “even when not very strongly focalized, will prepare the motor centers, and shorten the work which a stimulus has to perform on them, in order to produce a given effect when it comes” (J1 434). In the exemplary account of eyeglasses-recognizing proposition-formation, primarily at the perceptual level, concrescence is at once the formation of an objective datum (propositional content crystallized out of a lure for feeling as the lure is given purchase in a felt, determinate nexus), a subjective form (a perceptual experience in service to a subjective aim and so leading into further action, but also involving consciousness and perhaps emotional tones), and the final form of the subjective aim, a satisfaction—a final complex feeling, the emergent subject-superject, which is therewith a stubborn fact: that feeler feeling that feeling. The process whereby an actual entity becomes itself is, as ever, “the growth and attainment of a final end. The progressive definition of the final end is the efficacious condition for its attainment. The determinate unity of an actual entity is bound together by the final causation towards an ideal progressively defined by its progressive relation to the determinations and indeterminations of the datum [the ‘settled actual world’ which an actual entity ‘finds’]” (PR 150). Throughout, the organization of the perceptual field is an outgrowth of the operation of subjective aim: my office has a different “experiential structure” as I sit in it, reading, typing, talking on the phone, or stand in its doorway looking around for my eyeglasses. In each case, perception in the mode of presentational immediacy heightens the relevance of definite sensa and associates them with definite regions. Throughout, interest or subjective aim, manifest as the movement of attention, is pivotal in bringing the vague and relatively ill-defined into heightened relevance. The essence of autonomous

214

Chapter 6

concrescence “consists in the adjustment of subjective importance by functioning of subjective origin” (164). The functioning of subjective origin here brings memory, often linked with a functioning chreod, into play, so that perception in the mode of presentational immediacy flows, or is swept up, into perception in the mode of symbolic reference. Note that the symbolic reference involved can affect the subjective form of the final perception, coloring it for instance, via memories or associations, with feelings of strong positive or negative valuation, or via, for example, connection of the perception with a prior belief that a seen object had been discarded, with surprise or relief. The culmination of concrescence is the “emergent unity of the superject” (45); the world, the body, the activated background, the web of task-related and other aims, and the great multiplicity of things on one’s mind (family, work, sex, . . . ), and the interplay of value, memory, and emotion in the moment all function together as the subject-superject emerges. Now, the foregoing has concentrated overmuch on perceptual experiences. A similar account may be given of experiences involving more representational propositions too: just as the sensory consequent takes precise shape, so the propositional lure is narrowed down to one felt proposition as propositional feeling gains concrete form. Thus, in the concrescual approximation, in propositions less tightly connected with the physically immediate, it is as if the stabilization of an objective datum takes place in a conceptual space rather than in relation to a physical surround, and that space presupposes or provides general connection with an indicative relational system, actual or fictional. The symbolically referential connection of nexus and quality then is replaced by a connection between logical subject and concept, possibly both taking shape together, the conceptual element lending stability to the mental flow as a lure for feeling proves indeed attractive enough to secure clarity and strengthen growth toward a momentary final end. Thus may we recall details of an event, think about who to invite to dinner, work through a textbook or practical problem, or come to imagine something previously unimagined by us. The concrescual approximation, and Whitehead, propose that momentary experience can take all the forms it ever will take, and yet, in each case, the feeler feeling that propositional feeling will arise from a valuative creative synthesis of feelings culminating with a particular satisfaction felt with a particular mode of feeling—in short, out of a process of concrescence, which, regardless of all the objective


215

data and subjective forms that can possibly come into play, will be in accord with the categoreal obligations and a Whiteheadian categoreal scheme. 6.3

Intellectual Feelings and Consciousness

The Objective Data of Conscious Feelings: Affirmation-Negation Contrasts For Whitehead and the concrescual approximation, with propositional feelings we have not yet arrived at consciousness. The objective datum of each such feeling is a proposition, but the way in which the proposition is felt need not involve consciousness. A propositional feeling is one contrast shy of consciousness and of intellectual feeling. For example, one may have a perception in the mode of presentational immediacy of a clearly colored, clearly outlined patch, to the side, say, of a seen object, and this need not lead to object recognition, perception in the mode of symbolic reference. If the perception is integrated with a further conceptual feeling by conveyance or reversion, to form a complex perception in the mode of symbolic reference, we near consciousness: when we perceive a stone as gray conscious feeling is “in barest germ” (PR 161). After reading this sentence, lay this book down before you, look out over it, but with it in your visual field, and think of what you had for breakfast or how you came to start reading the book, and notice the change in the quality of visual focus. You are then normally, and in similar cases, only dimly conscious of the book— it is not available for immediate control and you have to refocus on it before or as you take it back up, turn a page. It is not fully part of an intellectual feeling. An intellectual feeling is a conscious feeling and its objective datum is a contrast of a proposition with a fact (e.g. 266). Typically, the fact in such a contrast is a nexus, whose members are the logical subjects of the proposition. Whitehead sometimes terms contrasts in which a proposition and a nexus are synthesized in one datum “affirmation-negation contrasts” (e.g. PR 24). These contrasts include cases in which an actuality or a felt nexus “is integrated with the potentialities which illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. Also, affirmation involves its contrast with negation, negation involves its contrast with affirmation. Further, affirmation and negation are alike meaningless apart from reference to the definiteness of particular actualities”

216

Chapter 6

(243). Definiteness, affirmation, and negation each have an evident role in Whitehead’s assertion that consciousness is “the way of feeling [a] particular real nexus, as in contrast with imaginative freedom about it” (261) and that it results from “the conjunction of a fact and a supposition about that fact” (AI 269). It is not too much to suggest that when one merely sees a cup, so that the cup is included in one’s visual field and as part of the full propositional content of one’s visual experience, one does not contrast it with what is not, one does not imagine any possibilities for it, one is not conscious of the cup, save “in barest germ.” But with even the minimal imagination of what is not—of a seen cup as within reach or as to-be-drunk-from—the perceived figures in an affirmation-negation contrast and a conscious feeling. The feeling of possibility involved in this feeling of what is not is a practical possibility, and plainly can affect decision and action. Understood in this way, intentions in action afford primary examples of consciousness: the sensory consequents aimed at in them, the somewhat indeterminate nonsensuous anticipations that can result in selection and guidance of moves with determinate sensory consequences in the course of action, are felt in contrast with what is, say, the cup as a real nexus or actuality. For James, cognition, the function of consciousness, is, in action, the feeling of contrast between the immediately sensed and the to-be-sensed, the perceived and the anticipated. As we move through dynamically structured and re-structured scenes, we move with our background activated, as it is, and we carry and live in the wraparound, engulfing appearance of our nearby world and anticipate immediate sensory consequents, the inherited world experienced in unitary contrast with what may be. Whitehead then is right. Propositional feelings do not involve consciousness. The affirmation-negation contrast, which principally contrasts a felt nexus and a proposition, gives a good criterion for saying what is conscious and what is not, for distinguishing conscious perceptions, for instance, from propositional feelings and physical purposes. To the extent that it functions in a physical purpose, the patch of green—say, a book—to my left is never contrasted with what it might be. For that, speaking loosely, it must first move “up” through perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, perception in the mode of symbolic reference, and it must involve conceptual reversion, which carries one away into possibility and contrast by introducing “non-conformation of conceptual feeling to other elements in the data” (PR 188) and paves the way for affirmation-negation contrasts.


217

The move to consciousness, and intellectual feeling, involves the union of a “placeholder” for the propositional subject—and in conscious perception this “placeholder” is the nexus of the consciousness-involving contrast— and a proposition that points to something other, arrived at by reversion, say, by conveyance (activated in expectant attention) or novel imagining. That is, there is a kind of investment in mentation, which may turn back toward or into action, but all the while there is contact with physical feeling via the nexus. To the extent that there is no achieved reversion, but a mere buzzing of possible reversion, as when one gazes at some object dumbly or absent-mindedly, Whitehead does acknowledge some minimum of consciousness. “Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception of ‘the stone as gray,’ such feeling is in the barest germ; in the perception of ‘the stone as not gray,’ such feeling is in full development. Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness. It finally rises to the peak of free imagination, in which the conceptual novelties search through a universe in which they are not datively exemplified” (161; cf. 5). In the peak of free imagination, any applicable concept, familiar or freshly imagined, may be linked with the actual and contrasted with it. When we talk about consciousness as the condition of being conscious, we are talking about the feeling of a contrast between a proposition and a fact. Now, this fact may be an immediately prior thought; that is, simple physical feelings of nexus are not essential to consciousness. In the concrescual approximation, an affirmation-negation contrast may be between an aspect of a hybridly prehended objective datum, perhaps a proposition, and a proposition as well as between a nexus and a proposition. The contrasted fact involved in the affirmation-negation contrast may ultimately be prehended physically through sense-reception or it may be prehended hybridly: for instance, consciousness may involve the contrast of a conceptual feeling related to the referential or predicative element of a proposition felt in a hybridly prehended preceding bud and a proposition felt in the present bud. Plainly, one may live through highly complex moments of consciousness, involving complex nexu ¯s or complex predicative patterns, but on this account if they are to qualify as involving consciousness they must involve a proposition in a contrast, just as the more mundane moments do. Thus, a felt proposition may be the actuality involved in an affirmation-negation contrast, and the potentiality involved may be a conceptually felt alternative to

218

Chapter 6

or generalization of the predicative pattern. It may be the negation of a proposition arrived at and leading to a new proposition, from a characterization to a denial of it. Now, the conscious feeling felt in one moment— contrasting, say, an oak tree with the same tree soon to be in full foliage—is hybridly prehended in the successor moment and may be incorporated in subsequent affirmation-negation contrasts. These subsequent contrasts may start with conceptual reversion from the applicable predicative pattern of the proposition, articulable, say, as that oak tree is coming into leaf, to that tree will be shade-giving or with generalization concerning the logical subjects (e.g. from an oak tree to deciduous trees). Then analysis or further generalization may yield hypotheses to be submitted to renewed observation (PR 5) or, more generally, free imagination may entertain conceptual novelties, whether exemplified or not (161). Here we must not be carried away by emphasis on the central propositional content, as if the stream of consciousness were a chain of clear and distinct thoughts. The content is not so simple. A figure lurking in the shade of one substantive core of thought may lure in the next, leading to new central content as a concrete memory may call forth another memory or a present observation, a word figuring in thought may lead to a verbal association, a generality to an example or counterexample, an analyzed event to a hypothesis, a hunch to a clarification. In the concrescual approximation and in Whiteheadian spirit, each such instance involves a contrast between what is now thought with an aspect of a hybridly prehended bud or non-social nexus, in which the new thought was a possibility, a might be, among luring possibilities, whether called forth with active intent or calling, attracting. In either case the luring proposition subsequently happens to be actually felt in the novel onflow of experiential energy as if, with attention, a luring rose into clarity, as if it entered clear thought much as a figure rises from the ground, takes shape, in perception. The sharpening of attention is always a factor at play in proposition-formation, whether perceptual or conceptual, and attention is further concentrated as the newformed proposition functions in further contrast, intellectual feeling, consciousness. Consciousness then is a mark of a substantive conclusion, a new-formed conscious state, some part of which by co-conscious transition or superjection leads into a next moment with its own evolution and transition to a new substantive part, and so we reconnect with James’s original description of the stream of consciousness.


219

Consciousness is what it is, an element in the feeling of an affirmationnegation contrast, however complex a shape the contrast may specifically assume. No more and no less. Consciousness as a term then does not refer to an entity, but to a process or function—that of contrasting what is and what might be, of uniting a lure for feeling and the immanence of the past in a novel concrescence. Consciousness and Subjective Form Whitehead talks alternately of consciousness as a subjective form (PR 161, 162) and as a special element in, belonging to, or entering into, the subjective forms of some feelings (53; 241, 256; 277). In characterizing it as a subjective form, he is maintaining that there is a general way of feeling characteristic of all forms of consciousness, and that it is how we feel affirmation-negation contrasts. This feeling may be pried off analytically from the complex feeling in which it comprises a special element. It is a mode of attention with which contrast is felt. When that contrast is a feeble element in experience, then consciousness is there merely in germ, as a latent capacity. So far as the contrast is well defined and prominent, the occasion includes a developed consciousness. That portion of experience irradiated by consciousness is only a selection. Thus consciousness is a mode of attention. It provides the extreme of selective emphasis. The spontaneity of an occasion finds its chief outlets, first in the direction of consciousness, and secondly in production of ideas to pass into the area of conscious attention. (AI 270)

The stream of consciousness is the flow of attention from one affirmationnegation contrast to another, with fluctuations in interest and attentiveness. As concrescence progresses the subjective forms of integrated feelings are mutually adapted into an “emotional complex,” so one may doubt that conscious thinking can appear apart from some other element of subjective form. In the case of vision, for example, conscious perception involves the subjective form of visual experience as through the eyes, and consciousness during reflective or speculative thought may involve a subjective form of theorizing, wonder, positive interest, excitement, and in practical thinking may involve a subjective form of intending to resolve a difficulty. Also, consciousness concerning a possible eventuality from current circumstance may, for instance, be felt with a subjective form of circumspection and quickly become suffused with fear, resulting in a subjective form involving consciousness and fear. Alternatively, because

220

Chapter 6

emotion and mood may dominate concrescence, a general feeling of apprehension may precede and provoke the reversion or imagination of a possible eventuality that becomes integrated in an affirmation-negation contrast, so that the resultant envisaged or anticipated eventuality is felt with a subjective form involving fear and consciousness. This latter feeling may later be integrated in a contrast of self as feeling fear and the possibility of not feeling fear. Finally, conscious feelings may be more or less intense by way of the depth of emotional feeling or breadth of consideration, intellectual synthesis, they incorporate. Consciousness, Interest, and Attention Typically, in visual experience, the propositional content is of something toward the center of the visual field. Meanwhile, the contents of physical purposes are at least somewhat toward the periphery: they are located shapes or colored patches, or, in other sensory modalities, the ambient temperature and humidity felt as pleasant or somewhere between changeable dispositional thresholds of hot and cool discomfort, and they are not the center of interest; they remain uninterpreted: there is no symbolic interpretation rendering image (here, datum of physical purpose) into object and no explicit feeling of enjoyment or purpose (PR 280; cf. Kraus 95). For the central objective datum of perceptual feeling to figure in consciousness, there must be a contrast of a proposition as something that could be (or could have been)— a theory—and something that is—a fact. Any sort of object—be it cup, tree, human, guitar, station wagon—may be in the visual field, but if one is to be conscious of it, one must experience it either as susceptible to some specific use in action—so that, for instance, reaching for the cup, as the nexus integrated in the propositional feeling, involves acting on the hypothesis, memory, or recognition that it contains a desired beverage—or as exemplifying or being associated with some characteristic, e.g. as having an attractive handle (minimally, as opposed to having an uncharacterized handle). At the same time, the rising of perception to consciousness is a relative isolation of the relatively interesting substantive core, as is the case with any “intellectual feelings, [which] in their primary function, are concentration of attention involving increase of importance” (PR 273). The concentration of attention characteristic of consciousness only arises in a late derivative phase of complex integrations. . . . Consciousness only illuminates the more primitive types of prehension so far as these prehensions are


221

still elements in the products of integration. Thus those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process. For example, consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy, because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience. . . . The consequences of the neglect of this law, that the late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements, have been fatal to the proper analysis of an experient occasion. In fact, most of the difficulties of philosophy are produced by it. (PR 162)

For the concrescual approximation, although all intentionality involves propositions, and all consciousness involves propositional feelings, so that the involvement of a proposition in experience does entail intentionality, proposition-involving experience does not entail consciousness. If we say, as it were with Whitehead, that propositional feeling, or the experience of propositional content, entails intentionality then propositional feelings are intentional, and physical purposes which we have seen are prepropositional become pre-intentional as well. (After all, if the intentionality of mental states refers to their being directed at or about states of affairs then the inclusion, by way of physical purposes, of a cup in one’s visual field does not entail that one’s visual experience is directed at or about the cup.) Thus, as we take concrescence to advance from simple physical and conceptual feelings to the integration of them in physical purposes, and in some organisms to the integration of them in propositional feelings and intellectual feelings, so we understand Whitehead’s assertion that “all forms of consciousness arise from ways of integration of propositional feelings with other feelings” (PR 256) and that “consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness” (53). Consciousness does not arise from unknown causes, as a Humean might be forced to have it, or emerge or sprout full-grown from observable neuronal events in the brain as “emergent materialists” might be forced to have it. Our conscious thoughts form in experience, commonly arising as aim-bearing attention is attracted to or directed on elements (nexu ¯ s, concepts), integrated in felt propositions, and incorporated in affirmation-negation contrasts. Our conscious thoughts are an outgrowth of concrescence, of buds of experience, no matter what the setting for or form of the thinking. No matter whether it be indoors or out, at home or abroad, lying abed at night or over morning coffee, mooddominated or media-dominated, theoretic or practical, playful or planful, adolescent or adult, worried or carefree, in moments of urgency or when the

222

Chapter 6

strain is over, mute or vocalized, American or Japanese, while walking or while engaged in professional work in this profession or that, the formation of conscious perceptions and thoughts will have the same bud-based structure, obey and affirm the same categoreal obligations governing the onflow of experiential energy. Conscious thoughts emerge in the late stages of concrescence. Each arises late in the real internal constitution of a subject, and the linguistic articulation of the correlate feeling raises that subject into expression: such subject-raising is a transformation of raw typically unverbalized experience into linguistic form. In the subject-predicate form of expression that transformation encourages abstraction from concrescence, with unfortunate results for philosophy. 6.4

Consciousness and Action

So far in this chapter I have used Whitehead-based concrescual analysis as an aid in characterizing processes of perception, proposition-formation, and the formation of conscious thoughts. It now remains to sketch a concrescencebased theory of action and to examine the coordinated flow of action and perception in activity-situations, as a means to get us “inside” the ongoing present conceptually and to further anchor the concrescual approximation. In a way befitting philosophical interests and traditions of his place and day, Whitehead’s writings include little that is concerned explicitly with action. Nevertheless, the concrescual approximation’s theory of action draws extensively on his analysis of concrescence, linking it at several points with disclosures of the processual approximation. As you shall see, concrescencebased action theory gives subjective aims an essential role, draws importantly on Whitehead’s notions of hybrid prehension, anticipation, satisfaction, and appearance, and incorporates elements of his account of perception. Further, it relies on the notions of chreods and actional, expressive, or outward transmutation, conceived under Whitehead’s influence.13 Subjective Aims and Prior Intentions In the concrescual approximation, a prior intention involves an objective datum whose core is a more or less complex proposition concerning an achievable end but need not include details concerning means of achievement. The intention or aim incorporates belief in or takes for granted ones’ power to enact chreods or action routines by means of which the intended


223

end may be realized. When in operation, with the aid of invoked chreods, the aim organizes the world from the point of view of agency or, rather, the invoked chreod takes over, ordering performance and serving aim: the particular actual sequence of intentions in action and perceptual experiences is ordered by the aim-serving chreod functioning in a situation and making that situation act-ual, “sculpted” by and in action. The subjective form of a just-conceived or actually operating prior intention includes special elements of consciousness and (prior) intending. Consciousness becomes a factor when a propositional feeling of what is not and is to be achieved (e.g., in words, thirst quenched) is contrasted with what is (e.g. feeling thirst). The prior intention is thus an intellectual feeling and will, as well, be called a subordinating intention in that more than one bud lies within its scope. A prior intention (e.g. to go to a museum) may include or bring forth in turn subordinate prior intentions or subjective aims (e.g. to dress in a particular way before leaving one’s abode), and subordinate prior intentions may likewise have more than one bud in their scopes. By contrast, a subordinate and momentary subjective aim has in its scope only the consequent of the current bud. Such a momentary or minimal subjective aim or intention in action occurs within the scope of a prior intention and its functioning normally involves some autonomous modulation of the generality-involving minimal aim to momentary particulars. The satisfaction of the momentary aim is the act of perception within the intensively relevant flow: it enters by superjection into the next bud, where it typically functions to release ensuing chreod-sequenced, pre-prepared, context-sensitive, aim-serving, activity. What of the element of intending, which must have some grounding in desire, albeit an attenuated or higher-order desire to fulfill an obligation? We have been over this ground before. The subjective aim may originate from physical feelings of thirst, hunger, sexual arousal, chill, or other matters which may be construed as triggering dispositions, which give rise to conceptual feelings and aims of quenching, sating, warming (cf. PR 32). Alternatively, initial subjective aims may arise from conceptions or recognitions of possibilities or obligations; or from perceptions, including recognized receipt of offers, or from reverted conceptual feelings felt with interest or curiosity stemming from motivational dispositions. The aroused aims relevate fields of possibilities: lures arising from recent memory and associations are often part of the intention-formation process. Accordingly, as a

224

Chapter 6

feeling of thirst is conceptually prehended or valuated as to-be-quenched it might call into graded relevance concepts of possible beverages to consume. Few, if any of these evanescent images, connected, for example, with personal experience or advertising campaigns, need be held at all fast. Subtly fleeting lures may be most familiar to the reader in the form of hypotheses that hover, tantalizing, near the threshold of articulability during theorizing, analysis, or brainstorming, or near the tip of the tongue, for example, in unsuccessful attempts to recall a name, a joke, a dream sequence. Thus, as it calls from memory into relevance, desire stirs a ferment, but the satisfaction and subjective aim are not yet determined. The conceptual, or initial subjective, aim functions to adjust the valuation of prospects, and selection from among them, including perhaps the integration of onceconflicting but compatible feelings, occurs with the formation of a determinate subjective aim, a subordinating subjective aim with intensity of feeling in the relevant, anticipated, future to be derived from itself (PR 27). There is no “I” guiding the integration, but the act of concrescence is informed by who the experient is, his or her whole long variously acculturated personal history replete with conditioning habits and dispositions, as well as by activated potentials and interests. Moreover, in the process we may experience the enhancement of intensity, with the sharpening of desire or ancillary emotion, say, as a prospect becomes invested with anticipation of pleasure or with apprehension concerning diminishing supply of a desired good, or as symbolic reference precipitates a condensed richness of association upon propositional content. Here, the possibilities are as vast as in life, with associations reached by reversion affecting emotion and subjective form, a connection with a rich and positive experience bringing an admixture of joy, some dreadful association a recoil. Further, and alternatively, enhancement of intensity may accompany the growing complexity of content as compatible elements, called into relevance, say by a feeling of thirst, are contrasted harmoniously, as when an apprehension concerning supply of a preferred beverage is subsumed in a subjective aim to drink a different beverage soon and consume the preferred one later (e.g., with dinner, the valuations of the corresponding feelings “mutually determined by the adaptation of those feelings to be contrasted elements congruent with the subjective aim” (PR 27)), or more generally as scruples or abstract ideas come into explicit play.


225

Each case of prior-intention formation typically involves a characteristic increase of attention generally correlate with enhanced intensity, and all of this, from initial conceptual or subjective aim on, may and often does, proceed non-verbally. For instance, the decision culminating a process of final subject-formation may involve intermediary propositional feelings, representable, e.g., as “the grapefruit juice is in the refrigerator,” and integrable in the satisfaction, representable, e.g., as “drinking juice quenching thirst” but these need never be verbalized, aloud or in interior monologue. At any rate, however densely packed a moment of prior-intention formation be with memory, anticipation, theoretic enrichment, and imagination, the felt value in the experienced moment will not flow from content or complexity of contrast alone, as in truth there never is content “alone.” Indeed, as in any experience, final objective datum, final subjective form, and subject are formed together with the definition of aim. Perforce, conceptual reversion, the play of memory, habit, meaning, and hybrid prehensions figure significantly in the process. If the process of prior intention-formation takes place over the course of several buds, the hybrid prehensions along a historic route are especially important in the process. In section 7.7 I will argue for the importance of the notion of hybrid physical prehensions to experiential monism. In this section, my concern with these prehensions relates to their role in action and activity-situations. In this role, hybrid prehensions are the vehicle for categoreal obligation viii, concerning the efficacy of subjective aims in affecting their relevant futures. We know that subjective aims and desires (and beliefs) persist. Thus, if one strays from one’s initial point in the give and take of conversation, one is sometimes heard to ask “What was my point?” and to resume pursuit of it upon recall. For the concrescual approximation, it seems tautological that any unsatisfied desire or intention of adequate intensity persists until satisfied, forgotten, or relinquished, and to the extent that it persists in a bundle of subjective aims, it is hybridly prehended by the ultimate percipients or experients formed along an organism’s historic route. Hybrid Prehensions, Chreods, and Consciousness in the Onflow of Perception in Action Hybrid Prehensions, Appearances, and Fields of Action

Hybrid prehen-

sions are instances of “the transmission of mental feeling” and include “the prehension by one subject [a concrescing subject-in-formation] . . . of an

226

Chapter 6

‘impure’ prehension, belonging to the mentality of another subject [typically, the immediately preceding subject, or in the case of event-memory, that of a yet earlier subject]” (PR 308, 107). In the concrescual approximation, each subject affects its immediate descendant by superjection and the hybridly prehended subject-superject is the heart of co-conscious transition at the root of James’s radical empiricism. Co-conscious transitions mark the bud-by-bud coordination of perception and action in the rhythmic flows of activity-situations. The substantive part terminating a bud then is not just, say, a perception, it is a subject-superject that at once integrates, conjoins, perception and co-conscious anticipation of what to do next and is the consciousness-involving transition between now and next. While an objective datum may be felt with the subjective form of perceptual experience in one bud, and as action-releasing anticipation in the next, that subsequent actual entity inherits too, or re-enacts, the subjective form of its predecessor: actual entities arising in the course of action carry forward the dominant, subordinating, subjective aim. (Thus, as we have seen, if the intensity with which a subjective aim is felt is weak then the relevant future to be derived from the aim is relatively weakly organized.) In the course of action, for each actual entity, adaptation for attainment spells the inclusion of anticipation in the satisfaction, meaning principally that the satisfaction achieved suits the previous anticipation or aimed-at consequent. But the satisfaction-defined subject also lays necessities “upon the future to embody it and to re-enact it so far as compatibility may permit” (AI 193). Consequently, we may think of subject-superjects formed in the course of action as “anticipation-satisfactions” (cf. 192). Each subject had an anticipation central to its initial subjective aim (read “intention in action”), formed under the influence of a dominant subjective aim (read “prior intention”) serving to order a series of buds, and upon satisfaction (correlate with perception of an anticipated sensory consequent) the newformed subject projects forward or superjects a world (including one’s causally efficacious body) and the re-enactive subject typically inherits a new subordinate aim that is at once anticipated (readied for) and anticipating and it inherits a world that is overwhelmingly consonant with the world as prehended in the concluding subjective harmony of the preceding bud. The world thus configured, with emphases brought forth by the importance-increasing concentration of attention, is a world organized intensively by subjective aim. The world thus configured is what is super-


227

jected, and the superject is powerful in the re-enactive bud’s actual world. So powerful that appearance “has shed the note of derivation” and “lives in our consciousness as the world presented to us for our enjoyment and our purposes” (212). Appearance is rife with integrated physical purposes, which “by their valuations determine the relative efficiency of the various feelings to enter into the objectifications of that subject in the creative advance beyond itself” (PR 277). The notion of physical purposes makes more immediate sense in relation to (purposive) action than to relatively static perception. In fact, the notion of physical purpose seems somewhat strained apart from the expression of subjective aim in action. Under the influence of dominant subjective aims, the conceptual valuations functioning in propositional feelings and in physical purposes make of the surrounding world a field of action, an environment of instrumentality, an environment of and for action. Consider an example from Whitehead: “As we cross a road busy with traffic, we see the color of the cars, their shapes, the gay colors of their occupants; but at the moment we are absorbed in using this immediate show as a symbol for the forces determining the immediate future” (S 57). After all, “the danger of a street-crossing is for the pedestrian a regulative factor in the aesthetic values of the apparent scene,” the apparent scene including entities “important for . . . control of the future” (AI 264). The regulative factors here and generally afford contextual accommodation, however fallible, to possible obstacles, dangers, and sources of pain or embarrassment, as well as to elements to figure later in the course of action. Generally, it is as if we are disposed to “scan” for such sources and, if we find none, no correlate physical purpose is lifted to propositional status. In the concrescual approximation, the dynamic field of action then is the meeting of hybridly prehended appearance and the physical feelings of the surrounding world, with anticipations and feelings of tendency in play, and with physical purposes providing a buffer for action, so that possible dangers may contribute to the contouring of a cognitive-valuative organized space. Subjective Aims and Chreods

A subjective aim cannot of itself organize a

series of buds or produce results: it can serve to initiate action, the expression of a subjective aim, but to be acted on chreods must be enacted, take over, and generate performance under the influence of aim. Chreods, which

228

Chapter 6

can be joined or integrated with other chreods in complex chreods or action routines, are abilities to generate or repeat canalized improvisational performance of coordinated action and perception and can be adapted to an unlimited range of appropriate circumstances and immediate aims. Action routines are enacted only upon invocation in accord with subjective aim, in which, as concepts, they may be included via conceptual feelings, especially at the point of action. That is, chreods are enacted with purpose, not as mere perceptuo-motor or sensori-motor programs, rather they are usable pathways that become useful precisely in that, invoked by subjective aims, they can help realize valuable order or adaptation for the attainment of a subjective aim, and therewith are vehicles for infusing perception in action with value. The chreod is in service, in context, to the invoking aim; the general chreod is transformed by the relevant aim into this particular performance-generating chreodic action. The chreod is enacted upon a decision, typically perception-informed, that the moment is right for action. This decision may come immediately or some time after the formation of the relevant subjective aim and requires integration with the subjective aim, which must have sufficient intensive relevance to promote action, if enaction of the chreod is to be initiated. If the decision to act comes some time after, the subjective aim is sustained for some period as part of the bundle or web of subjective aims. At any rate, the perception that the time is right is a perception marking the formation of a subject or I and this perception normally releases or draws upon an appropriate chreod. We may understand this moment of initiation as involving the subjective aim functioning as a momentary I and the activated chreod, relevated from the background or memory as the appropriated me. In effect, one decides to proceed and at that time the momentary I, with determinate subjective aim (albeit one serving organic need or disposition), appropriates the me and is typically off and running. The agent then lives out and may be described as holding to his aim as the action unfolds, even though each momentary subject along the way is unique. It is on this basis that we comfortably say “I did so and so,” the “I did” covering all action flowing from the prior intention,14 although much of it may be done in the grip of chreodic activity and with momentary ‘I’s forming bud by bud. Also, the cores of these momentary buds are not necessarily directly relevant to the intention, for chreodic activity often unfolds toward the periphery of awareness: we bring focus to a task only at significant junctures or when something


229

goes wrong, calling for attention, adjustment, even problem solving. Typically, once enacted in the service of aim or desire, chreodic action routines enable us to sense and contour the world for the attainment of an end and to live through perceptuo-motor sequences characteristic of the routine. That is, such routines serve to link expectation, perception, and action in sequences of sensory-action loops. One might then say that sensoryaction loops subserve chreods and chreods subserve subjective aims, and so sensory-action loops subserve subjective aims. Sensory-action loops carry one through transitive parts from the substantive core of one bud’s satisfaction to that of its consequent, and carry forth prior anticipations that may prove useful. As lived, in a series of buds treatable as linked in sensory-action loops, each action, An, involves non-sensuous anticipation and subordinate context-adapted aiming at an aim-satisfying sensory consequent, S n, which releases anticipated (pre-prepared for) action A n + 1, often without S n resulting in clear-cut perception; meanwhile, physical purposes flow on too. Within the chreod, presentationally immediate perception of located qualities suffices to release derivate action: there is symbolic reference from fleeting perception of symbol to its meaning in the aim-serving chreod. In turn, A n + 1 aims, with a feeling of tendency or experience of acting, at S n + 1, and so on. Each loop is marked with an affirmationnegation contrast: when a chreod is functioning smoothly, the contrast typically integrates the sensed outcome and the ensuing action with an initial subjective aim at a not-yet determinate consequent. And all the while as you go S-A-S-A smoothly, you do so within the integrative subjective form of the overarching subjective aim and its associated appetition, to use a Whiteheadian term that suggests the impetus energizing action. Appetition is “immediate matter of fact including in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not and may be” (PR 32). It “is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be” (163); it is the subjective aim’s feeling of “the relevant future [which] consists of those elements in the anticipated future which are felt with effective intensity by the present subject” (27). The word ‘appetition’ points back to the indeterminate desire in an initial subjective aim and forward to what is aimed at or attracts. Chreods, which range from the most simple capacities, such as those of focusing, shifting focus, and “hand-eye” coordination, to the most sophisticated competences, are among the principal powers constituting one’s personal matrix. For any performance that one can repeat effortlessly, can

230

Chapter 6

just do without thinking about how to do it, one has a chreod or chreodic action routine: the “same” chreod structures the many performances, but of course each performance is unique, marked by bodily, emotional, intentional, and environmental novelties. When a chreod is enacted the background is at work, building a present out of operating (remembered) abilities to perform and activated (remembered) associations concerning objects, without our thinking about what we are doing, although we are conscious within the chreod and as part of its chreodic unfolding. Memory and interest are conjoined as you move into and with remembered/anticipated/projected results, and as you are moving you are refocusing and readying for the next moves. Functioning chreods carry us into each loop with superjected anticipations, and are pivotal in transforming the subject’s environment into a landscape or scene for action.15 In accomplishing this, chreods involve the felt operation of canalized anticipations and readinesses to categorize and respond to stimuli. The readinesses are anticipatory conceptual prehensions or potentials for feeling, awaiting particular stimuli which can be categorized or perceived as exemplifying the relevant concept or sensory consequent,16 and activated chreods stir associations (conveyances) that in effect call into relevance possible connections, responses. As we move along useful chreodic pathways, as the loops unfold smoothly, drawing smoothly on anticipations and readinesses without need for conscious invocation or choice, activated chreods provide the frame in which novelty is met with novelty: “. . . in each concrescent occasion its subjective aim originates novelty to match the novelty of the environment” (PR 102; AI 207). Inseparable from the inherited, valuative, appearance, the conceptual aim at what is to come next takes on novel anticipatory, context-appropriate sensory characteristics. Objects are then generally perceived to the extent and under the guises in which they are interesting by means of playing roles in the chreodic action and serving the intention. A radically empirical theory of action should provide a ductile analytic frame that can be molded, adjusted, and fleshed out and so enable one to enter any actual activity-situation conceptually, taking into account the functioning characters of thought, given a person’s habits, mood, and so on, in the fullness of embodied and socialized life. In that flow, there may be, for instance, a walking to a refrigerator, the positioning before it so as to facilitate opening and looking within, the grasping of the door handle, the opening, the peering within, the seeing of beverage containers, the recog-


231

nition of brand names, the feeling of specific thirst, the play of preferences, expectations, intentions, and associations, the taking up of a container, the withdrawal of it from the confines of the refrigerator, the closing of the door, a working through of a complex procedure of securing a drinking vessel, the opening of the container, the pouring from it, the drinking, and so on, all normally performed with wondrously coordinated detail of anticipation and perception, the pre-preparings and the responsive hands, arms, legs, eyes, body enacting simple and complex chreods with flexibility and subtle adaptability, the doings possibly reflecting emotion, mood, physical condition—the walking occurring with, say, élan or drag, the graspings, openings, and closings with, say, impatience or lassitude—all this done, quite possibly, with thinking going on, or while listening to a broadcast medium-based program, possibly moving to the beat of recorded music, and quite certainly with the causal functioning of subordinating subjective aim, so that one is non-observationally aware of what one is doing—getting a drink, acting to slake thirst. The concrescual approximation should indeed help one gain a good grasp of embodiment, and of consciousness as the locus of aim-serving interplay between a chreod-exfoliating self and its chreod-sculpted world. Each “sculpting” of the world brings the physically felt into conjunction with the aim-serving chreod, “absorbing the objective content into the subjectivity of satisfaction” (PR 160), creating a new, superjected and hybridly prehended appearance. Should something go wrong along the way, should some deviation from contextualized chreodic expectation arise, we typically recover gracefully. Stumbling, we resiliently regain our balance upon the interplay of compensatory reactions and continue on within the chreod, with attention taken up in immediate phenomenological details, but with ongoing nonobservational awareness and transitivity of intentional causation deriving from overarching subjective aim. Thus, observing unfolding chreodic behavior, one will find evidence of: loops defining general, smooth-flowing buds, the unfolding possibly going on at the periphery of attention, say while thought or conversation is progressing; loops which can be enacted in minor subordinate buds that respond to minor missteps by smooth regaining of the chreodic groove, that is without disrupting the unfolding of the chreod, though possibly diverting attention to action from thinking; and behaviors in which something goes sufficiently wrong, forcing a diversion of attention and a break in the enaction. But Whitehead or the

232

Chapter 6

concrescual approximation can get at all this from the inside. When these things “happen to us,” they happen inside experience, pre-reflectively, in the flow, with inheritance via hybrid prehension from the immediate past, with re-enaction of subjective form (intensively relevant prior intention), with non-sensuous concept-based anticipation or readiness for upcoming feelings, with physical purposes providing some sense of what is relevantly nearby, and with appetition for satisfying the chreod-serving aim, and so with persisting intent and physical purposes or short-term memories, with re-enacted subjective form and mood in play (e.g., if fear is in play, one may be circumspect; if elation, one may be inattentive) and with geometrical or space-organizing feelings operative to facilitate re-orientation and focusing bud by bud. The organism associated with each chreod in enaction, with its characteristic sensory emphases and body sets, feels and makes the world differently than when enacting a different chreod in what to an observer might seem the same environment. Outward Transmutation, the Modal Theory of Action, and Whitehead

The

concrescual approximation treats action as, of course, bud-based and as ordered for the realization of a subjective aim, which aim initiates the enaction of an aim-serving chreod. By giving chreods a central role, the concrescual approximation makes a crucial application of Whitehead, extending his process approach to series of buds, adding bite to the category of subjective intensity, Whiteheadian concrescual phenomenology and theory of action, and serving as an antidote to possibly excessive theoretic orientation to single buds. However, please understand that I take Whitehead’s observations on canalization to indeed warrant saying that my notion of chreods is thoroughly Whiteheadian. Whitehead suggests that if the imagination of alternatives, or free conceptual functioning, proves efficacious in action it may consequently be canalized as an associative pattern or, we may say, a chreod, a concept of a chreod. In such fashion, with canalization, “personal mentality can be evolved, so as to combine its individual originality with the safety [or ‘survival power’] of the material organism on which it depends” (PR 107, bracketed text too; see also 108, 178). Thus, in a process that has been characterized as “the phenomenon of learning and memory” (Vlastos 1937: 164), “life turns back into society: it binds originality within bounds, and gains the massiveness due to reiterated character” (PR 107; 56), that is, upon reiteration, it strengthens the pattern and


233

availability of chreodic habit, including socialized competences, along the historic route of a society with personal order. Enacted complex chreods unfold in a series of sensory-action loops, each of them analyzable as running from the end of a “sensory-actional” bud, involving appropriate perception in the mode of presentational immediacy or of symbolic reference, to another bud with its momentary subjective aim aimed at a sensory consequent and acted on with an experience of acting. To understand the actional aspects of buds, the concrescual approximation introduces a neo-Whiteheadian distinction between “inward” and “outward” transmutation. In inward transmutation, so central to Whitehead’s theory of perception, the datum of a conceptual feeling derived by a prehending subject from analogous physical feelings of actual entities felt through the subject’s bodily nexus is transmuted and experienced as the characteristic of a “contemporary focal nexus” (PR 314). Had Whitehead elaborated the notion of canalization, or given more attention to the nature of action in his philosophy of organism, he might well have embraced a notion akin to that of outward, actional transmutation. As understood in embodied terms, transmutation in perception involves physical feelings felt by sense receptors, transmission of them to more central occasions, which foster emphasis on select incoming signals, and mental operations in the cortex, typically involving symbolic reference. In action, such symbolic reference is pre-prepared within the chreod, so that the perception as symbol refers to or means the release of the derivate, ensuing action. A modal theory of action may aspire to involve three modes in symmetrically reverse order to those in perception, starting, say, from action in the mode of symbolic reference, in which the operative subjective aim (cf. prior intention) orders things for the attainment of an end, starting by initiating the enaction of a chreod upon perception that the time is right. In this symbolic reference, the releasing perception is a symbol whose relevant meaning is the enaction of a background capability, namely the selective appropriation of a chreod-based “me” from which one will act. That is, the perception, conjoined, integrated, with the intensively relevant subjective aim, means “start acting,” and acting here involves chreod enaction. As the chreod unfolds in context, the dominant subjective aim functions in the valuing and interpreting of incoming data, and resulting perceptions yield momentary subjective aims affecting movements performed with feelings of the immediate causal efficacy of these subjective aims. Throughout, the dominant

234

Chapter 6

subjective aim acts as a basis for symbolic interpretation of the environment and for harmonic coordination of subordinate actions and perceptions. That is, the dominant subjective aim, operating in the framework of the activated chreod, sculpts value within the physical and social environment and provides the relevant basis for meaning in perception and movement: this is action in the mode of symbolic reference. Consequently, each bud, as a sensory-action loop, starts with a co-conscious transition in which the preceding momentary subjective aim of the ultimate percipient is typically satisfied, releasing or superjecting a new intention in action which is hybridly prehended by actual entities directly subsequent to that ultimate percipient, and those entities, as participants in the relevant non-social nexus, and with dominant subjective aim in operation, are in effect ready to act to perceive an anticipated sensory consequent, some entity or state of affairs that has meaning within the scope of the action. For Whitehead, and the concrescual approximation, two actual entities involved in a sequence as successive presiding occasions must both be along routes with members who participated in the relevant non-social nexus, but the two need not be associated with the same actual neuron. The hybrid prehension carries forward a momentary world as structured in appearance and a dominant subjective aim which is felt with some intensive relevance and functions by means of the aim-serving chreod. In summary, this accounts for the transitivity of intentional causation, and causality-at-work. Also, “Owing to the delicate organization of the body, there is a returned influence, an inheritance of character derived from the presiding occasion and modifying the subsequent occasions through the rest of the body” (PR 108–109; cf. 339). So the presiding occasion is felt in subsequent actual entities (actual neurons), leading to an outward move into the actual body and to a correlate feeling or experience of acting. By categoreal obligation viii—the category of subjective intensity—the subjective aim governs origination of conceptual feelings in subordinate buds and structures its relevant future: “The relevant future consists of those elements in the anticipated future which are felt with effective intensity by the present subject by reason of the real potentiality for them to be derived from itself” (PR 27). In the concrescual approximation, these elements in the anticipated future explicitly include bodily movements, which have meaning by way of symbolic reference in accord with the subjective aim. That is, they would not be the intention-infused motions that they are


235

without serving a subjective aim. Moreover, these movements involve a sort of expressive transmutation in action—outward transmutation—which, with its prepared muscular amplification of channeled outgoing signals, operates in conjunction with the play of anticipation and of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy as perception in action in its role of releaser of response, namely, we could say, of releaser of action in the mode of presentational immediacy—centrally, an intention in action taken in abstraction from the full bud—and executed with an experience of acting as action in the mode of causal efficacy (where the causal efficacy is of the intention in action and of the prior intention). I may then say that as I reach for my cup I know that I am reaching for it—in an action whose meaning is provided by symbolic reference to the prior intention—and the reaching has some end-related presentational content and qualifies as an action in the mode of presentational immediacy, but in the reaching I am not normally aware of my hand opening to grasp the cup, although I feel that what I’m doing is intentional, actional, here in the mode of causal efficacy. As perception in the mode of causal efficacy is felt as derived from the past and the body, so action in the mode of causal efficacy is felt as issuing from an intention and into a future and the body. Just as with perception in the mode of causal efficacy, so here normally “consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy” (PR 162). The symmetry between the modal accounts of perception and action may seem sketchy and forced but, in any event, if inward or perceptual transmutation is integrative (of sensory and other feelings), outward transmutation is differential or distributive, involving the expression in subordinate bodily elements—including motor neurons and muscle fibers—of momentary subjective aims in accord with superjects from the organism’s preceding ultimate experients. Chreods facilitate inward, perceptual, transmutation via readinesses to perceive and outward transmutation through the operation of canalized anticipations and readinesses to respond to stimuli. We might say that the inward transmutation is central to the formation of the presiding subject, and that outward transmutation, which starts with an act of symbolic reference, is crucial for the formation and working of the superject in intentions in action and experiences of acting. At any rate, it is in this fashion that the concrescual approximation takes the returned influence derived from the presiding occasion to modify actual cells. That is, the generic enacted action routine

236

Chapter 6

serially sets in place context-appropriate readinesses to respond in which potential “triggers” are positively valued, so that the triggers will be conceptually prehended with valuation up, a valuation which when integrated will contribute to the quick formation of a bud and its superjection, which affects subsequent buds associated with neurons and muscles and bringing into place subsequent readinesses, which serve to further assimilate world to goal. In outward transmutation, there is “transmutation” from a complex feeling felt by the focal or ultimate experient under the influence of a dominant subjective aim into prehensions subsequently felt elsewhere in the bodily nexus and procuring realization of that aim. This realization is through the body: The human body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human expression. For example, anger issues into bodily excitements, which are then publicized in the form of appropriate language, or in other modes of violent action. We can leave it to the physiologists, in the various departments of that science, to analyze the special sorts of bodily functioning thus elicited. (MT 22)

What holds for anger here, holds for other affective modes and tones, including desires, intentions, and subjective aims. Embodied action is the expression of subjective aim in chreod-based activity. The chreod takes over, and “in normal, healthy, bodily operations the chain of occasions along the arm [for instance] sinks into the background, almost into complete oblivion” (PR 120). In those healthy operations, the oblivion in question marks an energetic economy, borne of our becoming able to take our chreodic capabilities for granted. Outward Transmutation and Consciousness in the Course of Action

For

Whitehead, consciousness resides primarily in the subjective form of substantive parts, but that should not obscure awareness of the role of consciousness and formation of conscious states in onflowing experience: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a


237

selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. It replaces in rational experience what has been submerged in the higher sensitive experience and has been sunk yet deeper by the initial operations of consciousness itself. (PR 15)

Though consciousness be associated primarily with satisfactions, we may contrast that with re-enacted consciousness, felt at the start of a bud, especially when it is re-enacted subsequently in action as attention operates in the ensuing transitive parts. Thus, I may be conscious of a held cup as tobe-drunk-from, but as the cup is moved toward lips consciousness doesn’t lapse, to be reawakened rudely at touch to lips. The stream of consciousness is a stream of discrete conscious pulses joined by transitive parts, including co-conscious transition, with its hybrid prehension and its opening to incoming data from the onflowing surround. The hybrid prehension extends through the transitional phase and then into supplementary feeling, as minor adjustments are made, instancing the working of “autonomous energy” (PR 245), and these transitive parts involve the play of awareness, as say, cup is moved toward lips. In the embodied action emerging with outward transmutation, consciousness accompanies the affirmation-negation contrast between the perceived and the anticipated consequent, and is not just tied to the inherited objective datum. It is dynamic in that it is involved in the guiding of action. Here we have the Jamesian function of consciousness as cognition subservient to the attainment of an end. In fact, the transitive parts carrying from grasp of cup to drinking from it involve contrasts of what is not with what is: thus we are aware, conscious, of what we are doing as we do it or, more accurately, of what is going on non-verbally in experience as it is going on. Once a chreod is enacted in accord with a subjective aim, consciousness may largely become the movement of interest infusing the chreod, making the general action routine this course of action, calling forth anticipations that contrast now with next, each anticipation of consequent analyzable as linked with a momentary subjective aim, the canalized transitive flow in each moment including some openness to novelty that contributes (along with bodily feelings, anticipatory feelings of direction, and physical purposes) to the experience of acting. All of this simply goes on within an overall, unfolding, chreod-enacting onflow of action in accord with a dominant, enduring subjective aim that typically serves to organize and sculpt the environment in smoothly changing appearances befitting the specific action.

238

Chapter 6

Finally, let us review how bud-marking satisfactions serve as nodes in the bud-articulated stream of consciousness, with consciousness part of the subjective form of each satisfaction, with an affirmation-negation contrast as an essential factor in the objective datum of each satisfaction, and with conformal feelings carrying over the subjective form associated with the intensively relevant subjective aim. Consider again a case of locating a nearby cup preparatory to drinking from it, with the aim of satisfying a desire to slake thirst by consuming some fluid believed to be contained in the cup. The act of cup-perception may be assumed to proceed from perception in the mode of presentational immediacy to recognition of the cup. In action, the conscious perceptual feeling is felt by a subject-superject. As fulfillment of anticipation, cup-recognition contrasts what is (cup located) and what was not yet (cup not located); as satisfaction or superject it contrasts cup as located with cup to-be-grasped (and drunk from). As experienced, anticipation and satisfaction are together, co-conscious, though we can separate them, as here, upon reflection. Having separated these functions, one may think of associating them with different actual entities in a non-social nexus. In any case, the co-conscious transition is tightest and most evident in action (hence James’s interest in activity-situations), and there the conceptual lure is often at its narrowest. (To confirm this generality, consider the likelihood and actualities of having memorial or inferential associations intrude upon perceptions in action.) The lure widens in other types of co-conscious transition, as in the cases of flow of thought into thought treated earlier in this chapter. To the extent that the experient anticipated such cup-perception and was readied for it, the chreod then unfolds in outward transmutation, with parallel readying too for subsequent inward transmutation. The objective datum felt by the ultimate cup-perceiving experient may contrast what is and what was not yet, but in optimally simple flow the superject, by contrast, contrasts what is (cup located) and what is not yet (cup to be grasped), and we readily see that the anticipation-satisfaction is subjectsuperject and co-conscious transition. Anyhow, one may locate the cup and then reach for it, as if on the periphery of awareness, while one’s attention turns back to what one had been occupied with, reading, say. In any case, we are conscious within the applicable enacted chreod of the cup as to-be-grasped because it was looked for as to-be-grasped in the then relevant future of the subordinating subjective aim. Given that appetitive


239

anticipation, the initial fleeting perception of say the familiar blue of the cup (or, equally, the familiar curve of its handle) may suffice to release action and need not involve much more than a bare germ of consciousness. Rather, with a principle of unrest functioning, urging realization of what is not and may be, attention selectively highlights data in the service of object recognition and the furtherance of one’s subjective aim. We do not have to focus more than fleetingly for what was vague to become sufficiently clear to further action. Action often does not require clearly focused, full-fledged presentational immediacy. Here, with expectation functioning appetitively one goes right to symbolic reference: familiar blue shape means cup and cup means “reach for me, grasp me, take me close, drink from me.” What was perceived in the mode of causal efficacy counts as what is perceived in the mode of presentational immediacy, and what was perceived in the mode of presentational immediacy counts, with expectation operative, as object perception in the mode of symbolic reference and object recognition means prepared-for derivate action of reaching. That is, the readinesses to perceive, which are at work as the action sequence unfolds, await prehensions which exemplify the aimed-at, conceived, consequent and signify the anticipated object. Meanwhile, as the perceptions are integrated with the subjective aim driving and harmonizing experience, so that by symbolic reference the relevant perception means “Do next, now,” the propositional datum (say, “blue cup there”) comes to have to do with a consequent derivate action (PR 181). The derivate action itself aims at the next Jamesian anticipated sensory consequent, which takes determinate shape in the next bud, whose satisfaction involves the bringing of cup to lips. This redirection of attention is precisely where consciousness normally is pivotal, the affirmation-negation contrast normally including an affirmation (of what is not, as valuable) that carries one ahead toward the realization of what is not. Yet a proponent of the concrescual approximation ought not to render its rigorous interpretative account too rigid, must not commit its own fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and must return to the stream, in radically empirical fashion, to be reminded at once how full is embodied memorybearing experience. Philosophically, the fine details of the concrescual approximation’s account of action may count for far less than any success it has in making evident the continuity of the onflow, the general nature of the interplay of perception and action, and of intention, memory, and

240

Chapter 6

desire, and how value gives structure and meaning to experience in the lived moment. Here then, one may slacken one’s analytic effort, thinking to have recourse to what the physiologists have to say, as I will in chapter 7, even though one checks their observations and interpretations for taint by theory that is questionable by virtue of being formulated without concern for concrescence. 6.5

The Concrescual Approximation and James’s Characters of Thought

When awake, we all have experience that comes in a continuous onflow, yet moment by moment, and there are inescapable commonnesses—great organic conditions—to be recognized among each of those moments and onflows. James’s presentation of the characters of thought may be construed as a ground-breaking attempt at articulating those conditions. Whitehead deepens and enriches our understanding of them, and takes us far closer to their functioning, whoever the experient. Where James noticed the five characters of thought immediately in the process of thought, we now feel their experiential counterparts at work and can see the characters as expressions or aspects of concrescences, which themselves are the formation of moments of thought, including formation of what we abstract as objective datum, subjective form, and subject. Each bud is an act of experience, and each one, each concrescence of perception or cognition or possibility or of emotion, is a synthesis contributing to the formation of ensuing buds. Whitehead enables us to get in touch with concrescence from the inside and with what is going on “in” each moment, so that the functionings of the subsequently abstracted characters are strongly confirmed, and the actual indissociability of the characters from one another is evident. In the concrescual approximation as in Whitehead, the primary nature of a bud is no longer perceptual or intentional; it is valuative. Of course, for James as for Whitehead, what we attend to is what interests us, but for Whitehead, the progress from initial subjective aim to final satisfaction is the central theme in the history of a bud. A concrescence, with its subjective aim, is characterized (SMW 93) as “an end in itself, . . . something which is for its own sake, [and this] must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something. ‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event.”


241

Although I have hardly touched on it, Whitehead provides a metaphysics that situates James’s characters of thought, buds of perception or moments of subject-formation, and stream of consciousness and experience within a monistic cosmology, albeit one foreshadowed by James. In that metaphysics, Whitehead generalizes the notion of a bud of human perception to that of an actual entity, much as he enlarges the premise in ethical discourse that man is a social animal to arrive at the social nature of all actual occasions (see PR 204),17 and much as he may be taken to expand the notion of transitive parts to include all feelings, since every feeling involved in a concrescence contributes to the “process of transition from indetermination towards terminal determination” (PR 45; 221), and to the formation of the satisfaction from which a substantive part may be abstracted. In the past two chapters I have focused on what Whitehead has to say as it applies to human consciousness and experience, offering a “naturalized” version of his metaphysics, from which eternal objects and God are excluded. Does the resulting account—the concrescual approximation—generally meet the conditions of adequacy imposed by James’s characters of thought? More specifically: Does it treat credibly and usefully of transitive parts and coconscious transitions and of the I-me dialectic, and so of the first three characters? Does it have a credible place for intentionality and valuation (and so the remaining two characters) in the moment of experience? Does what Whitehead and the concrescual approximation say match with experience so as to illuminate it and let us draw closer to it than other philosophical approaches facilitate or even permit? Is the concrescual approximation generative enough to reflect, to capture something of, the vast, boundless richness of potential experience? The radical empiricist will want these questions to be answered in the affirmative. If they are so answered, he may then turn with interest from the concrescual approximation to its primary intellectual source, Whitehead’s metaphysics, his philosophy of organism, as well as to aesthetic and ethical applications of Whiteheadian views. The concrescual approximation does answer the above questions in the affirmative, briefly as follows. As for the transitive parts and co-conscious transitions, the two preceding sections stand as an extended response: with Whitehead, the concrescual approximation gives more refined and clearly distinguished elaborations of the two forms of transition than James did. Moreover, it affords a credible, useful definition of consciousness and shows how the stream may be continuous in thought and action.

242

Chapter 6

Concerning the I-me dialectic, the concrescual approximation views the me in terms of an organism’s defining characteristic or personal matrix, and sees each concrescence as novel, as freely synthesizing a new-formed subject-superject or “I.” Each new-formed subject-superject, its immediacy perishing (PR 29), contributes, as does the rest of the changing surround, to the novel initiation of ensuing buds. The I or experient is always new; it first comes into originative play after the responsive phase, in autonomous concrescence, and the me or organism is always changing, being modified, with each event imposing some relevant conformity on subsequent actual occasions along the organism’s historic route (56). Does the concrescual approximation have a credible place for intentionality and valuation in the moment of experience? In fact, the final objective datum of a concrescence is regarded as an outcome of successive integrative contrasts that dynamically affects what ensues and may be regarded as the natural, experiential basis for talk of the propositional content or conditions of satisfaction of an intentional bud. Moreover, the subjective form or emotional complex of a satisfaction is how the objective datum is felt, and is the outgrowth of physical, emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual feelings contributory to it in accord with the subjective aim, for the subjective aim-in-formation, which conceptually valuates new data, conditions all subjective forms through mutually sensitive adjustment. We may regard the subjective form of the satisfaction as the natural, experiential basis for talk of the psychological mode of an intentional bud. The concrescual approximation thus has place for the interfusion of intentionality and valuation in the play of the moment and in memory, in one’s personal matrix of powers, capacities. In the moment, which starts, superjected, from an efficacious past replete with feelings of other actualities, some factors rise toward the center of feeling and attention in perception and in propositional and intellectual feelings while other factors are eliminated from feeling, so that while one can feel things in so many different ways, one always ends up feeling them in one determinate, value-bearing way. Does what Whitehead and the concrescual approximation say match with experience so as to illuminate it and let us draw closer to it than other philosophical approaches facilitate or even permit? Aside from the conceptual analysis involved in the concrescual approximation itself, its adjunct methodology—concrescual phenomenology, which is grounded in the onflow of concrescences, rather than in isolated characters of thought—is


243

designed to draw one close to any experience by means of theoretically informed, but sensitive, interrogation. Such examination enables us to feel concrescence take place, catch perception and other propositional content in formation, grow sensitive to the function and shaping of subjective aim in perception, in the formation of complex objective data—contrasts—felt by intellectual feelings, and in the unfolding of chreods in activitysituations. We can begin to appreciate the flow and ebb of desires, emotions, moods and irritations, how these constitute subjective form, and how subjective forms function in concrescence. We begin to appreciate all this not merely as the connecting of antecedent and consequent buds but as a flow in a life, with aims, long-standing purposes, and stubborn facts all being factors in the ups and downs in the coursing of a personal historic route of experience, which is an abstraction from the full embodiment of life as we know it, and from onflow. The neurobiological approximation sketched in the next chapter will increase appreciation of the embodied nature of experience, but it too will be nonetheless abstractive. In principle, then, we can generate a descriptive account of any bud, each one a way station for influences and energies received, each with its inherited actual world and readinesses and biases toward possible lures for feeling. Thus, the concrescual approximation is generative in the sense that, allowing for novelties of data and feeling, it can conceptually build up what goes into the formation of each and every concrescence, each final objective datum and each emotionally complex subjective form, without introducing details that conflict with the findings and sensibility of radical empiricism. That is, it admits nothing that definitely doesn’t function in experience, and I believe denies nothing that does. Further, the concrescual approximation is generative in the sense that it sees and treats each moment in human experience as arising along a historic route of personal occasions, reflecting the moment-by-moment accumulation of socialized experience, and so can conceivably come to grips not just with the formation of each bud, but with the formation of life histories, personalities, and social groups. From there, it can offer a basis for interpreting behaviors by means of relevant deconcrescence of the formation of actual buds into immediate feelings involved, and of the analysis of those feelings in terms of what came out of one’s previous experiences, one’s values, ideas, and customary ways of thought and feeling, one’s language, culture, and evolutionary background—deconcrescence being a procedure that may afford

244

Chapter 6

some understanding of and release from conditioning. The bud itself becomes a zone of autonomy, an occasion of autonomous concrescence in which encrusted, limiting habits need not channel the onflow, so that prejudice may be overcome and relationship regained. The concrescual approximation then appears to meet conditions of adequacy based on James’s psychology and radical empiricism. Although the Whiteheadian system from which the concrescual approximation derives is a one-substance cosmology of feelings in an energetic onflow, does the concrescual approximation support or sustain a monism of pure experience such as James proposed? I deal with this question in the closing chapter.

7

Edelman, the Neurobiological Approximation, and

Consciousness

7.1

The Concrescual Approximation and Neurobiology

How well does the concrescual approximation sit with the “facts” of neurobiology? Compelling correlations between concrescual and neurobiological accounts of consciousness abound, and can sustain a potentially lavish “mind-body” parallelism that is naturally susceptible to a monistic interpretation. The parallelism tightly links Jamesian characters of thought and descriptions of mental processes involving consciousness, as presented in the concrescual approximation, with bodily and brain processes. To make this linkage, I draw on the writings of Gerald Edelman, who openly avows a debt to James and credits not just James but Whitehead as well with having worked to put the mind back into nature (e.g. BA 6–11, 111, 154). Damasio (313) characterized Edelman’s proposed biological theory of consciousness, known as “Neural Darwinism” or the “Theory of Neuronal Group Selection” (TNGS), as “perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to deal with the matter of consciousness published to date.” Searle (MC 39) wrote: “Of the neurobiological theories of consciousness I have seen, the most impressively worked out and the most profound is that of Gerald Edelman.” Oliver Sacks (1993: 49) characterized Edelman’s theory as “the first truly global theory of mind and consciousness, the first biological theory of individuality and autonomy.” Edelman’s comprehensive theory “connects descriptions of neural structure to those of psychological function” (RP 40), and treats consciousness as an evolved, phenotypic, functional capability that develops in the individual as a result of prenatal epigenetic development and postnatal interactions involving brain, body, and world. It includes a detailed account of the place of value, memory, and past experience in each moment—or “remembered present”—of consciousness. In

246

Chapter 7

examining “what kind of neural processes actually explain the fundamental properties of consciousness, rather than merely correlate with them” (UC 19), Edelman unites ideas from several fields of biology, including molecular and cellular biology, neuroanatomy, embryology, evolutionary morphology, natural selection theory, and ethology, connects them with psychology, and presents them in generally coherent and stimulating fashion. Edelman’s synthesis is formidable, daunting, even visionary. Edelman’s biological theory of consciousness (“the extended TNGS”) addresses “the central problem of conscious experience” (UC 17)—how neural processes can actually produce or be correlate with subjective experience—and is professedly and deeply Jamesian. It is permeated by the Jamesian notion that consciousness is a process, and acknowledgments of James are scattered throughout his texts. Most pointedly, Edelman believes his theory must account for James’s characters of thought (RP 17–18, 33; cf. BA 167, 174, UC 18): “We need a theory that . . . [is] consistent with evolution, population thinking, and biological individuality while accounting for the ‘Jamesian’ properties of consciousness” (RP 30–31). In elaborating his theory, he demonstrates that the Jamesian characters of thought and James’s account of habit and action provide an effective framework for aligning neurobiology with psychology and experience and for formulating exhaustive neuropsychological accounts of consciousness. Consequently, Edelman provides data and analyses that can be used to enrich and lend credence to if not ground the concrescual approximation. Although I find Edelman’s approach appealing and apparently sound, other neurobiological approaches may also prove helpful or suggestive in approaching questions concerning consciousness. However, Edelman’s Jamesian bent makes his views especially, and smoothly, adaptable to the concrescual approximation, which would itself require that any neurobiological account of consciousness fit coherently with it. What I want to show, using Edelman’s work, is how close a fit may be achieved between neurobiological and philosophical descriptions of experience, descriptions which, though they may be very sensitive to the realities of experience, ineluctably remain descriptions, not the lived actualities at the base of experiential monism. Of course, Edelman is a materialist, since he accepts as a constraint on “any adequate global theory of brain function” that “it must be uncompromisingly physical and must be based on res extensa, and indeed be derivable from them. According to this view, all cognition and all consciousness

Edelman, the Neurobiological Approximation, and Consciousness

247

must rest on orderings and processes in the physical world. . . . and should be based on a materialist metaphysics” (RP 10; UC xii; BA 7). As a scientist, he suffers from an inclination to keep away from the phenomenological and experiential, for instances of experience are not intersubjective. Thus, he regularly fails to deal with the stream of consciousness phenomenologically or experientially. The odd clinical or experimental item, yes; the attempt at any immersion in value-driven experience, no. In contrast, the concrescual approximation (and, subsequently, the neurobiological approximation) bids fair to come at consciousness from inside the moment and inside the stream and so, incidentally, provides an approach that can take Edelman from his neuroscientist’s remove and put him in vivid contact with the stream of experience. This helps unify Edelman’s observations, makes it easier to comprehend his treatments of conscious processes, and enlarges the imagination that can be brought to bear on topics of interest. The ways in which the concrescual approximation characterizes experience and consciousness can be correlated with neurobiological phenomena in a highly detailed “mind-body” or “psycho-neural” (J2 164) parallelism, that is, ultimately, theoretical, and at a remove from experience. It is experience, embodied concrescence, that this whole book, radical empiricism, and any Jamesian monism of pure experience, take or find as primary. As I said at the start, experience is embodied but not merely physical. As we act we feel things going on, and many of those feelings constitute our feeling embodied. When we try to observe them, we tend to feel them in less intensely embodied fashion. Moreover, experience involves awareness but is not merely mental. The physical and mental are aspects of experience. When treated in abstraction from experience, various forms of mind-body dualism may seem inescapable, unless one allows radical empiricism to counter the dualist’s tendency to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Although I have indicated how the mental and physical can be treated as poles of experience, it remains to show more fully, as I do late in this chapter, what the bodily might be in a monism of pure experience. 7.2

Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection

Edelman formulated his TNGS “to account for perceptual categorization and certain aspects of memory and learning in terms of brain structure,

248

Chapter 7

development, and evolution” (RP 10). In his “extended TNGS” (treated in section 7.3), Edelman expands his “biologically-based” TNGS to encompass consciousness (11). I will discuss correlates in James and Whitehead of Edelman’s terms and notions, and criticize his accounts from a concrescual point of view, but I must first elucidate several of Edelman’s terms if I am to expect you to appreciate Edelman’s extended theory, and the conjunction of its biological account of consciousness with the concrescual approximation. For my purposes, the terms of most interest in the TNGS proper are neuronal groups, reentry, local maps, global mappings, perceptual categorization, categorization on value, and recategorical memory. Terms of principal interest in the extended theory include concept, valuecategory memory, primary consciousness, and higher-order consciousness. I provide a quick account of these terms, deferring until section 7.5, the relation of them to the concrescual approximation and to the themes of this book. Neuronal Groups and Developmental and Experiential Selection Edelman often cites two notions that prompted him to develop the TNGS. The first is that a newborn animal enters an unclassified (and unpartitioned) world, so that “until a particular individual in a particular species categorizes it in an adaptive fashion, the world is an unlabeled place in which novelty is frequently encountered” (RP 40). Accordingly, the TNGS is obliged to “show how a behaving animal nevertheless adaptively matches its responses to unforeseen novelty occurring in such a world” (BA 82, 74). The other notion concerns the enormous structural diversity of individual nervous systems and brains even in a single species. The TNGS, then, is designed to indicate how rich brain connectivity is related to conceptual and experiential complexity and, in substance, is “above all, . . . a theory of perceptual categorization—one that relates this fundamental psychological process of categorization to neural functioning” (RP 41). The TNGS maintains that “the ability of richly endowed organisms to categorize an unlabeled world in an adaptive fashion arises from two interactive processes” (RP 41). The first, developmental selection, is rooted in genetics and evolution, and prepares the brain anatomy, characteristic of a species, for postnatal experience. Although largely constrained by genes and inheritance, developmental selection nonetheless allows for “enormous anatomical variation at its finest levels and ramifications” (242). In the course of


249

this genetically regulated process, the branching and extension of neurons leads to their joining, through synaptic connections, in neuronal circuits or groups, with connections among neurons strengthened or weakened according to the patterns of electrical activity of the neurons in question (UC 83). This “generation of diversity” leads to “the formation of primary repertoires consisting of large numbers of variant neuronal groups (or local circuits) within a given anatomical region” (RP 44). Neuronal groups, which constitute the smallest neural units of selection (e.g. ND 198), consist of hundreds to thousands (“perhaps 50 to 10,000 neurons” (Reeke 158)) of highly interconnected neurons, some of them excitatory, some inhibitory, many of them “respond[ing] simultaneously when an appropriate stimulus is presented” (UC 44). Changes in the strengths of synaptic connections between neurons in a group tend to “differentially enhance responses of other neurons in that group. . . . [Neuronal] groups are dynamic entities whose characteristics are affected by their developmental and functional history and by the nature of the signals they receive at any time” (RP 44). The other interactive process leading to adaptive categorization, experiential selection, is initially based on the extra-uterine interaction of an organism, already equipped with primary repertoires, with its (becominglabeled) world: “. . . during behavior particular functioning neuronal groups are dynamically selected by the action of various signals and mechanisms of synaptic change . . . strengthening some synapses and weakening others, a process that leads to the formation of secondary repertoires” (RP 46). That is, as a result of behavioral experience, “selective modification in the strengths of synaptic connections (differential amplification) leads to the compartition and stabilization of functioning circuits out of fixed networks [the primary repertoires]” (Reeke 158). “The world becomes ‘labeled’ as a consequence of behavior that leads to particular selective events within such neural structures in each animal. This process leads to the formation of relevant perceptual categories and to the association of behaviors with certain constellations of those categories in an adaptive manner. Such selective events act upon preexisting variation at each level of neural structure” (RP 41). The events are subsequently acted on, each developmental event enabling and constraining subsequent events. In humans, among other brain-equipped forms of life, “responses of neuronal populations are significantly influenced by similarities between present and past constellations of sensory signals. This re-evocation of previous responses constitutes

250

Chapter 7

the basis of what we call memory. Memory is a consequence of selective amplification, which leads to increased speed or strength of selected responses when similar patterns of stimulation are repeated” (Reeke 158). Memory, which involves the re-activation of previously stimulated connections among neuronal groups, can thus generate performance, and experiential selection may be regarded as the building up, within specific cultural and natural environments, of one’s memories and capabilities for performance. Throughout, experiential selection functions analogously to natural selection in the evolution of species (cf. RP 39), so that different patterns of doing things—like reaching, classifying, pronouncing—may compete in early childhood until a highly viable one wins out, though it too remains dynamic, changing as one’s nervous system continues to develop and as one lives through experience, bud by bud. The TNGS takes world-labeling perceptual categorization “to be fundamental in any attempt to relate physiology to psychology” (BA 89). Edelman believes that if he can establish, within materialism, the relation between neural functioning and categorization, then in an extended TNGS he can freely use the tenets of the TNGS to explain the move from categorization to consciousness as likewise involving no departure from the material realm. Perceptual Categorization, Value, and Maps If perceptual categorization—“the selective discrimination of an object or event from other objects or events for adaptive purposes” (BA 87; T 224)— is to occur, two additional characteristics are required. The categorizing organism must have an inclination or urge to categorize stimuli and assimilate them for recurrent function, and a basis for coordinating categorization with world. The former need is for categorization on value and the latter is for topographic mapping. Categorization on Value

Again, the categories shaping an organism’s per-

ceptions are not labels “inherent in the environment.” Instead, they develop interactively and “depend on the evolutionarily dictated predispositions of organisms to attend to categories that are relevant to their adaptive needs” (Reeke 166). These predispositions are the basis for what Edelman (BA 91–94) terms “categorization on value.” Here, we benefit from a summary of Edelman’s relevant views provided by Sacks (1993: 43–44):


251

Clearly there are some innate biases or dispositions at work; otherwise the infant would have no tendencies whatever, would not be moved to do anything, seek anything, to stay alive. These basic biases Edelman calls ‘values.’ Such values are essential for adaptation and survival; some have been developed through eons of evolution; and some are acquired through exploration and experience. Thus if the infant instinctively values food, warmth, and contact with other people (for example), this will direct its first movements and strivings. These ‘values’—drives, instincts, intentionalities—serve to differentially weight experience, to orient the organism toward survival and adaptation, to allow what Edelman calls ‘categorization on value,’ e.g. to form categories such as ‘edible’ and ‘nonedible’ as part of the process of getting food.

Organisms with brains then are equipped to respond to relevant conditions in an unlabeled world, and to selectively develop adaptive, perceptual categories. Each individual has a complex brain rich enough in fine structure to allow for development and modification of a set of categorizationenabling neuronal groups and interconnections unique to the organism, and quite adequate to the novelties encountered in the world. Local Maps

If the nervous system is to embody the ability to carry out cat-

egorization, perception and action in an unlabeled world, it must relate stimuli to categorization in some coherent fashion: “maps” must be generated selectively—anatomically during developmental selection and synaptically during experiential selection—to relate sampling of signals to the spatio-temporal surround. Edelman uses the term “map” for a physical linkage between distinct groups or sheets of neurons. “Local maps” systematically relate neurons on two-dimensional receptor sheets (such as the skin or retina) to corresponding portions of neuronal sheets in the brain (BA 19; RP 49). To facilitate movement and action in response to stimuli, “at least one brain map [say, that mapping a retina to a sheet in the brain] must be topographic” (RP 68). Here, ‘topographic’ “refer[s] to the situation in which a sensory receptor sheet receiving signals from the world connects to its recipient map in such a way that neighboring locations in the sensory sheet are also neighboring locations in the recipient map” (BA 87). For Edelman, these “local maps” preserve “some degree of continuity corresponding to the characteristics of primary sensory inputs” and “‘translate’” properties of objects (e.g. orientation, color) into neural properties at defined locations, making it “possible to sample and preserve portions of the gross topographic order of the external scene in time and space,” although topographic maps alone do not suffice for perception (ND 109).

252

Chapter 7

Reentry, Perceptual Categorization, and Global Mappings Local, topographic, maps provide the degree of continuity needed to anchor reference as the maps interact in higher-order mappings and thus play “a major role in the matching of changes in the environment with dynamic structures that are established in the brain” (ND 106). Edelman calls the process by which brain maps interact reentry. To coordinate the interaction of receptor sheets and maps with each other, a process by which distributed activity within mapped areas is correlated over time, the TNGS proposes . . . that mapped regions exchange signals by reentry. Reentry is a process of temporally ongoing parallel signaling between separate maps along ordered anatomical connections. Reentrant signaling can take place via reciprocal connections between maps. . .; it can also occur via more complex arrangements such as connections among cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. A striking example of a reentrant system is seen in the functionally segregated areas of the visual system. (RP 49)

The visual system of monkeys contains over 30 specialized, and to some extent functionally segregated, maps (BA 85), for color, motion, orientation, etc. (e.g. UC 106, RP 72). “By means of reentrant signaling, different maps separately receiving signals for features or for correlations of features [can] be connected in time, space, and neural properties and be altered as a result of correlated synaptic changes” (RP 111). According to the TNGS, integration of disjunct maps “occurs by a process of reentrant signaling along interareal connections” (73) and coordinated integration produces “a coherent and unified representation of the stimulus domain” (71). Reentry can thus functionally connect otherwise disjunct maps—maps responsive to different kinds of stimuli. When the interconnections between disjunct maps are strengthened within a segment of time, the responses of the maps are coordinated and integrated (70). “The TNGS proposes that any nontrivial categorization must arise through the operation of at least two separate channels carrying signals to maps. Each channel (for example, a sensory modality or submodality) independently samples a particular stimulus domain. After multiple encounters with a stimulus, particular patterns of neuronal groups will be selected in a mapped area. Following such selection, similar signals in each neuronal channel can preferentially activate previously selected neuronal groups in the repertoires of a neural region to which that channel is mapped” (49–50). Edelman terms the simplest such unit of re-entrantly connected maps a “classification couple” (48; BA 87). Classification couples


253

may link sensory features with one another or sensory and motoric elements in a sensorimotor system (ND 62), but by themselves they do not constitute perceptual categorization (let alone anything psychological). However, connection of disjunctively sampled “local maps in a global mapping serves to link these samples by reentry so that the various representations of features are correlated in space and time” (ND 210). Thus, classification couples become connected in global mappings linking perception and action. “A global mapping is the smallest dynamic unit capable of rich perceptual categorization” (RP 111). Global Mappings

Edelman’s theory exploits the distinction of “three main

topological arrangements of fundamental neuroanatomy in the brain,” namely “(A) . . . the thalamocortical system—a dense meshwork of reentrant connectivity between the thalamus and the cortex and between different cortical regions through so-called corticocortical fibers. (B) . . . long, polysynaptic loops that are arranged in parallel and that leave the cortex, enter the so-called cortical appendages [viz., the hippocampus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum] . . . and return to the cortex. (C) . . . the diffusely projecting value systems . . . which distribute ‘hairnet(s)’ of fibers all over the brain” (UC 43). These value systems can release neuromodulators that influence neural plasticity as well as activity, bringing about changes in synaptic strength (46), and so changes in value-based memory. According to the TNGS, The cerebral cortex alone is not sufficient to bear the burden of perceptual categorization and control of movement. That burden is carried out . . . by a structure called a global mapping. A global mapping relates an animal’s movement and changing sensory input to the action of the hippocampus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum as they connect to the cerebral cortex. It links the first two topological arrangements of anatomy, the thalamocortical system and the subcortical appendages. . . . A global mapping is thus a dynamic structure containing multiple reentrant local maps (both motor and sensory) that interact with nonmapped regions [regions not directly linked to sensory sheets], such as those of the brain stem, basal ganglia, hippocampus, and parts of the cerebellum. The activity of a global mapping reflects the fact that perception generally depends on and leads to action. When one moves one’s head to follow a moving target, the motor and sensory portions of a global mapping continually readjust. In other words, categorization does not occur solely in a cortical sensory area that then executes a program to activate a motor output. Instead, the results of continual motor activity are considered to be an essential part of perceptual categorization. This consideration implies that the global mappings carrying out such

254

Chapter 7

categorization must contain both sensory and motor elements. Neuronal group selection in global mappings occurs in a dynamic loop that continually matches gesture and posture to several kinds of sensory signals. In other words, the dynamic structure of a global mapping is maintained, refreshed, and altered by continual motor activity and rehearsal. (UC 95–96)

Global Mappings, Sensory-Action Loops, and Chreods

Consider the sim-

plest sort of effective global mapping, one patterning an act as simple as that of focusing resulting in some sort of categorization. Such mapping may be passive, as when an organism responds to an irritant or a change in its visual field, where the categorization as categorization on value is in accord with an evolved and survival-enhancing bias to respond to thresholdexceeding irritants and changes. Moreover, a mapping may be active, as if in service to volition (cf. RP 100), and may occur with expectation, as when one is looking to locate an object and where the recognition or perceptual categorization of a relevant quality leads in context to ensuing movements and focusings, all of which may be included within a sequence of global mappings. Thus, “a global mapping allows selectional events occurring in its local maps . . . to be connected to the animal’s motor behavior, to new sensory samplings of the world, and to further successive reentry events” (BA 89). In effect, the continual movement serves to correlate sets of detected features and to check for consistency in the workings of reentrant systems (ND 63), and to allow for ensuing unfolding activity in the form of successive global mappings. Global mappings “are dynamic metastable patterns of activity involving mapped classification couples and nonmapped regions. [They] can emerge from practically any combination of actions, past or present, and insofar as they involve large parts of the brain and various combinations of local maps for different modalities, they can subserve a large variety of perceptual categories. Different global mappings can correspond to widely different things: an object, an action, or a relation between two disparate objects, for example” (RP 143). Consequently, the global mapping for an object may connect classification couples with a nonmapped “concept” of the object, and a global mapping for an action may couple sensory and motoric elements. Moreover, “global mappings that are related to a particular task can be constructed or linked during consciously guided learning until a smooth, apparently effortless sensorimotor loop is executed speedily, reliably, and unconsciously” (UC 188). A series of global mappings thus


255

may correspond to a series of actions subordinate to an overarching aim or intention, and we may give such a series a single unifying name—an effortless sensorimotor loop, say, or a motor program (cf. RP 204)—just as a stringing together or conjoining of chreods may itself be termed a chreod, or an action routine. Although Edelman suggests that “of all of the concepts of the TNGS, global mapping based on reentry is perhaps the most difficult” (RP 56), global mappings are readily understood phenomenologically, namely as neurological counterparts of the sensory-action-sensory loops experienced in the course of unfolding chreods and constituting anticipation- and readiness to respond-laden enaction of those chreods, and thus as facilitated neural pathways that function dynamically to structure experience. Thus, we may say that a simple chreod, for instance, the running of fingers, epidermal receptor sheets, over a portion of the world as, say, one feels for a doorknob in the dark is a global mapping, and a complex, say door-opening, chreod is a series of global mappings, or, for short, that motor programs are constituted by global mappings. Accordingly, for Edelman, “one dynamic characteristic of the system of global mappings in the brain is the ability to order successive changes,” relying on “the organs of succession,” namely cortical appendages including the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and the hippocampus, which produce and categorize smooth gestures, providing both “the timing and smoothing of successions of movements” and the establishment of memory (BA 104–105). The importance of the basal ganglia in extended motor action may be singled out here. The basal ganglia, “a set of huge nuclei in the depths of the forebrain that contain a vast number of neurons and that have evolved in parallel with the thalamocortical system” are essential to smooth motor action, which is dependent on anticipation and readinesses to respond: “. . . input to the motor cortex leads to output to the spinal cord, which causes particular movements in accordance with motor plans. At the same time, the output from the motor cortex is also routed to the basal ganglia . . . [which] leads to an anticipatory arousal of specific cortical areas and results in enhanced sensitivity to proprioceptive and sensory feedback to the cerebral cortex” (UC 184; RP 201). This quick and efficient feedback to motor areas of the cortex alters “impulses to motor neurons and disinhibit[s] the cortical areas needed to attend to the next reentrant signal” in the next global mapping (RP 202).1

256

Chapter 7

As a subjective aim may activate a chreod, so in Edelman’s TNGS “volition requires the awareness of a goal and the ability to direct action (and thus sensation and perception). . . . It may be seen as the ability to facilitate the selection of a series of global mappings that are aimed at the satisfaction of needs” (RP 197). Correspondingly, Edelman specifies that “after formulation or determination of a goal . . . a global mapping . . . must be constructed on the basis of present perceptual input and motor state” (205), in effect, as one swings into action in accordance with a Jamesian “Now!” I read Edelman as calling the organizing center of such a series, its “dynamic core.” Here I let a single quotation serve both to support this reading and introduce the notion, which I detail later: “Since a dynamic core is a unified and highly integrated process, it must move from one global state to another. In other words, its temporal evolution must follow a single trajectory” (UC 151). A dynamic core is then the brain-based seat of an activated chreod, activated by and adapted to a subjective aim, or, for Edelman, an aim to satisfy “homeostatic, appetitive, and consummatory needs reflecting evolutionarily established values” (BA 100), and is capable of activating or triggering “elementary routines or fragments of routines, thanks to its wide access to a large number of basal ganglia circuits” (UC 188).2 Degeneracy, Global Mappings, and Recategorical Memory Since Edelman’s global mappings and reentrant connections are embodied as, and in, linkages of neuronal groups, the mappings may be indefinitely rich and are diversely realizable (i.e., capable of yielding similar outputs through different neural pathways). Edelman calls this property of diverse realizability “degeneracy.” It is seen “in the genetic code, where, because of the degenerate third position in triplet code words, many different DNA sequences can specify the same protein” (UC 86). The inclusion in the secondary repertoire of mappings based on a selective process in which the strength of connections in populations of synapses reflects adaptive value means that connected neuronal groups may, in simple terms, become correlated closely enough to secure, in a variety of ways, the “same” coherent output to other neuronal groups. The particular microprocess does not affect the outcome, or rather, the appearance of the outcome to an observer. We see the notion of degeneracy play out most usefully in the living through of sensory-action loops, where the anticipated sensory consequent (indicating, say, action completion, or object-location) is in the nature of a


257

concept—or for Edelman either a perceptual category or a concept. When one looks for an object, degenerate recognition of one feature or another will serve as a prepared-for sensory consequent and will in turn release consequent action (which can be executed in a variety of ways), no matter what the angle of discernment, lighting conditions, body position, etc. In fact, Edelman deftly introduces a Wittgensteinian notion of categories (and concepts) as polymorphous sets whose members share “family resemblances” and in which it isn’t singly necessary or jointly sufficient conditions that determine whether some candidate item secures membership in a class but whether it appears to have some properties adequate to secure membership given an organism’s memory and the momentary setting and activity (ND 31, BA 234–236, T 194). In part, the ability to categorize perception is a matter of generalization, which occurs, for example, “when responses to novel shapes are more like the responses to previously encountered shapes in the same class than would have been the case without prior experience” (Reeke 166). On this account, an individual animal, having encountered members of one class of entities will typically, on encountering another member, have stimuli sufficiently similar to, or overlapping, previous stimuli as to trigger generalization—namely, expansion of the relevant category to reflect the new instance. At the synaptic level, newly strengthened synaptic connections serve to modify the previous class or category, so that in future this further memory may be drawn on. This double change in connection and category is precisely what Edelman means to get at by the notion of recategorical memory, of memory that re-stimulates synaptic connections, reevokes categories, and revises synaptic efficacies and categories. Global mappings facilitate the matching of current perception and memory and, in fact, provide a necessary substrate for relating categorization to memory. This relationship cannot generally be accounted for by the activity of any one small neural region, for, by their nature, global mappings must include large portions of the nervous system. Within a global mapping, long-term changes in synaptic strengths tend to favor the mutual reentrant activity of those groups whose activity has been correlated across different maps during past behavior. When we prepare to grasp a glass and drink, for example, a whole set of different circuits, modified by previous synaptic changes, are called up. Such synaptic changes over large portions of a global mapping provide the basis for memory, but memory in global mappings is not a store of fixed or coded attributes to be called up and assembled in a replicative fashion as in a computer. Instead, memory results from a process of continual recategorization, which, by its

258

Chapter 7

nature, must be procedural and involves continual motor activity leading to the ability to repeat a performance—in our example, grasping a glass. The ongoing synaptic changes in global mappings that occur as a result of such rehearsals favor degenerate sets of pathways with similar outputs. (UC 97)3

Accordingly, Edelman says (RP 109–110), “memory is the specific enhancement of a previously established ability to categorize. This ability is procedural, and it emerges from the continual dynamic changes in synaptic populations and global mappings that allowed a particular categorization to occur in the first place. Memory thus arises from alterations of synaptic efficacies in global mappings as a result of the facilitation of particular categorizations or of motor patterns.” 7.3

Edelman’s Extended TNGS and Its Two Forms of Consciousness

Although global mappings may lead, neurophysiologically and conceptually, to perceptual categorization, they do not take us, in concept or neurophysiology, from physiology to experience or consciousness. Edelman’s TNGS concerns itself mainly with perceptual categorization, memory, and other “neural forerunners of consciousness” (RP 39): for Edelman, “perceptual categorization . . . is nonconscious and can be carried out by classification couples, or even by automata” (BA 125). In The Remembered Present, using such notions from his earlier work as primary and secondary repertoires, reentry, recategorical memory, and global mapping, Edelman attempts to extend the TNGS to concept formation, perceptual experience, language, and consciousness (RP xix, 95). Edelman distinguishes two forms of consciousness: primary consciousness, common to humans and other animals, and higher-order consciousness, which requires some semantic capability, and, if it is to flourish, as it does in humans, the use of language. For primary consciousness to appear, in addition to perceptual categorization, “a special memory system conceptually relating past categorizations to value had to be developed [and] . . . reentrant connections relating [this] conceptual system to the current immediately categorized signals had to be established. Primary consciousness emerges from the interaction of the value-category memory and ongoing (current or present) perceptual categorization” (245). We have three terms to contend with here: concepts, value-category memory, and the interaction of the latter with perceptual categorization, in a process termed “perceptual bootstrapping” (BA 121).


259

To appreciate these terms, we need introduce no tenets beyond those of selection and reentry. However, “new orderings of connections in the brain such as those seen in the cortical appendages” are needed (BA 108). Concepts and Conceptual Categorization An animal having concepts “is able to identify a particular thing or action and control its future behavior on the basis of that identification in a more or less general way” and “must act as if it could make judgments based on recognition of category membership or integrate ‘particulars’ into ‘universals’” (RP 141; cf. BA 108), the universals reflecting the abstraction of common features from a variety of perceptual categorizations (UC 104).4 Such “subsumption” of object, event, or action under a concept, or conceptual categorization, differs from perceptual categorization by relying on maps, constructed by the brain “of its own activities, not just external stimuli, as in perception. . . . [T]he brain areas responsible for concept formation contain structures that categorize, discriminate, and recombine the various brain activities occurring in different kinds of global mappings. Such structures in the brain, instead of categorizing outside inputs from sensory modalities, categorize parts of past global mappings according to modality, the presence or absence of movement, and the presence or absence of relationships between perceptual categorizations” (BA 109). A global mapping may, for instance, combine visual and tactile elements corresponding to an object or combine sensory and motoric elements corresponding to a simple action, but higher-order mappings can categorize parts of different global mappings—samenesses occurring in different global mappings—to form concepts or ideas of objects and actions. These structures “must be able to activate or reconstruct portions of past global mappings according to modality (or submodality), or types of movement, and then by recombination or some comparator function mix or compare them” (RP 144), and “the brain areas . . . mediating concepts must be able to operate without immediate [sensory] input” (BA 109). However, “ultimately, although concepts can be highly abstract, they are tied to objects (and actions) in the world, as are the perceptual categories on which they rest” (RP 146). Now, reentry enables different parts of the cortex to “compare the activities of different combinations of brain regions composing portions of global mappings” and so can “give rise to classifications of global mappings as a basis for action. In particular, the function of the frontal cortex could

260

Chapter 7

abstract the various consequences of action and store them as synaptic changes” (RP 145). In cortical regions able to categorize different types of global mappings, “recombinations of categories and higher-order generalizations become possible, and with them conceptual categorization and memory as a prerequisite for forming a model of the world” (245). Notice here that comparing, classifying, abstracting, and conceptual categorization are typically mental, not naturally neurophysiological, terms: yet, in Edelman’s treatment of concepts, it is not a mind but ever “the brain [that] categorizes its own activities” (BA 110), and the categorization is neural not mental. Concepts are thus stored “as synaptic changes capable of restimulating common features of global mappings characteristic of different individual experiences” (RP 145; cf. BA 110), and when a concept, as reactivated synaptic connections, somehow functions in experience, it may restimulate readinesses for action, associated memories, and so on, in ways appropriate to, but not necessarily dictated by, the dynamic core or operating, purpose-serving chreods. Conceptual categorization, like perceptual categorization, is recategorical: each employment or functioning of a concept modifies what the category had been or encompassed before, and synaptic connections between relevant neuronal groups are likewise altered. Just as perceptual categories are polymorphous sets, so that an item may be recognized in degenerately many ways as instancing a category, so a concept, evoked, may function in degenerately many ways that are context-appropriate, aim-appropriate, and chreod-appropriate, and may, as parts of global mappings are recombined or compared as functions of cortical activity, lead to the generalization or extension of concepts (RP 145). Thus, in anticipation, memory is at work, assimilating data to concepts and recategorically accommodating concepts to the assimilated. More generally, when a concept comes to function in experience, not necessarily as thought about, recategorical memory has been restimulated, and the restimulation is a lifting into relevance and the bringing of the restimulated into the scope of possible conceptual reversion, to be a factor in the lure for feeling, possibly the activated network, the fringe. Value-Category Memory Edelman holds that an ability to order concepts must have developed alongside an ability to form concepts. The concrescual approximation concurs: we should not expect distinctions to be made without functioning in experience; such functioning or conceptual ordering, whether it link object


261

or distinguished entity to action or action to distinguished entity, involves what in analysis may be regarded as a proto-grammatical ordering. At any rate, for Edelman, concepts must be ordered if thinking is to be carried out and consciousness achieved. Such ordering, of say a concept of an action and a concept of an object, “requires and builds upon the ability to carry out behaviors in a serial order.” Because such ordering may be viewed as a precursor of the ordering or syntax underlying a grammar, and need not rely on the use of symbols, Edelman terms it “presyntax” (RP 147–148). Among humans, each of these aspects of experience—categorization and presyntactic ordering—may deeply influence the structure of all subsequently developed forms of experience, and may vary from culture to culture, a point we shall return to in section 7.4. For presyntactic ordering to be adaptive, concepts had to be linked to value. This required two evolutionary developments. The first of these is “the development of the cortical system in such a way that when conceptual functions appeared they could be linked strongly to the limbic [hedonic] system, extending already existing capacities to carry out learning. The second is . . . a new kind of memory based on this linkage. Unlike the system of perceptual categorization, this conceptual memory system is able to categorize responses in the different brain systems that carry out perceptual categorization and it does this according to the demands of limbic-brain stem value systems” (BA 119, bracketed text 117; cf. RP 245). Learning and Value-Category Memory

In the extended TNGS, learning,

which involves the connection of categorization to value, requires memory and perceptual categorization, but these do not suffice for learning. “The sufficient condition is provided by the synaptic linkage of particular global mappings [such as those involved in perceptual categorization] to the activity of hedonic centers and to the limbic system in a fashion that will satisfy homeostatic, appetitive, and consummatory needs. . . . The operation of neural linkages between global mappings and the limbic system can connect categorization to behaviors having adaptive value under conditions of expectancy, that is, under conditions where the set points of the hedonic system are not yet satisfied” (RP 57; ND 304; BA 101). (Think of the set points on thermostats. For heating, a thermostat signals the heater to turn on when the temperature drops below a minimum set point chosen by someone. When the room temperature reaches an upper set point temperature, the

262

Chapter 7

thermostat signals the heater to turn off.) Value then is connected to category by reentry resulting in a conceptually based value-influenced memory—value-category memory, “a system of memory capable of relating value and perceptual category by conceptual means” (RP 97). Edelman proposes the following: . . . the fundamental neural structures for learning are neuronal groups tied in classification couples within global mappings, linked in reentrant fashion to hedonic centers, which provide a basis for the assignment of value. In other words, a large number of groups acting in classification couples (sampling the environment through several modalities) and linked through reentrant connections with limbic circuits, as well as to output, provide a system that can fulfill the requirements for learning. These reentrant couples relate categorizations to sets of neuronal groups in the limbic system fulfilling various set points established evolutionarily in that system. At the same time, the connection to groups in global mappings subserving motor output allows revision by search until the input fulfills expectancies based on the preceding categorization (“memory”) and reduces the reentrant drive from the limbic system. (ND 304)

Accordingly, “if the cortex is concerned with the categorization of the world and the limbic brain-stem system is concerned with value . . . then learning may be seen as the means by which categorization occurs on a background of value to result in adaptive changes in behavior that satisfy value” (BA 118). These adaptive changes arise with the coordination of synaptic changes in reentrant connections between neuronal groups and “combine to develop various individual memories, collectively constituting a ‘valuecategory memory’” (UC 105), which develops from and recategorizes categorizations on value, so that “current perceptual events are recategorized in terms of past value-category matches” (RP 102). Primary Consciousness Value-Category Memory and the Self-Nonself Distinction

For Edelman,

primary consciousness arises from and involves the ongoing dynamic connection of value-category memory and current perceptual categorization of signals from the world. The contrast of value and category is embodied in a contrast between two portions of the nervous system, one “dedicated mainly to adaptive, homeostatic, and endocrine functions of the individual animal” (RP 94). Edelman continues: “These functions of the individual animal relate to its immediate needs for survival and reflect evolutionarily selected values that have contributed to fitness. They operate mainly


263

through interoceptive neural and chemical signals, in contrast to other parts of the nervous system (such as the cerebral cortex), which are dedicated mainly to the categorization of exteroceptive signals arising mainly (but not exclusively) from the world.” The interoceptive and exteroceptive portions might loosely be called organism-based and environment-sensitive, or value-based and cognitionoriented, or, as Edelman does, self and nonself, understanding these latter terms in a biological sense and not “in the personal or psychological sense of ‘self-awareness’ or in the social or philosophical sense of ‘personhood’” (RP 94). For Edelman, “self is fundamentally determined by the signaling activity of areas mediating homeostatic—autonomic, hedonic, neuroendocrine—brain functions” (98). The systems associated with these areas, termed “homeostats” (BA 94), have set points, as thermostats do. As was noted earlier, the concrescual approximation adopts a naturalization of Whitehead that treats the momentary origination of some subjective aims— and so of value in concrescence—in terms of dispositions and, in effect, the triggering of hedonic, endocrine, and other set points (cf. RP 99). “It is likely,” Edelman asserts (UC 174), “that among the earliest conscious dimensions and discriminations are those concerned with the body itself— mediated through structures in the brain stem that map the state of the body and its relation to both the inside and outside environment on the basis of multi-modal signals that include proprioceptive, kinesthetic, somatosensory, and autonomic components. We may, indeed, call these components the dimensions of the protoself. These components are the bodily functions of which we are usually only dimly aware, but that influence almost every aspect of our being. Equally early and central are the dimensions provided by value systems indicating salience for the entire organism.” Thus, “the brain stem, together with the limbic (hedonic) system concerned with appetite, sexual and consummatory behavior, and evolved defensive behavior patterns [form] a value system” (BA 117). This value system and “the dimensions of the protoself” are at the core of the organism as a biological self. In a footnote to the passage just quoted (UC 174), Edelman notes that protoself is a term of Damasio’s. Damasio (22; 154) defines it as follows: The deep roots for the self, including the elaborate self which encompasses identity and personhood, are to be found in the ensemble of brain devices which continuously and nonconsciously maintain the body state within the narrow range and relative

264

Chapter 7

stability required for survival. These devices continuously represent, nonconsciously, the state of the living body, along its many dimensions. I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the proto-self, the nonconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self.

Damasio’s proto-self, the non-conscious forerunner of the self, is a central constituent of the stream of experience, forerunner of the stream of consciousness. This dim bodily awareness5 affords a continuity in experience that persists despite apparent discontinuities in the stream of consciousness arising, say, with what seem sudden incursions of sensation or “random” thought. Damasio’s core self and autobiographical self may be likened respectively to Edelman’s biological self—a biological individual with its self-nonself distinction—and Edelman’s form of self associated with higherorder forms of consciousness.6 Primary Consciousness and Perceptual Bootstrapping

The evolutionary

factor making for primary consciousness is the development of massively reentrant connections between cortical areas that carry out perceptual categorization and those on which value-category memory depends. “The dynamic, temporally ongoing, bootstrap between a value-category memory and perceptual categorization reflects an individual history, one illuminated at each moment by a remembered present—primary consciousness.” (UC 205) The arrival at primary consciousness is the arrival, on this account, at the formation of “mental images” or “pictures” (RP 154) as factors in experience, so that beings with primary consciousness can have mental images, in the present, of things presently in the world. The images arise with and require “reentrant interaction between a special form of memory with strong conceptual components and a stream of perceptual categorizations” (154), so we should think then of the coordinations among neuronal groups correlate with perceptual categorizations and memory as being integrated, and experienced as “out there,” in “a ‘mental image’ of ongoing categorized events” (BA 119). If we are to come up with a synthesis of Whitehead and Edelman concerning consciousness, then primary consciousness should necessarily involve something very like an affirmation-negation contrast and here we are close to being able to say that it does. For the continual reentrant signaling and interaction between neuronal groups mediating value-category


265

memory and “the ongoing, real-time exteroceptive global mappings that are concerned with perceptual categorization of current exteroceptive stimuli before they can form part of that value-category memory” generates primary consciousness. Primary consciousness arises “as a discriminative comparison” and appears as an image that is determined by “the actual physical interaction between the reentrant circuits. . . and the spatiotemporal ordering of current signals from the niche” (RP 154).7 Edelman often uses the term “perceptual bootstrapping” for this reentrant interaction between value-category memory and the “stream of perceptual categorizations” (RP 154). An animal incapable of such interaction can carry out perceptual categorization . . . and can even develop conceptual valuecategory memory . . . [but] cannot link perceptual events into an ongoing scene. With the appearance of the new reentrant circuits in each modality, a conceptual categorization of concurrent perceptions can occur before these perceptual signals contribute lastingly to that memory. This interaction between a special kind of memory and perceptual categorization gives rise to primary consciousness. . . . This “bootstrapping process” takes place in all sensory modalities in parallel and simultaneously, thus allowing for the construction of a complex scene. (BA 119)

Without these new reentrant circuits there is “no actual image or sketch,” no Whiteheadian appearance. With these new circuits, a “picture” of ongoing categorized events or a “mental image” [appears]. . . . It is the actual physical interaction between the reentrant circuits . . . and the spatio-temporal ordering of current signals from the niche that together determine the “image.” An image is, in fact, a set of correlations of such interactions with prior memory states. (RP 154)

Finally, Edelman proposes that after the cortex categorizes events the hippocampus helps order those events in short-term memory and then effects secondary or higher-order synaptic changes within the cortex, changes that facilitate longer-term memory, in part by linking neuronal groups that functioned in a given short-term memory. “By this means, the associative interaction of such groups in higher-order classification n-tuples would correlate their activity to characteristics of the complex of features, objects, and events of the kind that promoted the original group activity” (RP 115). While short-term memory connects the events in serial order, the secondary memory in effect abstracts distinctions from the temporal flow—in a fashion reminiscent of and closely analogous to Jamesian acts of conception—and provides a basis for the kind of conceptual reversion essential to

266

Chapter 7

autonomous concrescence for Whitehead (see 115, BA 107, ND 267–269). I will say more about this in section 7.6, when I compare Edelman’s treatment of the move from perceptual categorization to the conceptual categorization of perceptions (e.g. BA 119) with Whitehead’s treatment of the move from perception in the mode of presentational immediacy to perception in the mode of symbolic reference. For now, let it suffice to say that, in fact, Edelman (RP 115–116) holds that “to achieve ordering in long-term memory, some conventional means must exist . . . of distinguishing present from past. . . . [This] requires conceptual and symbolic mechanisms provided only by the structures underlying higher-order consciousness.” Higher-Order Consciousness While many animal species have primary consciousness, only a few have higher-order consciousness, and of those, Edelman believes only humans have a fully developed form of it. As beings with higher-order consciousness, Edelman maintains that we cannot intuit what it is like to only have primary consciousness (RP 168). An animal with primary consciousness “generates a ‘mental image’ or a discriminative correlation that is determined largely by immediate multi-modal perceptual categorization but that is nonetheless still largely dependent upon the succession of events in real time” (103). In other words, an animal with these capabilities has its nose to its grindstone, “is still tied to a frame of the present: although its behavior is undoubtedly altered by long-term changes in learning, it has no means of reviewing explicitly its present perceptions in terms of analogues in the past or in terms of anticipated analogues projected to the future” (186). If explicit review is to occur, one must be able to use concepts to imagine possibilities, to use analogues or mental surrogates for objects and the like, in a sort of semantic space bearing some connection with or symbolic reference to actualities. Experients of primary consciousness may live trapped within “a correlated scene, or ‘image.’ This image can be regenerated in part by memory in animals with primary consciousness, but it cannot be regenerated in reference to a symbolic memory” (BA 125). “By this,” Edelman continues, “I mean a memory for symbols and their associated meanings. And so an animal with primary consciousness alone is strongly tied to the succession of events in real time.” It cannot move—withdraw—from perceptual experience, perception in action, to reference in a conceptual space. In terms of


267

the concrescual approximation, it cannot synthesize higher-order contrasts, in which meanings are dependent on symbolic reference, where the concept of symbolic reference includes not just the purely perceptual reference involving perceptions in the modes of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy but also the social, namely “an intricate expressed symbolism of language and of act, which is spread throughout the community” (S 73). The interpretative element in human experience is not present in primary consciousness. In the terms of the intentional and processual approximations, primary consciousness cannot move from the presentational to the representational.8 To understand the evolution from primary to higher-order consciousness Edelman need employ no principles or notions beyond those of his TNGS. However, if higher-order consciousness was to develop extensively, Edelman maintains some new structures were needed, like a larynx, and Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the brain, which seem principally connected with language and speech functions. These structures allow “symbolic categorization and speech” to develop, along with “concepts of past and future [and] time-independent models of self and world” (RP 245–246) and “a symbolic modeling of the self-nonself distinction. [These] structures free some part of neural activity from the external drive of current behavior at the same time that this part still retains access to that behavior and its consequences” (186). Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are needed “for forming a model of the world” (245) and for the evolution of “the entire speech system . . . by way of affective and observational learning in a social scene.” Edelman continues: “The actual signs and symbols of language are arbitrary, but they serve to link conceptual categorization to a specialized system of phonological recognition and memory. According to the extended TNGS, there is a semantic bootstrapping via linkage of phonological and lexical systems to already existent conceptual systems” (246–247). As the lexicon grows, a rich set of meaning relations may provide further conceptual categorization “independent of current perceptual input” (247), so that one can analyze or theorize about the conceptual, or imagine a scene that is not present perceptually. More immediately, these structures, and conceptual categorization, facilitate conceptual withdrawal from immediate activity and the shifting between representational and presentational flows. Edelman holds that to escape the tie of primary consciousness to the present, to become “to some degree time-independent,” an animal “must also

268

Chapter 7

possess structures able to model the effects of past events on the self.” “At this point,” he continues (RP 186–187), “‘self’ becomes a term referring to such a conceptual model and not just to a biological individual [with its self-nonself distinction], as is the case for primary consciousness.” Edelman doesn’t see how such “modeling could have arisen without some form of social transmission involving imitation . . . [and] conventional means of reference” and so of “a true language” (187). Edelman’s thesis here is that “the development of such a language is absolutely predicated on the existence of consciousness—first, primary consciousness, and then the emerging ability to relate various systems of memory to a symbolic representation of the self acting on the environment and vice versa. This representation is the essential element in freeing an animal from slavery to present time and its ‘neural image’” (187; cf. BA 149). Thus, following Edelman, and touching on factors evolutionary, genetic, epigenetic, and neuroanatomic, and drawing on principles of reentry, categorization, and memory-formation, one arrives at an account of full-blown consciousness. Two principal questions remain. Has he presented a biological theory of consciousness in a fashion that avoids dualism? And what important cultural biases, if any, infect his theory? As to dualism, even if we say that Edelman has articulated the difference between “images” associated with primary consciousness and sometimes termed “neural” (e.g. RP 187) and sometimes “mental” (e.g. BA 119) and images associated with higher-order consciousness, he has not shown how images arise from neuronal activity, how the mental arises from res extensa. Now, the ability to have mental images may be supposed to develop not just with concepts and value-category memory but with short-term memory and anticipation as well, and to provide a selective advantage. It does this by “coupl[ing] dominant internal (or individual) homeostatic requirements to multiple parallel categorizations”; by facilitating “assignment of salience to events in terms of adaptive values” (RP 186); by providing an efficient basis for acting on previous experience, for sensing where things are and anticipating where they will soon be and so by guiding the movement of attention and enhancing the rapidity and adequacy of response or action. So we may imagine that some analogue of our embodied experience of a scene, or of Whitehead’s projected appearance, arose in the course of evolution and proved adaptive, that is, that the general experiencing of qualia9 within value-oriented unitary


269

scenes is the form that animal consciousness took and that such a form confers or enhances fitness. After all, it “supplies the ability to determine by internal criteria the salience of particular patterns among multiple parallel signals arising in complex environments” (191), thus speeding up effective decision making, increasing flexibility, as if the integration it realized drew on compressed experience, and quickened reaction by removing an integrative step in the face of novelty. Nonetheless, we are left with an unacknowledged disparity between the neural and the experienced, and need to be shown why the experienced sits well within a materialistic metaphysics, as Edelman has proposed. I discuss these matters further in section 7.7. As to my second question, we could say that in some languages, including, we shall soon see, middle-voice-based languages, there are relatively few passive or active verbs and, so, little or no emerging ability involving “symbolic representation of the self acting on the environment and vice versa” (RP 187), and coincidentally little or no emerging concept of self. (Furthermore, in some languages that make a self-environment distinction, the division may be more pronounced than in other languages.) But middle-voice-based languages are arguably not true languages by Edelman’s lights. This claim is strengthened because, as I also indicate in the next section, there need be no well-formed subject-predicate relation in middlevoice-based languages, but Edelman holds that “in a socially transmitting species in which symbolic systems begin to emerge, there is a fundamental need for a rich subject-predicate relation, because this relation is central in the emergence of a rich grammar” (187). As will be proposed below, what Edelman regards as the emerging ability to represent symbolically—“the accession of language and symbolic reference” (BA 149)—may be tied to the birth of active-voice-dominated language. If that proposal is correct, then an alternative model of higher-order consciousness might be generated in which the split of self and environment is not especially pronounced. It would then be permissible to say that active-voice-based conceptual space is not an essential feature of higherorder consciousness. In any case, Edelman has brought us then to the development of subject-predicate languages; for our purposes neurobiology need go no farther, but Edelman does within biology, most notably treating of diseases of consciousness (suggesting a correlate notion of diseases of concrescence) (RP, chapter 13).

270

7.4

Chapter 7

Forms of Consciousness and Grammatical Voices

Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar? —Nietzsche (1886: 47)10

Before proceeding to directly correlate notions of Edelman’s and Whitehead’s, it serves my argument to now make an excursion into classical Greek philosophy and language, and to critically relate Edelman’s characterizations of primary and higher-order consciousness and of self to a group of claims concerning language and experience. I believe that this may produce some softening of habitual proclivities toward dualism, and to produce this seems an appropriate aim before I adduce a concrescual-neurobiological parallelism from experience, treating the mental and physical as poles in process. Should some readers think the claims made below may be insufficiently substantiated they may take them for something like philosophical fiction, useful in presenting my views, as well, I believe, as those of James and Whitehead, in illustrating linkage of Edelman’s higher-order consciousness with languages in which the active voice is well developed, and in making the case for a monism of pure experience. Isonomia, Parataxis, and Hypotaxis In the Republic (561D), Plato calls the man whose life is subject neither to order nor restraint “isonomic” (iso: equal, without distinction; nomic: having to do with distribution, arrangement, management, law). B. E. Perry, who treats this passage in “The Early Greek Capacity for Viewing Things Separately” (410), educes from Plato a notion of intellectual isonomy. Perry characterizes it as “the habit of looking at different things one at a time with about equal interest in each” and “as the capacity to view one thing by itself without letting another interfere.” Perry (409) asserts that “the Greek language itself, [its] syntax, not to mention the rule-defying variety of its morphology and accent, shows a marked fondness for coordination [isonomia] rather than subordination [ordered arrangement], especially in the early period.” (See also Havelock 1986: 76.) Grammatically, this fondness for coordination typifies parataxis—in which elements are connected additively by, e.g., “and”—as opposed to hypotaxis, the syntactic subordination of qualifying to main elements. One cannot make a hypotactic connection without relying on some implicit (or


271

explicit) theory or interpretation that justifies the connection of the related parts, of subordinating one part to another or either to a whole, that is, of integrating subordinated and subordinating elements in a higher-order contrast.11 J. A. Notopoulos treats this feature of early Greek in his “Parataxis in Homer,” finding parataxis operative at the stylistic, structural and conceptual levels of the Homeric poems. He argues (6) that Platonic and Aristotelian principles of literary criticism were designed to apply “to literature of the fifth and fourth centuries which had evolved from a paratactic to a hypotactic type.” Notopoulos (5) takes Plato (Phaedrus 264B; Republic 603A–B) to be critical of “any work of art which is not organized on the basis of selective and subordinating principles imposed by reason and [so] is not [properly a work of] art but uncontrolled isonomia.” The isonomiac does not subordinate means to ends or instances to a definition, nor does he arrange otherwise uncoordinated characteristics into anything like a comprehensive system (Phaedrus 264B–C, 265D). In the Theaetetus (152E; cf. 160D, 179E), as part of his attack on the Heraclitean view that nothing stands and everything flows (cf. Cratylus 402A), Plato links Heraclitus with Homer, citing The Iliad (XIV 201) as evidence that Homer held all things to be “the offspring of a flowing stream of change.” Plato’s assault on the Heraclitean position concludes that the stability requisite for coherent speech, in which reference is possible and the law of excluded middle obtains, is not available to the Heraclitean (Theaetetus 183A–B). For Plato, the Heraclitean epitomizes, and provides the maximal case of, isonomia: the Heraclitean can practice no kind of subordination. Hypotaxis, Alphabetic Writing, and the Shift from Middle to Active Voice With alphabetic writing, meaning and sign have been separated, sound having been heard apart from connection with meaning and represented by using letters, and written sentences are presented apart from, detached from immediate contexts of, speech and thought. Notopoulos, Perry, and Havelock, among others, relate the shift from parataxis to hypotaxis to the shift from oral to alphabetic written composition. Some remarks by Quine (226–227) suggest how to link these shifts: There is a certain premium on eternal sentences [sentences taken to be “true for good”], though, and has been since writing began. Insofar as some utterances of a sentence can be true and other utterances of it false, demands are placed on our

272

Chapter 7

knowledge of the circumstances of utterance; and such knowledge is scarcer for script than for speech. Writing is essential to serious science, as rendering it cumulative; and the longer the preservation, the dimmer the circumstances of utterance. . . . Though scientific data go back to observation sentences, which are true only utterance by utterance, the sentences of the theory that is projected from those data tend to be eternal.

It looks as though the very act of alphabetic writing (and reading) can provide some impetus toward distancing and abstracting from the phenomena being written about, thus facilitating thoughts about topics and theorizing (cf. Havelock 1986: 103 ff.). Notopoulos places more emphasis than Quine on the act of composition and so is more attentive to ways in which writing facilitates organization of literary work. For Notopoulos (15), “the physical, technical, and psychological factors at work in the creation of oral poetry make the poet live largely in the moment and only secondarily in the larger framework of his material. . . . Unlike creation with the written word, where the audience is a remote factor in the imagination, where sufficient time is at hand to coordinate the part written to the whole conception, with opportunity for revision, the oral poet is both physically and mentally bound to the moment, the immediate verse, and his intimate relation with the audience. The artistic illusion . . . is ever in flux; neither the poet nor his audience can divert their attention for any period of time to the whole.”12 Consequently, Notopoulos (13–14) holds that “organic [non-isonomic] literature is the result of a disciplined artistic mentality which plans the architecture of a work of art. . . . The relation of the parts to the whole, carefully worked out by the leisurely method of composition with the written word, looking both fore and after, excluding the audience from immediate participation in the artistic illusion, is the modus operandi of organic literature.” The oral poet is given over to the performance—“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story,” the bard invokes at the start of The Odyssey—and cannot escape the tie to the present, “the ongoing eventdriven rush of primary consciousness” (UC 191). Meanwhile, the alphabetic writer can indeed use language to represent or model “the self acting on the environment and vice versa” (RP 187). These general effects of the practice of writing are compatible with linguistic trends noted by Bruno Snell and Martin Heidegger as taking hold during the centuries following Homer. In fact, each trend, each change,


273

cited in this discussion indicates a form of withdrawal, which we may think of as involving the ability to make new kinds of contrasts, strengthening not just associations but ways of conceiving of things. Snell pointed, for instance, to the “substantivation” of the verb, as in the following discussion of verbs denoting the operation of sight (4; cf. 222, 229): “. . . the verbs of the early period, it appears, take their cue from the palpable aspects, the external qualifications, of the act of seeing, while later on it is the essential function itself, the operation common to every glance, which determines the content of the verb.” The withdrawal here is from actual visual experiences, as indicated by any of several specific verbs meaning, e.g., looking around inquisitively, with care, or fearfully, or seeing something bright, or being a spectator. These verbs reflect elements of mood, posture and feeling, as well as “the object seen, and the sentiments associated with the sight, [and these] give the word its peculiar quality” (Snell 3–4). The shift is from the great variety of verbs used in Homer’s period to suit momentary visual experience to a generic verb that “to us conveys the real substance of the operation known as ‘sight,’” namely “the eye apprehend[ing] an object” (4) and can be modified by adverbs and prepositions.13 Heidegger (54–56) pointed to the abstraction of the infinitive from the particular relationships involved in the actual occasions of manifestation of the activity indicated earlier by inflected verb forms. Other intertwined developments, all fostering the ability to form mental images of things, to situate them in imaginary space, to analyze events, to form representational intentional states, and to create topics of discourse, include the following: •

achievement of the means to freeze activity by converting a sentence into

a noun phrase preceded by the increasingly used definite article, •

the introduction of general nouns, including -sis nouns, which denote

action and permit the isolation of an action from what comes to be treated as its agent and its result •

the formation of reflexive pronouns and the consequent ability to think

of oneself qua other14 •

“a proliferation of terms, for notions and thoughts and thinking, for

knowledge and knowing, for understanding, investigating, research, inquiry” (Havelock 1986: 115; Snell 229).

274

Chapter 7

In league with these abstractive tendencies, the notion of an enduring physical object surviving non-essential changes comes to the fore, as does the subject-predicate form of expression. All of these trends are compatible with the growing use of alphabetic writing and are mutually reinforcing: I take it to be true that these developmental processes actually unfolded concurrently. Moreover, the trends are compatible not only with each other but with the growing use of the dialect spoken and written by fifth-century-BCE Athenians among Greeks in the fourth century (Rostovtzeff 231), and with the spreading, then, of individualism in architecture, painting, sculpture and lyric poetry. One can relate these developments to those in many other domains as well, including rhetoric, city planning, gender relations, military technologies, and commerce.15 I propose that the nature of all of these developments can perhaps best be seen as allied with changes in the structure of experience—in the degree of withdrawal and separation of self from other and environment, in the wealth of new orders of contrast—and with a pervasive linguistic shift, one in “voice.” As was noted earlier, ‘voice’ refers to the relationship of the (surface) subject of a sentence to the action described by the verb. The pervasive linguistic shift was from a language (often termed Homeric Greek) that included a passive voice but whose primary voice distinction was between middle and active, with the middle predominating, to a language (late classical, or Hellenic, Greek) in which the primary distinction was between active and passive, with the active predominant.16 Overall, this shift may be viewed as a stabilizing of conceptual space, and as paralleling discernible changes in the views of philosophers from Heraclitus or earlier to Aristotle and later (cf. Heidel; Vlastos 1955). Middle and Active Voices What are active and middle voices? Suffice it to say here that in classical Greek the active voice covers all instances of the general case in which what speakers of Standard Average European languages would call the ‘subject’ is not specified as being affected by the relevant process (or ‘action’); an agent does something to a patient—someone or something—and, while the patient undergoes the action (passively), affect on the agent remains irrelevant. That is, the active-voice subject or agent is the source of the action, and remains the source throughout the action. Active-voice-based formulations generally treat agents (typically, human subjects) and objects (people, ani-


275

mals, things, the agent’s body) in dis-connection or abstraction from mutual interpenetration or internal relatedness, from interplay between protosubject and proto-object. These dis-connections, these formulary neglectings of interconnections, as well as the dis-connections of actions from larger contexts, are fundamental to the active-voice interpretation, and they are hidden in the playing of the active-voice language game. The active-voice speaker and active-voice-influenced agent, like the alphabet-employing writer, come to enjoy a new intentional capability, a power of mental representation, namely the ability to hold something steadily in mind, stably enough to think about it—the ability to experience and apprehend substantive parts. The active-voice formation provides a linguistic means of disengaging partially from the flux, of stabilizing withdrawal from process, of visualizing or conceiving of processes, of initially separating the cognitive from the valuative, and of perceiving and arranging things in terms of means-ends relations. In specific instances, shifts from middle verb engagement to active verb observation and control may have a qualitative feel to them, recognizable in cognitive “aha!s” and feelings of new competence. Aristotle, father of subject-predicate logic, expresses many related notions. One, for instance, can be read as an attempt to connect generalization with activity and action, mere sensation with passivity. If you step back, rise above the sensory, and assess a situation, you can act or think about acting effectively. Thus, the army in rout is disjunctively many and purely passive, reactive, until one man makes a stand, and then another, each then acting on his perception, until the original formation is restored. For Aristotle (100a 9–14), the ability to make such a stand is a mark of the human soul. The middle voice covers all cases in which the “subject” is affected by the “action”; the middle-voice “subject” undergoes change while engaged in interactive processes from which it has no means to withdraw stably.17 In the middle voice the “subject” performs an act and is affected as well; the subject is not exterior to, dis-connected from, the process or for that matter ongoing flux. This notion is well suited to the concrescual approximation, in which the subject is formed in an act that makes the subject the feeler of an aimed-at and in-the-process defined, feeling. Thus, Scott (748) says, “the middle voice verbs that retain their middle form but have come to have active and passive meaning often suggest that an event yields the subject that is able to act or receive an action. In boulomai [where mai is a middlevoice ending], ‘I wish out of a state of inclination,’ for example, something

276

Chapter 7

is produced—the ‘I’ that wants something—from a state in which the produced ‘I’ is not active. Something takes place that is other than a subject’s doing something regarding something else. To think of a state that of itself is to be pleased [or satisfied] is both an awkward thought for us and a mark of the middle voice.” With our understanding of concrescence, this thought is less awkward for us than it is for Scott. The linguist Emile Benveniste (148) regarded active verbs as denoting processes “accomplished outside the subject” and middle verbs as indicating processes “centering in the subject, the subject being inside the process.” Active verbs refer to processes accomplished outside the subject (the agent acts on an object to secure a goal, holding unswervingly to that goal all the while); middle verbs indicate processes in which the “subject” who is inside the process figures centrally and is changed. The middle-voice “agent” has effect while being affected, is engaged, and does things without looking at what he or she is doing or has done. The “agent” is interior to the process and is not disengaged enough to talk about doings as done by or to the agent or to think that he or she can undo them. In “experience” appropriate to middle voice there is no “space” in which objects and events are situated for the “agent.”18 Rather, middle-voice “space” is contoured by relations that active voice treats from outside the relevant processes as between an agent and an object. The partial disengagement or withdrawal allows the emergence of “insight” into what are taken for causal and transitive relations; it permits the successful framing of action, and the “control”

of

subordinated

phenomena

by

exploiting

that

apparent

understanding or knowledge. Of course, alphabetic writing had a large role in this. As Havelock said (1986: 109–110), it “offered its own forms of freedom, even of excitement. . . . [It] allowed of novel language and of novel statement . . . which a reader scanning as he read could recognize at leisure and ‘take in’ and ‘think over.’ Under acoustic conditions, this was not a possible operation.” The Active-Voice Withdrawal Benveniste (149) offers the following general characterization of how typically middle verbs came to take on active forms: . . . suppose that a typically middle verb . . . is endowed secondarily with an active form. As a result of this, there will be a change in the relationship of the subject to the process so that the subject, in becoming exterior to the process, will become the


277

agent of it, and the process, no longer taking place within the subject, will be transferred to another term that will become the object of it. The middle will be converted into a transitive. This is what happens when χοιµαται “he sleeps” produces χοιµα “he puts (someone) to sleep.” . . . Transitivity is a necessary product of this conversion from middle to active. Thus, starting from the middle [in which, say, the sleeper is affected by the sleeping, “achieves something which is being achieved in him”], actives are formed that are called transitives, or causatives, or factitives, and which are always characterized by the fact that the subject, placed outside the process, governs it thenceforth as agent, and that the process, instead of having the subject for its seat, must take an object as its goal.

In this characterization, we have linguistic demarcation of the active-voice withdrawal, and indications of a general means for exteriorizing and further withdrawal, an instance of the general process of dragging into explicitness auxiliary ideas and feelings compactly absorbed into the central inflected verb form in ancient Greek (cf. SMW 24; James 1884: 11), and an opening of a newfound ability to form hypotactic sentences (ones with main and subordinate clauses) and periodic sentences, thus permitting the clear expression and ordering of temporal, causal, and other relationships. This is the opening of a conceptual or imaginary (Whorf 150) space19 in which one can visualize or analyze remembered, imagined, heard-about, readabout actions and events, think about mental surrogates, and consider possible future states of and actions on objects. However, from a Whorfian (linguistic relativist) vantage, the recognition of this opening is tantamount to provincializing, or rendering arbitrary, active-voice-dominated language and thought, with its tendency to separate subject from object, agent from patient, and organism from environment (and, incidentally, to give the individuality of active-voice agents too much centrality, treating it habitually in neglect of factors shaping individuals and their momentary decisions and in neglect of unintended effects of their intentional actions). Note that, largely in the twentieth century, under the impetus of developments in the physical sciences, some of the most durable intellectual legacies of the ancient Greeks have been provincialized and found to be useful only in restricted domains or under specific boundary conditions. For example, the formulation of the general theory of relativity has involved a recasting of the significance of Euclidean geometry, and the inadequacy of subjectpredicate language for describing observer-observed relations and events in the quantum domain has become evident. I hope here to aid James and Whitehead (who provincialize the subject-predicate form of expression in

278

Chapter 7

many ways, but pre-eminently by showing that it abstracts from and is misleading concerning subject-formation) by showing how concrescual consciousness studies may provincialize the active-voice withdrawal. Edelman does intimate that higher-order consciousness of the sort I call active-voice-dominated may not have long-term adaptive value: Higher-order consciousness, with its self-nonself distinction and freedom from immediate time constraints and with its increased richness of social communication, eventually led to capabilities allowing the anticipation of future states and planned behavior. The adaptive flexibility of hunter-gatherers and the subsequent explosive emergence of human populations over the whole globe testify to the short-term advantages conferred by forms of consciousness incorporating [“true”] linguistic abilities. Whether those advantages will or will not be rapidly lost in the near future remains to be seen. (RP 191–192) 20

By terming the development in question the active-voice withdrawal, I mean to foretell linkage of that phenomenon with later withdrawals from the stream, including the very adoption of the dualizing Cartesian stance. In fact, mind-body and related dualisms can be regarded as outgrowths of the unwitting decision to let active-voice-based language games establish boundary conditions for rational discourse. That decision, coupled with the eventual disregard for the simplifications it involved, constitutes the linguistic cementing of withdrawal from onflowing experience. Whorf (221) pointed broadly to this radical transformation: “. . . the world view of modern science arises by higher specialization of the basic grammar of the Western IndoEuropean languages. Science of course was not CAUSED by this grammar; it was simply colored by it.” For Whorf (212), “the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade.” To my knowledge, Whorf did not treat the development of the basic grammar of the Western Indo-European languages. I propose that the emergence of activevoice dominance, which was strongly linked to alphabetic writing, may be taken to mark the first major specialization of that Western grammar.21 With the active-voice withdrawal, the speaker and the grammatical subject are dis-connected from the flux, as if no longer engulfed in process. Resulting versions of thought involve and lead to what might be called active-voice-dominated thinking, planning, even modeling, in which the


279

active-voice-dominated thinker can anticipate outcomes, exercise “rational control,” and practice ethical decision making. In effect, then, what Snell termed the “discovery of the mind” was the birth, in Greece, of the ability to think from an active-voice-based background and equally of an activevoice-dominated form of life. The characterization of active-voice-dominated languages is thus worth repeating: in these languages, linguistic subjects are regularly treated as if they were subjects who stood apart from and remained unaffected by interactive process. For instance, the active-voice perceiver is taken to look at things yet not to suffer qualification in the specific operation of sight, as if he is not internally related to the perceived. Thus, in one manifestation, active-voice-influenced withdrawal is of a piece with the separation of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy from perception in the mode of causal efficacy; concentration on the former and denial of the latter is tantamount to abstraction from the vitality of relatedness—the erection of a conceptual boundary between subject and world, between man and nature, between organism and environment. To rely on active-voicedominated forms of expression uncritically (that is, without a proper nod to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is an indulgence when addressing ontological questions and questions concerning, for example, experience and consciousness. As Whitehead and James well knew, to rely on those forms of expression when talking and thinking about the onflow is to impair or preclude sensitivity to transitive parts, to subject-formation, to concrescence, and is to fall prey to a principal barrier to radical empiricism—an uncritical trust in available linguistic tools that amounts to language-based or linguistic arrogance. The development of the subject-predicate form of discourse and of allied notions of objects, are of a piece with the active-voice withdrawal. In experience, we are engaged in interaction with things that we cannot perceive more directly than we do. I don’t mind if we say that when we see something, say a red table, under normal conditions, we are directly perceiving the table, but a significant part of what is going on is that we, or our socialized, organic, aim-guided, perceptual processes, are transmuting feelings and constructing images, including projected images of tables and other things that are taken to be objects and states of affairs in the subjectpredicate approximation of things. This approximation may work pragmatically, but, metaphysically, instead of making predicate or quality a

280

Chapter 7

characteristic of how a percipient organism experiences another entity, it makes the quality inhere in a separate substance and the train of dualistic problems stemming from the subject-object split ensues. That is, to repeat, in the terms of Whitehead’s modal theory of perception, the active-voice withdrawal dis-connects perception in the mode of presentational immediacy and perception in the mode of symbolic reference from perception in the mode of causal efficacy. The subject-predicate form of expression thus serves to disembody perception and to erect into syntactic rigidity the disconnection of subject and object. By contrast, in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, objects are societies whose members propagate a defining characteristic through a series of events, so that objects themselves are ongoing processes rather than static. They have all manner of ways of affecting us and of being affected by us and undergo change, while we do too. This discussion points to an additional basis in philosophy for linking the active-voice withdrawal with the subject-predicate form of expression. Whitehead traces the notion of power or dynamis to Plato (see AI 120), who proposes (Sophist 247) that “anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things, that they are nothing but power.” Plato, who may be viewed as a member of the vanguard of the rising active-voice form of thought, was able to characterize real entities as congeries of powers, as Whitehead might, and those powers may be understood as ways in which entities can enter into experience, affecting or being affected by other entities. The middle-voice “subject” is a congeries of powers and a momentary exchange station for the kinds of influence that can be real for it. Entities with powers are not yet substances (they are always in process), and their powers are not yet attributes, as they soon became conceptually, as if products of Aristotelian (subject-predicate) logic. Viewed in this light, Plato’s characterization of power may have been pivotal in the transition from middle voice to active voice. The development of concepts of objective space and time in which surrogates for objects may be arrayed, and of a self, as well as of knowledge, truth, and reality, are also compatible and of a piece with this withdrawal. The fact that the active-passive split is so deeply embedded in our language and habits of thought may suffice to account for the difficulty of conveying a sense of the nature of middle voice. No wonder then that Edelman, who has


281

a well-developed notion of recategorical memory that is ever-changing, and of consciousness as a process, holds to a version of higher-order consciousness that reflects the experience of people habituated to speaking languages in which the active voice is well developed: our thought about experience is so active-voice-dominated that middle-voice-influenced experience can seem inaccessible. Be that as it may, if the higher-order consciousness depicted by Edelman is linked to active voice as shaping and encouraging a general active-voice form of prehension and experience, then there may be other forms of higher-order consciousness—forms linked with languages significantly different from active-voice-dominated languages. Edelman does not seem to have weighed such possibilities. Further, in some cultural settings language may not have so central a place as it does in ours, the organism-environment split may be less pronounced, and humans may seldom if ever be conceptually pitted “against” nature. In such settings, as it appears they were in middle-voice-dominated languages, “agents” are plainly embedded in actional nexu ¯ s, interacting with entities that affect them rather than with separate entities available for manipulation. By examining the distinctions between active voice and middle voice, we gain another way to restore the vague to its proper place in experience and to conceive the stream of experience in some freedom from subject-predicate-based biases. Perhaps the reader is now prepared to turn with fresh eye to the linkage of the neurobiological and the concrescual, with regard to the stream of experience. If we think about buds as forming in the stream, or preferably try to remember some as they arose in the onflow of experience, if we remain gently attentive and come at them from “within,” then various delusions of detachment will be tempered or avoided. We will be making explorations with some independence from the arbitrary, nature-fracturing boundary conditions of the active-voice language game. The change in thinking comes with the recognition that the bud, taken for what it is, the integration of many feelings into a unity of feeling, is a locus of experience, within one’s personal stream and within larger streams, social, and environmental. Each bud of experience starts with prehensions of energetic data arriving out of the immediate past, and with hybrid prehensions introducing a mental pole into the moment, in the form of inherited appearance, subjective aim, and activated memory, along with a subjective form carrying its own energy in a curve of affective tone. Concrescence is then the interplay of the physical and mental, the historic and the immediate, and

282

Chapter 7

never leaves the realm of onflowing feelings and experience. Each pulse of experience is the seat of transient subjectivity, but it is not had by a subject, it is a subject-in-formation. This and the continuity of experience from pulse to pulse, the subject as superject, are the critical disclosures for the radical empiricist. If you are going to be radically empirical, you are going to have to get down into the moment and into the stream. Now, the linking of Edelman and Whitehead, or of the neurobiological approximation and the concrescual approximation, can help us do that, even more so than we have already done. Although Edelman thinks his position is rooted in materialism, we can use it to strengthen, lend body to, the case for a monism of pure experience. Edelman’s account of consciousness can help bring us close to the body as it is felt in action and to the stream, close enough to witness the working of consciousness and to apprehend bases for organismenvironment, subject-object, agent-patient, and mind-body/brain polarities and distinctions. 7.5

Edelman and Whitehead: Crucial Links and Parallels

The time has come then for me to provide an outline for a concrescencebased reconstrual of Edelman that gives a radically empirical basis for relating his theory to actualities of experience. At the same time, Edelman, who shares with Whitehead some indebtedness to James, and who is adept at associating complex neural phenomena with psychological phenomena, will help clarify the concrescence-based account of action and perception, particularly by drawing attention to the neurobiological means for perceptual categorization, conceptual activity, the ordering of successive changes in movement, and to the function of value in memory and action. Thus, while not embracing or disputing Edelman’s particular elaboration of how neural processes “explain” the fundamental and Jamesian properties of consciousness, I use that account to put neurobiological flesh on concrescual bones, and to indicate in some detail how far a neuropsychological approach can go in corroborating a naturalized Whiteheadian account. My aim here is to make a suggestive rather than exhaustive case for the “equivalence” of some concrescual terms with neurobiological and psychological terms in the Edelmanian account; I do not aim to give anything like a full translation table between terms in Whitehead-based and Edelman-based theories. Likewise, the next section suggests how an


283

Edelman-based approach could account for some principal types of concrescence, concentrating on perceptual categorization, primary consciousness, and the formation of subjective aims, while leaving to the side many other articulable correlations. The idea I want to convey is that the connections of a Whitehead-based concrescual approximation and an Edelman-based neurobiological analysis could be the basis of a thoroughgoing experiential-neurobiological synthesis, dubbed the neurobiological approximation.22 This approximation accepts the concrescual approximation and specifies a neurobiological interpretation of concrescual phenomena; it relies on an understanding of the nature of cells, and of neurons in particular, in which neurons are themselves enduring societies that, as series of actualities or actual entities, undergo concrescence after concrescence and in each concrescence are actual as opposed to merely observable neurons. The conjoined neurobiological and concrescual approaches enable us to go a long way toward specifying what may well be going on in the brain when we say that such and such is going on concrescually, and vice versa. In this section I discuss the most important “equivalents,” including those relating •

the remembered present and the bud,

•

reentry and contrasts,

•

subjective aims and expectancies,

•

N-dimensional neural space and the conceptual lure (concrescence as an

elimination of indeterminateness in neural space), •

value-category memory-affected primary consciousness and experience

involving the affirmation-negation contrast, and •

hybrid prehensions and perceptual bootstrapping. Another prime “equivalence” (that between global mappings and chre-

ods) has been treated briefly above; others (including that between recategorical memory and an organism’s defining characteristic or personal matrix and that between proposition-formation and conceptual categorization) will be touched on below. I will not deal here with possible neurobiological counterparts of or sources of subjective form, or with ways to treat neuronal groups as structured societies.

284

Chapter 7

The Remembered Present and the Bud The natural place to begin is with Edelman’s principal account of the remembered present in relation to the Jamesian characters of thought: Notice that primary consciousness as I have characterized it has the necessary Jamesian properties: It is individual (“self” systems contribute to it [where ‘self’ means “a unique biological individual,” not a socially constructed “human self”]), it is continuous and yet changing (as both world and internal signals evolve), and it is intentional (referring necessarily to internally given or outside-world signals derived alternately from things and events). If figure 11-1 [depicting a model of primary consciousness] were to be reiterated in a series of time steps, it would serve to stress these Jamesian properties of primary consciousness and the kind of perceptual bootstrapping that primary consciousness represents. Jamesian properties stress the flow of consciousness, its “before” and “after.” In the conscious process, current value-free perceptual categorization interacts with value-dominated memory. This occurs before perceptual events contribute further to the alteration of that memory. When such events do contribute to the alteration of that memory, they are, in general, no longer in the specious or remembered present, that is, they are no longer in primary consciousness. (BA 121, with gloss definition from 120)23

In the remembered present, the perceptual event is taking shape or emerging from the interplay or “continual reentrant signaling between the value-category memory and the ongoing global mappings that are concerned with perceptual categorization in real-time” (BA 119). In concrescual terms, the event marking the formation of a bud of perception is emerging from the creative interplay of subjective aim, subjective aimactivated and aim-serving chreod, and received data, including hybridly prehended, purpose-“sculpted,” agentive, appearances of the world. In Edelman’s remembered present, previous adaptive experience lends structure to present experience in order to serve expectancy, and the present value-category memory coordinates the coherence of the present scene (119). This scene is constructed by an integration “relating signals from many different modalities with memory based on an entire evolutionary history and an individual’s experience—it is a remembered present” (UC 211).24 Such scenes in turn affect the organism’s immediate future as well as its recategorical memory, or in the concrescual approximation’s counterpart, its defining characteristic. When the event can contribute to changes in synaptic connections that amount to changes in memory, the bud is over—a memorable event is a substantive part (J1 643)—and a new remembered present is entered. To the extent that memory interacts with


285

perceptual categorizations and structures the present without determining its outcome there is room for freedom of consciousness (and autonomy in concrescence): even though memory—the background—canalizes attention, it therewith enables as it constrains, so novelty encountered can be answered with conscious novelty, and so that, in turn, recategorical memory can be altered and a new moment—or “time step”—of experience, a new remembered present, can be entered.25 In accord with the dominant, proximately relevant, subjective aim, each bud superjects, or transitions co-consciously into, its successor, which “inherits with peculiar dominance the antecedent experiences in this succession.” But “these antecedent experiences include the ‘appearances’ as in those occasions” (AI 212). Likewise, each remembered present perceptually bootstraps into its successor, with coherency of value-category memory providing the basis for coherency of the scene, and with short-term memory reflecting recently “previous categoreal and conceptual experiences” (UC 109). Reentry and Contrasts The outcome of a bud is a satisfaction or superject. For Whitehead, the datum of any complex feeling, including that of a satisfaction, is a contrast of elements—e.g., objectified actual entities, concepts, propositions—which have a ground of identity (e.g., being colored or being linked with a common source so that they may be contrasted as, say, two colors or shades of the same color, as different aspects of a single object or field), and a ground of difference so that the diverse elements may be distinguished. Further, for Whitehead, a contrast integrates compatible elements into a unity of feeling, and the more elements an actual entity brings into definite feeling by way of harmonizing contrasts, the greater is the intensity and depth of its satisfaction. In the process of concrescence, as the contents of feelings are integrated into contrasts constituting the objective datum, the subjective forms of the feelings become synthesized, with mutual sensitivity to each other under the coordinating guidance of the subjective aim, into a complex unity of feeling, while the aim itself likewise becomes determinate as it conditions feelings being integrated in the concrescence. I now make a heuristic proposal to the effect that whenever there is a contrast in experience, there is a reentrant connection resulting in the integration or binding of maps. Likewise, whenever contrasts are taking

286

Chapter 7

shape reentrant connections are carrying ongoing signaling prior to the emergence of coherence. The emergence of synchronized coherence (cf. PR 25) then is the emergence of unity in contrast. In Edelman’s words: . . . reentry is a process of ongoing parallel and recursive signaling between separate brain maps along massively parallel anatomical connections, most of which are reciprocal. It alters and is altered by the activity of the target areas it interconnects. Reentry is . . . the most important integrative mechanism in higher brains. . . . It is critical to a variety of processes, ranging from perceptual categorization and motor coordination to consciousness itself. . . . In our brains, . . . the neural firings among . . . parallel, reciprocal fibers . . . go from one map to another and then come back or reenter in a constant dynamic interchange. This interchange synchronizes and coordinates the functions of the various maps. . . . Our ability to act coherently in the presence of diverse, often conflicting, sensory stimuli requires a process of neural interaction across many levels of organization without any superordinate map to guide the process. This is the so-called binding problem. . . . [B]inding can occur as a result of reentry across brain maps that establishes shortterm temporal correlations and synchrony among the activities of widely spaced neuronal groups in different maps. As a result, neurons in those groups fire at the same time. Thus, reentry correlates a large number of dynamic circuits in space and time. The selection of those circuits that are temporally correlated under constraints of value leads to a coherent output. This binding principle, made possible by reentry, is repeated across many levels of brain organization and plays a central role in mechanisms leading to consciousness (UC 105–107; 69–70).26

The coherent output results from the play of value-dominated memory under constraints of value. (Similarly, and in accord with Whitehead’s category of subjective harmony, “the valuations of conceptual feelings are mutually determined by adaptation of those feelings to be contrasted elements congruent with the subjective aim” (PR 27).) The coherent output arises with the correlation or binding of many dynamic circuits in a complex contrast. Recall that Edelman terms the simplest unit of associated, correlated, and readily integrated re-entrantly connected maps a “classification couple” (e.g. BA 87). These are experienced, typically without consciousness, as what Whitehead called conveyances. Edelman’s classification couples and n-tuples then become capabilities for symbolic reference. Further, these may be integrated in global mappings which allow for the formation of more complex contrastive feelings: “. . . a global mapping consists of multiple classification couples from different local maps linked in an inputoutput system, as seen for example in sensorimotor systems” (ND 205),


287

which would work in the course of action, but reentry can also “support generalization” and lead to conceptual categorization (RP 145).27 Wherever a contrast emerges, whenever a synthesis is achieved, there will be a coherent output contributing to an intensification of feeling. When reentrant connections bind sufficiently to “go coherent,” there may be a detectable element in experience, a slight experienced flash of contrast or categorization, as if transmutation reflects coherence and brings or coincides with recognition. The succeeding correlation of reentrant bindings is an increasing of synthesis—from transmutation involving the integration of physical feelings as analogous or mutually resonant, and from perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, involving contrast or integration of nexus and concept (eternal object) (PR 27) to perception in the mode of symbolic reference involving object recognition and contrast of symbol and meaning. The synchronizing of Edelman’s reentrant connective mechanisms, which play a central role in leading to perceptual categorization and consciousness, are thus correlate with the experience of contrastive integrations leading to perception and the affirmation-negation contrasts characteristic of consciousness. The linkage of Whiteheadian and Edelmanian terms may often be effectively mediated by Whitehead’s understanding of the body. “The whole body is organized,” Whitehead believed (AI 211), “so that a general coordination of mentality is finally poured into the successive occasions of [a] personal society.” The whole body is itself a “structured society,” providing “a favorable environment for the subordinate societies which it harbors within itself” (PR 99), with the harbored societies including organs, groups of cells, single cells, molecules, and so on. The human body is a highly complex structured society favoring “intensity of satisfaction for certain sets of its component members. This intensity arises by reason of the ordered complexity of the contrasts which the society stages for these components” (100), the nonsocial nexus, with “the higher contrasts depend[ing] on the assemblage of a multiplicity of lower contrasts” (95). If we take reentrant connections to correspond to important aspects of this highly complex structured society, and if we take contrasts felt by actual entities comprising the non-social nexus to be experiential counterparts of the “binding” of reentrant connections among neuronal groups, Edelman gives a plausible account of the details, and if we spell them out we will get a rich sense of the embodiment involved in the concrescual approximation. (See my discussion of vision in section 7.6.)

288

Chapter 7

Subjective Aims and Expectancies I suggested earlier that the concrescual approximation could readily source many initial subjective aims in the actual, organic body, in counterparts to feelings of aroused expectancies concerning homeostatic needs and hedonic and limbic system set points, effectively on “value systems governing adaptive survival” (RP 31). Further, in the concrescual approximation, some hybridly prehended conceptual feelings and propositional feelings may prove attractive, typically in conjunction with standing aims or motivating dispositions, and subsequently arouse initial subjective aims. These latter may be associated with acquired or learned values in Edelman’s theory, in which volition requires the awareness of a goal and the ability to direct action (and thus sensation and perception). Its underpinnings [comparable to potential sources of initial subjective aims] include various value systems (ethological or acquired), perceptual and conceptual categorizations, and learning. (RP 197)

N-Dimensional Neural Space and the Conceptual Lure: Concrescence and the Elimination of Indeterminateness in Neural Space For the concrescual approximation and Whitehead, the subjective aim shapes each process of subject-formation and takes shape too as it calls elements of past experience and contextual details into relevance and leads to a unification involving a coherent objective datum felt in a satisfaction that can affect consequent action. The concrescual approximation treats as an overall lure for feeling, or a “conceptual lure,” all that which could be conceptually felt or called into relevance by an actual forming experient in a specific moment. Each conceptual lure is conditioned by the actual world, operative chreods, subjective aims, and the experient’s personal matrix. For Edelman (UC 164), “the neural processes underlying conscious experience constitute a large and changing functional cluster, the dynamic core, which includes a large number of distributed neuronal groups, ”and that cluster, “through reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system, achieves high integration in hundreds of milliseconds” (144). Only that large subset of neuronal groups, which is highly integrated with itself and much less so with the rest of the brain, can contribute directly to conscious experience at any given time (139, 164). “The number of dimensions defining the neural reference space corresponding to the dynamic core is given by the number N of neuronal groups that, at any given time, are part of the


289

dynamic core” (165). Two principal claims of Edelman’s dynamic-core hypothesis are that the N neuronal groups constituting a functional cluster, are, “over a short period, . . . highly integrated among themselves and much less so with the rest of the brain” and that “the number of points that can be differentiated in this N-dimensional space . . . is vast, as indicated by high values of complexity. Clearly, the larger the number N of neuronal groups included in the dynamic core, the larger the number of points in the corresponding N-dimensional space that may be differentiated and the higher its maximum complexity” (165–166). Although this core is readily understood as the brain-based seat of an activated chreod when one is in the course of action, the neurobiological approximation treats the dynamic core more generally as the seat of consciousness in the moment, with the size of the neural reference space, and the tightness of interconnections among neuronal groups varying from moment to moment. Now, when we become aware of anything “we can make use of that information in a large number of possible ways that can trigger all kinds of behavioral responses” (UC 148). Generally, this range of possibilities for triggering makes up the closest counterpart to the conceptual lure in Edelman, and of course it is strongly conditioned by the operative dynamic core, or rather the “N-dimensional neural space corresponding to the dynamic core” (164). “At any given time, we experience a conscious state selected out of billions of possible states, each of which can lead to different behavioral consequences. The occurrence of a particular conscious state is therefore highly informative in the specific sense that information is the reduction of uncertainty among a number of alternatives.” (125; 208) Although this reduction occurs under constraints of value, Edelman places prime emphasis on informativeness, rather than valuation and anticipation. However, from the point of view of the concrescual approximation, the conceptual lure encompasses all that can be brought into relevance given momentary aims and aim-serving memory. Nonetheless, Edelman does treat the formation of a remembered present as a process of becoming determinate. But if a bud is equivalent to a remembered present, the formation of a remembered present is a concrescence, in which felt contrasts are integrated into a determinate satisfaction. Ideally, these felt contrasts correspond to reentrant connections among select neuronal groups in the dynamic core, connections that come into resonance with each integrative contrast, as the subjectin-formation progresses toward momentary satisfaction. At successive phases

290

Chapter 7

of concrescence the actual entity’s lure for feeling is narrowed, until with satisfaction there is the one actual entity feeling that propositional feeling. As a conscious state is selected out of billions of possibilities, a subjective aim is realized. The linking of Edelman’s process of uncertainty-reduction with concrescence is central to formulating a full neurobiological approximation. The concrescual approximation sees the concrescual process as “the elimination of indeterminateness of feeling from the unity of one subjective experience” (PR 88), so reduction of uncertainty may clearly be said to be involved in concrescence, but given the monistic emphasis on integration of datum felt and form of feeling, of content and value, the reduction must be seen as much in relation to valuative subjective aim as to objective datum. The progressive definition of the final end [read ‘satisfaction’] is the efficacious condition for its attainment. The determinate unity of an actual entity is bound together by the final causation towards an ideal progressively defined by its progressive relation to the determinations and indeterminations of the datum [given the “settled actual world” which an actual entity “finds” and the aim or ideal with which the world is greeted]. (PR 150)

As an indefinite propositional feeling that would wed conceptual lure and actual world, the initial subjective aim is “a lure to the supervention of those integrating feelings by which the mere potentiality of the proposition, with its outstanding indeterminations as to its setting amid the details of the universe, is converted into the fully determinate actuality” (PR 224). As the contents of feelings—the contrasts—are progressively formed and integrated into the objective datum, the subjective forms of the feelings become synthesized, with mutual sensitivity to each other under the coordinating guidance of the subjective aim, into a complex unity of feeling, which is likewise becoming determinate as it conditions feelings being integrated in the concrescence. Affirmation-Negation Contrasts and Data of Primary Consciousness As was noted in chapter 6, affirmation-negation contrasts generally contrast what is and what may be, and consciousness is the subjective form of the intellectual feeling involving the contrast: In an intellectual feeling the datum is the generic contrast between a nexus of actual entities [as felt physically] and a proposition with its logical subjects members of the nexus. In every generic contrast its unity arises from the two-way functioning of cer-


291

tain entities which are components in each of the contrasted factors. . . This two-way aspect . . . involves in itself the contrast between the sheer matter of fact, namely, what the objectified actual entity in question contributes to the objectified nexus in the physical feeling, and the mere potentiality of the same actual entity for playing its assigned part in the predicative pattern of the proposition. . . . This contrast is what has been termed the “affirmation-negation contrast.” It is the contrast between the affirmation of objectified fact in the physical feeling, and the mere potentiality, which is the negation of such affirmation, in the propositional feeling. . . . The subjective form of the feeling of this contrast is consciousness. Thus in experience consciousness arises by reason of intellectual feelings, and in proportion to the variety and intensity of such feelings. (PR 266–267)

For Edelman, consciousness requires “a special reentrant circuit that emerged during evolution as a new component of neuroanatomy. This circuit allows for continual reentrant signaling between the value-category memory and the ongoing global mappings that are concerned with perceptual categorization in real time” (BA 119). The global mappings in question provide categorization of what is, and the value-category memory provides the context-appropriate anticipation of what may be, the expectation of what is to come next. Together in the remembered present, they enable an animal to “plan and link contingencies constructively and adaptively in terms of its own previous history of value-driven behavior” (UC 109)—and the requisite special reentrant circuit makes these two elements cohere in a unified contrast. “With the appearance of the new reentrant circuits in each modality, a conceptual categorization of concurrent perceptions can occur before these perceptual signals contribute lastingly to that memory [that is, before the momentary remembered present is superseded and the hippocampus begins to bring about higher-order synaptic changes enabling longer-term memory]. This interaction between a special kind of memory and perceptual categorization gives rise to primary consciousness” (BA 119). Alternatively, “in the conscious process, current value-free perceptual categorization interacts with value-dominated memory. . . . According to the TNGS, primary consciousness helps to abstract and organize complex changes in an environment involving multiple parallel signals. . . . Primary consciousness connects their features in terms of the saliency determined by the animal’s past history and its values” (121). In the neurobiological approximation, the play of value-category memory results in conceptual reversion: here the movement from perceptual categorization, as perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, to conceptual categorization, as

292

Chapter 7

perception in the mode of symbolic reference, is the move from the presentationally immediate as symbol to its meaning within the chreod. The room for play here among conceptual lure, inherited appearance, and incoming data, allows for an interaction that may be termed autonomous, creative. Consider briefly the relation of the affirmation-negation contrast to sensory consequents as consciousness functions in action. As you perform actions, you are aware of the world from within the seat of the unfolding dynamic core, the activated chreod, and in each moment you’re moving toward an immediately attractive sensory consequent and your consciousness is free within that moment and movement. But it is of the world just past or at present as contrasted with the world as it is to be, and consciousness is the moving with that contrast toward what is to be, and as soon as one perceives the marker of what is to be, new contrasts come to the fore. The object consciously perceived is not just an actuality but a potentiality. The datum of an affirmation-negation contrast typically forms the core of a Jamesian substantive part, and as the outcome of primary consciousness it also generates or sustains a counterpart of Whitehead’s projected image or appearance. Thus, Edelman (BA 125) notes that “conceptual categorization works from within the brain, requires perceptual categorization and memory, and treats the activities of portions of global mappings as its substrate,” and that “connecting the two kinds of categorization with an additional reentrant path for each sensory modality . . . gives rise in primary consciousness to a correlated scene, or ‘image.’” The “image” (of the projected field, or appearance, as structured by valuation) becomes determinate as the affirmation-negation contrast does. Consciousness, then, as the feeling of an affirmation-negation contrast, emerges when anticipation is possible in some form that can adaptively contrast next with now and this form turns out to be image-based for us, and by plausible extension for other organisms capable of primary consciousness. Perceptual Bootstrapping and Hybrid Prehension The concrescual approximation holds that thought, aim, and world of appearance (including one’s body) pass from one bud to its successor by means of hybrid prehension. The passage from bud to bud in a personal activity-situation, from subject-superject to ensuing subject-superject, is


293

Jamesian co-conscious transition, or Edelman’s transition from one global mapping to its readied-for sequel, a succession that depends on the driving value, on attention, on the activity of organs of succession, and on the salience of signals (RP 246). If a series of remembered presents were treated as “a series of time steps, it would serve to stress these Jamesian properties of primary consciousness and the kind of perceptual bootstrapping that primary consciousness represents” (BA 121; cf. RP 158). Thus, onflowing primary consciousness, within value-driven action, may be conceived of as the result of ongoing discrimination of present perceptual categorizations by a valuedominated . . . memory. Inasmuch as such a memory is built by relating previous perceptual categorizations to values, primary consciousness is accomplished by continual bootstrapping of current perceptual states into memory states. Current perceptual events are recategorized in terms of past value-category matches. It is the contrast of the special linkage of value and past categories with currently arriving categories, and the dominance of the self-related special memory systems in this memorial linkage, that generate the self-referential aspect of consciousness. . . . If no comparison took place between value and past categorizations to form a special memory, consciousness would not appear. (RP 102)

In a neurobiological approximation enriched by an appreciation of concrescence, perceptual bootstrapping of current perceptual states into memory states involves the contrast of the perceived—Edelman’s “correlated scene,” the hybridly prehended appearance as structured by aim—with the anticipated, provided by the me in the form of value-category memory (with its readinesses or lures for feeling), which meets incoming data and leads to the formation of an I with a new perceptual consequent, in turn hybridly prehended and so on. Each juncture a co-conscious transition involving contrast of now with next, what is with what is not. Perceptual bootstrapping as ongoing memory-based discrimination in action thus plainly involves a central form of hybrid prehension. 7.6

The Extended TNGS and Concrescence

We have already seen how such crucial factors in concrescence as subjective aims, contrastive feelings, and the elimination of indetermination, are treated or represented in the TNGS. I am not here going to spell out anything like a full account of concrescence, or of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, including the categoreal obligations, in Edelman’s terms. But I will indicate how an Edelman-based account of perception would match with

294

Chapter 7

Whitehead’s and in the doing indicate something about what I see as the nature of physical and conceptual feelings—the two main species of “primary” prehensions—in Edelman’s theory. A Partial Sketch of the Neurobiological Approximation A Concrescual and Neurobiological Account of Perception

The concres-

cual approximation adopted much of Whitehead’s modal theory of perception. It fundamentally accepted his treatment of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, as of vague, ill-defined sensa, “combined with geometrical relationships to the external world of the settled past” (PR 171), and as the feeling of the efficacious surrounding environment, including preeminently the animal body. It recast Whitehead’s treatment of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, returning it to the stream by taking as central its function in action. Further, concerning perception in the mode of symbolic reference, it highlighted two principal instances of complex symbolic reference, beyond that “low-order” form that integrates perception in the mode of causal efficacy and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. These instances lead through conceptual reversion from perception in the mode of presentational immediacy to either action or further mentation (conceptual reversion), be it associative, analytic, reflective, or imaginary. For Edelman (Reeke 158), perception “begins” when receptor sheets receive signals from the external world: “The inputs to which the groups respond originate ultimately at the sense organs (encounter with the environment) but frequently are relayed first through other neuronal groups.” In the neurobiological approximation, the impingement of environmental input at the actual sense organs is a principal instance of physical prehension, which leads to conceptual prehension and perception in the mode of causal efficacy for Whitehead. Also, presumably, Edelman would have no quarrel with the role Whitehead gives to the withness of the body, central to perception in the mode of causal efficacy, especially since, just as action and perception are dynamically inseparable, the motoric is linked with the sensory in global mappings, which provide the minimum basis for perceptual categorization (e.g., ND 210; RP 54). A neurobiological approximation would take Edelman’s account of what is going on in global mappings as a neurobiological account of much of what is felt as the dynamic withness of the body as, e.g., our eyes move, focus, and as we move about.


295

What of conceptual feelings derived from physical feelings? The means used to achieve the form of representation needed for perception, “must allow continuous and coherent correlation of various temporal and spatial aspects of a neural construct with at least some features of a real-world object” (ND 108). Topographic or spatial maps fulfill that function (108; cf. RP 243). At the same time, “a first representation is generated in the cortex that . . . translates some physical properties of real-world objects into neural properties in certain regions” (ND 109). In short, neuronal groups in sensory sheets produce and transmit to their recipient maps input carrying some relation to the spatio-temporal surround, and some “features” of signals related to the data impinging on the relevant sensory sheet. The neurobiological approximation treats this “translation” as a correlate of conceptual prehension. That is, the recipient maps, by an extractive process, “conceptually prehend” features from receptor sheets; natural selection ensures that these extractive and translational processes are adaptive. Then, through re-entrantly connected processes of feature extraction, and classification coupling, the perceptual system resolves indeterminacies concerning qualities. Edelman’s mapped representations bear comparison with Whitehead’s qualitative feelings and associated strain feelings, but those feelings and Edelman’s translations, and local maps generally, are not sufficient for fullfledged perception. Let us restrict attention to the visual system, in which three sets of neuronal groups are activated respectively when red, blue, or light are perceived and inhibited when green, yellow, or darkness are encountered (UC 158–162). “Clearly, the firing rates of these three sets of neuronal groups can define a three-dimensional space within which each color that a human being can differentiate corresponds to a distinct point” (161). Perceptual categorization involves feature detection resulting as these neuronal processes are correlated over time by reentry (RP 49), yielding, say, the detection of a shade of blue. As these neuronal groups are firing, the organism, behaving in accord with the working out of a global mapping, moves or focuses, changing its standpoint slightly, and builds up a sense of object constancy; mind you, this may involve integration of other feature detectors, sensitive to edges, textures, occlusion, etc., joined in a progression of contrasts and integrations. The correlation and integration combined with the spatial constancy leads to categorization, the treatment of “nonidentical objects or events as equivalent” (ND 26) and the “adaptive

296

Chapter 7

discrimination of an object or event from background or other objects and events” (RP 49). The final phases of the process of perceptual categorization, culminating in the demarcation of an area or space by a remembered quality, are correlate with those of an act of transmutation. That is, perceptual categorization, which is the outcome of global mapping, is correlate with transmutation, and the perceptual categorizing is the transmuting, a process elements of which the radical empiricist may sometimes feel with awareness, and which the neurobiologist may link with a coordinated integration that produces “a coherent and unified representation of the stimulus domain” (71). Subsequently, the activation among the three neuronal groups corresponding to color axes may change slightly, but not sufficiently to alter the perceptual categorization of the object as blue. Recall that in an act of perceptual transmutation, perception in the mode of presentational immediacy makes of actual entities whose sensa are felt causally and conceptually a nexus of actual entities, and in this simplifying, abstractive transmutation it makes of the sensa, which initially were “emotional forms transmitted from occasion to occasion,” a common quality characterizing the nexus (PR 113–114). Thus, a neurobiological approximation could plausibly assimilate perceptual categorization not just to transmutation but to perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, which “is characterized by the close association of qualities and definite geometrical relations” and “is the basis of the so-called ‘projection’ of sensa” (310). For the concrescual approximation, these projected sensa are then further organized in a scene as a result of the workings of symbolic reference, typically in accord with the dominant subjective aim, forming what is characterized by Edelman as a “picture” or “mental image” that “lives in our consciousness as the world presented to us for our enjoyment and our purposes” (AI 212). In this scene, object recognition, an instance of perception in the mode of symbolic reference, secures the foreground. Meanwhile, the inherited appearance, including “content” of short-term memory, is adapted to current physical feelings as the perceptually new is incorporated into a new scene (UC 109) or appearance, yielding a relevant perceptual background. Remember too that some projected sensa may rise to the level of object images, but without any consequent association or reversion, so that they sink back to the level of physical purpose. It doesn’t matter whether a particular perceptual experience is active or passive: in both the concrescual and the neurobiological approaches we


297

may parse active and passive cases of perception or of image generation in terms of the same modal progression—causal efficacy with impingement, followed by conceptual feeling, transmutation and presentational immediacy correlate with perceptual categorization, and the perception of objects in the mode of symbolic reference. Edelman specifies that perceptual categorization is value-free (BA 121), and then interacts with value-dominated memory, which in the case of action often functions in an operative, aim-serving, chreod, ripe with basal ganglia-mediated and -ignited reentrant loops that correlate with readinesses to respond. In the concrescual approximation, following Whitehead, the initial data received when freshly orienting in a new context are almost always value-free, in the sense of not being adapted for the attainment of a remote end (but an immediate end is in play, the working out of the relevant bias or value, namely to get oriented). But perceptual categorization, if prepared for, need not be value-free, and this claim might be testable experimentally. In any case, if the move from signal (cf. physical prehension) to translation into neural property to perceptual categorization is correlate to the move to conceptual prehension and physical purpose, then that move may be anticipated so that the barest hint of an apt sensation may degenerately cascade or be amplified into response. On this count, the notion that conceptual prehension is conceptual valuation makes perfect sense. These readinesses, latter-day Jamesian expectant anticipations, depend on the activation of “voltage-dependent connections (those that require the postsynaptic neuron to be excited in order to be activated)” (UC 171). These readinesses and anticipations make so much of the actional perceptual, and the perceptual actional, and it is they that lead so swiftly—but with now conceivable rapidity—from sensa showing up on a backdrop of inherited appearance to action, and forced recasting of Whitehead on perception in the mode of presentational immediacy in chapter 6. This generic, always particularized, interaction of perceptual categorization with recategorical value-category memory facilitates and constitutes conceptual categorization and may be assimilated to perception in the mode of symbolic reference. Entities that are categorized perceptually, but not conceptually, remain at the level of physical purposes in the concrescual approximation; those that are categorized conceptually figure in the objective data of propositional feelings. In this way, a conceptual categorization as it figures in experience figures in a propositional feeling. But propositional feelings need not be

298

Chapter 7

conscious feelings and conceptual categorizations are not conscious categorizations although they give rise to consciousness (e.g. BA 125). Thus, to summarize, perceptual categorization is more or less correlate with perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, and it, plus value-category memory, yields conceptual categorization, which is more or less correlate with symbolic reference, and is in the nature of a propositional feeling, and this typically leads to an affirmation-negation contrast and, equivalently, primary consciousness, complete with a value-laden, memory-adjusted, memory-sculpted scene. The Neurobiological Approximation and Attention

I now give a compara-

ble correlation of the account of action in the concrescual approximation and in Edelman. To do this, I turn briefly to the function of attention, focusing on cases involving the operation of an action routine, or a series of global mappings, understanding that attention may and does function in the full variety of passive and active cases, with “mechanisms of attention . . . ranging from perceptual competition to volitional choice” (BA 142). In a personal activity-situation, action may be smooth or may involve minor disruption that is responded to without thought, simply by re-trying or by suitable reflexive adaptation, or may involve a breakdown forcing the incursion of reflective, problem-addressing, thought, say, a momentary consideration of what went wrong, the physical situation, available alternative actions, or whether to continue pursuit of the governing subjective aim. Edelman accounts for these three cases in relation to attention, treating them as: unconscious automatic performance, automatic acts interrupted by attention to novelty or threat, and the direction of attention by conscious means (BA 142). In the first case, a well-worn chreodic pathway is followed, involving, for Edelman, selective disinhibition by the basal ganglia of “thalamic nuclei projecting to the cortex. This leads to anticipatory and selective arousal of cortical areas corresponding to the motor program [read action routine]. These cortical areas then become more sensitive to those sensory inputs that are consistent with the performance of the task via a global mapping” (BA 143; cf. RP 197–207). Attention then is focused in each bud and proceeds with bodily movement toward a sensory consequent and is prepared for excitatory input, and, in effect, co-conscious transition. We may loosely relate the experience of the movement with attention with the experience


299

of acting, which is shaped by and follows on the disinhibited intention in action and is, in the concrescual approximation, action in the mode of causal efficacy. Here, while recategorical memory, in the form of a motor program corresponding to a series of global mappings (RP 204, 205), structures the present, and effectively canalizes attention and bodily movement, it leaves or makes room for adaptation, autonomous concrescence, freedom of consciousness within that frame. The canalizing is in accord with the relevant subjective aim, and “facilitates the construction of the appropriate global mapping in less than some critical time period (< 0.5 sec). Under these circumstances, the acts leading to the goal (whether they involve motor skills or conceptual skills) are carried out without stimulation of the reentrant loops relating value-category memory to current perceptual categorization in primary consciousness, or the reentrant loops involved in higher-order consciousness” (205). However, if, in a given context, recategorical memory fails to prompt construction of a global mapping within a given time period, “limbic reentry will engage the key loops leading to primary or higher-order consciousness” (206). Thus, if novelty disrupts automatic activity, “signals may pass down to the mid-brain value systems that connect back to the cortex and the basal ganglia. These systems may then send back signals to interrupt [the action]. As long as an automatized action is accomplished without a hitch, these mid-brain nuclei are not engaged.” (BA 143) In the latter event, conformal feelings carry the buds, and the routine unfolds at the margin of consciousness. Moreover, the relevant global mapping or chreod relevates or restimulates associated activities, which may be drawn on fairly smoothly, so that mild disruption may (re)call related chreods into play, as the dish washer discovering a filling dish drainer may dry and put away some already-washed dishes before washing more. Furthermore, as appropriate to cases involving serious disruption, requiring beings with higher-order consciousness to think about what to do, “verbal schemas in conceptual areas can, through the activities of the frontal cortex and limbic system, dominate the apportionment of disinhibition by the basal ganglia, which have strong connections to such regions” (143). Let this sketch suffice to indicate how Edelman’s neurobiological accounts of action and attention may be mapped onto the concrescual approximation’s, sharpening our appreciation of the interplay between physical and conceptual poles within experience. This, the preceding

300

Chapter 7

account of perception, and the summary of crucial linkages between Whitehead and Edelman in section 7.5, indicate that one may well correlate the rather fine-grained details of the concrescual account with the rather fine-grained neurobiological details covered in Edelman’s extended TNGS, although to make the correlation work it is generally necessary to add emphasis on the notion of concrescence as involving integration of feelings in accord with subjective aim, on co-conscious transition, and to replace Edelman’s “time steps” with something more dynamic, organic, and experiential: the bud. 7.7

Onflow: An Organic Monism of Pure Experience

Suppose you developed a thoroughgoing and quite precise form of “mindbody” parallelism by having the concrescual approximation and a neurobiological approximation feed off and nourish each other. Suppose you could describe the formation of subjective forms and emotions and objective data in exquisite and credible concrescual detail; suppose that, with guidance from the neurobiological approximation, you could correlate those descriptions with data from functional magnetic resonance imaging scans and other technological sources, so that you have a parallelism between what is detected as going on in muscle, nerve and brain, in body, with what is going on in experience in concrescual terms, a parallelism not between lines of analysis, but more like one between body suit and skin. Now, such a parallelism could, as the concrescual approximation and my sketch of a neurobiological approximation can, certainly function to help you get close to experience conceptually. To get an idea, do try: pick a chreod, enact or consider your enaction of it as you carry out a small project, and listen to what the neurobiological approximation would begin to say is going on in your brain during the enaction. Appropriate global mappings, drawn from recategorical memory and supporting categorization on value, loop along dynamically (and degenerately), as scenes are carved out in remembered presents, as organs of succession coordinate activity, and as short-term memories come and go, attention concentrates again and again, and conscious states bootstrap into accruing recategorical memory. Suppose we can describe what is going on experientially in concrescual terms as moment flows into concrescing moment in a way that is more suggestive and precise than a videotaped rendition because it is from the inside out. We can build


301

in, too, the play of bodily feelings, social selves, and traditions, of associations and conceptual lures, of emotions and moods, of activated and longterm subjective aims. I can imagine crafting in everyday words a convincing description of how it was to live through a specific personal activitysituation. Thus can we get close, yet as we do so we nonetheless and all the more feel and know that experience is of a different order than the descriptions. The concrescual approximation’s verbalized account of a moment can only reconstruct but so much of the felt pulse and tapestry of life, it can but suggest the nature and scope of the experience, of all that is enfolded in the moment. Similarly, the neurobiological account can but give us an abbreviated account of what is going on in the brain and the body. The Jamesian psychologist could live with the concrescual-neurobiological parallelism or with something akin to it, and could perhaps suit it to his materialistic metaphysical predilections, but the Jamesian philosopher need not. That is, the parallelism is not ontologically decisive: the neurobiological approximation can be given a parallelist cast by accepting thoughtmatter dualism and treating thought in a manner consistent with radical empiricism. Or it can be taken to support a monism. The concrescual and neurobiological aspects of the neurobiological approximation afford descriptions of mental and physical aspects of concrescence and experience, but the phenomena are not purely either mental or physical. Similarly, perception and action are entangled so inextricably and dynamically that the perceptual is not purely perceptual, nor the actional purely actional. Perception and action occur in chreodic unfoldings that typically involve anticipation and readiness to respond, the perceptions occurring within actional streams and on the basis of contributory actions (and global mappings), while actions depend on perceptions for their punctuation and guidance. Perception and action are thus not separate experiences, states, or events. The notions of mental and physical substances or realms, and of clear and distinct perceptions had apart from action, arise with reflective or self-observational withdrawal from experience. The physical and mental poles, like the perceptual and actional, are aspects of unitary experiences enjoyed in the ongoing onflow. It is in this sense of unitarity and seamlessness, in contrast with mind-body dualisms, that I talk of an experiential monism. It is a monism that emphasizes radically empirical findings revealed within the stream of consciousness. It would secure these findings through empirical immersion in the inclusive

302

Chapter 7

whole of the moment, while behaving just as one does in everyday action and activity-situations. It would secure these findings through immersion in the flow of chreodic activity, while gently preventing any thought or feeling from rising away from that flow, preventing by relinquishing, or not even granting energy to, characteristic analytic withdrawals. In this way, one may soften remnant edges of the subject-object split, get in touch with the workings of causal efficacy, and generally break the bonds of activevoice language games. Experiential monism views matter and consciousness as practical concepts arising from an analysis of undivided experience. It regards the very notions of knower and known and more generally of intender and intentional content, or equivalently of proposition feeler and propositional content, and even of attracted and attractor, as well as of mind and matter, as dualisms that are posterior to raw experience. This experiential monism may yet yield a full-blown metaphysical monism of experience, like Whitehead’s, that would situate everything in an onflow of experiential energy, but I am not here espousing such a monism. The experiential monism in question here is sourced in experience, and was first written of by James, in his psychological account of experience and the stream of consciousness and then in his efforts at radical empiricism. In his psychology, James viewed his “empirical parallelism” between brainprocesses and states of consciousness as “only a provisional halting-place,” acknowledging that things had to “some day be more thoroughly thought out” (J1 182). The Whitehead-based, concrescual approximation is an attempt at such a thinking out. It aims to provide an account of the stream of experience that is true to James’s psychology and to his later monism of pure experience, and that keeps us in intimate touch with the way things are in raw experience, before the advent of reflection or analysis, although it applies nonetheless to reflective and analytic experience. For James, psychology, “the science of individual minds, assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know” (J1 vi). These correspond neatly to two assumptions made by Edelman: the “qualia assumption,” namely that “phenomenal states or qualia . . . exist in conscious humans,” and “the physics assumption,” namely “that, in describing conscious states, we accept modern physics as an adequate description for our purposes of the nature of material properties” (RP 19).28 James recognized that the assumptions of psychology may be criticized in discourses termed meta-


303

physical (J1 vi), and in his later philosophy he addresses his earlier assumptions—in effect, showing how they specify the limits of an arbitrary but sustainable language game—and ends by foretelling a metaphysics (e.g. ERE 86 ff.) that can situate Edelman’s assumptions within a set of language games and ultimately within the active-voice syntactic bind. Edelman simply never goes beyond the “scientific” stance of James’s psychoneural parallelism. In this vein, Edelman asserts (BA 112; cf. RP 37), “there is no end of hypotheses about consciousness, particularly by philosophers. But most of these are not what we might call principled scientific theories, based on observables and related to the functions of the brain and the body.” However, he does show that the Jamesian characters of thought provide an effective framework for formulating psychophysically parallel neuropsychological accounts of consciousness, and he does, without aiming to do so, but as I hope to have shown, provide a basis for aligning a new neurobiology with a new concrescence-based psychology and with experience. With an elaboration of that framework we might then escape any prospective need to “adjust psychological terms to one set of standards and physical terms to another” (Davidson 1974: 109; cf. Chalmers 170 and chapter 4) but rather might adjust both to a concrescual standard, and work from there, for it is concrescence that is going on: the physical, neurobiological, psychological, and processual are but constructs therefrom. The notion of concrescence might then serve as a model for generating hypotheses and a basis for aiding in the (radically) empirical assessment of a variety of experience-related claims. In the remainder of this section I distinguish my abbreviated form of experiential monism from emergentist versions of materialism, in which mental phenomena emerge from physical events in the physical brain; in the next section I talk about what neurons, and other cells comprising the body, must be like if experiential monism is not to be either a solipsism, perforce disembodied, or an unacknowledged dualism. Biological Naturalism and Grammar Emergent materialism is a form of materialism that admits the reality of mind and takes consciousness somewhat seriously. Searle and Edelman are both of this stripe. Edelman does not deny the existence of qualia (discriminable properties of conscious experience), but he also flatly asserts that “consciousness arises within the material order of certain organisms” (UC

304

Chapter 7

xii), and that “[in] any adequate global theory of brain function . . . all cognition and all consciousness must rest on orderings and processes in the physical world . . . and should be based on a materialist metaphysics” (RP 10). Searle names his version of emergent materialism “biological naturalism.” In it, conscious states are irreducibly subjective and qualitative, and “consciousness is a natural biological phenomenon that . . . is caused by lower-level microprocesses in the brain and it is a feature of the brain at the higher macro levels” (MC xiv). In fact, for Searle, consciousness is “a part of the ordinary physical world” (214). As Searle sees it, the problem with ordinary versions of materialism is that they rely on the “false assumption that the view of reality as entirely physical is inconsistent with the view that world really contains subjective . . . conscious states such as thoughts and feelings” (RM 54), but (emergent) materialists can ditch this assumption, which makes the physical and mental mutually exclusive, and “cheerfully embrace consciousness as just another material property among others” (55). Searle regards the traditional dualistic (mental/physical) vocabulary and categories as “the source of our deepest philosophical difficulties” (RM 54; MC 211) and further asserts “that with very few exceptions all of the parties to the disputes in the current issues in the philosophy of mind are captives of a certain set of verbal categories,” namely these traditional categories (RM 31). He also holds that belief in the mind as containing an inventory of unconscious mental states, and in memory “as a storehouse of propositions and images” rather than “as a mechanism for generating current performance . . . is an illusion based largely on the grammar of our language” (187). Moreover, in places he talks of having to go back behind the neurotic symptoms of philosophy of mind to find the unconscious assumptions that led materialist philosophy of mind to leave out the consciousness, with its central feature of subjectivity (e.g. 31, 52). In these interrelated claims, he is surely correct, but he hasn’t progressed from them to address the impact of language and grammar on categorization and thought; Searle seems to have little interest in analytically entering the bud in process of formation or the stream of experience. Thus, although I concur with Searle (e.g. RM chapter 1; 1987) in just about all his criticisms of functionalists, behaviorists, materialists, I must say that, while he rightly charged those thinkers with abstracting from the subjective aspects of consciousness and intentionality and with being captive to misleading categoreal distinctions,


305

Searle himself abstracted from intentional processes and himself seems to have remained captive to and unaware of the limitations of the subjectpredicate form of expression. Searle may criticize mind-matter dualism, and he may qualify as a radical empiricist, by virtue of his recognizing the nature of intentional causation and, arguably, the transitive parts, but he nowhere evinces a radically empirical interest in how propositional contents take shape in experience or otherwise escapes the subject-object dualism of intentionality. Sensitivity to subject-formation, and the associated recognition that the subjective and objective are aspects of experience, secure freedom from that dualism. We know that for James, as for the concrescual approximation, the formation of a thought is the formation of a thinker, so that when thought goes on, thinker- or subject-formation goes on, and that for Whitehead, in each concrescence “the philosophy of organism presupposes a datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject” (PR 155). Searle knows that thoughts are not formed by agentive, homuncular, subjects, notwithstanding the fact that the grammar of our active-voicedominated language regularly requires the seeming reference to such subjects. Nonetheless, because he is not sufficiently critical of active-voice-based habits of thought, Searle conceives no detailed alternative, and steers clear of concern with subject-formation and other intentional processes. In effect, his analysis doesn’t go below the intentional, doesn’t explain how the subjective emerges from the objective, as concrescence proceeds “from the objectivity, whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity, whereby there is one individual experience” (156). The So-Called Hard Problem (The Difficulty Is Syntactic) From the point of view of experiential monism, Searle neglects the concrete realities, not only as an analyst of intentional phenomena but as an adherent of biological naturalism. Searle attempts to avoid mind-body dualism by making mental phenomena biology-based—part of the natural biological order—so that mental states and processes are caused and sustained by operations of the brain and are realized in brain structure, analogously to the way liquidity is caused by molecular behavior and realized in H2O molecules (e.g. Iy 264 ff., RM 14). Searle indicates that because one side of the relation between the material and the mental is already subjective, we cannot picture the relation of the subjective “to the material in the

306

Chapter 7

way that we can picture the relations between liquidity and molecule movement, for instance” (RM 102). If one keeps to the primacy of experience one may require him to explain why the move from the measurable molecular activity to sensible liquidity should be taken to apply to the move from measurable brain activity to non-sensible mental states rather than to, say, sensible behavior (cf. Griffin 65, 53; Nagel 1993). Has he done anything more here than define brain-mind dualism away, by subsuming it within biology and re-labeling an unpicturable relation between objective neural processes and subjective mental states a relation within biology as understood by one adopting Searle’s perspective, according to which mental states are higher-level (but nonetheless biological and so physical) features of the brain “caused by and realized in the structure of the brain” (Iy 15)? Has he brought us any closer to the actual or come up with an acceptable answer to the “hard problem”? Much as other philosophers and biologists working the mind-body street do (e.g. Chalmers xii; LeDoux 268), Searle takes “the hard part of the mind-body problem” to be dealing adequately with questions like “How, to put it naively, does the brain get us over the hump from electrochemistry to feeling?” (MC 28) Such questions remain even for those biological naturalists who “know for sure that inside our skulls there is a brain, sometimes it is conscious, and brain processes cause consciousness in all its forms” (RM 247). But Searle says “we ought to keep reminding ourselves of what we know for sure” (247), and so, if brain processes, neuronal processes, cause consciousness in all its forms, we ought to ask whether there are any senses in which consciousness ever causes brain processes. Searle doesn’t seem to hold that consciousness causes brain processes or, more specifically, that prior intentions cause brain processes which cause and realize intentions in action. And so he doesn’t show that consciousness and conscious states are not epiphenomenal, i.e., are not without causal impact, for it appears that for him consciousness is causally emergent (112) from brain processes and that any further change in consciousness will likewise be causally emergent from brain processes rather than be affected directly by prior consciousness, by way of hybrid prehension, as in the concrescual approximation. Neurobiology-based and intentionality-based analyses under review have not provided sufficient contact with the reality of experience to admit of hybrid prehension. For experiential monism, which would start from the reality of experience and


307

abstract the concrescual, and the neurobiological and intentional if it will, hybrid prehension is real and it is causal. Perhaps by “parsing” anticipation a Searlean can show that consciousness is causally efficacious via some counterpart of hybrid prehension but the fact that Searle hasn’t referred to consciousness causing brain processes in the works of his discussed herein suggests his position may be inadequate, arguably because it stayed to the propositional-content side of phenomenology. In any event, we ought to ask whether we know for sure the things Searle says we know for sure, and what assumptions and evidence any such knowledge relies on. I know and radical empiricists know the answers to questions like “What caused your arm to move?” when you have reached for something (cf. Iy 119), and that waking experience is continuous and continuously changing, and that experience is more fundamental, is known more directly, than either constituent of the so-called hard problem. What we know is that we are in flux amid onflux: “We find ourselves living within nature” (MT 156). We are all immersed in the onflow, amidst, possibly to overstate the case, “the general interconnectedness of things . . . the one allembracing fact which is the advancing history of the one Universe” (AI 150; cf. S 55). Thus, especially if you don’t accept the metaphysical ultimacy of the subject-predicate distinction, and withdrawals associated therewith, you can give the streaming nature of waking experience the place of what is known for sure, gaining therewith a vantage from which brain processes and consciousness are as intimately interdependent as the neurobiological approximation suggests, yet you can still question whether you know or can know for sure that brain processes cause consciousness. In the approach advocated in this book, each moment of consciousness involves the formation and projection forward of a (new) subject. Of course, newly formed embodied subjects are of a piece with their immediate, historic, and evolutionary inheritances: each new subject is consonant with characteristics of the person in whose life it arises; the cumulative effect of personal and social history weighs much. Yet one’s embodied self with all its associated capabilities, knowledges, temperaments, values, habits, aims, commitments, functions in its momentary dynamic constellation in the present. It is the me present in the moment in which the I-forming process, the concrescence, is in issue. The new subject does not predate and form or serve as the agent of the act of subject-forming experience. Autonomous or free

308

Chapter 7

concrescence is from the me and meets novelty with novelty. No “I” does the selecting among possibilities. No “I” does the thinking in “I think, therefore I am.” As Nietzsche (1886: 24) emphasized, “a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks; but . . . even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—’.” (Cf. Nietzsche 1886: 47; JI 224–225.) This grammatical habit is an active-voice-based habit, one that plainly sustains the homunculus fallacy challenged by Searle and Edelman (e.g. RM 214; BA 79–80). Another active-voice-based habit is the adoption of a characteristic form of introspection that obscures awareness of transitive parts and so proves thoroughly unable to “[hold] fast the transitive parts of thought’s stream, so as to observe them” and leads to the placement of “a far too great emphasis . . . on the more substantive parts of the stream” (James 1884: 3). The withdrawal from the stream is a withdrawal from subject-formation. Reliance on the subject-verb-object form as a syntactic standard or more generally on the subject-predicate form of discourse encourages neglect of subjectformation and concrescence and so is misleading when one is trying to understand the nature of consciousness and experience. In fact, the very grammar that encourages a withdrawal from experience and a loss of awareness of the onflow is assumed by those countenancing and confounded by the “hard problem.” In a sense, what it comes down to with regard to Searle (and Edelman as well) is: do we want to say consciousness (or even mental activity or mentation) is emergent from material conditions, and therefore is a form of the material, or that experience is basic and that the very ideas of the material and of mental processes arise with conceptualization of aspects of experience in a fashion bolstered by an active-voice-dominated, subject-predicate form of expression? Plainly, experiential monists opt for saying experience is basic, although saying that hardly commits one to accepting my historical “active-voice thesis.” However, if experience is to be basic, and not mysteriously emergent from the material, then some elements of the mental and experiential must be present in what might appear to be merely material entities. This is exactly what Whitehead maintains in his philosophy of organism, in what he occa-


309

sionally termed his theory of organic mechanism (SMW 80, 107). Accordingly, neurons, for pertinent example, although they are actually structured societies, are here reconstrued not just as subject to the onflow but as undergoing concrescence and in some sense having mental poles. That is, neurons are here treated as actual (experiencing) neurons, which are associated with actual entities each of which undergoes concrescence. On this view, as in a metaphysical experiential monism, the emergence of images and evident mentality and consciousness is far less mysterious than in any mind-body dualism. In such a metaphysical monism, some form of the mental is widespread—all actual entities have mental poles and have inaccessible “interiors” (real internal constitutions) decisive for behavior; cells and neurons are engaged in ongoing concrescence. Accordingly, there is no sudden emergence of mental phenomena from the merely physical; rather, in keeping with the categoreal obligations, in more and more complex organisms, with presiding occasions capable of more and more complex concrescences, the mental or conceptual figures in more and more complex contrasts until propositional feelings and then the affirmation-negation contrast (and so consciousness) are reached. 7.8

Actual Neurons and the Onflow of Experience

Radically empirical, concrescually phenomenological, active-voice-sensitive, experiential monists are not faced with the incoherence of dualism, or puzzlement about the emergence of mental images from neural activity, or about where thoughts are located, and the fact and efficacy of consciousness. They start from the stream of experience and understand mind-body dualism, and other problems of traditional philosophy, as outgrowths of sedimented, socially propagated, active-voice-dominated abstractions and practices. If we begin our theorizing from the point of view of an objectivityenshrining observer, happily neglecting valuation, volition, desire, bodily feelings, we may quickly be left with a world full of insentient matter in space-time, and with mind-body dilemmas. If we take an inverse approach, experience is basic, space-time and inert matter are abstracted from experience, and the dilemmas vanish. The experiential monist might well cry out “Emperor’s New Clothes!” to reigning materialists and dualists: “You are victims and witless champions of language-bound consensual neuroses and narcoses.”

310

Chapter 7

Of Actual Neurons and Neuronal Experience But not even the experiential monist can experience another’s experience, or even precisely re-live a moment of one’s own. We see hats and coats, which may cover automata, moving in the street, and we take them for humans—organisms, not automata—walking in the street. Now, notwithstanding Descartes’ fabricated, skepticism-dependent but also potentially skepticism-sustaining anxiety concerning the possibility that walking, talking humanoid figures out on the busy thoroughfare may be robots (Second Meditation), the fact that you cannot see or feel my experience is not sufficient reason to deny me my experience, nor, equivalently, I yours. Thus, if I, as experiential monist, hold that some form of experience that encompasses mental and conceptual elements but not necessarily “intellectual mentality” (PR 254) is widespread, and in fact that all actual entities have mental poles, so that the issuing of mental phenomena from the merely physical is not mysterious, in part because there is no “merely physical,” I may also maintain that the inability to see or feel the experience of neurons does not in itself tell against the thoroughgoing monist. If the neurons in our bodies are historic routes of concrescences, and we cannot observe or directly experience those concrescences, the neurons we observe are not the whole story; they are not the experient—the actual—neurons, any more than any object we perceive in the mode of symbolic reference is the actual object. But if we admit actual neurons then we can, to our satisfaction, explicate claims like Searle’s “mental states are both caused by the operations of the brain and realized in the structure of the brain (and the rest of the central nervous system)” (Iy 265) in Whiteheadian, and concrescual, terms. For example, concerning the ultimate percipient occasion in an organism at a moment, we would say something on the causal side more like “The satisfaction of the ultimate percipient neuron is influenced by causally efficacious physical and hybrid physical prehensions of other actual neurons, including immediate predecessors, those other actual neurons being organized in structured societies or neuronal groups (of actual neurons), and this ultimate percipient neuron, participating in a non-social nexus, momentarily enjoys its own ‘peculiar richness of inheritance’” (PR 109). We would say something on the realization side more like “And satisfactions like these are superjections that are hybridly prehended and contribute to transforming


311

the characteristics and actual synaptic efficiencies of affected enduring neurons.” An actual neuron is an experient occasion along a route of actual occasions, and I will term that route an enduring neuron, no matter whether it is a sensory transducer or a motor, cortical or some other type of neuron. For simplicity, each actual neuron will be viewed as associated primarily with one actual entity, although the observable neuron will contain functional elements and molecules that are in turn associable with enduring organisms, say enduring molecules (whose intrinsic characters vary “according to the general organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves” (SMW 80)), each comprising series of actual entities. Accordingly, each actual neuron, like each actual entity, “is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data” and “is a process of ‘feeling’ the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one ‘satisfaction’” (PR 40). What is the sense in which actual neurons may have mental poles? The experiential monist can let Whitehead provide the mark of the mental. He finds that the subjective aim “is not primarily intellectual; it is the lure for feeling. This lure for feeling is the germ of mind” (PR 85). “Here,” he continues, “I am using the term ‘mind’ to mean the complex of mental operations involved in the constitution of an actual entity. . . . The concrescence, absorbing . . . data into immediate privacy, consists in mating the data with ways of feeling provocative of the private synthesis. These subjective ways of feeling are not merely receptive of the data as alien facts. . . . The how of feeling, though it is germane to the data, is not fully determined by the data.” The ways of feeling provocative of synthesis are valuative in nature, attendant on aims which actual neurons may, for example, inherit as a part of outward transmutation and by means of hybrid prehensions (308) from recent ultimate percipients. A neuron may be activated and ready to respond, its readiness being in accord with the enduring neuron’s matrix of habits and dispositions, if I may so speak. In fact, the way of deriving a conceptual feeling from a physical feeling so as to provoke or contribute to private synthesis also depends on the enduring neuron’s prehensive capabilities and its defining characteristic, its synaptic and other dispositions, which change with experience. Can we make further sense of the actual neuron’s experience in neurobiological terms? Damasio (138–139) gives a statement from a related

312

Chapter 7

vantage that provides a basis for imagining the kind of experience that neurons might have: The unwitting and unconscious urge to stay alive betrays itself inside a simple cell in a complicated operation that requires “sensing” the state of the chemical profile inside the boundary, and that requires unwitting, “unconscious knowledge” of what to do, chemically speaking, when the sensing reveals too little or too much of some ingredient at some place or time within the cell. To put it in other words: it requires something not unlike perception in order to sense imbalance; it requires something not unlike implicit memory, in the form of dispositions for action, in order to hold its technical know-how; and it requires something not unlike a skill to perform a preemptive or corrective action. If all this sounds to you like the description of important functions of our brain, you are correct. The fact is, however, that I am not talking about the brain, because there is no nervous system inside the little cell. Moreover, this brainlike mechanism that is not really a brain cannot be the result of nature copying the properties of a brain. On the contrary, sensing environmental conditions, holding know-how in dispositions, and acting on the basis of those dispositions were already present in single-cell creatures before they were part of any multicellular organisms, let alone multicellular organisms with brains.

When Damasio says “it requires something not unlike perception in order to sense imbalance,” we say it requires physical and conceptual prehension. When Damasio says “it requires something not unlike implicit memory . . . and a skill to perform a[n] . . . action,” we say it requires something not unlike a background, an assemblage of neuronal powers and dispositions, a defining characteristic. Indeed, then, that defining characteristic, in a context-appropriate and aim-serving (or, per Damasio’s example, balancerestoring) way, may provoke or contribute to private synthesis. Thus, if a neuron of mine has “a skill” to respond to some range of stimuli, including signals from, physical prehensions of, other neurons in a neuronal group, then a relevant stimulus may be felt somehow as in the range and that recognitional feeling counts as and is a conceptual feeling which, within the context of mutual sensitivity provided by the neuron’s operative subjective aim (excited perhaps synaptically), is driven into integration by the readiness to form a physical purpose, the integration of conceptual and physical prehensions, which in superjection may help drive an action along an actual pathway and contribute to the release of “charges” or “chemical cascades” along signaling pathways that do their part to move actual cell and organism toward the next appropriate action and readinesses. More generally, we may speak in the same fashion of non-neuronal cells with their regulatory networks of proteins that detect, interpret, and respond to


313

changes in their environments, including electrical signals, and the flow of hormones and nutrients. If we are to generalize our notion of experience beyond our own concrete buds of conscious perception, even beyond the buds of actual neurons, then the real potentials for any enduring object are to be understood in terms of its prehendibles and its possible responses to data are influenced by memory, the effects of earlier events. Each enduring neuron has powers and habits, and in each moment of its experience it is an exchange station or locus at which causes are felt and integrated in more complex feelings. Thus, at any level there may be conceptual prehension in the face of prehendible data and for each conceptual prehension there is conceptual valuation at least and physical purpose or there is elimination from feeling, quiescence, and there are gradations in between, and in high-grade organisms the various possibilities may involve propositional feelings and consciousness. Finally, in a more thoroughgoing Edelman- and Whitehead-based neurobiological approximation, neuronal groups might be treated as structured societies of actual neurons, societies of a type that Whitehead may not have contemplated, although non-social nexu ¯ s might be taken for instances of them. I do not pursue such possibilities here. Parting Reassurances As I maintained earlier, in common-sense terms, signals from the world impinge upon sensory receptors, are transformed and relayed to the brain, where data are registered in conceptual terms, and integrated somehow into coherent, projected, three-dimensional scenes, with focuses reflecting our capabilities and momentary aims and interests, and with perceived items almost always matching well with what must “really” be out there. This is how we come to perceive things: the machines and people and trees that we see are not the things as they are “in themselves.” I am not saying that you have to give up believing that we really perceive the things that are there. This cup here and that child there and everything out in my sensory world is experienced as really where and as it seems. When something is really there then we experience its powers in the ways that we do, we are affected by it in the ways that we are. You and I agree: what we perceive is how we experience those real things perceptually. And we agree: we must breathe, eat, drink, do the things we need to do (an experiential monism

314

Chapter 7

need hardly dispute this). But I am and have been saying, among other things, “Every waking moment must be concrescual in nature, and in a stream of experience,” and “Appreciate the clearly and distinctly perceived for what it is, as arising late in concrescence, typically in action and with purpose,” and “Appreciate the structure and function and plasticity of the whole moment of experience, with its connections to the past, the surround, the aimed-at future, and possibility.” I am saying, “Appreciate too the onflow of experiential energy, ceaseless in what we take to be going on neurobiologically and concrescually.” On analysis, experience unfolds in accord with the concrescual approximation and, though I have but pointed toward it, the neurobiological approximation. There lies the basis for a potentially impressive psychoneural synthesis attempted by James and Edelman. But that is on analysis. In the concrete, each experience has physical and mental poles comprising respectively the feelings of causal efficacy, of physical feelings coming in through the actual body and hybrid physical prehensions of our immediate predecessors, and the play of conceptuality and memory in contrastive, integrative, value-suffused concrescence. Here we are beyond James’s psychological understanding of the stream of consciousness, in the reality of life amidst activity-situations, in the stuff of experiential monism. Although Whitehead’s philosophy of organism provides the basis for a coherent monism of pure experience, I have not explicitly defended it in this book, concentrating instead on its application to consciousness and experience. In Whitehead’s monism (and in the concrescual approximation), consciousness is but a characteristic, a wondrously protean yet altogether natural characteristic, of moments enjoyed by high-grade or suitably complex organisms. In that monism, the reality of experience, of concrescence, affords the standard of concreteness. However, even without adopting an experiential monism, if hypothesisforming neurobiologists appreciate the nature of concrescence, their imaginations may be enriched, in accord with Whitehead’s assertion (PR 17) that “philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations.” Further, with the concrescual approximation as a basis for conceptualizing the flow of experience, and with an appreciation of how active-voice-tainted habits of thought can inhibit awareness of that flow,


315

the radical empiricist can draw closer to the stream of consciousness than traditional withdrawals with their dis-connecting abstractions permit. With the aid of Whiteheadian analysis, one can on occasion be gently, nondisturbingly, aware of and within active experience, as if there were no such supervening awareness, can even notice the movement and opening of one’s sensibilities, be attentive to shifts in the vigor of action, the precision of aim, and the tone of feeling, to the lure and upsurge of concepts, to the flow of attention and intentionality. We can experience a diffused attentiveness supervenient upon attention, yet close to the flow of attention. This attentiveness can be live to subject-formation, where the valuative, emotional, associative and imaginative may be in novel, yet chreodreflecting or habit-dominated, dynamic interplay with the physically felt and novel, while barriers of inner and outer are somewhat dissolved, all in an emerging synthesis that brings the many feelings of possibility and actuality already together in process into a new unity of onflowing energy. With such awareness, and appreciation of subject-formation and of the larger flows affecting subject-formation and within which subject-formation is situated, radical empiricists may also, quite apart from any philosophical efforts, be present in the bud, and find possibilities opening beyond the habitual. On occasion, one may notice the movement of attention and sense what moves it, see how desire and habit, memory—valuebearing and ever-changing (recategorical) memory—are entwined and how they move attention in the moment. One may also imagine such movement in another’s life, along that other’s personal historic route. Thus, in effect, the concrescual approximation may help one work on self or relation: it can help get one in contact with memory and desire as they come into play, wedding past and future, in momentary experience. As a consequence, one can appreciate how enabling and constraining, how useful and how limiting, habits can be. The bud itself may then become a zone of creative exploration. There one may, then, prehend the workings of memory in the form of operative, value-bearing, habits, associations and dispositions, and deconcresce them, consequently, perhaps, partaking of new forms of synthesis, involving, perhaps, richer spaces of experience than those fostered by one’s syntax-influenced patterns of conception. So, too, one may intimately appreciate ways in which language influences experience and thought. One will have come, if one wishes, to an entryway into the exploration of actual and possible languages alternative to

316

Chapter 7

active-voice-dominated languages, including ones in which withdrawal is less pronounced, the agentive ego seems less removed from the physical world, and the workings of social and ecological processes in each moment of experience bear greater coordinative influence than in active-voice languages. One may also find oneself, if one wishes, at an entryway into metaphysics. Then one may explore alternative forms of higher-order consciousness as well. One may conceivably arrive at new accesses to breadth, intensity, actuality, authenticity, peace.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. A key to the abbreviations used to cite works will be found on pages xi and xii. 2. In Psychology: The Briefer Course, an abridged and reworked version of The Principles, James titles the corresponding chapter “The Stream of Consciousness.” 3. The last two sentences appear verbatim and the rest nearly so in James 1884. The “sensorial imaginations” can be contemplated without changing, but contemplating itself involves change (J1 480). 4. Further, Hume’s skeptical argument concerning causation relies on withdrawal from raw experience. See the discussion of regularity causation in section 3.2. 5. See, e.g., James 1884: 11; J1 224; Whitehead, SMW 24; PR xiii, 159; R 13 ff. For the most part, the cited remarks deal explicitly with the subject-predicate form of expression. 6. I discuss grammatical voices in section 7.4. Chapter 2 1. When one practices Humean self-observation, one finds nothing but collections of perceptions, can never catch oneself without a perception, can never observe anything but those perceptions and so can find no impression from which the idea of self could be derived (Hume 1737, I.IV.VI). 2. On a few occasions, James’s syntax appears to suggest that a more agentive force operates within the moment than James believed. Here it is thought that is appropriative and elsewhere it is the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention that selects data for emphasis (J1 288), but in both cases he is talking of processes involved in the formation of a thought, and is not referring to an ego controlling the process of bud formation.

318

Notes to pp. 24–50

3. James (J1 371) says: “The central part of the me is the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head; and in the feeling of the body should be included that of the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic activities and sensibilities run.” The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (154) terms a counterpart of this “central part of the me” the ‘proto-self’: “The proto-self is a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions.” The mapping (149–153) is principally of body signals from the internal milieu, viscera, the vestibular and musculoskeletal systems, and temperature, texture and other signals arriving through specialized sensors in the skin. 4. James continues: “Something like it may recur; but to suppose it to recur would be equivalent to the absurd admission that all the states that had intervened between its two appearances had been pure nonentities, and that the organ after their passage was exactly as it was before.” 5. It also means that in the event of time-gaps in consciousness brought on by sleep, fainting, or shock, the later consciousness feels a community of self with its past experience (J1 238 ff.). 6. In Principles, transitive parts—analogized to flights to perchings—lead from one substantive part to another, providing the basis for James’s sensible continuity of thought. However, the succession of one thought, bud or moment of experience by another might be regarded as a different sort of transition—from perching to flight. In Principles, James did not advance to a vantage from which he could discuss this difference in precise and motivated fashion. In 1904 he introduced the term “coconscious transition” to refer to the transition from one moment of experience to its successor. Co-conscious transition may qualify as a form of transitive part, in that it is the inception of movement from one substantive part to another. By employing distinctions later introduced by Whitehead, we will see how to further distinguish these two types of transition. 7. Notice the order reversal in ‘neuropsychological’. 8. The notion of ideational centers invoked here seems to conflate ideation with the operation of nerve centers, as if the physical nerve centers issued a mental command. I regard the apparent conflation as harmless, since James’s intent is plain. See also his talk of the brain as undergoing experience (e.g., J1 499). 9. James would certainly have admitted that the insights arising in this period were “a resultant of [his] experience of the whole world up to that date” (J1 234) at home, in education, and in travel, and reflected his interests in, conversations concerning, and studies of, several matters physiological, psychological, and philosophical. His considerations may have been fueled by relations with his novelist brother Henry; by his participation in the “Metaphysical Club,” a short-lived philosophical discussion group whose members included James’s intellectual companions C. S. Peirce


319

and Chauncey Wright, and O. W. Holmes Jr. (Perry 1948: 127–130; Menand, esp. chapter 9); and by his interest in the effects of intoxicants on experience (J2 284; VRE 307–308)—among a myriad of other factors. His central ideas might be traced to the work of German psychophysicists, and to then-contemporary technological and cultural developments associated with modernity, including the establishment, in the northeastern United States, of the first telegraph, telephone, and electric lighting systems, with attendant metaphors of connectedness and fluidity and the birth of impressionism or painting from within the experience of seeing. The art historian Jonathan Crary provides an extended analysis of the historic, technological, and cultural contexts in which concern with the flow of attention and the stream of consciousness originated. In any case, the ideas of James’s at issue here were no doubt provoked by his participation, starting in late 1882, in the “Scratch Eight,” a London dining and discussion group. Among other prominent intellectual figures of the day, this group included G. C. Robertson, the first editor of the British philosophical journal Mind; Shadworth Hodgson, a now-unread philosopher whose thought, like that of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, James often draws on or takes over; and Leslie Stephen, critic, author of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, and father of Virginia Woolf (Perry 1948: 155 ff.). However, I am not engaged in anything like Jamesian biographical scholarship or a study in the history of ideas, and forthwith return my attention to showing how James characterized consciousness 20 years later. Chapter 3 1. In a discussion of Franz Brentano, the first modern philosopher to discuss intentionality, James (J2 287) talks of the “psychic attitude in which our mind stands toward the proposition.” 2. However, the full mental states in which such anxiety or elation figures may include bodily awareness, and perceptions or other intentional components. For my purposes in elaborating an intentionality-based account of experience, all conscious states are taken to have intentional components, and are construed as intentional states, so that if the stream of consciousness is a stream of conscious states, it is also a stream of intentional states. 3. I don’t know whether Searle states anywhere that the background is memory, but he does say the following (RM 187–188): “We think of memory as a storehouse of propositions and images. . . . But we should think of memory rather as a mechanism for generating current performance, including conscious thoughts and actions based on past experience. The thesis of the background has to be rewritten to get rid of the presupposition of the mind as a collection, an inventory, of mental phenomena, because the only occurrent reality of the mental as mental is consciousness. . . . What goes on in the brain, other than consciousness, has an occurrent reality that is neurophysiological rather than psychological. When we speak of unconscious

320


states, we are speaking of the capacities of the brain to generate consciousness.” Note that for Edelman (BA 102) “whatever form it takes, memory is the ability to repeat a performance.” 4. Searle thinks the relevant brain structures might bear useful analogy with parallel distributed processing or “connectionist models [which] show how a system might convert a meaningful input into a meaningful output without any rules, principles, inferences, or other sorts of meaningful processes in between” (RM 246; CSR 140–141). Concerning such models, see Rumelhart and, e.g., Skarda. 5. See Wittgenstein, e.g., paragraphs 7, 19, 23, 65 ff., 199; CSR 132. 6. In the intentional approximation, social grouping is involved in any coordinated activity: trivial though the point appear, to be walking together is to count the other’s walking as a walking together with one rather than merely alongside oneself. At any rate, although we may look to James’s notions of social selves and social habits to ground a Jamesian counterpart to collective intentionality, we might also look among philosophers following on courses James first explored, and especially to the work of Mead (173 ff.), whose concern with the nature of the social self, and with its I and me components, traces back to James (Odin 1996: 22). Mead’s (154) notion of the generalized other—“the organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self”—stands out as a counterpart. Taking a ball team as an example of a social group, Mead (154, 155) says the team “is the generalized other in so far as it enters—as an organized process or social activity—into the experience of any one of the individual members of it.” Further, “it is in the form of the generalized other that the social process influences the behavior of the individuals involved in it and carrying it on, . . . . that the social process or community enters as a determining factor into the individual’s thinking.” Sometimes we consciously take on the attitude of another, sometimes we receive explicit instruction, but what goes on in learning our way around in a world is often more like incorporating, through play, imitation, and the like, the attitudes of others insofar as they are members of a group for whose members the ways in question are in accord with or flow from the relevant constitutive rules. To the extent that this claim can be sustained, the generalized other can be recast in terms of the informal system of rules underlying membership in Mead’s social groups. 7. Cf. Iy 132; R. Pred, chapter 3. 8. This account of actions involving bodily movement can be extended to mental actions. A typical intention in mental action might be displayed as follows: that there be an event of my remembering or imagining some state of affairs and this intention in mental action causes that event (Iy 103). 9. See James (J2 490) on the “absolute need of guiding sensations” for successful action involving movement, a passage cited by Searle (Iy 89).


321

10. A fully expressed account of this view, and of its conjunction with Jamesian empiricism, appears in R. Pred, chapter 5. 11. As James had it (J2 175), “the main function of the peripheral regions of our retina is that of sentinels, which when beams of light move over them, cry ‘Who goes there?’ and call the fovea to the spot.” 12. Often the balance between trains of experience is so even and well-coordinated that talk of core and periphery is misleading: two or more highly operative intentions may be in dynamic balance—as when one is driving a car and analyzing, reworking, a recent event or a news story; or showering and mentally preparing for a meeting; or knitting and watching television; or cutting vegetables and conversing—so that the flows in one activity are affected and modulated by those in the other, and there may be a pause in one action without a break in the other action. The actions then are bundled together, “multi-tasked,” with parallel pathways of performance unfolding in harmony (as if signals from distinct neural pathways were multiplexed), one superimposed on the other, so that between the start of relevant intentional movement and perception in one action-sequence there may occur buds that may be treated as irrelevant to that action but not to the other. Nevertheless, secondary or peripheral substantive parts may safely be said to terminate buds, but typically without substantially disrupting the intentionally central activity. Chapter 4 1. Whitehead (S 55): “So far as concerns the causal efficacy of the world external to the human body, there is the most insistent perception of a circumambient efficacious world of beings.” 2. For more on perception in the mode of causal efficacy (and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy), see section 6.1 below; S, chapter 2; PR 168ff. For Whitehead (PR 172), “presentational immediacy is an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy. But . . . what was vague, ill defined, and hardly relevant in causal efficacy, becomes distinct, well defined, and importantly relevant in presentational immediacy.” 3. However, while such occlusion is going on, “the inhibition of irrelevant movements and ideas” may also be proceeding as an “incidental to voluntary attention” (J1 445); such inhibition may be regarded as an aspect of the effort associated with the experience of acting/focusing. 4. Given the distinction between active and responsive acts of perception touched on here, we can imagine that James was indicating just such a distinction when saying that one’s acquaintance with reality “grows literally by buds or drops of perception” (SPP 155). Buds would be the outcome of internal growth or biological process, drops would be more in the way of mere response to physical conditions. Nonetheless, I use ‘buds’ to apply to both active and passive formations.

322


5. Cf. Anscombe (15) on jumping back from a crocodile’s “leap and loud bark.” 6. For a related use of ‘now’ in Searle, see Iy 108–109 with Iy 83. 7. This treatment obviously applies to desires as well, and it does to beliefs too, if we regard a belief as capable of affecting the propensity to have or generate thoughts, beliefs, and intentions that accord with that belief. 8. In The Strategy of the Genes, the geneticist C. H. Waddington introduced the term ‘chreod’ to refer to canalized, developmental pathways operating in epigenesis, in which developmental events depend on the activities of a large number of genes. For Waddington, whose original conception was “reinforced by Whiteheadian principles” (1977: 143), a chreod (1957: 32) represents, e.g. by a trajectory in phase space, a temporal succession of states or a pathway of change in which, after disturbance, the system tends to return to the pathway and to continue to converge on an endpoint. In stages of embryonic development, tissues can develop in one or another of several different directions, and the whole system of chreods (potential pathways of development) in a complex developing system, say an egg, thus gives rise to an epigenetic landscape (of possible pathways) through which tissue can develop (1957: 30 ff.; 1977). Piaget (13 ff.) applied Waddington’s notion of chreods to cognitive development; Thom (114–119, 321) applied it more broadly, even talking (316) of “concepts [as] systematically excited chreods.” Kauffman (448), crediting Waddington, defines “a canalizing function as any Boolean function having the property that at least one of the regulating variables has one value which alone suffices to guarantee one state of the regulated locus.” Thus, the subordinate sensible markers of Jamesian habitual action may be recast as values of such regulating variables, so that any sensory consequent anticipated momentarily within what I term an unfolding chreod “guarantees” a consequent action. In keeping with Waddington’s original formulation, a dynamical systems theorist might regard a chreod in terms of canalizing functions supporting movement toward an attractor in a suitable mathematical space, so that, by analogy, when your experience is comprehensible in terms of an unfolding chreod, your experience may be modeled as if it were governed by, or unfolded inside, the attractor’s dynamic function (cf. Kauffman, chapter 5 and p. 442). Organic behavior may thus be approximated in some detail using mathematical tools—e.g., catastrophe theory (Thom) or chaos or complexity theory (Kauffman, W. Freeman, Skarda). James (ERE 69) put it this way: “We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path. It is as if a differential quotient should be conscious and treat itself as an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve. Our experience . . . is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey’s end.” 9. The schemata and capacities may be likened to Bourdieu’s habitus. Bourdieu (53) says, “The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures


323

predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. It is, of course, never ruled out that the responses of the habitus may be accompanied by a strategic calculation tending to perform in a conscious mode the operation that the habitus performs quite differently. . . . The practical world that is constituted in the relationship with the habitus, acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of already realized ends—procedures to follow, paths to take—and of objects endowed with a ‘permanent teleological character,’ in Husserl’s phrase, tools or institutions.” Searle (CSR 132) likens the background to Bourdieu’s habitus. 10. It also depends on what is there for us in those moments in terms of social relations and setting, the distinctions we have mastered and our discursive capabilities and other habits of thought. Thus, what we can do depends on the immediate situation and is also a reflection and measure of who we are—our capacities and dispositions, our social selves and our positions in different social groups, the discourses in which we are competent or with which we are concerned, and, incidentally, all of these often bear evident marks, idiosyncrasies, and biases accrued in personal histories. Chapter 5 1. Physical and conceptual feelings are discussed at some length in section 5.3. 2. Whitehead (AI 243; cf. PR 188) effectively notes that the intention to affect the auditor is a central factor in speaking, in what Searle later dubbed “speech acts”: “No verbal sentence [utterance] merely enunciates a proposition. It always includes some incitement for the production of an assigned psychological attitude in the prehension of the proposition indicated. In other words, it endeavors to fix the subjective form which clothes the feeling of the proposition as a datum. There may be an incitement to believe, or to doubt, or to enjoy, or to obey.” Having cited the intentional aspect of speech action, Whitehead goes some way to indicate its conventional aspects: “This incitement is conveyed partly by the grammatical mood and tense of the verb, partly by the whole suggestion of the sentence. . . .” For Searle on illocutionary force indicators, see SA 30 ff. 3. Whitehead’s use of ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ may have been given some license by James’s uses of the terms (AI 231). James specifically prefers ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ to other terms that might serve to “designate all states of consciousness merely as such” (J1 185–186), and proposed an influential account of how emotions arise in and affect experience (J2, chapter XXV). Recently, some neurobiologists interested

324


in developing accounts of consciousness have given a prime place to emotions as “complex, stereotyped patterns of response” that are often publicly observable, and have treated our subjective experiences of emotions as feelings (Damasio 55, 42; cf. LeDoux 329 and Cairns-Smith 154, 188). Damasio gave his 1999 study of consciousness, The Feeling of What Happens, the subtitle Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Edelman, speaking of his own biological theory of consciousness, says that “value systems and emotions are essential to the selectional workings of the brain that underlie consciousness” (UC 218; cf. 91). 4. Throughout, I use ‘subject-formation’ to refer to satisfaction-formation, subjective aim-determination, and subject-superject-formation, indiscriminately, except where I think that doing so would be misleading; I do not use this term to refer to extended processes of character-formation or personality-formation. 5. Many books on Whitehead (e.g. Nobo; Lango; Kline) don’t even mention James; others (e.g. Jones; Kraus; Sherburne 1966) give him only brief mention. 6. The curve of an emotion also tends to limit “the possibilities of initial subjective form available for the initial feelings” (PR 244) of buds in its thrall: generally, one does not go directly, without intermediary buds, from anger to delight, or from intense engagement in action to full-blown theorizing. 7. Whitehead makes a variety of related claims (AI 184, 234–237; SMW 73; PR 112; FR 26). 8. The brief preface to the second edition was dated at Cambridge, England, August 1924, and thus very shortly before Whitehead embarked on August 16 (Lowe 1990: 136) for North America, where he wrote his process-based metaphysical works. 9. I think it a plausible conjecture that Gertrude Stein, who knew both James and Whitehead fairly well, was a significant transmitter of Jamesian influence to Whitehead. First, she was a valued graduate student of James’s (Allen 373–374, Stein 73 ff.), and she developed a stream-of-consciousness writing style evidently indebted to James, who had encouraged her on a course of “automatic writing” (Allen 374; Solomons). Second, she held Whitehead in great esteem, including him with Picasso and herself as the only “first-class geniuses” she had known (Stein 5). Third, she stayed with the Whiteheads for six weeks in the summer of 1914 (Lowe 1990: 29–31), spending extended portions of many days with the man, walking and talking: “The long summer wore on. It was beautiful weather and beautiful country, and Doctor Whitehead and Gertrude Stein never ceased wandering around in it and talking about all things” (Stein 145; cf. Simon 93). I find it easy to imagine Stein and Whitehead talking at some length on, playing with, employing, returning to, such Jamesian themes as the stream of consciousness, pure experience, and radical empiricism. 10. Whitehead did not claim to have elaborated a minimum set of categories under the four main headings; in some cases, one category can be seen as an application or instance of another (see, e.g., PR 228, 250).


325

11. For generally accessible introductions to Whitehead’s categoreal scheme and metaphysics, see Sherburne’s Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality and Kraus’s Metaphysics of Experience. 12. For Whitehead on solidarity, see PR, especially 7, 40, 56, 164. 13. Whitehead’s notion that an actual entity has a perfectly definite bond with each item in the universe is philosophical but it has counterparts in physics, namely, in field theories and in versions of quantum theory (e.g. Bohm; Cairns-Smith, chapter 7; Lucas, chapter X). It also has counterparts in several religious and spiritual traditions; see, e.g., Odin (1982: 71) on Indra’s Net and other metaphors relied on in Hua-Yen Buddhism. 14. Eternal objects and concepts are in the nature of Locke’s general terms, separated from “circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence” (Locke III, III, 6). In their singularity and individuality, events are beyond the reach of concepts, which enable us to recognize factors as the same in different settings: “It is impossible to recognize an event, because an event is essentially distinct from every other event.” (CN 143) 15. In human experience, eternal objects ingressing in the first mode include all the intersubjective observables. More generally, these eternal objects function as factors in objectifications by actual entities, and include all the sensa and relational patterns that can contribute definiteness to the character of an actual entity or nexus as objectified by an actual entity prehending it. 16. On occasion, Whitehead used ‘concept’ in this way; see, e.g., RIM 113–114, IS 242, PR 55. 17. Whitehead introduces the notion of society not as a part of the categoreal scheme but as a notion “derivative” from it (PR 34). 18. Whitehead admits that the third category can be seen as an application of the second (PR 228). The third category requires that a complex objective datum “provide for each of its components a real diversity of status” (227), and “a ‘status’ is after all something; and, according to the Category of Objective Identity, it cannot duplicate its role” (228). 19. Adversion—valuation up—may arise from fear or other “negative” emotion, as well as from desire and other “positive” feelings. Also, for the notion of valuation up or down, see J1 302: “It is as if all that visited the mind had to . . . just show its face so as to be either approved or sent back. These primary reactions are . . . turnings-towards and turnings-from,” and S 45, where Whitehead talks of “the primitive functioning of ‘retreat from’ and ‘expansion towards’ [as] . . . reactions to the way externality is impressing on us its own character.”

326


20. Recall James’s “law of habit in the nervous system, working . . . in the ‘association of ideas’” to cause retention, recollection, and “reproductive” or newly “productive” imagination. (J1 653; J2 44). 21. Whitehead does call the phase of conformal feeling “individualizing” (PR 115), as it would be by virtue of uniqueness of extensive standpoint alone, but he does not call it “originative.” 22. As James has it: “. . . even though there be a mental spontaneity. . . . Its power is limited to selecting amongst those [ideas] which the associative machinery has already introduced or tends to introduce.” Those ideas may be regarded as being proximately relevant, and as included in the lure for feeling; if a mental operation does “emphasize, reinforce, or protract” any of them, it “then decides the direction of the next associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized term” (J1 594). 23. James’s “what-we-attend-to is what-interests-us” (J2 559) is the ultimate formulation linking attention and value. For him (J1 403–404), attention “is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” Whitehead details how such withdrawal transpires. 24. A Jamesian counterpart (J2 563): “When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us the tendency is for no images but such as are congruous with it to come up.” 25. Several commentators, including Hartshorne (20), Hall (102 ff.), Lowe (1962: 319 ff.) and Neville (247 ff.), have urged Whiteheadians to adopt a less realist or Platonic approach. 26. For more extended discussion of the superjective nature of God, see Nobo 186–190; see also Kraus 57; Sherburne 1966: 227. In Whitehead’s philosophy, God and the temporal actual entities are engaged in a dynamic embrace that Whitehead portrayed in some detail. Whitehead’s conception interweaves the primordial nature of God, as envisaging the field of potentiality in its relevance to creativity, with the origin and realization of value in temporal concrescences, and entwines the consequent nature of God with the temporal concrescences, taken up into, objectified, and rendered “everlasting” in that consequent nature, so that the interdependencies of God and world obtain in every bud. Whitehead’s feat of conceptual imagination and analysis introduces a conception of God that has been taken up in “process theology”—see Neville’s foreword to Kraus. 27. Cf. Griffin 204; Lucas 161 ff.; Neville 247–248, 203. See also Odin 1982: 170. 28. For Whitehead, divine purposiveness stems from God’s subjective aim at maximizing his satisfaction by providing lures to the realization of satisfactions increasing order and complexity in the world: “The primordial appetitions which jointly


327

constitute God’s purpose are seeking intensity, and not preservation. . . . His aim for it [an immediate occasion] is depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfillment of his own being. . . . Thus God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities” and subsidiarily to this end the evocation of societies, which provide backgrounds of social order permitting the development of organisms capable of experiencing more or less complex, harmonizing contrasts and intense satisfactions in actual occasions along those organisms’ historic routes (PR 105; cf. 249). Chapter 6 1. For a Whiteheadian critique of dualism and of recent attempts to provide materialistic resolutions to the mind-body problem, see chapter 1 of Griffin; for Searle’s criticisms of orthodox materialism and forms of Cartesian dualism, see RM, especially chapters 1 and 2. 2. Actual neurons are treated in section 7.8. 3. The concrescual approximation also recognizes hybrid physical prehensions as causal feelings, so that co-conscious transition or superjection carries forward with the impetus of causal efficacy the newly formed subjective aim of one bud into its sequel in accord with categoreal obligation viii, the category of subjective intensity. We do not construct our world and form our complex feelings from scratch in each bud. Buds start with both simple and hybrid physical prehensions. The notion of hybrid physical prehensions is essential for understanding the stream and efficacy of consciousness. 4. For counterpart Jamesian accounts of the move from causal efficacy to presentational immediacy, see J2 181 ff. 5. For Whitehead, the mental operations involved in the constitution of an actual entity “achieve, in the immediate subject, the subjective aim of that subject as to the satisfaction to be obtained from its own initial data” (PR 277, 85), with those initial data corresponding to “the qualities and coordinations of the given physical world” and the concluding appearance to the objective datum of the satisfaction. 6. Cf. Whitehead (S 46): “In practice we never doubt the fact of the conformation of the present to the immediate past. It belongs to the ultimate texture of experience, with the same evidence as does presentational immediacy. The present fact is luminously the outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago.” 7. The “presented locus” is the experient’s contemporary surround as “perceived in the mode of presentational immediacy, with its regions defined by sensa” (PR 126). 8. “The geometrical interest which dominates the growth of a strain lifts into importance the complete lines, planes, and three-dimensional flats, which are defined by the seat [read: experient’s standpoint] of the strain” (PR 310). Strain feelings—

328


including field-organizing feelings of geometrical direction of fixed-on nexu ¯ s (including, say, a stone in a pathway) that figure in perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy—are integrable with inherited strain feelings and feelings of bodily efficacy or “bodily strain feelings” (313). Consequently, in the supplemental or autonomous phase of concrescence, under the influence of an operative subjective aim, the relevance of some sensum—say, gray—may be heightened and coordinated with “the geometrical relationships of the past by picking out the contemporary region of the stone to be the contemporary representative of the efficacious historic routes” (172), and the stone may be sidestepped, kicked, or picked up. Thus, as we move we may experience successive fixes on a stone (Sherburne 1961: 85) or on any visible object, as sensory and motoric strains are mapped and function together in unified experience, and as an object is incorporated in action. In effect then, Whitehead’s strain feelings help secure the coordination of sensory with kinesthetic and other bodily feelings in anticipation-involving embodied action. In the concrescual approximation, the concept of strain feelings thus affords another opportunity for action-oriented application of Whiteheadian notions. 9. For a Jamesian account of the feeling of distance between seat, here, and focal region, there, see J2 195 ff. 10. In Elizabeth Kraus’s relevant characterization (118): “The conceptual feelings arising from the initial physical feelings adjust the importance of the physical feelings for the concrescence, valuing them up or down. If they are valued up and transmuted into a physical feeling of a nexus, the subjective form of the feeling is intensified as adversion. If valued down, the transmuted feeling is either attenuated or eliminated from the concrescence with a subjective form of aversion.” 11. Bergson himself says the following (139): “A nervous chain . . . marks a welldefined track between one point of the periphery and another, the one sensory, the other motor. It has therefore canalized an activity.” Such canalization extends to simple acts of seeing: “The vision of a living being is an effective vision, limited to objects on which the being can act. It is a vision that is canalized” (104). For Bergson (107–108), “the visible outlines of bodies are the design of our eventual action on them.” 12. “The logical subjects,” Whitehead remarks (PR 263), “have preserved their indicated particularity, but have lost their own real modes of objectification.” 13. In regard to Whitehead’s influence on the conception of the notion of chreods, see Waddington 1977. 14. Likewise, “I believe b” and “I want w” may be taken to hold over extended periods of time even as beliefs and wants wax and wane, become modified, enriched, or refined. 15. For example, when I am driving a car, the car is part of a different landscape for my action than is the same car when I’m riding in it and talking with the driver.


329

16. For perception in the course of action, readinesses to respond are lowerings of thresholds for perception and for action. In effect, one is pre-prepared to transmute stimuli into quality-recognition and nexus-recognition, and for object-recognition. One is likewise pre-prepared for appropriate action. 17. A personal society’s defining characteristic is largely a matter of biological and cultural and socialized personal memories in various forms, nested in “a social background, of which it [the personal society] is itself a part. In reference to any given society the world of actual entities is to be conceived as forming a background in layers of social order, the defining characteristics becoming wider and more general as we widen the background” (PR 90). Physical laws then are in the nature of statistical laws characterizing the habits of relevant societies. Laws of nature then are not imposed on the ultimate constituents of nature but rather are propagated and sustained by members of the societies habitually generating and upholding the applicable statistical laws: “. . . the characters of the relevant things in nature are the outcome of their interconnections, and their interconnections are the outcome of their characters” (AI 113; cf. J1 104). Whitehead uses the phrase “a special cosmic epoch” to “mean that widest society of actual entities whose immediate relevance to ourselves is traceable. This epoch is characterized by electronic and protonic actual entities, and by yet more ultimate actual entities that can be dimly discerned in the quanta of energy. Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field hold sway by reason of the throngs of electrons and of protons” (PR 91). The laws of nature then may change from epoch to epoch, but the categoreal obligations, the categoreal scheme, the ultimate onflow of experiential energy may not, since they provide perhaps inviolable constraints on the shape of concrescence. Incidentally, what goes for the development of physical laws goes for human social formations as well, though those formations be considerably more changeable. Chapter 7 1. For the succession or consecution of global mappings, see RP 205, 246. 2. Edelman (UC 188) adds: “Recent evidence indicates that the neural selection leading to the functional insulation of dedicated loops and circuits occurs through the reinforcement of basal ganglia circuits brought about by the firing of value systems, especially the so-called dopaminergic system (named after the neuromodulator dopamine that it releases).” 3. Compare The Rediscovery of the Mind, where Searle sees memory as “a mechanism for generating current performance, including conscious thoughts and actions, based on past experience” (RM 187). I term each mechanism for the generation of a type of performance a chreod. 4. Although Edelman, unlike Whitehead, reserves the designation ‘conceptual’ for categorizations closer to consciousness than are perceptual categorizations, the very

330


notion of categorization operative in perceptual categorization may be read as conceptual in the Whiteheadian sense of involving the prehending of factors contributing to the definiteness of a perceived entity. 5. Cf. note 3 to chapter 2 above. 6. Damasio (338, 349) explicitly distinguishes his concepts of consciousness and self from Edelman’s. 7. Such spatiotemporal ordering is based on “the categorization of smooth movements and the development of short-term memory” (RP 245). 8. For Edelman, “higher-order consciousness involves the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts and affections. It embodies a model of the personal, and of the past and future as well as the present” (BA 112). 9. For Edelman, qualia are the phenomenal properties of consciousness, and may be described “in third-person terms, . . . in terms of a variety of property correlations— discriminability, modality, intensity, continuity, temporal and spatial properties, and so on” (RP 24; 20–21). For Edelman, as for James, each thought is private, subjective: “the subjective, qualitative aspects of consciousness, being private, cannot be communicated directly through a scientific theory that, by its nature, is public and intersubjective.” Edelman terms this the “qualia assumption.” He does not think that it means that necessary and sufficient conditions of consciousness are not to be described, just that any such description differs from the experiencing of consciousness (UC 15). 10. Cf. Nietzsche 1887: 179: “For all its detachment and freedom from emotion, our science is still the dupe of linguistic habits; it has never yet got rid of those changelings called ‘subjects.’” 11. As an example of hypotaxis, Havelock (1986: 108), drawing on a late classical text, offers this: “There where your mother had laid you down from her mighty lap, straightway she sought a stream of water, wherewith she might. . . .” He contrasts it with an alternative that avoids “the subordinate clause, saying instead, paratactically, ‘she laid you down and sought a stream. . . .’” 12. For a ground-breaking book-length study of oral composition in the work of Homer, “a singer of tales,” see Lord. 13. When Plato accounts for the difference between knowledge and perception (or sensation) in the Theaetetus (184B-187A), he distinguishes “perceiving through” from “perceiving with” the senses. He takes the ability to perceive through the senses to be characteristic of beings with minds. The mind looks through the eye. For us, the use of the verb “look” normally signals the working of an intention. We actively look for a desired object and when we see the object, the looking for is finished although we may certainly look at the object as something that interests us. In looking for and looking at, we experience intentions in action as the directing of attention through the eyes.


331

14. Principal sources for these claims are Snell (chapters 9 and 10), Webster, and Havelock 1986 (chapters 9 and 10). 15. Works explicitly supporting these claims include Rostovtzeff, Kerferd, Cole, Finley, Keuls, Adcock, Feyerabend (esp. chapter 17), McLuhan, and, of course, Nietzsche. Other especially relevant trends are detailed in articles by Kurt von Fritz. 16. Active and passive are the only well-developed voices in modern English. In the spirit of generative or transformational grammar (e.g., Chomsky), we may think of the middle-voice verb as being first in “deep” structure, and the relation of subject to verb as emerging into active-voice clarity in surface structure as a result of “subjectraising.” Active-voice-based metaphysics may then be seen as “surficial” and process philosophy as deep. 17. For useful discussions of middle voice see Benveniste (chapters 14 and 6) and Barber. Also, see Lyons, 371 ff. 18. See F. M. Cornford’s treatment of the shift from a pre-Euclidean to a Euclidean conception of space. For an account that can be read as dovetailing with Cornford’s, see Heidegger, who maintains (54) that “the Greeks had no word for ‘space.’ This is no accident; for they experienced the spatial on the basis not of extension but of place (topos); they experienced it as cho¯ra, which signifies neither place nor space but that which is occupied by what stands there. The place belongs to the thing itself.” 19. Whorf (150) proposes that “the Hopi thought-world has no imaginary space. The corollary to this is that it may not locate thought dealing with real space anywhere but in real space, nor insulate real space from the effects of thought. A Hopi would naturally suppose that his thought (or he himself) traffics with the actual rosebush—or more likely, corn plant—that he is thinking about.” 20. The extent to which Edelman thought that “the subsequent explosive emergence of human populations over the whole globe” was directly associated with the linguistic abilities of hunter-gatherers or was mediated by later linguistic developments is unclear to me. At any rate, Whitehead (AI 109-110) associated “the arrival of a stage of high grade reflection upon the course of events” with the introduction of agriculture. Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist, has worked on questions concerning how social, economic and demographic processes might be correlated with changes in language. For his arguments linking the spread of Indo-European languages throughout Europe with the spread of a farming economy involving the cultivation of wheat and barley and the herding of livestock, see Renfrew, esp. chapter 7. He traces the spread of this farm economy in Europe back to Greece in around 6500 BCE, well before the advent of alphabetic writing and the active-voice withdrawal. For speculation on differences between life in hunter-gathering societies and in agricultural societies and on the impacts of agriculture on Western experience, perception, and thought, see Shepard, chapters 6 and 7.

332


21. A major instance of the higher specialization of that grammar may be tied to the replacement of Latin as the language of scholarship and science by less inflected, more active-voice-dominated European national languages. 22. One could as well name an Edelman-based approximation “the neurobiological approximation” and an approach combining that with the concrescual approximation, say, “the concrescuo-neurobiological approximation,” but I have chosen not to, because I have not elaborated a separate Edelman-based approximation, and because I prefer relative simplicity of expression. 23. The term “time steps” evidences Edelman’s understandable inclination to characterize consciousness and experience as a scientist and observer, rather than as an experient, for whom the series is one of lived buds. 24. Compare Whitehead’s reference to “each creature [as] including in itself the whole of history” (PR 228). 25. Recategorical memory can accordingly be associated with what Whitehead termed “personal identity”—“a natural matrix for all transitions of life . . . changed and variously figured by the things that enter it” (AI 187)—and so with the me functioning in moments of the I-me dialectic. 26. On the “binding problem,” see Crick 208 ff. and MC 33–34. 27. This categorization is the counterpart in Edelman of the formation of a propositional feeling, as I indicate in section 7.6. 28. Edelman holds to a third assumption, acceptable to James (cf. J2 626 ff.): “that consciousness is a phenotypic property that arose during evolution (the evolutionary assumption).” This, he continues, “implies that the acquisition of consciousness by certain species either conferred fitness directly or provided the basis for other traits that enhanced fitness” (RP 20).

Works Cited

Adcock, F. E. 1957. The Greek and Macedonian Art of War. University of California Press. Allen, Gay W. 1967. William James: A Biography. Viking. Anderson, Walter Truett. 1998. The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person. Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam. Anscombe, Elizabeth, and Peter T. Geach, eds. 1954. Descartes: Philosophical Writings. Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Anscombe, Gertrude E. M. 1957. Intention. Blackwell. Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon. Random House, 1941. Barber, E. J. W. 1975. “Voice—Beyond the Passive.” In Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society. Benveniste, Emile. 1958. Problems in General Linguistics. University of Miami Press, 1971. Berkeley, George. 1710. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Bohm, David. 1981. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press, 1990. Cairns-Smith, Alexander G. 1996. Evolving the Mind: On the Nature Of Matter and the Origin of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press. Chalmers, David J. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press. Cherniak, Christopher. 1986. Minimal Rationality. MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.

334

Works Cited

Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin, eds. 1977. Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy. University Press of America. Cole, Thomas. 1991. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. Johns Hopkins University Press. Cornford, Francis M. “The Invention of Space.” In Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray, ed. H. Fisher et al. Allen & Unwin, 1936. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. MIT Press. Crick, Francis. 1995. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Touchstone Books. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt, Brace. Danto, Arthur C. 1965. “Basic Actions.” American Philosophical Quarterly 2: 141–148. Also in White. Davidson, Donald. 1967. “Causal Relations.” Journal of Philosophy 64: 691–703. Davidson, Donald. 1974. “Psychology as Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Mind, ed. J. Glover. Oxford University Press, 1976. Dennett, Daniel C. 1978. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Bradford Books. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown. Descartes, René. 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Descartes: Philosophical Writings, ed. E. Anscombe and P. Geach. Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Descartes, René. 1644. The Principles of Philosophy. In The Philosophical Works of Descartes, volume 1, ed. E. Haldane and G. Ross. Cambridge University Press, 1911. Dewey, John. 1896. “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.” Psychological Review 3: 357–370. Edelman, Gerald M. 1987. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M. 1988. Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology. Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M. 1989. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. Basic Books.

Works Cited

335

Edelman, Gerald M., and Giulio Tononi. 2000. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Basic Books. Edie, James. 1987. William James and Phenomenology. Indiana University Press. Ellmann, Richard. 1959. James Joyce. Oxford University Press. Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method. Verso, 1978. Finley, John H., Jr. 1966. Four Stages of Greek Thought. Stanford University Press. Fisher, H. A. L., et al. 1936. Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray. Allen & Unwin. Freeman, Kathleen. 1978. Ancilla to The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Harvard University Press. Freeman, Walter J. 1995. Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate. Erlbaum. Fritz, Kurt von. 1943. “Noos and Noein in the Homeric Poems.” Classical Philology 38: 79–93. Fritz, Kurt von. 1945, 1946, “Noos and Noein, and Their Derivatives in Pre-Socratic Philosophy (excluding Anaxagoras).” Classical Philology 40: 223–242; 41: 12–34. Also in The Pre-Socratics, ed. A. Mourelatos. Doubleday Anchor, 1974. Glover, Jonathan, ed. 1976. The Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press. Goldman, Alvin I. 1970. A Theory of Human Action. Princeton University Press. Griffin, David Ray. 1998. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. University of California Press. Haldane, Elizabeth S., and G. R. T. Ross. 1911. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Cambridge University Press. Hall, Everett W. 1930. “Of What Use Are Whitehead’s Eternal Objects?” Journal of Philosophy 27: 29–44. Also in Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. G. Kline. Prentice-Hall, 1963. Hampshire, Stuart. 1967. Thought and Action. Viking. Hartshorne, Charles. 1963. “Whitehead’s Novel Intuition.” In Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. G. Kline. Prentice-Hall. Havelock, Eric. 1963. Preface to Plato. Harvard University Press. Havelock, Eric. 1986. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. Yale University Press. Hebb, Donald O. 1949. The Organization of Behavior. Wiley. Heidegger, Martin. 1960. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953). Harper.

336

Works Cited

Heidel, W. A. 1906. “Qualitative Change in Pre-Socratic Philosophy.” Excerpted from Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. In The Pre-Socratics, ed. A. Mourelatos. Doubleday Anchor, 1974. Homer. 1974. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Doubleday Anchor. Hume, David. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. Selby-Bigge. Oxford University Press, 1888. Hume, David. 1748. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Liberal Arts, 1955. Husserl, Edmund. 1906. “Persönliche Aufzeuchnungen.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 16 (1956): 293–302. James, William. 1884. “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology.” Mind 33: 1–26. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. Dover, 1950. James, William. 1892. Psychology: the Briefer Course. Harper & Row, 1962. James, William. 1896. The Will to Believe. Dover, 1956. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harvard University Press, 1960. James, William. 1907. Pragmatism. Dover, 1995. James, William. 1909. The Meaning of Truth. University of Michigan Press, 1970. James, William. 1911. A Pluralistic Universe. Peter Smith, 1967. James, William. 1911. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. University of Nebraska Press 1996. James, William. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Peter Smith, 1967. Jones, Judith A. 1998. Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology. Vanderbilt University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781. Critique of Pure Reason. St. Martin’s, 1965. Kerford, G. B. 1981. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge University Press. Keuls, Eva C. 1985. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. Harper & Row. Kim, Jaegwon. 1993. Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press. Kirk, G. S., and J. E. Raven. 1964. The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge University Press.

Works Cited

337

Kline, George L., ed. 1963. Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy. PrenticeHall. Kraus, Elizabeth M. 1979. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Fordham University Press, 1998. Lango, John W. 1972. Whitehead’s Ontology. State University of New York Press. LeDoux, Joseph. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster. Locke, John. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Dover, 1959. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Harvard University Press. Lowe, Victor. 1941a. “William James and Whitehead’s Doctrine of Prehensions.” Journal of Philosophy 38: 113–126. Lowe, Victor. 1941b. “The Development of Whitehead’s Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. P. Schilpp. Tudor. Lowe, Victor. 1962. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins University Press. Lowe, Victor. 1985, 1990. Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work. Johns Hopkins University Press. Lucas, George R. 1989. The Rehabilitation of Whitehead: An Analytic and Historical Assessment of Process Philosophy. State University of New York Press. Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. McKeon, Richard, ed. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Random House. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. University of Toronto Press. Mead, George H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. University of Chicago Press, 1967. Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Minsky, Marvin. 1985. The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster. Mourelatos, Alexander P. D., ed. 1974. The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays. Doubleday Anchor. Nagel, Thomas. 1993. “The Mind Wins!” New York Review of Books, March 4: 37–41. Neville, Robert C. 1981. Reconstruction of Thinking. State University of New York Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1870–71, 1887. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Doubleday, 1956.

338

Works Cited

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Vintage, 1966. Nobo, Jorge Luis. 1986. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. State University of New York Press. Notopoulos, James A. 1949. “Parataxis in Homer: A New Approach to Homeric Literary Criticism.” Transactions and Proceedings of The American Philological Association 80: 1–23. Odin, Steve. 1982. Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration. State University of New York Press. Odin, Steve. 1996. The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism. State University of New York Press. Penfield, Wilder. 1975. The Mystery of the Mind. Princeton University Press. Perry, Ben E. 1937. “The Early Greek Capacity for Viewing Things Separately.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 68: 403–427. Perry, Ralph B. 1935. The Thought and Character of William James. Little, Brown. Perry, Ralph B. 1948. The Thought and Character of William James. Vanderbilt University Press, 1996. Piaget, Jean. 1967. Biology and Knowledge: An Essay on the Relations between Organic Regulations and Cognitive Processes. University of Chicago Press, 1971. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including The Letters, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Pantheon, 1961. Pred, Allan. 2000. Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination. University of California Press. Pred, Ralph. 1983. Introduction to a Theory of Intentional Processes. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. University Microfilms. Quine, Willard V. O. 1960. Word and Object. MIT Press. Reeke, George N., and Gerald M. Edelman. 1987. “Real Brains and Artificial Intelligence.” Daedalus 117: 143–173. Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge University Press. Rostovtzeff, M. 1926. Greece. Oxford University Press, 1963. Rorty, Richard M. 1963. “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn.” In Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. G. Kline. Prentice-Hall.

Works Cited

339

Rumelhart, David E., James L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group. 1986. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. MIT Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson. Sacks, Oliver. 1993. “Making up the Mind.” New York Review of Books, April 8: 42–49. Sacks, Oliver. 2004. “In the River of Consciousness.” New York Review of Books, January 15: 41-44. Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed. 1941. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Tudor. Scott, Charles E. 1989. “The Middle Voice of Metaphysics.” Review of Metaphysics 42 (June): 743–764. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1979. “The Intentionality of Intention and Action.” Inquiry 22: 253280. Searle, John R. 1981. “Intentionality and Method.” Journal of Philosophy 78: 720–733. Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. 1987. “Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person.” Journal of Philosophy 84: 123–146. Searle, John R. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press. Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press. Searle, John R. 1997. The Mystery of Consciousness. New York Review of Books. Shepard, Paul, ed. 1996. The Only World We’ve Got: A Paul Shepard Reader. Sierra Club. Sherburne, Donald W. 1961. A Whiteheadian Aesthetic. Yale University Press. Sherburne, Donald W. 1966. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Macmillan. Sherburne, Donald W. 1971. “Whitehead without God.” In Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. D. Brown et al. Bobbs-Merrill. Simon, Linda. 1977. The Biography of Alice B. Toklas. Doubleday. Skarda, Christine, and Walter J. Freeman. 1987. “How Brains Make Chaos in Order to Make Sense of the World.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10, June: 161–195. Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. Translated from second (1948) edition. Harvard University Press, 1953.

340

Works Cited

Solomons, Leon M., and Gertrude Stein. 1896. “Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Harvard University: II. Normal Motor Automatism.” Psychological Review 3, July: 492–512. Stein, Gertrude. 1933. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. C. Van Vechten. Vintage, 1972. Thom, René. Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models. Translated from the French edition (1972) as updated by the author. Benjamin, 1975. Vlastos, Gregory. 1937. “Organic Categories in Whitehead.” In Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. G. Kline. Prentice-Hall, 1963. Vlastos, Gregory. 1955. “On Heraclitus.” American Journal of Philology 76: 337–368. Waddington, Conrad H. 1957. The Strategy of the Genes. Allen & Unwin. Waddington, Conrad H. 1977. “Whitehead and Modern Science.” In Mind in Nature, ed. J. Cobb and D. Griffin. University Press of America. Webster, T. B. L. 1958. “From Primitive to Modern Thought in Ancient Greece.” Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Classical Studies 2: 29–43. White, Alan R., ed. 1968. The Philosophy of Action. Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1898. A Treatise on Universal Algebra, with Applications. Hafner, 1960. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1919. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Dover, 1982. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1920. The Concept of Nature. University of Michigan Press, 1957. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1922. The Principles of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science. Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World. Free Press, 1967. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1926. Religion in the Making. World, 1960. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1927. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Macmillan, 1958. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929a. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected Edition, ed. D. Sherburne and D. Griffin. Free Press, 1978. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929b. The Function of Reason. Beacon, 1959. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1933. Adventures of Ideas. Free Press, 1967. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1938. Modes of Thought. Free Press, 1968.

Works Cited

341

Whitehead, Alfred North. 1947. Essays in Science and Philosophy. Philosophical Library. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1961. The Interpretation of Science: Selected Essays, ed. A. Johnson. Bobbs-Merrill. Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J. B. Carroll. MIT Press. Wild, John. 1969. The Radical Empiricism of William James. Doubleday Anchor. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Macmillan.

Index

Action. See also Coordinated flow of action and perception basic, 74 James on, 36–42 modal theory of, 232–236 Searle on, 73–77 Action routines, 110, 118, 227–228, 236, 255, 298 Active voice, 19, 132, 269, 274–282, 302–305, 308, 309 Activity-situations. See Personal activitysituations Actual entities, 11, 121, 123, 128, 137–139, 144–150 non-temporal, 173, 175, 178, 180 temporal, 144, 154, 173 Actual neurons, 186, 310–313 Actual world(s), 147, 148 Affective tone, 126, 137, 176, 281 Affirmation-negation contrast, 214–221, 290–292 Alphabetic writing, 271–278 Anscombe, G. E. M., 61 Anticipation, 229–232 and co-conscious transition, 108–112 Whitehead on, 159, 166, 167, 226 Appearance, 164, 166, 192, 193, 226, 227, 231 Appetition, 229, 232 Approximations, 13 Aristotle, 274, 275

Attention, 32–35, 38, 40, 77, 90, 115, 213, 216–222, 297–300 Background, 58, 62–64, 110, 233 Basal ganglia, 253, 255, 297, 298 Benveniste, E., 276 Bergson, H., 201 Berkeley, G., 6, 7 Biological naturalism, 303–309 Body as structured society, 186–189, 287 and consciousness, 67, 88, 89, 264 withness of, 89, 294 Buds, 9–13, 121, 122, 138, 139, 284, 285 Call(ing) into relevance, 105–107, 167, 176, 201, 206, 224, 230, 288, 289 Canalization, 188, 201, 232, 233, 299 Categoreal obligations, 139, 152–170 Categories of Existence, 142, 146 Categories of Explanation, 142, 146–152 Categorization on value, 250, 251 Category of the Ultimate, 142–145, 179 Causality-at-work 48, 70, 108, 111, 112, 117, 167 Causation, regularity, 70, 71. See also Intentional causation Chalmers, D., 7 Characters of thought, 14, 16, 21, 36, 46, 50, 59, 85, 240–242, 246, 284, 303 changing, 27–28, 66–69

344

Characters of thought (cont.) cognitive/intentional, 34–35, 77–79 continuous, 28–34, 69–77 interested/selective, 35–36, 79–82 personal, 23–27, 60–66 Cherniak, C., 104 Chreods, 109–112, 116–118, 222, 227–238, 255, 256, 289 Classification couples, 252–254, 286 Co-conscious transition(s), 46, 85, 107–119, 123, 134, 152, 218, 226, 293 Comparative feelings, 202 Concepts, 79, 101 Edelman on, 259 and eternal objects 171, 172 James on, 34–35 Conceptual categorization, 259–260, 267, 291, 292 Conceptual feelings, 149, 157, 163, 295 Conceptual reversion, 157–162, 199, 265, 291 Conceptual schemes, 34–36 Conceptual valuation, 156, 157 Concrescence, 10, 154, 240, 288–290, 303 autonomous, 159, 200, 265 idea of, 139–141 phases (stages) of, 122, 159, 202, 208, 290 transitional, 200, 237 Concrescual approximation, 16, 17, 121–128, 142, 143, 149–161, 167–180, 183–247, 263, 282–284, 288, 292 Concrescual phenomenology, 183, 242 Conditions of satisfaction, 57 of intentions in action, 74, 76, 100–103 of perceptual experiences, 72, 95, 115, 116 of prior intentions 76 Conditions-of-satisfaction analyses 75–78 of co-conscious transition, 114–119

Index

of perceptual processes, 93–98 Conjunctive relation(s), 46, 55, 109, 112, 115, 131 Consciousness. See also Primary consciousness; Higher-order consciousness in course of action, 236–239 and intentionality, 221 James on, 48–53, 140 Whitehead on, 214–222, 236 Constitutive rules, 64–66, 151 Contrast(s), 127, 128, 159, 202, 285–287. See also Affirmationnegation contrast Conveyances, 201, 286 Coordinated flow of action and perception, 82–84, 108–116, 222–240 Creativity, 139, 143–145 Crick, F., 185 Damasio, A., 136, 198, 263, 264, 311, 312 Davidson, D., 60 Deconcrescence, 211, 244, 315 Defining characteristic, 150–152, 159, 176, 210, 242, 284 Degeneracy, 256, 257 Dennett, D., 7, 8, 10 Descartes, R., 5, 11, 125, 140, 199, 310 Developmental selection, 248 Dewey, J., 14, 44, 109 Direction of fit, 58, 78, 81, 97 Dynamic core, 256, 260, 288, 289 Edelman, G. M., 14, 16, 17, 245–270, 278, 281 and James, 33, 246, 284, 302, 303, 314 on language, 268–270 as materialist, 246, 269, 282 and Searle, 303, 308 and Whitehead, 264, 265, 282–300 Emergent materialism, 303, 304, 308, 309 Emotion, 126, 136

Index

Emotional complex, 126, 219 Enduring objects, 150 Epiphenomenal, 186, 306 Eternal object(s), 149, 171, 172, 196 Expectancies, 288 Experience of acting, 73, 97–100, 229, 233–237, 298, 299 Experiential monism, 54, 179, 246, 301–309, 313, 314. See also Monism of pure experience Experiential selection, 249 Extensive relationships, 144, 145 Fallacy of misplaced concreteness, 12, 135, 239, 279 Feeling, 121, 126, 138 Feelings of tendency and direction, 29, 30, 32, 41, 42, 88, 299 Freedom and determination, 169, 170 Free will, 26, 170 Fringe, 29, 30, 31, 41, 68–69, 160 Geometrical feelings, 196 Global mappings, 253–257, 261, 286 God, 172–180 Habit(s), 63, 92, 201 and chreods, 109, 111 James on, 24–27, 36–42 and personal activity-situations, 43–46 Hampshire, S., 61 Hard problem, 305–307 Havelock, E., 271, 276 Hebb, D., 38 Heidegger, M., 272, 273 Heraclitus, 27, 271, 274 Higher-order consciousness, 258, 264–270, 278, 316 Hippocampus, 253, 255 Historic route, 51, 150, 152, 176 Homer, 271–273 Hume, D., 4–8, 30, 46, 47, 60, 71, 93, 125, 156

345

Husserl, E., 14 Hybrid prehensions 151, 152, 162, 167, 187, 217, 218, 225–232, 292, 293, 306 of God, 158, 172–175 of self, 176 Hypotaxis, 270, 271 Images, 264, 266, 268, 296 I-me dialectic, 23–27, 42, 63, 150, 242 Impure prehensions, 152 Ingression, 149 Intellectual feelings, 203, 215–222 Intensity, 128, 159, 165, 168, 186, 224 Intentional approximation, 14–15, 55–86, 151 Intentional buds, 85–87 formation of, 87–107 Intentional bundle, 107, 159, 168 Intentional causation, 59, 70–77, 92 transitivity of, 55, 70, 77, 117, 167 Intentional content, 56, 57, 61–64, 79, 97, 105, 111, 121, 125 Intentional states, 15, 56 presentational, 57, 80 representational, 57, 81, 106 self-referential, 72, 87 Intentionality, 56, 65, 66, 221 Intention(s) in action, 73, 97, 216 and experience of acting, 73, 99, 100 and onset of prior intended action, 102, 103 spontaneous, 100–102 Isonomia, 270, 271 James, H., 135 James, W., 1–18, 21–56, 59–71, 75–100, 103, 108, 109, 112, 113, 122, 123, 157, 165, 167, 170, 175, 183, 198, 216, 240, 245 Edelman and, 33, 246, 284, 302, 303, 314 Whitehead and, 128–141 Jamesian neural net, 30–34

346

Jones, J. A., 175 Joyce, J., 136 Kant, I., 47, 153, 156 Kraus, E. M., 193 Learning, 42, 261, 262 Leibniz, G., 131 Limbic (hedonic) system, 261–263, 288, 299 Local maps, 251–253, 286, 295 Locke, J., 4, 125 Logical subjects, 205, 209, 210, 214, 215 Lowe, V., 134, 141, 174 Lure for feeling, 154, 159, 173, 176, 177, 205–208, 212–214, 288, 293 Matrix for transitions, 150, 191 Mead, G. H., 25 Memory, 28, 40, 58, 59, 176, 258 Middle voice, 260, 275–281 Mind, and body, 11, 14, 19, 22, 31, 48, 184, 191, 199, 245, 247, 278, 300–303 Minsky, M., 7 Monism of pure experience, 23, 43, 50, 137, 146, 191, 247, 300–302, 314. See also Experiential monism Motivational dispositions, 80, 106, 157, 177, 223 Motor program 255, 298, 299 Negative prehensions, 128, 155, 156, 161 Network, 58, 59, 68, 69, 78, 79, 86, 104, 106 Neural space, N-dimensional, 288–290 Neurobiological approximation, 17, 247, 283, 289–300 on attention, 298–300 on perception, 294–298 Neuronal groups, 245–269, 283, 313 Nexus, 147, 150, 188, 234, 287, 310, 313

Index

Nietzsche, F., 270, 308 Nobo, J. L., 145, 159 Non-observational awareness, 57, 60 Non-sensuous anticipation/perception, 136, 137, 212, 213, 216, 229, 232 Notopoulos, J. A., 271, 272 Objectification, 148, 149 Objective data, 123–128, 156, 160–166, 202, 206, 208, 210, 213–218, 226, 242 Objective diversity, 156 Objective identity, 156 Objective lure, 173–176, 206 One-substance cosmology, 11, 138, 244 Ontological principle, 146, 147 Organs of succession, 255, 293 Parataxis, 270, 271 Peace, 168 Peirce, C. S., 25 Perception in action, 15, 193, 212–214, 228, 235 in mode of causal efficicacy, 91–93, 190–192, 196–200, 294 in mode of presentational immediacy, 144, 191–200, 209, 214, 266, 294 in mode of symbolic reference, 195–202, 266, 294 James’s general law of, 97 modal theory of, 189–202, 280, 294 Perceptual bootstrapping, 258, 264, 265, 292, 293 Perceptual categorization, 248–254, 264, 296 Perceptual experience(s), 72, 73, 82, 87–99, 111–119, 126, 160, 184, 189, 196, 199, 201, 204, 222, 226, 296 Perry, B. E., 270, 271 Personal activity-situations, 43–47, 53, 167, 188, 193, 200, 225, 230, 298 Personal matrix, 150, 151, 159, 188, 230 Philosophy of organism, 11, 122, 129, 137, 141, 170, 280, 305, 314

Index

Physical prehensions (feelings), 122, 148, 190, 198 Physical purposes, 166, 203, 204, 209, 221, 297 Plasticity, 37 Plato, 125, 270, 271, 280 Platonic forms, 149, 171 Predicative pattern, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 217 Prehension, 121, 147 Pre-presentational/pre-propositional awareness, 87–91, 94, 97, 98, 210 Presyntax, 261 Primary consciousness, 258, 262–268 Prior intentions, 73–77, 82, 83 formation of, 104–107, 225 and subjective aims, 222–225 Processual approximation, 15, 16, 56, 85–125, 193 Propositional content, 15, 56, 124, 242 Propositional feelings, 124, 149, 203, 204, 207–215, 221 Propositional loci, 205–208 Propositions, 121, 124, 203–215 Proto-self, 263, 264 Proximate relevancies, 159, 160 Psychological modes, 56, 86, 124–126, 242 Psychic powers, 24, 33, 103 Psychologist’s fallacy, 6, 9, 12, 50, 210 Qualia, 268, 302 Quine, W. V. O., 60, 271, 272 Radical empiricism, 1, 2, 6–8, 11, 12, 17, 46, 50, 128, 133, 170, 193, 207, 226, 279, 282 Readiness to respond, 32, 33, 40, 41, 44–46, 75, 77, 79, 83, 98, 109, 111, 235, 255, 297 Recategorical memory, 257, 258, 260, 262, 283–285, 293, 297, 299 Re-enaction, 159, 166, 168, 226, 227, 232

347

Reentry, 252–256, 285–287 Remembered present, 264, 281, 282, 289 Ryle, G., 61 Sacks, O., 245, 250 Satisfaction, 122–130, 147, 148, 154–156, 159, 164–166, 179, 185–187, 199, 222–226, 238, 241 Scott, C. E., 275, 276 Searle, J. R., 14, 15, 55–88, 96, 111, 118, 124, 167, 245, 303–310 and characters of thought, 59–82 as radical empiricist, 55, 56, 305 Self, 23–27 Self-nonself distinction, 262–264, 268 Semantic bootstrapping, 267 Set points, hedonic, 261, 263, 288 Snell, B., 272, 273 Social selves, 25, 64–66, 151 Society, 150, 151, 201 living, 188 structured, 187, 313 Specious present, 141, 284 Speech acts, 64, 65, 124, 129 Strain, 197, 295 Stubborn fact, 135, 136, 144, 147 Subject-formation, 24, 128–132, 141, 207, 225, 278, 279, 305, 308, 315 Subjective aims, 124, 126, 127, 129, 133, 163–165, 208, 288, 290 and chreods, 227–232 initial, 154, 158, 172–179, 208 momentary, 223 and perception, 199–200 and prior intentions, 222–225 web of, 168, 176, 228 Subjective form, 122, 124, 128, 133, 136, 163–168, 177, 205, 214, 219–220, 223, 232, 242, 243 Subjective harmony, 163–166 Subjective intensity, 165–168, 225, 234 Subjective unity, 153–156, 165

348

Subjectivist principle, 138 Subject-predicate/subject-verb-object, 17, 18, 35, 130–132, 199, 211, 222, 269, 277–281, 307–308 Subject-superject, 129, 130, 169, 179, 226 Substantive parts, 4, 9, 28, 29, 32, 41, 47, 61, 62, 78, 123, 218 Superjection, 150, 173, 218, 223, 225 Supervenience, 41 Supplementary phase, 153, 158, 237 Symbolic reference, 195, 200, 204, 214, 267 Symbolism, 65, 195, 202, 267 Thalamocortical system, 253, 255, 288 Time steps, 284, 285, 293, 300 Traditional empiricism, 1, 4, 6, 9, 46, 118, 193, 195, 199 Transitive parts, 4–6, 29, 30, 32, 41–44, 62, 92, 108, 123, 125, 134 Transmutation, 160–163 outward, 222, 232–238 in perception, 192, 199, 210, 233 Unrest, 177, 179, 208 Value-category memory, 262, 291 Voice, grammatical, 19, 274 Whitehead, A. N., 6, 10–13, 85, 119–222, 227, 231–236, 240–245, 277, 280, 305, 311 categoreal scheme of, 142–170 and Edelman, 264, 265, 282–300 and James, 128–141 Whorf, B. L., 211, 278

Index

Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Bradford Books)

Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Action (Bradford Books)

Consciousness and experience

Relocating Consciousness: Diasporic Writers and the Dynamics of Literary Experience

Consciousness, Function, and Representation: Collected Papers, Volume 1 (Bradford Books)

Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Explanation and Cognition (Bradford Books)

Representation and Behavior (Bradford Books)

Plasticity of Development (Bradford Books)

Mind and Mechanism (Bradford Books)

Minimal Rationality (Bradford Books)

Consciousness and the Urban Experience

Understanding Intelligence (Bradford Books)

Understanding Intelligence (Bradford Books)

Minimal Rationality (Bradford Books)

Our Own Minds: Sociocultural Grounds for Self-Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Visual Versions (Bradford Books)

Probabilistic Linguistics (Bradford Books)

Without Justification (Bradford Books)

Social Empiricism (Bradford Books)

Conditionals (Bradford Books)

Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (Bradford Books)

Ant Colony Optimization (Bradford Books)

Creating Scientific Concepts (Bradford Books)

The Attentive Brain (Bradford Books)

Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (Bradford Books)

The Body and the Self (Bradford Books)

Methods of Theoretical Psychology (Bradford Books)

The Handbook of Multisensory Processes (Bradford Books)

Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Bradford Books)

Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Action (Bradford Books)

Consciousness and experience

Relocating Consciousness: Diasporic Writers and the Dynamics of Literary Experience

Consciousness, Function, and Representation: Collected Papers, Volume 1 (Bradford Books)

Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Explanation and Cognition (Bradford Books)

Representation and Behavior (Bradford Books)

Plasticity of Development (Bradford Books)

Mind and Mechanism (Bradford Books)

Minimal Rationality (Bradford Books)

Consciousness and the Urban Experience

Understanding Intelligence (Bradford Books)

Understanding Intelligence (Bradford Books)

Minimal Rationality (Bradford Books)

Our Own Minds: Sociocultural Grounds for Self-Consciousness (Bradford Books)

Visual Versions (Bradford Books)

Probabilistic Linguistics (Bradford Books)

Without Justification (Bradford Books)

Social Empiricism (Bradford Books)

Conditionals (Bradford Books)

Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (Bradford Books)

Ant Colony Optimization (Bradford Books)

Creating Scientific Concepts (Bradford Books)

The Attentive Brain (Bradford Books)

Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (Bradford Books)

The Body and the Self (Bradford Books)

Methods of Theoretical Psychology (Bradford Books)

The Handbook of Multisensory Processes (Bradford Books)

Recommend Documents